The Correspondence Artist (18 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, things Greek have occupied a considerable amount of space in my correspondence with Tzipi. Which was part of why it was so important to me that we were going to be spending time together on Mykonos. In fact, the visit itself seemed to me so symbolic, even the most banal practical details – my connecting flight on Olympic Airlines, paying my cab fare to the driver, Epifanio – seemed to take on mythic significance. This was also attached to the fact that so many of the cultural references we had were fundamentally about sex and sexuality: Sappho, of course, and
Dionysus in '69
. We'd essentially been living in the mythic realm, or working our way toward it, and this is why, on that balmy night on Mykonos, it seemed oddly right that when I opened my eyes on Tzipi's guest bed to see who was entering the patio door, I saw Medusa.

She was carrying a boom box. Between this and the wriggling snakes all over her head, she was having a somewhat difficult
time getting through the door. She banged the doorframe with her sound system, which was what really got my attention, but somehow she managed to get in, set up her equipment on the floor, and hit play. It was Fani Drakopoulou singing “Thelo na ta pio.” Melina's snakes were dripping all over her forehead as she shimmied and swiveled to the music. Snakes in her eyes and the dim lighting may have contributed to her inability to discern that she was dancing for her arch nemesis, me, and not the impossibly desirable Tzipi. Her eyes were shut, in fact, and yet from her grimacing mouth and tremulous dance performance, it was clear that she was crying, and had been for some time. Aside from the snakes, Melina was wearing a flesh-tone Lycra unitard. Her large, firm breasts pushed up against it, struggling to escape. She had no panties on and her pubic hair was entirely visible. She swiveled her hips and turned in a circle, one snake slipping off her shoulder and dropping to the floor. Tzipi was right about her ass.

As you can imagine, things started to go haywire pretty quickly. The snakes weren't cooperating, and the CD started to skip. Melina, who was really in no condition to deal with these frustrations, ended up dropping to the floor herself and kicking the boom box with her left foot. Then she began sobbing and kicking away her snakes.

That's when her dad came thumping in, screaming in Greek. I couldn't tell if he was angrier with Melina or with me, and I didn't understand a word he said. All I know is, when Melina figured out I wasn't Tzipi, she started in on me too, and then she and her father started hitting each other, and the only thing she could yell at me in English was, “Bitch! Go back to America!” And finally her dad dragged her out and she carried the boom box and he managed to round up the snakes (in point of fact there were only five although their initial effect gave the impression of there being many more) and they were out of there. Fortunately I'd kept Epifanio's card and I called him and got
him to take me back to the airport and after a hellish wait at the Olympic Airlines counter I managed to change my tickets and get the hell out of Mykonos. I had a splitting headache.

 

 

 

Don't look at me if this story seems overdetermined. Everything about my affair with Tzipi has been overdetermined. But in the aftermath, we did have an interesting exchange about Freud's essay, “Das Medusenhaupt,” and Hélène Cixous's “Le Rire de la Méduse.” Tzipi was interested in the figure of castration, and the thesis of the proliferating phalluses, of course, but she really has no patience with the notion of “
écriture féminine
.” She had also forgotten that Freud suggests that petrifaction symbolizes “the comforting erection.”

 

 

 

When I testily mentioned having had to pay a surcharge on my ticket to come back early, Tzipi did offer to reimburse me for the whole failed trip. I should also mention that Djeli ended up paying my Bamako hospital bill.

 

 

 

I realize that I will appear at least as hard-hearted as Tzipi for submitting Melina's anguish to this treatment – first a distanced irony, and then a clinical, psychoanalytic diagnosis highjacked for French feminist theoretical ends. The truth is that when I saw her slumped over on the floor in that ridiculous get-up come undone, the shadow of her hungry pubic hair and her mashed nipples urgently forcing their reality through her unitard, when I heard her moan and uselessly thud her foot at her uncaring snakes, when I watched her wipe the snot from
her nose and grimace in all her exquisite pain, I felt for her, just as I felt for Hannah there on that sidewalk in Tel Aviv, as she clawed at her own arms and howled in agony. I may be a little more understated, but what is this but my own grim display of the intolerable ache of losing Tzipi Honigman? What are these little glimpses of our story together but “luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night”?

Fortunately, I never lost it like this with the paramour. I told you, Tzipi was the one I fell in love with. She's the one I thrashed over, sobbed at, howled for, in my own quiet way.

I'm not in love with my lover. My ex-lover. I'm not sure what term to use. The paramour is my friend forever or something like that.

T
he following was actually the complete e-mail I sent Santutxo about Darwin. As I read it over, I see why I abbreviated it before. You may find some of it objectionable, on the grounds of certain sweeping generalizations about gender and writing. It's also pretty unbearably politically lofty. How embarrassing. I was responding to one of Santutxo's more excessive tirades, in which he'd careened from extremes of feminist speechifying to sexist hissy-fit, the apotheosis of which was a very tasteless joke about the female anatomy. He was irked by the fact that I'd attributed one of his more idiotic comments (about the French elections) to his own gender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Santutxo had said in his message that aside from his inability to sleep or to be happy, aside from the insufferable, bellyaching rhetoric of Ségolène, aside from my own half-baked socialist idealism, aside from the pervasive whininess and unnecessary drama of my sex, the worst thing was that he'd reread a recent message he'd sent me and realized that he'd made an egregious number of very stupid spelling errors.

 

 

 

I'm not the only one who struggles with the paramour's incongruous and often irreconcilable opinions. Can you understand that I find Santutxo's profound commitment to feminism and the anticolonial struggle even more moving because of his occasional expressions of oafish sexism and racial and cultural insensitivity? He really does possess an uncanny ability to identify with the Other, even if that means subverting the most fundamental aspects of his being.

You may just think I've been buffaloed, but without those long and tortuous arguments over coffee and cigarettes back at UNAM, surely his most dedicated student would never have been able to come up with this:

 

“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, an indigenous person in the streets of San
Cristóbal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker on campus, a Jew in Germany, ombudsman in the sedana, feminist in political parties, Communist in the post-Cold War era, prisoner in Cinalapa, pacifist in Bosnia… Marcos is every underrated, oppressed, exploited minority that is resisting and saying ‘Enough!'” – El Sup, “Shadows of Tender Fury,” 1995.

 

Massimo De Angelis dubbed this Marcos's “subversive affinity,” but it's pure Santutxo – excepting that Santutxo also has moments when he identifies with Nancy Reagan. Naturally, Marcos gets frustrated with his friend, and so does Garzón – but to know Santutxo is to love him. If you knew him like I know him, you'd see what I mean.