The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (2 page)

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.

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.

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 1930. 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.

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.