Boris and Hanna took the one surviving roll and the entire digitalized version of the work with them. At Customs they simply said they had painted it themselves, and they had no problems at all. That was how the canvas got to the Röell Museum in Amsterdam.
38
Some time ago I read this phrase: “The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.” I can’t remember where I read that. It caught my attention because that’s what I felt about my dad. I was never much of a believer, because the idea of adding a spiritual father to the gigantic biological one I already had seemed to me overwhelming. I understood the phrase to mean: “The page is the only place in the universe my father left blank for me.” We occupy the places our parents leave blank. Salvatierra occupied a marginal space as far away as possible from my grandfather’s hopes of his becoming a cattle rancher. I inhabit the words that Salvatierra’s muteness left untouched. I began to write a couple of years ago. I feel that this place, the space of the blank page, is mine, independently of what the results may be. The whole world fits into this rectangle.
My son Gastón devotes himself to music. He’s the bass guitarist in a band. He’s doing well. He lives in Barcelona; I went to visit him two years ago. I looked for work without much success, so in the end I came back. Nowadays I live in Gualeguay, a few hours from Barrancales. In the afternoon I work at a local newspaper. In the morning I write my own things and walk the quiet streets.
39
One weekend during the trip I made to see Gastón, we took a plane to Amsterdam and went to visit the Röell Museum. He was the one who asked me to go. I had to swallow my pride; I’d sworn never to set foot in the place. We weren’t on good terms with the foundation any more: they had paid us barely five per cent of what they’d promised.
It was my son who persuaded me to go. One morning we arrived outside the new building that houses the Latin American collection. It’s close to the Nieuwmarkt. We left our coats in the cloakroom, bought our tickets, and went to the gallery where the canvas Luis and I had saved was on display. It covers a whole wall. It was strange to see the intimate world of Eugenia Rocamora’s siestas at the other end of the earth and under artificial lighting. At one point she appears to be dreaming of horses, rearing at the start of a race, then gathering speed and galloping towards the shore, then fording the river, riderless by now, until reaching the opposite bank, where my half-brother Ibáñez’s black mother is hiding in the shadows.
Yet the greatest surprise of all came when we went down the steps to the old part of the museum. Suddenly, on the wall of a long, curving corridor, we saw Salvatierra’s painting. It gives off a disturbing glow, like an aquarium. It unfolds gradually across a screen that is exactly the size of the canvas.
The digitalized version of the work moves slowly from right to left, as if it was the viewer who was drifting downstream, or down the painting. Gastón and I sat to watch. We saw what Salvatierra had painted just before his death: the one-eyed cook who looked after him when he was almost killed by his horse; his friend Jordán playing an accordion out of which flow waves of water and fish; his naked cousins bathing in the river beneath the soft light of the willows; my mother drinking her mate tea all alone on our house patio. I saw people going by who stopped to sit down in front of the painting for a moment or two. Now everyone could see it. What Luis and I had achieved wasn’t so bad after all. I saw them smiling in astonishment at Salvatierra’s strange images, light, and colors. Now everything was together, now the work could flow freely from end to end, without any gap. And I was there with my twenty-three-year-old son, who could see what his grandfather had done, this painting that enveloped us all, this space where his creations could move freely, limitlessly, because there were no boundaries, there was no end, because after we had sat there for a long while, Gastón and I could see that the fish and circles in the water painted on what we had thought was the end of the last roll matched up exactly with the circles and fish of the very beginning, painted by Salvatierra when he was barely twenty.