Montevideo

Montevideo is at once a working city crossed on foot and an imagined refuge in Lucas Pereyra’s account of his day trip from Argentina. He arrives hoping to collect writing advances and meet Magalí Guerra Zabala, but the city he has idealized through memory and messages does not remain a backdrop: its streets turn into a map of desire, its banks offer a precarious form of freedom, and its waterfront becomes the scene of a sudden robbery.

A familiar city made strange

Pereyra reaches the city by boat, briefly relieved simply to have left Argentina. The ship’s announcement that the duty-free shop is open prompts him to think about how restrictions make the language of free shopping seem like an odd promise of liberty. That tension sets the terms of the visit: Montevideo offers distance from home, but his escape depends on money he must carry across a border in excess of the permitted amount.

At Terminal Tres Cruces, the mixture of station and shopping center feels familiar, yet small differences quickly unsettle him. People speak in ways he recognizes from Argentina, but he hears a different word, notices the use of tú where he expects vos, and sees a couple sharing a thermos and mate. Other sights suggest Brazil to him. The city seems, in his formulation, like a place that is and is not the one he knows. Its resemblance to home makes its differences more vivid rather than less.

The imagined city and the walk through it

Before arriving, Pereyra has assembled a private Montevideo from a few earlier memories and the videos Magalí Guerra Zabala sends him roughly every two weeks. The messages—songs, episodes of Tiranos temblad, and loosely filmed streets—work like breadcrumbs into the life of the city where she lives. One song, Te abracé en la noche, has become bound to his longing; its repeated presence in his imagination makes the streets feel emotionally inhabited before he has walked them. He recognizes that he is in love both with a woman and with the city where she lives, and that much of this city may be his own invention.

His actual route gives that imagined place a physical structure. He leaves the terminal, crosses a small square, and follows Avenida 18 de Julio, the main line of his limited mental map. He uses it to orient himself toward the Old City, the bank district, and places associated with earlier visits, including the area where Enzo Arredondo lives. Yet the map is emotional as well as practical: the avenue carries him through neighborhoods and landmarks while his mind overlays them with memories and expectation.

As he walks, ordinary street details become part of this private geography. A flyer advertising tattoos and piercings makes him think of Guerra’s genital piercing and of the questions he has never asked her. He notices the flyer’s shifting use of vos and tú, keeps it in his jacket pocket, and later considers that small decision part of the chain of contingencies preceding what happens. In this way, the city speaks to him less through any single landmark than through objects he turns into signs of his attachment and unease.

Landmarks, associations, and desire

At Plaza Independencia, the Palacio Salvo brings the city’s physical architecture into contact with Pereyra’s imagined one. Guerra had sent him a link to an album whose cover showed the building; he associates it with the Barolo in Buenos Aires and with the two towers’ far-reaching lights across the Río de la Plata. Looking from the square at the actual building, then reasoning that the album photograph might have been taken from the hotel tower, he follows the association into the Radisson Montevideo Victoria Plaza Hotel. A view prompted by a landmark becomes a spur to action: he enters the hotel and goes upstairs, letting desire turn a passing sight into a detour.

The streets also bring literature into the present. Near the University of the Republic, Pereyra recognizes a location he associates with a scene by Onetti, in which a man makes his wife walk down toward the rambla while watching her from a distance. His literary memory does not replace the city; it gives a real street another layer, making the built landscape a meeting point for remembered fiction and the walk he is taking with Guerra. The city’s meaning repeatedly shifts as one image calls up another.

Money, escape, and reversal

The bank gives Pereyra’s visit its immediate material purpose. His advances have arrived from Spain and Colombia for two book contracts. If transferred to Argentina, the dollars would be converted at the official rate and subject to income tax; collecting them in Uruguay and exchanging them later at the unofficial rate in Buenos Aires would leave him with more than twice as much. He expects to bring the money home despite the risk of being discovered at customs. In his account, the financial controls have divided the currency market and made the act of retrieving printed bills across the river feel like a workaround in a supposedly electronic age.

The sum is not merely a balance in an account. Pereyra imagines paying his debts, covering overdue household bills and repairs, repaying his brother, hiring an afternoon babysitter, and buying nine or ten months in which to work. The advances are payment for a book of chronicles for Milenio and a novel for Astillero; in his mind, they also become time and the possibility of beginning again. He has a grand plan for the novel, imagining a man who leaves his wife and children and disappears into Brazil. The fantasy of a character’s escape shadows his own wish to leave, even as the cash is meant to let him return home and write.

After withdrawing the money, Pereyra puts the pesos in his trouser pocket and the dollars in the zipped inner pocket of his jacket. He feels newly in possession of time, but that sense of possibility is already accompanied by fear. He cuts across Plaza del Entrevero and goes into La Pasiva, alert to the possibility that someone may be following him. The city has delivered the money he came for, but the freedom it seems to purchase remains fragile.

The waterfront and the city’s double face

The day’s movement toward an encounter with Guerra eventually reaches the shore. There, with his back to the sea, Pereyra is attacked by two men. One presses his face into the sand and pins him down; when he tries to rise after hearing Guerra’s protest, he is kicked again. In the confusion, he is most acutely ashamed of being exposed with his trousers undone, before he can even take stock of the danger. The attackers run off with his money belt and backpack. The Fifteen thousand dollars he had collected—advances intended to pay debts and sustain months of work—are gone.

The robbery reverses the city’s earlier promise without erasing what made it compelling. Montevideo had offered distance from domestic and financial pressure, a landscape where messages, songs, books, and landmarks seemed to converge on a desired meeting. It also made possible the dangerous crossing that funded his hope of writing. At the waterfront, that hoped-for freedom collapses into bodily vulnerability and loss. The city remains both real and projected: a place of streets actually walked and a refuge built from longing, whose imagined openness cannot protect Pereyra from what happens there.