'Lost' art tells of a love lost

In the late 1980s, with the house set for demolition, a group of concerned Argentines mounted an extraordinary, if desperate, salvage mission. A Mexican restoration expert, Manuel Serrano, who had known Siqueiros, was contracted to oversee a team of 35 artisans to remove the mural.

"There had never been a rescue effort like this before," Serrano recalled by telephone from Mexico. "I think maestro Siqueiros would have enjoyed the project of extracting the mural, for its novelty and complexity."

The mural, covering more than 2,000 square feet, was sliced into half a dozen sections, encased in metal and wood frames and yanked out by cranes in 1991. It was placed in metal shipping containers, loaded onto trucks and exiled unceremoniously to an outdoor industrial lot. There it has sat for 16 years, and still sits today, amid labyrinthine lawsuits and disputes about ownership.

This year, Argentine First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the runaway favorite to succeed her husband as president, visited Mexico and pledged to save the mural "at any cost." With the participation of the Mexican government, experts are devising a scheme to remove the work from storage, mount it in downtown Buenos Aires and restore it. The formidable legal barriers have been cleared, officials say.

Despite the work's water damage, cracks and discolorations, those who have seen it recently say its condition is relatively good, a testament to Siqueiros' use of industrial-strength materials.

"The mural is absolutely salvageable," said Magdalena Faillace, of the Argentine Foreign Ministry.

With the mural completed and his Uruguayan siren lost, Siqueiros left Buenos Aires for New York and Mexico. He subsequently fought in the Spanish Civil War, headed a Stalinist hit squad that attempted to assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico City (the Russian revolutionary was in fact slain there soon after), and was jailed again in Mexico in 1959 for "social dissolution." Brum doesn't figure much in his memoirs. Siqueiros died in 1974 in Mexico.

Brum relocated to Chile, married into money, wrote articles and poetry and moved to the right politically. Rumors still swirl of an affair with Juan Domingo Peron, the Argentine strongman. Brum returned to Catholicism and finally became an apologist for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

She retreated to a life of semi-seclusion on Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, so named for Defoe's literary classic reputedly inspired by a shipwreck victim who spent four years there. She painted and jotted her memoirs, recalling a charmed evening long ago beneath the white light of the Southern Cross.

"Siqueiros left with me that night and forever," Brum wrote before dying in 1985, 11 years after her former husband. "Yes, it was an everlasting pact beneath the sky of Montevideo."