Montevideo as idealized and unfamiliar

Montevideo as idealized and unfamiliar is the unstable city Lucas Pereyra encounters while traveling from Argentina: recognizable enough to invite comparison, distinct enough to resist it, and already charged by his longing for Magalí Guerra Zabala. His impressions move between actual streets and a private map assembled from memory, online videos, and imagined intimacy. The city becomes a place he can walk through, but also a place he has partly invented—and whose risks eventually puncture its promise of escape.

First contact and the feeling of difference

At the Tres Cruces terminal, Lucas experiences Montevideo through a sequence of small recognitions and dislocations. The station’s combination of bus terminal and shopping center feels familiar, as do the people’s general manner and speech, yet unfamiliar brands, a different word, and the use of tú instead of the Argentine vos mark a neighboring but separate world. He notices a couple carrying a thermos and mate, and women whose appearance evokes Brazil. The city’s strangeness does not arrive as a dramatic border crossing; it accumulates in details that make what seems familiar feel subtly altered.

That impression competes with a more practical city. After leaving the terminal, Lucas watches a working day resume around him, with commercial movement and banks about to open. The street begins to replace the Brazilian associations that had briefly colored his first impressions. He relies on Avenida 18 de Julio as an organizing axis: in his mental map it leads toward Ciudad Vieja, while neighborhoods, plazas, Enzo Arredondo’s home, banks, and familiar businesses occupy rough positions around it. This is not a complete or reliable city plan. It is a personal instrument for navigating a place he knows only partially.

A city assembled from longing

Before walking its streets, Lucas has encountered Montevideo through Guerra’s intermittent emails and videos. Roughly every fortnight, she sends him a song, a video from Tiranos temblad, or footage of city blocks recorded with an unsteady camera. These fragments function like breadcrumbs: they give him glimpses of everyday life across the Río de la Plata while leaving most of the city beyond his view. A song performed in a bar becomes inseparable from the messages that brought it to him, and from the painful awareness that Guerra lives in the city while he remains elsewhere.

The result is a city made partly from mediated images and emotional association. Lucas imagines that a doorway on Avenida 18 de Julio might lead to the bar from the video, and recalls watching the performance repeatedly at home without Catalina knowing how intensely it affected him. He recognizes that this Montevideo is mostly his own construction. His feeling for the city is joined to his love for Guerra: he is drawn not only to a place but to the imagined life on the other side of the distance between them. His admission that he has walked more through this imagined city than through the actual streets identifies the gap at the center of the concept.

Walking among real streets and borrowed images

As he walks, the city keeps generating associations that make the boundary between observation and projection difficult to hold. At Plaza Independencia, the Palacio Salvo recalls an album cover Guerra had sent him. Lucas connects the building with Buenos Aires’s Barolo, notes their matching lighthouse-like towers, and imagines the historic signaling between the two cities as a portal at the Río de la Plata. The actual building is in front of him, but his attention travels through the image, the music, Guerra’s message, and the other city before returning to the street.

His gaze also lingers on less monumental details. He notices subdued storefronts and old-fashioned displays, including elaborate cakes that look to him more like plaster or cement than food. Later, a tattoo-parlor flyer triggers thoughts about Guerra’s genital piercing and the unanswered questions he has never raised with her. He keeps the flyer in his jacket pocket, partly because its wording shifts between forms of address. The episode shows how walking makes the city legible to him through personal associations: an ordinary object can feel addressed to him because desire has turned the surrounding environment into a field of possible signs.

The physical journey contributes to this imaginative openness. On the bus, a cramped window seat places Lucas on the side where he feels the sea must be near, even when it cannot be seen. Palms, bright light, rolling countryside, and the sensation of travel combine into an unexpected happiness. The landscape is still the estuary becoming the sea, but he experiences it as anticipation—as though the next place and the remembered summer when he met Guerra in Rocha were drawing closer. Later, beneath the September sun, he feels able to surrender to the day because he is going to meet her. The city’s appeal is therefore not only visual: it is intensified by movement, distance from routine, and expectation.

The fantasy tested by consequence

Montevideo is also where Lucas goes to collect foreign writing advances. The journey is shaped by Argentina’s currency restrictions: transferring the dollars to an Argentine bank would convert them at the official rate and incur tax, whereas collecting cash in Uruguay and exchanging it at the unofficial rate could leave him with more than twice as much. He risks carrying more dollars back into Argentina than permitted. The boat’s multilingual safety announcements and the opening of its freeshop turn this crossing into a moment of relief and a peculiar sense of freedom, even though the purpose is to evade the restrictions that make the trip necessary. The idealized destination is thus also a practical stop within an economic predicament.

The city’s imagined safety and openness are similarly complicated. Enzo warns Lucas against treating Uruguay as a kinder Argentine province where corruption and political conflict have disappeared and everyone is benign. He invokes the dangers of Montevideo and its capacity to overwhelm visitors who arrive with that simplified expectation. His warning does not simply replace Lucas’s romantic picture with an authoritative opposite; it exposes the picture as incomplete. The city cannot be reduced either to the gentle refuge Lucas has assembled from Guerra’s messages or to a threat that explains everything that happens there.

That incompleteness becomes bodily and immediate after Lucas and Guerra share an intimate encounter and Guerra tells him she is pregnant. When Lucas embraces her, he registers that her life is entangled with other people and obligations, not available to the uncomplicated escape he has proposed. The assault that follows violently breaks the scene’s suspended intimacy. Later, Lucas weeps while thinking of Guerra, Catalina, Maiko, and the hospitality he received from Enzo. He understands that he must return to Buenos Aires. Montevideo remains bound to longing, but it no longer sustains the fantasy that desire alone can make a new life possible. Its significance lies in that double exposure: the city is both the setting of Lucas’s imagined escape and the real, resistant place through which he must pass before choosing to go home.