The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal Read Free Book Online

it seemed as though he had forgotten all about it, that the dragonfly made its reappearance, perfectly naturally, smaller but alive, integrated into the background of some scene or other.
    I was always astonished at the way things came and went in the work. The canvas was one long open-air procession where beings could vanish and return some time later. Something similar often happens in music, when certain themes reappear with variations. Salvatierra once painted a baby hare I had found and later on, although the hare died on me, he painted it again, asleep in the grass. “Is that mine?” I asked, and he nodded. “Where was it hidden?” I said, and he pointed to the colors and brushes.
    Possibly because of this sense of the limitless flow of nature that the canvas had, I find it hard to call it a painting, because that suggests a frame, a border that surrounds certain things, and that’s precisely what Salvatierra wanted to avoid. He was fascinated by the lack of a limit, of a boundary, by the way different spaces communicated with one another. Boundaries are suppressed in his work: each being is at the mercy of all the others, trapped within the cruelty of nature. They are all prey. Even the humans.
    Salvatierra wanted to create the impression that, once something was included in the canvas, it could cross the painted space, advance along the work, reappear. Nothing and no one is protected. Not even the scenes in the privacy of a home manage to be enclosed or safe; there is always someone lurking in the shadows, spying; or a man is sleeping while the sick beasts of his nightmares slip in through the bedroom mirrors. There is no “inside,” no home; everyone is vulnerable in the constantly evolving world of color.  
    Salvatierra painted every day. Each Saturday he would paint the date in blue at the bottom of the point he had reached. Some weeks he managed to paint five meters; others, it would be one, but never less than that. The amount varied according to how much detail each fragment demanded. He never stopped, because for him the canvas itself never stopped. That seemed to be his way of exorcising any painter’s block. It was as if the canvas itself was constantly unfolding to the left, in a manner over which he had no control. He never allowed himself to go back over things. If he didn’t like something he had done, he painted it again further on with variations, but he never went back. Like the past, he considered it impossible to change whatever he had painted.
    Sometimes the force driving things on like a torrent is so strong that the figures start to lean, to lose their balance. There are parts of the canvas where they are painted horizontally, dragged along by the rushing current of life, as if the force of time were greater than the force of gravity.
    This instability became more pronounced following my sister’s death in 1959. At first Salvatierra began to paint gloomy, lonely corners of the countryside, full of chañar and thorn bushes. These are dense episodes in which every centimeter seems to be viciously alive. In one, there’s a little girl standing motionless while a host of ants climbs her leg and a swarm of wasps surrounds her head and smothers her face. The entire space is a struggle between stinging and biting beings; they all use each other to survive and reproduce.
    After that, Salvatierra began to paint my sister in a less painful way: drowned, as if she were asleep, purified by the river, an Ophelia of warm, muddy waters. In his work, Salvatierra had sought to portray the force of the river, and in return the river had demanded his twelve-year-old daughter. The river was carrying her slowly but implacably away, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. That was how he painted her: Estela drowned in the pool beneath the willows; Estela among the monster fish, her hair entangled in the reeds by the water’s edge, her heavy dress, her closed eyelids in the calm current; Estela