The Correspondence Artist (9 page)

I've been reading those letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren. In late November of 1947, it seems there was a postal strike in France. Their correspondence was interrupted both ways. She found this very distressing. She sent him a telegram saying, “STRIKE STOPS LETTERS NOT MY HEART WAIT PATIENTLY WARMEST LOVE SIMONE.” She kept writing, despite the clogged communication pipeline, and he did too. Eventually they got the backed up letters. It seems that during the hiatus, he wrote her about some other women he'd considered sleeping with. She refers to them as “the phoney blonde,” “the Jewish girl,” and “the older woman.” She says that she is dead set against sexual jealousy, though she can't help but feel it a little. Still, she encourages him to go ahead and indulge his desires – just to be sure to kick anybody out of the Chicago apartment when she gets back to town.

She also talks about the people in Paris who are trying to seduce her: an “ugly lesbian,” another “Jewish girl,” and a velvety creep named “Puma.” She indicates that she's also open to sleeping around. She seems to take some pleasure in cataloging their respective potential strange bedfellows.

 

 

 

Speaking of strange bedfellows, but in the figurative sense of the term, you might be interested in another of Santutxo's complicated friendships – that with Baltasar Garzón Real. Garzón, perhaps you know, is often referred to as Spain's “
Juez Estrella
” – the Rock Star Judge. He had a famous and pyrotechnic debate in 2003 with El Sup over the Basque question. Garzón's persecution of alleged ETA operatives has been, you might say, rabid. He's done pretty much anything he could do to eviscerate the movement, shutting down legitimate news outlets on the grounds of “terrorist” ties, intimidating community activists, and basically being a pain in every Basque ass. So what
the hell, you may ask, is Santutxo doing cozying up to him? I have to say, I do have my own doubts about Garzón, but he's nearly as complicated a case as Santutxo. He was the one who issued that arrest warrant in 1998 for Pinochet, for the torture and murder of Spanish citizens in Chile. He started a flood of suits over the disappearance of Spaniards in Argentina's dirty war. He went after Kissinger over Operation Condor. More recently, he tried to get a European block to suspend Berlusconi's immunity. And around the time he was having that row with El Sup, he was simultaneously blasting the US over human rights abuses in Guantánamo Bay and the Iraq war. I have to say, while he can be something of a blow-hard, I was pretty charmed by his public threat last year to sue Bush for catastrophic imbecility.

As you can imagine, Garzón has had to keep his friendship with Santutxo under wraps. The press – from both the left and right – would have a field day if they got their hands on this. But El Sup knows, and of course Garzón is fully aware of Santutxo's history with Marcos. Frankly, I think they're both a little jealous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Santutxo liked this dream. He generally likes the things Sandro says, even though he finds him too predictably “politically correct.” One time I asked Sandro if he thought that he and I were hippies. This was in reference to that “antipathetic” comment I'd made in an article regarding Santutxo's hippie image in the 1970s. Sandro thought about it for a while, and then he said, no, that he thought a better description of the two of us would be “clean philosophers with disturbing tendencies.” When I told Santutxo about this, he said he wanted to join our club.

 

 

But I began this chapter with a reference to misdirected mail, and I guess it's time for me to tell you about the most significant glitch in our correspondence – the dead letter that almost left me dead as well. You may think I'm exaggerating.

It was only after that “cunt” e-mail went missing that I finally
consulted with an IT guy and figured out about the spam filter. I honestly didn't even know I had a filter. I get plenty of spam, and I'd sent and received any number of e-mails with naughty bits in them. The filter seems to be arbitrary, and weirdly selective. That's why the first time this happened, I really didn't have a clue. It never occurred to me that somebody could be sending me important information and it could get caught in that net. The filter, I later learned, traps suspect messages for a period of a week, and then automatically and permanently deletes them. So while I managed to retrieve the “cunt” one before it got sucked away into oblivion, I never did receive the message I'm telling you about now. (You can pause here to think about Lacan, Derrida, and Žižek, or not, as you please.)

It was during a period when Santutxo had begun to suspect that he was being followed again. He wasn't sure by whom. Garzón swore he knew nothing about the government's involvement, and the ETA hadn't seemed to be paying too much attention recently. Still, there were some disturbing signs: objects on his desk that appeared to have been tampered with, a cigarette butt left mysteriously in his toilet, a creepy guy who was hanging out a lot across the street. He mentioned these things to me, but I told you, Santutxo's neurotic. He also mentioned a lot of medical “symptoms” that sounded pretty benign to me.

We were making plans for a visit. Even though I thought he was exaggerating the risk, I decided to give in to his suggestion that we meet this time not at his place in Donostia, but at a safe house about an hour out of town. It was a farmhouse owned by a friend of a friend – obviously, I'm not at liberty to disclose much more than that. Let's just say it was yet another “strange bedfellow.”

When my plane landed in Barcelona, I checked my BlackBerry for messages. There was a bit of spusa-listserv spam, something vaguely irritating from my editor, and two short messages from Florence asking me about when she should check in
on Sandro and if I were wearing the black thigh-high stockings she'd given me to my tryst at the farmhouse (Florence is the soul of discretion). Nothing from Santutxo. Everything appeared to be on track.

I found a driver willing to take me out to the safe house. Of course, I didn't call it that. He seemed a little surprised that somebody like me would be headed in that direction, but a fare's a fare. I swung my satchel into the back seat and we were off. When we got to the farmhouse he asked me if I wanted him to see me to the door. It was already starting to get dark, and this was, as you can imagine, a pretty remote location. I knew Santutxo was feeling paranoid, so I said no and then stood there by the road waving, gesturing to him that it was okay to go. Finally he drove off.

Little sticks crunched under my feet as I made my way to the farmhouse. It was chilly out. The door was slightly ajar and there was a dim light emanating from within. I pushed it with my fingertips. My heart was beating pretty hard. I couldn't wait to have Santutxo's swollen cock pressed up against my body once again. But before I knew what had happened, a scabrous guy with a shaved head and a pierced lip was wrenching both my arms behind my back, breathing into my neck, and an enormous red-haired woman with a mohawk was sneering at me in derision, calling me, mockingly, the Txotxolo's little “
andragai
” (girlfriend). She had a pistol. I thought I could even smell it.

 

 

 

As I said, I never saw the message that Santutxo had sent. But later he told me the content, and a little about the specific turn of phrase that may have activated the despamming mechanism. Just before he left to ready the safe house for my arrival, he got a tip that there would be trouble. He immediately booked me a room in a Barcelona dive hotel, and then wrote to tell me NOT
to make the trip out to the country. He relayed the name and location of the hotel, and told me to stay there until he sent further word. His message ended: “And even if I can't be stroking your pussy tonight in – -- – as we planned, I'll figure out a way to get to your hotel in Barcelona. I am getting a very hard wood just thinking about it.”

I had recently taught Santutxo the English expression “morning wood,” which he found very charming and poetic. I told him we also said, somewhat less poetically, “woody” to refer to any masculine erection. He seemed to have confused the terms. I don't think, however, it was Santutxo's erection which set off the spam filter. I think it was my pussy.

M
aybe you find it odd that both the ETA extremists and a public figure as important as Baltasar Garzón Real would pay so much attention to a fictional character like the Arrano Beltza. But this kind of thing has happened before. Djeli once told me a story about the great Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 1986 he published a novel in Gikuyu called
Matigari
. It was unusual for an African novel to be published in a non-colonial language, so the people were all talking about it. In fact, they were talking so much about the main character that the government became convinced that he was a real person and issued a warrant for his arrest.

And then there's the reverse process, which I guess happens a little more frequently. El Sup, for example, wrote himself into that mystery novel.

Obviously, these kinds of questions interest me, because, as I mentioned, I occasionally dick around writing fiction. Look, I'm dicking around right now. That's a rather vulgar way to put it but as you'll remember, the paramour likes the word “dick,” and
every once in a while I find myself using it, and various other salty American expressions. The paramour, after all, is kind of my ideal reader, so I do what I can to be entertaining. In spite of the demands of greatness, my lover has generously reviewed and commented on various failed efforts, claiming to find me a writer of some charm. When pressured, Sandro will also look things over, and Florence can be counted on in a pinch. I can also turn to my mother, though sometimes I hesitate on account of questions of seemliness. I'm sure you see what I mean. But for the last three years, the paramour has generally been the first set of editorial eyes.

 

 

 

Binh and I had a pretty interesting exchange going on for a while there about the significance of plot in a novel. When it comes to literary terminology, Binh tends to use French. In my early efforts, he noted that I appeared to be a
romancière sans intrigue
. He was being a little cheeky. You know,
intrigue
is French for
plot
, but he knew (and pointed out) that because the French term for
novelist
sounded to Anglophone ears like a romanceartist, this would make me sound not like a plotless novelist, but like a really dull lover. Of course, he insisted that contrary to appearances, my plotlessness was actually very arousing. He found my theoretical digressions “sexy.”

Binh's little play on words may have been cheeky, but really, he had a very touching reaction to the manuscripts I'd sent him. I wrote to thank him for his comments, and I answered his etymological questions about the English term
plot
.