Pedro Mairal

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

1

The painting (the reproduction of the painting) is in the Röell Museum. It stretches around a curved underground corridor that links the old building with the new wing. When you descend the stairs it’s as if you’re in an aquarium. The painting flows along thirty meters of the inside wall like a river. There’s a bench on the opposite wall where people can sit and watch the canvas go slowly past. It takes a whole day for it to complete its cycle. More than four kilometers of images gradually unfolding from right to left.

If I say it took my father sixty years to paint it, that makes it sound as though he set himself the task of completing some vast work. It would be more exact to say that he painted it over a period of sixty years.

2

The myth now starting to grow up around the figure of Salvatierra is based on his silence. In other words, on his inability to speak, his anonymous life, on his work’s lengthy secret existence, and its almost complete disappearance. The fact that only one canvas has survived means that this unique piece is worth a great deal more. He never gave interviews, left no notes about his work, played no part in our cultural life and never had an exhibition. As a consequence, curators and critics can fill that silence with a vast array of opinions and theories.

I read that one critic described his work as “art brut,” an art made in a completely naive and self-taught way, with no artistic pretensions. Another critic spoke of the obvious influence of the Mallorcan Luminist painters on Salvatierra’s work. If that’s so, the distance that influence had to travel is a long one, but not impossible: from those Spanish Luminists to Bernaldo de Quirós; from Quirós to his friend and pupil Herbert Holt; and from Holt to Salvatierra. Another critic mentioned similarities with emakimono, those long painted scrolls you find in Chinese or Japanese art. It’s true that Salvatierra had seen one of those scrolls, but it’s also true that he had already developed his technique of continuity in painting long before that.

But these hypotheses are unimportant. If I started trying to correct all the misapprehensions in what is being said about my father, I’d have no time to do anything else. I have to get used to the idea that Salvatierra’s work is no longer ours (by that I mean our family’s) and that now other people see it, look at it, interpret and misinterpret it, make critical assessments of it, in some way appropriate it. That’s how it should be.

I can also understand that the absence of the artist improves the work. Not only because he is dead, but because of the silence I mentioned earlier. The fact that the artist isn’t present, getting in the way between spectator and work, means that people are freer to appreciate it. In this sense, Salvatierra is a particularly extreme case. For example, there’s not a single self-portrait in the entire work; he does not appear in his own painting. In what is essentially a personal diary in images he himself does not figure. It’s like writing an autobiography in which you don’t even figure. And another curious point: the work isn’t signed. Although perhaps that’s not so strange. After all, where could he have signed a painting that size?

Of all the distortions that have grown up around my father’s posthumous popularity, what I find hardest to take is the sudden appearance of his supposed friends and acquaintances. Especially bearing in mind the fact that hardly anyone in Barrancales knew that Salvatierra painted, and that the few who did were not interested. A couple of weeks ago I saw a documentary where several unknown Barrancales luminaries were talking on camera (with French subtitles), recounting anecdotes about him, his character, his way of working. My aunts also appeared, even though they looked down on him, together with a provincial cultural secretary who rejected the work for years, and even Doctor Dávila’s widow, who wouldn’t open the door for me when I went to visit her. All of them spruced up, decent-looking, recounting their false or true stories about my father. They should at least have interviewed Jordán or Aldo. That would have been more honest.

3

When he was nine, Salvatierra had an accident while he was out horse-riding with his cousins through the palm grove down by the river. Salvatierra was riding a dapple-gray with a bristling coat. That’s how he always painted it: like a threat that reappears every so often throughout the work, a horse whose coat mingles with a leaden sky. His mount took fright in mid-gallop; Salvatierra fell off when it bucked, but his foot was caught in the stirrup, and he was left dangling between the horse’s legs as it made off through the trees. He was trampled on so badly that he had a fractured skull, a broken jaw, and a dislocated hip.

His cousins found him half an hour later in the woods, still dangling from the horse, which was quietly grazing behind a thorn bush. My uncle always used to say that they brought him back slowly, in tears, believing he was dead.

His life was saved by an old, one-eyed cook. She took him in, washed his wounds with some kind of herbal potion, wrapped him in clean clothes and put him to bed, whispering in his ear. When my grandparents returned from the village and saw how he looked, my grandmother fainted.

It wasn’t until the next day that a drunken doctor drove up in his surrey. Fortunately, he didn’t even touch Salvatierra, but simply said: “There’s nothing to do but wait,” and appeared again every three days, more to sample the lunch-time wine than to examine his patient. I’ve never been able to discover the name of that doctor, but he did something fundamental in my father’s life. Not only did he allow him to recover without submitting him to the bloodletting and ice-cold baths recommended in those days, but when he saw he was getting better, he gave him some English watercolors that were brought down the river from Paraguay.

Following that accident, Salvatierra never spoke again. He could hear, but not speak. We never knew whether his muteness had a physical or psychological cause, or was a combination of the two. Any attempts to cure him were homespun: for example, a glass of water was left somewhere where he could see but not reach it, and he was told he could not have it until he said the word “water.” This proved useless: even though he might be dying of thirst, Salvatierra never uttered a single word.

What they did achieve was to get him to draw whatever it was he wanted. Then, after he had seen the watercolors, he began to paint. The drawings from those years have not survived (in fact, when he began his great work at the age of twenty, he himself burned all his previous efforts). According to what I’ve been told, while he was recovering from the accident his bed would be moved out under the arbor and he would draw birds, dogs, and insects, or sketch furtive portraits of his adolescent girl cousins and his aunts, while they drank fresh lemonade in the early evening shade.

4

His long convalescence and his muteness spared him from the role established for the robust, healthy males of the family, and freed him from his Spanish father’s great expectations. My grandfather, Rafael Salvatierra, had come to Argentina in his early twenties with his brother Pablo. They had worked on small farms in Concepción del Uruguay, then as farm managers in Colón until in their forties they had been able to buy some sandy land nobody else wanted in the Barrancales area. Over dinner, my grandfather would spread his arms wide in a gesture that was meant to include not only the big dining room but also the acres of land all around them, and he would say to his sons: I started out from complete poverty and have reached this far; this is where you start from, let’s see how far you get. The dapple-gray’s kicks spared my father this challenging destiny.

So he became the little dumb kid, the idiot of the family. They let him play with the women, and did not demand from him the proofs of virility the other males in the family were called upon to demonstrate: firing a shotgun, lassoing or riding steers. He spent his time with his cousins, who fetched and carried him, treated him like a doll, played at being schoolmarms with him, and taught him everything they knew. They forced him to write so that he wouldn’t forget the alphabet, made him communicate with them by writing letters on a slate, and bathed in the river with him. My aunt Dolores used to tell me that when the girls were getting changed to go for a swim down among the willows, they would make him turn his back to them. He would clap his hands once (his way of asking if he could look yet) and they would say no. After a while he would clap again, and they would say no a second time, that on no account was he to look around, and then he would hear them laughing and turn to find that his cousins were already in the water.

Their little joke must have tormented Salvatierra, because in his work you can often see adolescent girls getting changed in the green light beneath the riverside willows, sun-tanned girls in a hurry because they are ashamed of their nudity. He must have painted them because he needed to see at long last those scenes that had taken place behind his back but which he had been unable to witness, their luminous intensity that was so close and yet forbidden to him.

5

If Salvatierra had asked my brother Luis and me to take care of his work after his death, we would probably not have done so, or if we had, much less willingly. As it was, the day before he died in Barrancales hospital, when Luis asked him: “Papa, what should we do with the canvas?” he smiled, and bent his elbow upwards with the careless gesture of tossing something behind him, towards the past, as if to say: “It doesn’t matter, I’ve enjoyed it.” Then he put his index finger under one eye and lifted his chin towards mother, who was opening the curtains with her back to us. I understood his gesture to mean: “Keep an eye on her,” or something of the sort. We didn’t get the chance to ask him again about the painting. It seemed as though what was important to him was having painted it, nothing more. Whatever we decided to do was fine by him. My father died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of the next morning.

Some time later, when Luis and I decided to do something about the painting, the first move we made was to go and talk to his old friend Doctor Dávila. He’d been our doctor as children, and despite his age, he still had some contacts in the provincial government. He suggested we ask for a grant to help build a small museum. He wrote several letters to the authorities stressing the quality and importance of the work, and its value as a document showing the customs and people of a specific time and region. This succeeded in having the work declared “part of the provincial cultural heritage,” but the funds needed to set up the foundation were never forthcoming. Nor did anyone from the Town Hall ever come to see what my father’s work was like. All we got was the certificate: a stack of sheets of paper with official headings and stamps, signed with great flourishes. Instead of helping us, these turned out to create a bureaucratic nightmare.

After that, time went by when we could do nothing. We didn’t talk about it with mom because we didn’t want to stir up (or rather, unfold) the past in front of her eyes; we thought it might be painful for her. This wasn’t a decision I talked over with my brother; it simply happened that way. My parents had always been very close and, following his death, my mother bore his absence with a lucid, resigned silence we didn’t dare break. She died two years after him. She never knew we intended to rescue the painting, and she never brought the matter up. All she said once was that the owner of the supermarket recently built next to the shed where father painted had made her an offer to buy the land, but that she had refused it.

6

On the day of mom’s funeral, once we were free of the aunts and all the condolences, Luis and I escaped and drove in his car to the shed. It had been years since we’d gone in there. We saw that on the land behind it, once no more than a bamboo grove, there now stood the supermarket. The shed still had its sliding door.

“Shall we go in?” said Luis.

For a while we hesitated, then parked the car and got out. We were surprised to find there was no padlock on the shed door. We pushed it open. We entered as if it were a temple, asking permission from Salvatierra’s ghost. The rolls of canvas were there, neatly hanging from the roof beams. We counted them: more than sixty. A man’s entire life. All his days rolled up, hidden there.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Luis.

The rolls were hanging above our heads. We had an enormous task in front of us.

“How many meters do you think there are?”

Peering upwards and straightening his glasses, Luis said:

“Kilometers, che, several kilometers of it.”

We knew some parts of the work, especially from the period when we had helped our father prepare the canvas. But Salvatierra often painted sections behind closed doors, which were then rolled up and which we never saw. It was only now that we were freely confronted with the entire work, its colors, its secrets, and all its years. I think we were both very curious, but also felt intimidated as we calculated the immensity of the task before us. We stood there, unable to move: two men in their forties, vapor coming from our mouths in the cold shed, our hands stuffed in our overcoat pockets.

All of a sudden we heard a gruff voice:

“What are you looking for?”

We saw a small, hirsute man with a big stick in his hand. We told him who we were. This calmed him down, and he presented himself as well: he was Aldo, an assistant Salvatierra had taken on to carry out the work we had stopped doing when we left for Buenos Aires. We’d only seen each other on a couple of occasions. It took him some time to recognize us, and for us to recognize him. He seemed to have become sullen, almost unapproachable. He told us that after Salvatierra’s death, mom had no longer paid him, but that he kept on coming to the shed because he had a few of his things there, and while he was in the shed he checked for leaks and topped up the rat poison. He explained that a few weeks earlier he had found two guys prowling around the shed trying to force their way in, but that now he kept his eyes peeled and always had a gun handy. We saw there was a camp bed in a corner, with the stump of a candle next to it. There was also a half rotten canoe, an old bike, a few crates, some sacks, and lots of broken or dismantled bits and pieces.

We asked him what had been the last thing Salvatierra had painted. He showed us the scroll from his final year. It was near the ground, at our height. He took the cover off, and we began to unroll it. We saw the very last things Salvatierra had painted a fortnight before he died. The final few meters of the canvas were all the color of still water, sometimes transparent, at others more opaque, like an underwater silence where a single fish occasionally swam, or there were a few circles on the surface.

Luis and I looked at each other. I think we both liked the sense of tranquility it gave off. “It’s unfinished,” said Aldo, pointing out a fish and some circles that were only half completed. “After he’d done this bit, he had no strength left and didn’t want to go on.” That didn’t matter. It was clear that somehow Salvatierra had finished it where he wanted to. As if afterwards he had simply chosen to die.

I had wondered thousands of times what the end of the canvas would be like, that canvas that seemed to me to flow on forever, however much I knew it had to end someday, just as my father would also meet his end, that he was mortal even though I refused to believe it. Here was the answer.

7

When he was fourteen, and had been abandoned by his cousins who had grown bored with him, Salvatierra became increasingly solitary. A family photograph from that time shows him awkwardly clutching his cap off to the side of the others, looking on like some skittish foal from behind that prominent nose of his that both Luis and I have inherited. His mother used to let him visit a German anarchist painter called Herbert Holt who lived for a while in Barrancales and was a friend and pupil of Bernaldo de Quirós. Holt taught my father the techniques of oil painting.

It was Salvatierra himself who recounted all this, with that mixture of mime and gestures he sometimes used to tell us stories. He used to go to Holt’s house twice a week on his bike (it was a long time before he got on the back of a horse again). He would pedal by the river along the old track that’s now been replaced by the avenue, riding through the grove of trees at the town’s southern entrance: the ash, willows and poplars that formed the green tunnels that appear in his work. He would arrive at Holt’s at nine in the morning. The old man let him paint alongside him, with only occasional suggestions. Little by little, Holt taught him to use perspective, to mix colors, study proportions and, most important of all, to paint each day. Every so often they would paint tramps who Holt had pose for them in return for wine and biscuits.

Holt left, returning to Germany following Uriburu’s coup in 8930. My brother reckons there was nothing political about his departure, but that when he saw he had been so quickly surpassed by his pupil, the old man decided to seek out fresh horizons as far away as possible from this humiliation. Two rather poor paintings by him still hang on the walls of the Barrancales Social Club. They are meant to show the banks of the River Uruguay, but look much more like the chilly Danube of his native country.

The figure of Holt makes two or three appearances in Salvatierra’s huge work. In one he paints him as an orchestra conductor, baton raised as he gazes down imperiously at the countryside. In another he is seated, looking contented as he devours a big yellow watermelon beneath a fire-yellow sky. Salvatierra told us that one day the two of them had an argument because he painted a watermelon yellow, and Holt said he ought to paint things their real color. If watermelons were as pink as the evening sky, you had to paint them pink. With his nervous mimicry, my father tried to explain that yellow watermelons did exist. Holt thought he was making fun of him, and threw him out. The next day, Salvatierra came back with a round melon as a gift. He chopped it in two with his penknife in front of Holt. To the German’s astonishment, two perfectly yellow halves fell open.

During the years of his apprenticeship with Holt, Salvatierra avoided his brothers and cousins as much as possible and roamed all over the rough countryside by the shore. He got to know the fishermen who built shacks on the riverbank and eked out a living by going out in their canoes to catch fish with lines and nets. Old men who prevented the rising tide carrying off their few possessions by hanging them from the highest branches of the carob trees. The fishermen appear in his work among constellations of the kinds of monstrous fish often found in our rivers: huge tiger surubies with their long whiskers; oriental looking patíes; sour bile colored bagres; shovel nosed manduvies; and the pez chancho, the battleship among fish, armed with spines the length of its body. That is how Salvatierra paints these fishermen from his youth, like ragged saints who are the lords of the fish swimming high in the air among the boards, pans, bags, and ladles hanging from the branches so they won’t be swept away by the river. As if they could all swim in the air just as they did in the water: men, fish, and things.

It’s understandable that he didn’t like to go — even if he was occasionally forced to do so — with his cousins and brothers and sisters to the dances organized in the town. His muteness obviously inhibited him, and in addition he hated all formality. I only ever saw him in two sets of clothes: the paint-stained mechanic’s overalls he wore to paint in, and the gray jacket he donned to go to the Post Office, which he never put on again once he retired.

I think that what he also learned from Holt — more by example than from any direct teaching — was a certain love of freedom, a vital anarchy or happy sense of isolation. A simplification of life to the bare essentials, which meant he could carry on doing what he liked without hindrance.

When Holt returned to Europe, he left my father a large quantity of paint and a long roll of canvas that he had not used. Holt himself would cut pieces off this roll and stretch them on rectangular frames to paint on. Salvatierra though decided to use the entire roll to paint a lengthy depiction of the river, without cutting it up. That was his first roll. He was twenty when he began.

8

The first thing we did before we left was to pay Aldo a few pesos for him to look after the canvases and keep the shed intact. A short time later, Luis and I were able to leave our affairs in Buenos Aires behind and return to Barrancales. Luis had no difficulty escaping from his notary office. I was divorced and my only son was living in Barcelona, so all I had to do was close the real estate office for a few days — I was doing hardly any business anyway.

We installed ourselves in our parents’ last house, which was still for sale. It was close to the river, five blocks from my father’s shed. With Aldo’s help, we spent our days lowering and raising the rolls of canvas, using the system of pulleys and an apparatus for lifting engines that Salvatierra had found in a former car repair shop. We calculated that each roll must weigh around a hundred kilos. Luis said we were getting old, and we laughed because the simple act of rolling up our sleeves to do some physical work put us in a better mood.

When each canvas was lowered to the ground, we unrolled it and Luis took photos of different fragments. His idea was to send the images with a letter to the provincial authorities insisting they come up with the promised subsidy, or if that failed, to ask for support from a foundation or museum interested in backing an exhibition.

It would have been impossible to exhibit the entire canvas in one place, but we thought it could go on display in segments. Two sequences had been shown in Buenos Aires for a short while in the sixties, but Salvatierra had not wanted to be present. He had always felt the odd man out, a figurative painter among non-figuratives, a provincial among artists from the capital, a practitioner among theorists. Besides, those were the days of installations and happenings: aesthetic concerns that were alien to him. On another occasion, his friend Doctor Dávila took a section to an art biennial in Paraná, after he and my father agreed that if his work won they would share the prize money. And it did win. We all went to the ceremony. Salvatierra felt very awkward, and never exhibited again. He wasn’t interested, and anyway it interrupted his daily work. He didn’t want recognition, he wouldn’t have known how to handle it: he felt it had nothing to do with the task he had allotted himself.

I think he saw his work as something too personal, a kind of intimate diary, an illustrated autobiography. Possibly because he was mute, he needed to tell himself his own story. To recount his own experience in one never-ending mural. He was content with painting his life; he had no need to show it. For him, living his life was to paint it.

I also believe (something I only understand now) that he was perhaps slightly embarrassed at the immensity of his work, its outsize dimensions, how grotesquely gigantic it was: almost more like a hoarding vice or obsession than a finished work of art.

With Luis we decided that rather than send out photos with an accompanying letter, it would be better to put together a leaflet showing some fragments of the canvas, alongside an explanation and an image of Salvatierra. We also decided to include a photograph of the shed with the hanging rolls, to give some idea of the extent of the work and my father’s project.

It proved very difficult to choose how to frame the different sections of the canvas, because Salvatierra painted without any lateral divisions so as to achieve continuity between the different scenes. That was something that obsessed him. He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.

One example of this is the segment dated February 1975. This begins with an open-air celebration under the trees, in a garden where we see couples dancing and laughing. There seems to be a lot of noise in the air, and there are several drunkards lying on the ground. A man is dragging a woman off into the bushes; two other men are about to start a fight; one of the drunks is wearing a military uniform, another on his knees seems to have something sticking out of his stomach; then there’s another officer clutching a woman’s arm, and more men struggling beneath the trees, men in uniform fighting hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers; people killing each other in a big scrum, with some lying dead on the ground: by now the canvas has turned into a fight to the death in the undergrowth. In passing from a fiesta to a battle, the painting succeeds in making the viewer accept the transformation as if it were an obvious, logical consequence.

Because of this continuity, we found it hard to decide where to frame our photographs. The canvas had no borders, even at the end of each roll: they all fit exactly with the start of the next one. If he could have, Salvatierra would have kept them all together in one vast scroll, although it would have been impossible to take care of it or transport it.

The date and number of each roll were clearly written on the back. The day before we had to leave again, when I began to make a list of them, I noticed that one was missing. A whole year was absent: 1961. The dates on the back jumped from ’60 to ’62. Salvatierra had never missed a day’s painting. It was impossible that he had stopped for an entire year. We glanced suspiciously at Aldo. He said he had no idea where it might be, and that if the roll existed, it had been missing for a long while, because the order they were hanging in had not been altered in years. If it had been stolen recently, the gap would be obvious. I believed him; my brother didn’t.

We tried to recall that year. What had happened in ’61? We couldn’t remember anything in particular. At the time, we were living in a house near the Municipal Park. I was ten; Luis was fifteen. My sister Estela had already died. Salvatierra was working in the Post Office, and mom gave English classes… all the usual. If Aldo hadn’t stolen it, what had happened to the roll? Where could it be? Had the rats got at it, with the result that Aldo had hidden it or thrown it away? Could someone else have stolen it? Perhaps Salvatierra himself had destroyed it, or sold it, or given it away? The rolls that had been shown in Buenos Aires and Paraná were still there; the missing one was none of those. We spent some time trying to work out what could have happened, but then we had to get on with our work because we were going back to Buenos Aires the next day.

9

Salvatierra was twenty-five years old and working in the Post Office when he met Helena Ramírez, my mother. She was twenty-one and worked in the Ortiz library in Barrancales. Salvatierra used to go there on Saturday mornings to read about the lives of the great painters and to look for books with illustrations and engravings. In the canvas from that time there is a slow transition from nocturnal scenes to those with the brightness of morning. First there are lengthy twilight landscapes with black women washing clothes on the riverbank (Doctor Dávila told us that sometimes in summer Salvatierra would go with the fishermen to the opposite side of the river in Uruguay, where they were received by a group of washerwomen). Salvatierra painted the hour when the first stars are reflected in the water, and everything is beginning to merge into the shadows. In one segment, somebody is striking a match, and in the darkness you can just make out a woman who is smiling provocatively from behind the bushes.

After that, daytime scenes began to take over. These show the outskirts of the town at dawn with long, tree-lined streets along which sleepy figures cycle by. These landscapes coincide with the moment when he met my mother. There are several portraits of her: one shows her seated at her librarian’s desk, in the distance at first, at the far end of a large empty room; then closer up, still radiant, absorbed in her reading; a girl with enormous eyelashes who will not look up until much further on. Mom always said my father was as shy as a guinea pig, and stayed at the opposite end of the room, leafing through his books and casting surreptitious glances at her. She used to say she could tell when Salvatierra was drawing her because she found it impossible to read, her body began to itch, and she became very self-conscious.

10

At the last minute, just as we were about to leave for Buenos Aires, we managed to get someone from Town Hall to come and look at Salvatierra’s work. We were keen to know whether they would finally decide to support the project of creating a museum. If we didn’t receive any funds, we were prepared to do something on our own account. Doctor Dávila had died; two governments had come and gone since he had succeeded in having the painting declared part of our “cultural heritage.” The local government in Barrancales was now being run by the “Let’s Go!” movement, a party made up of Peronists who were in charge of doling out the contracts for Carnival, and ex-Radicals who held the purse strings for the forestation projects.

A secretary working for the Cultural Affairs director came. He was on his cell phone the whole time he was there. We showed him a few of the rolls, unfolding them on the floor of the shed. I would try to explain, but his phone would ring and he would take the call. He would go to the door and shout out phrases like: “You tell the people in the associations that we’ve got the dough.” He walked around in circles waving his arms about and insulting someone on the other end of the line. He came closer, then moved off again. “Listen brother, those guys don’t even have enough for gas,” he would say.

At a certain moment, still listening to somebody on his phone, he pushed back one of the rolls a little with the tip of his shoe, to take a look. That was the only sign of interest he showed. Afterwards, he told us that the matter would have to be discussed with the mayor, and that perhaps a letter could be sent to the provincial government. “All I can say is that there’s no money,” he said. “It’s really tough trying to raise any. But put forward a proposal anyway.” We told him we already had, but it was obvious none of them knew anything about it.

Before getting back into his car, he asked us if we were aware that someone called Baldoni, the owner of the neighboring supermarket and the man in charge of Social Welfare at the Town Hall, was interested in buying the land. I remembered the offer made to mom. The guy had a quick look around the shed and immediately suggested we sell the plot, store my father’s work somewhere else that he could help us find, and then use the money to build a museum.

It didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Luis gave him his card. We agreed we would talk, and he left. The following day we returned to Buenos Aires, and it was several months before I could visit Barrancales again.

11

I went back towards the end of winter, after we had already received support from the Adrian Röell Foundation. All we had achieved in the intervening months was to make contact with Señor Baldoni, who made a ridiculously low offer for the land. When Luis rejected it, the director of Cultural Affairs’ secretary called him. Doubtless Baldoni and he had been in touch. They were offering us an alternative place to store the rolls, half a block from the river. A place prone to flooding. Luis thanked him and said we were going to deal with things ourselves.

I shut the real estate office down. We prepared the leaflets and sent them to be printed. We started distributing them to galleries, foundations, and companies. A graphic designer made a digital version for us, which Luis sent by email to several foreign institutions. It wasn’t long before we started to receive replies.

We had thought of several ways we could exhibit the canvas. One of them was to join all the pieces together and have them pass by behind a glass screen, then wind them on to a second big reel. But it would need an enormous space to do this, and with this system, once the roll had reached the end, the canvas would unwind in the opposite direction, as if time were flowing backwards. Another idea was to exhibit, if not the totality of the canvas, at least some lengthy fragments in an enclosed space, or a circular gallery like the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires. A further possibility was to publish a bulky coffee table book with foldout illustrations.

To begin with, things didn’t look too promising. The first people to express interest in Salvatierra’s work were some North Americans from the Guinness Book of Records. Luis had written to them, thinking they might finance an exhibition. But their proposal was to display the whole length of the work on the asphalt of an abandoned highway and to film it from a helicopter. They said that if our information was correct, we were the owners of the longest work of art in the world, and that could bring us substantial rewards. We thought Salvatierra wouldn’t have liked this. He hadn’t painted his work for it to be seen from a helicopter like some kind of monstrous prodigy. So we said no, and waited for further offers.

(I’ve noticed that, in the most recent editions of the book, the longest canvas in the world is still said to be a sacred painting from Tibet, on display in Beijing. It is six hundred and eighteen meters long, and was made by four hundred Buddhist monks. Salvatierra’s work is four kilometers long and he was its sole creator.)

After receiving a few calls from curious individuals and some unviable Argentine galleries offering only small spaces, the proposal from the Röell Foundation arrived from Holland. They were interested in the work because they were putting together a collection of Latin American art. In the first place, they proposed to photograph it to create a digital archive. They would make the work known in Europe, and if it aroused any interest, they could arrange to buy it and transfer it to the foundation’s museum in Amsterdam. Luis and I thought this was an interesting idea. We were prepared to take things step by step, and besides which, they were offering us a decent sum of money.

Someone had to be in Barrancales to supervise their work (scanning, digitalization, and so on). I told Luis I was prepared to go, and that I was even thinking of travelling a few days earlier than I had first said.

“What for?” he asked at the far end of the line, in his big brother voice.

“I’m going to look for the missing roll.”

12

By the time the bus pulled into the station at Barrancales it was almost night. I took a taxi to the house, which still had no electricity. I had the candles we had bought some months before, and there was water thanks to a call Luis had made to an old friend who worked in the Town Hall, which led to it being turned back on. The rooms seemed eternally cold and dank.

That night I slept badly, unnerved by the ghosts in the house. Mom’s clothes and other possessions were in big plastic rubbish sacks in one of the bedrooms. She’d collected and stored all kinds of things throughout her life. Dad’s possessions on the other hand fit into a single small bag: a watch, a shaving brush, a comb, a toothbrush, seven shirts… they were like the personal effects of a prisoner. The framed photograph of their wedding was still hanging on the wall. They looked very young and ill-at-ease, in one of those black-and-white photographs that are sent away to be tinted. They were married in 1945, without much enthusiasm on the part of their families. My maternal grandmother did not want her daughter to get married to a mere Post Office employee who, on top of it all, was mute. My paternal grandparents were none too keen to see their son married to the daughter of a reclusive widow who was unknown in Barrancales society. But the imminent arrival of my brother Luis, who was already gestating in my mother’s belly, meant they all had to swallow their opinions.

Salvatierra painted the ceremony — which took place in the garden of a chapel demolished years earlier — seen from above, as if someone were looking on from its bell tower. The two families are sitting opposite each other, one on either side of the central aisle. My father’s family is numerous, robust, taking up too much room, the relatives united by red veins as thick as roots. My mother’s side is sparse, ethereal, consisting of a few translucent aunts and some distant relations called in at the last moment, united by almost invisible bloody threads. Each web of these family veins is joined, via my grandmothers, to my parents. The priest delivers his sermon pointing at my mother’s belly, where the two bloodlines are mixed. A vein leads from my father’s right arm out towards the river.

13

I was able to study many of these things closely over the next few days I spent in the shed, before the Dutch people from the Röell Foundation arrived. Whenever Aldo turned up, he would help me lower a couple of rolls, which I would spread out on the ground and go over slowly, peering at every detail. I sometimes felt I was getting to know my father for the first time. There were portraits of people I’d never seen: green-faced men drinking in a store; old women long since dead, dressed in black and sitting bolt upright; old-style gauchos almost alive in their gestures, staring out from the depths of an afternoon of branding cattle or hard at work slaughtering a steer, standing there with bloodied arms next to a beast slit open to the skies. At other points, the painting reminded me of moments in our lives: dogs we had at home but that I’d completely forgotten about, or the great fire of 1958 that reached as far as the south of Barrancales. Over almost nine meters of canvas, Salvatierra painted a huge meadow in flames, with smoke billowing out to the side, and the strange, sacred light we all saw that evening, as our whole family stood watching by the side of the road.

I looked at all this, asking myself so many questions at once. What was this interlacing of lives, people, animals, days, nights, catastrophes? What did it all mean? What could my father’s life have been like? Why did he feel the need to take on such a huge task? What had happened to Luis and me for us to have ended up in our gray, city-dwellers’ lives, as though Salvatierra had monopolized all the available color? We seemed more alive in the light shining from the painting in some portraits he had done of us eating green pears when I was ten years old, than in our current lives with their legal documents and contracts. It was as if the painting had swallowed us: both of us, our sister Estela, and mom. All those luminous provincial days had been soaked up by his canvas. There was a super-human quality to Salvatierra’s work; it was too much. I had always found it hard to begin anything new, sometimes even the simplest task, like getting up in the morning. I thought I had to do everything on a gigantic scale like my father, or nothing at all. And I confess that often I chose to do nothing, which also led me to feel that I was nobody.

14

I asked Aldo to lend me the old bike I’d seen in the shed. I changed the inner tubes, blew up the tires, and oiled it. I hadn’t ridden a bike since those distant Saturdays in the mid-1980s when I used to cycle with my son in the Palermo woods in Buenos Aires.

I rode aimlessly around Barrancales, pedaling slowly, comparing my memories of the village I had been brought up in with the town it had now become. I had no idea where to start looking for the missing roll.

Compared to the work as a whole, this fragment was almost nothing, and yet I wanted to find it because that gap disturbed me, the jump in a continuous flow. If four or five rolls had been missing, I wouldn’t have bothered trying to find them, but since it was only one, the painting was too close to achieving the absolute fluidity that Salvatierra had wanted for me not to make the effort. There was no vertical cut in the work; it was a single continuum, a single river.

For a while I roamed the center of town. At eleven, I found I was near the cathedral, and so I rang the bell at the house of my distant aunts, cousins of Salvatierra who had been present at my mother’s funeral. They were no longer the young girls undressing in the shadows of the canvas; now they looked exactly like the Spanish matrons dressed in mourning of the previous generation. I thought they might be able to tell me something, though I didn’t know what.

They weren’t exactly overjoyed to see me. “The spitting image of your father,” they said, staring at me time and again. I couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing. Coming from them, it was more likely to be bad. I tried to tidy myself up. The bike ride had left me out of breath, my clothes rumpled. They asked me to take a seat in a room that smelled of mothballs. I decided not to beat about the bush. I asked them if Salvatierra had sold or given away one of the rolls of his work. They had no idea.

“But take a good look in that shed, you could find almost anything in there,” one of them said, casting a knowing glance at her sister.

“Why’s that?”

“Well… he always was such a hoarder.”

They didn’t have much more to add. There was a note of censure in their tone that I put down to the general feeling of rejection the family had always shown towards my father. I had to stay a while longer, listening to tales of illnesses and unscientific cures before I could leave. They wanted to invite me to tea the next day, but when I told them I had an appointment, they didn’t insist.

I also rang the bell at the house of the deceased Doctor Dávila. His widow, a suspicious, gloomy woman, didn’t ask me in, but assured me that her husband had never possessed any painting by Salvatierra.

“A roll,” I said, “a long roll of canvas.”

“No, young man, I don’t know anything about that,” she said from behind a half-open door.

When I got back to the shed, I did as my aunts had suggested and searched among all the bits of junk. Underneath the canoe I found my old sky blue dinghy. It was like seeing an apparition. In summer, my father would take us down to the river in a carriage pulled by Tiza, a white mare we used to leave grazing in the vacant lots near our house. When we arrived, he would unharness her and lead her down to the riverside, walking her up and down the sandbank where we were going to play to scare off the poisonous stingrays. Then we would go into the water. We weren’t allowed to go too far from the bank because the river had treacherous drops and whirlpools. My boat was only big enough for me. We used to tie it to a long length of rope, and I would float downriver on the current. Salvatierra would wave goodbye with his hand, pretending I was off on a long journey. Then he would haul me back on the rope; we did this time and again. One day we no longer went. My sister Estela drowned while she was swimming with some friends near the old bridge, and after that mom didn’t want us to go back to the river.

Rummaging about, I also managed to find the stools made from tree stumps that Salvatierra laid out whenever his friends came to visit him in the shed. They were in the habit of staying until late, drinking. Sometimes mom would send us to go and fetch him, and he would let us stay for a while until dispatching us back. I must have been around ten years old at the time, and regarded those men with a mixture of admiration and fear. It was a group that came with Mario Jordán, a friend of my father’s who had a motorboat, and to whom he lent a corner of the shed to store his merchandise. He had a goatee, always carried an old.38 revolver, and occasionally turned up with an accordion. Six or seven of them would get together. Some of them, like Salazar the Basque or a black guy called Fermín Ibáñez, were surly types who said very little, although they warmed up once they got some alcohol inside them. One of the group would ask Salvatierra to show a bit of the work, and after making them insist, Salvatierra would put the end of the canvas on a reel that wound around a pole, and slowly turn it. Mario Jordán would play the accordion as the images floated by, like the pianists in the days of silent films. By now they would all be pretty drunk. They laughed when they recognized someone in the painting, or often, lulled by the slow rhythm of the music, they would stare glassy-eyed in astonishment at the dream-like scenes my father had painted: islands, herds of horses fording the river, channels, riders with their throats slit, swamps full of gigantic insects, bloody battles.

One night there was an argument; Fermín Ibáñez slashed the canvas with his knife and threatened Salvatierra. Luckily, Jordán stepped between them and managed to calm them down. The evening went on for a while longer without any further problem, then they all went home. I remember, for nights afterwards I woke up in terror, convinced that Ibáñez was in the darkness of our bedroom, standing quite still as I had seen him in the shed, brandishing his knife.

15

It had been one of my grandfather’s old shearing sheds. But wool never really took in the region, and over time cattle, batteries of hens, and citrus fruits proved more profitable, so the shed lay abandoned until my father took it over in the forties.

It was south of Barrancales, near the track down to the river, on high ground that never flooded. Salvatierra used to open it at seven in the morning. He painted until ten. He closed up to go to work at the Post Office, then opened the shed again at five in the afternoon. I used to go there sometimes after school, because I liked helping him prepare the canvas.

This process lasted two or three days, depending on the weather. First he would send me to cut some canes from the bamboo grove growing in the wasteland behind the shed, where the supermarket now stands. I was scared because the breeze rustling in the dry leaves sounded like dead murmurs and invisible footsteps. We sewed the canes to the top and bottom edges of the canvas, then tied them to two old shafts from a horse carriage. We used pieces five meters long. The wooden shafts slowly separated from each other, and when the canvas was as tight as a drum, we brushed two coats of glue on it. As this dried, we applied several coats of a paste made from plaster and lime that we had previously sieved through an old shirt. That was the part I liked best: to watch how the lumpy paste filled the shirt and then trickled out as a purified liquid. And the smell it gave off, which I only ever experienced again in a few hardware stores in Buenos Aires. We always had two or three canvases at different stages of preparation. We would take them out into the sunshine and hold them up to the light to see which bits hadn’t been covered evenly, so that we could add more of the mixture. When we had finished preparing them, Salvatierra would join the pieces up using a pedal sewing machine, so that they formed a single roll. He always wanted to have at least one blank roll ready so he could work without worrying about it.

In the best of cases, the canvas might be proper white material meant for painting on; in the worst, when the money was only just enough to cover our household expenses, it could be sacks we asked for from the grain silos after the grain had been unloaded. Between these two extremes, Salvatierra could make his canvas out of anything: old tarpaulins, armchair upholstery, bedspreads, awnings.

For a while at the start of the seventies, a friend of Luis’s who did odd jobs at the station would bring a stack of excellent green tarpaulins. My father was really pleased. They were for tying around merchandise, known for their toughness. Salvatierra paid a good price for them, which helped Luis’s friend make a few pesos. He said he was given them at the railway warehouse.

One morning an enormous guy appeared at the shed, large wrench in hand. He wanted to know where his truck tarpaulins were. He was shouting and beating the corrugated iron walls of the shed with his wrench. He said he’d been told this was where they ended up. Salvatierra — who later painted the truck driver as a paunchy Cyclops — signed to him to calm down, but since the guy wanted an explanation and my father said nothing, he grew even more irate. When, on top of that, he spotted the stolen tarpaulins about to be cut up and stretched, he threatened to bash my father’s head in. Luis had to explain that my father was mute. Possibly because Salvatierra demonstrated his innocence by staying completely calm, the truck driver did not strike out, and eventually they got him to sit down and explained the situation. The driver wanted to know the boy’s address to go and find him, and so my father had to lie, telling him through Luis that he didn’t know where he lived. The guy said he’d get him at the station, because that was where the tarpaulins had been stolen at night after he unloaded his trailer. My father made me run to the house to pay for them. The truck driver left counting the notes.

Salvatierra sent for the boy. When he appeared on his bike, dad seized him by the arm and forced him to walk along the street. He signed to me to go with them. Terrified, the boy kept glancing at me to see if I could explain what my father was up to.

“Where’s he taking me?” he wanted to know.

Salvatierra made as if to clutch the peak of an invisible helmet.

“To the police,” I told the boy.

“Why?”

Salvatierra mimicked putting on a glove, then closing his fingers one by one. That needed no translation.

“I won’t steal any more, I swear, sir,” the boy cried desperately.

We came to a halt on the corner. Dad looked the boy in the eye, pointed to him, raised a hand to his own shoulder as if he were carrying something, then pointed to his chest.

“He says he wants you to work for him.”

The boy accepted. Salvatierra had him running errands for a couple of weeks, then found him a job at the Post Office. He stayed there for fifteen years before going into the Town Hall. Nowadays he occupies an important post where he does a job not dissimilar to the one he did with the tarpaulins. He was the friend of Luis’s who managed to get our water switched back on when we spent a week in Barrancales.

There must have been hundreds of meters of Salvatierra’s work painted on tarpaulins stolen from the trucks that unloaded their goods at the train station early in the seventies.

16

The Dutch people arrived a few days after I began the search for the missing roll. Their names were Boris and Hanna. They arrived in a rented van, and had brought with them an enormous scanner from the Röell Museum that could digitalize paintings at their original size. Dressed in sandals and ethnic tunics, Hanna seemed more open than Boris to experiencing the Latin American adventure, but she left soon afterwards for Misiones, supposedly because she wasn’t needed for the job in hand. I think she fled from the famous cockroaches at the Gran Hotel Barrancales.

Their mission was to scan several sections of the painting, send them back in digital form to Holland, and then await instructions. Boris and Aldo did all the work: they got on well despite not being able to exchange a single word. Seeing them together was striking: the tall, thin Boris with a bald patch surrounded by a curtain of long, blond hair, and Aldo, short and stout, with a spiky black mop. They lowered the big rolls between the two of them and placed them in the scanner, which could copy two meters of canvas every five minutes. The first day I tried to help them, but soon realized I was simply getting in the way whenever they were carrying a roll or trying to adjust it on the scanner. After that I stayed out of it, and stood with my arms by my side next to Hanna, who probably felt as I did.

I talked with her a little in the shade of the shed while the other two got on with their work. I showed her how we drink mate tea, and answered her questions about Salvatierra and the river. She told me, in Spanish that sounded as if it were being pronounced backwards, about her postgraduate studies in baroque art of the Americas, her interest in the Jesuits’ influence, her work with Boris even though they were now separated. I won’t deny that I fantasized about a brief fling with such a pretty woman, but nothing happened. I never made a move, and besides, I don’t think that going to bed with a guy like me formed part of her search for the Latin American exotic. The next day, she left to visit the Jesuit ruins at San Ignacio in Misiones.

17

With the scanning well underway, I decided to go to the Post Office building where Salvatierra had worked for many years. He started there back in 1935, taken in by one of my grandfather’s brothers, who couldn’t bear to see him wandering about by the river without doing anything useful. My grandfather hadn’t sent him to school, and had accepted he would not become a stockbreeder like his brothers. Instead, he let Salvatierra roam without keeping too close an eye on him, perhaps hoping that the consequences of his lack of interest would follow naturally. But, contrary to what they all expected, my father did not do badly in life. Thanks to his cousins’ insistence as teachers, he could write and spell impeccably, and was very good at letter writing. In fact, he was much better educated than my uncles, whose skill on horseback or with a lasso was of little use to them when it came to administering the lands they first inherited and then were forced to sell when they went bankrupt some years later. Salvatierra began at the Post Office as an assistant clerk, but gradually made a position for himself.

I was received at the old Post Office building with suspicion. I asked several employees if they remembered Juan Salvatierra or if they knew of anybody who had worked there since before 1975, the year he retired. They all passed me on to someone else, down gloomy corridors with incredibly high doors and vast offices. Our voices sounded tiny in there, out of proportion, as if we were a race of dwarves living in a building that had once housed giants.

In one of the offices I was received by a bony, elderly woman. She was sucking on a cigarette, and had big, green eyes. She was very moved when I explained who I was, and said that now she understood why when I first appeared, my face looked familiar. She invited me in, and we talked for a while.

Her name was Eugenia Rocamora and she had begun working there when she was twenty. She showed me what had been Salvatierra’s office (I already knew it, he used to take me there sometimes as a boy). She told me how much everyone respected and appreciated him. She brought out an old photograph of the Post Office staff gathered on the entrance steps, among them a smiling Salvatierra.

“And that was me. Look how pretty I once was,” she said, glancing at me with a gleam of sympathy and sadness in her eyes.

She was right: she had been a beautiful woman.

When I asked her if she knew anything about Salvatierra’s painting, if he had ever told her he intended to give part of it away, she told me she wasn’t even aware that Salvatierra painted. She accompanied me to the exit, and on the way out showed me a plaque on the wall with a long list of names, including my father's. They were all retired employees who had worked at the Post Office for more than forty years.

18

Out in the street I felt suddenly weary. I pedaled haphazardly towards the edge of town, where the streets looked as if they had been painted by Salvatierra: corner stores with peeling whitewash, people sitting out on the cool of the sidewalks, trees lopped to little more than stumps, and tethered cows grazing between the irrigation ditches. We would sometimes pass by here when he took me to school on the handlebars of his bike from our house near the Municipal Park.

All at once, on an unpaved stretch of road, a black dog started barking at me and snapping at my feet. I saw that an old man with a white goatee was shouting at it from the doorway of his house. He was carrying a bag. Something about him made me look more closely. He seemed very similar to Mario Jordán, my father’s friend. I went over and shouted over the barking dog:

“Are you Mario Jordán?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Miguel Salvatierra, Juan's son.”

“Ah, how’s things?”

Jordán was wearing a vest, a pair of trousers, and rope sandals. He was trying to shut a bag overflowing with stuff. He must have been around eighty.

“Are you going out?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, peering up and down the street. “Could you give me a hand?”

He passed me his bag, which I put on my handlebars. We set off together, walking slowly.

“Where are we going?”

“Down there, around the corner from the cemetery.”

Every so often he’d turn and look behind him.

“Let’s get a move on, I’m being followed,” he said, trying in vain to quicken his pace.

I turned around, but couldn’t spot anyone.

“Who’s following you?”

“Someone I owe money to. Don’t look back.”

He was dragging his feet as he walked. From time to time he’d raise a hand to point the direction we should be taking, as though he were clutching at the air to pull himself along.

“Do you remember Salvatierra?” I ventured to ask.

“Why on earth wouldn’t I?” he replied with a flash of anger, then said nothing more until we reached the street corner.

“Do you remember he used to paint?”

“Aha.”

“Do you happen to know if he gave away one of the rolls of his painting?”

“They’ve got new, quicker boats these days, but let’s go to the train station anyway,” he said.

I repeated my question.

“We’ll come to that,” he said, “we’ll come to that.”

By now I was growing impatient. It had been a mistake to accompany him in the first place, and now he wanted to go to the train station.

“There’s no train any more, Jordán,” I told him.

“They’ve brought it back. There’s one at six-thirty.”

We propped the bike against the brick wall of the station and climbed the steps. Grass was growing through the cracks in the cement floor. Everything was shut up. There was nobody about. There had been no trains for fifteen years. Jordán made me lift the bag up and put it down on the platform. The tracks were smothered in weeds.

“Let’s be getting back, Jordán: the train doesn’t run anymore,” I said.

“There’s one at half past six. D’you have a watch?”

“Yes, it’s nearly seven,” I lied.

‘That doesn’t matter. It’s a bit late sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I decided to humor him.

“Are you going to travel in that vest?”

He looked down and said:

“Well I’ll be damned. They won’t let me on looking like this. Can you lend me your shirt?”

When I refused, he wanted to open his bag to see if he’d brought anything he could wear. Time was going by, and night was drawing in. All at once we heard a voice calling: “Grandad.” Jordán froze.

“I think someone’s calling you.”

“Oh, it’s that fatass,” he said, without looking round at her.

A young woman came up. She apologized and explained the old man escaped like this from time to time. I told her Jordán had been a friend of my father’s, and that I wanted to ask him a few questions.

“Come and see him one morning. He’s not so lost then,” she told me. She picked up the bag, and led Jordán away by the arm.

I walked round the station for a while, but soon left: seeing everything so abandoned made me sad.

19

Salvatierra could go for an hour without painting, standing in front of the canvas or near the round iron stove that warmed a corner of the shed in the coldest months, or sitting in a barber’s chair he had bought at auction. He would stand or sit there thinking, perhaps planning what he was going to paint next. Suddenly, if a fly buzzed past, he would snatch it out of midair. He never missed.

He liked to tune in to the local radio that played chamamés, Paraguayan polkas, and chamarritas, while the presenters repeated the same adverts over and over again, or made endless comments about Carnival.

With that noise in the background, he would sometimes sit, head buried in his hands. Anyone who didn’t know him might have thought he was depressed, but in fact he was absorbed in his work. All of a sudden he would get up and start sketching a few lines. Or he would leaf through books of engravings or illustrations that were gathering dust on a bookshelf. Over the years he collected an art library, especially after 1960, when color reproductions began. I remember a collection called The Great Masters of Art. He liked lots of different artists: Velázquez, Zurbarán’s still-lives, Caravaggio (he had a plate of The Conversion of Saint Paul pinned up on a column), Degas, Gauguin, Cándido López, even Escher’s metamorphoses; photographs of Roman friezes and Minoan frescoes. He was interested in medieval altar pieces where one figure is seen several times in the same landscape. He would stare at these paintings for hours. I know he was constantly trying to learn. He absorbed everything he could use, with complete freedom, making it his own. Salvatierra had never had the chance to visit museums; those books were a way for him to carry on learning.

Occasionally he would search for something on a big table that had once belonged to a tobacco firm, where he used to collect dried leaves, insects, illustrations, bones, flotsam from the river, or things he found: roots, worn pieces of wood, round stones from local Indians’ boleadoras, fragments of colored glass, all kinds of objects. He’d pick one of these up and study it closely so that he could depict it somewhere on his canvas.

I remember one evening after a storm we went out for a walk and I came across one of those beetles with a long horn known as “little bulls” crawling through the mud on the track. I took it back to the shed, and the next day saw that Salvatierra had painted a huge version of it that filled the canvas from top to bottom. By enlarging objects in this way (in fact, he sometimes looked at them through a magnifying glass), he succeeded in capturing that appearance of cold machines that some insects have. The beetle looked like a battleship, with its spiky legs, tiny, cruel eyes, and that enormous horn that functions as a pincer to hold its prey aloft, a starkly murderous weapon on the head of a compact body.

These studies of plants or insects looked like sketches God had made before Creation. First came the detailed study, of a dragonfly for example, as if Salvatierra were inventing it, including it for the very first time in the universe of his canvas. He would draw it in different colors from above, below, and face on; it was only some weeks later, when it seemed as though he had forgotten all about it, that the dragonfly made its reappearance, perfectly naturally, smaller but alive, integrated into the background of some scene or other.

I was always astonished at the way things came and went in the work. The canvas was one long open-air procession where beings could vanish and return some time later. Something similar often happens in music, when certain themes reappear with variations. Salvatierra once painted a baby hare I had found and later on, although the hare died on me, he painted it again, asleep in the grass. “Is that mine?” I asked, and he nodded. “Where was it hidden?” I said, and he pointed to the colors and brushes.

Possibly because of this sense of the limitless flow of nature that the canvas had, I find it hard to call it a painting, because that suggests a frame, a border that surrounds certain things, and that’s precisely what Salvatierra wanted to avoid. He was fascinated by the lack of a limit, of a boundary, by the way different spaces communicated with one another. Boundaries are suppressed in his work: each being is at the mercy of all the others, trapped within the cruelty of nature. They are all prey. Even the humans.

Salvatierra wanted to create the impression that, once something was included in the canvas, it could cross the painted space, advance along the work, reappear. Nothing and no one is protected. Not even the scenes in the privacy of a home manage to be enclosed or safe; there is always someone lurking in the shadows, spying; or a man is sleeping while the sick beasts of his nightmares slip in through the bedroom mirrors. There is no “inside,” no home; everyone is vulnerable in the constantly evolving world of color.

Salvatierra painted every day. Each Saturday he would paint the date in blue at the bottom of the point he had reached. Some weeks he managed to paint five meters; others, it would be one, but never less than that. The amount varied according to how much detail each fragment demanded. He never stopped, because for him the canvas itself never stopped. That seemed to be his way of exorcising any painter’s block. It was as if the canvas itself was constantly unfolding to the left, in a manner over which he had no control. He never allowed himself to go back over things. If he didn’t like something he had done, he painted it again further on with variations, but he never went back. Like the past, he considered it impossible to change whatever he had painted.

Sometimes the force driving things on like a torrent is so strong that the figures start to lean, to lose their balance. There are parts of the canvas where they are painted horizontally, dragged along by the rushing current of life, as if the force of time were greater than the force of gravity.

This instability became more pronounced following my sister’s death in 1959. At first Salvatierra began to paint gloomy, lonely corners of the countryside, full of chañar and thorn bushes. These are dense episodes in which every centimeter seems to be viciously alive. In one, there’s a little girl standing motionless while a host of ants climbs her leg and a swarm of wasps surrounds her head and smothers her face. The entire space is a struggle between stinging and biting beings; they all use each other to survive and reproduce.

After that, Salvatierra began to paint my sister in a less painful way: drowned, as if she were asleep, purified by the river, an Ophelia of warm, muddy waters. In his work, Salvatierra had sought to portray the force of the river, and in return the river had demanded his twelve-year-old daughter. The river was carrying her slowly but implacably away, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. That was how he painted her: Estela drowned in the pool beneath the willows; Estela among the monster fish, her hair entangled in the reeds by the water’s edge, her heavy dress, her closed eyelids in the calm current; Estela barely visible beneath the surface, floating through the clouds of reflected water.

This is where everything begins to be flattened by the gusting wind of time. People are suddenly horizontal, swept along by the invisible current. The tree branches flail about, the animals, rain, everything slants to one side, unable to resist. Further on still, they start to appear upside down, to turn tail, until at a moment of complete loss of balance when I think my father must have been close to going mad, the universe tips over completely, the landscape does a somersault, the sky is at the bottom and the land at the top, as though my father were once again seeing the world with the fear of dangling from the stirrup of a horse galloping out of control among the trees.

20

Jordán's house had no bell, so I clapped my hands. A curious yellow puppy came out, then the black dog from the previous day appeared. The house was at the back of a small lot; it was a square building with two rooms and a bare cement front. Next to it stood a trellis vine that gave shade. I was about to leave again when I heard a sneeze. Jordán was inside, but he hadn't heard me. I called out to him. Still no reply. I opened the gate and went in. The dog growled and pranced about, but I tried to walk on without looking down at it. When I got close to the house it gripped my trouser leg. I started shouting “Get off me!” but it wouldn't let go. Then Jordán appeared, his hair tousled. He shooed the dog out of the way, and peered at me in astonishment.

“I'm Salvatierra, do you remember me?”

“Aha.”

“Forgive me for entering like this, but I was clapping my hands and…”

“Come on in,” he said.

We went into one of the rooms, which turned out to be a kitchen. It had no light, only a table and a few chairs. On the wall there was a small, round mirror and a calendar with photos of rodeo riders demonstrating their skills. I sat down and Jordán put some water on for mate tea. I noticed his right hand was bandaged. He sat in the far corner of the room while the water boiled.

“Don’t you practice on the accordion anymore?”

“No,” he replied, bending to reach for something behind him. “Now I practice on my shotgun.”

He was pointing a double-barreled shotgun at me. I was once robbed in a Buenos Aires taxi, and they pointed a revolver at me, but I never saw it because it was pressed into my ribs. The guy must have been a cop, because he had short hair and was very calm. This was different. A crazy old man whose hands trembled was pointing a gun meant for blasting capybara straight at my face.

I started to rise to my feet, warning him to be careful.

“Sit down or I’ll blow your head off,” he said.

I sat down and he stared at me.

“So, Salvatierra… Still after the same old thing, are you?”

“After what?” I asked.

“That little painting of yours.”

“Yes, but why don’t you put that gun down, Jordán? We can talk about it peacefully, there’s no need to threaten me.”

“You owe me.”

“Owe you?”

“You’re nothing but a henpecked asshole.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is that shotgun loaded?”

“Orbea 16 mm cartridges. Two shots. One to make you suffer, the other to finish you off.”

“Stay calm, boss. I’m going to leave now. Tomorrow without fail I’ll bring what you say I owe you. Agreed?”

“Agreed, nothing,” he replied angrily.

I fell silent and didn’t move. The water was already boiling. Jordán’s finger was on the trigger. He was pointing it at my head, but the weight of the gun-barrel meant it kept dropping towards my stomach. Every so often, he jerked it up again.

“You’re a liar as well as a traitor. The guy who couldn’t speak is not so dumb after all.”

“I’m not Juan Salvatierra, Jordán. I’m Miguel, his son.”

“And I’m General Perón. You owe me half a load of white horse that was stored in the shed.”

“What white horse?” I said.

“Don’t play the fool, Juan. You want your painting, I want my white horse.”

“Have you got the painting?”

“No, but I know who has. Bring me my whiskey and then we’ll see.”

“How much whiskey?”

“The forty cases you owe me.”

“OK, I’ll bring them tomorrow,” I said, rising from my seat once more.

“Stay where you are.”

I sat down again.

“Do you know why I feel like killing you? How long have we known each other, Juan?”

“How long?” I asked.

“Since we were this tall. We were like brothers. The whole day together in the river. We were partners. Then you wanted to split up. I accepted that, didn’t I?”

He paused for me to answer, but I said nothing.

“Did you know that Ibáñez and Vázquez wanted to kill you?”

“No.”

“I made them swear they’d leave you alone. But when you shut the shed on me… that really made me mad, che. I don’t know how I ever forgave you for that.”

The old man fell silent, looked me in the eye, and then said:

“So you owe much more than a little white horse, Juan. You owe me your life.”

I didn’t say a word. There was the sound of shuffling feet in the corridor. It was Jordán’s granddaughter.

“Messing about with that shotgun again, granddad!” she said, and snatched it from him as if she were taking a toy from a child. She glanced at me, lifted the kettle from the stove, and said:

“Did he scare you with the gun? Don’t worry,” she whispered. “My brother filed down the hammer. Let me see your hand, granddad,” she said out loud, and began to check his bandage. “You’ve been playing with it, haven’t you? You have to leave the bandage alone. And be careful with that kettle. The handle is loose, mind you don’t go burning yourself again.”

“I’ll be leaving now. ’Bye,” I said, rushing for the door.

The dog snapped at me on the way out, but by now, after being so scared I was going to die, I felt almost friendly towards it.

21

I cycled to the telephone office to call my brother. I don’t know why, but now that the danger had passed I couldn’t stop shaking. I could hardly dial the numbers. When Luis answered, I told him I’d met Jordán. He barely remembered who I was talking about. I explained that Jordán had stolen the missing roll out of revenge because Salvatierra wouldn’t let him use the shed to store contraband goods any more. Luis didn’t understand a thing. I was so anxious I stumbled over my words. “I think dad was a smuggler,” I said. Luis grew mad at this: he told me I was crazy, that I should be more careful about what I said, and asked where I was phoning from. It was an absurd conversation.

When I reached our old house, I found it impossible to stop thinking about it. Mom was staring at me from her portrait on the wall. She had never wanted to even hear about Jordán and his gang. Whenever she knew they were in the shed, she would send me or my brother to fetch Salvatierra. She was always against his friendship with them. Salvatierra had known them since childhood, so it must have been hard for him to distance himself from them. In the end, my mother succeeded in getting him to shut the shed door to them. Her powers of persuasion were slow and gradual, but she always won eventually.

She liked to tell us she was a descendant of the caudillo Francisco Ramírez. I’ve never been able to draw up a proper family tree for that side of the family. My maternal grandfather died soon after my mother was born. Supposedly, he was Ramírez’s great-nephew. There’s no way of knowing for sure. The fact is that my mother claimed she was related to him, and the way she treated the two of us and our father sometimes seemed to corroborate it. Over the years she grew increasingly dry and harsh. My sister’s death hardened her forever. We never saw her smile again.

As long as she didn’t interfere with his task of painting, Salvatierra usually let her have her way. Was that why Jordán, thinking he was talking to my father, had called me henpecked? Could Jordán and his friends have been smugglers? Cattle rustlers? Horse thieves? And was Salvatierra their partner at some point? Had my father been a smuggler?

I tried to take a siesta but found it impossible. I tossed and turned in the bed while everything the old man had told me fell into place, as if his hints slowly settled on the images in the canvas and what I knew of Salvatierra.

I came to the conclusion that he must have worked with them at one time or other in some murky business, probably smuggling cases of White Horse whiskey. The shed must have been a very safe place to store contraband goods, because nobody would have suspected the mute Salvatierra, a Post Office employee, a decent, law-abiding citizen. Except perhaps for my distant aunts, whose disapproving comment about the shed the other day suddenly came back to me: “You could find almost anything in there.”

Jordán must have felt betrayed when my father shut the doors of the shed on him. Perhaps that was why he stole one of the painted rolls. It was obvious that at some point Salvatierra had gone to reclaim it, but that Jordán had refused. Or possibly he didn’t have it. Ibáñez and Salazar the Basque had wanted to kill him. Then I recalled the occasion when Fermín Ibáñez had slashed the canvas. I calculated I must have witnessed that scene when I was ten or eleven. My eleventh birthday was in 1961: the year of the missing roll. I went to the shed to see if I could find the damaged piece.

Boris and Aldo weren’t there. They only came back to work at three. The Dutchman had quickly gotten used to taking a siesta. Until they arrived, I could only get one roll down. I pulled down the one for 1960 and slowly opened it out, but couldn’t see any cut or repair in it. Some of the sections showed portraits of my drowned sister. I was overwhelmed at seeing them because she looked still alive, swimming with her eyes closed, drifting along with the current. I was nine when Estela died, and have only vague memories of her as someone playing in the house or who annoyed mom because she wouldn’t eat. I have two black-and-white photos of her. She is always the same, frozen in the instant, and I’ve looked at them so often they mean hardly anything to me now. That was why I was so moved to see her painted in color and with that ability Salvatierra had to picture the things he loved in a few brushstrokes, making them come to life. His images slide, move on, won’t stay still. They flow towards their own end, their dissolution in the landscape.

When Aldo arrived he helped me get down the rolls from 1959 and 1962. There was little doubt about it: the missing canvas was the one Ibáñez had slashed.

22

The next day I went into the supermarket behind the shed and searched through the alcoholic drinks section. They had Chivas, but not White Horse. And I only had enough money for one bottle. But if I wanted information I couldn’t turn up at Jordán’s place empty-handed, so I bought one.

Outside a truck was blocking the traffic as it tried to back into a loading bay. I stood there staring at it: it was impossible for the truck to get in. A paunchy guy with rolled-up sleeves came up to me. It was Baldoni, the supermarket owner.

“When are you going to sell me that shed, Salvatierra?” he asked.

“Well… it’s a bit difficult.”

“D’you want to come into my office, so we can talk about it in peace?”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“As you wish. But you can see how badly we need room to load and unload… How much do you want for the land?” he asked me straight out.

“We’ve taken it off the market. There are people working inside the shed, on my father’s art.”

“Yes… it’s a statue or something, isn’t it?”

“A painting.”

“The fat guy mentioned something about it.”

The “fat guy” must have been the Cultural Affairs secretary. When I said nothing, Baldoni looked down and muttered:

“I’ll give you ten thousand pesos for the plot.”

That wasn’t too bad an offer. Baldoni glanced back at me.

“Well,” I said, “as you know, I run a real estate office in Buenos Aires… and your offer…”

“In Buenos Aires?”

“Yes…”

“There’s no way you can compare prices in the capital with those out here.”

“No, but…” I let my voice trail off. “Anyway, once the work is finished I guess we’ll take all the stuff out of there, so then we can sell it.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Oh… quite a long while.”

Baldoni smiled, somewhat irritated. We said goodbye, and I left with the bottle hanging in a plastic bag from my handlebars.

23

Jordán was outside his house, leaning on the fence. He was wearing glasses, and his hair was neatly combed. The dogs didn’t bark.

“Good morning,” I said, making sure the shotgun was nowhere to be seen.

“Morning,” he said, staring without recognizing me.

“I’m Miguel Salvatierra. Miguel,” I explained, “Juan Salvatierra’s son.”

“Ah, how’s it going, che?” he said, extending his hand over the fence.

“I’ve brought you a little bottle of what my father owed you.”

I held the whiskey out to him, and he took it, astonished.

“But I haven’t drunk in years. Thanks a lot, but take it with you. If my granddaughter catches me, there’ll be hell to pay.”

I stood there, bottle in hand, not knowing what to say. He seemed to have his wits about him today.

“Jordán, do you remember Salvatierra’s painting?”

“Yes, that long thing he was always doing on rolls of canvas?”

“Yes. You know one of them is missing.”

“It must be Ibáñez who has it.”

“Fermín Ibáñez? The black guy?”

“That’s right, the black guy. I’ve no idea if he’s still alive. He must be getting on a bit now.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He always used to stay down by the river. Down by the pétanque court. He sometimes went down there when it was closed. They say he would go around shouting out loud, muttering bets into thin air, talking to himself.”

“He made bets even though no one was around?”

“Nobody! You know there’s no shortage of crazy old men around here.”

“So you think Ibáñez has got the painting?”

“He was the one who stole it from him,” Jordán said with a laugh. “He wanted to burn it. I told him it’d be better to sell it: What good would burning the painting do? Sell it, make some dough! But Ibáñez was always a bit dumb.”

“Why did he steal it?”

“Who knows? Kids’ stuff.’”

“Kids? They were over fifty when it happened.”

“They were? They must have been drunk then. Ibáñez was always drunk.”

“How many years ago can that have been?”

“How should I know? A ton of years. We didn’t see Salvatierra anymore. We crossed over to Uruguay because the military were after us on this side. They wanted to get rid of us fishermen. They said we were vagrants.”

We both fell silent. The dogs had dozed off at his feet.

“What year did your dad die in?” asked Jordán.

“In 1990.”

“How old was he?”

“Eighty-one.”

“Imagine that. We first met as youngsters.”

“And when Salvatierra worked with you, what kind of work was that?”

“Odd jobs.”

“Odd jobs?”

“Yes,” he said, and this time he didn’t laugh. “I had a big boat and we transported limestone from Berti’s quarry, or hides from Peluffo’s tannery, or wool. Anything we could get our hands on.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes… Would you like to come in for some mate tea?”

“No thanks, boss, I have to be off.”

We said goodbye.

I pedaled towards the river down dirt roads, between ditches and rows of low houses, steering around potholes with the bottle hanging from the handlebar and clanking against the bike frame. This part of town was neglected, run down, with no sign of any new housing. Nobody went by: dogs were curled up asleep in the middle of the road. I cut through Parque Ortiz, where we once played football. The weeping willow Salvatierra used to sit under when he came to watch us was still there. The paths and flowerbeds had long since gone, the grass was uncut; it looked like wasteland. A chestnut foal was rubbing its neck on one of the goal posts.

24

The Dutchman and Aldo had scanned almost half the canvas. Boris explained that he had emailed some of the digital images back to the museum. There was good news: the museum had decided to purchase the entire work. Contrary to what I’d expected, the news made me feel very sad. The painting would no longer be ours. We had to start getting together the paperwork so that it could leave Argentina. Until all that was complete, Boris was to carry on with the digitalization. Even though this could be done in Holland once the work was there, Boris had been told to continue for now. They wanted to copy as much of it as possible before he returned, because they were going to present some Latin American artists in a biennial. There wasn’t much left to do. Working two five-hour shifts, Boris and Aldo dealt with two hundred and forty meters of the canvas each day; in other words, four rolls, more or less. We calculated it would take them just over a week to finish. But perhaps we could ship out the canvas before then.

I talked to Luis. We needed to find out about Customs duties, to see if they applied to works of art, perhaps ask for an export request. He said he’d take care of all that.

“Did you find the missing roll?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but I know who has it.”

25

That afternoon I headed for the river, determined to find Ibáñez. I was going to have to ask for him by name, or for a black fisherman. I couldn’t recall his face; and anyway, he must be old by now, and too much changed for me to identify him. Jordán had said I should look for him down by the pétanque court, so that’s where I started my search. The houses here had watermarks from different floods, some of them halfway up their windows. I took a gravel path that led off to the north.

It was one of the first days of spring; not cold, but damp. Alongside the road stood the usual stalls, offering bait with signs saying “maggots, eels, earthworms,” and clear plastic bags full of water with tiny bream swimming in them.

Two boys in baseball caps rode past. One of them was carrying a cage on his handlebars with a cardinal inside. The other had a fishing rod and two fat fish hanging from the frame of his bike. I asked them if the fish were biting.

“Not a lot,” they replied warily.

“Have you come from Vélez beach?”

“No, from the quay.”

“Did you see any old fishermen down there?” I asked them, braking to catch my breath as they cycled off.

They slowed up and looked back over their shoulder at me.

“Any of those old guys who live on the riverbank,” I said. “Are there none down at the quay?”

“No, but there are people at Los Italianos.”

I thanked them, and they went on their way much more rapidly than me.

The rush of air from passing cars made my handlebars wobble. I saw there was a faucet in the entrance to a tire repair place, so I stopped for some water. The building was nothing more than a cement cube, with bushes and weeds immediately behind. A woman and two children were sitting on deck chairs, drinking mate in the doorway. I gestured towards them if I could use the tap, and they said yes. The kids were feeding bits of crackers to a young river otter. I wet my head, neck, and face. I saw some skins hanging from the wire fence, and thinking the otter hunter might be around, I went up to talk to the group.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon.”

“I don’t suppose you know whether a man by the name of Fermín Ibáñez can be found down here?”

“Not that I know of…”

“Don’t you know anyone around here called Ibáñez?”

“No, not Ibáñez,” said the woman, slapping at a mosquito on her forearm.

The kids stared at me with curiosity.

Next to them was the sky blue body of a Fiat 600 that served as a hencoop. There was washing hanging from a line. Not a single flowerbed, flower, or plant. Nothing but trash among the long grass.

I cycled on. The further I went, the more tired I felt. I started to ask myself what I was doing, if I really thought I was going to find what I was looking for. A painting stolen forty years earlier by a guy who most likely burned it or threw it into the river.

I left the track and headed down towards the shore. The slight downwards slope helped me continue despite my skepticism. There was no one at the pétanque court. The plastic chairs and tables were piled up in one corner and the kiosk was closed.

26

I reached the part known as Los Italianos, some meadows that had started out as dairy farms, then become sheep enclosures, and now were camping sites. The road stretched beneath a grove of eucalyptus trees. I saw new shacks that hadn’t been there before, corrugated iron huts, patched-up shelters. A shanty town had sprung up there in recent years.

A young boy jumped out from behind a tree and fired a gun at me. Hearing the report, I was slow to duck down, and lost control of my bike. I landed head first in the grass beside an irrigation ditch. I heard laughter. Several more kids hiding behind the trees ran off. I shouted at them, then looked down at my body. I wasn’t hurt, apart from a graze on my knee. I got up. A young girl carrying an orange plastic bowl full of washing saw me looking round in panic and said, “They’re only blanks.”

I thanked her, and couldn’t help staring after her. In her blue dress and with wet hair, she looked beautiful as she walked away between the rubble-filled potholes and tufts of grass, her flip-flops slapping on the ground. She turned back for a second. I’d like to be able to say she smiled at me, but she didn’t. She simply kept going, and I walked on, pushing my bike.

I found myself getting deeper and deeper into this new shanty town, and so I turned off along a dirt path leading down to the river. Before long through the trees I could see the muddy, tawny-colored water that stretched from here right across to Uruguay, which always used to seem to me so distant and difficult to reach.

There was a path bordering the riverbank. I came across several anglers with fishing rods. At their feet lay chickens they had gutted to use the innards as bait. Flies were clustering on the dead flesh, the buckets, their rubber boots. I asked if they knew someone called Ibáñez, a black fisherman. None of them did.

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, Salvatierra 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 Historical 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.

Boris told me that the museum wanted to know how the export documents were going. They were anxious for a date when the move could take place because they would have to hire special transport. I didn’t tell him about the difficulties we were having with Customs. I said everything would be sorted out soon. Boris told me he would go on working until Saturday. If they carried on at the rate they were going the whole canvas would be digitalized by then. After that he’d have nothing more to do. He said that perhaps he’d go back to Holland until the work was ready to be shipped.

“So Saturday is your last day?” I asked him.

“Yes, Saturday,” he said.

Before they left I wanted to go and look for Ibáñez over in Uruguay. I was desperate to find the missing roll.

When Luis arrived on Friday, we decided to put on a farewell barbecue at home the next night for Aldo and the Dutch couple. We still had no idea what we were going to say about the bureaucratic obstacles. It wasn’t a simple matter. Luis had gotten nowhere trying to make the National Heritage Commission see reason. Once a work had been declared “of cultural interest” or “part of the cultural heritage,” that could not be rescinded. We would have to follow the legal procedures to have its ownership transferred back to us. We had to re-acquire something that not only was ours, but had been neglected for years by the institution that now, according to the law, was its legal owner.

We talked for some time in the kitchen. I suggested we cross to Uruguay to try to find Ibáñez. Luis said he didn’t have the papers needed for the car to get over the Uruguayan border, and that anyway my idea about where the missing roll might be was ridiculous. I told him we could get across by boat without the car, and that possibly it would be easier to look for a fisherman by water than by land. He told me I was crazy. My brother listened to my arguments without looking at me, pacing round the kitchen, snorting scornfully from time to time. Then he started washing the dishes. I told him what Jordán had said, and the things I had discovered by looking at more of the rolls. Luis didn’t reply, but dried the plates in silence. He wanted Salvatierra’s work to become known, not his life. He preferred not to find out if Salvatierra had been a smuggler. He wanted the canvases taken away once and for all: the shadow of that life rolled up in the shed seemed to weigh heavily on him.

“If you don’t want to come, I’ll go on my own tomorrow,” I said to end the discussion, and went to my room.

I heard him prowling around the house for a while, then I fell asleep.

31

I woke up very early, when it was still dark. I sipped some mate tea in the kitchen, wondering how on earth I was going to get across the river in a motorboat. I would have to cycle all the way up to Gervasoni’s quay again. Yet I was determined to do it. I had a shower, and put on the last change of clean clothes I had left. Then I went out into the yard to get my bike. I have to admit that because I was angry with my brother I made more noise than necessary. I put a few crackers in a bag, and went to the front door. Just as I was going out, Luis appeared, looking disheveled, without his glasses, and in his pajamas. The notary in pajamas, I thought. I hadn’t seen him like that for at least twenty years. “Wait for me,” he said.

He dressed, had a cup of coffee, and we left in his car. Day was just breaking over the river.

“Listen to me,” he said, “OK, so we’ll go across by boat. But if we don’t find this Ibáñez by noon, we come back.”

“No problem. We have to be here by this afternoon to prepare the barbecue anyway,” I said, to keep him calm.

It took us ten minutes to cover the distance that had taken me an hour riding my bike the day before.

We left the car near the Customs post and boarded a boat that was supposed to be leaving at seven but finally got under way at a quarter past eight, because it was waiting for some cargo from Concepción. It was the same man on board as on the previous day. He charged ten pesos for the two of us. I asked him if he knew Ibáñez, and he said he hadn’t seen him for a long time, but that he was usually to be found in a place called El Duraznillo.

The river turned golden before the sun came up. As the water slid around, the surface looked like giant sheets of metal shifting at different speeds. When the boat pulled away from the shore, we could feel the force of the river. The engine strained and spluttered with its prow pointed diagonally across the current, and yet the river still gained on us, pushing the boat to the south.

We saw a yacht sail by, then a Coast Guard boat shot past, with most of its hull raised out of the water.

We went up to the prow and leaned on the rail. Luis remembered a soccer championship we had played as youngsters against teams from Paysandú on the Uruguayan side of the river. Wearing our team jerseys, we’d crossed a couple of times in a diesel barge we always thought was about to sink.

We stood silently for a while, staring down at the water curling round the hull. We passed two men in a canoe, and were passed in turn by a dinghy with an outboard motor carrying a family and their furniture. That made me think of Salvatierra smuggling goods across at night with Jordán. The river wasn’t so wide after all, and on the far side it was another country, with other laws. I gripped Luis by the arm.

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“The canvas can’t get out of Argentina?”

“Well no, it can’t.”

“But it could get out of Uruguay…”

Luis stared at me.

“What do you mean?”

“We transfer it to Uruguay and send it to Holland from there.”

“We ‘transfer’ it?”

“Yes, we transfer it.”

Luis’s face brightened.

“That’s not a bad idea at all,” he said, and we both laughed.

The low, wooded cliffs of the Uruguayan coast came closer, until we could make out a landslide, the big clumps of whitish earth down by the water. We disembarked in a port that was new to both of us. A Uruguayan Customs officer asked to see our documents, then we got off without knowing where to head.

A man came up offering us a taxi. We asked him if we were far from El Duraznillo, and he said about fifteen minutes. He drove us along a gravel road; from the low houses on each side we could tell we were in a different country: they had neat flowerbeds with flowers and plants in them. It took us over fifteen minutes to get there. El Duraznillo was a cluster of houses beside a path that ended in the river.

Asking the taxi driver to wait, we banged on the door of a closed store. A woman came out drying her hands on a dish towel. We inquired if she knew where Ibáñez lived, and she said he was on the coast, in a plot of land owned by the municipality, beyond Los Linares ranch. She had to explain how to get there because we didn’t know the area.

It would have been easier to go along the river, but there was no one who could take us, and so Luis and I climbed back into the taxi. He drove along a dirt road, talking politics the whole time and glancing at us in his rear-view mirror to see if we would respond. But neither of us encouraged him. We were as silent as two hit men: although we didn’t look dangerous, the driver was unnerved by us. Perhaps that’s why the guy never stopped talking.

The road was pretty bad, and the car bounced over the dry potholes. We went past a ranch called Los Lanares. (I thought the woman had said “Los Linares.”) There was an entrance that was blocked with a loose chain and padlock. We got out. We tried to see if we could lift the chain so the car could pass underneath, but it was impossible. We would have to walk down to the river. The driver didn’t want to wait for us. We could understand him not wanting to stay there, in the blazing sun. Luis paid him for the journey and something in advance for him to come and collect us two hours later, at the same spot.

We set off down the white path, crossing a field with a few sparse trees in it. We weren’t wearing shoes for walking over rough ground. I had on a pair of loafers; Luis was wearing smart shoes that were soon covered in dust. He began to run out of breath, and asked if we could rest for a while. He wiped off the sweat with his handkerchief. Angry at our invasion, some lapwings skimmed over our heads. They had a point. What were we doing out here in the middle of nowhere beneath a sun that was already warming our backs?

As we approached the river, the trees grew denser. The shore couldn’t be far off. We carried on walking and it wasn’t long before we reached a small brick-built house alongside some posts that had once been a corral. We saw a man stripping an engine outside, and asked him where Ibáñez lived. He told us to carry on until we reached the river, then to continue along the shore until we saw an old bus. That was where we could find him.

We bordered a field of stubble, then a pond covered in water hyacinths, a patch of thorny undergrowth, and finally came out on to the riverbank. It was odd to see the river from the other side, as though it were flowing in the opposite direction, as if the water were rising and time was flowing backwards. We walked along the shoreline, crossed a barbed wire fence and eventually caught sight of a gray bus with no wheels, held up on four barrels, and with a metal awning projecting from one side. We went closer and clapped our hands. Nobody. There was no boat tied up in the water. We decided Ibáñez must be out fishing.

We sat on a couple of crates in the shade of a tree near an extinguished fire. We talked a bit about how we could get the sixty-five rolls of the painting over to this side of the river. We would have to find a boat, a smuggler willing to make several trips. We would have to see. We ate the crackers I’d brought in the bag. More than an hour went by.

We were already planning to make our way back when a man appeared in a boat downriver. He was whistling a tune absent-mindedly. We couldn’t see his face beneath the broken brim of his hat. When he spotted us, he used the oar to slow the boat down, and peered at us from a safe distance. He looked too young to be Ibáñez.

“Good morning,” I said, loudly and in a friendly voice, trying to reassure him, because I could understand that he wasn’t thrilled to see two intruders standing there waiting for him outside his home, like ghosts. “We’re looking for Fermín Ibáñez.”

“Fermín Ibáñez?” he said, and we saw his dark-skinned face.

“Is that you?”

“No, Fermín was my uncle,” he said. “He died some time ago.”

“Are you the nephew?” asked Luis, although it was obvious.

“Yes,” he said. “What is it you were after?”

“We wanted to know whether your uncle Fermín still had a roll of canvas our father Juan Salvatierra painted. A roll this big,” I said, spreading my arms. “A canvas with drawings on it.”

The guy kept staring at us.

“Your uncle and our father were friends,” I said.

Less suspicious by now, he maneuvered his boat into the bank. He climbed out, tied a piece of rope round a fallen tree trunk, slung a sack over his shoulder and came up to where we were standing. He didn’t offer his hand.

“Do you have any idea if your uncle had that roll?” Luis asked impatiently.

“Yes, he did have it,” said the man. “He kept it over there in the bus engine, wrapped in sacks. Then he went to jail and died.”

“So where is it now?”

“I gave it away years ago.”

“You gave it away?”

“Yes, to Soria, the boss of Los Lanares near here. He never paid me. He said he was going to give me a mare and her foal, but he never did.”

Ibáñez tipped the contents of his sack onto the sand. Slimy looking fish fell out: a surubí and several sábalos. He started cleaning them right there, in the water. Barely visible beneath the surface, tiny fish nibbled at the innards as they fell.

“Do you know if that Soria fellow kept it?”

“No, I don’t… He said he wanted it for decoration.”

Ibáñez finished gutting the fish and, seeing that we made no move to leave, invited us to eat with him.

“It’s not luxurious, but there’s plenty for everyone. I’ve got some wine as well.”

Luis said a taxi would be coming for us in a short while. I would have gladly accepted the offer. Ibáñez passed some warm wine around in a mug.

As he lit the fire he told us that as far as he could remember the roll was kept under the hood of the bus when he was a boy. On one occasion he had been curious to see what it was, but his uncle had driven him off with his whip. This place had once belonged to the municipality, which used it to collect brushwood for use in road building. Fermín Ibáñez had been taken on to look after the machinery, and he was allowed to live in the old bus. Then the brushwood ran out, and the machines were taken elsewhere. His uncle had gone on living there for many years, before he was arrested for killing a man south of Paysandú in a bar room brawl. He had died in prison. By then his nephew was already settled in the bus. Later on, the spot began to be known for its fishing, and for a while he ran a drinks stall and a barbecue. Later still, the Day of the Fisherman was celebrated there. People came to it from all over, even from Argentina and Brazil. Ibáñez told us that during one of these celebrations he had unrolled the canvas to show it and Soria, who had just bought the Los Lanares ranch, offered to exchange it for a mare and foal. Soria was crazy about horses and according to Ibáñez part of the canvas depicted some rural horse races. Fifteen years old at the time, Ibáñez had accepted Soria’s offer, and helped load it in the trunk of his car, but never got anything in return. He used to occasionally run across Soria, and the old man always said: “I’m putting aside a nice little mare for you,” and yet he never kept his promise. Soria had died five years earlier; his children started a lawsuit over the property with some creditors, and it was now abandoned.

32

“Are you sure there’s nobody there?”

“The only caretaker lives at the entrance to the property, and he’s always either drunk or in town.”

It took us some time to make up our minds, or rather it took me time to convince Luis, who at first didn’t want to know anything. In the end he reluctantly climbed into the dinghy: we had let the taxi go back, and to him that was like burning our bridges. Ibáñez took us downstream to the Los Lanares ranch. Possibly because the wine had gone to my head I felt almost happy, especially watching my brother the notary sitting in this muddy little craft, clinging to the sides and constantly readjusting his glasses with a quick jerk of his thumb as if he was afraid they would fall in the water.

We followed the coastline without having to row: the current took us along slowly but surely. After a while, eucalyptus and pine trees started to replace the native thorn bushes. Ibáñez told us the house was behind the screen of trees, and took us in to the bank. We clambered out at a small jetty where only the wooden posts were left standing.

“I’ll be back later,” said Ibáñez, rowing off upstream.

We stood there, looking around. Now we really had nothing but our feet to rely on. We began to walk slowly away from the river. Panting with exhaustion, Luis kept saying things like: “We have to ask permission first,” “If it’s locked we’ll leave,” “I don’t know what on earth we’re doing here,” “It’s me who’s the idiot for following you.” All of a sudden the house appeared among the trees: a big stone building with a tower and balconies. We came to a halt.

“There must be people in there,” said Luis.

We crossed the grass of what had once been the lawn around the house, jumping over fallen tree trunks, dry branches, and through thistle bushes that came up to head-height. Every so often we stopped so as not to make any noise on the leaves and to listen. But no dogs barked; the only sound was a buzzing like cicadas or wasps that seemed to be coming from the ranch house. Then we startled a tinamou bird, and it startled us back with its cries and beating wings. We reached the veranda. Some of the guttering had been brought down by storms, tufts of grass were growing through the floor tiles, there were bird nests, earth. It looked completely deserted. We walked around the house. At the front, Luis clapped his hands, then knocked on the door. Nobody answered. He pushed, but it was locked.

We tried to peer through the window bars, but could only make out the vague shapes of furniture in the gloom. We went around the house again. I found a wooden door that had a half-rotten lower part. I bent down to see if I could tear a slat off. Luis wanted to leave, but I pretended I didn’t hear him.

“What are you going to do now? Go in and steal?”

That incensed me. I straightened up and told him I wasn’t going to steal anything; on the contrary, I was going to recover something that had been stolen from us.

“If you’re going to moan at me the whole time, I prefer you to go. Right now,” I said. He walked away among the thistles.

I tried to loosen the door. I kicked it, barged it with my shoulder. I took out all my pent-up anger at my brother on the door. This went on for a good while. Whenever I grew tired, I would pause, then start again. Now that I’d gotten this far, I wasn’t going to let a stupid old door stand in my way. I insisted, but got nowhere apart from raising a few splinters. All of a sudden a big piece of wood landed beside me: I jumped to one side. Luis had reappeared with a huge branch. Without a word, he pushed it through the rotten wood to gain some leverage. Between the two of us we managed to smash in the bottom part of the door, until there was a hole large enough for someone to crawl through.

“You first,” he said, so I pushed my way in.

It was like going inside of a smell. A smell of ammonia and rot that was too strong for me to breathe. I had to cover my nose. It was the smell of bats. I stood up in the darkness. I groped for a wall, and my hand collided with something made of tin.

“What’s wrong?” asked Luis, still crawling through the door.

“Nothing. But be careful, there are some metal things here.”

As my eyes grew used to the gloom I saw we were in a larder. Light filtered in through the hole we had made. We opened a tall door and stepped into a corridor, where the air was more breathable but where we were still surrounded by the dank cold of winter. We edged forward. There were doors on either side, all of them shut. We couldn’t see anything at the far end of the corridor. We reached a corner. At first we thought the corridor must be L-shaped, then a U, until finally we discovered it was a square, because we found ourselves back at the door where we first started. This time we began opening some of the doors on the right. We saw a kitchen with pots and pans hanging from the wall, some big rooms with rugs and porcelain ornaments, an office, three bathrooms. We opened a door on the interior of the corridor, but couldn’t see anything.

“What’s there?” Luis asked.

“It’s dark,” I said, and from the echo we realized it must be a very large space.

We went in. We couldn’t see properly, so Luis lit his lighter. By its timid flame we made out some armchairs, a dining room and, behind our backs, an animal on its hind legs staring at us. A giant rat, the size of a small pig. We crept away from it.

“What is it?”

I stood stock still, and didn’t say a word.

“Shoo!” said Luis, “get out!” He stamped his foot to scare it off, but it didn’t budge.

I laughed nervously because I had just realized it was a stuffed capybara. The lighter’s flickering flame had made it look alive and breathing. Luis touched it with his foot: it gave off a hollow sound. Holding the light high above our heads, we looked all around us; it was an enormous place that had once served as both a living and dining room. When we had recovered from our fright, I went out and started opening doors.

“What are you doing?” asked Luis, with a sort of strangled cry.

I didn’t reply; I wanted to let in more light. I walked the whole length of the corridor, opening the doors on both sides. Daylight streamed in from the exterior-facing rooms and reached the boxed-in space. I was about to complete my tour when I heard my brother say something. I went back into the big central room and saw him staring upwards. I looked in the direction he was gazing, but at first couldn’t make anything out. Eventually I saw there was something in between the ceiling and the tops of the doors; a series of shapes, a kind of frieze decorating the walls all around the room. It was Salvatierra’s canvas. There it was. Even though the sunlight only reached us dimly, we could see horses, the outlines of human beings. An immense relief swept over me: this was the bridge, the link that was going to fill the gap that so upset me in my father’s work. At last I would have the weight of that interruption lifted from me. I felt the pleasure that comes when something is finally complete and becomes fluid, continuous.

“We have to get it down,” I said, and we set to work at once.

33

We had to construct scaffolding from pieces of furniture. At the bottom we put the long dining table. On top of that, we built two columns: one using a sideboard, the other using two small tables and a chair. I let Luis climb onto the sideboard because with his weight he needed the more stable one. We discovered that the canvas was attached with studs to long boards. We tried to pull the planks off the wall, but it proved impossible. We had no tools. I looked in the kitchen for something we could use, and took some knives. In the end, what turned out to be most useful were the bases of some steel candlesticks that fit underneath the studs and allowed us to pry them out. But it was a lot of work. Every so often we thought it would be better to leave it to the following day, telling ourselves we could come back with proper tools and stepladders, but after a break we always went back to it.

We saw a fragment of the canvas that depicted a horse race. There were the mounts, nervous before the start, tense, reined in, rearing, and yet delicate-looking, like furious beasts elegantly poised on the tips of their hooves. Then the start itself, when their coats seemed to leap out of the painting. A brilliant chestnut, a golden colored bay, a fiery roan, a dapple-gray gleaming white in the sun. All of them exploding from the gate like springs, enormous and threatening as bison in cave paintings, their diminutive riders clinging to their backs, completely unable to control this unleashed power.

Whenever we had managed to unhook five meters or so, we had to move our makeshift scaffolding. It was exhausting. Even though we took great care, it seemed as though the noise we made shifting the furniture could be heard for kilometers around. We spent the whole afternoon like this. I was starting to get blisters on my hands, and our shoulders and necks began to seize up from having to keep our arms above our heads the whole time. At one point I left to look for some water to drink. I went to the kitchen but couldn’t find any. The supply to the house had been cut off.

We tried to get the studs out by pulling together on the canvas, but this only ripped it, so we were forced to remove them one by one. We would slide the candlestick in, press down, and the stud would fly out, landing noisily on the floor tiles. We kept going. We reached a part of the canvas showing a woman with light colored eyes who looked familiar to me. Asking Luis for his lighter, I brought the flame up close to the canvas, and then I realized:

“This woman was a colleague of dad’s at the Post Office.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure.”

It was Eugenia Rocamora, painted from memory, smoking naked in the bed of some secret bedroom in Barrancales. The siesta-hour sun splintered on the shutter and fell on her youthful hip.

“I met her the other day. She’s the woman I told you about who showed me around.”

There were more images of Eugenia Rocamora. Although her face wasn’t always visible, it was clearly her: sometimes she was asleep, her long auburn hair spilling over the sheets; at others she was reading a book, lying naked in a white light that poured into interconnecting rooms: even if it was the same one repeated from different angles, Salvatierra had painted them as if they comprised a single house with many rooms in it, the long house of siestas he had spent with that woman.

I think we were both taken aback, because neither of us had the slightest suspicion of this romance. I suppose mom knew nothing about it either. Or perhaps she did, and had made sure to put an end to it. There could be no doubt that Salvatierra had had a relationship with Eugenia Rocamora, most likely in 1961, the year this roll was painted. It didn’t appear to be something he had imagined, but rather scenes painted soon afterwards, day by day, like a siesta diary. There was no way we could be sure. It gave the impression of having been a brief relationship, a series of encounters, possibly for a month, who knows, or it might have lasted a year and Salvatierra had later reduced it in his memory. It seemed a short, impossible, intense relationship, like a flash of lightning streaking across his canvas. At some point they must have decided to separate. It couldn’t last. She was about twenty-five, and he was fifty-two, and married. That was too much of a scandal for a small town.

As we freed the canvas, it began to topple onto us. At a certain moment, the figure of the naked woman appeared to be falling right on to Luis, who was tired, fed up, and not particularly pleased at the revelation of dad’s infidelity.

After we had released three of the four sides of the painting, we stopped for a rest. By now it was already five in the afternoon. Luis sat smoking in one of the dusty armchairs. From time to time he came out with a skeptical remark:

“We should have left it here to rot, Miguel. We’re sticking our noses in where we’re not wanted. You shouldn’t poke around in the past like this, should you?”

I sat in the other armchair and said nothing. He went on:

“What happens to someone belongs to his own time; you shouldn’t dig it up again. There’s a reason for it being forgotten. Everybody has to live their own life and leave the dead in peace.”

I reminded him that neither of us had exactly had much of a life of our own. I thought of him going to the supermarket every night after work to buy a chicken breast and a bit of salad, but didn’t mention it.

I was causing Luis to lose his bearings, because he had always fought against Salvatierra’s omnipresence by trying to bury it in time. That was how he built his life. And now here I was forcing him to struggle with it as I did; in other words, scouring that enormity until I discovered its limit.

I peered up at the dangling canvas and, trying to justify myself to Luis to some extent, I said:

“Do you remember the gesture he made in the clinic when we asked him what to do with his painting?”

“He did this,” said Luis, copying the offhand gesture Salvatierra had made.

“Yes, but after that he lifted his finger to his cheek and signed ‘Keep an eye on her,’ pointing to mom.”

“So?”

“At the time I thought he meant ‘Keep an eye on your mother, take care of her.’ Now I think he was saying: ‘Do what you like with the canvas, but keep an eye on mom, don’t let her see the things I painted.’”

“That’s possible… He wasn’t keen on it all coming to light.”

“OK, but it’s done now. It can’t offend anyone.”

We fell silent so as not to carry on arguing over the same old thing.

“We have to leave it over here on the Uruguayan side,” said Luis, changing the topic. “We can give it to Ibáñez. That way we’ll have at least one roll outside Argentina.”

We set to work again, in a hurry because Aldo, Boris and Hanna would be waiting for us and the barbecue. This last part was the hardest, because of the blisters. I had to wrap a handkerchief round my hand. We freed a section showing the river: empty boats moored in the morning chill; boats clustered in mid-stream, with men in some sort of clandestine meeting; two men fighting on the shore. It was all very mysterious, a bit frightening. We had no idea what we would find next.

Towards the end of this river sequence, a naked black woman appeared, like a lost soul, running away through the persicaria branches and foliage. As we started to lower it, I noticed that this part had been stitched up, with a diagonal repair. It was the slash Fermín Ibáñez had made during the brawl in the shed that night, when I was eleven.

When I told Luis this, he didn’t seem interested, or was too exhausted to reply. He didn’t say a word until we had completely finished our work. Once the whole canvas was on the floor, we rolled it up and pushed it over to a window. It occurred to Luis that we should roll it up again, but with a pole in the middle so we could carry it on our shoulders. We used the branch that had served as a lever. We pushed the canvas out of the window and carried it between us. It weighed as much as a grown man.

34

We reached the river as the sun was setting. Ibáñez was waiting for us. Seeing us arrive, he pulled in some fishing lines and helped us load the canvas onto his boat. We asked him if he could take us across to the other side.

“Yes… but there’s the Coast Guard,” he said.

“What can they do to us?” I asked.

“Well… they don’t like people crossing at night…”

“How much would you charge us?” I asked.

“Fifty.”

Luis took out fifty pesos and gave it to him.

First we went to Ibáñez’s place and left the roll there. We wrapped it in a tarpaulin and covered it with sheets of corrugated iron. Ibáñez helped us without a word. Seeing his willingness to lend a hand, I asked him if he knew of anyone who had a bigger boat, a boat that could ship things across at night, because at most we could take two rolls at a time in his. He gave a rather embarrassed smile and asked what we wanted to get across.

“More rolls like this one,” I told him.

“How many?”

“About sixty.”

He thought about it for a few moments.

“When are you thinking of doing this?”

“Tomorrow or the next day at the latest.”

“When you come, I’ll have something for you.”

We climbed back into his boat. Night was falling slowly. Ibáñez began to row, the prow pointed directly towards the Argentine shore. Every so often he raised his oars and took a rest. To arrive more quickly, we decided to head straight across and then follow the shoreline until reaching the shed. Our guests must be worried. We could walk to our house and come back the next day for the car, which we had left at the Customs quay. All three of us were quiet. The only sounds were the oars, the water slapping against the sides of the boat, and Ibáñez’s breathing. Then the horseflies started to pester us, buzzing round our ears.

On the way we caught sight of a motorboat with powerful searchlights. Ibáñez saw it too, but said nothing. He went on rowing, keeping his rhythm. The boat sped by without paying us any attention.

“That was the Coast Guard,” he said when it had gone. “They’re a real pain in the ass.”

Night drew quickly in, until we could barely make out each other’s faces, only Ibáñez’s dark silhouette against the orange sky. During one of his rests, I asked if he wanted me to row.

“No, I’m fine,” he said, and then seemed to freeze for an instant. I wondered what he could be doing. All of a sudden, his hand shot out and he caught a horsefly that was bothering him in mid-air. He flicked it into the river and went on rowing.

Dumbfounded, I sat there saying nothing, staring at his profile. Who was this man rowing us? I was unnerved and confused. We were in mid-river, with only a few lights twinkling on the far bank.

We headed downstream towards the old jetty.

“Be careful you don’t make any noise or light a cigarette around here. They take potshots at any boats passing nearby.”

“Why’s that?” asked Luis.

“For fun, to practice their shooting,” said Ibáñez. “Lots of drugged kids.”

In the silence we heard a commotion a few blocks away, like a big party, and saw a glow in the sky. A bright patch of light.

We felt the prow of the boat run into sand and jumped out.

“We’ll see you in a few days,” said Luis.

“Have a good time,” said Ibáñez, then began to row off.

He was about to disappear in the darkness when I called out to him:

“Ibáñez?”

“What?”

I tried to see him, but he had been swallowed up by the night. His voice though still seemed close, perhaps because of the strange effect that makes sound skim off smooth water without losing strength.

“Is your mother dead?”

“Yes, a long time ago,” he said out of the shadows.

“Was she black?”

“Yes, she was.”

“And your father?”

“I never knew him.”

“Don’t you know anything about him?”

He didn’t reply for a moment, and then his voice sounded more distant:

“Only that he was mute.”

35

Luis climbed the bank and began to walk quickly away, without looking back. Had he heard what I’d heard?

“Luis,” I called out to him. “Luis!”

I didn’t see him turn round, and only realized he had when he was right on top of me, grabbing my shirt.

“How could you ask him that? How could you?”

I tried to free myself. I was as shocked as he was. Shouting to him to let go of me, I grasped his hands and tried to push him off. We struggled.

“Let go of me,” I was shouting, but he wouldn’t stop shaking me.

“How could you ask him that?”

Nothing made sense. I pushed him hard and we both fell to the ground. It was as if in the darkness we had no age. We fought like adolescents.

Luis wouldn’t let me go. The neighborhood dogs started barking. It was like a drunken brawl. Time and again I told him it wasn’t my fault. Eventually I managed to stand up and loosen his grip. He sat in the middle of the dirt road.

I waited, but when he didn’t get up I walked off. I heard him coming behind me. Did we have a half-brother? Perhaps Salvatierra had had a son with that black woman who appeared in the canvas? The fisherman Ibáñez had gone crazy that drunken night in the shed when he recognized his sister in the painting. Possibly he even knew Salvatierra had got his sister pregnant. That was why Ibáñez had slashed the canvas then later on stolen it, or collaborated with Jordán to steal it. Is that how it had been? As well as his affair with Eugenia Rocamora, the woman in the Post Office? Could there have been more women we would never find out about? And more children?

I felt crushed by all this, on top of my tiredness. I was exhausted, numb. Who had my father been? It seemed to me I didn’t know him. It seemed to me I had just seen him rowing our boat, his silhouette etched against the orange sky. Salvatierra had been like the two banks of the river. My mother and that black Uruguayan woman. Which of the two banks was he on? Perhaps he would always remain hidden, down where the two shores touch beneath the water.

We drew closer to the commotion we heard up in front of us. We saw people running towards the glow in the sky a few blocks further on. I thought perhaps there was some kind of performance outside the supermarket. A boy came running past, so I asked him:

“What’s going on?”

“A fire,” he said.

I hurried on, but something within me seemed to be running backwards, fleeing. With each step it became more and more obvious that what I feared was happening.

36

The shed was in flames.

I know I ran and had to be restrained by several of the neighbors. But my images of that moment are confused. The shed was burning down: the roof seemed to have collapsed, and tongues of fire leapt into the air. I shouted for someone to call the firemen, but was told they were already on their way. I was so distraught, they thought there must be people inside. I can remember the heat on my body, and the sensation of not being able to accept what was happening. It wasn’t right. A whole life’s work was being lost in the fire. I was desperate, shouting for buckets and water, but they grabbed me by my clothes and tried to persuade me it was no use. I struggled with them. I couldn’t accept it. It was as though my entire life and that of my family were going up in flames. My memory, my childhood. Salvatierra’s years, the time we had together, his colors and all his effort, his talent, his days, his enormous, silent affection for the world. All going up in flames. Everything that gave his life meaning, as well as the efforts I, Luis and mom had made. The images of Estela vividly alive in the painting, her eyes as if they were about to look at you. The endless river going up in flames forever. It wasn’t right.

Luis put his arm round my shoulder, and I saw him weep. We stood there staring, breathing in the hot air of our impotence at being unable to put out this inferno. The oil of the paint and the canvas set the rolls blazing like huge torches. Aldo, Boris and Hanna came up to us: they’d been waiting for us outside our house. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They asked us what had happened, and we asked them the same. They said they had finished work at seven. They had padlocked the door shut. They hadn’t left anything lit. Fortunately, as it was their last day, they had taken out the scanner and their equipment. Boris stood blinking at the blaze, still holding the bottle of wine he’d brought for the barbecue. Then he began to walk around and around in circles, cursing in Dutch, before coming to a halt again. Each of us was grieving in our own way. The locals who gathered to look thought it was entertaining, because they had no idea of the dimension of our loss.

Later, the firemen arrived, but there was nothing they could do. They asked us what was inside, and when we explained, they said it was highly flammable material, and the best they could do was to prevent the fire spreading to the neighboring plots of land.

There’s no point in dwelling on our sadness at having to watch the shed burn all night, or of how at first light we were finally able to enter, with the smell of burning everywhere, ashes in pools of water, twisted metal rafters, the round iron stove that was the only thing left intact. We were unable to rescue a single meter of the rolls of Salvatierra’s painting that had been stored there.

37

Now there’s a parking lot where the shed once stood. Just as Baldoni wanted. I saw this in a French documentary on Salvatierra’s life and work. There was no way we could prove that the fire was deliberate, or that Baldoni was to blame. There’s no doubt though that his people did it. The door had been forced. He claimed it had been his political enemies, who broke in thinking the shed was his. Supposedly they imagined this was where he hid donated goods like mattresses and boxes of food. When they found nothing, they took revenge by setting fire to it.

In order not to sell the land to Baldoni, we sold it to someone else; but he resold it to the supermarket owner not long afterwards.

We recovered the roll we had left in Ibáñez’s place over in Uruguay. I crossed the border with the Dutch couple by the international bridge. Luis didn’t want to come. Aldo couldn’t because he had no documents. So I went with Hanna and Boris. Between us we scanned the only roll that had survived the fire.

I managed to take Ibáñez to one side and tell him what I believed. I told him that perhaps Salvatierra had been his father, and that possibly we were half-brothers. I didn’t sense much of a reaction in him, as though either he was not interested or because the news had come too late to make any difference. I felt I had to tell him though, however awkward it might make us both feel. I told him that, partly thanks to him, the one existing fragment of Salvatierra’s painting had been rescued. When I told him about the fire, he was only sad that we wouldn’t be transferring the rolls, because he said he had already struck a deal with the owner of quite a big boat.

Boris and Hanna took the one surviving roll and the entire digitalized version of the work with them. At Customs they simply said they had painted it themselves, and they had no problems at all. That was how the canvas got to the Röell Museum in Amsterdam.

38

Some time ago I read this phrase: “The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.” I can’t remember where I read that. It caught my attention because that’s what I felt about my dad. I was never much of a believer, because the idea of adding a spiritual father to the gigantic biological one I already had seemed to me overwhelming. I understood the phrase to mean: “The page is the only place in the universe my father left blank for me.” We occupy the places our parents leave blank. Salvatierra occupied a marginal space as far away as possible from my grandfather’s hopes of his becoming a cattle rancher. I inhabit the words that Salvatierra’s muteness left untouched. I began to write a couple of years ago. I feel that this place, the space of the blank page, is mine, independently of what the results may be. The whole world fits into this rectangle.

My son Gastón devotes himself to music. He’s the bass guitarist in a band. He’s doing well. He lives in Barcelona; I went to visit him two years ago. I looked for work without much success, so in the end I came back. Nowadays I live in Gualeguay, a few hours from Barrancales. In the afternoon I work at a local newspaper. In the morning I write my own things and walk the quiet streets.

39

One weekend during the trip I made to see Gastón, we took a plane to Amsterdam and went to visit the Röell Museum. He was the one who asked me to go. I had to swallow my pride; I’d sworn never to set foot in the place. We weren’t on good terms with the foundation any more: they had paid us barely five per cent of what they’d promised.

It was my son who persuaded me to go. One morning we arrived outside the new building that houses the Latin American collection. It’s close to the Nieuwmarkt. We left our coats in the cloakroom, bought our tickets, and went to the gallery where the canvas Luis and I had saved was on display. It covers a whole wall. It was strange to see the intimate world of Eugenia Rocamora’s siestas at the other end of the earth and under artificial lighting. At one point she appears to be dreaming of horses, rearing at the start of a race, then gathering speed and galloping towards the shore, then fording the river, riderless by now, until reaching the opposite bank, where my half-brother Ibáñez’s black mother is hiding in the shadows.

Yet the greatest surprise of all came when we went down the steps to the old part of the museum. Suddenly, on the wall of a long, curving corridor, we saw Salvatierra’s painting. It gives off a disturbing glow, like an aquarium. It unfolds gradually across a screen that is exactly the size of the canvas.

The digitalized version of the work moves slowly from right to left, as if it was the viewer who was drifting downstream, or down the painting. Gastón and I sat to watch. We saw what Salvatierra had painted just before his death: the one-eyed cook who looked after him when he was almost killed by his horse; his friend Jordán playing an accordion out of which flow waves of water and fish; his naked cousins bathing in the river beneath the soft light of the willows; my mother drinking her mate tea all alone on our house patio. I saw people going by who stopped to sit down in front of the painting for a moment or two. Now everyone could see it. What Luis and I had achieved wasn’t so bad after all. I saw them smiling in astonishment at Salvatierra’s strange images, light, and colors. Now everything was together, now the work could flow freely from end to end, without any gap. And I was there with my twenty-three-year-old son, who could see what his grandfather had done, this painting that enveloped us all, this space where his creations could move freely, limitlessly, because there were no boundaries, there was no end, because after we had sat there for a long while, Gastón and I could see that the fish and circles in the water painted on what we had thought was the end of the last roll matched up exactly with the circles and fish of the very beginning, painted by Salvatierra when he was barely twenty.

Content

Pedro Mairal
The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

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