Free The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal

came to shut up the shed. I asked him to help me get a few of the rolls down. I queried him about how many years exactly he had worked with my father, and calculated that Salvatierra must have worked alone, without help, for about ten years. We lowered several rolls from that period, and some later ones from the eighties. When Aldo left, I spent a while gazing at a roll completely given over to portraying the seasons. There were no people in it, except for occasional tiny figures flitting through the background of the landscapes. The scenes progressed from the white light of summer siestas to the time of April showers, from flooded winter fields to trees bursting with fresh, almost phosphorescent leaves. If I’m not mistaken, he painted this in 1962, the year President Frondizi was toppled by a coup. Whenever he was disillusioned with politics – or humanity in general – Salvatierra used to paint these empty landscapes, as if wanting to get away to a place where the links with other human beings would be reduced to a distant wave.
    Another roll I had never seen began with a train. Seated gazing out of the window in the last carriage was a skinny, melancholy-looking adolescent. Was it me? It looked a lot like me. The youth was saying goodbye to someone, a nervous smile on his face. Yes, it was me. I recognized myself as if in an old photo that I was unaware had been taken. My father had painted me exactly as he saw me the morning he accompanied me to the station with mom. Further on, the grass and the train became blurred because the train was in motion, and I appeared at the other windows of the carriage. In one, I was eating a sandwich. In another, I was asleep with my head against the window, while opposite me sat a naked young girl, as if she were my own dream. I was astonished Salvatierra should think so intensely about me. Astonished to see myself through his eyes, because it was obvious how much it had hurt him to see me leave. I felt that he was talking to me through his painting, bridging the enormous silence that had existed between us. Now he was talking to me with the love in his painting, saying things he had never been able to say.
    I drank some more Chivas. I don’t know how much, because I was drinking straight from the bottle. A little more. What exactly had happened during those years? Luis had left for Buenos Aires first, and I had followed not long afterwards. I was supposed to be going away to study, but above all I wanted to escape from Barrancales, from home, and most of all from the painting, from the vortex of the painting that I felt was going to swallow me up forever, like an altar boy destined to end up as chaplain in that huge temple of images and endless duties with the canvases, pulleys, colors ... Salvatierra had painted my escape as though wanting to protect me, because the train windows later became those of the faculty building, and there I was again, his younger son, absent-minded in the midst of other students, a flock of parrots fluttering round my head. Through another window I was sitting with Luis at the table in our boarding house. Luis seems happy, and is pouring himself a glass of what looks like beer; I am smoking. How did Salvatierra know I had started smoking? He must simply have imagined it, and painted his son as having already got away from him, doing things over which he had no control. This was him keeping an eye on the two of us, wanting us to have an easy student life, free of danger. Since he listened to the radio, he heard about what was going on at university in those days. He must have been most worried about Luis, because he was flirting with being a Peronist militant. He knew that because I used to refer to him (until it became dangerous to do so) as “my Peronist brother.” But Luis didn’t really have strong political convictions: he was active for a couple of years to set himself apart from dad’s inclination to support Frondizi, and to be accepted by a