Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  “Not that, Pablo! We agreed you would only blindfold me. I just nearly broke my neck, and it doesn’t make sense to handcuff a groggy featherweight. As for gagging me, you should at least wait until the circulation between my head and my body starts up again!”

  “Agreed. I’ll only handcuff you if you try to jump up, because I never underestimate a panther with delusions of genius.”

  “And I wouldn’t jump, because I would never underestimate a criminal with the delusions of a schizophrenic.”

  After a long pause that seems to last an eternity, he says suddenly, “We’re going to see how true it is that the blind have extra-sharp hearing….”

  I hear his shoes treading on the carpet and a combination safe being opened. Then, the unmistakable sound of six bullets entering the chamber of a revolver, one after the other, and the snap of the gun when the safety is removed. After that, everything is silent. Seconds later he is behind me, speaking into my ear in a whispery voice while his left hand holds me by the hair and the other slides the barrel of the gun in circles on my neck, around and around:

  “You know, people in my line of work are referred to as ‘the magicians.’ That’s because we work miracles. As the king of those magicians, only I know the secret formula to reattach this body that drives me crazy to that little head I adore. Abracadabra…imagine we’re gluing it with a diamond necklace…around this swan’s neck…so thin…so fragile I could break it in two with my bare hands. Abracadabra…once around…twice…three times. How do they feel?”

  I tell him the diamonds are cold, and they hurt, and they’re very small for my taste. And that it’s not the promise he made me, and since it’s improvisation, it doesn’t count.

  “Everything counts between the two of us, my love. You’ve never felt a gun on your skin before. This silken skin…so golden, so perfectly cared for…without a scratch…without a scar, isn’t that right?”

  “Careful with the blindfold, it could fall off and ruin the surprise of the century, Pablo! I think you should know that I practice shooting with the police in Bogotá—with a Smith and Wesson—and that, according to my trainer, I have better aim than some officers with twenty-twenty vision.”

  He tells me I’m just full of surprises, but that it’s one thing to have a gun in my hand and another for it to be held by a murderer and pointed at my temple. He adds that he’s been in that position, too, and he asks if it’s not absolutely terrifying.

  “Quite the opposite: it’s absolutely exquisite! Ooohhh…what could be more divine…more sublime,” I say, throwing my head back and sighing in pleasure while he unbuttons my shirt dress and the gun starts to descend along my throat toward my heart. “And, in any case, you’re only a sadist…not a murderer.”

  “That’s what you think, my dear. I am a serial killer….Now tell me why you like it so much. You surprise me….Go on!”

  Slowly, I tell him that a gun is always…a temptation. Eve’s sweet apple. An intimate friend who offers us the option of ending it all and flying up to heaven when there’s no other way out…or to hell, in the case of…confessed murderers.

  “What else? Keep talking until I give you permission to stop,” he says in a hoarse voice, lowering the upper part of my dress to kiss me on the nape of my neck and my shoulders. I obey and continue:

  “It’s silent…like the perfect accomplice. It’s more dangerous than all your worst enemies put together. When it explodes, it sounds…let me think…like…like…the bars of San Quentin prison! Yes, yes, the bars slamming in a gringo prison sound like bullets, morning, noon, and night. Now, that must be absolutely terrifying, right, my love?”

  “So that’s how it is, you perverse little creature. Now tell me what it’s like…physically. And if you stand up, I’ll gag you with tape over your mouth and nose so you won’t be able to breathe, and I won’t be responsible for what this mere sadist would do to you!” he orders as he starts to caress me with his left hand, and the revolver descends slowly in a straight line down my breast and my diaphragm, across my waist and toward my abdomen.

  “It’s big…and I think it’s very masculine. It’s rigid…and hard…and it has a duct in the center. But it’s cold, because it’s metal…and it’s not made of what you are, is it? And now that you’ve heard what you wanted to hear, I swear to you, Pablo, if you go one millimeter lower I’ll get up from this chair, go back to Bogotá, and you’ll never see me again!”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he says, with a guilty little laugh of resignation. “The things that occur to a guy when he’s got an utterly defenseless sex symbol in his hands. Okay, wet blanket, let’s move on…but I warn you that you’ll have to wait for me to finish my job with the duct tape, because I’m almost as much of a perfectionist as you are.”

  “And you have to understand that for someone like me, these games are really very elementary. I’ve been waiting days for my surprise, and you’d better hope it’s up to my expectations!”

  In an authoritative voice he tells me that here, the only one who decides what is and isn’t elementary is him.

  “I know what you’re going to show me: your gun collection, because you’re going to give me one! Like the ones the Bond girls have, of course! Can I take off the blindfold now so I can choose the prettiest and deadliest one?”

  “You take the blindfold off when I say! Have you not realized yet that the only one who gives orders here is the murderer who owns the gun, the sadist who owns the camera, the macho who has the brute strength, and the rich man who owns the territory, and not a poor little woman who weighs a hundred and twenty pounds and has an obviously inferior IQ? You only have to wait a few minutes. I’m just going to cover…where these last four are from…and there we are! It’s for your own good: imagine if in the future someone was torturing you horribly, for days and days, to get information on what you’re about to see. Or what if you turn out to be a Mata Hari, and someday…you betray me?”

  “They’re stolen diamonds, right, my love? Thousands and thousands of carats, that’s it!”

  “Don’t be such an optimist. I would never show you those, because you’d steal the biggest ones and swallow them, and then I’d have to cut you open with these scissors to fish them out of your belly!”

  I can’t stop laughing at the image of me choking down diamonds. Then I think of another theory.

  “I’ve got it. How did I not think of this sooner? You’re going to show me the kilos of coke ‘made in Colombia’ and packed for exportation to the United States! Do you seal them with duct tape? Finally, I’m going to get to see them. Is it true that each one looks like two pounds of butter and has the brand La Reina?”

  “But what a lack of imagination! You’re a real disappointment. Any one of my partners can see that, or my men, my pilots, my customers, even the DEA. I told you that what I’m going to show you, no one has seen—or will ever see. No one but you. Okay…we’re ready. Now I can sit at the feet of my queen to watch the reaction on her face. I promise you’re never going to forget this night. One…two…three: I order you to take off the blindfold!”

  There are blue ones, green ones, wine-colored, brown, black ones. And, before I can leap forward to try to examine them up close, a steel handcuff closes with a click! around my right ankle, and my foot is attached to the chair. The only reason I don’t fall face-first on the floor with the chair on top of me is because Pablo jumps up and catches me in the air. He squeezes me in his arms and kisses me again and again, laughing nonstop as he exclaims, “I knew you were dangerous, you tricky panther! You’re going to pay for that! If you want to see them, you have to first tell me that you love me as you’ve never loved anyone before! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Say you adore me. Go on, say it now! If you don’t, I won’t let you look, not up close or from far away!”

  “I’m not going to say what you want to hear, I’m going to say what I want, understand? And that is that you are…you are…you’re a genius, Pablo! The greatest prodigy of the underw
orld, ever!” And in a nearly inaudible voice, as if someone could be listening to us, I shoot off a barrage of questions, which I know he loves:

  “Are they all yours? How many are there? How much do they cost? How do you get them? Let me see the photos and your names! Give me the key to the cuffs, Pablo, they’re hurting my ankle! Let this poor blind girl look at them from up close; don’t be such a sadist, I’m begging you! I want to take the duct tape off the names of all the countries so I can see!”

  “No, no, no! I bet you, my prodigy of the up-and-up world, never would have thought someone from my world could be so, so popular that fourteen nations have granted him citizenship!”

  “Wooow! Now I know what all that money—along with an exceptional criminal IQ—is good for. It looks like half the UN is fighting for the honor….But I don’t see the United States anywhere, which in your profession must be priority number one, right?”

  “Well, my love…Rome wasn’t built in a day! And seven percent of all the countries in the world isn’t such a bad start…and at my tender age. For now you can only see the photos. My nationalities and names you’ll find out as we use them. Not even I know them yet.”

  “You see? I’m the only person you can trust who can help you with the correct pronunciation in five languages! At the tender age of seventeen, I was already a phonetics teacher at the Instituto Colombo Americano. Aren’t I just a treasure of a girlfriend? How are we going to go to a foreign country if you can’t pronounce your own name, Pablo? We have to start practicing now, so you don’t arouse suspicion down the road. You have to understand it’s for your own good, dearest love of my life.”

  “No and no, period. For now there’s only one more phase to the surprise, and then comes the champagne reward. The pink rosé that comes in the most beautiful bottle of all, isn’t that right?”

  Without taking off the cuffs, he makes me sit back down in the chair, and he kneels down in front of me, facing the double line of passports spread out on the floor six feet away. He has covered the names of the countries with duct tape, and also his own names and birth dates on the inside pages. Then, like a child with new toys on Christmas morning, he starts to show me each of the fourteen photographs. Hypnotized, I watch the parade of unimaginable, inconceivable, unthinkable versions of the face of the man I love.

  “In this one I have my head shaved. Here I am with glasses and a goatee, like a Marxist intellectual. I have an Afro in this one. Awful, isn’t it? Here I am as an Arab; my friend the Saudi prince got it for me. I dyed my hair blond for this one; and for this other one, where I’m a redhead, I had to go to a beauty salon, where the women looked at me like I was a marica, a fag. In this one I’m wearing a wig. Here I don’t have a mustache, and here I’ve got a thick beard. How about this one, bald on top and with little glasses, like Professor Calculus in Tintin? It’s great, right? I look horrible in almost all of them, but not even my own mother would recognize me! Which one’s your favorite?”

  “All of them, Pablo, all of them! You look hilarious! I’ve never seen a more sensational collection. You’re the most lawless person I’ve met in my life, the biggest bandit who’s walked the face of the earth,” I say in praise, laughing nonstop while he returns his passports to their places. “How could anyone get bored with you? You really know how to have fun!”

  He closes the safe, leaves the revolver on the desk, and comes toward me. He caresses my face with great tenderness, and without a word, he removes the cuffs. He kisses my ankle—which now boasts a thick red line—over and over. Then he places me on the bed and gently massages the part of my head that hit the roof of the car.

  “You may not believe it, but what I love most in the world isn’t this head or this body that are so…multidimensional,” he tells me, now with his usual voice. “And bruised!” he adds, laughing. “It’s all that gold of yours pressed up against me, like this, the way we are now.”

  Surprised, I tell him that if there’s anyone in that room who doesn’t have an ounce of gold, it’s precisely me. And he murmurs in my ear that I have the biggest heart of gold in the world, because, he says, I start out as his challenge, and in spite of all the terrible tests he puts me through, I never complain and, in the end, I am his prize.

  “Since my heart is inside yours, I know everything about you. And now that we’ve both won, we can lose our heads together, right? Abracadabra, my darling Marie Antoinette…”

  When he falls asleep, I check the revolver. It’s loaded with six bullets. I go out onto the terrace and I see that below there are four cars with bodyguards parked on each corner of the street. I know they would give their lives for him. I would, too, without thinking twice. I am now soothed, and I fall asleep happy. When I wake up, he’s already gone.

  Two Future Presidents and Twenty Love Poems

  AFTER AMASSING A COLOSSAL FORTUNE, Pablo’s goal is to use his money to become the most popular political leader of all time. And, how could it be anything else but madness, delusions of grandeur, an overwhelming cult of personality? His aspiration is an unheard-of extravagance; to give away ten thousand houses to homeless families and to end hunger in a city of one million people—a useless expenditure in Colombia, possibly a country with the stingiest tycoons in all of Latin America.

  People who possess fabulous riches live in constant doubt as to whether they are loved only for their money. Thus they are almost as insecure and untrusting in matters of the heart as women who are famous for their beauty, who are always wondering if men really need them as wives or girlfriends, or just want to show them off as possessions or hunting trophies. But when it comes to Pablo, he is utterly convinced he is loved not for his wealth but for himself—by his followers, his army, his women, his friends, his family, and, obviously, by me. While he is correct, I can’t help but wonder if his extreme sensitivity, combined with what seems to be a pathologically obsessive personality, will be able to handle the pitfalls of the fame that’s approaching. In particular, the antagonism it will bring him in a country where people proverbially “don’t die of cancer, but of envy.”

  I see Pablo for the second time in public at the grand opening of one of his basketball courts. His political movement, Civismo en Marcha (Civic-mindedness in Motion), extols healthy recreation and he has a passion for sports, so Pablo plans to donate a court to all the poorest neighborhoods in Medellín and Envigado, and to install lighting on all the city’s soccer fields. When we met, he had already donated several dozen.

  That evening, he introduces me to more of his family, lower-middle-class people without an ounce of evil in their very serious faces. I also meet his twenty-three-year-old wife, Victoria Henao, mother of Juan Pablo, his six-year-old son. The Nanny, “La Tata” as everyone calls her, isn’t pretty, but her face has a certain dignity. Only her earrings—two solitary diamonds of unheard-of size—could give her away as the wife of one of the country’s richest men. She wears her hair very short, she’s dark and small, and her evident timidity contrasts with his poise. Unlike Pablo and me, who feel like fish in water when we’re in a crowd, she doesn’t seem to enjoy the event very much. Something tells me she is starting to view her husband’s growing popularity with some unease. She greets me coldly and with the same mistrust I read in the eyes of almost all of Pablo’s family. She looks at him with absolute adoration, and he stares at her enraptured. I watch them both with a smile, because I have never felt jealous of anyone. Fortunately, my passion for Pablo is not exclusive or possessive; I love him with heart and soul, body and brain, madly but not irrationally, because I love myself above him. And my insight leads me to question if, after seven years of marriage, those mooning lovers’ gazes might not really answer to the need to publicly clear up any doubts about their relationship.

  As I study his family with the triple perspective afforded by the lover’s intimacy, the journalist’s objectivity, and the spectator’s distance, I seem to see an enormous shadow hanging over the idyllic scene and the crowd of people
pushing toward Pablo to thank him for the thousands of supplies he distributes weekly among the poor. The kind of sadness that accompanies a premonition—inexplicable and heavy with doubt—enfolds me suddenly, and I wonder if those triumphant scenes of multicolored balloons and raucous music could be mere illusions, fireworks, houses of cards. When the shadow moves away, I can clearly see what no one else seems to have noticed: that over Pablo’s whole extended family—dressed in their new clothes and jewelry sprung from a formidable newly born fortune—fear looms. Fear of something that has been gestating for a long time, and that could explode at any moment like a volcano of biblical proportions.

  These disturbing feelings pass through me and disappear while Pablo is basking in the warmth of the crowd, the admiration and applause. Things that for me are everyday reality, tokens of my job as a TV host and at countless events, accustomed since age twenty-two to the cries of bravo! in a theater or a jeering stadium. But for Pablo they are oxygen, the only reason for his existence, the first steps on the path to fame. It’s clear that his ardent political discourse touches something deep in the common people’s hearts. As I listen to him, I think of the words of Shakespeare that Mark Antony says at Julius Caesar’s burial: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” I wonder what the fate of this man will be, this strange combination of benefactor and bandit, so young and naive, with whom I’ve also fallen in love. Will he know how to play his cards right? Will he learn someday to speak in public with a less marked accent and a more mannered tone? Will my diamond in the rough polish his elementary speeches to transmit a powerful message that can reach beyond the provinces? Will he manage to find some more controlled form of passion in order to get what he wants, and an even more intelligent one to keep it? After several minutes pass, the joy that has come over all those poor families spreads to me, and I share in their hopes and illusions. I thank God for sending the only large-scale benefactor that Colombia has produced for as long as I can remember, and full of enthusiasm, I join in the people’s celebration.