Free The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning Page B

they still manifested his completely unique combination of lyricism, intelligence, and humor, the Arrano Beltza was starting to crack a little under the pressure.
    In 1987, against his passionate objections, the extremist wing of the ETA bombed a supermarket garage in Barcelona. Twenty-four innocent people were killed. Santutxo was devastated. The ETA apologized for the “mistake.” There was a particularly sad story about a young girl who had survived the explosion. She was eighteen. She was a ballet dancer. Her left leg had been ripped off by the blast. Disguised as a hospital orderly, Santutxo began visiting her every day. Two years later, Luz was living with him in Donostia, pregnant with Bakar.
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    We were eating pintxos at Goiz Argi in the Parte Vieja when she appeared out of nowhere: an extravagantly beautiful, agonized woman in her 30s, with green eyes, dark brows, cascading black curls, and a prosthetic leg, screaming in Castilian that I was not the aging plain-Jane journalist that she’d been led to believe. And then came the Coke, and the violence.

    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.
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    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,