The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (6 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.