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see if he’d brought anything he could wear. Time was going by, and night was drawing in. All at once we heard a voice calling: “Grandad.” Jordán froze.
    “I think someone’s calling you.”
    “Oh, it’s that fatass,” he said, without looking round at her.
    A young woman came up. She apologized and explained the old man escaped like this from time to time. I told her Jordán had been a friend of my father’s, and that I wanted to ask him a few questions.
    “Come and see him one morning. He’s not so lost then,” she told me. She picked up the bag, and led Jordán away by the arm.
    I walked round the station for a while, but soon left: seeing everything so abandoned made me sad.

19
    Salvatierra could go for an hour without painting, standing in front of the canvas or near the round iron stove that warmed a corner of the shed in the coldest months, or sitting in a barber’s chair he had bought at auction. He would stand or sit there thinking, perhaps planning what he was going to paint next. Suddenly, if a fly buzzed past, he would snatch it out of midair. He never missed.
    He liked to tune in to the local radio that played chamamés , Paraguayan polkas , and chamarritas , while the presenters repeated the same adverts over and over again, or made endless comments about Carnival.
    With that noise in the background, he would sometimes sit, head buried in his hands. Anyone who didn’t know him might have thought he was depressed, but in fact he was absorbed in his work. All of a sudden he would get up and start sketching a few lines. Or he would leaf through books of engravings or illustrations that were gathering dust on a bookshelf. Over the years he collected an art library, especially after 1960, when color reproductions began. I remember a collection called The Great Masters of Art . He liked lots of different artists: Velázquez, Zurbarán’s still-lives, Caravaggio (he had a plate of The Conversion of Saint Paul pinned up on a column), Degas, Gauguin, Cándido López, even Escher’s metamorphoses; photographs of Roman friezes and Minoan frescoes. 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.
    Occasionally he would search for something on a big table that had once belonged to a tobacco firm, where he used to collect dried leaves, insects, illustrations, bones, flotsam from the river, or things he found: roots, worn pieces of wood, round stones from local Indians’ boleadoras , fragments of colored glass, all kinds of objects. He’d pick one of these up and study it closely so that he could depict it somewhere on his canvas.
    I remember one evening after a storm we went out for a walk and I came across one of those beetles with a long horn known as “little bulls” crawling through the mud on the track. I took it back to the shed, and the next day saw that Salvatierra had painted a huge version of it that filled the canvas from top to bottom. By enlarging objects in this way (in fact, he sometimes looked at them through a magnifying glass), he succeeded in capturing that appearance of cold machines that some insects have. The beetle looked like a battleship, with its spiky legs, tiny, cruel eyes, and that enormous horn that functions as a pincer to hold its prey aloft, a starkly murderous weapon on the head of a compact body.
    These studies of plants or insects looked like sketches God had made before Creation. First came the detailed study, of a dragonfly for example, as if Salvatierra were inventing it, including it for the very first time in the universe of his canvas. He would draw it in different colors from above, below, and face on; it was only some weeks later, when