The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (5 page)

“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.

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.

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.

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.