Read Online The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Pedro Mairal
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clouds tall as mountains or entire regions, and I silently told Salvatierra we should go out and look.
Frequently it happens that when I see something I know how he would have painted it. I see figs in a bowl and imagine how Salvatierra would portray them. I spot a tree, a gray-blue eucalyptus for example, and see it as if it were his creation. Or people (this usually happens to me in gatherings after I’ve had a couple of drinks): I sometimes see them as if in oils, boldly colored, with red and yellow faces, Cubist guffaws, or making a gesture he would have caught, a way of tilting their face, crossing their legs, or sitting.
It may seem as though this is my own artistic gaze I never had the courage to develop. But I never had any wish to paint. I always felt as if there was nothing he hadn’t done. I remember that when I was ten I showed him a scribble I had drawn of submarines and rockets. I was proud of the result. A week later I went into the shed and found a gigantic, brightly-colored submarine and rocket depicted on his canvas. Rather than thinking he had copied them from me, my sensation was that I had copied him without realizing it.
As an adolescent I would often dream I was embracing a naked woman. I clung to her out of fear that she would change into something else. But I squeezed her so tight she began to soften, to crumble into colors. If I caressed her arm, the skin would start to smudge, and beneath I would see a blue, sticky color. I would let go of her and she would start to melt. Terrified, I would grow desperate, smear her against the sheet as if trying to kill her, as if trying to reach her, until she was no more than an impossible, beautiful, two-dimensional figure, painted forever on the canvas.
Finding the missing roll was something I needed to do so that my father’s work would not be infinite. If one part was missing, I wouldn’t be able to take it all in, to know it in its entirety. There would still be mysteries, things that Salvatierra had perhaps painted of which I knew nothing. But if only I could find it, this world of images would have a limit. The infinite would reach an end, and I could discover something he hadn’t painted. Something of my own. Yet these are interpretations I’m making now. Back then I was simply obsessed with finding the roll; I didn’t even think about these things.
28
By the time I reached the shed I was out of breath. Boris and Aldo had already gone. I opened the bottle of whiskey I’d bought for Jordán. I took a couple of swigs and started searching through the shelves and crates. I found a Japanese drawing Doctor Dávila had given Salvatierra. It was a long drawing on a scroll, where each scene was linked to the one before it, and in turn provided the inspiration for the ones that followed. Salvatierra must have been fascinated by that.
I found brushes my father had made from the hair of all kinds of animals. The broadest ones were made from the horse tails we got at the auctions of old mares where they sold bags of horsehair by the kilo. For medium brushes, Salvatierra would use hair from the inside of cows’ ears. We would go and get them from Lorenzo the butcher on Tuesdays, when he was slaughtering. More delicate brushes were made from river otter bristles, brought by an old trapper called Ceferino Hernández in exchange for a bottle of Trenzas de Oro red wine. The finest brushes, used to paint the figures’ hair, blades of grass, or gossamer threads, consisted of the fur from black cats we neighborhood kids would fling stones at from time to time, or from the tiny feathers collected from the floor of the cages out in the yard where Luis kept a canary, cardinal or finch. Salvatierra would make the handle of the brush from a length of bamboo cane. He would put the hairs into a funnel to shape them, carefully cut the top end and then, when they had been fastened and glued together, push them into the cane. That was how he made his brushes.
Aldo
Frequently it happens that when I see something I know how he would have painted it. I see figs in a bowl and imagine how Salvatierra would portray them. I spot a tree, a gray-blue eucalyptus for example, and see it as if it were his creation. Or people (this usually happens to me in gatherings after I’ve had a couple of drinks): I sometimes see them as if in oils, boldly colored, with red and yellow faces, Cubist guffaws, or making a gesture he would have caught, a way of tilting their face, crossing their legs, or sitting.
It may seem as though this is my own artistic gaze I never had the courage to develop. But I never had any wish to paint. I always felt as if there was nothing he hadn’t done. I remember that when I was ten I showed him a scribble I had drawn of submarines and rockets. I was proud of the result. A week later I went into the shed and found a gigantic, brightly-colored submarine and rocket depicted on his canvas. Rather than thinking he had copied them from me, my sensation was that I had copied him without realizing it.
As an adolescent I would often dream I was embracing a naked woman. I clung to her out of fear that she would change into something else. But I squeezed her so tight she began to soften, to crumble into colors. If I caressed her arm, the skin would start to smudge, and beneath I would see a blue, sticky color. I would let go of her and she would start to melt. Terrified, I would grow desperate, smear her against the sheet as if trying to kill her, as if trying to reach her, until she was no more than an impossible, beautiful, two-dimensional figure, painted forever on the canvas.
Finding the missing roll was something I needed to do so that my father’s work would not be infinite. If one part was missing, I wouldn’t be able to take it all in, to know it in its entirety. There would still be mysteries, things that Salvatierra had perhaps painted of which I knew nothing. But if only I could find it, this world of images would have a limit. The infinite would reach an end, and I could discover something he hadn’t painted. Something of my own. Yet these are interpretations I’m making now. Back then I was simply obsessed with finding the roll; I didn’t even think about these things.
28
By the time I reached the shed I was out of breath. Boris and Aldo had already gone. I opened the bottle of whiskey I’d bought for Jordán. I took a couple of swigs and started searching through the shelves and crates. I found a Japanese drawing Doctor Dávila had given Salvatierra. It was a long drawing on a scroll, where each scene was linked to the one before it, and in turn provided the inspiration for the ones that followed. Salvatierra must have been fascinated by that.
I found brushes my father had made from the hair of all kinds of animals. The broadest ones were made from the horse tails we got at the auctions of old mares where they sold bags of horsehair by the kilo. For medium brushes, Salvatierra would use hair from the inside of cows’ ears. We would go and get them from Lorenzo the butcher on Tuesdays, when he was slaughtering. More delicate brushes were made from river otter bristles, brought by an old trapper called Ceferino Hernández in exchange for a bottle of Trenzas de Oro red wine. The finest brushes, used to paint the figures’ hair, blades of grass, or gossamer threads, consisted of the fur from black cats we neighborhood kids would fling stones at from time to time, or from the tiny feathers collected from the floor of the cages out in the yard where Luis kept a canary, cardinal or finch. Salvatierra would make the handle of the brush from a length of bamboo cane. He would put the hairs into a funnel to shape them, carefully cut the top end and then, when they had been fastened and glued together, push them into the cane. That was how he made his brushes.
Aldo
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