In the best of cases, the canvas might be proper white material meant for painting on; in the worst, when the money was only just enough to cover our household expenses, it could be sacks we asked for from the grain silos after the grain had been unloaded. Between these two extremes, Salvatierra could make his canvas out of anything: old tarpaulins, armchair upholstery, bedspreads, awnings.
For a while at the start of the seventies, a friend of Luis’s who did odd jobs at the station would bring a stack of excellent green tarpaulins. My father was really pleased. They were for tying around merchandise, known for their toughness. Salvatierra paid a good price for them, which helped Luis’s friend make a few pesos. He said he was given them at the railway warehouse.
One morning an enormous guy appeared at the shed, large wrench in hand. He wanted to know where his truck tarpaulins were. He was shouting and beating the corrugated iron walls of the shed with his wrench. He said he’d been told this was where they ended up. Salvatierra — who later painted the truck driver as a paunchy Cyclops — signed to him to calm down, but since the guy wanted an explanation and my father said nothing, he grew even more irate. When, on top of that, he spotted the stolen tarpaulins about to be cut up and stretched, he threatened to bash my father’s head in. Luis had to explain that my father was mute. Possibly because Salvatierra demonstrated his innocence by staying completely calm, the truck driver did not strike out, and eventually they got him to sit down and explained the situation. The driver wanted to know the boy’s address to go and find him, and so my father had to lie, telling him through Luis that he didn’t know where he lived. The guy said he’d get him at the station, because that was where the tarpaulins had been stolen at night after he unloaded his trailer. My father made me run to the house to pay for them. The truck driver left counting the notes.
Salvatierra sent for the boy. When he appeared on his bike, dad seized him by the arm and forced him to walk along the street. He signed to me to go with them. Terrified, the boy kept glancing at me to see if I could explain what my father was up to.
“Where’s he taking me?” he wanted to know.
Salvatierra made as if to clutch the peak of an invisible helmet.
“To the police,” I told the boy.
“Why?”
Salvatierra mimicked putting on a glove, then closing his fingers one by one. That needed no translation.
“I won’t steal any more, I swear, sir,” the boy cried desperately.
We came to a halt on the corner. Dad looked the boy in the eye, pointed to him, raised a hand to his own shoulder as if he were carrying something, then pointed to his chest.
“He says he wants you to work for him.”
The boy accepted. Salvatierra had him running errands for a couple of weeks, then found him a job at the Post Office. He stayed there for fifteen years before going into the Town Hall. Nowadays he occupies an important post where he does a job not dissimilar to the one he did with the tarpaulins. He was the friend of Luis’s who managed to get our water switched back on when we spent a week in Barrancales.
There must have been hundreds of meters of Salvatierra’s work painted on tarpaulins stolen from the trucks that unloaded their goods at the train station early in the seventies.
16
The Dutch people arrived a few days after I began the search for the missing roll. Their names were Boris and Hanna. They arrived in a rented van, and had brought with them an enormous scanner from the Röell Museum that could digitalize paintings at their original size. Dressed in sandals and ethnic tunics, Hanna seemed more open than Boris to experiencing the Latin American adventure, but she left soon afterwards for Misiones, supposedly because she wasn’t needed for the job in hand. I think she fled from the famous cockroaches at the Gran Hotel Barrancales.
Their mission was to scan several sections of the painting, send them back in digital form to Holland, and then await instructions. Boris and Aldo did all the work: they got on well despite not being able to exchange a single word. Seeing them together was striking: the tall, thin Boris with a bald patch surrounded by a curtain of long, blond hair, and Aldo, short and stout, with a spiky black mop. They lowered the big rolls between the two of them and placed them in the scanner, which could copy two meters of canvas every five minutes. The first day I tried to help them, but soon realized I was simply getting in the way whenever they were carrying a roll or trying to adjust it on the scanner. After that I stayed out of it, and stood with my arms by my side next to Hanna, who probably felt as I did.
I talked with her a little in the shade of the shed while the other two got on with their work. I showed her how we drink mate tea, and answered her questions about Salvatierra and the river. She told me, in Spanish that sounded as if it were being pronounced backwards, about her postgraduate studies in baroque art of the Americas, her interest in the Jesuits’ influence, her work with Boris even though they were now separated. I won’t deny that I fantasized about a brief fling with such a pretty woman, but nothing happened. I never made a move, and besides, I don’t think that going to bed with a guy like me formed part of her search for the Latin American exotic. The next day, she left to visit the Jesuit ruins at San Ignacio in Misiones.
17
With the scanning well underway, I decided to go to the Post Office building where Salvatierra had worked for many years. He started there back in 1935, taken in by one of my grandfather’s brothers, who couldn’t bear to see him wandering about by the river without doing anything useful. My grandfather hadn’t sent him to school, and had accepted he would not become a stockbreeder like his brothers. Instead, he let Salvatierra roam without keeping too close an eye on him, perhaps hoping that the consequences of his lack of interest would follow naturally. But, contrary to what they all expected, my father did not do badly in life. Thanks to his cousins’ insistence as teachers, he could write and spell impeccably, and was very good at letter writing. In fact, he was much better educated than my uncles, whose skill on horseback or with a lasso was of little use to them when it came to administering the lands they first inherited and then were forced to sell when they went bankrupt some years later. Salvatierra began at the Post Office as an assistant clerk, but gradually made a position for himself.
I was received at the old Post Office building with suspicion. I asked several employees if they remembered Juan Salvatierra or if they knew of anybody who had worked there since before 1975, the year he retired. They all passed me on to someone else, down gloomy corridors with incredibly high doors and vast offices. Our voices sounded tiny in there, out of proportion, as if we were a race of dwarves living in a building that had once housed giants.
In one of the offices I was received by a bony, elderly woman. She was sucking on a cigarette, and had big, green eyes. She was very moved when I explained who I was, and said that now she understood why when I first appeared, my face looked familiar. She invited me in, and we talked for a while.
Her name was Eugenia Rocamora and she had begun working there when she was twenty. She showed me what had been Salvatierra’s office (I already knew it, he used to take me there sometimes as a boy). She told me how much everyone respected and appreciated him. She brought out an old photograph of the Post Office staff gathered on the entrance steps, among them a smiling Salvatierra.