Meeting in Valizas and a trip to Polonio

The meeting in Valizas and the excursion toward Cabo Polonio mark the beginning of Lucas Pereyra’s intense attraction to Magalí Guerra Zabala. What starts amid the social bustle of a literary festival becomes a private adventure along the coast: an encounter shaped by flirtation, secrecy, and the physical landscape, and recalled later as Lucas travels toward Montevideo.

Festival and First Encounter

Lucas attends a Friday-to-Monday literary festival in Valizas on the last weekend of January, while Catalina stays with Maiko at her sister’s country home. The event offers readings and panel discussions, but Lucas is more drawn to what happens around them: walking the dunes, swimming, talking, drinking, and observing the festival’s makeshift social world. At a panel on literature and culture, he begins speaking more freely after an initially automatic performance. The audience applauds, and the discussion gives way to a party.

There, Lucas notices Guerra standing with a friend, beer in hand. He takes her hand and brings her onto the dance floor. They hold one another’s gaze as they turn together; he remembers her as forceful and grounded, and describes his attraction as an abrupt surge that seems to rise through his body. They talk, drink more beer, and dance again. Guerra says she works at a newspaper in Montevideo and has left her social-sciences studies. When Lucas kisses her during a walk to find more beer, she warns him to be careful. She indicates that she may be involved with someone, and knows Lucas is married and has a son because he mentioned his child during the panel.

The Walk Toward Cabo Polonio

The next morning, they meet at a store at half past nine. They do not kiss immediately. Instead, they walk together past people sleeping beside extinguished fires, sometimes falling into long silences and exchanging smiles. At the stream, they choose to swim across rather than pay to cross by boat. They tie Lucas’s backpack and Guerra’s shoulder bag inside a knotted bag, and Guerra warns him to start farther upstream so the current will not carry them out toward the sea. The crossing proves manageable but the current is strong; they reach the other side near the mouth of the stream, and Lucas takes longer than Guerra to catch his breath.

As they continue toward Cabo Polonio, other walkers repeatedly interrupt their attempts to be alone. Lucas has bought pastries, which they eat as the sun beats down; they tie their shirts over their heads while crossing a green valley. Whenever they pause to embrace in the grass, passing groups force them to sit up, conceal their closeness, and move on. Near Cabo Polonio, they finally hide among ancient-looking rock formations, seeking the recesses and folds the open trail has denied them. When Lucas says he has no condoms, Guerra takes silver packets from her backpack. The scene establishes how far their attraction has moved from flirtation toward sexual intimacy, while its concealment remains part of the encounter.

A Memory Carried into Montevideo

The episode returns as a flashback during Lucas’s later journey from Buenos Aires toward Montevideo. On the bus, the palms, open landscape, and approaching water bring back the summer in Rocha when he first met Guerra. The route becomes more than scenery: as the coast draws nearer, Lucas imagines her face and recalls their first dance. The remembered excursion is thus embedded in a present-day crossing, where travel itself offers him a temporary release from the pressures of home.

That later journey has a practical purpose as well: Lucas is going to collect advances on book contracts. Yet Montevideo has already become inseparable in his mind from Guerra. Her occasional emails and videos have fed an imagined city assembled from fragments, so that his desire for her and his fascination with the place reinforce one another. The Valizas memory belongs to this same emotional geography: the coast holds the beginning of their relationship, while the bus ride turns that beginning into an anticipation of seeing her again.

Later Reversal and Significance

The later reunion does not resolve the secrecy established in Valizas. During an intimate encounter in Montevideo, Lucas asks Guerra to run away with him to Brazil; she does not agree, and reveals that she is in her second month of pregnancy and unsure whether she will continue it. The disclosure makes explicit how many lives and obligations converge in their private connection. After the violence that interrupts the encounter, Lucas recognizes that he must return to Buenos Aires.

In retrospect, the trip toward Cabo Polonio is both an escape and a threshold. Lucas is drawn out of family routine by the promise of unstructured time, movement, and desire, but the excursion does not free either lover from existing ties. Its strongest images—swimming against the current, being interrupted by other walkers, and taking refuge among rocks—give physical form to a connection that is intense but constrained. The memory remains vivid in the later journey precisely because it offers no simple division between romantic possibility and responsibility.