Travel to Montevideo to collect writing fees

Lucas Pereyra’s trip to Montevideo to collect writing fees turns a bank withdrawal into a wager on work, family finances, and personal freedom. The $15,000 he expects to bring home represents both a way around Argentina’s currency controls and the possibility of several months in which to write; the journey’s promise of relief is shadowed from the outset by the danger of carrying the cash back across the border.

The journey and its risks

Lucas drives to the Buquebús terminal before dawn, finds the main parking lot full, and leaves his car in a lot across the avenue. The two dark blocks he expects to walk on his return trouble him because he anticipates having the dollars with him. Even the ferry’s check-in unsettles him: an employee looks at him longer than expected, and Lucas wonders whether same-day travelers are being identified. At immigration, he gives his document and ticket, stands before a camera, and provides a thumbprint. Routine border procedures acquire a sharper edge because the purpose of the trip is not simply travel: he intends to bring back more dollars than Argentina permits.

Once the ferry leaves the harbor, Lucas feels an enormous relief at being outside the country, even temporarily. The open river and the ferry’s free-shop announcement sharpen the irony of his crossing: he is seeking a small personal freedom through a journey shaped by restrictions. He understands the trip as an attempt to collect his own money while avoiding the unfavorable official conversion and tax deductions that would apply if the fees were transferred to Argentina.

Why the money matters

The withdrawal consists of advances from two book contracts signed months earlier: $8,000 from Spain and $7,000 from Colombia. Lucas had opened his account in Montevideo in April, but the payments did not arrive until September. At the unofficial Buenos Aires exchange rate, he calculates that the $15,000 could yield roughly 240,000 pesos, more than twice what he would retain through a domestic bank. The exchange system has divided the dollar into official and parallel rates, with informal intermediaries and exchange houses filling the gap. Lucas recalls having been followed and having his car window broken during an earlier attempt to change money, so the advantage carries a concrete risk as well as a financial one.

The hoped-for proceeds answer a household crisis that has accumulated through postponed repairs, overdue bills, and debts. Lucas expects first to repay Catalina for the months when the family lived on her salary, settle household accounts, repair the home, and repay his brother. He also imagines hiring an afternoon babysitter so that he can work without interruption. He estimates that careful spending might buy nine or ten months of writing time: the crónicas for Milenio need structure, while the novel for Astillero remains to be written and is due in May.

That novel already exists in his imagination as an extravagant escape story: a man leaves his wife and children, disappears into Brazil, and becomes someone else amid portuñol, sex, contraband, drugs, rivers, and stories nested within stories. The fantasy gives the money a second meaning. It is not only payment for completed literary labor or a means of covering debts, but the imagined condition for beginning the ambitious work Lucas has not yet managed to finish.

Montevideo as an imagined city

After leaving the terminal, Lucas walks toward Avenida 18 de Julio, using the avenue as the spine of his limited mental map of Montevideo. He places the banks, Ciudad Vieja, familiar plazas, and Enzo’s home in relation to it, while the city he actually sees is overlaid with memories and videos sent by Magalí Guerra Zabala. Songs and street footage have made him feel attached both to her and to the place where she lives; he recognizes that much of this Montevideo is an invention assembled from scraps of memory and mediated images.

The walk repeatedly turns ordinary details into signs. A tattoo flyer brings Guerra’s genital piercing to mind, and Lucas keeps the flyer rather than throwing it away. At Plaza Independencia, the Palacio Salvo recalls an album cover Guerra had sent him and the parallel lighthouse tower of the Barolo building in Buenos Aires. That chain of associations leads him into the Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel. Later, in Cordón, he recognizes the University of the Republic as the building printed on the five-hundred-peso note and recalls a scene by Onetti set on the street toward the waterfront. The streets are at once real locations, literary references, and surfaces on which Lucas’s desire projects itself.

Withdrawal and the return

At the bank, Lucas quietly asks to withdraw $15,000. He exchanges $500 into Uruguayan pesos and puts the rest of the dollars inside the zipped inner pocket of his jacket. Once outside, the bundle against his chest feels like a store of possibilities: he thinks of Guerra and of possessing nearly a year of time. But the sense of freedom arrives together with fear. He hurries across Plaza del Entrevero and enters La Pasiva, still alert to the possibility that someone is following him.

The return journey reverses the danger he had anticipated. At the Buenos Aires port, officials stop and search him, patting him down, checking his jacket, asking him to lift his shirt, and looking inside his ukulele. Their attention centers on the places where money might be concealed, including the spot where his belt had been. Lucas has no cash left for them to find. The inspection therefore confirms not the successful arrival of the financial rescue he planned, but the loss of the money before he reached home.

With no pesos for a taxi and no car keys—the car remains in the lot until Catalina retrieves it fifteen days later—Lucas walks more than thirty blocks toward the apartment. He is exhausted and in pain, yet describes himself as defeated and invincible at once: without the money, he believes, he can no longer be robbed. The next day he is hospitalized with a fever. The trip ends not in the security of a funded writing period but in an exposed, physically weakened return, while the missing cash leaves the debts and the work still waiting.