WHAT ABOUT THE MISSING YEAR OF JUAN SALVATIERRA?
Pedro Mairal's fiction about the mystery of a missing year in the life of a painter is a gorgeous tribute to the arts.
Almost no one knows that Juan Salvatierra had been painting a series of long rolls of canvas for years, except, of course, his wife and two sons. The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, is a novel centered around the work of a fictional Argentine painter. The story is narrated by one of his sons, Miguel Salvatierra, who, along with his brother Luis, tries to figure out how to unleash his father’s work upon the world after his parents’ passing.
From the get-go, we’re sucked in; this is the story of a painter who becomes mute after a horrific accident. What he loses in voice seems, uncannily, to have powered his hands. Salvatierra began the project of his life at the age of twenty and through the next six decades, he meticulously paints life in his village on Argentina’s river frontier with Uruguay.
I can also understand that the absence of the artist improves the work. Not only because he is dead, but because of the silence I mentioned earlier. The fact that the artist isn’t present, getting in the way between spectator and work, means that people are freer to appreciate it. In this sense, Salvatierra is a particularly extreme case. For example, there’s not a single self-portrait in the entire work; he does not appear in his own painting. In what is essentially a personal diary in images he himself does not figure. It’s like writing an autobiography in which you don’t even figure. And another curious point: the work isn’t signed. Although perhaps that’s not so strange. After all, where could he have signed a painting that size?
When the painter passes on, the work seems to breathe more freely in the world. When my first book was about to be published, my writer friends would tell me that when my work was out in the world, it would belong to the world and be subject to interpretation and analysis by every person who read it. Its publication effectively released my artistic hold on it for it didn’t belong to me anymore.
When Salvatierra’s sons arrive at the shed where all their father’s canvases hang, they are blown away by their father’s artistic legacy.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Luis.
The rolls were hanging above our heads. We had an enormous task in front of us.
“How many meters do you think there are?”
Peering upwards and straightening his glasses, Luis said:
”Kilometers, che, several kilometers of it.”We knew some parts of the work, especially from the period when we had helped our father prepare the canvas. But Salvatierra often painted sections behind closed doors, which were then rolled up and which we never saw. It was only now that we were freely confronted with the entire work, its colors, its secrets, and all its years.
I found The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra invaluable both in terms of the stupendous narration by Mairal and the actual story itself. I watched how this painter who was self-taught had applied himself to his art every day from the age of twenty. Miguel Salvatierra recounts how his father began collecting an art library—especially after 1960, when color reproductions began—made up of myriad artists: Velázquez, Caraveggio, Degas, Zurbarán, Gauguin and more.
Mairal’s novella is infinitely quotable on how an artist pushing his potential must consume with a rabid intensity while being aware of his uniqueness in the pantheon.
He was interested in medieval altar pieces where one figure is seen several times in the same landscape. He would stare at these paintings for hours. I know he was constantly trying to learn. He absorbed everything he could use, with complete freedom, making it his own. Salvatierra had never had the chance to visit museums; those books were a way for him to carry on learning.
Here, then, was a treatise on how practitioners of an art form must apply themselves, daily, systematically, deliberately and spiritually, too, over the decades, to hone their craft. We learn that Salvatierra worked at the post office by day but toiled at his art for four hours in the morning before he started his day at the post office. He returned to his canvases in the early evening hours. He created his work in the morning; the evening was dedicated to the medium. The constant stream of administrative work (of building the rolls of canvases) had to be done daily because he produced work every single day until two weeks before his life began to ebb away from him.
“After he’d done this bit, he had no strength left and didn’t want to go on.” That didn’t matter. It was clear that somehow Salvatierra had finished it where he wanted to. As if afterwards he had simply chosen to die.
I had wondered thousands of times what the end of the canvas would be like, the canvas that seemed to me to flow on forever, however much I knew it had to end someday, just as my father would also meet his end, that he was mortal even though I refused to believe it. Here was the answer.
The story ripples with tension from the very beginning for we are about to find out why one scroll from the year 1961 is found missing in a four-kilometer magnum opus of a man’s life. The narrator’s desperate search for answers to his father’s story becomes our quest, too. As we try to understand what may have happened in that crucial year of his life when Salvatierra met his wife and fell in love, we pull apart the layers of the family’s life story.
Author Pedro Mairal’s work has been translated into French, German, Arabic, English and Dutch. In 2007, he was named as one of the Bogota39, which is a selection of the best young writers in Latin America. Journalist Nick Caistor has translated more than 40 books of fiction from Spanish, Portuguese and French, including works by Paulo Coelho. He has also published biographies on the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.
This sounds like a must-read book. I also love the choice of pictures for your post, Kalpana.