The Correspondence Artist Read Free Page B

paragraphs about the political situation. After all this time, I still find your tirades sexy. And lovable.
    Â 
    Oops, I used the word, in adjectival form. I’ve been trying to avoid it, especially after you told me how American it was, this business of saying “I love you” all the time. But if you can say it why can’t I? I do love you, profoundly, but I’m also not sure if I’m in love with you. It’s hard to understand, because you would think that if you loved someone and you also felt as much desire for them as I feel for you that that would be what being in love was.
    Â 
    But I think being in love is when you allow yourself to enter into a state of fiction, where you become very vulnerable, completely open, naïve, and naked. The fiction is thinking: “I can only be happy with this person.” Of course, your friends always see this for what it is from the outside. They know you could be happy with someone else, if you chose that.
    Â 
    Believing in the fiction of your singular necessity isn’t really possible for me, because of your emotional distance. Also, between us, there are all those other kinds of distance – of language, nation, age, social context. Fame. I won’t even speak of politics because that’s more ambiguous with you. But of course even if you share those things with someone, even if they would seem to correspond to you in so many ways, there are those moments when you realize that they’re miles away from you. Even, I’m sure, if they’re the same sex.
    Â 
    Anyway, being in love. It’s a huge, beautiful luxury. I do it with more facility than you.

    Â 
    The paramour agreed.
    I fell in love almost immediately with Tzipi, but I don’t know why I should feel any safer with her than I do in real life. Still, that’s not why I’ve decided to try something else. It’s that there are some ways in which she really doesn’t correspond to my lover. It’s not what you might think. It’s the question of politics. So far Tzipi appears to be a progressive intellectual who nonetheless enjoys the comforts of bourgeois celebrity. My actual lover’s politics are very complicated. Often extreme. Let’s say, in fact, that he’s the legendary Basque separatist, Santutxo Etxeberria, also known by his alias from his more notorious activist days, the Arrano Beltza (the “black eagle”), or increasingly, since his falling out with the ETA, Txotxolo (“the dumb ass”). He prefers the latter.
    â€œWait,” you’ll say. “I thought you said the paramour was an artist.” But he is. Santutxo is one of the few revolutionaries who raised the struggle to an art form. Well, of course, he once would have said that all revolutionary acts are works of art, but even in his youth he secretly knew that that was mostly puffed up rhetoric, and if pressed, he’d confess that every struggle produced an enormous dung heap of bad poetry. Santutxo was another story. He is completely lyrical.
    I came to know of him, as most people do, through his blog. There was a link from the official site of the EZLN. They’ve since taken it down. Santutxo has a sensitive relationship with El Sup. If you think I’ve had to be discreet about our love affair, it doesn’t even begin to approach what he’s had to keep under his hat about his friend Marcos. Of course, if this weren’t entirely fictional, I really couldn’t be revealing any of this. As it is, I still have to resort to these public personae. Even in his private e-mails to me, Santutxo superstitiously insists on referring to his friend by the various versions of his nom de guerre . But they go back – way back. Which is why no matter how far Santutxo goes off his rocker, El Sup will always have a place for him in his heart. Of course he can’t state this publicly.

    For some, Santutxo is a fallen god. I think falling was