The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Read Free

Salvatierra himself who recounted all this, with that mixture of mime and gestures he sometimes used to tell us stories. He used to go to Holt’s house twice a week on his bike (it was a long time before he got on the back of a horse again). He would pedal by the river along the old track that’s now been replaced by the avenue, riding through the grove of trees at the town’s southern entrance: the ash, willows and poplars that formed the green tunnels that appear in his work. He would arrive at Holt’s at nine in the morning. The old man let him paint alongside him, with only occasional suggestions. Little by little, Holt taught him to use perspective, to mix colors, study proportions and, most important of all, to paint each day. Every so often they would paint tramps who Holt had pose for them in return for wine and biscuits.
    Holt left, returning to Germany following Uriburu’s coup in 1930. My brother reckons there was nothing political about his departure, but that when he saw he had been so quickly surpassed by his pupil, the old man decided to seek out fresh horizons as far away as possible from this humiliation. Two rather poor paintings by him still hang on the walls of the Barrancales Social Club. They are meant to show the banks of the River Uruguay, but look much more like the chilly Danube of his native country.
    The figure of Holt makes two or three appearances in Salvatierra’s huge work. In one he paints him as an orchestra conductor, baton raised as he gazes down imperiously at the countryside. In another he is seated, looking contented as he devours a big yellow watermelon beneath a fire-yellow sky. Salvatierra told us that one day the two of them had an argument because he painted a watermelon yellow, and Holt said he ought to paint things their real color. If watermelons were as pink as the evening sky, you had to paint them pink. With his nervous mimicry, my father tried to explain that yellow watermelons did exist. Holt thought he was making fun of him, and threw him out. The next day, Salvatierra came back with a round melon as a gift. He chopped it in two with his penknife in front of Holt. To the German’s astonishment, two perfectly yellow halves fell open.
    During the years of his apprenticeship with Holt, Salvatierra avoided his brothers and cousins as much as possible and roamed all over the rough countryside by the shore. He got to know the fishermen who built shacks on the riverbank and eked out a living by going out in their canoes to catch fish with lines and nets. Old men who prevented the rising tide carrying off their few possessions by hanging them from the highest branches of the carob trees. The fishermen appear in his work among constellations of the kinds of monstrous fish often found in our rivers: huge tiger surubies with their long whiskers; oriental looking patíes ; sour bile colored bagres ; shovel nosed manduvies ; and the pez chancho , the battleship among fish, armed with spines the length of its body. That is how Salvatierra paints these fishermen from his youth, like ragged saints who are the lords of the fish swimming high in the air among the boards, pans, bags, and ladles hanging from the branches so they won’t be swept away by the river. As if they could all swim in the air just as they did in the water: men, fish, and things.
    It’s understandable that he didn’t like to go—even if he was occasionally forced to do so—with his cousins and brothers and sisters to the dances organized in the town. His muteness obviously inhibited him, and in addition he hated all formality. I only ever saw him in two sets of clothes: the paint-stained mechanic’s overalls he wore to paint in, and the gray jacket he donned to go to the Post Office, which he never put on again once he retired.
    I think that what he also learned from Holt—more by example than from any direct teaching—was a certain love of freedom, a vital anarchy or happy sense of isolation. A