The Correspondence Artist (4 page)

 

 

 

 

Santutxo had figured out for himself the open-endedness of the last line of the sestina. He liked the poem, and had noted that the almost obsessive, repetitive structure echoed some of my writerly maneuvers in the first article I'd written about him – the one that had brought us together. I should perhaps be embarrassed to say that it was Sandro who got me interested in the Arrano Beltza. It was when he was in the 6th grade at a very progressive alternative public school here in Manhattan. His humanities teacher was a young, earnest member of the Green Party named Wesley. He wore sandals even in the winter. He wore a flak jacket. Wesley had asked the class to do reports on “activist role models.” Sandro had some disdain for the poor drudges who could only come up with Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Not that there was anything wrong with them, of course, but he felt he should be looking a little further afield. El Sup was a step in the right direction. And then he found that link to Santutxo's page of communiqués.

It was a goldmine. Soon he had me tethered to the computer as well. There were MP3s of his original ham radio broadcasts, as well as more recent recordings he'd made in English and Spanish. Several of them made our eyes well up with tears. One was so funny we nearly peed in our pants. I did a little internet research on him. Of course, I figured what I was finding was entirely unreliable. It had to be. Each account seemed to contradict another. The individual communiqués, too, were really difficult to dissect. He had a lyrical style that was captivating, but the metaphors were often so attenuated that you ended up losing track of the argument, and suddenly found yourself in utterly unexpected territory. Like a freaky paean to Ronald Reagan.

Santutxo, naturally, posted no photographs of himself, but an image search turned up plenty of snapshots on tribute pages. There were a few from his college days at Deusto, with a floppy mop of black curls, a cigarette dangling from his full lips – Dionysian. Then others from the early '80s in Mexico City – shorn,
with a knit cap and a couple days' growth of beard, speaking into the microphone of the ham radio. Another was carefully posed, in front of the flag bearing the eagle image that had become his moniker. The most recent one I found must have been taken in the mid-'90s. There were traces of grey at his temples, but he was still wiry, tanned, and he flashed an impish smile. I can tell you without exaggeration, he is the most beautiful man in the world. When I showed his picture to Florence, she had to agree.

That's not, of course, why I ended up writing a profile of him for
The Paris Review
. It was a short piece about the small but steadfast cult that remained devoted to his missives, despite their erratic shifts in political perspective. I wrote that the compelling thing about his writing was that it was “theoretical and sensual, ironic and lyrical, bitter and sweet, all at the same time.” I hypothesized that it was due to this unlikely combo that even those who remained true to the revolutionary ideals he'd apparently disavowed continued to be seduced by his language. Of course, not everybody was susceptible. The official stance of the ETA was “Txotxolo”'s excommunication. That's funny, I just realized what an interesting word that is,
excommunication
. That's the kind of thing he loves to think about. How words spill out in all directions, etymologically, historically, cosmologically, politically. He'll wring a single word out like a wet towel – you can't believe what he can get out of three syllables. We had an exchange that lasted for a week about “denigrate.”

My article in
The Paris Review
probably suffered from what the New Critics referred to as the Imitative Fallacy. In fact, my e-mails probably do too. It's hard not to let that kind of thing rub off on you.

Santutxo's English is excellent, if a little stiff. He likes to ask me about obscure words, and also certain slang expressions. He likes dirty words. Last year there was a glitch in our correspondence because the spam filter in my e-mail server had trapped a
message with the word “cunt” in it. He wanted to ask me about it. The word, I mean, but he was also asking after my cunt. He told me he wished I'd use more words like that in bed with him. Just to show you what an unusual person he is, he asked me in the same message if we spelled hubris “hybris.”

After I discovered the filtered message in the spam folder, I answered it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His response began, “Oh I love cunt.” He went on to defend the word
dick
, and then launched into a fairly cranky complaint about my claim to being “focused,” which he interpreted as accusatory. We'd recently been debating the question of focus in sex. I had expressed some doubt about three-person couplings, to use an oxymoron. He'd reported recently engaging in such an event. Let's face it, these opportunities arise with some frequency for a man like Santutxo. Revolutionary sex symbols arouse all kinds of communal ideals in people. I said I had nothing against this in principle, but that in practice it struck me as overly distracting.

Santutxo's answer was, as I said, cranky, and also lengthy and self-contradictory. After passionately arguing for the potential for “focus” while fucking two women, he went off again on the debilitating, anti-feminist fiction that many women clung to, associating sexuality with the bourgeois marital ideal. Still, he reiterated his constitutional tendency toward constancy with a single partner, as evidenced by his two lengthy and largely uninterrupted runs with Amets and Luz. I was surprised to have touched a nerve with that brief reference to focus, despite the obvious affability of the rest of my e-mail. I said, “After I wrote you last I thought maybe you'd just write back, ‘Yes, that would be nice.' I mean about me sucking your cock, and slipping it into my cunt.” He said, “You found my message cranky? But it began, ‘Oh I love cunt.'” I said I might have found that warmer in tone if it had contained the possessive pronoun “your.” I said “I love cunt” sounded like a t-shirt that Sandro might wear (Sandro, like Santutxo, is a committed feminist whose way of expressing it might not always read as such). He thought my desire for a personal pronoun was further evidence of a politically suspect individualism – very “American.”

O
bviously, I've fallen prey to Santutxo's seductive powers, but it's also embarrassingly clear that in making him up, I've exaggerated the paramour's political sacrifices. Even I need a break from this farce. I also experienced a painful twinge of self-consciousness when I realized I'd just approximated the paramour to my son. I'm afraid it's time to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that my lover is closer to a state of adolescent naïveté than you might find appropriate for a woman of my age and experience. One way to configure this would be to tell you, outright, that he's the 22-year-old art world phenomenon, Duong Van Binh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hm. The writing of this chapter was interrupted by my receiving a message from the paramour, and I felt compelled to respond. This strikes me as an unfortunate glitch. I had written
first, it's true, but just because I needed to communicate a small piece of practical information, and I happened to mention, in passing, that my brother had broken his arm under unfortunately silly circumstances. Typical for the paramour to have forgotten my brother's name, even though they've met.

The whole point of beginning this novel, of course, was to displace my excessive interest in the correspondence into a piece of writing of my own. This way, instead of waiting impatiently for ever-dwindling dribs and drabs from my lover, I could just plug away on my own. It's been working pretty well. In fact, I started to find myself waking up hoping for no messages in my inbox, so I could just get straight to the novel, straight to Tzipi, and later Santutxo. But I clearly can't resist stringing the real correspondence along, half-heartedly. Telling a little anecdote, suggesting that essay and so on.

Maybe I'm a little too hard on Binh. What did I expect? The scene of me tethered to the computer with Sandro wasn't inaccurate, but we weren't reading the communiqués of a Basque separatist. We were watching Binh's YouTube postings. Leave it to both Binh and Sandro to be on the cutting edge of these things. It was just a week after the launch of the site, in February of 2005, when Binh uploaded the first in his series of short videos, “zona fasciculata.” “Zona glomerulosa” came later, and the “Bartholin's gland” series didn't start until last year. That first video was uncanny. People started passing the link around. As I watched it, I realized it was either brilliant, or very dumb. But its charm was inescapable. Maybe it was age-inappropriate for me to become fixated on Binh's weird, poetic images. Maybe it was because I was living with a teenager. But I thought I recognized a sophistication in his work. The pared-down references to Tarkovsky, the subtly disjunctive Godardian soundtrack – you could tell he knew more than he was letting on. I wrote up a piece for
Wired
magazine, thinking this was just a curiosity. But somebody from
ArtForum
called me the day it went up, and as
you know, his reputation spread virally. I can't take any credit for that. Anybody with even a modicum of sensitivity could see that Binh's work was a provocation. People wanted to draw connections – to Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Sadie Benning, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat – but I found him unique. Of course there were influences. He's incredibly erudite about art history, as well as the history of experimental film, video, sound, and poetics. Some people accuse him of being derivative. And some people, of course, just find him bad. They think his moments of spare minimalism just indicate that he doesn't have that much to say. I found them very touching.