Lucas Pereyra and Magalí Guerra Zabala meet at a literary festival in Valizas, where an evening dance opens into a sudden, consequential attraction. Their next-day walk toward Cabo Polonio turns that attraction into physical intimacy, but crowds and their separate obligations interrupt the fantasy of having the coast to themselves. Recalled later as Lucas travels toward Montevideo, the encounter becomes both a formative memory of desire and one of the sources from which he invents an intimate, idealized version of the city.

Festival and first encounter

Lucas attends the festival over the last weekend of January, from Friday to Monday, as an invited writer. Catalina stays behind with their son, Maiko, at her sister’s country house. The gathering offers readings and panel discussions, but Lucas is more drawn to what happens around them: walking the dunes, talking, smoking, swimming, and trading literary gossip. The festival’s bohemian setting includes shared bunk rooms and bathrooms, and a crowd he regards as affluent young people temporarily playing at a marginal, carefree life.

At a crowded panel in a large pavilion, Lucas initially speaks almost automatically, then becomes more engaged. The writers discuss realism, verisimilitude, new technologies, the 1990s, and the post-dictatorship period. He senses that the audience might prefer readings and entertainment to theoretical discussion, though the panel is warmly applauded. Afterward, at the party, he notices Magalí Guerra Zabala standing aside with a friend and a beer. He takes her hand and brings her onto the dance floor; she has already heard him speak and holds his gaze as they dance. Her physical presence, energy, and confidence make the encounter feel to him like a sudden return to life.

They talk between dances and while fetching more beer. Magalí Guerra Zabala says she began studying social sciences but left, works afternoons at a newspaper in Montevideo, and is spending two weeks in Valizas with friends. She has not read Lucas’s work and does not recognize his name. On the walk to a shop farther down a dark street, he takes her hand; she holds him around the waist, and they kiss. Their attraction does not erase their existing relationships: she warns him to be careful and hints that she has a boyfriend, while Lucas tells her that he is married and has a child. She already knows about his son because he mentioned him during the panel.

The invitation to Cabo Polonio

Lucas lends Magalí Guerra Zabala his sweater when she gets cold. He tells her about a walk along a stream and a line of people he saw climbing a dune; she explains that they were heading to Cabo Polonio and that the walk takes a couple of hours. He asks her to go with him the next day. After hesitating, she agrees to show him the way and says they will need to leave early. They part with a restrained kiss on the cheek, without discussing the appointment in front of her friend, who comes to take her away to help carry boxes of books.

The meeting seems especially improbable to Lucas because Magalí Guerra Zabala has no cellphone and he has no way to contact her. Then an organizer tells him that the next morning’s panel has been cancelled, leaving him free. Lucas interprets the coincidence as if attraction itself had cleared the path. He goes to sleep at three in the morning, exhilarated and, as he recalls it, without a gram of guilt. The episode’s intensity is already in tension with the facts they have disclosed: each is involved with someone else, and his wife and child are elsewhere.

The dunes and the limits of escape

The following day, they climb dune after dune, sinking their feet into the sand. Lucas privately doubts whether he can manage the walk, but does not say so. At a crest, they see the sea spread out below them. He kisses Magalí Guerra Zabala, holds her against him, and touches her as they stand within the immense openness of the coast. The scene’s expansiveness narrows into a private encounter: he discovers that she has a genital piercing, and her amusement at his surprise becomes part of the physical memory he will later describe as unusually vivid and enduring.

Their walk does not deliver the solitude they had imagined. As they continue, children and other visitors fill the route with voices and laughter. The crowd changes their mood: they exchange frustrated looks, become serious and complicit in their disappointment, and eventually reach Cabo Polonio among its small houses and rustic shelters. They swim to cool off, drink beer, and eat small fried fish at a modest bar. Quieting down, they accept that the day cannot give them uninterrupted privacy. Lucas has to return that afternoon, and Magalí Guerra Zabala must leave too.

The end of the outing is therefore neither a fulfilled escape nor a clean separation. They discuss possible future itineraries, while Lucas remembers the sadness of a love still new. At Cabo Polonio he begins calling her Guerra, a name that turns their flirtation into a private form of address. He learns that she is twenty-eight, sometimes lives with her father, and bears her mother’s surname, Zabala; her mother had died several years earlier. He also learns that her boyfriend is a bassist in a well-known Uruguayan metal band. Lucas tells her about his own books and promises to send her a novel set in Brazil, though he has not yet written it.

A memory that remakes the city

The encounter returns to Lucas in recollection during a later bus journey toward Montevideo. Palms, the shifting river-to-sea horizon, and the feeling of movement away from the Argentine pampas draw him back to the summer in Rocha when he first met Magalí Guerra Zabala. The remembered festival and walk are not presented as a resolved romance: they hold together the thrill of physical closeness, the frustration of public space, and the knowledge that both lovers have other attachments and obligations.

After the encounter, Magalí Guerra Zabala periodically sends Lucas songs and short videos of Montevideo. Those fragments help him build a city from afar, combining a few remembered streets with images she shares. In his account, he becomes enamored of both the woman and the place where she lives, while acknowledging that much of the Montevideo he walks through is imagined. A later street flyer advertising genital piercings also brings the dunes back to mind, showing how a small detail of that first intimacy recurs in his attention to the city. The Valizas meeting thus remains more than the beginning of an affair: it supplies the bodily and emotional memories through which Lucas experiences Montevideo as a landscape of longing.