The child Omayra dies, but another twenty-one thousand have survived the drama in Tolima with injuries and property damage. In a matter of minutes, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano had erupted and swelled the peaceful Lagunilla River with lava and volcanic rock, and around midnight, it had descended over Armero now converted into a torrent several miles wide. The millions of tons of mud and rubble has literally wiped from the map a prosperous town that had existed for ninety years. There are warnings before all of Colombia’s tragedies, and this one was no exception: for several months the volcanologists have been warning about the enormous fumaroles coming from the crater, but in its proverbial indifference the state decided to ignore them. Because how could the government evacuate fifty thousand people, and where could they put them up for days or weeks on end?
The two catastrophes in a row leave the country in deep mourning and with the most profound feeling of impotence. But the Armero disaster is a true blessing for the military men who’ve tired of raping and strangling the prisoners from the Palace of Justice, of yanking out fingernails, of pouring baths of sulfuric acid, of incinerating and throwing bodies into garbage dumps; now they want to recover at any cost their image as public servants in times of calamity. They put their men, resources, planes, and helicopters at the disposal of the thousands of people who have been left injured, wounded, or homeless. Overnight, they’ve stopped being villains and become saviors.
All that horror, the endless stories of unbearable suffering and irreparable loss, is shown morning, noon, and night on TV. And all those torrents of tears and collective pain combine with my own, and as I finally accept the selfishness, blindness, and irresponsibility of the man I had loved, I’m left feeling guilty for being alive and wishing only that I were in peace with the dead.
*
—
SOME TWO MONTHS LATER, my friend Alice de Rasmussen invites me to spend a few days at her house in the Rosario Islands, the small archipelago situated thirty-five miles from Cartagena de Indias. It is a national park, a collection of coral islands owned by the Colombian nation, but dozens of families from the traditional, well-off spheres of Cartagena, Bogotá, and Medellín have built all sorts of houses and mansions there. They are technically denominated as “improvements.” In Colombia, the country where anything goes, common practices end up turning into legal ones. While the islands belong to the state, the surface land really belongs to whoever has appropriated it with the intention of “improving” it with sumptuous buildings. And who cares about the fact that the submerged part of an island in the Colombian zone of luxury tourism belongs to someone else? By 1986, there isn’t a single vacant lot left, every lot is worth a small fortune, and the price of the most humble house doesn’t go below a quarter of a million dollars.
Rafael Vieira Op Den Bosch is the son of one of the white colonists of the Rosario Islands national park and a Caribbean-Dutch mother. He is thirty-four years old, and though he doesn’t have a zoo, he is an ecologist who is respected by the tourists, his neighbors, and the director of that reserve on whose domain he and his family have built the profitable business of the Oceanario Aquarium. Rafa, as everyone calls him, isn’t rich, but he sells eight hundred lunches a day. He isn’t short, ugly, and chubby, but rather tall, beautiful, and athletic. He doesn’t have speedboats, just an old enormous fishing boat. He doesn’t collect giraffes and elephants but rather barracudas and dolphins, and the only thing he has in common with Pablo Escobar is Pancho Villa: while Pablo kills people—and in photos where he’s dressed in a traditional hat and charro costume he looks like the Mexican bandit reincarnated—Rafa has only kidnapped “Pancho Villa,” a ferocious lemon shark, and in his minuscule bathing suit, he looks like a carbon copy of Kris Kristofferson.
I have been sad and terribly alone for months, and it’s not hard for me to fall in love at first sight with someone as beautiful as Rafael Vieira, while he supposedly also falls in love with my smile and my breasts. He nicknames me “Pussycat,” and I stay and live with him from the very first day. With him are his fish, his crustaceans, his dolphins, his sharks, and his cause: preserving marine life in a country and a national park where one of the oldest traditions is fishing with dynamite to save time and money, because what matters most is rum and today, not children or tomorrow.
In San Martín de Pajarales, the Vieiras’ tiny island, there are no beaches or palm trees, and fresh water is a luxury. A dozen and a half Afro-Colombian workers who are descended from the island’s original inhabitants live there, and so does Rafael’s mother. His father and stepmother live in Miami, and his brothers in Bogotá. There are a dozen little houses, and the door of ours is always open. Rafa works all day on the expansion of the aquarium while I swim, dive, and learn the names of all the animal species of the Caribbean Sea in Latin, English, and Spanish. In the spirit of Cousteau, I become an authentic expert in the ethology of the crustaceans, and in the spirit of Darwin, I learn why sharks have evolved a perfect design over three hundred million years, while we humans evolved over only five million years and have all kinds of defects, like my myopia. I realize that it’s because we descend from a bunch of simians who took millions of years to learn to walk on two legs and much longer to become hunters, and not from marine species, so much more inquisitive, adventurous, and free.
Rafa teaches me to fish and to dive with an oxygen tank. He teaches me to lose my fear of the manta rays that sometimes play with us and of the curious barracudas that swim around the humans to study that most predatory of species, the only one on the planet that tortures. He convinces me that the animals in the ocean don’t attack unless they are stepped on or harpooned wrong, but I refuse to learn how to do it correctly because I don’t like to kill or hurt any creature—I’d rather care for them all. With every day that passes I descend deeper without the help of a tank, and my lung capacity gradually expands. Since I swim six or seven hours a day, farther and farther, I become something of an athlete and I look several years younger. At the end of the day, Rafa and I always have a drink on a small pier he built with his own hands—like almost everything on the island—and watch the sunset over an incandescent horizon while we talk about environmental subjects, his trips to Africa, animals, and evolution. He doesn’t like books, either, but he does like stories, and at night I read him Hemingway’s. My life is now incredibly simple, and we are so happy we talk about the possibility of getting married down the road and even having children.
Every six weeks I spend a few days in Bogotá. The city now seems like an inhospitable and strange place where you have to always keep up the usual defenses of femina sapiens—long, painted witch’s nails, makeup, hairstyle, tailored suit with silk blouse, long stockings and stiletto heels. You have to be dependent on a bunch of cosmopolitan and malicious people who talk nonstop about infidelities and conspiracies, and who look at me with profound compassion and a bit of envy because I left behind my career, my trips, and my social life to go live “on a microscopic island, for the love of a beach boy known for being pretty and penniless.” I stop by my apartment, pay the bills, and quickly return to my maritime life and Rafa’s loving arms. One morning, on one of those visits toward the middle of 1986, as I’m going through my mail, I open a manila envelope that looks like it contains a magazine.
Nothing, nothing in the world could have prepared me for what it really holds: photographs of sixteen dismembered cadavers that return me to the reality of continental Colombia. And the anonymous text brings me back to the reality of a man I stopped seeing and loving months ago, whose memory is no longer the bittersweet taste of a forbidden fruit, but a series of memories, ever more faded, of uncertainties and agonies as costly as they are useless. It is clear that someone had learned about our meeting with the M-19, possibly a member of the security or military intelligence agencies involved in the most horrifying torture. The letter writer accuses Pablo and Gonzalo of crimes more atrocious than any I could have imagined and swears to make me pay with every drop
of my blood and every inch of skin on my body. After crying for a couple of hours and praying to the victims’ souls to ask for enlightenment as to what I should do, I decide to make two calls: the first is to an acquaintance in Medellín to say I have changed my mind about the seventy-two-carat diamond we had talked about. I tell her that now I do want to show it to the collector (the owner is asking a million dollars for it, and he’s offering me $100,000 in commission for its sale). The other is to my friend Susanita, a real estate agent, to ask her to put my apartment up for sale. Then, instead of traveling to Cartagena, I take the first flight to Medellín.
Gustavo Gaviria receives me immediately with the same distant but sincere affection as always. While we talk about his business, my canceled contracts, and the situation in the country, I notice in the depths of his gaze what seems to be the start of a profound existential disillusionment. After a few minutes chatting, I show him the diamond that, according to what I’ve been told, once belonged to a European royal house. Taking a jeweler’s glass that lets him detect the most insignificant carbon in the most apparently perfect stone, he starts to analyze that crystalline quail’s egg that I’ve brought him.
“Really, it’s one of the biggest rocks I’ve seen in my life….It covers my finger from knuckle to joint. Yes, it must be from a crown….From the price, it’s obviously stolen. But it’s not very clear…yellowish, not white or canary. It’s not expensive…but I don’t like the color and it has carbon flaws….”
“For God’s sake, Gustavo! You and I know that if it were D-flawless or canary, it would be worth four or five times more.”
Someone knocks on the door, and without waiting for Gustavo’s okay, he comes in and closes it behind him.
“Well, look who we have here! It’s the Little Mermaid herself! Isn’t she tan! And to what do we owe this honor?”
“She came to show me this, Pablo,” Gustavo tells him, showing him the diamond. “They’ve canceled all of Virginia’s advertising contracts, and she needs the money from the commission.”
He takes that shining jewel between his thumb and index finger and studies it with his arm extended, at a distance, as he might hold a finger from the decomposing cadaver of his worst enemy. His face shows such disgust that for a second, I think he’s going to throw the million dollars out the window. Then, as if he’s had to overcome the desire to do just that, he looks at his partner and exclaims, “This is a drug business, not Harry Winston! And we don’t make deals with her. If she needs money, let her come to me! And don’t forget, brother, they’re waiting for us in the meeting.”
With a deep sigh, Gaviria tells me he doesn’t buy diamonds of that size because in an emergency they’re impossible to trade or sell for what he’d bought them for. I ask how someone with a billion dollars in cash could have liquidity problems of a million, and he, shrugging his shoulders with a resigned smile, replies that the rich cry, too. He says good-bye with a kiss on the cheek, and when I’m alone with his cousin, I hand him the envelope with the photographs and the anonymous letter.
“I think you should see this. It came in my mail and I had planned to leave it for you with Gustavo. It seems that because of something that you or the Mexican ordered done, someone wants to do the same to me. Who else knew about our meeting with Iván Marino, Pablo? And who was behind Álvaro Fayad’s death in March?”
He opens the envelope and dumps its contents on the table. He is stunned, mute, and stupefied, and he sits down. He doesn’t go pale, because nothing in the world can make him do that. Pablo Escobar has never trembled before things that would make a human being keel over. With Gustavo’s jeweler’s tweezers, he picks up each of the sixteen photos and studies them in silence. Then he reads aloud some parts of the text that accompanies them, and finally, he says to me, “I think you and I are going to have to talk. And for a long time….Are you married?”
I reply that I’m not, but that Rafael is expecting me tonight in Cartagena. He asks me then to go return the diamond, lead my friend to believe that I’m going to travel, and then wait for him in his apartment until he can get free. What he needs to tell me, he says, is a matter of life or death.
“Call your boyfriend or whatever he is, and tell him you missed the plane and you’ll be there tomorrow. And calm down, no one’s going to hurt you, and I don’t have the slightest intention of touching you. I’ll keep these photos so I can have some friends of mine check them for prints. We’ll find out just who this pervert is, not to mention the psycho who sent them to you, and the suicidal son of a bitch who’s accusing me of paying for this bloodbath!”
“No, no, Pablo! Those photos already have hundreds of my prints, and you’re going to make things worse. Don’t show them to anyone or try to find out how they were taken, I beg you! I live on a little island with a man who’s like an angel, and I’m not to blame for the crimes all of you commit,” I tell him, bursting into tears and trying to get the photos back.
He stands up and puts an arm around my shoulders. When he manages to calm me down, he puts the photos into the envelope and promises me that he’ll burn them once he’s studied them carefully to see if the faces correspond to the disappeared people from the Palace of Justice; that is, what’s left of their faces after the sulfuric acid did its work. He insists I spend that night in Medellín, and when I reluctantly agree, he says good-bye and hurries off. Following his instructions, I call Rafael to tell him I’ll be there the next day, that my flight was canceled due to bad weather. I could never talk to him about the terror I feel, and much less about my reasons for sharing it with Pablo. When I reach the apartment and place my suitcase on the bed to unpack some things, I catch a glimpse of something shiny between the carpet’s thick wool threads: it’s a little gold bracelet, and I try it on. My wrist is almost as thin as a child’s, but that worthless chain would have had to be an inch longer for me to clasp it.
When I see Pablo enter a few hours later, I realize that in this year he has aged five. He is barely thirty-six, but his walk seems slower and less sure. I notice he has gained weight and his temples are starting to turn gray; I think how mine are, too, but it’s easier for women to hide it. He seems calmer than in the afternoon, but he looks tired and sad, as if he needed a good hug. His whole face is a question mark; mine, an enormous accusation. When he sees our separate reflections in the mirror that so many times reflected us together, he comments that I could be ten years younger than him and that I look like a golden statue. I thank him politely for a compliment that a year earlier I would have returned with a hundred kisses. He wants to know why I changed my phone number without telling him, and with a half-dozen short, curt phrases, I explain my reasons. After one of his downcast silences, he sighs, looks up, and tells me he understands. Then he looks at me with something like nostalgia for all the dreams that fled, smiles sadly, and adds that, really, he’s very pleased to see me and talk to me again, even if it’s only for a few hours. He asks if I mind if he lies down on the bed, and when I say no, he throws himself heavily onto it, puts his hands behind his neck, and starts to tell me stories about real life and of times as recent as November 6 of the previous year.
“Minister of Justice Carlos Medellín’s secretary was taken to Simón Bolívar Hospital with third-degree burns. When the soldiers came for her, and the burn unit director tried to oppose them, they threatened to accuse him of collaborating with her, a guerrillera, and to take him to a barracks to interrogate him. They flayed that innocent woman for hours in the army cavalry school, and she died while those animals were literally pulling her flesh off in strips. One woman gave birth in an army truck, and they stole the baby; after the birth, they tortured her right there until they killed her. The dismembered cadaver of another pregnant woman was thrown into the Mondoñedo dump. Pilar Guarín, a young woman who was a substitute that day in the cafeteria, was raped for four days in the military garrison. They put her and several of the men into tubs of sulfuric acid, and they buried others in the “ceme
tery” of the cavalry school, where there are hundreds of bodies of people who disappeared during Turbay’s government. And you know why they did all that? To try to get information about seven million dollars that I had supposedly given the M-19 to divide among the military and security organizations. The torture wasn’t to find out who had financed the siege—they already knew that—but to find out where Álvaro Fayad and all that money was, including what I had already given Iván Marino Ospina.”
“How much did you really give the M-19, Pablo?”
“I gave a million in cash to Iván Marino, and I promised them another million in arms and financial aid down the line. Thanks to the landing strip at Nápoles, we were able to bring in some explosives, but the weapons and munitions didn’t make it on time, and that was the tragedy: the plan had to be moved up because that day the court was going to start to study our extraditions, and the evidence against us was overwhelming. The M-19 only wanted to make a proclamation and demand explanations from the president, but everything went wrong. The military set fire to the palace and assassinated the magistrates so there wouldn’t be any witnesses to anything that happened inside. They told Gonzalo everything, and he told me. I can admit in front of you that that million and change was the best deal of my life; but close as he is to the B-2 and as much as he hates the left, neither the Mexican nor I paid the army to assassinate six M-19 commanders! That’s the lowest blow I’ve heard in my life, because Fayad and Ospina weren’t just my friends, they were also our connection to Noriega, the Sandinistas, and Cuba. I have no reason to lie to you, Virginia, because you know me very well and you know what I’m saying is true. And now I can admit that I wanted the highest M-19 commanders to meet you that night because I knew they were going to demand air time from the government, and I thought you could work with them.”
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 26