The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Read online

  It was Salvatierra himself who recounted all this, with that mixture of mime and gestures he sometimes used to tell us stories. He used to go to Holt’s house twice a week on his bike (it was a long time before he got on the back of a horse again). He would pedal by the river along the old track that’s now been replaced by the avenue, riding through the grove of trees at the town’s southern entrance: the ash, willows and poplars that formed the green tunnels that appear in his work. He would arrive at Holt’s at nine in the morning. The old man let him paint alongside him, with only occasional suggestions. Little by little, Holt taught him to use perspective, to mix colors, study proportions and, most important of all, to paint each day. Every so often they would paint tramps who Holt had pose for them in return for wine and biscuits.

  Holt left, returning to Germany following Uriburu’s coup in 1930. My brother reckons there was nothing political about his departure, but that when he saw he had been so quickly surpassed by his pupil, the old man decided to seek out fresh horizons as far away as possible from this humiliation. Two rather poor paintings by him still hang on the walls of the Barrancales Social Club. They are meant to show the banks of the River Uruguay, but look much more like the chilly Danube of his native country.

  The figure of Holt makes two or three appearances in Salvatierra’s huge work. In one he paints him as an orchestra conductor, baton raised as he gazes down imperiously at the countryside. In another he is seated, looking contented as he devours a big yellow watermelon beneath a fire-yellow sky. Salvatierra told us that one day the two of them had an argument because he painted a watermelon yellow, and Holt said he ought to paint things their real color. If watermelons were as pink as the evening sky, you had to paint them pink. With his nervous mimicry, my father tried to explain that yellow watermelons did exist. Holt thought he was making fun of him, and threw him out. The next day, Salvatierra came back with a round melon as a gift. He chopped it in two with his penknife in front of Holt. To the German’s astonishment, two perfectly yellow halves fell open.

  During the years of his apprenticeship with Holt, Salvatierra avoided his brothers and cousins as much as possible and roamed all over the rough countryside by the shore. He got to know the fishermen who built shacks on the riverbank and eked out a living by going out in their canoes to catch fish with lines and nets. Old men who prevented the rising tide carrying off their few possessions by hanging them from the highest branches of the carob trees. The fishermen appear in his work among constellations of the kinds of monstrous fish often found in our rivers: huge tiger surubies with their long whiskers; oriental looking patíes; sour bile colored bagres; shovel nosed manduvies; and the pez chancho, the battleship among fish, armed with spines the length of its body. That is how Salvatierra paints these fishermen from his youth, like ragged saints who are the lords of the fish swimming high in the air among the boards, pans, bags, and ladles hanging from the branches so they won’t be swept away by the river. As if they could all swim in the air just as they did in the water: men, fish, and things.

  It’s understandable that he didn’t like to go—even if he was occasionally forced to do so—with his cousins and brothers and sisters to the dances organized in the town. His muteness obviously inhibited him, and in addition he hated all formality. I only ever saw him in two sets of clothes: the paint-stained mechanic’s overalls he wore to paint in, and the gray jacket he donned to go to the Post Office, which he never put on again once he retired.

  I think that what he also learned from Holt—more by example than from any direct teaching—was a certain love of freedom, a vital anarchy or happy sense of isolation. A simplification of life to the bare essentials, which meant he could carry on doing what he liked without hindrance.

  When Holt returned to Europe, he left my father a large quantity of paint and a long roll of canvas that he had not used. Holt himself would cut pieces off this roll and stretch them on rectangular frames to paint on. Salvatierra though decided to use the entire roll to paint a lengthy depiction of the river, without cutting it up. That was his first roll. He was twenty when he began.

  8

  The first thing we did before we left was to pay Aldo a few pesos for him to look after the canvases and keep the shed intact. A short time later, Luis and I were able to leave our affairs in Buenos Aires behind and return to Barrancales. Luis had no difficulty escaping from his notary office. I was divorced and my only son was living in Barcelona, so all I had to do was close the real estate office for a few days—I was doing hardly any business anyway.

  We installed ourselves in our parents’ last house, which was still for sale. It was close to the river, five blocks from my father’s shed. With Aldo’s help, we spent our days lowering and raising the rolls of canvas, using the system of pulleys and an apparatus for lifting engines that Salvatierra had found in a former car repair shop. We calculated that each roll must weigh around a hundred kilos. Luis said we were getting old, and we laughed because the simple act of rolling up our sleeves to do some physical work put us in a better mood.

  When each canvas was lowered to the ground, we unrolled it and Luis took photos of different fragments. His idea was to send the images with a letter to the provincial authorities insisting they come up with the promised subsidy, or if that failed, to ask for support from a foundation or museum interested in backing an exhibition.

  It would have been impossible to exhibit the entire canvas in one place, but we thought it could go on display in segments. Two sequences had been shown in Buenos Aires for a short while in the sixties, but Salvatierra had not wanted to be present. He had always felt the odd man out, a figurative painter among non-figuratives, a provincial among artists from the capital, a practitioner among theorists. Besides, those were the days of installations and happenings: aesthetic concerns that were alien to him. On another occasion, his friend Doctor Dávila took a section to an art biennial in Paraná, after he and my father agreed that if his work won they would share the prize money. And it did win. We all went to the ceremony. Salvatierra felt very awkward, and never exhibited again. He wasn’t interested, and anyway it interrupted his daily work. He didn’t want recognition, he wouldn’t have known how to handle it: he felt it had nothing to do with the task he had allotted himself.

  I think he saw his work as something too personal, a kind of intimate diary, an illustrated autobiography. Possibly because he was mute, he needed to tell himself his own story. To recount his own experience in one never-ending mural. He was content with painting his life; he had no need to show it. For him, living his life was to paint it.

  I also believe (something I only understand now) that he was perhaps slightly embarrassed at the immensity of his work, its outsize dimensions, how grotesquely gigantic it was: almost more like a hoarding vice or obsession than a finished work of art.

  With Luis we decided that rather than send out photos with an accompanying letter, it would be better to put together a leaflet showing some fragments of the canvas, alongside an explanation and an image of Salvatierra. We also decided to include a photograph of the shed with the hanging rolls, to give some idea of the extent of the work and my father’s project.

  It proved very difficult to choose how to frame the different sections of the canvas, because Salvatierra painted without any lateral divisions so as to achieve continuity between the different scenes. That was something that obsessed him. He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.

  One example of this is the segment dated February 1975. This begins with an open-air celebration under the trees, in a garden where we see couples dancing and laughing. There seems to be a lot of noise in the air, and there are several drunkards lying on the ground. A man is dragging a woman off into the bushes; two other men are abo
ut to start a fight; one of the drunks is wearing a military uniform, another on his knees seems to have something sticking out of his stomach; then there’s another officer clutching a woman’s arm, and more men struggling beneath the trees, men in uniform fighting hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers; people killing each other in a big scrum, with some lying dead on the ground: by now the canvas has turned into a fight to the death in the undergrowth. In passing from a fiesta to a battle, the painting succeeds in making the viewer accept the transformation as if it were an obvious, logical consequence.

  Because of this continuity, we found it hard to decide where to frame our photographs. The canvas had no borders, even at the end of each roll: they all fit exactly with the start of the next one. If he could have, Salvatierra would have kept them all together in one vast scroll, although it would have been impossible to take care of it or transport it.

  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.

  9

  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.

  10

  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.

  11

  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. Lui
s 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.