So he became the little dumb kid, the idiot of the family. They let him play with the women, and did not demand from him the proofs of virility the other males in the family were called upon to demonstrate: firing a shotgun, lassoing or riding steers. He spent his time with his cousins, who fetched and carried him, treated him like a doll, played at being schoolmarms with him, and taught him everything they knew. They forced him to write so that he wouldn’t forget the alphabet, made him communicate with them by writing letters on a slate, and bathed in the river with him. My aunt Dolores used to tell me that when the girls were getting changed to go for a swim down among the willows, they would make him turn his back to them. He would clap his hands once (his way of asking if he could look yet) and they would say no. After a while he would clap again, and they would say no a second time, that on no account was he to look around, and then he would hear them laughing and turn to find that his cousins were already in the water.
Their little joke must have tormented Salvatierra, because in his work you can often see adolescent girls getting changed in the green light beneath the riverside willows, sun-tanned girls in a hurry because they are ashamed of their nudity. He must have painted them because he needed to see at long last those scenes that had taken place behind his back but which he had been unable to witness, their luminous intensity that was so close and yet forbidden to him.
5
If Salvatierra had asked my brother Luis and me to take care of his work after his death, we would probably not have done so, or if we had, much less willingly. As it was, the day before he died in Barrancales hospital, when Luis asked him: “Papa, what should we do with the canvas?” he smiled, and bent his elbow upwards with the careless gesture of tossing something behind him, towards the past, as if to say: “It doesn’t matter, I’ve enjoyed it.” Then he put his index finger under one eye and lifted his chin towards mother, who was opening the curtains with her back to us. I understood his gesture to mean: “Keep an eye on her,” or something of the sort. We didn’t get the chance to ask him again about the painting. It seemed as though what was important to him was having painted it, nothing more. Whatever we decided to do was fine by him. My father died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of the next morning.
Some time later, when Luis and I decided to do something about the painting, the first move we made was to go and talk to his old friend Doctor Dávila. He’d been our doctor as children, and despite his age, he still had some contacts in the provincial government. He suggested we ask for a grant to help build a small museum. He wrote several letters to the authorities stressing the quality and importance of the work, and its value as a document showing the customs and people of a specific time and region. This succeeded in having the work declared “part of the provincial cultural heritage,” but the funds needed to set up the foundation were never forthcoming. Nor did anyone from the Town Hall ever come to see what my father’s work was like. All we got was the certificate: a stack of sheets of paper with official headings and stamps, signed with great flourishes. Instead of helping us, these turned out to create a bureaucratic nightmare.
After that, time went by when we could do nothing. We didn’t talk about it with mom because we didn’t want to stir up (or rather, unfold) the past in front of her eyes; we thought it might be painful for her. This wasn’t a decision I talked over with my brother; it simply happened that way. My parents had always been very close and, following his death, my mother bore his absence with a lucid, resigned silence we didn’t dare break. She died two years after him. She never knew we intended to rescue the painting, and she never brought the matter up. All she said once was that the owner of the supermarket recently built next to the shed where father painted had made her an offer to buy the land, but that she had refused it.
6
On the day of mom’s funeral, once we were free of the aunts and all the condolences, Luis and I escaped and drove in his car to the shed. It had been years since we’d gone in there. We saw that on the land behind it, once no more than a bamboo grove, there now stood the supermarket. The shed still had its sliding door.
“Shall we go in?” said Luis.
For a while we hesitated, then parked the car and got out. We were surprised to find there was no padlock on the shed door. We pushed it open. We entered as if it were a temple, asking permission from Salvatierra’s ghost. The rolls of canvas were there, neatly hanging from the roof beams. We counted them: more than sixty. A man’s entire life. All his days rolled up, hidden there.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Luis.
The rolls were hanging above our heads. We had an enormous task in front of us.
“How many meters do you think there are?”
Peering upwards and straightening his glasses, Luis said:
“Kilometers, che, several kilometers of it.”
We knew some parts of the work, especially from the period when we had helped our father prepare the canvas. But Salvatierra often painted sections behind closed doors, which were then rolled up and which we never saw. It was only now that we were freely confronted with the entire work, its colors, its secrets, and all its years. I think we were both very curious, but also felt intimidated as we calculated the immensity of the task before us. We stood there, unable to move: two men in their forties, vapor coming from our mouths in the cold shed, our hands stuffed in our overcoat pockets.
All of a sudden we heard a gruff voice:
“What are you looking for?”
We saw a small, hirsute man with a big stick in his hand. We told him who we were. This calmed him down, and he presented himself as welclass="underline" he was Aldo, an assistant Salvatierra had taken on to carry out the work we had stopped doing when we left for Buenos Aires. We’d only seen each other on a couple of occasions. It took him some time to recognize us, and for us to recognize him. He seemed to have become sullen, almost unapproachable. He told us that after Salvatierra’s death, mom had no longer paid him, but that he kept on coming to the shed because he had a few of his things there, and while he was in the shed he checked for leaks and topped up the rat poison. He explained that a few weeks earlier he had found two guys prowling around the shed trying to force their way in, but that now he kept his eyes peeled and always had a gun handy. We saw there was a camp bed in a corner, with the stump of a candle next to it. There was also a half rotten canoe, an old bike, a few crates, some sacks, and lots of broken or dismantled bits and pieces.
We asked him what had been the last thing Salvatierra had painted. He showed us the scroll from his final year. It was near the ground, at our height. He took the cover off, and we began to unroll it. We saw the very last things Salvatierra had painted a fortnight before he died. The final few meters of the canvas were all the color of still water, sometimes transparent, at others more opaque, like an underwater silence where a single fish occasionally swam, or there were a few circles on the surface.
Luis and I looked at each other. I think we both liked the sense of tranquility it gave off. “It’s unfinished,” said Aldo, pointing out a fish and some circles that were only half completed. “After he’d done this bit, he had no strength left and didn’t want to go on.” That didn’t matter. It was clear that somehow Salvatierra had finished it where he wanted to. As if afterwards he had simply chosen to die.
I had wondered thousands of times what the end of the canvas would be like, that canvas that seemed to me to flow on forever, however much I knew it had to end someday, just as my father would also meet his end, that he was mortal even though I refused to believe it. Here was the answer.