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I love my politics with a nice dash of sex. True to my generation, I am a dirty detail vulture of the highest order. From Bill Clinton to Eliot Spitzer, I can name them all. I devoured the Starr Report in a couple of days, staked Jessica Cutler's blog before her Washingtonienne book deal, ran out and bought The National Enquirer in the middle of the night and performed endless Google searches for more, more, more.
So it should come as no surprise that when I heard that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford had resurfaced, not from a hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail as previously speculated, but from his mistress's arms in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I'm sitting up in bed, laptop on my knees, eyes devouring every available piece of information.
That is, until I find their correspondence on The State.
Now I'm pacing back and forth in my apartment, barefoot, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I can't read it all—not in one sitting. Something about this is different. Instead of lurid details, I am faced with the mundane details of daily life—Sanford at his farm, his mistress reading on the coast of a Brazilian island—all told in the powerful language of love, that rare blessing that turns the most inane into poetry.
“Don’t know why you think you bore me with the description of your farm,” Maria Belen Chapur assures Sanford in a message shortly after their relationship became romantic in mid-2008. “I am an urban girl but that doesn’t inhibit me from loving other things, specially if they are the ones you love. I was able to imagine the place with every single detail you wrote and had trassmitted (sic) me the love you have for your farm. It sounds to be a great and peaceful place and loved you had shared it with me.”
“Got back an hour ago to civilization and am now in Columbia after what was for me a glorious break from reality down at the farm,” Sanford responds to her. “No phones ringing and tangible evidence of a day’s labors. Though I have started every day by 6 this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds—and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt. It is admittedly weird but one of my more favorite ways of escaping the norms, constant phone calls and formalities that go with the office—and it probably fits with my weakness in doing rather than being—though you opened up a new chapter last week wherein I was happy and content just being.”
I imagined Sanford in South America, Buenos Aires of all places, the city of Carlos Gardel and tango, the refuge of José Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher whose rebuttal to Rene Descartes' “cogito ergo sum,” (“I think therefore I am”) could not have summarized Sanford's dilemma more perfectly: “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (“I am myself and my circumstances”), that tenuous balance between free will and responsibility.
There is a freedom that comes with traveling to a different place. Even in a well-connected world like ours, the illusion of escape persists. That's why we call them get-aways. Imagine a governor able to go out among a people and feel unknown and unreachable in a way he had only felt before at his farm when he was alone.
“I am not in love with him,” Chapur tells Sanford in another e-mail during that summer about the lover she has accompanied to Brazil. “You are my love ... something hard to believe even for myself as it’s also a kind of impossible love, not only because of distance but situation. Sometimes you don’t choose things, they just happen ... I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.”
“I have been specializing in staying focused on decisions and actions of the head for a long time now—and you have my heart,” Sanford responds. “You have oh so many attributes that pulls it in this direction. Do you really
