The Correspondence Artist

by Barbara Browning

  The weather is beautiful here. Sandro just discovered Cervantes.

  I hope you are well. I send you a kiss.

  V

  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.

  Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 9:54 a.m.

  Subject: dirty words

  Dirty words in English: I could say these things in bed with you, but it would be a little theatrical (I have nothing against theater) because I’m pretty discreet this way and always have been. Florence finds my erotic poems transcendent, she loves the fact that I only use the word “sex” to refer to genitals, masculine or feminine. I think I say “cock” every once in a while. Pussy is an unsatisfactory word, either too debasing or too silly. Cock is sexy. Dick is ridiculous (it’s in the middle of the word ridiculous, that might be part of it, but it’s also a silly name for a man, as is Willy).

  There are no good words for vagina. Including vagina. Penis is clinical and silly but kind of charming. Vagina is just clinical and weirdly noble and distant. When I was 22 I was sleeping with a boy you would have found very beautiful, he worked washing dishes in the restaurant under my apartment, his name was Jorge, he was very delicate, he loved me, and one day we were walking through the park and he stopped with me beneath a tree and said, “Feel my penis.” He wanted to show me his hard-on. I thought it was so charming he used this word.

  Fuck is a good word. Funny that these words – fuck, dick, cock – are all short and end with – ck. Sharp words, kind of violent.

  Screw has a bad sound, but the image is nice. Slow and circular movement. I like it because I like to screw like that. But the word, like I said, isn’t great.

  I sent you those love letters between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They invented words for all these things. “Tender Buttons” were nipples. You must know that.

  Masturbate is not a word I like particularly. I think I wrote you once that I made love to my whole body thinking of you. I know you don’t like the phrase “to make love” but it was an accurate description. When I masturbate I’d rather make love to my whole body. Make it a project, something ambitious, something beautiful. Not always, but sometimes I like to do that. It doesn’t have to be big – just attentive, careful.

  I love chamber music – I often listen to the Bach cello suites. I don’t generally like to listen to orchestral music. I am a very focused person.

  It made me happy that you imagined me licking your cock. If you were here, if you would let me, I would push you back on my bed and take your cock in my hands and the tip of it in my mouth and I would lick and kiss it and move my hands around the base of it and my cunt would be wet (cunt is a good word! cunt is spelled “cynt” in Chaucer! oh, and we spell hybris “hubris”) my cunt would be wet and tight and hungry for you and while I kissed the tip of your cock I’d slip two fingers inside my cunt and feel it tighten until I couldn’t wait any more and I’d climb on top of you and take you inside of me and I’d kiss your mouth and the kiss would be hot and my breath would be fast and shallow in your mouth and I’d come, I think, immediately.

  And afterwards I’d hold you inside of me and you’d feel me throbbing like that.

  Wouldn’t that be nice?

  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, an
d 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.”

  Obviously, 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.

  Sunday, May 11, 2008, 11:14 a.m.

  Subject: miniature golf

  I loved “Cage was half miniature golf, half wailing castrato.” But the next sentence, “It’s genius to contain such disparate impulses,” is totally narcissistic seeing as you wrote it. But true.

  Walter is my brother, the one you met. HE’S the one who broke his arm falling on the miniature golf course. He likes a lot of things like that – laser tag, truck pulls, bowling – he’s also one of those people who drinks a gallon of Sprite when he goes to the movies. But the music he listens to is that doleful, melancholic, obscure indie rock you spoke of.

  I’m reading The Mandarins. And some books about Tel Aviv, Hanoi, Bamako, El Sup, and the history of the ETA. Research. You didn’t say whether you read that essay by Lethem.

  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.

  Binh liked my piece in Wired. In it, I’d described some of the recurring images in “zona fasciculata” – fleshy, yet abstract; sexual, yet oddly pristine – and I titled the article “Duong Van Binh’s Heart on a Plate.” I was glad they let me do something kind of lyrical like that. It seemed appropriate. He sent me an e-mail when he read it. There was no text, just an embedded image, beautiful, innocent, saturated with color: a split beef heart on a piece of chipped china.

  I was so touched he’d made this image, apparently, for me and me alone. Sandro was very impressed.

  Binh was already getting to be a household word among the youthful YouTube cognoscenti, as well as some of the influential curators and critics of my generation. Interview magazine asked me to fly out to Berlin to speak with him. He said he was glad it was going to be me.

  You may be wondering how I can be flitting off on these international flights with such frequency, given that I’m a single mom. But keep in mind, I’m giving you various fictional versions of a single trip. Still, I must confess, I do leave Sandro home alone with a bit more ease and frequency than some parents might. The first time was that initial meeting with the paramour. Since then, I’ve done it two or three times a year. Sandro’s been completely amenable to this plan. He’s so mature. He’s so tall. I realize that doesn’t mean much. We have a doorman, we’re friendly with our neighbors, and both Florence and Walter call and check in on him. I try not to leave him for more than a few days at a time. He eats take-out. I leave him detailed instructions regarding his homework and piano. So far so good.

  I texted Sandro on my BlackBerry from the hotel room when I got to Berlin. I said, “Dude I can’t believe this hotel room – the bed is on the ceiling.” They’d booked me into the Upside Down Room at the Propeller Island City Lodge. Maybe you’ve heard of this place. Binh had recommended it – it’s run by his friend Lars Stroschen. Binh was about to release a CD of his video soundtracks on Lars’ label, which puts out experimental sound discs. Lars basically runs his hotel to support the label, which obviously doesn’t turn a big profit. Every room in Propeller Island has a theme. In my room, all the furniture was bolted to the ceiling. There were some foam pads you could sit or lie on under the floorboards, but there weren’t many convenient places to put your stuff. It was a little disorienting.

  Of course there are no televisions at Propeller Island. That was kind of a relief – no temptation to watch CNN or MTV. Depending on your perspective, I guess you could say I was lying above the ceiling staring at the floor when Binh texted me to say he was going to be a little late for our dinner date. That was a good thing because I’d lost track of time and hadn’t yet chosen my outfit. I changed my top a couple of times. When I looked at myself in the upside-down mirror, I thought I looked
beautiful but it seemed strange that my hair wasn’t flying upward toward the floor. When Binh texted to say “im in the lobby,” I climbed down the stairwell, running my hands against the wall. By the time I got down there things had righted themselves back to some semblance of reality.

  Still, it was a shock to see him standing there, looking at me with such familiarity. He had a faint smile on his face. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket and he held a helmet in each hand. Before handing me mine, he told me I looked exactly as he’d imagined I would. That was an unusually self-possessed thing for someone his age to say to someone like me. Of course, Binh doesn’t seem his age. He’s one of those people that other people refer to as an “old soul.” We were standing very close to each other in the lobby and it was all strangely intimate. It was the first moment I actually articulated to myself that we might sleep together. You might have thought I’d have figured that out from the photo of the bloody heart. I think I was just afraid to want it.

  He drove us on his scooter to a Vietnamese restaurant he likes called Monsieur Vuong. It’s in the section they call Mitte. It was intensely crowded, but Binh is a regular there and the hostess helpfully ushered us to a corner table in the back. A few people seemed to be watching us as we moved through the crowd. I wondered how many of them realized this was Duong Van Binh. They might just have been looking because he’s so astonishingly beautiful.