The Correspondence Artist (3 page)

I
t'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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 few 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:

My loose English translation from the standard Castilian rendering, accommodating for rhyme and meter, would be:

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. If 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.