The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (10 page)

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.

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.

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.”

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?