Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  “A little anonymity at this point in life won’t do you any harm, will it, my love?”

  “And how old is our nineteenth-century hero, Pablo?” I ask.

  Laughing, he tells me around forty-three, and I tell him that the only Colombian men that age who don’t know who I am are from those tribes in the depths of the jungle that still haven’t heard about the invention of Spanish, or the brassiere.

  “This one is a soldier from the Valle del Cauca who isn’t even afraid of me, and he doesn’t deal in intellectualism or bullshit! Promise me you’re going to follow my lead, and that for once in your life, you’re going to talk about national and local subjects. Swear to me, on what you most love, that you’re not going to bad-mouth Pol Pot or the Cultural Revolution!”

  “Are you insinuating, Pablo, that I can’t ask the supreme commander of this country’s star guerrilla group about the Montoneros’ modus operandi, or about the Shining Path, the IRA and the ETA, the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof, the Black Panthers and the Tamil Tigers, Hamas and Fatah?” I tease him. “What did you bring me for? To talk about the ninth of April, the Sandinistas and Betancur? Surely I can ask about the Moncada Barracks attack, right? Havana is right there, between Cartagena and Miami…”

  “Let him talk about Simón Bolívar and whatever he wants, because he won’t say a word about Fidel Castro, I warn you. This man is the guy I’ve been needing to put an end to all my problems….Let’s not keep him waiting longer. And for the love of God, don’t act like a movie star; it’s enough you’re wearing that dress! You just be simple and charming, as if you were just a nice, discreet girl, okay? One thing, I should warn you that my friend is very high…but you and I have seen it all when it comes to…other people’s weaknesses. Right, my love?”

  I imagine that the Amazonian commander will look like an army sergeant and wear camouflage, that he’ll see me as an intruder in a meeting of very macho men, and that he’ll do everything humanly possible to get rid of me so that Pablo will stay and talk about money. Iván Marino Ospina is a man of medium build, blunt features, wispy hair, and a mustache, and beside him Escobar looks like Adonis. I am sporting a short silk dress with high heels, and when he introduces me, Pablo is overflowing with pride. I realize immediately that this legendary guerrilla chief really isn’t afraid of Pablo or of anyone else, because from the moment he lays eyes on me he doesn’t take them from my face, my body, my legs; he has an inflamed gaze that to this day I don’t remember ever seeing in another man.

  The M-19 leader is wearing civilian clothes, and he tells me he’s coming back after spending several months in Libya. No one travels from South America “to do” Libya, as the middle-class tourists say: they go for business involving oil or arms, and the M-19 is not exactly Standard Oil. Since I know the fascination Pablo feels for dictators, I comment that Muammar Gaddafi made the decision to dethrone Idris I of Libya when he saw him lose five million dollars in a single night—figures at the end of the seventies—in the Monte Carlo casino. I ask Ospina if he knows him, and he says he’s never laid eyes on him, because the M-19 only goes to Libya for combat training. When I try to find out if the “M” has good relations with the Arab League, the men exchange a glance and Pablo proposes we don’t talk any more about the distant African desert, but rather of how hard life is in the Colombian jungle.

  Iván Marino tells me he has spent many years in Colombia’s Eastern Plains. The rivers, of colossal size in the rainy season, include the two hundred main tributaries of the Orinoco, whose basin covers 385,000 square miles of Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Colombian flatlands and jungle. Staring at me and measuring my reaction to every word he says, he starts telling me about temblones, a kind of worm. He explains that because of those creatures, the people fighting against the oligarchy in Bogotá and the imperialism in Washington have to be completely protected when they wade through those currents, especially from the waist down, and the boots and soaked clothing become additional cause for pain and suffering. Pablo and I listen in horror to stories of those animals like spiny corkscrews that tear their victims’ flesh with a kind of forceps when they’re pulled out, after a titanic struggle between the jungle doctor tending the “territory’s” owner and the temblón in dispute of that ownership. And I fall into the trap of asking whether these blessed animals enter the body through the mouth or nose or ears.

  “Much farther down. They get into all the orifices of the body, especially the ones waaaay down! And for our female comrades the problem is double,” says Ospina, devouring me with his eyes as if he wanted to give a demonstration that would convince me.

  Gloria Gaitán has always accused me of displaying abnormal doses of candor for a woman of my age and lucidity, and I show it off now as I ask the supreme commander of M-19, with widened eyes, “And you, Iván Marino, how many temblones have you had to pull out in all these years of revolutionary struggle?”

  Staring at the wall with a certain sadness, as if he had suddenly remembered some dark and painful chapter he thought he had forgotten, he replies, “A few, a few.” Pablo glares at me, and I get up to go to the ladies’ room so as not to submit his friend to any more questions about the subject he chose in order to sell me his revolutionary ideology.

  When I’m back, I stop behind the half-open door because I hear the guerrilla chief demanding something from Escobar in the most peremptory terms:

  “No, brother, no and no. I want one like that. I don’t want any other, period. Just like that one, who’s not missing a thing. Where did you get her, all perfect like that? Uuyyy, brother, the way she crosses and uncrosses her legs…and the way she smiles…and the way she moves! Is she like that in bed? What a heavenly little doll! Now, that’s the kind of woman’s woman I’ve always dreamed of. No…when I think about it, I want two like her! Yes, two in a Jacuzzi, and you can take it out of the million if you want.”

  “From the million…well, let me think about it, brother…because that’s sounding good to me. But we have two problems: one is that, weeeelllll…Virginia is the most famous TV anchorwoman in Colombia. She says that’s like being a movie star in a country without a film industry. Look at her here, in all these magazines, if you don’t believe me. And two, since she knows about everything and talks about everything…she’s my treasure. What I wouldn’t give to have her in duplicate!”

  “But why didn’t you tell me, brother? Okay, okay, okay…sorry, man! Now that I think about it some more, then…two who look like Sophia Loren, you can find me that, right? Doesn’t matter if they’re mute…the more stupid, the better!” exclaims Ospina, rolling with laughter.

  “Of cooooourse, man! I can get as many as you want of those: a brunette Sophia Loren, a blonde one, and even a redhead if she fits in the Jacuzzi!” exclaims Pablo with immense relief. “And don’t worry, it won’t cost you a thing, brother.”

  I am tempted to leave those two men alone and go to sleep, but I decide to go in. When I push the door open, I find the eyes of the most wanted criminal in the world looking in terror at the most wanted guerrilla in Colombia, as though imploring him to shut up; Pablo makes an affectionate gesture to have me sit next to him, but I ignore him and sit beside the table where both have left their machine guns. Since I see that Ospina is still looking at my cover of Al Día—I’m kneeling and I look naked, but I’m really wearing a tiny flesh-colored bikini—I ask him if he wants me to autograph it so he can keep it as a souvenir.

  “Don’t even think about it!” exclaims Pablo, snatching the magazines to put them away in a drawer that he locks with a key. “Imagine if the army found them in a raid, and they interrogated you to find this bandido’s whereabouts? And mine, while they’re at it!”

  I ask Iván Marino why he entered the revolutionary fight. Looking off toward that point in space where we all keep our painful childhood memories, he starts to tell me how, after Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in 1948, in his native Tulúa the conservative “birds” of the Valle del Cauca
murdered three of his uncles, one of them with machetes in front of his eleven children. After a pause, and with profound sadness, I also start to tell him how it happened that my family lost all their land in Cartago—very close to Tulúa—because of those same “birds”: during the first years of La Violencia, my grandfather—a liberal minister married to a conservative landowner—arrived every week at his haciendas and found the administrator dead, with his ears, tongue, and genitals cut off and in the belly of his young wife, impaled or sliced open. If she was pregnant—and the young peasant women always are—it wasn’t unusual to find the fetus in the mouth of the dead husband or in the other torn cavities of the poor woman.

  “You and I know that the only form of depravity that all those conservative ‘birds’ didn’t practice with the peasant women was cannibalism. The men of my family never picked up arms, I don’t know whether out of cowardice or Catholicism. Instead, they sold their land for pennies to the multimillionaire sugar family the Caicedos, who financed those monsters and were supposedly their friends and neighbors.”

  “But how can you compare your situation with ours?” exclaims Ospina. “In your family of oligarchs, ‘the birds’ killed the servants in the absence of their masters. In my family of peasants, they tore people apart in front of their children!”

  I express my horror at all those atrocities, my compassion for all the suffering, and my deep respect for the origins of the Colombian armed conflict. I comment on how strange it is that three such dissimilar stories as ours are gathered here tonight on the country’s most valuable estate: the head of a rebel organization, the number one drug trafficker, and a woman who owns not a square foot of land, but is related to half the country’s oligarchy and is friends with the other half. I say that life takes many turns, and that Pablo is now a landowner many times greater than my great-grandfather and his siblings combined, and that the size of one of his associates’ properties far exceeds that of Pepe Sierra, the richest landowner in the history of Colombia and friend of my ancestors. Since the two men stay silent, I ask Iván Marino why in June the M-19 broke the cease-fire they had agreed on with Betancur’s government. He explains that once they had demobilized, their members and those of other insurgent groups included in the amnesty started turning up murdered by dark forces of the extreme right. I ask him if he’s referring to MAS.

  “No, no, no. Thanks to this man,” he says, pointing to Pablo, “we don’t mess with MAS, and they don’t mess with us. He and I have a common enemy, which is the government…and as you know, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ The minister of defense—General Miguel Vega Uribe—and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Rafael Samudio Molina, have sworn to wipe out the left. If in Turbay’s government they threw us in jail and tortured us, in Betancur’s there won’t be a single one of us left alive. Colombia is still in the hands of ‘birds,’ Laureano and his son Álvaro Gómez, only now they’re military men who think these countries only get fixed with Pinochet’s model: exterminating the unarmed left like cockroaches!”

  “Yes, in my social circle almost no one hides their admiration for the Chilean model, but Álvaro Gómez is no Laureano, comandante….And, though it may be hard for you to believe it, in 1981 I quit the highest-paid job on television for refusing, day after day, to refer to your group as a “band of criminals.” In those days, I was the anchor of 24 Horas, the newscast directed by Mauricio Gómez: Álvaro’s son and Laureano’s grandson.”

  Ospina seems surprised that someone like me could take such a costly political position, and I explain to him that since now I am one of those who have nothing, I also have nothing to lose. Pablo interrupts us to tell him, “Virginia had already been fired from another news program for supporting the creation of a technicians’ union…and she’s just turned down the offer from a channel in Miami because I convinced her to stay here in Colombia, even though all our enemies left her without work. Right there, brother, you’re looking at a woman who’s braver than the two of us put together. That’s why she’s so special, and that’s why I wanted the two of you to meet.”

  He gets up and comes toward me. The guerrilla leader stands up to say good-bye, and it seems that now he is looking at me with new eyes. He is very high, and he reminds his host not to forget the favor he’s promised. Escobar suggests that he go have dinner, and they agree to meet after midnight. Before saying good-bye, I wish him great success in his fight for the rights of the weakest:

  “Take good care, and count on me when you need a microphone…if they ever give me one again.”

  “What did you think of my friend?” Pablo asks me when we’re left alone.

  I tell him that Iván Marino struck me as a brave, audacious man who is convinced of his cause, but that, in effect, he didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

  “People who aren’t afraid of absolutely anything have a suicidal personality…and I think he lacks greatness, Pablo. I can’t imagine Lenin asking Armand Hammer for two prostitutes in front of a journalist; or Mao Zedong, or Fidel Castro, or Ho Chi Minh—who spoke a dozen languages—while they were high. And now tell me: What’s that million for?”

  “To recover my files and set them on fire. And without a record, there’s no way they can extradite me,” Pablo admits with a triumphant smile.

  “But you won’t get your innocence back, Pablo! The justice department and the gringos can rebuild your record! Did Iván Marino put that idea in your head?”

  “You know very well no one puts anything in my head. That’s the only way; there’s no other. It will take them years to rebuild the case…and do you think anyone is going to volunteer to testify against us? Where are they going to find them—Suicide Anonymous?”

  He explains that all the cases against him and his partners are already in the Palace of Justice, and the warnings he had sent to the Supreme Court haven’t done him any good: in a matter of weeks, the Constitutional Court will begin to evaluate the cases in order to fulfill the U.S. requirements to extradite them all.

  “And for grabbing a stack of papers from just one place you are going to pay him a million dollars?”

  “It’s no stack of papers, my love: we’re talking about six thousand files. Let’s say…a few boxes.”

  “I thought your record was a few phone books, not crates of phone books! My God!”

  “Don’t underestimate me, my love. You’re in the arms of the world’s biggest outlaw, and I wanted you to know that in a few months I’ll be a man with no criminal history. I won’t have a past, like you do….” He laughs, and before I can answer him, he silences me with a kiss.

  *

  —

  HE’S PUTTING ON HIS SNEAKERS, and he tells me he’s going to go do his friend the favor he promised before he goes crazy.

  “Pablo, it’s true that the M-19 is used to pulling off spectacular hits, but the Palace of Justice is not the Dominican Embassy….That strike was successful because the residence is on a quiet street, with wide access and exit roads. But the Palace of Justice looks out over Bolívar Square, which is huge and open. The only two exits are narrow and always congested, and the Presidential Guard Battalion is around the corner. What if they fire a shot and they kill some poor secretary with three kids, or one of those cops stationed at the entrance? That building is exposed to everything, my love. Getting into the palace must be easy. Stealing the papers, a little more complicated. But getting out of there is going to be impossible! I don’t know how they’re going to do it…and, well…the truth is, I don’t really want to know.”

  He sits down on the edge of the bed and takes my face in his hands. For a space of time that seems like an eternity, he runs his fingers over it as though trying to memorize it. He stares at me, searching in my eyes to be sure that my evident disapproval of the plan doesn’t hide the risk of some future indiscretion, and he warns me, “You can never, ever talk to anyone about what happened here tonight, understood? You never met Ospina or saw Fayad leaving. And if they a
sk you about me, you haven’t seen me again. Don’t forget for an instant that they interrogate people to death to get information about where these guys are…and things go the worst for someone who knows nothing, because anyone with information ‘sings’ in the first ten minutes! My friend is a skillful strategist, and everyone knows of his bravery in combat. Stop worrying, it’s going to be a clean and fast hit. They’re very professional in these things, and so far they haven’t failed. I know how to choose my people, and that’s also why I chose you…from among ten million women!” he says, kissing my forehead.

  “So many…and why did you want me to meet Iván Marino, Pablo?” I ask him.

  “Because he’s a very important leader, and only someone like him can do me this favor. And you have to have another view of reality, different from that superficial and false high society you live in. And there are other things, too…but I can’t talk about those. I can tell you about my business, so you understand why I can’t call you or see you as often as I’d like, but I can’t talk about my associates’ matters. Now try to rest. In a couple of hours they’ll come for you to get you back to the hotel before dawn. And you’ll see, in a few weeks we’ll be celebrating the operation’s success with your rosé champagne.”

  He wraps me in a comforting hug and kisses my hair several times, the gesture of a man comforting a woman he doesn’t want to lose when he knows she’s sad. He silently caresses both my cheeks, then stands up.