Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Read online

  I tell him that the rocks of coke that he gave to Aníbal as a gift led me to decide that a woman like me could not live with an addict. And I add that, on principle, I don’t talk about a man that I’ve loved with another. He notes that that is an unusual trait, then asks if it’s true that I was married to an Argentine director who was twenty years older than me. I admit that, unfortunately, I’m still married to him.

  “Even though we’ve split our property, he absolutely refuses to sign the divorce papers, so I can’t get married again and he cannot marry the new woman in his life.”

  He looks at me in silence, as though memorizing my words. Then he transforms, and in a tone that leaves no room for the slightest argument, he tells me what I have to do.

  “Tomorrow, your lawyer is going to call David Stivel and tell him he has until Wednesday to sign the divorce papers, or there will be consequences. You and I will talk after the notaries close, and you can tell me what happens.”

  With my eyes shining in the amber light of the candles, I ask if Zorro would be able to kill the ogre keeping the princess locked in the tower. Taking my hand in his, he replies very seriously, “Only if the ogre is brave. Because I don’t waste lead on cowards. But you’re worth dying for…aren’t you, my love?”

  With those words, and the question in his eyes and the touch of his skin, I finally know that he and I are leaving our friendship behind, because we are destined to become lovers.

  *

  —

  WHEN HE CALLS on Wednesday night, my news is not good.

  “So he didn’t sign, then….He’s a stubborn che, isn’t he? He sure wants to complicate our lives. This is a serious problem! But before we figure out what to do about it, I need to ask you something: Once you’re finally a free woman, will you have dinner with me again, at my friend Pelusa Ocampo’s restaurant?”

  I reply that it’s fairly improbable that in the year 2000 I’ll still be free, and he persists, “No, no, no! I’m talking about Friday, day after tomorrow, before some other ogre beats me to it.”

  With a resigned sigh, I note that this is the kind of problem that cannot be solved in forty-eight hours.

  “Day after tomorrow you will be a free woman, and you’ll be here with me. Good night, love.”

  *

  —

  ON FRIDAY, when I come home for lunch after spending hours in the studio editing the program we’d filmed at the dump, my housekeeper informs me that my lawyer, Hernán Jaramillo, has called three times because he needs to speak with me urgently. When I call him, he exclaims, “Stivel called this morning, desperate to tell me he had to sign the divorce papers before noon, or he was dead! The poor guy came to the notary pale as wax and shaking like a leaf; he looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He almost couldn’t sign his name! Then, without a word, he ran away like a bat out of hell. I can’t believe you’ve been married for three years to such a chicken! But anyway…you’re a free woman now. Congratulations, and let me know about the next one. Just make sure he’s rich and good-looking this time.”

  At two thirty in the afternoon, my housekeeper announces that six men are here bearing flowers; the arrangement won’t fit in the elevator and they’re asking for permission to carry it up the stairs, which seems suspicious to her. I tell her it’s possible the man who sent them isn’t just suspicious but “a criminal.” I ask her to put our minds at ease and run down to reception to find out who they’re from. She comes back and hands me the card:

  For my freed Panther Queen,

  from El Zorro. P.

  *

  —

  WHEN THE MEN LEAVE, I’m confronted by a thousand cattleya trianae, Colombia’s national flower, and orchids in every shade of purple, lavender, lilac, and pink, with white phalaenopsis here and there like foam in a vivid violet sea. My housekeeper’s only comment, with arms crossed and brow furrowed: “I didn’t like those characters one bit…and your friends would say that this is the most ostentatious thing they’ve seen in their lives!”

  In fact, I know that if I showed them something so splendid, they would die of envy. I tell her that this arrangement could only have been done by the famous silleteros of Medellín, the artists of the Flower Festival.

  At three in the afternoon, the phone rings; without bothering to ask who’s calling, I ask where he’d pulled a revolver on David. At the other end of the line, I sense surprise and then happiness. He bursts out laughing and tells me he has no idea what I’m talking about. Then he asks what time I want him to pick me up at the hotel to go to dinner. Glancing at the clock, I remind him that the Medellín airport closes at 6:00 p.m. and the last flight on Friday must have about twenty people on the wait list.

  “Oh hell…I hadn’t realized….And here I was hoping to celebrate your freedom! What a shame! Well, we’ll have dinner another day, maybe in the year 2000.”

  And he hangs up. Five minutes later, the phone rings again. This time I pray to God it isn’t one of my friends when, without waiting for him to identify himself, I say that his thousand orchids are overflowing out the windows, and they’re the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life. I ask him how long it took to pick them.

  “They’re just like you, my love. And I’ve had people gathering them since…the day I saw you with Band-Aids on your face and knees, remember? Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that Pegasus has been waiting for you since last night. You can fly him today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow, in a week or a month, because he’s not going to move from there until you’re on him. I’m only going to hope…and wait for you.”

  Now, this is really a carriage for a modern Cinderella: a brand-new Learjet, white and shining, with three handsome and smiling pilots instead of six white shire horses. It’s 5:15 p.m., and we have just enough time to get to Medellín before the airport closes. I could have made him wait a week or a month, but I also love him, and I can’t wait a single day. While I slide through the clouds, I wonder if Pablo will make me suffer the way a couple of other men I’d loved ages before had, cruel men who were perhaps richer than him. Then I remember the words of Françoise Sagan: “I’d rather cry in a Mercedes than on a bus,” and I tell myself happily:

  “Well, I’d rather cry in a Learjet than in a Mercedes!”

  There are no unicorn-drawn carriages or moonlit dinners beneath the Eiffel Tower, no emeralds or rubies, no fireworks displays. Only him close to me, confessing that the first time he felt me holding on to his whole body in the Río Claro, he knew he hadn’t saved my life just so I could belong to another man, but so that I would be his. Now he is begging me, pleading, imploring, repeating over and over:

  “Ask me for anything, everything you want! Just tell me what you desire most,” as if he were God, and I’m telling him that he’s only a man, and not even he could stop time to freeze or draw out for a second longer that flood of golden moments that the gods’ splendid generosity has decided to pour over us.

  That secret night at Hacienda Nápoles is the last of my innocence and the first of my reverie. When he falls asleep, I go out onto the balcony and look up at the bright stars shimmering in all that unfathomable cobalt expanse. Flooded with happiness, I smile as I remember the conversation between Pilar and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I think about the earth trembling beneath the bodies of earthly lovers. Then I turn to go back to the arms that await me, my universe of flesh and blood, the only thing I have and the only thing that exists.

  Death to Kidnappers!

  I RETURN TO BOGOTÁ to tape my TV programs, and the next weekend I’m back in Medellín. This pattern will repeat for fifteen months, the happiest of my life and, according to Pablo, the fullest of his. What neither of us realizes is that this brief time will contain the last perfect, easy days of either of our existences.

  “You have my eleven planes and my two helicopters at your disposal. And you can ask me for anything you want. Anything, my love. What do you need first?”

  I reply that I’l
l just need one of his planes to bring my assistant and cameraman back to Medellín. I want to take some more shots to fill out the report, and I’d like to ask him a few more questions in a different setting: a political meeting, perhaps.

  Again and again he insists that he wants to give me a fabulous gift, saying I am the only woman who hasn’t asked him for anything in the first week. He tells me to choose the most beautiful penthouse in Bogotá and whatever Mercedes I want.

  “And how would I explain that to the Treasury Department? Or my friends, my colleagues, my family? I would look like a kept woman, my love. Plus, I don’t drive, because if I did they’d lock me up for life. Thank you, Pablo, but I have my little Mitsubishi and my chauffeur, and I don’t need anything else. I’m definitely not a car lover, and in this country a luxury car is just an invitation to kidnappers.”

  He insists so much that I decide to give him two options: either a Pegasus like his—I am turning into a plane lover, it seems—or a million kisses. He bursts out laughing and chooses the latter, but instead of counting one by one, he counts hundred by hundred, then thousand by thousand, and, finally, a hundred thousand by a hundred thousand. When he finishes in a couple of minutes, I accuse him of being a kiss thief, and I ask him what I can give him in return. After thinking about it a few seconds, he says I could teach him how to give interviews, because over the course of his life he’ll have to give more than a few; he praises mine and asks what my secret is. I tell him there are three: the first is to have something important, interesting, or original to say, and also something witty, because everyone likes to laugh. As for the second and the third, since I like to take things slow, I categorically refuse to share them in the first week.

  He takes the bait, and with a smile that’s something between mischievous and guilty he swears that if I teach him my professional secrets, he’ll confide some of his own to me.

  Fast as lightning I reply that the second secret is not to answer every question the journalist asks, but instead to say what you want to say. But I insist that to play ball well you need years of practice; that is, years of fame. Someone like him should not grant interviews except to media editors or directors—since they know where curiosity ends and insult begins—or to journalists who are friends.

  “Purebred bulls are for expert bullfighters, not banderilleros. Since you’re still what a Hollywood insider would call a ‘civilian,’ I recommend for now that you don’t give interviews except to a matador who knows some of your professional secrets and who loves you with all his heart in spite of them. Now, you’re going to tell me when you stopped stealing headstones and stripping stolen cars, and started exporting ‘snuff.’ Because that’s what really marked a turn in your philanthropic activity….Isn’t that right, my love?”

  Offended, he looks at me and lowers his eyes. I know I’ve caught him off guard and crossed a line, and I wonder if I’ve touched his Achilles’ heel too soon. But I also know that Pablo has never been in love with a woman his age or of my class. And I know that if we’re going to love each other on completely equal terms, I’ll have to teach him from the start where the fun and games of two overgrown kids ends, and where the relationship between an adult man and woman begins. The first thing I tell him is that a senator has to submit to scrutiny from the press—and that in his case, it will be unrelenting.

  “Okay, what do you want to know? Let’s play ball,” he says, raising his head defiantly.

  I explain that when the program we filmed airs, the whole country is going to wonder not only how he made his fortune but also what the real purpose of all that generosity is. And with a simple phone call to Medellín, any journalist will be able to learn a couple of open secrets in a matter of minutes. I warn him that the owners of media companies are going to shoot to kill when they see him strutting around with his millions, showing off his charity projects. The media elite have been feeding off the people for years, and Pablo’s generosity will be a threat to the avarice of nearly all the established powers in Colombia.

  “Fortunately, you have a formidable mental quickness, Pablo. And I’ll tell you from the start none of the big Colombian tycoons could admit the whole truth about where their own fortunes came from. That’s why the superrich don’t give interviews, not here or anywhere else. What sets you apart from them is the size of your social projects, and that’s what you’ll have to mention when everyone starts going after you.”

  Animated now, he starts to tell me his story: When he was still a boy, he directed a massive fund-raising drive to build a school in the La Paz neighborhood in Envigado, near Medellín, because he didn’t have anywhere to study. The result was a school building for eight hundred students. When he was little he rented bicycles, as a boy he sold used cars, and at a very young age he started out in land speculation in Magdalena Medio. At one point he stops and asks if I think he’s lying; I reply that, though I’m sure it’s all true, it could hardly be the origin of such a colossal fortune. I ask him to tell me what his parents did. He says that his father was a worker on the hacienda of Joaquín Vallejo, a well-known industrial leader, and his mother was a rural schoolteacher.

  I recommend, then, that he start by saying something like: “From my father, an honest Antiochian peasant, I learned the ethic of hard work, and from my mother, a teacher, the importance of solidarity with the weakest among us.” But I remind him that no one likes to have their intelligence insulted; he has to prepare for the day when some veteran reporter will ask him, in front of a camera and the entire country:

  “How many marble headstones do you need for a new bicycle? Or is it the other way around: How many secondhand bicycles can be bought with a good gravestone, a real beauty, Honorable Father of the Nation?”

  He replies that he would say, without a second’s hesitation: “Why don’t you go and find out how much both of them cost? You can do the numbers yourself. Then get your own group of kids who aren’t afraid of gravediggers or the dead, send them into the cemetery at night, and have them carry those damned stones that weigh a ton!”

  And I exclaim that with stone-faced arguments like that, any journalist would have no choice but to recognize his unique talent, his innate leadership, his heroic bravery and unusual strength.

  Pablo asks me whether, if we had met each other when he was poor and anonymous, I would have fallen in love with him. Laughing, I tell him definitely not: we never would have met! No one in their right mind would have thought to introduce me to a married man because while he was sanding names off tombstones, I was going out with Gabriel Echavarría, the most beautiful man in Colombia and son of one of the ten richest. When he was stripping cars, I was already dating Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a bachelor, heir to the largest fortune in the country, and the most handsome man of his generation.

  He points out that if those are my parameters, I must really love him. And I admit that it’s precisely because of the points of comparison that I love him so much. With a caress and a grateful smile, he tells me I am the most brutally honest and generous woman he’s met, and that’s why I make him so happy.

  Over and over we practice the answers, serious or hilarious, that he would give in order to publicly account for his donations, his planes, and especially his giraffes. We conclude that he’s going to need the parameters of logic, used by the Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago. Because to justify his fortune he’ll have to forget about “land speculation in Magdalena Medio” and start thinking in terms of “real estate investments in Florida,” even if no one believes it, and even if it could bring everyone from the DIAN in Colombia to the IRS and the Pentagon in the United States down on him.

  “Fame, good or bad, is forever, my love. Why don’t you keep a low profile, at least for now, and wield power from the shadows, like capi di tutti capi all over the world? Why do you need to be well known, when it’s far better to be a quadruple-millionaire? And in Colombia, fame only brings you mountains of envy. Just look at me.”

  “At y
ou? But all the women in this country would love to be in your shoes!”

  I tell him we’ll talk about that another day, not now. To change the subject, I tell him I find it very hard to believe that the rescue of Martha Nieves Ochoa was done only through exhaustive tracking. He seems surprised at my frankness, and he replies that it’s also a matter for another day.

  I ask him to explain to me what MAS is. Lowering his eyes, and in a voice full of determination, he tells me that “Muerte a Secuestradores!” (Death to Kidnappers!) was founded at the end of 1981 by the big drug traffickers, and that it already has many supporters among the rich landowners and some state organizations: the DAS (Administrative Department of Security), the B-2 unit of the army (military intelligence), the GOES (Grupo Operativo Antiextorsión y Secuestro, or Operative Group Against Extortion and Kidnapping), and the F2 unit of the police. MAS wants to keep rich people’s money from going to Miami, and their partners’ and associates’ money from having to stay out of the country. To that end, they were determined to end a plague that exists only in Colombia.

  “We all want to invest our money in the country, but with that sword of Damocles hanging over us it’s impossible! That’s why we’re not going to let a single kidnapper go free: every time we catch one, we’ll hand him over to the army to deal with. No drug trafficker wants to go through what I did with my father’s kidnapping, or what happened with the Ochoas’ sister, or the torture my friend Carlos Lehder del Quindío had to endure in the flesh. Everyone is joining together around MAS and Lehder and making large contributions: we already have an army of almost twenty-five hundred men.”

  I suggest that starting now, and given that his associates are also farmers, businessmen, exporters, or industrialists, he should try to always refer to them as his “professional colleagues.” I express my horror about what happened to his father and ask if Pablo also managed to free him in record time.