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 about 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 rolclass="underline" 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.