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. Luis 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.
“What for?” he asked at the far end of the line, in his big brother voice.
“I’m going to look for the missing roll.”
12
By the time the bus pulled into the station at Barrancales it was almost night. I took a taxi to the house, which still had no electricity. I had the candles we had bought some months before, and there was water thanks to a call Luis had made to an old friend who worked in the Town Hall, which led to it being turned back on. The rooms seemed eternally cold and dank.
That night I slept badly, unnerved by the ghosts in the house. Mom’s clothes and other possessions were in big plastic rubbish sacks in one of the bedrooms. She’d collected and stored all kinds of things throughout her life. Dad’s possessions on the other hand fit into a single small bag: a watch, a shaving brush, a comb, a toothbrush, seven shirts… they were like the personal effects of a prisoner. The framed photograph of their wedding was still hanging on the wall. They looked very young and ill-at-ease, in one of those black-and-white photographs that are sent away to be tinted. They were married in 1945, without much enthusiasm on the part of their families. My maternal grandmother did not want her daughter to get married to a mere Post Office employee who, on top of it all, was mute. My paternal grandparents were none too keen to see their son married to the daughter of a reclusive widow who was unknown in Barrancales society. But the imminent arrival of my brother Luis, who was already gestating in my mother’s belly, meant they all had to swallow their opinions.
Salvatierra painted the ceremony — which took place in the garden of a chapel demolished years earlier — seen from above, as if someone were looking on from its bell tower. The two families are sitting opposite each other, one on either side of the central aisle. My father’s family is numerous, robust, taking up too much room, the relatives united by red veins as thick as roots. My mother’s side is sparse, ethereal, consisting of a few translucent aunts and some distant relations called in at the last moment, united by almost invisible bloody threads. Each web of these family veins is joined, via my grandmothers, to my parents. The priest delivers his sermon pointing at my mother’s belly, where the two bloodlines are mixed. A vein leads from my father’s right arm out towards the river.
13
I was able to study many of these things closely over the next few days I spent in the shed, before the Dutch people from the Röell Foundation arrived. Whenever Aldo turned up, he would help me lower a couple of rolls, which I would spread out on the ground and go over slowly, peering at every detail. I sometimes felt I was getting to know my father for the first time. There were portraits of people I’d never seen: green-faced men drinking in a store; old women long since dead, dressed in black and sitting bolt upright; old-style gauchos almost alive in their gestures, staring out from the depths of an afternoon of branding cattle or hard at work slaughtering a steer, standing there with bloodied arms next to a beast slit open to the skies. At other points, the painting reminded me of moments in our lives: dogs we had at home but that I’d completely forgotten about, or the great fire of 1958 that reached as far as the south of Barrancales. Over almost nine meters of canvas, Salvatierra painted a huge meadow in flames, with smoke billowing out to the side, and the strange, sacred light we all saw that evening, as our whole family stood watching by the side of the road.
I looked at all this, asking myself so many questions at once. What was this interlacing of lives, people, animals, days, nights, catastrophes? What did it all mean? What could my father’s life have been like? Why did he feel the need to take on such a huge task? What had happened to Luis and me for us to have ended up in our gray, city-dwellers’ lives, as though Salvatierra had monopolized all the available color? We seemed more alive in the light shining from the painting in some portraits he had done of us eating green pears when I was ten years old, than in our current lives with their legal documents and contracts. It was as if the painting had swallowed us: both of us, our sister Estela, and mom. All those luminous provincial days had been soaked up by his canvas. There was a super-human quality to Salvatierra’s work; it was too much. I had always found it hard to begin anything new, sometimes even the simplest task, like getting up in the morning. I thought I had to do everything on a gigantic scale like my father, or nothing at all. And I confess that often I chose to do nothing, which also led me to feel that I was nobody.