Valizas

Valizas is the coastal setting where Lucas Pereyra first meets Magalí Guerra Zabala, and the place where a writers’ festival gives way to an encounter that alters his emotional life. The dunes, beach, and loosely organized festival world make Valizas more than a scenic backdrop: for Lucas, it becomes the remembered origin of a relationship whose intensity follows him long after he leaves.

Setting and Festival

The festival runs from Friday through Monday on the final weekend of January. Lucas has been invited with other writers; his wife stays behind with their child at her sister’s country club. The accommodations are informal, with rooms full of bunk beds and shared bathrooms, and the literary program unfolds alongside a broader beachside routine of walking the dunes, swimming, smoking, talking, and catching up on literary gossip.

The setting’s appeal lies partly in what happens outside the scheduled events. Lucas is more interested in the festival’s social periphery than in the readings and round tables alone. Around him, groups gather for guitar music, mate, percussion, and cannabis; tents and camps spread among the dunes. The crowd includes affluent young visitors adopting a temporary, improvised style of life, as well as musicians, artisans, and older festivalgoers. Lucas, in his forties among mostly twenty-somethings, feels himself joining that world through the drug and the freedom it seems to offer from family, work, schedules, city life, and ordinary responsibilities.

The festival’s literary program remains a distinct part of the place. In a large, crowded shelter with a sound system, audience chairs, and independent publishing stalls behind the speakers, the participants discuss realism, verisimilitude, new technologies, the 1990s, and the post-dictatorship period. Lucas remembers the panel as competent and mildly polemical, but senses that some listeners might have preferred more readings and less theory. The audience nevertheless applauds enthusiastically. Afterward, the festival’s social life takes over: the party is where Lucas first sees Magalí Guerra Zabala.

The Encounter

At the party, Lucas is already dancing amid the crowd when he notices Magalí Guerra Zabala standing with a friend, holding a beer. He takes her hand and brings her onto the dance floor; she accepts, and they keep finding each other’s eyes as they turn together. He remembers her as physically assured and forceful in movement, barefoot, with wet hair, a denim miniskirt, and a loose shirt over her bikini. The attraction is immediate, registered in his recollection as a sudden bodily and emotional awakening.

They talk between dances and over more beer. Magalí Guerra Zabala has not read Lucas’s work and does not recognize his name. She tells him that she began studying social sciences but left, and that she works afternoons at a newspaper in Montevideo. She is staying in Valizas for fifteen days with friends, though she is evasive about that part of her circumstances. When they walk down a dark stretch to find another beer, they take each other’s hands and kiss. The party’s music and motion have become the beginning of a private connection.

The attraction is complicated from the outset. Magalí Guerra Zabala tells Lucas that he must be careful, then indicates that she is involved with someone. Lucas replies that he is married and has a child; she already knows about his son from his remarks at the festival. Valizas therefore marks not a clean escape from their existing lives but the point at which desire encounters the commitments and uncertainties both bring with them.

The Next Morning and the Journey

The morning after the party, they meet at the store at half past nine, as arranged. In daylight, they walk past people sleeping beside extinguished fires, sometimes in silence, smiling at one another now and then. Lucas chooses not to hurry into another kiss; he values the sense of beginning again while sober and in daylight. Their walk leads to a stream they can cross by boat or by swimming. They choose to swim, partly because they have committed themselves to the adventure, and bundle their bags together before entering the water.

Magalí Guerra Zabala warns Lucas to cross farther upstream because the current could carry them outward toward the sea. The warning proves practical: the water runs strongly, and they reach the opposite bank near the end of the stream’s mouth. They sit there catching their breath. Their excursion carries them on to Cabo Polonio, after which they return together by truck over the sand and then by bus to Valizas. On the bus, Magalí Guerra Zabala falls asleep against Lucas’s shoulder. The intimacy of the journey does not settle what their relationship means, but it gives their brief time together the shape of a shared passage through the landscape.

Their parting is concrete and abrupt. On the bus, Magalí Guerra Zabala says she has to get off a little earlier, writes her email address on a scrap of paper, and says goodbye to Lucas. He sees her get off at the entrance to a campground, where a group of young people is waiting; a somewhat gray-haired man with a muzzled dog embraces her longer than Lucas thinks necessary. Lucas continues to Valizas, gathers his belongings, and boards the writers’ van back to Montevideo. He does not want to answer questions about where he has been or hear what happened that day. Instead, he curls toward the window and gives himself over to the sadness of possibly not seeing her again for a long time.

Valizas in Memory

The novel revisits Valizas through Lucas’s recollection during a later bus journey toward Montevideo. The passing landscape—the road, fields, and approach toward the water—brings back the summer when he met Magalí Guerra Zabala among the dunes. The remembered party, their dancing, the swim, and the goodbye do not remain a settled episode in the past; the journey makes them vivid again as the narrator moves toward the city where she lives.

That return also distinguishes Valizas from the Montevideo Lucas subsequently imagines through Magalí Guerra Zabala’s messages and videos. Valizas is remembered as the place of direct encounter: a crowded festival, a dance, a dark walk for beer, a crossing made together, and a parting at a campground. The recollection gives the landscape emotional force without making it a lasting refuge. The festival’s temporary freedom ends in separation, while the address on the scrap of paper carries the possibility of contact beyond the coast.