The Correspondence Artist (19 page)

 

 

 

Of course not everybody feels this way. Certain members of the ETA-M, for example, think he's an ass. And that was the reason, as you will have surmised, that I found myself that night in the stranglehold of that scabrous bald guy with the pierced lip.

“So, Tubal, look at what we've got here,” said his swaggering, mohawked comrade. “This is the Txotxolo's little
andragai
.” She hocked up a wad and spat in the general direction of my feet. I stared at the impressive glob of slobber on the floor. “Well, little American piglet, let's see how much your traitor boyfriend really cares for your little American piglet ass!”

My captors dragged me, struggling, out the back door of the so-called “safe” house. Waiting out back were two more thugs – a short, stocky heavy-metal guy with a bandana tied around his forehead, and a tall, beautiful, young woman with a conspicuous burn scar that stretched from her left cheek down into the deep V of her black V-neck sweater. They wordlessly ground out their cigarettes under foot and joined us in our bungling, contentious march across a small field toward the barn. Since
none of us spoke, the only sound was more of those little dried sticks crackling under their boots. I was really regretting having worn high heels, but how could I have known?

The moon was nearly full, and out there in the country the stars speckled the sky like the pock marks on Tubal's ugly mug. There was a smell of fresh air, manure, and distant smoke.

When we got into the barn, the mohawked ringleader told Tubal to take me up to the loft. She and the others would go back to the house to make a couple of phone calls. Tubal dragged me up some wooden steps toward an enclosed loft. I snagged my thigh-high stockings on the way up and gave a little yelp. That pissed him off. “
Cállate
, American bitch! Nobody'll hear you out here.” We'd reached the loft. He shoved me into a broken, old arm chair and shut the door. I was trying to keep my cool. Tubal and I stared defiantly at one another. He grabbed a hunk of chorizo that was sitting on a plate on a small table. Tossing it into my lap, he snarled, “Nobody's going to hurt you – you'll be out of here in an hour if your old man comes through. Now make yourself at home – but shut up!”

I was gnawing on my hunk of chorizo when, a few minutes later, we heard a rustling noise below, out in front of the barn. Tubal opened the shuttered window of the loft and looked down. Apparently he saw two men poking around the entry to the barn. “Hey,” Tubal shouted in irritation, “what're you doing here?” That wasn't a very bright question, but to tell the truth, Tubal didn't give you the impression of being the brightest bulb.

I was later to learn that the men rustling around in front of the barn were a couple of Garzón's hired henchmen. They weren't cops – Garzón clearly couldn't let it get out that he was protecting the Arrano Beltza's lover – and I have a feeling they were the kind of men who would have played on anybody's team for the right price. Still, I'm very glad they ended up on mine. “Hey!” Tubal shouted again.

He rigged the door to the loft shut with a length of rope and
clattered down the stairs to confront the intruders. I struggled with the rope on the door and managed to pry it open a couple of inches so I could see what was happening below.

Tubal was lumbering toward the two men like a zombie. I screamed. Tubal looked over his shoulder irritatedly.

“She's up in the loft!” one of them said.

“No way you're getting up there!” Tubal shouted threateningly.

“Well,” said the other guy, “it's better to have loft and lost than never to have loft at all.”

That's when the free-for-all started. Tubal was chasing the guys around in circles. Hay was flying everywhere. The chickens started squawking. Two horses watched the action with expressions of boredom. A cow bellowed.

The first hired man took a dive into a haystack, and the second man and Tubal followed. All I could see were sprays of hay shooting up into the air. Suddenly, Garzón's third man came running into the barn with a pitchfork. He ran over to the
lucha libre
in the haystack and poked poor Tubal in the ass.

“
Mierda!
” he shouted, turning to encounter the new threat. He was busy fending off the pitchfork when, to my great relief, Santutxo came running in.

“I'm up here!” I shouted. Santutxo looked up at me with – I swear to you – pure compassion and affection in his eyes. He ran over to Tubal and socked him in the neck. Tubal fell down and Santutxo came running up to the loft.

He'd finished untying the rope from the door and we had a quick embrace when suddenly the other three ETA thugs came running into the barn. Now it was going to get really hot.

Santutxo yelled from the loft, and all eyes turned up to him. The mohawked ringleader had her hand on the pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “Okay,” she said threateningly, “which one of you is the ‘Arrano Beltza?'” Her voice dripped with bitter irony as she pronounced Santutxo's once proud
nom de guerre
.

With the fire of righteousness burning in his eyes, chin thrust forward, Santutxo intoned, “I am the Arrano Beltza.”

There was a pause.

And then Garzón's first hireling, a goofball with a greasepaint moustache, a swallow-tail coat, and a cigar, stepped forward, saying, “I am the Arrano Beltza.” And then the kooky Italian with a pork-pie hat stepped forward, saying, “I am the Arrano Beltza.” And then the guy with the pitchfork, an angelic blond lunatic, stepped forward and honked a bicycle horn. Because this wasn't really a remake of
Spartacus
. This was the last scene of
Monkey Business
.

When the shock had settled on us all, Santutxo took a headlong dive from the loft into the fray. He landed directly on top of the ringleader. Garzón's men joined in and once again the hay was flying. The beautiful woman with the burn scar rose up momentarily, and the loon with the horn bonked her over the head – out cold. The thug with the bandana revived, briefly, only to get bonked himself. Santutxo was having a genuine fisticuffs with Tubal, and the moustachioed mercenary started clanging on a cowbell as though this were a boxing match: “Now they're in the center of the ring, and the crowd ROARS!…” And a cow mooed.

That's when Garzón himself came charging in, and the story was over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, this was a fairly recent exchange we had about Obama and Clinton. Santutxo was enthusiastic about Obama from the get-go, but, as is his wont, he's had a couple of unpredictable moments of jumping ship. For a minute there he got a McCain bee in his bonnet, but fortunately that was short-lived. Of course he'd love to see a woman president, and there are many things he likes about Hillary, but he's very bothered by the fact that she'd be coming in on the coattails of her husband. He hates the idea of a dynasty. Bush II has been more than enough.

He got caught up in the skirmish between Hillary and Obama on religion when it showed up on the Yahoo! homepage. I have to undo a lot of nonsense from Yahoo! I had said that I thought Obama had a hard time concealing his own intelligence, and he probably really did believe on some level that religion was the opiate of the people. And I said I also thought that was true and I knew Santutxo believed the same thing, or something approximating
it. Santutxo grudgingly conceded that, indeed, he believed something like that, even though, at this point in his life, he's disinclined to align himself directly with a Marxist truism.

I did end up going to the iPod rave with Sandro and his friends. It was great. A thousand people turned out in Union Square, each one dancing to his or her own beat. And yet we were also kind of dancing together. I found it very beautiful. Every once in a while somebody would invite you to hear their music, or want to hear yours. I shared for a while with a Jamaican guy, and, briefly, a German techno tourist.

 

 

 

Antonin Artaud loved the Marx Brothers. He said that the moments of “boiling anarchy” in their films represent nothing less than the essential poetic disintegration of reality. When a lady topples over a sofa, or some goon whacks a musical rhythm on his dancing partner's behind, “these events comprise a kind of exercise of intellectual freedom in which the unconscious of each of the characters, repressed by conventions and habits, avenges itself and us at the same time.”

 

 

 

I never found out what “very important” meant. Maybe it was enough that I said it was good to “feel free.” Santutxo suffered a lot in captivity. He still has nightmares. I told you, he's very afraid of dying.

L
et us take stock of the situation.

Something did happen, of course, between me and the paramour, and it involved a purloined letter. But the various versions I've given you are all fictional – obviously. That pseudo-Faulknerian account of the hallucinatory fever in the Bamako clinic was particularly implausible. Dengue fever has an incubation period of four to seven days. It couldn't possibly have happened the way I wrote it. Binh never could have risen to the top of the art world heap on the basis of such juvenile work as the “Nocturnal Emissions” series. I'm sure I don't need to point out the excess of the scene with the snakes, or the one from the Marx Brothers. By the way, you earlier probably should have noted the unlikelihood of somebody like Santutxo being able to get a visa to come to New York to visit me and have dinner with Slavoj Žižek. I narrowly resisted using the other hilarious scene from
Monkey Business
to explain that one – the one in which each of the stow-away Marx Brothers attempts to pass himself off to immigration officials as Maurice Chevalier by singing that ridiculous song.

No, clearly, the catastrophic event precipitated by an undelivered message trapped in my spam filter wasn't an art scandal, or a tropical disease, or a run-in with a crazy stalker, or a terrorist kidnapping. But it was humiliating, scary, sad, and funny – and full of intrigue, in both the French and American senses
of the term. I can't really tell you any more than that. And regarding the use of guidebooks for research: I suppose I should also apologize for that. It's probably pretty evident that this novel was constructed out of some fairly questionable knowledge gleaned from Google, a small, arbitrary stack of library books, a few Netflix DVDs, and my bin of sent e-mails. I'm clearly not an expert in Israeli political fiction, Basque separatism, experimental digital art, or Malian pop music. I now know a little about all these things, but not a lot.