by Pedro Mairal
“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.”
12
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.
13
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.
14
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.
For a while I roamed the center of town. At eleven, I found I was near the cathedral, and so I rang the bell at the house of my distant aunts, cousins of Salvatierra who had been present at my mother’s funeral. They were no longer the young girls undressing in the shadows of the canvas; now they looked exactly like the Spanish matrons dressed in mourning of the previous generation. I thought they might be able to tell me something, though I didn’t know what.
They weren’t exactly overjoyed to see me. “The spitting image of your father,” they said, staring at me time and again. I couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing. Coming from them, it was more likely to be bad. I tried to tidy myself up. The bike ride had left me out of breath, my clothes rumpled. They asked me to take a seat in a room that smelled of mothballs. I decided not to beat about the bush. I asked them if Salvatierra had sold or given away one of the rolls of his work. They had no idea.
“But take a good look in that shed, you could find almost anything in there,” one of them said, casting a knowing glance at her sister.
“Why’s that?”
“Well ... he always was such a hoarder.”
They didn’t have much more to add. There was a note of censure in their tone that I put down to the general feeling of rejection the family had always shown towards my father. I had to stay a while longer, listening to tales of illnesses and unscientific cures before I could leave. They wanted to invite me to tea the next day, but when I told them I had an appointment, they didn’t insist.
I also rang the bell at the house of the deceased Doctor Dávila. His widow, a suspicious, gloomy woman, didn’t ask me in, but assured me that her husband had never possessed any painting by Salvatierra.
“A roll,” I said, “a long roll of canvas.”
“No, young man, I don’t know anything about that,” she said from behind a half-open door.
When I got back to the shed, I did as my aunts had suggested and searched among all the bits of junk. Underneath the canoe I found my old sky blue dinghy. It was like seeing an apparition. In summer, my father would take us down to the river in a carriage pulled by Tiza, a white mare we used to leave grazing in the vacant lots near our house. When we arrived, he would unharness her and lead her down to the riverside, walking her up and down the sandbank where we were going to play to scare off the poisonous stingrays. Then we would go into the water. We weren’t allowed to go too far from the bank because the river had treacherous drops and whirlpools. My boat was only big enough for me. We used to tie it to a long length of rope, and I would float downriver on the current. Salvatierra would wave goodbye with his hand, pretending I was off on a long journey. Then he would haul me back on the rope; we did this
time and again. One day we no longer went. My sister Estela drowned while she was swimming with some friends near the old bridge, and after that mom didn’t want us to go back to the river.
Rummaging about, I also managed to find the stools made from tree stumps that Salvatierra laid out whenever his friends came to visit him in the shed. They were in the habit of staying until late, drinking. Sometimes mom would send us to go and fetch him, and he would let us stay for a while until dispatching us back. I must have been around ten years old at the time, and regarded those men with a mixture of admiration and fear. It was a group that came with Mario Jordán, a friend of my father’s who had a motorboat, and to whom he lent a corner of the shed to store his merchandise. He had a goatee, always carried an old .38 revolver, and occasionally turned up with an accordion. Six or seven of them would get together. Some of them, like Salazar the Basque or a black guy called Fermín Ibáñez, were surly types who said very little, although they warmed up once they got some alcohol inside them. One of the group would ask Salvatierra to show a bit of the work, and after making them insist, Salvatierra would put the end of the canvas on a reel that wound around a pole, and slowly turn it. Mario Jordán would play the accordion as the images floated by, like the pianists in the days of silent films. By now they would all be pretty drunk. They laughed when they recognized someone in the painting, or often, lulled by the slow rhythm of the music, they would stare glassy-eyed in astonishment at the dream-like scenes my father had painted: islands, herds of horses fording the river, channels, riders with their throats slit, swamps full of gigantic insects, bloody battles.
One night there was an argument; Fermín Ibáñez slashed the canvas with his knife and threatened Salvatierra. Luckily, Jordán stepped between them and managed to calm them down. The evening went on for a while longer without any further problem, then they all went home. I remember, for nights afterwards I woke up in terror, convinced that Ibáñez was in the darkness of our bedroom, standing quite still as I had seen him in the shed, brandishing his knife.
15
It had been one of my grandfather’s old shearing sheds. But wool never really took in the region, and over time cattle, batteries of hens, and citrus fruits proved more profitable, so the shed lay abandoned until my father took it over in the forties.
It was south of Barrancales, near the track down to the river, on high ground that never flooded. Salvatierra used to open it at seven in the morning. He painted until ten. He closed up to go to work at the Post Office, then opened the shed again at five in the afternoon. I used to go there sometimes after school, because I liked helping him prepare the canvas.
This process lasted two or three days, depending on the weather. First he would send me to cut some canes from the bamboo grove growing in the wasteland behind the shed, where the supermarket now stands. I was scared because the breeze rustling in the dry leaves sounded like dead murmurs and invisible footsteps. We sewed the canes to the top and bottom edges of the canvas, then tied them to two old shafts from a horse carriage. We used pieces five meters long. The wooden shafts slowly separated from each other, and when the canvas was as tight as a drum, we brushed two coats of glue on it. As this dried, we applied several coats of a paste made from plaster and lime that we had previously sieved through an old shirt. That was the part I liked best: to watch how the lumpy paste filled the shirt and then trickled out as a purified liquid. And the smell it gave off, which I only ever experienced again in a few hardware stores in Buenos Aires. We always had two or three canvases at different stages of preparation. We would take them out into the sunshine and hold them up to the light to see which bits hadn’t been covered evenly, so that we could add more of the mixture. When we had finished preparing them, Salvatierra would join the pieces up using a pedal sewing machine, so that they formed a single roll. He always wanted to have at least one blank roll ready so he could work without worrying about it.
In the best of cases, the canvas might be proper white material meant for painting on; in the worst, when the money was only just enough to cover our household expenses, it could be sacks we asked for from the grain silos after the grain had been unloaded. Between these two extremes, Salvatierra could make his canvas out of anything: old tarpaulins, armchair upholstery, bedspreads, awnings.
For a while at the start of the seventies, a friend of Luis’s who did odd jobs at the station would bring a stack of excellent green tarpaulins. My father was really pleased. They were for tying around merchandise, known for their toughness. Salvatierra paid a good price for them, which helped Luis’s friend make a few pesos. He said he was given them at the railway warehouse.
One morning an enormous guy appeared at the shed, large wrench in hand. He wanted to know where his truck tarpaulins were. He was shouting and beating the corrugated iron walls of the shed with his wrench. He said he’d been told this was where they ended up. Salvatierra—who later painted the truck driver as a paunchy Cyclops—signed to him to calm down, but since the guy wanted an explanation and my father said nothing, he grew even more irate. When, on top of that, he spotted the stolen tarpaulins about to be cut up and stretched, he threatened to bash my father’s head in. Luis had to explain that my father was mute. Possibly because Salvatierra demonstrated his innocence by staying completely calm, the truck driver did not strike out, and eventually they got him to sit down and explained the situation. The driver wanted to know the boy’s address to go and find him, and so my father had to lie, telling him through Luis that he didn’t know where he lived. The guy said he’d get him at the station, because that was where the tarpaulins had been stolen at night after he unloaded his trailer. My father made me run to the house to pay for them. The truck driver left counting the notes.
Salvatierra sent for the boy. When he appeared on his bike, dad seized him by the arm and forced him to walk along the street. He signed to me to go with them. Terrified, the boy kept glancing at me to see if I could explain what my father was up to.
“Where’s he taking me?” he wanted to know.
Salvatierra made as if to clutch the peak of an invisible helmet.
“To the police,” I told the boy.
“Why?”
Salvatierra mimicked putting on a glove, then closing his fingers one by one. That needed no translation.
“I won’t steal any more, I swear, sir,” the boy cried desperately.
We came to a halt on the corner. Dad looked the boy in the eye, pointed to him, raised a hand to his own shoulder as if he were carrying something, then pointed to his chest.
“He says he wants you to work for him.”
The boy accepted. Salvatierra had him running errands for a couple of weeks, then found him a job at the Post Office. He stayed there for fifteen years before going into the Town Hall. Nowadays he occupies an important post where he does a job not dissimilar to the one he did with the tarpaulins. He was the friend of Luis’s who managed to get our water switched back on when we spent a week in Barrancales.
There must have been hundreds of meters of Salvatierra’s work painted on tarpaulins stolen from the trucks that unloaded their goods at the train station early in the seventies.
16
The Dutch people arrived a few days after I began the search for the missing roll. Their names were Boris and Hanna. They arrived in a rented van, and had brought with them an enormous scanner from the Röell Museum that could digitalize paintings at their original size. Dressed in sandals and ethnic tunics, Hanna seemed more open than Boris to experiencing the Latin American adventure, but she left soon afterwards for Misiones, supposedly because she wasn’t needed for the job in hand. I think she fled from the famous cockroaches at the Gran Hotel Barrancales.
Their mission was to scan several sections of the painting, send them back in digital form to Holland, and then await instructions. Boris and Aldo did all the work: they got on well despite not being able to exchange a single word. Seeing them together was striking: the tall, thin Boris with a bald
patch surrounded by a curtain of long, blond hair, and Aldo, short and stout, with a spiky black mop. They lowered the big rolls between the two of them and placed them in the scanner, which could copy two meters of canvas every five minutes. The first day I tried to help them, but soon realized I was simply getting in the way whenever they were carrying a roll or trying to adjust it on the scanner. After that I stayed out of it, and stood with my arms by my side next to Hanna, who probably felt as I did.
I talked with her a little in the shade of the shed while the other two got on with their work. I showed her how we drink mate tea, and answered her questions about Salvatierra and the river. She told me, in Spanish that sounded as if it were being pronounced backwards, about her postgraduate studies in baroque art of the Americas, her interest in the Jesuits’ influence, her work with Boris even though they were now separated. I won’t deny that I fantasized about a brief fling with such a pretty woman, but nothing happened. I never made a move, and besides, I don’t think that going to bed with a guy like me formed part of her search for the Latin American exotic. The next day, she left to visit the Jesuit ruins at San Ignacio in Misiones.
17
With the scanning well underway, I decided to go to the Post Office building where Salvatierra had worked for many years. He started there back in 1935, taken in by one of my grandfather’s brothers, who couldn’t bear to see him wandering about by the river without doing anything useful. My grandfather hadn’t sent him to school, and had accepted he would not become a stockbreeder like his brothers. Instead, he let Salvatierra roam without keeping too close an eye on him, perhaps hoping that the consequences of his lack of interest would follow naturally. But, contrary to what they all expected, my father did not do badly in life. Thanks to his cousins’ insistence as teachers, he could write and spell impeccably, and was very good at letter writing. In fact, he was much better educated than my uncles, whose skill on horseback or with a lasso was of little use to them when it came to administering the lands they first inherited and then were forced to sell when they went bankrupt some years later. Salvatierra began at the Post Office as an assistant clerk, but gradually made a position for himself.
