The Correspondence Artist (8 page)

Imagine being the unique and privileged listener to the most beautiful music in the world. He began to sing, softly, in that haunting falsetto of his. It was an old song, traditional, one of the first his father had taught him. A tear rolled down his cheek as he sang. Afterwards, he wiped away the tear and said that sometimes he cried like this when he played for his sons. He said he was moved because he knew I was hearing this beautiful song for the first time.

But just at the end of my stay in Paris, he seemed to pull back. There was that awkward conversation about “fragmentation.” Things were complicated with Mariam. There were obviously some other women he'd seen. That didn't worry me particularly. I was just afraid of losing the correspondence. I would be very sad to lose the correspondence.

But pretty quickly he warmed up again. One day he wrote to say that he missed me and he wanted to see me in New York. He said he thought we needed to “talk.” Then I felt safe enough to be honest about my feelings, without actually using the word “love.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
spent part of January with the paramour. I think this was the closest we've been. We were together for a week, almost all the time. But as soon as I got back to New York, I got another one of those “I love you but I'm not in love with you” messages. It was really irritating. We'd already been through this before. My lover generously appended a list of reasons I would make an excellent life partner, and yet despite all these “advantages,” it seems that doubt lingered. I was a little too polite to point out all the potential disadvantages, from my own perspective, of our being together: Hannah's understandable and yet still fairly terrifying volatility; the wrath of the ETA
and
Homeland Security; the smirking disdain of the youthful, media-crazed art world; and the seemingly endless parade of leggy supermodels. Oh, and there was also the little inconvenience that we lived on different continents.

When Santutxo got my abbreviated response, he wrote back asking what “fort/da” meant. I would have thought he'd have heard about this from his shrink.

Don't tell me it surprises you that the paramour sees a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

Forgive me if you find this basic knowledge, but given that it had slipped even the memory of my erudite friend, maybe I should remind you: Freud tells the story in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
of a little boy who's always throwing his toys into the corner and under the bed. He's a nice kid but this habit is a little inconvenient. Then one day Freud watches him playing with a spool. The kid tosses it away and shouts, “
fort!
” which means “gone!” Then he reels the spool back and says, “
da!
” which means “there!” And Freud figures out that this is repetition compulsion: the kid is rehearsing the big thing he's learned to do, which is to separate from his mother.

So, you see, my message to Santutxo was not particularly subtle. It was kind of Freud with a mallet. When I reminded him of the story, he seemed vaguely disgruntled, but he said he got it. It was, I must confess, a pretty self-congratulatory interpretation of his pattern of pulling me close and then pushing me away. At the time, I basically believed that this was true – that he was compulsively rehearsing our separations so he could imagine himself to be in control of them. Of course I figured these separations were also replaying some trauma that well pre-dated me. But at this point I'm starting to take his rejections a little more seriously. I think they may be personal.

I don't know if he took this up with his analyst. I suspect not. I have a funny feeling he's pretty selective about what he tells his shrink. And you know, appointments with Lacanians are famously short. I'd love for her to read this manuscript. But obviously, that would tell her a lot more about my own neuroses than Santutxo's.

She's already got her hands full with him. When I wrote,
“You're very strange,” I wasn't exaggerating. Of course, what would you expect? Pick your primal scene. He's seen a lot of things nobody should see. His father's bloodied mug with a black hole where his teeth used to be. Melitón's fish eyes staring back accusingly out of his dead head. His own bruised, charred, punctured, zapped, and slashed limbs, first at the hands of GAL, and later the ETA. Luz's bandaged stump. Here's a shocker: Santutxo's afraid of dying.

 

 

 

You know, Jacques Lacan had a very interesting way of explaining the repetition compulsion, and I've been thinking about it in relation to the e-mail that got trapped in my spam filter, and some other glitches we've encountered in our correspondence. I'm referring to the famous “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.'” In this essay, Lacan analyzes a story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, which is narrated by an unnamed friend of the private investigator, Dupin, who unravels the mystery, the Queen is nearly caught reading a clandestine letter from her lover. The King walks in and she decides that the best way to hide it is to leave it lying, face down, right out in the open. The King is a little slow so this goes right past him. But the tricky Minister walks in, and he sees right away what's up. So he nonchalantly lays a similar looking letter right next to the Queen's, then coughs or makes some other distracting noise, I don't remember exactly, and picks up the incriminating document and walks out. He holds onto this letter for a long time, and uses it to harass and politically intimidate the Queen. She gets the cops to search his house when he's not there, and they look in all the most crafty, secret places, to no avail. That's when they call in this Dupin character, who's interested in the reward, but also harbors some resentment toward the Minister. He goes for an ostensibly friendly visit, and right away figures out that the Minister is
playing the Queen's game: the letter's right out in the open, just a little crumpled and refolded with a new address. So Dupin returns the next day, producing a crumpled letter of his own. He creates some distraction, and does the Minister's switcheroo. Dupin leaves a humiliating little message on his decoy letter for the evil Minister. He gets the reward, and the Queen gets her letter back.

Lacan points out that the Minister is compulsively repeating the Queen's action. His interpretation of this is fairly complicated. It has to do with the way in which the subject is constituted by the symbolic order. Really, it doesn't matter who fills that role – somebody has to. The implications are fairly distressing. You think you're writing your own plot, but you're really just getting plugged into a signifying chain. And Lacan asks, “And is it not such effects which justify our referring, without malice, to a number of imaginary heroes as real characters?”

Hello, Santutxo.

Lacan ends the seminar with the famous and perplexing statement, “a letter always arrives at its destination.” A lot of people have weighed in about what this means. It's obviously nothing so simple as saying the Queen got her letter back and things always go this smoothly. Most people think it means that when we get plugged into that signifying chain, it doesn't really matter if we're in the “wrong” place – we're just playing out our neurotic destiny. Jacques Derrida took issue with that last line, though. He liked the idea of the possibility of letters getting lost in the mail. That is, language that would get detached from a singular, true “meaning.” But Slavoj Žižek said Derrida didn't get the point: it wasn't that all letters got where they were “supposed” to go. He said a message in a bottle arrives at its destination the moment it's thrown into the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

That was a message from very early in our correspondence. Obviously, there had been some problem with Santutxo's server. He said he'd composed two long and carefully drafted messages but somehow they got lost before he could send them. That had also happened to me before. As I said in my message, I kind of like that about e-mail.

I'm having a flashback to that dinner party in New York, when Slavoj Žižek and Gayatri Spivak were standing there politely chewing on my edible flowers while Analia Hounie poured Santutxo a Coke.

 

 

 

When I got the very first e-mail from Santutxo, I wasn't sure I could believe it was from him. One of the things that seemed weird was that he had a Yahoo! account. On the other hand, what should I have expected? His own address at arranobeltza.com? Obviously I can't publish his e-mail address, but it's a kind of lame joke involving one of his aliases. Because he opens up the Yahoo! page to check his e-mail, he often reads the Yahoo! news. Every time he mentions something he's read there, he refers to it as Yahoo!, with the exclamation point. You can see why this all seems kind of funny, coming from an iconic revolutionary figure. He seems to take seriously the news flashes
he reads on the Yahoo! homepage. Sometimes they'll prompt him to ask me for an update on political events unfolding here. He also displays a surprising curiosity about pop culture items. He says that Cameron Diaz seems like an interesting person.

So in a way, it would seem that Santutxo's use of the internet for personal correspondence and general websurfing is like the average person's. But every once in a while, one or the other of us gets a little paranoid about who might be looking in. These days, of course, he's not planning any violent actions. Excommunicated from the ETA, even his broadcast political missives are what you might call ex-communiqués. Swerving unpredictably from the radical to the reactionary, nobody actually thinks they'll come to any material end.

But it wasn't always like this. He spent the '70s practically running the ETA show from Mexico City. A lot of people would take issue with this account, and of course there was only so much he could help with in terms of practical strategizing for individual operations. But the Arrano Beltza's broadcasts were the poetic heart and soul of Euskadi Ta Askatasuma, simultaneously the clearest and most lyrical expressions of its fundamental political philosophy. I'm talking, of course, about the ETA-PM, the Political-Military Front. Santutxo already had friction with the more militant faction, the ETA-M, but he had this uncanny ability to persuade even some of the most extreme to let go of their bloodiest dreams. He believed in “blood, when necessary,” but never civilian.

Still, 1980 was the ETA's bloodiest year since its formation. It was a difficult time for Santutxo. Amets was supportive but she was getting increasingly frustrated by his emotional unavailability. She didn't blame him – she knew it was for a higher cause, but it's hard to love a saint, and Amets needed affection. Aitor was still pretty little, but even then, he seemed to know that as dedicated a father as he was, Santutxo's idealism made him extremely vulnerable. To this day, I think Aitor feels protective of his dad.

Around 1983, the “anti-terrorist” terrorist organization GAL was formed to fight a dirty war against the ETA. Things got really scary. Santutxo knew he had to go back. Amets and Aitor stayed behind. It was terribly sad for everybody, but they knew it had to be this way.

For the next four years, Santutxo was back in the trenches. He didn't carry out any actions himself, of course, but he was now deeply involved in the practical strategizing. He continued sending out communiqués, and you could see that while they still manifested his completely unique combination of lyricism, intelligence, and humor, the Arrano Beltza was starting to crack a little under the pressure.

In 1987, against his passionate objections, the extremist wing of the ETA bombed a supermarket garage in Barcelona. Twenty-four innocent people were killed. Santutxo was devastated. The ETA apologized for the “mistake.” There was a particularly sad story about a young girl who had survived the explosion. She was eighteen. She was a ballet dancer. Her left leg had been ripped off by the blast. Disguised as a hospital orderly, Santutxo began visiting her every day. Two years later, Luz was living with him in Donostia, pregnant with Bakar.

 

 

 

We were eating pintxos at Goiz Argi in the Parte Vieja when she appeared out of nowhere: an extravagantly beautiful, agonized woman in her 30s, with green eyes, dark brows, cascading black curls, and a prosthetic leg, screaming in Castilian that I was not the aging plain-Jane journalist that she'd been led to believe. And then came the Coke, and the violence.