Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  “Yes, yes. We got him back safe and sound, thank God. Some other time I’ll tell you how.”

  I’m learning to leave for another day any question about what seems to be rescue methods of exceptional force and effectiveness. But I express my skepticism about the MAS’s ability to achieve the same results in every one of the three thousand kidnappings that happen each year in Colombia. I tell him that to end all the abductions he would first have to get rid of several guerrilla groups that total more than thirty thousand men. In a third of a century of trying, the army hasn’t been able to eradicate them. Rather, their numbers seem to grow with every day that passes. I tell him that the rich establishment is going to be happy with MAS—because they won’t have to provide a single peso, or a bullet, or a life—while he will have to bear the costs, the enemies, and the deaths.

  He shrugs and replies he doesn’t care. The only thing he’s interested in is being the leader of his profession and having his colleagues’ support in backing a government that would end the extradition treaty with the United States.

  “In my line of work, everyone’s rich. And now, I want you to rest so you’ll be very beautiful tonight. I invited two of my partners—my cousin Gustavo Gaviria and my brother-in-law Mario Henao—and a small group of friends. I’m going to go check on the work they’re finishing up with on the soccer field we’re donating next Friday. You’ll meet my whole family there. Gustavo is like a brother to me. He’s very intelligent, and he’s the one who practically runs the business. That way I have time to dedicate myself to the things that really interest me: my causes, my social work, and…your lessons, my love.”

  “What’s your next goal…after the Senate?”

  “I’ve told you enough for today. If I’m going to give you all of those million kisses I owe you, we’re going to need about a thousand and one nights. See you later, Virginia.”

  A while later I hear a helicopter’s propeller as it moves off over the vast expanse of his little republic, and I wonder how this man with the heart of a lion is going to manage to balance all those contradictory interests and achieve such outsized goals in just one lifetime.

  Well, at his age he has all the time in the world ahead of him….I sigh, observing a flock of birds that also disappears over a limitless horizon.

  I know that I am attending the birth of a series of events that is going to split the history of my country in two, that the man I love is going to be the protagonist of many of them, and that almost no one seems to be aware of it. I don’t know if this man that God or Fate has placed in my path—so utterly sure of himself, so ambitious, so passionate about every one of his causes and about everything—one day will make me cry oceans the same way he makes me laugh now. But he certainly has all of the elements to become a formidable leader. Luckily for me, he isn’t beautiful or educated, and he’s not a man of the world: Pablo is, simply and completely, fascinating. And I think to myself, He has the most masculine personality I have ever known. He’s a diamond in the rough, and I think he’s never had a woman like me. I am going to try to polish him and teach him everything I’ve learned. And I’m going to make him need me like water in the desert.

  *

  —

  MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Pablo’s partners and family members takes place that night on the terrace of Hacienda Nápoles.

  Gustavo Gaviria Rivero is inscrutable, silent, secretive, distant. Every bit as sure of himself as his cousin Pablo Escobar is, this race-car champion rarely smiles. Though he’s the same age as us, he is, without a doubt, more mature than Pablo. From the first moment my eyes meet those of that small, thin man with straight hair and a fine mustache, everything about him warns me that he doesn’t touch the subject of his business with “civilians.” He seems to be a great observer, and I know he’s there to evaluate me. My intuition quickly tells me that not only is he uninterested in Pablo’s aspiration to fame, but he’s also beginning to worry about his partner’s exorbitant spending on social projects. Unlike his cousin, who is a liberal, Gustavo is affiliated with the Conservative Party. Both of them consume alcohol in minimal quantities, and I notice that they are not interested in music or dancing, either. They are alert: all business, politics, power, and control.

  They are capos recently arrived in the world of the very rich and the even more ambitious, and they have just acquired a new connection: an exquisite diva who by profession is an insider of the most select ranks of political and economic power and who is related to the Holguines, Mosqueras, Sanz de Santamarías, Valenzuelas, Zuletas, Arangos, Caros, Pastranas, Marroquines. And so, as if hypnotized, for the next six hours, none of the three men will glance at another table, another woman, a man, or anything else, not even for an instant.

  Mario Henao, brother of Pablo’s wife, Victoria, has an exhaustive knowledge of and furious adoration for the opera. I realize that he wants to impress me and maybe even instruct me on the subject that would least interest Pablo or Gustavo. And since I know he’s the last ally someone in my position could aspire to, without the slightest consideration for Caruso or Toscanini or La Divina—or for the Capones’ and Gambinos’ legendary passion for those three gods—I steer the conversation directly to Pablo’s and Gustavo’s competencies.

  It takes me hours to get that ice king Gustavo to lower his guard, but my effort bears fruit. I spend nearly two and a half hours interviewing him, and almost as long listening to an enthusiastic lesson about the discipline and precision needed to control a car going 150 miles per hour—the life-or-death, split-second decisions that must be made in order to leave the competition behind and come in first. In the end, both of us know we have won, if not the affection, at least the respect of a key ally. And I have learned where Pablo and his partner get that fierce determination to always be number one, rolling right over anyone who stands in their way, which seems to extend to each and every aspect of their lives. Around us, two dozen tables are occupied by people with last names like Moncada or Galeano, whose first names and faces it would be impossible for me to remember today. Toward midnight, two boys armed with automatic long-range rifles and soaked in sweat run up to where the four of us are talking and yank us back to reality.

  “Mr. X’s wife is here looking for him,” they tell Pablo, “and he’s here with his girlfriend. Imagine the problem, boss! The woman’s mad as a hornet. She’s here with two friends, and they’re demanding we let them in. What should we do?”

  “Tell her to learn to act like a lady. Tell her no self-respecting woman goes looking for a man—whether husband, boyfriend, or lover—anywhere, especially at night. Tell her to be smart and go home and wait there with the frying pan and the rolling pin so she can beat him up when he gets there. But she cannot come inside.”

  The boys return after a while and inform Pablo that the women are determined to get in; they say he knows them.

  “I do know that kind of wild animal, and very well…,” he says with a sigh, as if he had suddenly remembered an episode that made him deeply sad. Then, without hesitation or holding back because of my presence, he orders them:

  “Fire two shots in the air very close to the car. If they keep coming, aim directly at them. And if they still don’t stop, shoot to kill without hesitation. Is that clear?”

  We hear four gunshots. I imagine them reappearing with at least three bodies, and then I wonder who the fourth one might be. Some twenty minutes later, the boys come in panting and sweaty, their hair disheveled. They have scratches all over their faces, hands, and forearms.

  “What a fight, boss! They didn’t get scared even with the gunshots: they punched and kicked us, and you can’t imagine those nails like tigresses’ claws! We had to march them out at gunpoint, with help from two other guys. Poor guy, with what’s waiting for him when he gets home, completely drunk.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. Get a room ready for him so he can spend the night here,” orders Pablo, flaunting his masculine solidarity with his long-suffering peers.
“Otherwise, tomorrow we’ll have to bury him!”

  “These paisas women are fierce, aren’t they? Ave María!” say the three little angels with me, sighing in resignation.

  I’m like Alice in Wonderland as I learn more and more about Pablo’s world. I find out that many of these tough and rich men are literally kicked around by their wives…and I think I can guess why. I wonder about that other “wild animal” he knew so well, and something tells me that it is not his wife.

  With a group of Pablo and Gustavo’s friends, we decide to go out one Sunday and play with the Rolligon. Looking around while we knock over trees with the giant caterpillar-tractor, I long for the laughter of my own friends from seven months ago. I feel nostalgia for my “beautiful people,” the ones I’ve always lived among and with whom I feel at ease anywhere in the world, no matter the language. But the truth is I don’t have time to miss them much because, as we hit a tree trunk, a black and buzzing swarm about three feet wide comes charging at us like a train. I don’t know why—maybe because of that singular destiny God has reserved for me—in a fraction of a second I free-fall out of the Rolligon, hide in the tall grass, and stay so still that I don’t dare to breathe until a quarter of an hour later.

  What seems like a million wasps go flying after those dozen and a half people who derive their living from the traffic of cocaine. Miraculously, not a single one stings me. When Pablo’s men find me an hour later, thanks to my lavender dress, they tell me that some of the guests even had to be hospitalized.

  *

  —

  IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS I would spend a thousand hours by his side and maybe another thousand in his arms, but for reasons that I would only come to understand many months later, from that afternoon on Pablo and I would never return to Nápoles to enjoy time with friends in the place where I had thrice been on the verge of dying, and had almost died of happiness as well. Only once—and to live the most perfect day of his existence and mine—would we return to that paradise where he had saved me from that whirlpool because he wanted all my life for himself. He had decided to steal me from the arms of another man and take over the unexplored spaces of my imagination, the already forgotten times of my memory, and every single inch of skin that in those days housed my existence.

  Eleven years later, all those men who were the age of Christ on the cross would be dead. And this “chronicler of the Indies” survived them all, it’s true; but if someone were to paint today the picture of Alice in Wonderland in that hall of mirrors and mirages, he would see, repeated to the infinite, only the shattered reflections of Munch’s The Scream, my hands clasped to my ears to blot out the blasting of bombs and the moans of the dying, the buzzing of chainsaws and cries of the tortured, the explosions of airplanes and the weeping of mothers, my mouth open in a cry of impotence that only a quarter of a century later has finally managed to escape from my throat, my eyes wide open in horror and fright under the red skies of a country ablaze.

  That huge hacienda still exists—it’s also true—but from the place of reverie where, for a fleeting moment, we shared the most delicious expressions of freedom and beauty, the most loving moments of joy and generosity, and all those of passion and tenderness, the magic vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived. All that is left of that enchanted Eden is the longing of the earthly senses for the colors and the caresses, the laughter and the stars. Hacienda Nápoles would soon become the stage for the legendary conspiracies that would forever change the destiny of my country and its relationship to the rest of the world. But—as in those first scenes of Chronicle of a Death Foretold or The House of the Spirits—today that paradise of the damned is populated only by ghosts.

  All those young men have now been dead for quite some time. But, when it comes to their loves and their hatreds, their pleasures and their pains, their causes and their utopias, their struggles and their battles, allies and rivals, loyalties and betrayals, triumphs and defeats, when it comes to the lives and the deaths that comprise the rest of this story, all this chronicler can tell you is that she wouldn’t dream of trading this story for a briefer time or a less plentiful space.

  PART TWO

  Days of Splendor and Fear

  Oh courage, could you not as well

  Select a second place to dwell

  Not only in that golden tree

  But in the frightened heart of me?

  —The old poet NONNO reciting Tennessee Williams’s “How Calmly Does the Orange Branch” in The Night of the Iguana

  The Caress of a Revolver

  PABLO ESCOBAR had belonged to that small group of privileged children who knew from the tenderest age exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up. He also knew what he didn’t want to be: little Pablo never dreamed of being a pilot or a fireman or a policeman.

  “I just wanted to be rich, richer than the Echevarrías of Medellín and richer than any of the rich people in Colombia, whatever it cost, using all my resources and every one of the tools life placed at my disposal. I swore to myself that if I didn’t have a million dollars by the time I was thirty I would kill myself. With a bullet to the brain,” he confesses to me one day while we’re boarding his Learjet, parked in its private hangar in the Medellín airport along with the rest of his fleet. “Someday soon I’m going to buy a jumbo and fit it out as a flying office, with several bedrooms, bathrooms with showers, a living area, bar, kitchen, and dining room. Sort of a flying yacht. That way, you and I can travel all over the world without anyone knowing or bothering us.”

  Once we’re on the plane, I ask him how we’ll manage to fly around incognito in an aerial palace. He replies that when we get back I’ll find out, because, from now on, every time we see each other he’s going to have a surprise for me that I’ll never forget. He tells me he’s noticed something very interesting: as he tells me his secrets, my own seem to parade across my face, especially my eyes. He adds that when I burst out in joy at discovering something new, my happiness and excitement make him feel as if he’d just won a car race and I was the champagne.

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re the most effervescent thing in the world, Virginia?”

  “All the time!” I exclaim happily, because I know that when it comes to lack of modesty, we’ve both met our match. “And from now on, I’m going to have to close my eyes when I want to protect my deepest secrets. You’re only going to be able to extract them veeeeerrrry slowly…with a bottle opener, made especially for Perrier-Jouët rosé!”

  He replies that that won’t be necessary because, for the next surprise, he plans to blindfold me, and he might also have to handcuff me. With a wide smile I tell him I’ve never been blindfolded or handcuffed, and I ask him if he is, by chance, the kind of sadist you see in the movies.

  “I’m a depraved sadist a thousand times worse than the ones in horror movies, or hadn’t you heard, my love?” he whispers into my ear. Then he takes my face in both his hands and sits looking at it, as if it were a deep well where he sought to quench his most hidden longings. I caress him and tell him we’re the perfect couple because I’m a masochist. He kisses me and tells me he’s always known that.

  When the day of the surprise arrives, Pablo picks me up at the hotel around ten at night. As always, a car with four of his men follows at a prudent distance.

  “I can’t believe that a woman like you doesn’t know how to drive a car, Virginia,” he says, taking off at top speed.

  I reply that any half-literate guy can drive a five-gear bus and that I, who am nearly blind, don’t need my IQ of 146 to drive a car but to cram ten thousand years of civilization into my head. Not to mention to memorize half-hour news programs in five minutes, because I can’t see the teleprompter. He asks me what I would guess his IQ is, and I say it must be around 126, if that.

  “No, ma’am: my minimum confirmed is 156. So don’t be so cocky!”

  I tell him he’s going to have to prove it to me, and I ask him to slow down, because at 110 miles per hour
, we’re going to be two prematurely dead prodigies.

  “We already know that neither of us is afraid of death. Or are you, miss know-it-all? Now you’re going to see what you get for being so arrogant. Today I’m in a very bad mood, and I’m sick of these bodyguards following us everywhere. They don’t leave us alone for a minute, and I’m bored with it. I think there’s only one way to escape them. You see on the other side of the highway, there to my left? You have your seat belt on, right? Well, hold on, because in thirty seconds we’re going to be down there heading in the opposite direction. If it doesn’t work, see you in the next life, Einstein! One…two…threeeeee!”

  The car swerves and rolls over the grass-covered median. After rolling once and spinning three times, it stops ten feet below. I hit my head hard, twice, but I don’t make a sound. Pablo recovers in seconds, puts the car in reverse, and with tires squealing starts driving on the opposite lane of the highway, careening like a madman toward his apartment. We’re there in a few minutes, driving at top speed into the garage; the door clicks shut behind us and the car slams to a stop millimeters from the wall.

  “Pheeew!” he says, exhaling air. “We’ve lost them now, but I think I’m going to have to fire those guys tomorrow. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if someone like me had tried to kidnap me?”

  I smile to myself and keep quiet. I’m in pain, and I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of saying what he wants to hear, which is that another person with his sangfroid hasn’t been born yet. We go up to the penthouse, which is deserted, and I notice a camera across from the bedroom door. I sit down in a low-backed chair, and he stands in front of me with his arms crossed. With a threatening tone and an ice-cold expression in his eyes, he says to me:

  “So now you see who has the higher IQ here. Not to mention who’s got the balls, right? And if you complain or make one false move while I’m preparing the surprise, I’m going to rip that dress in two, film what comes next, and sell the video to the media. Understood, Marilyn? And since I’m a man of my word, we’re going to start by…blindfolding you. I think we’ll also need a roll of duct tape.” He puts a black blindfold over my eyes, tying it firmly with a double knot, all the while humming “Feelin’ Groovy” by Simon and Garfunkel. “And some handcuffs…where did I put those?”