Bodily impulse and the “blind spot”

Bodily impulse and the blind spot describe a recurring tension in Lucas Pereyra’s account: he tries to explain desire through conscious decisions, yet repeatedly encounters bodily actions and reactions that seem to precede or exceed intention. The idea connects his jealous interpretations of Catalina’s behavior, his reflections on how they conceived Maiko, and the physical intimacy with Magalí Guerra Zabala that culminates in her disclosure of another pregnancy. The blind spot is not simply a secret he has failed to uncover; it is the limit of what he can know about the forces moving through himself and other people.

Definition and narrative pattern

Lucas presents the body as an agent that can act where language and deliberate reasoning fall short. Looking back on his relationship with Catalina, he considers their decision to stop taking precautions and asks how the body decides when conception will occur. Months passed before Catalina became pregnant, but he cannot identify what changed or explain the moment as the straightforward result of a rational plan. Reproduction appears instead as a process involving impulses and living forces beyond his conscious command.

The same uncertainty shapes the account’s form. Lucas revisits events, proposes explanations, and then marks the limits of his certainty: he is almost sure about some details, unsure about others, and aware that his mind supplies connections that may not amount to knowledge. His retrospective narration does not resolve the blind spot so much as map the impressions around it. Bodily signs, memories, and associations become evidence, but evidence filtered through a narrator who knows that desire can make unrelated things seem addressed to him.

Jealousy and the interpretation of bodies

During the deterioration of his marriage, Lucas’s unoccupied mind becomes a hostile forum in which suspicions gather. He wonders whether Catalina is seeing someone else and interprets her late returns from meetings and cocktails, her grooming, and changes in her body as possible signs of an affair. Her newly smooth legs and altered pubic hair become clues in a theory that he cannot confirm. He also turns ordinary explanations over against his suspicions: Catalina says the change is for bikini season, and her treatment for candidiasis involves him taking the same medication in case he has it too. Even these shared and practical circumstances are drawn into his question about whether they are preparing for a lover.

The details of Catalina’s late-night routines sharpen that uncertainty without settling it. Lucas hears her return after midnight and imagines her washing, removing makeup, and brushing her teeth; he suspects she has resumed smoking and recalls once noticing a strong scent. He recognizes that he is unusually sensitive to smells and allows that the scent could have come from greetings at a dinner. His imagined instructional email to a hypothetical lover, with its rules about spare underwear, washing, secrecy, and avoiding traces, converts jealousy into a fantasy of technical control. The elaborate rules cannot give him access to Catalina’s motives. Instead, they expose the distance between his effort to read bodily evidence and the unknowable life he assigns to it.

Conception, fear, and surrender

Lucas’s reflections on the body are also shaped by the vulnerability of parenthood. He remembers Maiko’s fever convulsions and the terror of thinking the child might die in his arms, followed by doctors explaining that such episodes are common and not dangerous. The gap between the alarming event as experienced and its medical explanation reinforces how little preparation can make bodily life fully predictable. He even imagines that a comprehensive course on raising children would frighten prospective parents away from having them.

In recalling the night he believes Maiko may have been conceived, Lucas sets a conscious hesitation against a physical surrender. After an argument at Catalina’s apartment on Agüero, he tells her he is not sure and describes feeling vertigo; she is deeply hurt and goes to bed crying. He stays, later comforts her, and remains overnight at her request. During the night they have sex in a way he remembers as a struggle between animals falling through darkness. He recalls the moment of ejaculation as an abandonment to the vertigo, as though unknown forces could decide what followed. His recollection does not prove the precise moment of conception; its significance lies in the contrast he draws between his earlier doubt and the bodily act through which he relinquishes control.

Associations in Montevideo

On a walk through Montevideo, Lucas’s attraction to Magalí Guerra Zabala makes public details feel charged with private meaning. A flyer for a tattoo shop advertises piercings, including genital piercings, and prompts him to imagine that Magalí Guerra Zabala has one. He wonders where it was done and whether the tattoo artist was a trusted friend, but the correspondence between them has not addressed the subject. He keeps the flyer partly because its wording catches his attention. In his account, the paper is both a concrete object and a screen onto which desire projects questions for which he has no answer.

Later, after seeing Magalí Guerra Zabala dance and making a slow turn to the left himself, Lucas follows a chain of associations into a bathroom at the end of a gallery. He recalls a supposed study in which women preferred men who turned more to the left while dancing, and wonders whether the preference might reach back to the movement of primitive organisms. The marijuana he has smoked makes his theories feel momentarily revelatory, though he admits that they dissolve when he tries to retain them. The spiral staircase, turning left as he descends, redirects the association toward Catalina’s intrauterine device, the question of having another child, and the possibility of a daughter. His image of women nested within women makes reproduction at once intimate and ancestral: a chain of bodies extending backward through generations and forward toward children he might or might not have.

Encounter and disclosure

At the beach, the bodily force Lucas has been theorizing becomes immediate. He and Magalí Guerra Zabala exchange red and purple lollipops, kiss, and lie together in the sand. Their contact becomes sexual, while Lucas urges her to leave with him for Brazil that night and spend a week away. Her tears and slight shake of the head make clear that his invitation has not freed her to follow him. She continues touching him and tells him that she is also pregnant, in her second month, and does not know whether she will have the child.

The disclosure interrupts Lucas’s attempt to make the encounter an escape. He embraces her, but says that he does not understand what is happening and continues to experience desire even as she cries and speaks. The scene refuses to turn bodily intensity into mutual clarity: their closeness is real, but it does not erase the complications of Magalí Guerra Zabala’s situation or answer what she will decide. Pregnancy arrives not as the outcome of a plan shared between the two of them, but as news that alters the meaning of the present encounter while remaining unresolved.

Retrospective recognition and limits

Lucas later tries to explain Catalina’s uncertainty by disclosing his own infidelity. He recounts a clandestine relationship with a Brazilian woman, describing the care he took to avoid being seen, return washed, remove stray hairs, and delete messages. He believes Catalina sensed something despite his precautions; after he calmed down and stopped for a time, he interprets her late returns and secretive schedule as a more or less conscious retaliation. This account complicates his earlier role as the suspicious observer of her body and routines. He had also maintained a hidden life, and his efforts at concealment did not guarantee that nothing was perceived.

After the night of the assault and hospital visit, Lucas and Catalina discuss their marriage. He has fractured ribs; Maiko is to sleep at Catalina’s mother’s home. Catalina asks who Magalí Guerra Zabala is, and Lucas tells her. She then reveals that she is in love with a woman, a doctor she met at a foundation cocktail, and that their relationship has continued for nearly a year. Lucas’s account presents both affairs as disclosures that reorganize what each spouse thought they knew, without claiming that either person had complete access to the other’s motives. The blind spot therefore operates in both directions: bodily conduct and private desire leave traces, but those traces do not amount to transparent knowledge. Lucas’s repeated effort to reconstruct them is also an admission that explanation begins where certainty has already failed.