Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Read online

  “Well, aren’t you a treasure of a girlfriend! What heaven did you come down from? I adore you!” he exclaims in a state of terrible excitation. “My associate, Mr. Molina, will leave for New York on the next flight.”

  I’m learning how to play on his field, but that’s as far as I go: not being a soccer player myself, I prefer to leave the goals to the professionals.

  Pablo’s gratitude is, and will always be, the greatest gift he gives me; his passion is the second. Back in Medellín, he showers me with praise and caresses, then tells me he’s decided to confess the real reason he’s in politics: it’s the parliamentary immunity, plain and simple. A senator or representative cannot be detained by the police, or by the Treasury Department, the Armed Forces, or state intelligence agencies. But he doesn’t tell me this because I’m a treasure of a girlfriend, or his guardian angel, his interview trainer, or his future biographer. Rather, it’s because El Espectador, a newspaper that staunchly supports Galán, has been doing its own tracking, looking into Pablo’s past; and beneath all those stolen gravestones, they’ve found two dead men clamoring for justice: agents from DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, or the Administrative Department of Security), who had caught Escobar and his cousin Gustavo in 1976 on the Colombian-Ecuadoran border with one of their first shipments of pure cocaine and had sent them to jail.

  Pablo already knows my capacity for compassion toward every kind of human suffering. And as he tells me the details of that tragedy that marked his life, I realize he is scrutinizing every one of my reactions.

  “When they were putting me on that plane in Medellín to go serve my time in Pasto, I turned around in handcuffs to say good-bye to my wife, who was fifteen and pregnant with Juan Pablo, and my mother, both in tears. I swore that I would never again let them put me on a plane to send me to jail, and much less on a DEA plane! That’s why I went into politics: to put out an arrest warrant for a congressperson, they have to lift parliamentary immunity first. And in this country, that takes somewhere between six and twelve months.”

  He tells me that thanks to the money and threats they’d dispensed left and right, he and Gustavo had gotten out of jail only three months later. But in 1977 the same agents had captured them again and forced them to beg for their lives, on their knees with their hands up. The only way to get out of it alive was to offer them a massive bribe. After handing over the money, and in spite of Gustavo’s opposition, Escobar killed the DAS detectives with his own hands.

  “I gave them ‘chumbimba corrida’ till I got tired! Otherwise, they would have extorted us for the rest of our lives. And I swore to a judge who sentenced me that she would always ride the bus: every time she buys a car, I set it on fire! There’s no such thing as a small enemy, my love. That’s why I never underestimate them, and I get rid of them before they grow strong.”

  It’s the first time I’ve heard him say “chumbimba corrida.” Others say “pump full of lead”; people like me say “bullets in bulk.” Since I know what it means, I ask him in his own language:

  “And did you also give chumbimba corrida to your father’s kidnappers? And to how many of Martha Nieves Ochoa’s?” Without waiting for an answer or hiding my sarcasm, I go on: “In the end, are there two dead, or twenty, or two hundred, my love?”

  Everything in him transforms. His face hardens and he grabs my head with both hands. He shakes it, trying to communicate an impotence and pain of the kind a man can never admit to a woman, much less a man like him to a woman like me. He gazes at my face with a look of anguish, as if it were a liquid dream trickling through his fingers to disappear forever. Then, with something between a roar and a moan that seems to come from the throat of a wounded lion, he cries, “But don’t you realize they discovered that I am a murderer? And that they’re not going to leave me in peace? And I will never be able to be president? And before I answer you, you’re going to answer this: When they prove all this, are you going to leave me, Virginia?”

  I confess that for an angel caught by surprise, it can be terrifying to find herself in a murderer’s bloodied hands, a demon’s warm lips on hers. But the dance of life and death is the most voluptuous and erotic of all, and in the lifesaving arms of a demon who’d snatched her from death’s embrace, the poor angel finds herself wrapped in an exquisite sensation, one of such perverse and sublime ambivalence that, in the end, she surrenders. And for having been dragged in ecstasy to heaven, she is returned to earth, punished. And that angel, now condemned to the sinful human form, ends up murmuring into the ear of that pardoned demon that she will never leave him, that he will always be inside her, like right now, and in her heart and her mind and her existence until the day death does come for her. And that murderer, comforted, his face still pressed against my tear-dampened neck, surrenders completely and ends confessing, “I adore you as you can’t even dream….Yes, I gave it to my father’s kidnappers, too, and with twice as much pleasure! And now the whole world knows that no one, no one, will extort me or harm my family. And that anyone who has the slightest ability to hurt me is going to have to choose between plata o plomo, money or lead. What they wouldn’t give, all the rich men of this country, to be able to kill the kidnapper of a father or a son with their own hands! Right, my love?”

  “Yes, yes…what wouldn’t they give! And how many of Martha Nieves’s kidnappers did you give chumbi to?” I ask, calmer now.

  “We’ll talk about that another day; it’s much more complicated. That was the M-19….Enough for today, my love.”

  For a long time we embrace in complete silence. Each of us believes we know what the other is thinking. Once again he looks radiantly happy. My tears vanish as though by magic and turn into laughter as he begins to sing and dance for me.

  *

  —

  IN THAT DEFENSE of impunity put to a salsa rhythm, Rubén Blades says that “la vida te da sorpresas y sorpresas te da la vida” (Life gives you surprises, and surprises give you life). And since our life has been turning into a roller coaster, in June 1983 a circuit court judge in Medellín requests that because of his possible ties to the deaths of the two DAS agents Vasco Urquijo and Hernández Patiño, the Honorable Chamber of Representatives lifts the parliamentary immunity from the congressman Pablo Emilio Escobar.

  A Lord and a Drug Lord

  I HAD MET my first version of “the richest man in Colombia” in 1972 at the presidential palace; I was twenty-two, and he was forty-eight and divorced. Days earlier, my first lover had told me he was the second-richest man in Colombia, but a few weeks later, when I saw that smiling reincarnation of Tyrone Power, whom the president’s diminutive secretary introduced as Julio Mario Santo Domingo—and when he saw me in hot pants under a coat that reached my ankles—sparks flew, and the rest was history. For the next twelve years of my life, my boyfriend or secret lover would always be whoever occupied the throne of Colombia’s richest man.

  Ultimately, exceptionally rich or powerful men are every bit as solitary as women who are famous for their glamour or sex appeal. The latter want to find the illusion of protection or security in the arms of a great magnate, and the former dream of holding the illusion of all that beauty against their bodies for a brief moment, before it flees and becomes part of their past. The richest man in the country—who in Colombia is always the stingiest—has two advantages as a boyfriend or lover, and they have nothing to do with money. The first is that a great tycoon is terrified of his wife and of the press, and as such is the only man who doesn’t flaunt a sex symbol like a hunting trophy or say indiscreet things in front of his friends. The second is that, like a peacock, he will parade his encyclopedic knowledge of the exercise and manipulation of power for the woman he is seducing or falling in love with, as long as she shares his codes of social class. Otherwise, they would have no one to laugh about together, and complicit laughter is the greatest of all aphrodisiacs.

  By January 1982, all my exes know I left that poor, ugly Argentine I’d married
in 1978, who’d taken off with a chorus girl. Today, the ex who calls me, happy as can be, is Julio Mario Santo Domingo.

  “Since you are the only Colombian woman one can present everywhere in the world, I want you to meet my great friend David Metcalfe. He’s not that rich, or an Adonis; but next to that guy you were married to, he’s a multimillionaire who looks like Gary Cooper. He’s a legendary lover on two continents, and I’ve been thinking that he’s just what you need now that you ditched that husband. This is the man who’s good for you, doll, before you go falling in love with another poor asshole!”

  Santo Domingo, the Colombian beer mogul, explains that Metcalfe is the grandson of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, viceroy of India and the second man of the British Empire during Queen Victoria’s reign. I learn that the Mountbattens—the last viceroys of India—had been in the wedding party of Curzon’s daughter Lady Alexandra and “Fruity” Metcalfe. That Fruity and “Baba” Metcalfe, in turn, were in the Duke of Windsor’s wedding party after he abdicated the British throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. That Edward VIII (whose family called David) was godfather of his best friend’s son. And that David Metcalfe, upon his father’s death, had inherited the ring and cuff links bearing the Duke of Windsor’s family crest from when he was Prince of Wales. He adds that David Metcalfe is friends with all the richest people in the world, hunts with British royals and with the king of Spain, and is one of the most popular men of international high society.

  “He’s going to pick you up on Friday for a dinner at my apartment, and you’ll adore him, you’ll see! Bye, my pretty, precious, dreamy doll.”

  As David is coming into the living room, my mother is on her way out, and I introduce them. The next day, she will say to me, “That six-foot-tall man, in black tie and patent leather shoes, must be the most elegant in the world. He looks like one of those cousins of Queen Elizabeth!”

  He is a nearly bald and perfectly tanned Englishman, with narrow shoulders and enormous hands and feet, an angular and quite wrinkled face, opera glasses perched on an aquiline nose, gray eyes that are wise and generous but somewhat cold. He has eight hundred years of pedigree and fifty-five of life. He looks at me with an enchanting smile and says that “Mario” has told him I am every man’s dream. I tell him that’s right and also that, according to our friend, he is every woman’s. And then I change the subject, because the truth is that Metcalfe, as they say in Colombia, doesn’t inspire the slightest salacious thought in me. I share Brigitte Bardot’s maxim: “The only thing necessary for a man to be a perfect lover is physical attraction.” And any animal lover knows that at the hour of truth, the Prince of Wales’s ring on the finger, the six-person staff in Belgravia, and the Van Gogh in the dining room are not enough.

  Among the strict rules that the elegant and haughty Lord Curzon considers inarguable are that “a gentleman does not wear brown in the city,” and “a gentleman does not eat soup at lunch.” Eighteen months have passed since I’d met his grandson, and it’s the middle of 1983. The “richest man in Colombia” is not an English lord or a local gentleman. He doesn’t get up at 6 a.m. to call his ambitious “slaves,” but summons his sinister “boys” at eleven. He has bean soup at his daily brunch, and he doesn’t even wear a brown suit to congressional sessions, but rather a beige jacket. He doesn’t know what the hell chalk stripe or Prince of Wales fabrics are, and he lives in sneakers and blue jeans. He is thirty-three years old, not fifty-nine, and he doesn’t have a clear idea of who Santo Domingo is, because since he owns a small republic, he is only interested in the presidents he finances and the dictators who cooperate with him in everything. In a country where none of the stingy tycoons have their own planes yet, he puts an aerial fleet at my disposal. He shipped sixty tons of coke last year—but this year plans to double production—and his organization controls 80 percent of the world market. He is five feet five inches tall and has no time for tanning. While he’s not as ugly as Tirofijo (“Sureshot”), the leader of the FARC, his conviction that he bears a certain resemblance to Elvis Presley is stretching things a bit. He has never cared about Queen Victoria, only the beauty queens of Caquetá, Putumayo, or Amazonas. He makes love like a peasant boy but believes himself a stud, and he only has one thing in common with the four richest men in Colombia: me. And I idolize him. Because he adores me, because he’s the most exciting and fun person to ever have walked the face of the earth, and because he isn’t stingy, but lavish.

  “Pablo, I’m afraid to enter the United States with this much money,” I’d said to him before my first shopping trip to New York.

  “The American government doesn’t care how much money you bring in, only how much you take out, my love! Once, I arrived in Washington with a million dollars in a briefcase, and they gave me a police escort so no one would assault me on the way to the bank! Me, can you believe it? But woe on you if they catch you taking out more than $2,000 cash, even if the law says $10,000. Always declare all the money when you go in. You spend it or deposit it in your bank account $2,000 at a time, but never, ever, ever even think about bringing it back. If the Feds catch you with cash, they give you a thousand years in jail, because money laundering is a much bigger crime than even drug trafficking. I’m a moral authority on these matters. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”

  Now when I travel, I always put $10,000 rolls of bills in a Kleenex box in each of my three Gucci suitcases, and another in my Louis Vuitton carry-on, and I declare it all. When the customs agents ask me if I robbed a bank, I invariably reply, “The dollars are bought on the black market, because that’s how it’s done all over Latin America, where the peso is the currency. The Kleenex are because I never stop crying. And I take many trips a year because I’m a TV journalist; just look at all these magazine covers.”

  And the officer invariably replies, “Go ahead, beautiful, and give me a call the next time you’re sad!”

  And I go out like a queen to the limousine that’s always there waiting for me, and when I reach the hotel—after passing some Rothschild, Guinness, or Agnelli in the lobby, or the retinue of a Saudi prince, a French first lady, or an African dictator—I throw the Kleenex in the trash and climb happily into a bubble bath to polish my shopping list for the next day. I’ve already labored over it for three hours in my first-class seat on the plane, while I drank rosé champagne and ate caviar blinis, because now my lover’s Pegasus is almost always busy carrying thousands of kilos of coke to Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas. That place belongs to his friend Carlitos Lehder and is an obligatory stop for the other queen—the white one you inhale—on the way to the Florida Keys.

  Any civilized and brutally honest woman will admit that one of the greatest delights in existence is to go shopping on Fifth Avenue with a lavish budget. That’s especially true if she’s already had four moguls at her feet who are worth twelve billion combined, and none of them had even sent her flowers.

  And on each return to Colombia, there is my Pablo, “crowned” again, with Pegasus and the rest of his fleet, his political ambitions—the result of aspirations of a different kind by millions of grateful and happy gringo fans—and his adoration, his passion, and all of his crazy and terrible need for me. And the Valentino or Chanel falls to the floor, and Cinderella’s crocodile shoes fly through the air, and any suite or shack is the same earthly paradise for death’s embrace or the demonic dance, because, when your lover acts like an emperor and pays for a series of shopping sprees, his past is as irrelevant as Marilyn Monroe’s or Brigitte Bardot’s in some lucky man’s bed.

  But the problem with many exceptionally rich men is the lengths to which they are willing to go to cover up yesterday’s crimes or indiscretions. Horrified at the revelations about Pablo Escobar’s past, Margot Ricci has destroyed every copy of the program we filmed at the dump and informed me that she doesn’t ever want to hear from Pablo or me again. We sell the TV production company, now debt-free, to her boyfriend, Jaime, a good-natured man who dies so
on thereafter. She marries Juan Gossaín, director of RCN, the radio network that belongs as well to the soft-drink tycoon, Carlos Ardila, who is married to Aníbal Turbay’s ex-wife.

  The paisa Robin Hood has by now learned to deal with the media. He competes with me for magazine covers, and he’s enjoying his newfound fame to the utmost. When Adriana, daughter of the banking and construction mogul Luis Carlos Sarmiento, is kidnapped, I urge Pablo to put his thousand-man army at his disposal. Not just out of principle, but because he needs to start sowing seeds of gratitude among decent people, including the most powerful members of the establishment. Very moved, Luis Carlos tells me that the negotiations to free his daughter are already well under way, but that he will always be grateful for congressman Escobar’s gesture.

  Pablo’s life takes a complete turn the day President Betancur names a new minister of justice: Rodrigo Lara, he of the agricultural business deal with Evaristo Porras, the triple jackpot winner. Immediately, Lara accuses Escobar of drug trafficking and of having ties to MAS, and Escobar’s followers, who feel betrayed by Betancur, display Evaristo’s million-peso check in Congress. And the key minister of Luis Carlos Galán’s New Liberalism starts bearing down on Pablo like a freight train: the Chamber of Representatives lifts his parliamentary immunity, a Medellín judge issues an arrest warrant over the deaths of the two DAS agents, the American government revokes his tourist visa, and the Colombian government confiscates the animals in his zoo as contraband. When they are auctioned, though, Escobar buys them back through intermediaries; after all, except for the Ochoas and the Mexican, no one in the country has enough room for thousands of exotic animals to graze, or a veterinarian to take care of them, and especially not enough rivers and straw for the elephants and two dozen hippopotamuses who are nearly as territorial as their owner.