The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra Read Free Page B

between the different scenes. That was something that obsessed him. He wanted his painting to encapsulate the fluidity of a river, of dreams, the way in which they can transform things in a completely natural way without the change seeming absurd but entirely inevitable, as if he were revealing the violent metamorphosis hidden within each being, thing, or situation.
    One example of this is the segment dated February 1975. This begins with an open-air celebration under the trees, in a garden where we see couples dancing and laughing. There seems to be a lot of noise in the air, and there are several drunkards lying on the ground. A man is dragging a woman off into the bushes; two other men are about to start a fight; one of the drunks is wearing a military uniform, another on his knees seems to have something sticking out of his stomach; then there’s another officer clutching a woman’s arm, and more men struggling beneath the trees, men in uniform fighting hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers; people killing each other in a big scrum, with some lying dead on the ground: by now the canvas has turned into a fight to the death in the undergrowth. In passing from a fiesta to a battle, the painting succeeds in making the viewer accept the transformation as if it were an obvious, logical consequence.
    Because of this continuity, we found it hard to decide where to frame our photographs. The canvas had no borders, even at the end of each roll: they all fit exactly with the start of the next one. If he could have, Salvatierra would have kept them all together in one vast scroll, although it would have been impossible to take care of it or transport it.
    The date and number of each roll were clearly written on the back. The day before we had to leave again, when I began to make a list of them, I noticed that one was missing. A whole year was absent: 1961. The dates on the back jumped from ’60 to ’62. Salvatierra had never missed a day’s painting. It was impossible that he had stopped for an entire year. We glanced suspiciously at Aldo. He said he had no idea where it might be, and that if the roll existed, it had been missing for a long while, because the order they were hanging in had not been altered in years. If it had been stolen recently, the gap would be obvious. I believed him; my brother didn’t.
    We tried to recall that year. What had happened in ’61? We couldn’t remember anything in particular. At the time, we were living in a house near the Municipal Park. I was ten; Luis was fifteen. My sister Estela had already died. Salvatierra was working in the Post Office, and mom gave English classes ... all the usual. If Aldo hadn’t stolen it, what had happened to the roll? Where could it be? Had the rats got at it, with the result that Aldo had hidden it or thrown it away? Could someone else have stolen it? Perhaps Salvatierra himself had destroyed it, or sold it, or given it away? The rolls that had been shown in Buenos Aires and Paraná were still there; the missing one was none of those. We spent some time trying to work out what could have happened, but then we had to get on with our work because we were going back to Buenos Aires the next day.

9
    Salvatierra was twenty-five years old and working in the Post Office when he met Helena Ramírez, my mother. She was twenty-one and worked in the Ortiz library in Barrancales. Salvatierra used to go there on Saturday mornings to read about the lives of the great painters and to look for books with illustrations and engravings. In the canvas from that time there is a slow transition from nocturnal scenes to those with the brightness of morning. First there are lengthy twilight landscapes with black women washing clothes on the riverbank (Doctor Dávila told us that sometimes in summer Salvatierra would go with the fishermen to the opposite side of the river in Uruguay, where they were received by a group of washerwomen). Salvatierra painted the hour when the first