Free The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal Page A

group of friends in the capital. He drifted away from militancy well before the most violent years.
    At Salvatierra’s insistence, mom would call us regularly on the phone to see how we were. “Dad wants to know when you’re coming to visit us,” she was in the habit of saying, but we let the months go by without returning, until the vacations arrived and we went to spend Christmas with them. Both of us knew though that we were going to stay and live in Buenos Aires, and were accomplices in this sort of betrayal.
    By now it was late. The whiskey on an empty stomach had given me the silly, clumsy courage to spread out one last roll before I left. It was from the eighties. At first all I saw were sandy shores and skinny greyhounds among the willows. Then I came across a portrait Salvatierra had done of my ex-wife Silvia and my son Gastón during some celebration or other in Barrancales. Just the two of them: I’m not there. As if we had already separated. Seated, Silvia is looking off to the right; my son Gastón, who must have been six or seven years old, is standing up, pressed against his mother and staring straight ahead. His eyes intimidated me. Salvatierra always painted them as if they were on the point of blinking. My son’s eyes, their transparent, slightly pained gaze. As if asking me why everything that happened had happened. The separation and the divorce, and going to fetch him so that we could ride our bikes in the Palermo woods on Saturday mornings. I had to sit down.
    I stared at the painting, absorbed in it. It was shortly after this portrait was made that Silvia and I split up. There the two of them are. My wife and my son. As if I were rediscovering them exactly where I’d left them. As if they had stayed there waiting for me without moving in the shadows of the canvas for more than ten years. I knew Silvia was partly to blame, but here was Salvatierra showing me what I had lost. I found it hard to contemplate. My father had succeeded in capturing what had slipped through my fingers.

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    It was dark when I left the shed to cycle back to the house. A few stars were out, and there was a cool wind. I tried to spot potholes and bits of rubble in order to avoid them. A couple of blocks before I arrived, I heard a car accelerating behind me. I tried to see who it was, but its headlights blinded me. It seemed to be heading straight for me, to cut me off, threatening to run me over. I steered as best I could towards the pavement. Startled, I put one foot down on the ground. The car came to a halt a few meters further on. There were two people inside. The one in the passenger seat had his arm dangling out of the window. Without looking back, he shouted:
    “Sell that pile of crap and have done with it!” At that, the car sped off, raising dirt.
    I couldn’t make out their faces. Some neighbors came out to see what was going on and asked me what had happened. I didn’t know whether to tell them it had been a misunderstanding or that somebody had tried to kill me. I wasn’t sure either way.
    Instead of continuing on home I went to the telephone office and called Luis. When I told him what had happened he said it had probably been thugs sent by Baldoni, the supermarket owner.
    “He’s trying to put the screws on us so we’ll sell,” said Luis.
    He seemed very certain, although I thought it was an incredible idea. Luis suggested I report the incident to the police if that would reassure me. He tried to play it down, saying, “No one’s going to kill us for a shed, Miguel.”
    That was easy for him to say from so far off. Then he told me that the documents to get the painting out of the country weren’t going well. He’d been talking to a lawyer because, when he started the process, a problem had arisen. Luis asked for an export permit from the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Commission. The Commission discovered that, since years earlier Salvatierra’s work had been declared “part of the