The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (7 page)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.