“And that was me. Look how pretty I once was,” she said, glancing at me with a gleam of sympathy and sadness in her eyes.
She was right: she had been a beautiful woman.
When I asked her if she knew anything about Salvatierra’s painting, if he had ever told her he intended to give part of it away, she told me she wasn’t even aware that Salvatierra painted. She accompanied me to the exit, and on the way out showed me a plaque on the wall with a long list of names, including my father's. They were all retired employees who had worked at the Post Office for more than forty years.
18
Out in the street I felt suddenly weary. I pedaled haphazardly towards the edge of town, where the streets looked as if they had been painted by Salvatierra: corner stores with peeling whitewash, people sitting out on the cool of the sidewalks, trees lopped to little more than stumps, and tethered cows grazing between the irrigation ditches. We would sometimes pass by here when he took me to school on the handlebars of his bike from our house near the Municipal Park.
All at once, on an unpaved stretch of road, a black dog started barking at me and snapping at my feet. I saw that an old man with a white goatee was shouting at it from the doorway of his house. He was carrying a bag. Something about him made me look more closely. He seemed very similar to Mario Jordán, my father’s friend. I went over and shouted over the barking dog:
“Are you Mario Jordán?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Miguel Salvatierra, Juan's son.”
“Ah, how’s things?”
Jordán was wearing a vest, a pair of trousers, and rope sandals. He was trying to shut a bag overflowing with stuff. He must have been around eighty.
“Are you going out?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, peering up and down the street. “Could you give me a hand?”
He passed me his bag, which I put on my handlebars. We set off together, walking slowly.
“Where are we going?”
“Down there, around the corner from the cemetery.”
Every so often he’d turn and look behind him.
“Let’s get a move on, I’m being followed,” he said, trying in vain to quicken his pace.
I turned around, but couldn’t spot anyone.
“Who’s following you?”
“Someone I owe money to. Don’t look back.”
He was dragging his feet as he walked. From time to time he’d raise a hand to point the direction we should be taking, as though he were clutching at the air to pull himself along.
“Do you remember Salvatierra?” I ventured to ask.
“Why on earth wouldn’t I?” he replied with a flash of anger, then said nothing more until we reached the street corner.
“Do you remember he used to paint?”
“Aha.”
“Do you happen to know if he gave away one of the rolls of his painting?”
“They’ve got new, quicker boats these days, but let’s go to the train station anyway,” he said.
I repeated my question.
“We’ll come to that,” he said, “we’ll come to that.”
By now I was growing impatient. It had been a mistake to accompany him in the first place, and now he wanted to go to the train station.
“There’s no train any more, Jordán,” I told him.
“They’ve brought it back. There’s one at six-thirty.”
We propped the bike against the brick wall of the station and climbed the steps. Grass was growing through the cracks in the cement floor. Everything was shut up. There was nobody about. There had been no trains for fifteen years. Jordán made me lift the bag up and put it down on the platform. The tracks were smothered in weeds.
“Let’s be getting back, Jordán: the train doesn’t run anymore,” I said.
“There’s one at half past six. D’you have a watch?”
“Yes, it’s nearly seven,” I lied.
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s a bit late sometimes.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I decided to humor him.
“Are you going to travel in that vest?”
He looked down and said:
“Well I’ll be damned. They won’t let me on looking like this. Can you lend me your shirt?”
When I refused, he wanted to open his bag to see if he’d brought anything he could wear. Time was going by, and night was drawing in. All at once we heard a voice calling: “Grandad.” Jordán froze.
“I think someone’s calling you.”
“Oh, it’s that fatass,” he said, without looking round at her.
A young woman came up. She apologized and explained the old man escaped like this from time to time. I told her Jordán had been a friend of my father’s, and that I wanted to ask him a few questions.
“Come and see him one morning. He’s not so lost then,” she told me. She picked up the bag, and led Jordán away by the arm.
I walked round the station for a while, but soon left: seeing everything so abandoned made me sad.
19
Salvatierra could go for an hour without painting, standing in front of the canvas or near the round iron stove that warmed a corner of the shed in the coldest months, or sitting in a barber’s chair he had bought at auction. He would stand or sit there thinking, perhaps planning what he was going to paint next. Suddenly, if a fly buzzed past, he would snatch it out of midair. He never missed.
He liked to tune in to the local radio that played chamamés, Paraguayan polkas, and chamarritas, while the presenters repeated the same adverts over and over again, or made endless comments about Carnival.
With that noise in the background, he would sometimes sit, head buried in his hands. Anyone who didn’t know him might have thought he was depressed, but in fact he was absorbed in his work. All of a sudden he would get up and start sketching a few lines. Or he would leaf through books of engravings or illustrations that were gathering dust on a bookshelf. Over the years he collected an art library, especially after 1960, when color reproductions began. I remember a collection called The Great Masters of Art. He liked lots of different artists: Velázquez, Zurbarán’s still-lives, Caravaggio (he had a plate of The Conversion of Saint Paul pinned up on a column), Degas, Gauguin, Cándido López, even Escher’s metamorphoses; photographs of Roman friezes and Minoan frescoes. He was interested in medieval altar pieces where one figure is seen several times in the same landscape. He would stare at these paintings for hours. I know he was constantly trying to learn. He absorbed everything he could use, with complete freedom, making it his own. Salvatierra had never had the chance to visit museums; those books were a way for him to carry on learning.
Occasionally he would search for something on a big table that had once belonged to a tobacco firm, where he used to collect dried leaves, insects, illustrations, bones, flotsam from the river, or things he found: roots, worn pieces of wood, round stones from local Indians’ boleadoras, fragments of colored glass, all kinds of objects. He’d pick one of these up and study it closely so that he could depict it somewhere on his canvas.
I remember one evening after a storm we went out for a walk and I came across one of those beetles with a long horn known as “little bulls” crawling through the mud on the track. I took it back to the shed, and the next day saw that Salvatierra had painted a huge version of it that filled the canvas from top to bottom. By enlarging objects in this way (in fact, he sometimes looked at them through a magnifying glass), he succeeded in capturing that appearance of cold machines that some insects have. The beetle looked like a battleship, with its spiky legs, tiny, cruel eyes, and that enormous horn that functions as a pincer to hold its prey aloft, a starkly murderous weapon on the head of a compact body.