The beach that is deserted on other days is full of people today, the kind who arrive in boats by the dozen and end up having lunch at the aquarium. I take off my wetsuit and sunbathe while I decide what I’m going to do. The captain of one of the boats recognizes me and asks if I want him to take me to San Martín; I tell him no, because I’m going to swim back. He says he’s never heard of anyone undertaking such a feat, and he advises me to start as soon as possible, because after 3:00 p.m. it will be much more difficult with the rising tide. After some twenty minutes, I feel rested enough to set off, and I decide that if I’m tired, I can ask one of the boats to pick me up once I’m close to San Martín.
But…it’s a miracle, there’s not a single jellyfish left! Where could they all have gone? It’s like they were vacuumed up. What luck! Now there’s nothing to stop me from making it back in under three hours….
A while later I take my head from the water and see that San Martín looks farther away than usual. I turn to look back and I notice that the big island also seems to lie at a much greater distance. In any case, there’s no point in going back because the tourist boats have already left. I don’t understand what is happening, and I wonder if I’m seeing things because of the insomnia. I decide to swim as hard as I can, taking my head out of the water every five minutes, but the two islands move farther and farther away. Suddenly, I realize that I’m not in a straight line between two destinations but rather in the vertex of a V: a powerful current, the same one that carried millions of jellyfish away in twenty minutes, is dragging me out to open sea. There isn’t a single tourist boat in sight because it’s lunchtime, and not even a fishing boat because it’s Sunday.
It is already three in the afternoon. There is a breeze and the waves are six feet high. I calculate that now I would need some five hours to reach San Martín. Since night in the tropics starts to fall around six thirty, in about three hours the first lights will come on and I’ll be able to swim toward them. I know that no one drowns with snorkel and fins, because they let you float and swim without getting tired. But in the open water there are always sharks, and unless I find a yacht that has deviated from the usual route, on high seas I will have maybe seventy-two hours of life. I decide to prepare myself to die of thirst, but strangely, I don’t feel afraid. I repeat that “he whom the gods love, dies young,” and I wonder why Pablo ever bothered to save my life.
Pablo again…When will he stop killing everyone who wrongs him? Now he killed the colonel who led the DEA to Tranquilandia and the director of the newspaper who’s been after him for four years! It’s like a wound that won’t scar over: every time I open a newspaper, there he is again…with that evil face of his. I wonder what the newest threats on my answering machine will be! Maybe God wants me to die in the sea and not at the hands of those butchers….Yes, it will be a relief to end all the suffering. I love Rafa a lot, but in these countries you don’t marry a person, you marry a family. Families are terrible…and his father is a horrible old man. I think I’m going to rest, because it’s pointless to struggle against the current and I’ll need all my strength to swim behind a boat, if one ever shows up….
At 4:00 p.m., both islands are mere dots on the horizon. Far in the distance I glimpse—finally!—a beautiful yacht gliding slowly through the water. It seems to be coming toward me, and I tell myself I am incredibly fortunate. But a long time later it goes right past me, and I can see a pair of lovers hugging and kissing on the prow, and an island captain who is whistling on the stern. I start to swim fast behind the boat but no one sees me, and I realize it was a mistake to have bought a black wetsuit to make myself look thinner, instead of the orange or yellow one that Rafa recommended. For the following hours I yell until I have almost no voice, but the noise of the engines prevents anyone from hearing me. I know perfectly well that if I get any closer, the wake of the propellers could yank off my mask, and without the tube for breathing and my contact lenses, I would be even more lost. Around six thirty in the afternoon, when I’m about to lose consciousness from exhaustion after leaping hundreds of times in waves eight feet high, it looks like the captain’s eyes meet mine. He turns off the motors, and I summon all the strength I have to leap again. He shouts to the couple that it looks like there is a dolphin following them, and they move to the stern to get a look. When I jump again and cry for help with the little voice I have left, they can’t believe that they are seeing a woman out in the middle of the ocean. They pull me up onto the yacht, and I tell them I live in San Martín de Pajarales; that I don’t know how to swim freestyle but I’ve spent nine hours in the water and more than five in the open sea; and that I was dragged out by a current. They look at me incredulously, and I collapse onto a bench lined in white plastic, wondering why the hell God has now saved my life fourteen times, and always at the last minute.
When I reach San Martín, Rafa pushes me into the shower and slaps my face over and over, supposedly to wake me up. Then he calls his father and his neighbor Germán Leongómez, uncle of Carlos Pizarro, the new M-19 commander. Those three men subject me to a war council and decide I have to leave on the first plane. Again and again I explain that I was dragged out by a current, and I implore Rafa to let me rest until the next day. But his father yells at him not to believe me and orders him to expel me from the island immediately—without even letting me pack my things—while Leongómez repeats over and over that I was trying to kill myself and I pose a risk for his friends.
At the wheel of his small, old boat and with his back to me, Rafael navigates toward Cartagena in complete silence. While I look out at that lead-gray sea, I tell myself that the man with whom I’ve lived for the past ten months has turned out to be nothing but a “daddy’s boy” who lets other cowards tell him what to do with his woman. I think that Pablo was right, that Rafa isn’t a man but a thirty-five-year-old child, and that at his age Escobar had already built an empire and donated hundreds of houses for thousands of people. When we reach the airport, Rafael tries to kiss me good-bye, but I turn my face away and walk quickly toward the plane. I reach Bogotá at ten at night, shivering with cold in my summer dress, because the Vieiras and their neighbor never even let me take a sip of water. I sleep for ten hours straight, and the next morning, when I get onto the bathroom scale, I see that I’d lost thirteen pounds—almost twelve percent of my body weight—in one single day.
Never again will I answer Rafael Vieira’s calls. When I try to find out the names of the captain and the couple who rescued me from open waters so I can invite them to dinner and thank them, no one can tell me anything about them. Some months later, one person will tell me that “they were mafiosos, and they got killed,” to which I’ll reply that “you could also call people who build mansions and businesses on land stolen from the nation mafiosos.”
A few days later I come down with a respiratory infection, and I visit the well-known ear, nose, and throat doctor Fernando García Espinosa.
“Did you fall into a sewer, Virginia? Because you have three types of streptococci that are only found in human feces! There’s one that over time could seriously affect your heart, and I’m going to have to give you years of vaccinations.”
Every time I’d gone swimming in the ocean, I had encountered “gamalotes,” yellow islands twenty-five to forty feet in diameter made of decomposing plants and detritus. I had skirted them with disgust, and as it turned out, they were emitting millions of microbes into the water around them. But at the beginning of 1987, the infection was only the start of the odyssey that followed my miraculous rescue on the high seas. I had spent the night before crying, because I knew that in order to keep me from returning to TV at any cost, the media owned by the presidential families would make me pay for the newspaper director’s murder. And now that Pablo wasn’t my lover, and thus not my protector, state security organizations were free to do to me what they hadn’t dared do when I was with him.
A few days after my return to Bogotá, Felipe López Caballero c
alls to invite me to dinner. The editor of the magazine Semana has three obsessions in life: Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Pablo Escobar, and Armando de Armas; though I am the only person who knows all three, I have always roundly refused to talk to him about them. Felipe is a tall and beautiful man with Sephardic features, like his brother Alfonso, who is always an ambassador to one of the world capitals. Although affable and seemingly shy, Felipe is a man of ice who has never been able to understand why he, so powerful, elegant, and “presidential,” can’t inspire in me the love I feel for that short, ugly peasant—and criminal summa cum laude—named Pablo Escobar.
His dinner invitation—the first he’s made—surprises me, because while López has always had an “open” marriage, he would never risk being seen in a restaurant with someone who for years has been the target of the most visceral hatred from his wife and his mother-in-law, the unrecognized daughter of Santofimio’s uncle. While we are dining in “The Library,” the restaurant of the Charleston Hotel, he tells me about the recent scandalous events involving his wife, which all of Bogotá is talking about. The straw finally broke the camel’s back, and he’s decided to get a divorce. He is living temporarily in his brother Alfonso’s apartment, and he invites me to see the place. In front of a long wooden table with two huge silver candelabra, Felipe asks me if I would like to marry him. It’s a question I’ve heard dozens of times, and although I have always been gratified, it’s been a while since I was impressed by it.
“Semana never tires of saying that I’m Pablo Escobar’s lover. Since you’ve always had an ‘open’ marriage, do you want, then, to share me with him?”
López asks me not to pay attention to all that nonsense, because he can’t control what every one of his journalists writes about me.
“Then I can only ask you this: If you looked like the King of Cuckolds when you were married to the ugliest woman in Colombia, what will it be like when you’re married to the prettiest? I don’t cheat on my husbands or boyfriends, Felipe, and especially not in public. Plus, I think I already know the only man who could get me to marry again.”
He asks me who it is, and I reply that he’s a European intellectual, eleven years older than me and from a noble family. I add that his greatest charm is that he still doesn’t know that someday he will become the only intelligent choice I’ve made in my entire life.
*
—
THE DECISION to keep anyone from hiring me at any cost no longer knows any bounds imposed by journalistic ethics or logic: from Caracol Radio—directed by Yamid Amat, Alfonso López’s attendant journalist—on down, all the broadcasters in Colombia crow that I threw myself into the ocean to kill myself because I have AIDS. Others swear that I’m dead and my humiliated family had to bury me in secret. An actress who has trained her voice to sound like mine calls the clinics of well-known doctors to say, in tears, that I’m suffering from the most embarrassing and contagious illnesses. The doctors, for their part, have no qualms about repeating left and right at all the cocktail parties that they’re treating me for syphilis.
I’m calmly having lunch dressed in Chanel, in a Salinas restaurant, with Beatriz Ángel de Rugeles, the wife of an IBM executive. Suddenly the radio is shouting that if I’m alive, I should prove it once and for all by appearing before the microphones and cameras. Beatriz Ángel, who owns a chain of video stores, proposes that we should go to the Video Festival in Los Angeles together in order to forget about what happened on the island and escape everything they’re saying about me. She is close friends with Felipe López and tells me he will be there, too, negotiating distribution for his film The Child and the Pope. López has taken advantage of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Colombia to make a feature film with funds from Focine, directed by his close friend María Emma Mejía. And a loan of $800,000 in 1986, with no defined term—plus two hours of free acting from the Holy Father himself—have conspired to make what promises to be a smash box-office hit in Catholic Latin America, only exceeded by productions the size of The Girl with the Blue Backpack.
When I’m about to get on the plane—running, because I’m late—half a dozen photographers and journalists chase me though the airport corridors. They’re from Hoy por Hoy, the magazine published by Diana Turbay, daughter of ex-president Turbay. The headline of the next issue, with me on the cover sporting a mink coat and dark glasses, will be: “Virginia Vallejo Flees the Country!”
The contents of the article will suggest that I’m not running from the paparazzi but from the law.
Beatriz and I stay at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Felipe López, who is staying at an economy hotel, calls to ask me if he can come to the main event as my husband so he won’t have to pay for the fifty-dollar ticket. I have no choice but to accept, because how could I not help a movie producer save such a fortune in Hollywood? After we’ve been there for a while talking, López tells me, “Jon Voight hasn’t taken his eyes off of you for half an hour, because you’re the prettiest girl at the party. Now that I’m finally a free man, you really don’t want to be my girlfriend?”
I look over at Jon Voight, laughing, and I tell Felipe López that according to the magazine Semana, the fearsome and sinister cartel boss Pablo Escobar Gaviria is not willing to share me with the son of the ex-president who turned him into a myth.
*
—
WHEN I AM BACK IN BOGOTÁ and unpacking my suitcases, the phone rings.
“But what is all this they’re doing to you, my love? Why are they saying you have AIDS, that you’re a fugitive, that you have syphilis? Is it true you tried to kill yourself? Are they tormenting you that badly? I’ll tell you what: you’re not going to answer any of these questions over the phone, and tomorrow I’ll send a plane for you. You can tell me in person about everything those Vieiras did to you and what’s behind what that pack of hounds are saying. I’m going to have all those butchers and quacks killed, and I’ll castrate all those murderers with microphones! And Tarzan and his father, too!”
What woman in my situation wouldn’t be dancing with happiness at that news? And even more so with the mariachi serenade that night, with “Amor del Alma” and “Paloma Querida” as incontrovertible proof that her Saint George will always protect her from the dragon? When he spins me around twice the following night and says the only thing that matters is that I’ve returned to his arms, I feel like the most protected woman in the universe. Now nothing and no one can hurt me, and for a few days I don’t care about the threats and anonymous letters, the evil stepsisters and the butchers, the moguls and vipers, extradition and the dead, and whether all the rest of humanity loves or hates me. Nothing, nothing else matters to me except being next to that face, that heart, that torso, and in Pablo Escobar’s arms. And when he swears that when he has me like that, all the other women disappear, that I’m the first and the only and the last, that his hours with me are the only true heaven that an outlaw like him will ever know, I float in the light ether Huxley talked about, because beside that masculine being, time and space disappear from my life, all the substance of which fear is made, and all matter that could contain the slightest bit of suffering. With Pablo I lose my reason, and with me he loses his head; and then all that’s left are a man pursued by justice and a woman pursued by the media who know and take care of and need each other, despite the pain caused by all the absences, all his crimes and her sins.
“So the Vieiras forced you to get on a plane after struggling against a current in open waters and losing thirteen pounds in one afternoon?! They’re a bunch of murderers…and you are a heroine! I’m going to blow that daddy’s boy’s boat to bits! There’s a member of the ETA who’s an expert in explosives and wants to come over from Spain to work with me. I’m told he’s a genius, and I want to find out if it’s true.”
“But, Pablo…isn’t the ETA…a little much to send to Tarzan? It’s not as if San Martín de Pajarales is the Kremlin…or the Pentagon!”
“No, no, they’re just common coward
s…but I need the guy to start practicing now, because there’s a war coming. And I have other plans for the Pentagon: I’m going to get that missile whatever it takes, if I have to go to the ends of the earth.”
I ask him what missile he’s talking about, and he reminds me of the one he had initially planned to use to protect the airspace over Nápoles. Since a missile can only be used once, he’s changed his mind: he plans to hit a worthwhile target, and it’s not the Colombian air force or the presidential palace. The latter and the Presidential Guard Battalion can be neutralized with a few bazooka hits, without the need for a missile that’s so expensive and complicated to get. But if he hits the Pentagon right in the middle of the building, the U.S. defense systems will be annulled, along with their communications with allies. That’s why he’s trying to contact Adnan Khashoggi, who is the richest arms dealer in the world and a man who balks at nothing.
“The Pentagon? Wow…woooow. But…haven’t you seen the Pink Panther movies where there’s a thousand-carat diamond protected by a bunch of crisscrossed rays that can only be seen with special glasses? How can you not remember? That’s what you’ll find at the Pentagon! Or don’t you think the Russians would have hit the gringos with missiles a while ago, if it were that easy? There are thousands and thousands of miles of airspace protected by an impressive weave of invisible rays; yes, sir, I believe they’re called lasers! And the White House and Fort Knox must be the same. Ay, my love! You’re starting to seem like those bad guys in the James Bond movies. Like Goldfinger, willing to wipe out all of humanity in order to achieve their goal. Extradition isn’t worth all that….”
He looks at me wild with rage, and I think he’s about to strangle me.
“That’s what you think, Virginia! Extradition is worth all that and anything else I have to do. Everything, everything, everything, and don’t say such an outrageous thing again or I’ll throw you out the window! And the Pentagon isn’t protected by any rays, visible or invisible. I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to send that missile. People are convinced the gringos are so invulnerable and smart, but it’s not true. How do you think I get millions of tons of coke in there, which have already gone down from $50,000 a kilo to $14,000 since I’ve known you? Have you still not realized that we Colombians are much smarter than them?”
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 29