Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Read online

  Pablo begs me not to be alarmed by his avalanche of problems, and he tries to convince me that his life has always been this turbulent. He is either a great actor or the most self-confident man I have ever met. One thing I have no doubt about: he is a formidable strategist and has nearly inexhaustible resources with which to mount devastating counterattacks, because money is pouring in. I never ask him how he launders it; but sometimes, when I’m worried, he gives me some clues as to the size of his income. He has more than two hundred luxury apartments in Florida, bundles of hundred-dollar bills are sent right to Hacienda Nápoles camouflaged in household appliances, and the cash that’s entering the country is enough to finance the presidential campaigns of all the political parties until the year 2000.

  The arrest warrant drives Pablo into partial hiding. Our need for each other’s skin has been growing in intensity right along with the manhunt and the bugging of our phones. Since neither of us confides in anyone, we both need our interlocutor/lover’s voice more and more. But every one of our encounters now demands careful logistical planning, and we can no longer see each other every weekend, much less at the Intercontinental Hotel.

  As the months pass and our trust grows, I have also started to hear him and Santofimio use much more bellicose language. It’s not unusual for the latter to say things in front of me like:

  “Wars are not won halfway, Pablo. There are only winners and losers, not half winners and half losers. You’re going to have to chop off a lot of heads to get things done; or in any case, the most visible ones.”

  And Escobar unfailingly replies, “Right, Doctor. If they keep fucking with us, we’re going to have to start giving a lot of chumbimba, so they learn some respect.”

  In the course of a tour through the Department of Tolima, Santofimio’s native soil and political stronghold, he starts to embrace me in front of his local leaders in a way that makes me terribly uncomfortable. But when his “caciques” leave, the candidate transforms and is all business: he tells me I have to help him convince my lover to increase his campaign contributions, because the money he’s giving now isn’t enough for anything, and Santofimio is the only senatorial and presidential option that guarantees Pablo not only that the extradition treaty will end, but also that his past will be completely buried.

  When I return to Medellín, I’m mad as a hornet, and before Pablo can even kiss me, I start reeling off the events of recent weeks in a crescendo of complaints, finger-pointing, accusations, and questions without answers:

  “I held a cocktail fund-raiser for his campaign and invited the leaders from all the poor neighborhoods of Bogotá. Only because you asked me to, I crammed a hundred and fifty nosy people into my apartment. Santofimio got there after 11 p.m., stayed fifteen minutes, and then rushed off. He didn’t even call the next day to thank me. He’s a classless, ungrateful, two-faced pig! This poor country matters shit to him! He’s going to finish off your idealism, and you’ll end up just like him. Here, in your territory and in front of your people, he would never have dared embrace me in public like he did in Tolima! Haven’t you yet realized the price I’m already paying for putting my clean image in the service of your interests, so that an Iago like him—if you even know who Iago is—will try to use me in such a sleazy way in front of that gang of provincial criminals who think an unscrupulous crook like him is God?”

  An invisible wall seems to descend from the ceiling and comes between the two of us. Pablo stands still as a rock, paralyzed. Then, he looks at me in shock and sits down. With his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, and eyes fixed on the floor, he starts talking to me in an icy voice, carefully measuring his words:

  “It pains me to the core, Virginia, but I have to tell you that that man you call an ungrateful pig is my link to the whole political class of this country, from Alfonso López on down, not to mention his connection to sectors of the Armed Forces and security organizations that aren’t with us in MAS. I’m never going to be able to dispense with him, and it’s precisely his lack of scruples that makes him so invaluable to someone like me. And, in fact, I don’t know who Iago is, but if you say he and Santofimio are similar, it must be true.”

  All my respect for him shatters like a mirror hit by a bullet. In terrible pain, my face washed in tears, I ask him: “Is that sewer rat perhaps trying to tell me that it’s high time I start considering other options…because you’ve already found them, my love? That’s what this whole show of grabbing me in public is about, right?”

  Pablo stands up and looks toward the window. Then, with a sigh, he tells me, “You and I are adults, Virginia. We’re free, and we can both consider all the options we want.”

  For the first time in my existence, and without caring that I could lose the man I’ve loved most in my life, I throw a jealous fit. Unable to control myself, I punch the air with every phrase I shout:

  “You’ve turned into a scoundrel, Pablo Escobar! And I want you to know that the day I trade you in for someone else, it won’t be some poor swine like your beggar candidate! You don’t even know how spoiled I am when it comes to men. I can have the richest or the handsomest, and I don’t have to pay like you do! I treat kings like pawns and pawns like kings, and when I trade you in for a pig, it’ll be a pig who’s richer than you. And one who wants to be president. No, one who wants to be a dictator, yes, sir! And you, who have never underestimated me, you know that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll swap you for a dictator, but not a half-assed one like Rojas Pinilla. Not like that, no, one like…like…like Trujillo! Or Perón! Like one of those two, I swear to God, Pablo!”

  When he hears this, he bursts out laughing. He turns around and, still laughing, comes toward me. He grabs both my arms to keep me from punching him in the chest and he wraps them like a noose around my neck. Then he holds me firmly around the waist and presses against my body while he tells me: “The problem with that future husband of yours is that he’s going to need me to bankroll him. And when he sends you to pick up the cash, we’ll go at it nonstop, won’t we? Your other problem is that the only two pigs as rich as I am are Jorge Ochoa and the Mexican…and neither of them is your type, are they? You see that I’m the only option for a woman like you? And you’re my only option, because where else am I going to find another box of surprises that makes me laugh so much…with that heart of yours? Or another Manuelita…with that Einstein IQ? Or another Evita…with that body of Marilyn, hmm? Are you going to abandon me at the hands of powerful enemies who have started a ruthless hunt for me…that’s going to end with my early death and my poor humanity under some terrible gravestone that someone had to buy for me? Swear you’re not going to trade me in yet for some Idi Amin Dada who would extradite me…or barbecue me! Swear to me, my adored torment, on what you love most. And what you love most…is me, right?”

  “And when do you propose I trade you in, then?”

  “How about in…a hundred years. No, more like seventy, so you don’t think I’m exaggerating!”

  “I’m not giving you more than ten!” I reply, drying my tears. “Anyway, you’re sounding like Augustine of Hippo, who before becoming Doctor of the Church, prayed: ‘God grant me chastity, but not yet!’ And I warn you, now I’m really going to sack the stores on Fifth Avenue. This time I’ll clean them out!”

  He looks at me with something like profound gratitude. Exhaling in relief, he says with a smile, “Pheeeew! Go sack them whenever you want, my adored panther, as long as you promise we’ll never, ever talk about these things again.” Then he laughs and asks: “And how old was that saint when he went impotent, miss know-it-all?”

  Facing the prospect of a closet full of Chanel or Valentino, what average woman is going to worry about Santofimio’s duplicity? I dry the last of my tears, reply that he was forty, and inform Pablo that I’m never going out on the campaign trail again. He says that the only absence he cares about is that of my face on his pillow—and all the rest of me in his bed—and he starts to caress me.
As he lists each of those possible absences, I have only my present and Pablo’s presence.

  Pablo seems to have forgotten that I never forgive and that when it comes to the opposite sex, any one of my options is more interesting than all of his put together. So, I finally let my arm be twisted, and I accept the invitation I have declined over and over during the previous eighteen months: a first-class ticket to New York, an enormous suite at the Pierre Hotel, and the passionate, elegant arms of David Patrick Metcalfe. And the next day, when I go out to spend $30,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue, I leave the bags in the limo and go into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I light one candle for the patron saint of Ireland and another for the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of the generals of the Mexican Revolution who were ancestors of mine. For the rest of my life I will carry in my heart a nostalgia for something that was lost forever on that night of dictators and pigs, and from that day on, I will never care about Pablo’s one-night stand with a model or a weekend with a beauty queen, much less about a couple of lesbians in some Jacuzzi in Envigado.

  One day, in the central library of my friends Hans and Lilly Ungar, I meet with the man who’d been my first TV director, now the former minister of foreign affairs, Carlos Lemos Simmonds. He advises me to go back to radio, and he recommends the Grupo Radial Colombiano, now the fourth-largest network in the country. It has a stellar team, and it belongs to the Rodríguez Orejuela family of Cali, who owns banks, drugstore chains, cosmetics laboratories, Chrysler of Colombia, and dozens of other companies.

  “They keep a low profile. Gilberto Rodríguez is very intelligent and is on his way to becoming the richest man in the country. Also, he’s a gentleman.”

  A few weeks later I receive a job offer from Grupo Radial. It’s a pleasant surprise, and since I’ve heard such good things from Carlos Lemos, I delightedly accept. My first assignment is to cover the Cali Fair and Sugar Cane Beauty Pageant the last week of December and the first of January. Pablo is spending the holidays at Hacienda Nápoles with his family, and he has sent me a Christmas present: a beautiful gold watch with a double strand of Cartier diamonds. He bought it from Joaco Builes’s girlfriend, Beatriz, who is quite a businesswoman and sells jewelry to all the drug traffickers of Medellín. She cautions me:

  “Virgie: don’t even think, never ever, of taking it to Cartier in New York for repairs! I admit it, the watches Joaco and I sell are stolen, and they could seize it or throw you in jail. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! In any case, Pablo is convinced that watches as gifts are very lucky.”

  One night I am dining in Cali with Francisco Castro, the young and handsome president of the Banco de Occidente, the most profitable of all the banks owned by Luis Carlos Sarmiento. Two men enter the restaurant and a hush falls; everyone turns to look, and a dozen waiters rush to attend them. In a low voice full of contempt, “Paquico” Castro tells me, “Those are the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the kings of coke in the Valley. A couple of foul, awful mobsters. They may both have a billion dollars and a hundred companies, but they’re the kind of customer Luis Carlos would immediately have kicked out of his banks!”

  I’m surprised, and not because the news reaches me through someone with a reputation for being a child prodigy in financial matters. I thought that, by now, I knew the names of everyone who’s anyone in Pablo’s line of work; so, it is very strange that I’ve never heard of them. The next day, the radio station director informs me that Gilberto Rodríguez and his wife want to meet me. They’ve invited me up to the presidential suite of the Intercontinental Hotel, their base of operations during the fair, where they will personally give me my first-row tickets to the bullfights. (In a bull ring, the first row is really the third, behind the barrera and the contrabarrera. The barrera row looks directly onto the alley where the bullfighters congregate, along with their teams, cattle breeders, and the male journalists. Never the female ones, because supposedly they bring bad luck, and because sometimes the bulls jump the fence into the alley and charge at everything in their way.)

  Rodríguez Orejuela looks very different from the bosses in Medellín; all that is obvious in them is subtle in him. He looks like an ordinary businessman, and he would go completely unnoticed anywhere but Cali. He is very courteous and polite, as all rich men are with pretty women, and he has a certain crafty, cunning element that he camouflages perfectly with another that, to the eyes of a less perceptive observer, could seem like shyness or even a discreet hint of elegance. I would say he is a little over forty years old; he isn’t tall, his face and hands are round, and he lacks Pablo’s masculine presence. The truth is that both Pablo Escobar and Julio Mario Santo Domingo have what on the Colombian coast they call mandarria (potency), a word whose unique sonority says it all. When one of them enters a place, everything in their movements and attitude seems to cry out: “Here comes the king of the world, the richest man in Colombia! Stand back! Don’t anyone dare get in my way, because I am danger on two legs and today I woke up in a bad mood!”

  Rodríguez’s wife is around thirty-seven; her face is fairly ordinary and has scars from juvenile acne. She is taller than either of us, and under her tunic printed in green tones she clearly has a good figure, like nearly all women in the Cauca del Valle. She has eagle eyes, and everything seems to indicate that her husband doesn’t move a muscle without her permission.

  I have always believed that behind every exceptionally rich man there is either a great accomplice or a great slave.

  This is no “Nanny,” like Escobar’s wife. She’s more like a “Beast,” and she seems like the general’s general!

  On my return to Bogotá, I’m surprised by a call from Gilberto, who invites me to the bullfights with him and the sports commentators of Grupo Radial. I reply, “Thanks very much. But you should know that I only sit in the first row—that is, with the poor people—when I’m at a fair working like a slave, exploited by the radio network of some presidential family, or some banker with hundreds of drugstores. Meaning, since I am blind, the only place I can see from and where I can be seen, is the barrera. See you on Sunday!”

  After the bullfight, the group takes me home. A few days later, Myriam de Rodríguez calls to ask me why I went to the bullfight with her husband. Extremely displeased, I reply that she should be asking the owner of Grupo Radial Colombiano himself why he sent the sports commentators and the international editor to cover the bull season. And before hanging up, I make a suggestion: “Next time, you could ask him to bring you, too—with your microphone, of course—so you can see why, as the Agustín Lara song goes, ‘when Silverio faces the bull, nobody changes a shady barrera for a throne!’ ”

  Afterward I wonder why I didn’t taunt that beast some more. Why didn’t I tell her that her husband couldn’t interest me for anything, absolutely anything in the world? That I am madly in love with his rival, who is much richer than him, well married, adores me, and can’t wait to return from his estate and melt in my arms? That he’s going to be either a president with a past or a dictator with no record, and that he is, whether she likes it or not, the only, true, inarguable universal King of Cocaine? Why didn’t I ask her what percentage of the market her Gilberto had—if last year Pablo already had 80 percent, and this year he’s doubling production—so I could take pleasure in her replying: “Well, my husband has another eighty percent!”

  Once my rage has passed, I start to remember those four tycoons of the establishment I had loved in the past: their privileged intellects, those hearts of stone, their incapacity for any form of compassion, their legendary capacity for revenge. Then, and with a smile that comes from some hidden corner of my heart, I also remember their gifts for snake charming, their laughter, their weaknesses, their hatreds, their secrets, their lessons…all that capacity for work, that passion, ambition, and vision…their power to seduce, their presidents…

  How would they react if they knew Pablo Escobar aspired to the presidency? If he were to retire from the business, which one of them could
be an ally? Which his rival and which his enemy? Which one could become a mortal danger for Pablo? I think none of them, because by now everyone knows that Escobar has more money, more cunning, and more balls…and is twenty or twenty-five years younger than any of them. In any case, as Machiavelli says, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

  And I’m left thinking that it isn’t women’s bodies that pass through men’s hands, but rather men’s heads that pass through women’s hands.

  The Seventh-Richest Man in the World

  OUR FIRST HUG of 1984 is followed by two spins and a piece of news that falls on me like gallons of freezing cold water. Pablo plans to retire from politics, and he wants to know what I think, so he can weigh it against the opinions of his family, his partners, and, obviously, his candidate, “Doctor Santofimio.”

  I reply that you don’t have to be Einstein to know what all of them think, and I beg him for once in his life to say to hell with all of them and think only of himself. I implore him not to fold to Minister Lara, or galanismo, or the government, or public opinion, or the gringos. I ask him to remind his family where the diamonds and Mercedeses come from, and all the Boteros and Picassos. I advise him, instead of attacking the extradition treaty head on and throwing away millions on politics, to start social projects in Bogotá of the same scope as Medellín sin Tugurios, so that his popularity can protect him and make him untouchable, and also to start thinking about retiring from the business or leaving it in the hands of his partners, who are loyal and solid as rocks.