Terminal Tres Cruces

Terminal Tres Cruces is Montevideo’s bus terminal and a mixed transport-and-shopping space that becomes the starting point for Lucas Pereyra’s movement through the city. It is more than a backdrop: its arrivals, public telephone, and route counters place him between the practical business of travel and the imagined escape he associates with Uruguay and Brazil. From its doors, the city’s unfamiliar details begin to unsettle and enrich the emotional map he has brought with him.

Arrival and First Impressions

After a four-hour bus ride, Lucas arrives at Terminal Tres Cruces and deliberately lets the other passengers get off before him. Among those leaving are a Jehovah’s Witness and a pastor. He notices their contrasting appearances and their seriousness, and that they descend without speaking to one another. The brief observation gives the arrival a human detail before the station’s bustle absorbs him.

He buys a sandwich and takes the escalator up through the terminal’s unusual combination of shopping center and bus station. The space makes Montevideo feel familiar and strange at once. The people, speech, and clothing seem close to those of Argentina, yet unfamiliar brands and words, the use of tú rather than vos, and small scenes of everyday life mark the difference. Lucas also notices features he associates with Brazil. His first impression is not of a wholly foreign place, but of a city that seems recognizable while refusing to be quite the same.

The terminal’s position within the city is important to that impression: the transition from enclosed transport space to the streets begins a day in which Lucas repeatedly moves between actuality and projection. He has come to Montevideo with practical business, but the city is already charged with associations before he reaches the bank or meets anyone there.

Calls, Meetings, and Routes Outward

Lucas has a little Uruguayan money left from an earlier trip and an Antel card. From a public telephone in the terminal, he calls Enzo Arredondo. Enzo cannot receive calls from a mobile phone, so Lucas must use a landline to reach his landline; the arrangement strikes him as odd, although Enzo always answers. Lucas had warned him that he was coming, but the call still surprises him. Enzo greets him with a nickname he has used since Lucas attended his literary workshop in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, based on Enzo’s idea that Lucas looks Dutch.

They arrange to meet at Enzo’s home at six o’clock, leaving time to talk before Lucas’s nine o’clock boat back. The terminal therefore anchors a tightly bounded visit: the reunion is fitted between arrival in the city and a scheduled departure. Enzo is described as continually involved in literary projects, books, travel, discoveries, and cultural networks linking Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and Entre Ríos. He tries to recruit Lucas to help create a literary magazine called N.º 2, a name that acknowledges Enzo’s expectation that it would last for only two issues. The proposed project turns their meeting into a continuation of the literary connection that began years earlier.

Lucas also walks among the counters for different bus companies and reads the destination boards. Nearby destinations include Castillos, La Pedrera, La Paloma, and Valizas; the farther routes point toward Porto Alegre and Florianópolis. The boards make Brazil tangible as a possible journey, while Lucas imagines the time, beaches, turquoise water, and caipirinhas that such a trip might involve. At the terminal, escape is at once a set of legible routes and a fantasy nourished by distance.

From the Terminal into Montevideo

When Lucas leaves, the commercial motion of the working day begins to erode that fantasy. He crosses a small square with restaurants and street vendors, follows a diagonal street, and reaches Avenida 18 de Julio. This avenue is the principal line in his limited mental map of Montevideo: he uses it to orient himself toward Ciudad Vieja, the central banking district, Parque Rodó, Cordón, and Enzo’s home. The map is incomplete, but it is also emotional, assembled from a few memories and images rather than from comprehensive knowledge of the city.

Before the trip, Magalí Guerra had periodically sent him songs and short videos showing streets and scenes from Montevideo. Those fragments had made the city intimate in advance. As he walks away from the terminal, he recognizes how much of his idea of the place has been invented from them, and how thoroughly his desire for Guerra has become attached to the city where she lives. The actual streets do not simply confirm the imagined Montevideo; the discrepancy between them is part of the experience.

The walk also gives him a route through ordinary urban detail. He notices shops and galleries, the Plaza de los 33 Orientales, the municipal building, and the varied traffic and storefronts along the avenue. At one point a passerby hands him a flyer for a tattoo and piercing business. Its mention of genital piercings brings Guerra’s piercing to mind, along with questions he and she had not discussed in their emails. He keeps the flyer in his jacket. The incident belongs to the city walk rather than to the terminal itself, but it shows how the terminal’s role as a point of entry extends into Lucas’s way of reading the streets: ordinary objects acquire private meaning as he moves through them.

A Threshold Between Escape and Return

The terminal sits at the beginning of a day shaped by competing purposes. Lucas has travelled from Buenos Aires to collect advances on book contracts held in Uruguay. Because a transfer to Argentina would be converted at the official exchange rate and subject to tax, collecting the dollars in Montevideo and bringing them back as cash promises him considerably more money. He knows that returning with more dollars than permitted carries a risk. The station’s transport connections belong to this material plan, even as its route boards tempt him with a different kind of departure.

Once in the city, Lucas goes to the bank and continues walking toward an encounter with Guerra. The day ultimately draws him away from the terminal’s practical order: he meets her, learns that she is pregnant, and is robbed on the beach. Afterward, the prospect of escape gives way to the recognition that he must return to Buenos Aires. Terminal Tres Cruces is not the setting for those later events, but its schedules and connections frame the limited interval in which they can occur. It marks the point where Lucas enters a temporary passage out of his ordinary life, and from which the return that closes that passage remains scheduled from the start.