The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

by Pedro Mairal

  I reached a spot where there was a slate that said “Parrots for sale,” then another one declaring “El Pajarito Grill.” It wasn’t clear whether the parrots they sold were alive or were on the menu. Then I came to a corrugated iron stall, where a scrawny cook was turning some spicy sausages over a bed of hot coals. I said hello, sat down for a rest, and ate a sausage sandwich with a glass of wine.

  For something to say, I asked him how long Los Italianos had been inhabited.

  “The shanty?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must be two or three years. Nowadays, here in Barrancales,” he said, thinking I came from Buenos Aires, “anyone who doesn’t work for the municipality lives in a shanty town.”

  “Doesn’t the Town Hall help them in any way?”

  “You must be joking! Those thieves even steal the mattresses and clothing people donate.”

  I asked him about Ibáñez. He paused while he wiped down the counter with a cloth, then said:

  “Ibáñez? There is an Ibáñez, but over on the Uruguayan side.”

  “Fermín Ibáñez?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure about his first name,” he said. “But he’s a fisherman called Ibáñez.”

  “Is he black?”

  “Yes ... more like mulatto, in fact.”

  “Directly across from here?”

  “Yes, a bit out of the way though, up towards Paysandú.”

  “How can I get across?”

  “On this side, at Gervasoni’s, beyond the saw mill, there’s a ferry that takes cars across.”

  “I didn’t think it was still going ...”

  “Yes, they brought it back because people don’t have the money to drive as far as the bridge, because of the price of gas and the tolls.”

  “What time does it cross?”

  “Oh ... around five, more or less.”

  I walked along the riverbank to Gervasoni’s. There was nobody on the quay: it was still early. I pushed into the undergrowth for a few meters and lay down in the shade of an ash tree, the bike beside me. I think I soon dozed off.

  I woke an hour later, staring up at the treetop, not knowing what on earth I was doing there. I felt as if I were inside one of those strips of foliage that Salvatierra loved to paint so much: the empty space between trees, the thick undergrowth, with hidden birds; an almost abstract composition he often used as a transition between scenes, as though the eye of the observer were at the height of the birds flying through the woods, full of shadows splashed with light; secret, intimate places where there are no human beings, where the eye gazes as if it were flying without touching the ground, flitting from tree to tree, solitary, in the fastness of the air, the dense greenery of nandubays, carobs, hackberries, ceibas in blossom, surrounded by small birds like scarlet flycatchers, larks, yellow-headed woodpeckers, thrushes, parrots.

  I sat up a little and saw a rusty ferry tied up at the quay. It was almost empty. When a Customs inspector had finished checking documents, a car and two motor scooters made their way off the boat, and some men unloaded wooden crates. I went down and asked the person who seemed to be in charge if the ferry was going back across. He told me that if any cars arrived, they might be going. I sat for some time on the quay, staring down at the barely moving waters. The little brown waves lapped against the columns, making the bits of floating rubbish sway to and fro.

  Our entire family had crossed on a couple of occasions to go on holiday at La Paloma in Uruguay. When my grandfather died, Salvatierra had spent part of his inheritance on those two or three summers by the sea. We rented a house near the beach. Salvatierra used to take lengths of prepared canvas with him, and paint on the veranda. When he got back, he’d add them to the latest roll. We made the crossing on a ferry that left us in Fray Bentos, and from there we took the train to La Paloma, changing in Montevideo. For me, the holidays always began on board the ferry.

  After two hours waiting on Gervasoni’s quay, I felt weary. The river seemed to me too wide, as if I had to swim across. I’d no idea what I was going to do, on my bike, looking for a fisherman who I had heard lived over on the far shore. In the end, the ferry didn’t leave because no cars showed up. I was able to head for home, comforted by the feeling that I had been defeated by insurmountable obstacles rather than by my own weakness. I told myself it was better this way. When my brother arrived, we could take his car and cross by the international bridge.

  27

  On my way back I saw one of those skies that Salvatierra so loved to paint. One of those deep, shifting, powerful skies. He sometimes painted scattered clouds growing smaller towards the horizon, which gave the sky its true dimension. He could create vast aerial spaces that left you giddy, as if you might plunge headfirst into the canvas. I knew—I had learned—what kind of skies interested him and so some afternoons when I went to the shed after school, I would say, “There’s a good sky outside,” and we would go out to look. It’s something I still do without realizing it, although my father had been dead these many years. I did it that afternoon as I was cycling slowly back to Barrancales: I saw the huge sky, the sky of flatlands, an intense blue with clouds tall as mountains or entire regions, and I silently told Salvatierra we should go out and look.

  Frequently it happens that when I see something I know how he would have painted it. I see figs in a bowl and imagine how Salvatierra would portray them. I spot a tree, a gray-blue eucalyptus for example, and see it as if it were his creation. Or people (this usually happens to me in gatherings after I’ve had a couple of drinks): I sometimes see them as if in oils, boldly colored, with red and yellow faces, Cubist guffaws, or making a gesture he would have caught, a way of tilting their face, crossing their legs, or sitting.

  It may seem as though this is my own artistic gaze I never had the courage to develop. But I never had any wish to paint. I always felt as if there was nothing he hadn’t done. I remember that when I was ten I showed him a scribble I had drawn of submarines and rockets. I was proud of the result. A week later I went into the shed and found a gigantic, brightly-colored submarine and rocket depicted on his canvas. Rather than thinking he had copied them from me, my sensation was that I had copied him without realizing it.

  As an adolescent I would often dream I was embracing a naked woman. I clung to her out of fear that she would change into something else. But I squeezed her so tight she began to soften, to crumble into colors. If I caressed her arm, the skin would start to smudge, and beneath I would see a blue, sticky color. I would let go of her and she would start to melt. Terrified, I would grow desperate, smear her against the sheet as if trying to kill her, as if trying to reach her, until she was no more than an impossible, beautiful, two-dimensional figure, painted forever on the canvas.

  Finding the missing roll was something I needed to do so that my father’s work would not be infinite. If one part was missing, I wouldn’t be able to take it all in, to know it in its entirety. There would still be mysteries, things that Salvatierra had perhaps painted of which I knew nothing. But if only I could find it, this world of images would have a limit. The infinite would reach an end, and I could discover something he hadn’t painted. Something of my own. Yet these are interpretations I’m making now. Back then I was simply obsessed with finding the roll; I didn’t even think about these things.

  28

  By the time I reached the shed I was out of breath. Boris and Aldo had already gone. I opened the bottle of whiskey I’d bought for Jordán. I took a couple of swigs and started searching through the shelves and crates. I found a Japanese drawing Doctor Dávila had given Salvatierra. It was a long drawing on a scroll, where each scene was linked to the one before it, and in turn provided the inspiration for the ones that followed. Salvatierra must have been fascinated by that.

  I found brushes my father had made from the hair of all kinds of animals. The broadest ones were made from the horse tails we got at the auctions of old mares where they sold bags of horsehair by the kilo. For medium brushes, Salvat
ierra would use hair from the inside of cows’ ears. We would go and get them from Lorenzo the butcher on Tuesdays, when he was slaughtering. More delicate brushes were made from river otter bristles, brought by an old trapper called Ceferino Hernández in exchange for a bottle of Trenzas de Oro red wine. The finest brushes, used to paint the figures’ hair, blades of grass, or gossamer threads, consisted of the fur from black cats we neighborhood kids would fling stones at from time to time, or from the tiny feathers collected from the floor of the cages out in the yard where Luis kept a canary, cardinal or finch. Salvatierra would make the handle of the brush from a length of bamboo cane. He would put the hairs into a funnel to shape them, carefully cut the top end and then, when they had been fastened and glued together, push them into the cane. That was how he made his brushes.

  Aldo came to shut up the shed. I asked him to help me get a few of the rolls down. I queried him about how many years exactly he had worked with my father, and calculated that Salvatierra must have worked alone, without help, for about ten years. We lowered several rolls from that period, and some later ones from the eighties. When Aldo left, I spent a while gazing at a roll completely given over to portraying the seasons. There were no people in it, except for occasional tiny figures flitting through the background of the landscapes. The scenes progressed from the white light of summer siestas to the time of April showers, from flooded winter fields to trees bursting with fresh, almost phosphorescent leaves. If I’m not mistaken, he painted this in 1962, the year President Frondizi was toppled by a coup. Whenever he was disillusioned with politics – or humanity in general – Salvatierra used to paint these empty landscapes, as if wanting to get away to a place where the links with other human beings would be reduced to a distant wave.

  Another roll I had never seen began with a train. Seated gazing out of the window in the last carriage was a skinny, melancholy-looking adolescent. Was it me? It looked a lot like me. The youth was saying goodbye to someone, a nervous smile on his face. Yes, it was me. I recognized myself as if in an old photo that I was unaware had been taken. My father had painted me exactly as he saw me the morning he accompanied me to the station with mom. Further on, the grass and the train became blurred because the train was in motion, and I appeared at the other windows of the carriage. In one, I was eating a sandwich. In another, I was asleep with my head against the window, while opposite me sat a naked young girl, as if she were my own dream. I was astonished Salvatierra should think so intensely about me. Astonished to see myself through his eyes, because it was obvious how much it had hurt him to see me leave. I felt that he was talking to me through his painting, bridging the enormous silence that had existed between us. Now he was talking to me with the love in his painting, saying things he had never been able to say.

  I drank some more Chivas. I don’t know how much, because I was drinking straight from the bottle. A little more. What exactly had happened during those years? Luis had left for Buenos Aires first, and I had followed not long afterwards. I was supposed to be going away to study, but above all I wanted to escape from Barrancales, from home, and most of all from the painting, from the vortex of the painting that I felt was going to swallow me up forever, like an altar boy destined to end up as chaplain in that huge temple of images and endless duties with the canvases, pulleys, colors ... Salvatierra had painted my escape as though wanting to protect me, because the train windows later became those of the faculty building, and there I was again, his younger son, absent-minded in the midst of other students, a flock of parrots fluttering round my head. Through another window I was sitting with Luis at the table in our boarding house. Luis seems happy, and is pouring himself a glass of what looks like beer; I am smoking. How did Salvatierra know I had started smoking? He must simply have imagined it, and painted his son as having already got away from him, doing things over which he had no control. This was him keeping an eye on the two of us, wanting us to have an easy student life, free of danger. Since he listened to the radio, he heard about what was going on at university in those days. He must have been most worried about Luis, because he was flirting with being a Peronist militant. He knew that because I used to refer to him (until it became dangerous to do so) as “my Peronist brother.” But Luis didn’t really have strong political convictions: he was active for a couple of years to set himself apart from dad’s inclination to support Frondizi, and to be accepted by a group of friends in the capital. He drifted away from militancy well before the most violent years.

  At Salvatierra’s insistence, mom would call us regularly on the phone to see how we were. “Dad wants to know when you’re coming to visit us,” she was in the habit of saying, but we let the months go by without returning, until the vacations arrived and we went to spend Christmas with them. Both of us knew though that we were going to stay and live in Buenos Aires, and were accomplices in this sort of betrayal.

  By now it was late. The whiskey on an empty stomach had given me the silly, clumsy courage to spread out one last roll before I left. It was from the eighties. At first all I saw were sandy shores and skinny greyhounds among the willows. Then I came across a portrait Salvatierra had done of my ex-wife Silvia and my son Gastón during some celebration or other in Barrancales. Just the two of them: I’m not there. As if we had already separated. Seated, Silvia is looking off to the right; my son Gastón, who must have been six or seven years old, is standing up, pressed against his mother and staring straight ahead. His eyes intimidated me. Salvatierra always painted them as if they were on the point of blinking. My son’s eyes, their transparent, slightly pained gaze. As if asking me why everything that happened had happened. The separation and the divorce, and going to fetch him so that we could ride our bikes in the Palermo woods on Saturday mornings. I had to sit down.

  I stared at the painting, absorbed in it. It was shortly after this portrait was made that Silvia and I split up. There the two of them are. My wife and my son. As if I were rediscovering them exactly where I’d left them. As if they had stayed there waiting for me without moving in the shadows of the canvas for more than ten years. I knew Silvia was partly to blame, but here was Salvatierra showing me what I had lost. I found it hard to contemplate. My father had succeeded in capturing what had slipped through my fingers.

  29

  It was dark when I left the shed to cycle back to the house. A few stars were out, and there was a cool wind. I tried to spot potholes and bits of rubble in order to avoid them. A couple of blocks before I arrived, I heard a car accelerating behind me. I tried to see who it was, but its headlights blinded me. It seemed to be heading straight for me, to cut me off, threatening to run me over. I steered as best I could towards the pavement. Startled, I put one foot down on the ground. The car came to a halt a few meters further on. There were two people inside. The one in the passenger seat had his arm dangling out of the window. Without looking back, he shouted:

  “Sell that pile of crap and have done with it!” At that, the car sped off, raising dirt.

  I couldn’t make out their faces. Some neighbors came out to see what was going on and asked me what had happened. I didn’t know whether to tell them it had been a misunderstanding or that somebody had tried to kill me. I wasn’t sure either way.

  Instead of continuing on home I went to the telephone office and called Luis. When I told him what had happened he said it had probably been thugs sent by Baldoni, the supermarket owner.

  “He’s trying to put the screws on us so we’ll sell,” said Luis.

  He seemed very certain, although I thought it was an incredible idea. Luis suggested I report the incident to the police if that would reassure me. He tried to play it down, saying, “No one’s going to kill us for a shed, Miguel.”

  That was easy for him to say from so far off. Then he told me that the documents to get the painting out of the country weren’t going well. He’d been talking to a lawyer because, when he started the process, a problem had arisen. Luis asked for an export permit from the National H
istorical and Artistic Heritage Commission. The Commission discovered that, since years earlier Salvatierra’s work had been declared “part of the provincial heritage,” it could not be sold or allowed out of the country. If the province had in fact done nothing for the work, we had the right to take them to court and ask for this to be annulled. But that could take years. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Don’t say anything to the Dutch people for now,” he said.

  I went home, no longer frightened so much as annoyed. For the bureaucracy to put obstacles in the way of getting Salvatierra’s work known, for Baldoni to try to scare me into selling him the shed ... I saw the TV was on in the Dursts’ corner store, so I went in to have a beer and take my mind off things. I needed a bit of noise.

  30

  The next morning I went to the supermarket to confront Baldoni in his office.

  “You’re saying I did what?” he blustered.

  He was really offended when I explained. He denied it outright. He said it was not his way of doing things. That he might be in a hurry to buy the land, but he would never send his people to put pressure on anyone.

  “So what do your ‘people’ do?” I asked, emphasizing the fact that this was what he himself had called them.

  “I’m in the Social Welfare office. We distribute the donations we’re given. Some people are annoyed with me because they reckon I keep the things for myself, so perhaps they confused you with someone on my team ...”

  I left more bewildered than ever. I went to the shed and watched Boris and Aldo at work. By now they did everything with mechanical efficiency. They would open one roll under the scanner, stretching it out on each side with identical movements, mirror images of one another. While the machine was copying that section, they rolled up the far end. Hanna came back from Misiones with wooden sculptures of little birds, jaguars, and alligators. From what she said, it seemed she’d been more impressed by the Iguazú Falls than by the Jesuit mission ruins. She spoke half Spanish and half Dutch, adding explanations for Boris.