Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  Pablo always suffered from a strange condition: he knew who his enemies would be before they struck the first blow, and what each person who crossed his path could do for him.

  Starting that night, our happy and passionate meetings at the hotel are almost always followed by work meetings.

  “This week I want you to describe what you saw and felt at the dump.”

  The next Saturday, I give him six handwritten pages. He reads them carefully and exclaims, “But…it makes you want to go running with a handkerchief over your mouth to keep from throwing up! You feel things with your gut, don’t you?”

  “That’s the idea, Pablo. And I write viscerally; ‘gut’ is your word.”

  A week later his assignment for me is to describe what I feel when he…makes love to me. On our next encounter I give him five and a half pages, and I sit watching him, not looking away for a second, while he devours them.

  “But…this is the most salacious thing I’ve read in my entire life! If I didn’t hate maricas so much, I’d say it makes me want to be a woman. They’re going to put you in the Vatican’s index. Honestly…this’ll give me multiple erections!”

  “That’s the idea, Pablo. And…you didn’t have to tell me that.”

  The third week my assignment is to describe what I would feel if I was told he had died. Eight days later, I give him a seven-page manuscript, and this time, while he reads it, I look silently out the window toward the hills in the distance.

  “But…what’s this nightmare? This is heartbreaking! You think you love me this much, Virginia? If my mother read this, she would cry for the rest of her life….”

  “That’s the idea, Pablo.”

  He asks me if I really feel everything I write. I reply that it’s barely a fraction of what has been in my heart since the day I met him.

  “Well then, you and I are going to talk about many things. But, oh, don’t start criticizing or judging me! You have to know that I’m no Saint Francis of Assisi, got it?”

  By now I hardly ever ask him questions, and I let him choose what he wants to talk to me about. Now that he trusts me, I’ve been learning to recognize his boundaries, to try not to ask any questions whose answer might be “I’ll tell you another time,” and not to issue value judgments. I discover that, like nearly everyone on death row in the United States, Pablo has a perfectly rational explanation and moral justification for all of his illegal actions: according to him, refined human beings with imagination need to try all kinds of pleasure, and he is simply the provider of one of them. He explains that if religions and moralists didn’t punish those pleasures, the way they did with alcohol during Prohibition—which only brought dead policemen and economic recession—his business wouldn’t be illegal, he would pay tons of taxes, and Colombians and gringos would get along splendidly.

  “You, a pleasure-seeker and freethinker, understand perfectly well that governments should live and let live, right? And that if they did, there wouldn’t be so much corruption, or so many widows and orphans, or so many people in prison. All those lives lost are a waste for society and very expensive for the state. You’ll see, someday drugs will be legal. But, well…until that day comes, I’m going to show you that everyone has a price.”

  And then he opens a briefcase and takes out two checks. They’re made out to Ernesto Samper Pizano, the head of Alfonso López Michelsen’s presidential campaign.

  “This is the price of the country’s most powerful, intelligent, experienced president. And the most independent, because López doesn’t sell out to the gringos!”

  “It’s about…$600,000. That’s all? That’s the price of the richest president in Colombia? If I were him, I’d have asked you for…at least three million, Pablo!”

  “Well, let’s say it’s…the initial installment, my love. Because toppling that extradition treaty is going to take a while. Do you want to have these copies?”

  “No way! I could never show them to anyone, because I support anyone who’s on your side. And anyone who’s at all well informed knows, too, that Alfonso López has anointed Ernesto Samper as a future president of Colombia…when he’s older and more mature, of course, because he’s a year younger than us.”

  I recommend to Pablo that he listen to the speeches of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, not only to train his voice but also for their content. The only popular leader of titanic proportions that Colombia has produced in its entire history was assassinated in Bogotá on April 9, 1948, when he was about to reach the presidency. He was murdered by Juan Roa Sierra, a man who served obscure interests and who was then horribly lynched by enraged mobs. For days they dragged his mutilated cadaver through the streets, and they set fire to the city center and the presidents’ houses, making no distinction between parties. My great-uncle Alejandro Vallejo Varela, writer and close friend of Gaitán’s, was at his side when Roa shot him, and in the clinic where he perished minutes later. The following weeks, which would go down in history as El Bogotazo, became an orgy of blood, fire, and drunken snipers. Stores were sacked, people were murdered indiscriminately, and thousands of cadavers piled up in the cemetery because no one dared to bury them. During those days of terror, the only Colombian statesman, Alberto Lleras Camargo, took refuge in the house of his best friends, Eduardo Jaramillo Vallejo and Amparo Vallejo de Jaramillo, my father’s elegant sister. After Gaitán’s death came that era of limitless cruelty in the fifties known as La Violencia. When I was a teenager, I saw the photographs of what men do in wartime with the bodies of women and their fetuses. I vomited for days and swore that I would never bring children into the world just so they could live in that country of brutes, monsters, and savages.

  I talked about this history one night with Gloria Gaitán Jaramillo, the hero’s daughter, over dinner. We were joined by her daughters, María and Catalina, two adorable and very Parisian girls who had inherited inquisitive minds from their brilliant mother, their mythic grandfather, and an aristocratic grandmother who was related to mine. Some days earlier, on learning that Virginia Vallejo was looking for a CD or cassette of her father’s speeches, Gloria had come out of her office in the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Center in Bogotá to ask me, with her charming smile, why I was interested. From my (recent) ex-husband—a socialist Peronist and a great friend of the Jewish millionaire banker of the Argentine Montoneros—I had learned that if there is anything that makes a revolutionary heart beat faster, it’s a tycoon who sympathizes with their cause. I told Gloria that the paisa Robin Hood—son of a teacher, just like Gaitán—had asked me for her father’s speeches. He wants to see if, after studying them thoroughly and with my help, he can learn to wield his voice in such a way as to awaken something of what the hero inspired in the masses. After an hour of enthusiastic conversation on participatory democracy, and a tour of the center’s facilities and the Exploratory Wing under construction, Gloria had invited me to have dinner with her daughters the following Friday.

  Gaitán’s daughter is a refined woman and a great cook. While we are enjoying the exquisite food she’s prepared, I tell her that Pablo Escobar financed part of Alfonso López’s presidential campaign, and that his conservative partners, Gustavo Gaviria and Gonzalo Rodríguez, did the same for President Betancur. Gloria knows almost all the world’s socialist heads of state and the resistance leaders in many countries. Among other things, she tells me she was once the lover of Salvador Allende, the assassinated Chilean president; that she had been López Michelsen’s ambassador to (the Romanian dictator) Nicolae Ceauşescu’s government; and that she is a great personal friend of Fidel Castro’s. I don’t know whether it’s because she believes in reincarnation and the concept of circular time, but Gloria feels a particular curiosity about people born in 1949, the year after her father’s assassination. So when Pablo and I invite her to Medellín, she accepts with pleasure. For several hours, as though hypnotized, we listen to her as she analyzes Colombia’s history in light of her father’s omnipresent absence; she speaks of the irrepar
able loss his death entailed and the void that no other Colombian leader could fill, because all who have come after him lack his integrity, courage, and greatness, not to mention his magnetism. She also talks about his ability to communicate his faith in the people, moving audiences, regardless of class, gender, or age. She recalls the sheer power of that vibrant voice, trained to sell his ideology with the perfect dosage of reason and passion, the formidable strength of his gestures, and the power that radiated from that imposing and unforgettable masculine presence.

  While we’re flying back to Bogotá in Pablo’s jet, I ask Gloria what she thinks of him. She responds with a few polite phrases recognizing his ambition and his existential curiosity, his enormous social projects and generous philanthropy, his passion and generosity toward me. Then, she tells me with enormous affection and frankness:

  “Look, Virgie: Pablo has one great defect, and it’s that he doesn’t look people in the eye. And people who look down at the ground when they’re talking to you are either hiding something because they’re false, or they aren’t being sincere. But in any case, you two look so good together! Like Bonnie and Clyde!”

  Gloria is the most intelligent and astute woman I have ever met. We will be excellent friends for the next six years, and she will be one of only three people I introduce Pablo to, along with Margot and Clara, two exceptionally shrewd women. Gloria possesses an impressive lucidity—a Virgo and a Bull in the Chinese horoscope, coincidentally, my signs as well. From her I would gradually learn slowly that true intelligence comes not only from a capacity for deep analysis and rigorous classification, or from exceptional mental quickness like Pablo Escobar’s, but above all, from strategy. And, although Gloria will often hear me say that trading my innocence for discernment was the worst deal I’d ever made, over time I would take back my words: not only was it the best deal, it was also my only choice.

  When Escobar asks me about Gaitán’s daughter’s impression of him, first I tell him what I know he wants to hear and then what I know that I have to communicate to him: I insist on the subject of strategy and the imperative need to divide Antioquian voters into zones by town, neighborhood, block, and house. Finally—for the first time, and for reasons I can’t explain—I talk to him about the bullet-ridden, naked body of Bonnie Parker on the floor of the morgue, displayed beside Clyde’s for the press cameras.

  Before another burning fireplace, Pablo will hug me and smile with infinite tenderness, contemplating me with a serious face and saddened eyes. After a few seconds, he’ll give me a kiss on the forehead and pat my shoulder, something he knows will soothe me. Then, sighing in silence, he’ll look away into the fire. Among the many things that he and I will always know and never put into words is that, for all those with the genes of power running through their blood, I am nothing but a bourgeois diva, and he a multimillionaire criminal.

  I think I am one of the few people who rarely thinks about Pablo’s money. Very soon, though, I would learn the true dimensions of the fortune possessed by that man I love as I’ve never loved another, and whom I believe I understand as no one else in the world could.

  In the Devil’s Arms

  PABLO AND I are up very early—something unusual for both of us—because he wants me to meet his son, Juan Pablo, who stayed the night at the Tequendama Hotel in his bodyguards’ care. When we come down from my bedroom and pass through the study on the way to the elevator, he stops to look out at my neighbors’ gardens in daylight. My apartment occupies the entire sixth floor, and it has a lovely view. He asks me who owns the enormous house that takes up the whole block across the street from me. I tell him it belongs to Sonia Gutt and Carlos Haime, head of the Moris Gutt Group and the richest Jewish family in Colombia.

  “Well, from this window—after some tracking—I could kidnap them in about…six months!”

  “No, you couldn’t, Pablo. They live in Paris and in the South of France, where they raise horses that run with Aga Khan’s, and they almost never come to Colombia.”

  Then he asks who owns the lawns at the back that are so well cared for. I tell him that it’s the residence of the American ambassador.

  “Well, from here I could…hit him with a bazooka and blow him to bits!”

  Astonished, I tell him that of all the people who have looked through that window, he is the only one who thought of it as the watchtower of some medieval fortress.

  “Ohhh, my love, it’s just that there is nothing, nothing in the world I like more than being naughty! If you plan things carefully, they will always, always work out.”

  With an incredulous smile, I pull him away from the window. In the elevator I tell him he has to promise me he’s going to start thinking like a future president of the republic and stop thinking like the president of an organized crime syndicate. With another smile, full of mischief, he promises me he’ll try.

  Juan Pablo Escobar wears little glasses and is adorable. I tell him that at his age I didn’t see well, either, and that when I got glasses I became the best student in my class. I look at Pablo and add that it was then that my IQ started to really climb. I tell him his father is number one, too, in car and boat races and in everything else, and that he’s going to be a very important man. I ask him if he would like to have a very long electric train, with an engine that whistles and a lot of cars. He replies that he would love it, and I tell him that when I was seven, I was dying to have one, but no one gives trains to little girls and that’s why it’s better to be a boy. We say good-bye, and when I watch the young man I love walk down the hotel hallway holding that happy child’s hand, it reminds me of Charlie Chaplin and the Kid in one of my all-time favorite film scenes.

  A few days later I get a call from the director of Caracol Radio, Yamid Amat, who wants a phone number for the paisa Robin Hood so he can interview him. I pass the message on to Pablo.

  “Don’t tell him I get up at eleven! Tell him that, from six to nine a.m.—the time of his news show—I…have French classes. And that from nine to eleven…I go to the gym.”

  I advise him to make Amat wait about two weeks. Also, to prepare an original and evasive answer for any attempt to find out the nature of our relationship. Pablo gives the interview, and when the journalist asks him what woman he would like to make love to, he replies: Margaret Thatcher! As soon as the program is over, he calls me to find out what I think and, of course, to hear my reaction to his public declaration of love for the most powerful woman on the planet. I analyze the report and then congratulate him effusively.

  “You’re learning to play on my field, love, and you’re doing it very well! The student is exceeding the master, and you can be sure that Thatcher quote will go down in history.”

  We both know that any of the “richest men in Colombia”—and any men less brave than him—would have answered with an anxious “Sir, I am offended!” or perhaps some nonsense like “I only make love to my esteemed and respectable wife, the mother of my five children!” After reiterating that “Thatcher is for the public and you, only you are for me,” Pablo says good-bye until Saturday. I am beaming: he didn’t say Sophia Loren, or Bo Derek, or Miss Universe. But best of all, he didn’t say “my adored wife.”

  Escobar makes news again when he attends sessions of Congress for the first time and the police at the Capitol won’t let him in. But it’s not because of his criminal mind, or his criminal beige linen jacket—it’s because he’s not wearing a tie.

  “But, Agent, don’t you see it’s the famous paisa Robin Hood?” protests someone in the entourage.

  “Paisa Robin Hood or coastal Robin Hood, only ladies enter without ties!”

  Parliamentarians of all stripes run to offer Pablo theirs, and he takes the tie from one of his companions. The next day, the story is all over the news.

  My Pablito superstar! I think with a smile.

  *

  —

  SOME WEEKS LATER, I’m in New York. First I go to FAO Schwarz and spend $2,000 on a toy train for J
uan Pablo, just like the one I always wanted. Then I walk down Fifth Avenue, trying to think of a really useful gift for the boy’s father. He already has someone to buy him ties, and he also owns toy airplanes, toy boats, toy tractors, a toy James Bond car, and toy giraffes in bulk. When I pass a window display with unusual electric devices, I stop. I go inside, and after studying the products on offer, I observe the Arabs who manage the place: no doubt about it, they have the look of businessmen. I ask the one who seems to be the manager if he knows of a place to buy equipment to tap phones. In another country, of course—not in America, God forbid! He smiles and asks me how many lines we’d be talking about. I take him to one side and tell him it’s the whole Secret Service building in a tropical country, because the man I love is the leader of the Resistance and aspires to be the next president; he has many enemies and needs to protect himself from them and from the opposition. He tells me that an angel like me couldn’t appreciate what he has to offer. I tell him that maybe I couldn’t, but our movement certainly could. He asks if the movement could pay fifty thousand dollars. I say sure. Two hundred thousand? I say yes. Six hundred thousand dollars? I say of course, but for that kind of money we would be talking about a variety of high-tech products. He calls to the other man, who seems to be his father and the owner of the store. Biting his nails, he says a few phrases in Arabic that end with what sounds like the word “Watergate.” They both give me radiant smiles, and I in return smile appreciatively. They look around and then invite me into the back of the store, where they inform me that they have access to all kinds of equipment thrown out by the FBI and even the Pentagon. First, with carefully measured phrases, and then with manifest enthusiasm, they tell me that they are in the position to offer us things like a briefcase that can decipher a million codes in a dozen languages, glasses and telescopes to see at night, and some suckers that you put on the wall to listen to the conversations in the room next door—in a hotel, for example. But the pièce de résistance is a device to intercept a thousand phone lines simultaneously—it would have been the dream of Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign and costs a million dollars—and another that guarantees your phone can’t be bugged. But first, they want to know if the Resistance has cash. Since I know perfectly well that the movement’s only problem is excess liquidity in American territory, I flash a movie-star smile and tell them that’s a matter for our leader’s secretary; I was only passing through to buy a lighted makeup mirror. I say he’ll be in touch in a couple of days, and I dash off to the hotel to call Pablo.