Lucas's Obsession with Magalí Guerra

Lucas Pereyra’s obsession with Magalí Guerra is sustained as much by distance and imagination as by their encounters. Before and after seeing her in Montevideo, he turns songs, emails, videos, and street details into signs of their connection. The fixation makes the city feel intimate while also revealing how thoroughly he has invented the woman he longs to meet.

An imagined city built from messages

Lucas’s attachment to Guerra becomes inseparable from his imagined Montevideo. As he walks Avenida 18 de Julio, his limited map of the city consists of a few remembered locations and routes: the banks, the old city, Parque Rodó, Cordón, and the place where Enzo lives. Yet the streets acquire an emotional geography beyond what he knows firsthand. He imagines that almost any entrance could lead to the bar in the video for Te abracé en la noche, a song whose farewell lyrics he has replayed at home. Guerra has sent him the video, and he has watched it hundreds of times. In his account, he is in love both with her and with the city where she lives, though he recognizes that he invented much of that city for himself.

The emails extend this imagined intimacy. Roughly every fifteen days, Guerra sends him a song, a video, or footage of ordinary streets, as if leaving a trail to keep him from losing his way. Those fragments let him picture a life on the other side of the border without actually sharing it. His feelings therefore attach not only to Guerra’s messages but to the place those messages seem to open: a Montevideo assembled from her selections, his memories, and his own desire.

Everyday signs and the walking fixation

The city’s smallest details intensify Lucas’s sense that everything addresses him. Passing schools, he hears a boy call to a friend with the refrain Que nada te detenga. Lucas recognizes it from Tiranos temblad, a viral Uruguayan compilation that gathers amateur videos of minor events: children rescuing a bird, a girl learning to ride a bicycle, or someone making a compressor from a refrigerator. The videos’ gentle voice-over and inconsequential subjects give them a distinctive local texture. A recurring figure, Peteca, repeats the refrain, and each installment closes by thanking YouTube. When Lucas recognizes the schoolboy’s allusion, he feels included in a web of references that reaches from online clips into the street.

That pleasure has a more uneasy counterpart. A flyer advertising tattoos and genital piercings brings Guerra’s piercing to mind. Lucas imagines the procedure taking place in a shop at the back of a gallery and wonders who performed it and whether it hurt. He keeps the flyer because its mixed use of forms of address catches his attention; afterward, he speculates that throwing it away might have prevented what happened. The episode shows how readily an ordinary object becomes charged with private meaning: the flyer does not tell him anything new about Guerra, but it gives his thoughts another surface on which to fix themselves.

A similar chain of association carries him toward Palacio Salvo. He remembers that Guerra sent him a link to a solo album by Blur’s singer, whose cover shows the building. Seeing the real tower, he connects the image to its architectural twin in Buenos Aires, the Barolo, and to the two buildings’ lighthouses overlooking the Río de la Plata. The remembered album image, the street view, and Guerra’s earlier message converge; his desire rises with the association, and he enters the Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel to seek a higher view.

The remembered woman and the real encounter

When Lucas and Guerra walk together in Cordón, he describes the strange effect of seeing her after months of remembering her. In his mind, the emails could be opened and closed, replayed, or paused; memory gave him control over an image he could revisit at will. Her arrival unsettles that arrangement. She is familiar enough to match the figure he has carried with him, but also too real to remain within his private version of her. He initially experiences her as superimposed on the remembered woman, displacing that image, and says that listening to and looking at her gradually bring the two together.

The exchange makes the fixation visible as a conflict between possession through memory and knowledge through contact. Lucas admits that they have not seen each other many times and that he had, in effect, invented her within himself. Guerra questions whether he found her unattractive; he reassures her that he found her beautiful and sexy, while acknowledging that she differed from his recollection. Their conversation does not dissolve the projection so much as give him a new way to describe it: the real person and the one constructed through distance briefly coexist, then become one again for him.

Suspicion, silence, and the image that remains

The fixation persists beyond the meeting and becomes entangled with fear. After exchanging money at a bank, Lucas feels the cash against his heart and thinks first of Guerra. He experiences the money as a year of time and a field of possibilities, but the sense of freedom comes with the fear of being prey. He hurries through the city, cutting across Plaza del Entrevero and entering La Pasiva. The episode places his longing beside his vulnerability: even a moment of financial possibility immediately turns his thoughts toward her, while paranoia follows close behind.

A year later, Lucas says that he is nearly certain Guerra did not arrange the robbery in which he was beaten, while admitting that a small residue of doubt remains. He associates that remaining uncertainty with the silence after the second kick and says it will never quite heal. He and Guerra have stopped exchanging emails; the correspondence cooled into silence. Still, he grants her the benefit of the doubt and lets her remain within his idealized Uruguay, as if hidden inside a song known only to him. The unresolved suspicion does not cancel his attachment; it becomes one more reason the day and its meanings resist simple closure.

A later image of Guerra

Lucas’s later glimpse of Guerra comes through Tiranos temblad rather than direct contact. In a brief segment among the week’s small happenings, the program shows the first triple marriage in Montevideo: Guerra, César, and Rocío, two brides pregnant and the groom between them, laughing at an alternative ceremony that appears almost to parody a conventional wedding. Lucas pauses the image to recognize Guerra, now visibly pregnant. On Facebook, he finds photographs of each woman with her child and sees César feeding two children at once, one with each hand. He does not know whether all five live together, and he says that he and Guerra no longer write.

The images complicate rather than resolve his private portrait of her. Lucas is glad she became a mother and thinks she looked happy in the video, though he reads tiredness in the more domestic photographs. The mediated fragments repeat the structure of his earlier attachment: a fleeting public image becomes something he studies for signs of an inaccessible life. Yet the pictures also show a family arrangement beyond the story he had imagined. His obsession survives as memory and uncertainty, but the life visible onscreen belongs to Guerra and the family she has made, not to the fantasy Lucas once built around her and Montevideo.