The Correspondence Artist Page 2

I also wanted to give you the reference for that CD of Thelonious Monk learning “I’m Getting Sentimental over You.” It’s “Monk: The Transformer.” If you can’t find it, tell me, and I’ll send it to you.

  I survived my last break-up watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on DVD – I recommend it.

  I don’t know if I should ask your forgiveness for my timidity, or for being so brash as to seek you out in Tel Aviv, and get you into that mess. Then again, my guide book said that in Tel Aviv, there are two things a foreigner never needs to learn to say in Hebrew: “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” It said the expression for “excuse me” is literally “get out of my way.” This doesn’t come so naturally to a woman like me, whose aggression is generally of the passive variety. So I’ll just say, Tzipi, sorry.

  Yours, V

  After Hannah stormed out of the restaurant we tried to recover, but Tzipi’s cell phone kept going off. The first two times she spoke in a hushed voice, but when it went off a third time she said, “Maybe I’d better just take you back to your hotel. She’s having a hard night.” Of course I agreed. God knows, I wouldn’t have been able to eat, anyway.

  In the car driving back, we tried to talk a little about music. Tzipi often writes about jazz, and piano improvisation is a kind of leitmotif in more than one of her novels. I told her about a fabulous CD a friend had given to Sandro of Monk learning a tune. She was intrigued. As I described it to her, I found myself reaching over and touching her arm. I knew what I was doing.

  Then we stopped at a light, and Tzipi looked up into the rearview mirror. “Oh, look at that,” she said calmly. “She’s following us.” I wrenched around and saw Hannah gripping the steering wheel of the car directly behind us. My pulse picked up again. We pulled up in front of the hotel and I thought to myself, “Maintain composure.” Tzipi and I leaned in and kissed each other on the cheek. The porter of the hotel was opening the car door. I swung my leg out, began to step out, and suddenly felt a thud on the right side of my head. Hannah was tackling me. I stumbled but managed to stay upright as she yanked at my hair and swung another punch, this time pummeling my left ear. I turned and ran toward the lobby. I heard a scream and looked back. Hannah had pushed up the sleeves of her jacket and was mercilessly clawing at her own arms and howling in my direction, “If you call her again, if you send her another e-mail, I swear to God, I’ll kill you! I saw you kiss in the car! I have a photograph! Bitch! Get the hell out of Israel!” Tzipi had rushed out of the car and was trying to hold a thrashing Hannah in her arms. I ran up to my room without looking back.

  Tzipi later told me that the hotel security had misunderstood her attempt to calm Hannah down, and thought she was attacking her. They ended up pulling the two of them apart. Fortunately nobody called the cops, but it took some talking before everyone calmed down.

  Needless to say, I didn’t do any research that night for my article. The next night I poked around a few clubs in the downtown area and got enough to fill my word count. The section on Jerusalem was a little more thorough, but as you’ll surely understand, I kind of wrote this piece on automatic pilot.

  Tzipi answered my e-mail very graciously. She said it had been a difficult few days after that scene, but that there had also been moments when Tzipi thought she saw a light at the end of the tunnel. She said she liked Hannah very much, and wanted for her to be happy. She said it was funny that I’d expressed shyness, when she so obviously had so much more to feel awkward about.

  I was glad to get back to New York. Sandro found this story pretty amusing. “Wow,” he said. “Cat fight.” I periodically checked my e-mail over the next few days, half-hoping Tzipi would pop back up, but I was mostly getting messages from the Socialist Party USA [spusa] list serve about labor abuses in Colombia, and a variety of other spam. One evening I found myself writing a poem. I couldn’t resist sending it to Tzipi. It was a sestina, called “Coca-Cola and Violence.” It was about those e-mails I was receiving from spusa-listserv and Hannah’s blow-out in the restaurant. It basically implied we’re all implicated in violence, little and big, political and personal, even if we think we’re trying to be good.

  Tzipi wrote back saying she liked the poem. She’d been confused by the last line, which was a fragment of a torn-up love letter, but she solved the riddle for herself.

  It’s funny, writing about Tzipi, I began to fall in love with her. Which I can do, because she’s a fictional character. With the real paramour I’m always on my guard. About a year ago I got an e-mail with the not particularly felicitous formulation: “I love you but I’m not in love with you.” As you can imagine, I found this disappointing, but when I really thought about it, honestly, I had to answer that I also felt love but I wasn’t sure I was in love. I attributed this to the fact that my lover was always holding something back. It’s difficult to abandon yourself to passion when you don’t feel safe. When I wrote that, the paramour seemed disconcerted, claiming to have fallen in love only once, in childhood. Romantic passion was a kind of foreign emotion, attractive and yet elusive. And the threat of someone else’s passionate desire was mortifying – particularly if it involved possessiveness. That seemed like a pretty pointed message.

  It’s ironic that I’ve been falling in love with my lover’s fictional manifestation, because when we were discussing what it meant to fall in love (this rather unpleasant exchange evolved into a fairly absorbing philosophical back-and-forth), I could only describe it in relation to fiction.

  Thursday, June 7, 2007, 2:17 p.m.

  Subject: fiction

  I knew your answer would begin with several long paragraphs about the political situation. After all this time, I still find your tirades sexy. And lovable.

  Oops, I used the word, in adjectival form. I’ve been trying to avoid it, especially after you told me how American it was, this business of saying “I love you” all the time. But if you can say it why can’t I? I do love you, profoundly, but I’m also not sure if I’m in love with you. It’s hard to understand, because you would think that if you loved someone and you also felt as much desire for them as I feel for you that that would be what being in love was.

  But I think being in love is when you allow yourself to enter into a state of fiction, where you become very vulnerable, completely open, naïve, and naked. The fiction is thinking: “I can only be happy with this person.” Of course, your friends always see this for what it is from the outside. They know you could be happy with someone else, if you chose that.

  Believing in the fiction of your singular necessity isn’t really possible for me, because of your emotional distance. Also, between us, there are all those other kinds of distance – of language, nation, age, social context. Fame. I won’t even speak of politics because that’s more ambiguous with you. But of course even if you share those things with someone, even if they would seem to correspond to you in so many ways, there are those moments when you realize that they’re miles away from you. Even, I’m sure, if they’re the same sex.

  Anyway, being in love. It’s a huge, beautiful luxury. I do it with more facility than you.

  The paramour agreed.

  I fell in love almost immediately with Tzipi, but I don’t know why I should feel any safer with her than I do in real life. Still, that’s not why I’ve decided to try something else. It’s that there are some ways in which she really doesn’t correspond to my lover. It’s not what you might think. It’s the question of politics. So far Tzipi appears to be a progressive intellectual who nonetheless enjoys the comforts of bourgeois celebrity. My actual lover’s politics are very complicated. Often extreme. Let’s say, in fact, that he’s the legendary Basque separatist, Santutxo Etxeberria, also known by his alias from his more notorious activist days, the Arrano Beltza (the “black eagle”), or increasingly, since his falling out with the ETA, Txotxolo (“the dumb ass”). He prefers the latter.

  “Wait,” you’ll say. “I thought you said the paramour was an artist.” But he is. Santutxo is one of the f
ew revolutionaries who raised the struggle to an art form. Well, of course, he once would have said that all revolutionary acts are works of art, but even in his youth he secretly knew that that was mostly puffed up rhetoric, and if pressed, he’d confess that every struggle produced an enormous dung heap of bad poetry. Santutxo was another story. He is completely lyrical.

  I came to know of him, as most people do, through his blog. There was a link from the official site of the EZLN. They’ve since taken it down. Santutxo has a sensitive relationship with El Sup. If you think I’ve had to be discreet about our love affair, it doesn’t even begin to approach what he’s had to keep under his hat about his friend Marcos. Of course, if this weren’t entirely fictional, I really couldn’t be revealing any of this. As it is, I still have to resort to these public personae. Even in his private e-mails to me, Santutxo superstitiously insists on referring to his friend by the various versions of his nom de guerre. But they go back – way back. Which is why no matter how far Santutxo goes off his rocker, El Sup will always have a place for him in his heart. Of course he can’t state this publicly.

  For some, Santutxo is a fallen god. I think falling was a relief for him. Marcos understands this better than anyone, which is probably why he’s so forgiving. Also because even in Santutxo’s most erratic moments – perhaps especially then – he is irresistibly seductive. When I said the paramour was rich and famous, I was putting his possessions in earthly terms. Of course, Santutxo’s capital is of another sort altogether: it’s the erotic capital of his political commitment, or the political capital of his erotic power, however you want to put it. There’s hardly a woman in Euskal Herria who hasn’t masturbated imagining his “piercing dart.” I’m sure he’s figured prominently in plenty of masculine fantasies as well. The Basque have a reputation, as I’m sure you know, for machismo, but Santutxo has always had excellent gender politics, and his sensuality is polyvalent.

  Maybe I should explain that “piercing dart” comment, as it’s entirely possible you’re not conversant with 16th-century Basque poetry. It was Bernat Etxepare, father of Basque literature, who created the figure in his famous poem, “In Defense of Women” (“Emazten Fabore”). The penultimate stanza says:Jo badeza dardoaz ere gorputzaren erditik,

  ainguruiak bano hoboro ezlarrake gaizkirik,

  bana dardoa ematurik, zauri ere sendoturik,

  bere graziaz ezarten tu elgarreki baketurik.

  My loose English translation from the standard Castilian rendering, accommodating for rhyme and meter, would be:Although he stabs her tender body with his piercing dart,

  She answers him compliantly, as with an angel heart,

  And once the dart’s relaxed again and stillness seals the part,

  She heals them both with gentleness, her reconciling art.

  You wouldn’t exactly call this a “feminist” poem by contemporary standards, but I find it kind of poignant. There’s something so pathetic about the masculine dart-wielder – the way the woman has to take care of him once he’s just limp and spent.

  Santutxo recited this entire poem to me once on his terrace. I don’t speak Basque but I love the way it sounds, especially in his warm, slightly scratchy, incredibly intimate voice. That night the moon was almost full, and Santutxo’s place has a beautiful view of the city. I had this flash of self-consciousness – I was in Donostia, alone in the moonlight in the arms of the Arrano Beltza, who was reciting the poetry of Etxepare into my ear as he pressed his hard-on up against my body. He smelled faintly of sweat. How many thousands, how many hundreds of thousands of women and men had dreamt about a scene like this with him? How did I come to find myself here?

  But before I tell you that story, I probably need to tell you how Santutxo came to find himself here – that is, there, in his lair, alienated from both the State and from the revolutionary cause to which he’d committed so many years, so much blood, so much heartache, so much poetry.

  “We start from humiliation when we write in Basque. It’s the darkness that pushes us.” – Bernardo Atxaga

  It may surprise you to learn that Santutxo didn’t grow up speaking Basque. But his father was a man of letters, and he collected, analyzed, and translated early Basque documents, including those of Etxepare. As a young kid, Santutxo couldn’t be bothered. But when he was ten years old everything changed. It was 1961, and the ETA had been in covert existence for two years. Some of the founders were former students of Santutxo’s father. Of course as a family man, he wasn’t directly involved in any actions. He had no advance knowledge (Santutxo’s sure of this) of the attempt to derail that train full of Civil War veterans. Perhaps you know, this was the ETA’s first major operation, and it failed. That didn’t stop the police from raiding Santutxo’s house and taking his father in for interrogation. He came home missing four teeth. What’s worse, they confiscated and destroyed a valuable 17th-century manuscript he’d been keeping under his bed.

  Is it really so surprising that seven years later, Santutxo’s cell carried out the murder of Melitón Manzanas? Not even his family knew. Despite everything that had happened, Santutxo’s parents remained doubtful regarding the strategy of violent intervention. For five years, Santutxo kept up the appropriate bookish profile, acquiring his licenciatura in philosophy. He met Amets, no surprise, in a seminar on Marx, and they became lovers. When the shit hit the fan in ’73, they fled together to Mexico City. She had an uncle there who was willing to help them out.

  Santutxo enrolled in the doctoral program at UNAM. Amets did too, but she dropped out after the second week with debilitating nausea. She was pregnant, of course, with Aitor. When Franco died two years later, they were gravely tempted to go back, but now, with a kid, it was more complicated. Santutxo thought he might be able to do just as much from Mexico. He had a ham radio, and late at night he’d help strategize new operations with his comrades. Sometimes he’d read out inspirational communiqués, which they’d record and distribute. It was during this time that they started calling him the Arrano Beltza.

  When he finished his degree at UNAM, Santutxo was invited to stay on as a lecturer, and it was in his first course that he met the young student on whom he would have such a profound impact. Of course, students can also shape the lives of their teachers. It wasn’t just the endless conversations about Gramsci that they shared. It was the soccer skirmishes, the late nights spent listening to cassette tapes of Coltrane, the outings to the jardin zoológico with Aitor. It was even Amets.

  Santutxo wrote me about this in a long e-mail about sexual jealousy. He claimed he’d never felt it, or rarely. I told you his gender politics were excellent. But I’m not sure you could attribute this attitude entirely to his politics. He was, he explained, constitutionally monogamous, despite his fundamental rejection of the model of the bourgeois marriage, which had historically enslaved women. But he had no desire to constrain the desires or pleasures of any woman. He and Amets lived together in an almost embarrassingly tranquil pattern of affectionate and satisfying, faithful nightly coitus for twelve years. Amets had the occasional romp with a friend, but it was more to affirm her political passions than anything else. I mean her sexual politics, but there was also the erotic draw of rebellion – of course. Who am I to judge? God knows I would have slept with the future Subcomandante Insurgente.

  Anyway, when Santutxo set up house with Luz in 1989, it was the same deal: fourteen years of almost exclusively simple, happy, dedicated one-on-one fucking. Not to say that he and I ever had this kind of arrangement. When our preoccupation with each other started to feel uncomfortably binding, we’d shake it off by sleeping with somebody else. We were always feeling each other out, sniffing at each other like nervous dogs, getting close to something and then recoiling. Obviously, there were certain risks for me – from the Spanish authorities, the ETA – and of course there was that incident with Luz. Maybe the stakes for him were even higher. I was used to a fairly rapid rotation, but when Santutxo chose a partner, he had a tendency to stick. I
f he made a decision, he was going to have to live with it. Cautious, we were lovers, but not committed.

  I keep wondering what verb tense to use. The past tense feels a little too definitive. It’s not yet clear it’s completely over. But as you can see, I’ve never been entirely sure to what degree it had even begun.

  Thursday, April 7, 2005, 1:28 p.m.

  Subject: yes it was an unfinished

  sentence – a ripped up letter. I probably shouldn’t confess this, but whenever I write something, when I’m done I sit up in bed and read it out loud to myself. The ripped up letter was the only part of the poem that was completely fictional, but when I read it to myself, that was the line that made me cry. I didn’t know if a man or a woman had written it. The obvious end of the sentence, “no consigo vivir sin tu,” is “amor”, but I don’t think that’s how it ended. Maybe it was “cuerpo”, or “sexo”, or “olor”. Anyway, the fact that this word was missing was what made me cry, I think.

  Your written voice in English is like your speaking voice in English – elegant, practically flawless, and slightly formal. I enjoy the strangeness very much.

  I had to go to Providence, Rhode Island for a professional meeting. To pass the time in the train, I knit a big, warm woolen scarf. I would like to give it to you although I can’t imagine when you’ll need it. I was very honored that you stopped to notice that the sestina was structured like my article. Maybe you also can see that they both owe something to “The Communiqué on the Sentencing of José Barrionuevo.”