14
I asked Aldo to lend me the old bike I’d seen in the shed. I changed the inner tubes, blew up the tires, and oiled it. I hadn’t ridden a bike since those distant Saturdays in the mid-1980s when I used to cycle with my son in the Palermo woods in Buenos Aires.
I rode aimlessly around Barrancales, pedaling slowly, comparing my memories of the village I had been brought up in with the town it had now become. I had no idea where to start looking for the missing roll.
Compared to the work as a whole, this fragment was almost nothing, and yet I wanted to find it because that gap disturbed me, the jump in a continuous flow. If four or five rolls had been missing, I wouldn’t have bothered trying to find them, but since it was only one, the painting was too close to achieving the absolute fluidity that Salvatierra had wanted for me not to make the effort. There was no vertical cut in the work; it was a single continuum, a single river.
For a while I roamed the center of town. At eleven, I found I was near the cathedral, and so I rang the bell at the house of my distant aunts, cousins of Salvatierra who had been present at my mother’s funeral. They were no longer the young girls undressing in the shadows of the canvas; now they looked exactly like the Spanish matrons dressed in mourning of the previous generation. I thought they might be able to tell me something, though I didn’t know what.
They weren’t exactly overjoyed to see me. “The spitting image of your father,” they said, staring at me time and again. I couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing. Coming from them, it was more likely to be bad. I tried to tidy myself up. The bike ride had left me out of breath, my clothes rumpled. They asked me to take a seat in a room that smelled of mothballs. I decided not to beat about the bush. I asked them if Salvatierra had sold or given away one of the rolls of his work. They had no idea.
“But take a good look in that shed, you could find almost anything in there,” one of them said, casting a knowing glance at her sister.
“Why’s that?”
“Well… he always was such a hoarder.”
They didn’t have much more to add. There was a note of censure in their tone that I put down to the general feeling of rejection the family had always shown towards my father. I had to stay a while longer, listening to tales of illnesses and unscientific cures before I could leave. They wanted to invite me to tea the next day, but when I told them I had an appointment, they didn’t insist.
I also rang the bell at the house of the deceased Doctor Dávila. His widow, a suspicious, gloomy woman, didn’t ask me in, but assured me that her husband had never possessed any painting by Salvatierra.
“A roll,” I said, “a long roll of canvas.”
“No, young man, I don’t know anything about that,” she said from behind a half-open door.
When I got back to the shed, I did as my aunts had suggested and searched among all the bits of junk. Underneath the canoe I found my old sky blue dinghy. It was like seeing an apparition. In summer, my father would take us down to the river in a carriage pulled by Tiza, a white mare we used to leave grazing in the vacant lots near our house. When we arrived, he would unharness her and lead her down to the riverside, walking her up and down the sandbank where we were going to play to scare off the poisonous stingrays. Then we would go into the water. We weren’t allowed to go too far from the bank because the river had treacherous drops and whirlpools. My boat was only big enough for me. We used to tie it to a long length of rope, and I would float downriver on the current. Salvatierra would wave goodbye with his hand, pretending I was off on a long journey. Then he would haul me back on the rope; we did this time and again. One day we no longer went. My sister Estela drowned while she was swimming with some friends near the old bridge, and after that mom didn’t want us to go back to the river.
Rummaging about, I also managed to find the stools made from tree stumps that Salvatierra laid out whenever his friends came to visit him in the shed. They were in the habit of staying until late, drinking. Sometimes mom would send us to go and fetch him, and he would let us stay for a while until dispatching us back. I must have been around ten years old at the time, and regarded those men with a mixture of admiration and fear. It was a group that came with Mario Jordán, a friend of my father’s who had a motorboat, and to whom he lent a corner of the shed to store his merchandise. He had a goatee, always carried an old.38 revolver, and occasionally turned up with an accordion. Six or seven of them would get together. Some of them, like Salazar the Basque or a black guy called Fermín Ibáñez, were surly types who said very little, although they warmed up once they got some alcohol inside them. One of the group would ask Salvatierra to show a bit of the work, and after making them insist, Salvatierra would put the end of the canvas on a reel that wound around a pole, and slowly turn it. Mario Jordán would play the accordion as the images floated by, like the pianists in the days of silent films. By now they would all be pretty drunk. They laughed when they recognized someone in the painting, or often, lulled by the slow rhythm of the music, they would stare glassy-eyed in astonishment at the dream-like scenes my father had painted: islands, herds of horses fording the river, channels, riders with their throats slit, swamps full of gigantic insects, bloody battles.
One night there was an argument; Fermín Ibáñez slashed the canvas with his knife and threatened Salvatierra. Luckily, Jordán stepped between them and managed to calm them down. The evening went on for a while longer without any further problem, then they all went home. I remember, for nights afterwards I woke up in terror, convinced that Ibáñez was in the darkness of our bedroom, standing quite still as I had seen him in the shed, brandishing his knife.
15
It had been one of my grandfather’s old shearing sheds. But wool never really took in the region, and over time cattle, batteries of hens, and citrus fruits proved more profitable, so the shed lay abandoned until my father took it over in the forties.
It was south of Barrancales, near the track down to the river, on high ground that never flooded. Salvatierra used to open it at seven in the morning. He painted until ten. He closed up to go to work at the Post Office, then opened the shed again at five in the afternoon. I used to go there sometimes after school, because I liked helping him prepare the canvas.
This process lasted two or three days, depending on the weather. First he would send me to cut some canes from the bamboo grove growing in the wasteland behind the shed, where the supermarket now stands. I was scared because the breeze rustling in the dry leaves sounded like dead murmurs and invisible footsteps. We sewed the canes to the top and bottom edges of the canvas, then tied them to two old shafts from a horse carriage. We used pieces five meters long. The wooden shafts slowly separated from each other, and when the canvas was as tight as a drum, we brushed two coats of glue on it. As this dried, we applied several coats of a paste made from plaster and lime that we had previously sieved through an old shirt. That was the part I liked best: to watch how the lumpy paste filled the shirt and then trickled out as a purified liquid. And the smell it gave off, which I only ever experienced again in a few hardware stores in Buenos Aires. We always had two or three canvases at different stages of preparation. We would take them out into the sunshine and hold them up to the light to see which bits hadn’t been covered evenly, so that we could add more of the mixture. When we had finished preparing them, Salvatierra would join the pieces up using a pedal sewing machine, so that they formed a single roll. He always wanted to have at least one blank roll ready so he could work without worrying about it.