The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (3 page)

The date and number of each roll were clearly written on the back. The day before we had to leave again, when I began to make a list of them, I noticed that one was missing. A whole year was absent: 1961. The dates on the back jumped from ’60 to ’62. Salvatierra had never missed a day’s painting. It was impossible that he had stopped for an entire year. We glanced suspiciously at Aldo. He said he had no idea where it might be, and that if the roll existed, it had been missing for a long while, because the order they were hanging in had not been altered in years. If it had been stolen recently, the gap would be obvious. I believed him; my brother didn’t.

We tried to recall that year. What had happened in ’61? We couldn’t remember anything in particular. At the time, we were living in a house near the Municipal Park. I was ten; Luis was fifteen. My sister Estela had already died. Salvatierra was working in the Post Office, and mom gave English classes ... all the usual. If Aldo hadn’t stolen it, what had happened to the roll? Where could it be? Had the rats got at it, with the result that Aldo had hidden it or thrown it away? Could someone else have stolen it? Perhaps Salvatierra himself had destroyed it, or sold it, or given it away? The rolls that had been shown in Buenos Aires and Paraná were still there; the missing one was none of those. We spent some time trying to work out what could have happened, but then we had to get on with our work because we were going back to Buenos Aires the next day.

Salvatierra was twenty-five years old and working in the Post Office when he met Helena Ramírez, my mother. She was twenty-one and worked in the Ortiz library in Barrancales. Salvatierra used to go there on Saturday mornings to read about the lives of the great painters and to look for books with illustrations and engravings. In the canvas from that time there is a slow transition from nocturnal scenes to those with the brightness of morning. First there are lengthy twilight landscapes with black women washing clothes on the riverbank (Doctor Dávila told us that sometimes in summer Salvatierra would go with the fishermen to the opposite side of the river in Uruguay, where they were received by a group of washerwomen). Salvatierra painted the hour when the first stars are reflected in the water, and everything is beginning to merge into the shadows. In one segment, somebody is striking a match, and in the darkness you can just make out a woman who is smiling provocatively from behind the bushes.

After that, daytime scenes began to take over. These show the outskirts of the town at dawn with long, tree-lined streets along which sleepy figures cycle by. These landscapes coincide with the moment when he met my mother. There are several portraits of her: one shows her seated at her librarian’s desk, in the distance at first, at the far end of a large empty room; then closer up, still radiant, absorbed in her reading; a girl with enormous eyelashes who will not look up until much further on. Mom always said my father was as shy as a guinea pig, and stayed at the opposite end of the room, leafing through his books and casting surreptitious glances at her. She used to say she could tell when Salvatierra was drawing her because she found it impossible to read, her body began to itch, and she became very self-conscious.

At the last minute, just as we were about to leave for Buenos Aires, we managed to get someone from Town Hall to come and look at Salvatierra’s work. We were keen to know whether they would finally decide to support the project of creating a museum. If we didn’t receive any funds, we were prepared to do something on our own account. Doctor Dávila had died; two governments had come and gone since he had succeeded in having the painting declared part of our “cultural heritage.” The local government in Barrancales was now being run by the “Let’s Go!” movement, a party made up of Peronists who were in charge of doling out the contracts for Carnival, and ex-Radicals who held the purse strings for the forestation projects.

A secretary working for the Cultural Affairs director came. He was on his cell phone the whole time he was there. We showed him a few of the rolls, unfolding them on the floor of the shed. I would try to explain, but his phone would ring and he would take the call. He would go to the door and shout out phrases like: “You tell the people in the associations that we’ve got the dough.” He walked around in circles waving his arms about and insulting someone on the other end of the line. He came closer, then moved off again. “Listen brother, those guys don’t even have enough for gas,” he would say.

At a certain moment, still listening to somebody on his phone, he pushed back one of the rolls a little with the tip of his shoe, to take a look. That was the only sign of interest he showed. Afterwards, he told us that the matter would have to be discussed with the mayor, and that perhaps a letter could be sent to the provincial government. “All I can say is that there’s no money,” he said. “It’s really tough trying to raise any. But put forward a proposal anyway.” We told him we already had, but it was obvious none of them knew anything about it.

Before getting back into his car, he asked us if we were aware that someone called Baldoni, the owner of the neighboring supermarket and the man in charge of Social Welfare at the Town Hall, was interested in buying the land. I remembered the offer made to mom. The guy had a quick look around the shed and immediately suggested we sell the plot, store my father’s work somewhere else that he could help us find, and then use the money to build a museum.

It didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Luis gave him his card. We agreed we would talk, and he left. The following day we returned to Buenos Aires, and it was several months before I could visit Barrancales again.

I went back towards the end of winter, after we had already received support from the Adrian Röell Foundation. All we had achieved in the intervening months was to make contact with Señor Baldoni, who made a ridiculously low offer for the land. When Luis rejected it, the director of Cultural Affairs’ secretary called him. Doubtless Baldoni and he had been in touch. They were offering us an alternative place to store the rolls, half a block from the river. A place prone to flooding. Luis thanked him and said we were going to deal with things ourselves.

I shut the real estate office down. We prepared the leaflets and sent them to be printed. We started distributing them to galleries, foundations, and companies. A graphic designer made a digital version for us, which Luis sent by email to several foreign institutions. It wasn’t long before we started to receive replies.

We had thought of several ways we could exhibit the canvas. One of them was to join all the pieces together and have them pass by behind a glass screen, then wind them on to a second big reel. But it would need an enormous space to do this, and with this system, once the roll had reached the end, the canvas would unwind in the opposite direction, as if time were flowing backwards. Another idea was to exhibit, if not the totality of the canvas, at least some lengthy fragments in an enclosed space, or a circular gallery like the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires. A further possibility was to publish a bulky coffee table book with foldout illustrations.

To begin with, things didn’t look too promising. The first people to express interest in Salvatierra’s work were some North Americans from the Guinness Book of Records. Luis had written to them, thinking they might finance an exhibition. But their proposal was to display the whole length of the work on the asphalt of an abandoned highway and to film it from a helicopter. They said that if our information was correct, we were the owners of the longest work of art in the world, and that could bring us substantial rewards. We thought Salvatierra wouldn’t have liked this. He hadn’t painted his work for it to be seen from a helicopter like some kind of monstrous prodigy. So we said no, and waited for further offers.

(I’ve noticed that, in the most recent editions of the book, the longest canvas in the world is still said to be a sacred painting from Tibet, on display in Beijing. It is six hundred and eighteen meters long, and was made by four hundred Buddhist monks. Salvatierra’s work is four kilometers long and he was its sole creator.)

After receiving a few calls from curious individuals and some unviable Argentine galleries offering only small spaces, the proposal from the Röell Foundation arrived from Holland. They were interested in the work because they were putting together a collection of Latin American art. In the first place, they proposed to photograph it to create a digital archive. They would make the work known in Europe, and if it aroused any interest, they could arrange to buy it and transfer it to the foundation’s museum in Amsterdam. Luis and I thought this was an interesting idea. We were prepared to take things step by step, and besides which, they were offering us a decent sum of money.

Someone had to be in Barrancales to supervise their work (scanning, digitalization, and so on). I told Luis I was prepared to go, and that I was even thinking of travelling a few days earlier than I had first said.

“What for?” he asked at the far end of the line, in his big brother voice.

“I’m going to look for the missing roll.”

By the time the bus pulled into the station at Barrancales it was almost night. I took a taxi to the house, which still had no electricity. I had the candles we had bought some months before, and there was water thanks to a call Luis had made to an old friend who worked in the Town Hall, which led to it being turned back on. The rooms seemed eternally cold and dank.

That night I slept badly, unnerved by the ghosts in the house. Mom’s clothes and other possessions were in big plastic rubbish sacks in one of the bedrooms. She’d collected and stored all kinds of things throughout her life. Dad’s possessions on the other hand fit into a single small bag: a watch, a shaving brush, a comb, a toothbrush, seven shirts ... they were like the personal effects of a prisoner. The framed photograph of their wedding was still hanging on the wall. They looked very young and ill-at-ease, in one of those black-and-white photographs that are sent away to be tinted. They were married in 1945, without much enthusiasm on the part of their families. My maternal grandmother did not want her daughter to get married to a mere Post Office employee who, on top of it all, was mute. My paternal grandparents were none too keen to see their son married to the daughter of a reclusive widow who was unknown in Barrancales society. But the imminent arrival of my brother Luis, who was already gestating in my mother’s belly, meant they all had to swallow their opinions.

Salvatierra painted the ceremony—which took place in the garden of a chapel demolished years earlier—seen from above, as if someone were looking on from its bell tower. The two families are sitting opposite each other, one on either side of the central aisle. My father’s family is numerous, robust, taking up too much room, the relatives united by red veins as thick as roots. My mother’s side is sparse, ethereal, consisting of a few translucent aunts and some distant relations called in at the last moment, united by almost invisible bloody threads. Each web of these family veins is joined, via my grandmothers, to my parents. The priest delivers his sermon pointing at my mother’s belly, where the two bloodlines are mixed. A vein leads from my father’s right arm out towards the river.

I was able to study many of these things closely over the next few days I spent in the shed, before the Dutch people from the Röell Foundation arrived. Whenever Aldo turned up, he would help me lower a couple of rolls, which I would spread out on the ground and go over slowly, peering at every detail. I sometimes felt I was getting to know my father for the first time. There were portraits of people I’d never seen: green-faced men drinking in a store; old women long since dead, dressed in black and sitting bolt upright; old-style gauchos almost alive in their gestures, staring out from the depths of an afternoon of branding cattle or hard at work slaughtering a steer, standing there with bloodied arms next to a beast slit open to the skies. At other points, the painting reminded me of moments in our lives: dogs we had at home but that I’d completely forgotten about, or the great fire of 1958 that reached as far as the south of Barrancales. Over almost nine meters of canvas, Salvatierra painted a huge meadow in flames, with smoke billowing out to the side, and the strange, sacred light we all saw that evening, as our whole family stood watching by the side of the road.

I looked at all this, asking myself so many questions at once. What was this interlacing of lives, people, animals, days, nights, catastrophes? What did it all mean? What could my father’s life have been like? Why did he feel the need to take on such a huge task? What had happened to Luis and me for us to have ended up in our gray, city-dwellers’ lives, as though Salvatierra had monopolized all the available color? We seemed more alive in the light shining from the painting in some portraits he had done of us eating green pears when I was ten years old, than in our current lives with their legal documents and contracts. It was as if the painting had swallowed us: both of us, our sister Estela, and mom. All those luminous provincial days had been soaked up by his canvas. There was a super-human quality to Salvatierra’s work; it was too much. I had always found it hard to begin anything new, sometimes even the simplest task, like getting up in the morning. I thought I had to do everything on a gigantic scale like my father, or nothing at all. And I confess that often I chose to do nothing, which also led me to feel that I was nobody.

I asked Aldo to lend me the old bike I’d seen in the shed. I changed the inner tubes, blew up the tires, and oiled it. I hadn’t ridden a bike since those distant Saturdays in the mid-1980s when I used to cycle with my son in the Palermo woods in Buenos Aires.

I rode aimlessly around Barrancales, pedaling slowly, comparing my memories of the village I had been brought up in with the town it had now become. I had no idea where to start looking for the missing roll.

Compared to the work as a whole, this fragment was almost nothing, and yet I wanted to find it because that gap disturbed me, the jump in a continuous flow. If four or five rolls had been missing, I wouldn’t have bothered trying to find them, but since it was only one, the painting was too close to achieving the absolute fluidity that Salvatierra had wanted for me not to make the effort. There was no vertical cut in the work; it was a single continuum, a single river.