Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  After two minutes of heavenly silence, I ask him why he knows so much about those things. Still exhausted, he replies, “Because in my life I’ve had to squeeze a lot of people…a lot of kidnappers. That’s why, my love.”

  After another two minutes of idyllic repose, I ask him how many people. After a pause, he sighs and he replies with the utmost calm that…it’s about two hundred. After another two minutes I ask him how many of those two hundred “died on him.”

  After another pause and another sigh, he replies “a lot, a lot.” This time I don’t give him a rest before I ask him what happened to all the others who were left alive. And this time Escobar doesn’t answer. I get up from the place where our pitched battles always end, gather up the bullets, and load the Beretta. I carry it to my safe, take out the copy of the key to the private elevator that opens directly into my apartment, and return with the gun in one hand and my gold key ring in the other. I hand him the key.

  “I’ve never given this to anyone, Pablo. If someday you don’t have anywhere else to go, you can always hide here. No one in their right mind would think of looking for you at my house; maybe they’ll come here for me, but not for you. Here, in this little heart locket, is the combination to my safe; you’ll always find your gun there when I’m out of the city, because from now on it will always be with me and I’ll only leave it behind when I take a commercial flight. Now tell me what name you want me to leave with the concierge so they let you into the garage and you can come up when I’m not here.”

  A tender caress in a long silence, the same deep sadness as always in his eyes, and three words impossible to forget are his response to the infinite gratitude that I deposit in the hands of that formidable, unique, and terrible man. He gives me a gun; I hand him a gold heart. And after we say good-bye, I’m left with not two but two hundred souls vying for my compassion and my sanity. Some inner demon whispers to my conscience that if lovers always replied truthfully to each other’s questions, the entire world would freeze in seconds.

  *

  —

  AS THE PROVERB GOES, “If you want to kill the bird, cut down the tree where it nests.” March 1984 sees the downfall of “Tranquilandia,” the largest cocaine-processing laboratory in the world. The citadel in the Yarí jungle was detected by a U.S. satellite, and the American government passed the information on to Minister Lara and the Colombian police. The group of fourteen labs that stretch the length and width of twelve hundred acres produces 3,500 kilos of cocaine a week. It has its own landing strips to ship the drugs immediately out of the country as well as its own roads and comfortable facilities for nearly three hundred workers. The police throw fourteen tons of coke into the Yarí River, and they seize seven planes, a helicopter, vehicles, weapons, and almost twelve thousand drums of chemical supplies for processing cocaine paste into pure cocaine.

  I see Pablo a few days before I leave for Venice. He is smiling and calm. He tells me that the laboratories at Tranquilandia and Villa Coca belonged to Jorge and Gonzalo, not to him, and that only a fraction of the figures the police reported had actually been seized. He explains that they all learned a valuable lesson: from now on, the jungle “kitchens” will be mobile, and in the guerrilla-controlled zones they’ll pay tolls to the rebel groups. In any case, the merchandise that “fell” is only 10 percent of their total. Compared with the 90 percent that is “crowned,” it’s irrelevant. He earns $5,000 from every kilo he transports and insures for his clients, and for every kilo of his own he realizes double net profits, because he doesn’t have to pay transportation. That’s after subtracting all the expenses, like pilots, gasoline, and payments to authorities who cooperate in each country. The last are known in the profession as “the route.” The shipments are several tons each, and the crew can earn up to a million dollars per trip; that way, if they’re caught by the law and bribery doesn’t work, the pilots can hire the best lawyers and pay fines without having to call Colombia. I gradually learn that except in the United States and Canada, bribes always work. The key people along the route are the dictator or ruler, the commander of the air force or police, or the head of customs in whichever tropical country the plane stops to refuel. All of them—chemists, “cooks,” guards, pilots, accountants—earn extravagant salaries to make sure they won’t steal, turn in their superiors, or hand over the routes. Pablo almost always uses the word “merchandise,” not cocaine, and he tells me these things to reassure me, so I’ll stop worrying so much about Minister Lara Bonilla’s implacable pursuit.

  This time, I am going to Italy, so my shopping budget is $100,000. I ask for leave from Grupo Radial, pre-record TV programs for three weeks, and happily depart for Venice, the city founded by the richest merchants in history and the most splendid place ever built on the face of the earth and the waters of the sea.

  At the beginning of April 1984, everything in my world is nearly perfect: my young lover is perhaps the most lavish merchant of his own time, and thanks to him I also feel like the happiest, most pampered and beautiful woman on earth. I stop first in Rome to buy dresses for the commercial we’ll film in Venice. Today, I’ve emerged from Sergio Russo’s beauty salon wondering why I can never look like this in Colombia. I suppose it’s because this style has just cost me hundreds of dollars, and that’s a mere fraction of the price of my Odicini dress and my crocodile shoes and handbag.

  After Pablo, nothing makes me happier than people staring at me as I walk past the luxury stores lining the city’s main street; I have a handsome, elegant, smiling, and proud man on either side of me, both sporting impeccable navy-blue blazers and rings with coats of arms on their fingers. On this perfect day I’m walking down Via Condotti with Alfonso Giraldo Tobón and Count Franco Antamoro de Céspedes. Alfonso is a legendary playboy, and the most adorable and refined man Colombia has ever produced. His father made an enormous fortune after inventing the dandruff product Caspidosán, and Alfonso frittered it away dancing with Soraya, the dreamlike Persian empress, and drinking with princes like Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, the richest in the Holy Roman Empire, “Princie” Baroda of India, and Raimondo Orsini d’Aragona, of the Pontifical Throne. After taking intensive classes from the greatest expert in women, Porfirio Rubirosa—first Trujillo’s son-in-law and later married to the two richest women in the world—Alfonso now lives in his favorite city in a wing of a palazzo owned by Orsini. Franco, for his part, is partner in a private bank in Geneva and the grandson of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the hero who rang the bells of freedom in Cuba and the first of the great hacienda owners to set all his slaves free. My two old friends make me laugh nonstop, have tender nicknames for me, and are incredibly generous with their words.

  Franco exclaims, “At thirty-four you are disgustingly young, Cartagenetta. Forty is the best age for beautiful women. What is someone like you doing living in Colombia? Such a luminous creature urgently needs a rich, handsome husband who’s great in bed and has a title!”

  “Tomorrow,” says Alfonso, “you’re going to have dinner with a polo player who is the most beautiful man in Rome, and on Sunday he’ll take you to the Polo Club, where all the handsomest men in Italy are. Now, that’s eye candy, lover! I already told my friends that the most beautiful woman in Colombia was coming to Rome, and they’re all dying to meet you.”

  I smile happily, because now I finally have a title, too! And I laugh to myself, because I adore the seventh-richest man in the world with all my soul, I have an alternate lover at the level of Porfirio Rubirosa, and I’ve managed not to lose my head yet over the most beautiful polo player in Colombia. And since Alfonso has perfect taste in all that has been or will ever be, I beg him to take me to Battistoni to buy shirts and to Gucci to buy the most divine layers and leather jackets for “an untamable stud who only wears jeans and tennis shoes to supervise, whip in hand, hundreds of ponies, and about a thousand grooms on his estate.” When Aldo Gucci comes into his store, Alfonso introduces us and accuses me with a broad grin of having bo
ught twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of crocodile bags. Though it’s really only five thousand, the delighted owner disappears and comes back minutes later with two scarves as gifts, one with little polo horses and another one with flowers that I still have today.

  I travel to Venice with half a dozen suitcases loaded down with treasures, and I settle into my suite at the Gritti Palace. I happily tour the city, buy Murano crystal and a bronze for “The Nanny” as Pablo requested, and I prepare to film the commercial. Everything has been planned down to the last detail, but working in the Grand Canal turns out to be simply impossible. I am wearing a spectacular white Léonard dress with flowers, a large straw hat, my turquoise and diamond necklace and earrings, and I have my legs crossed at that perfect angle. Boatloads of tourists catch sight of the cameras, and six or seven of them surround us. The guides point to me and shout “Un’ attrice, vieni! Un’ attrice!” and dozens of Japanese sightseers approach to take my picture and ask for my autograph. At first I find it all very funny; but after a hundred attempts that stretch out over nearly three days, we decide to move to a caneletto with a little bridge, from where a ragazzo in medieval dress throws me a rose, which I receive smiling and blowing a kiss. Finding the bello ragazzo biondo has been another drama, because in Venice everyone lives on tourism, and a blond model charges thousands of dollars. In the end it all works out, and my Venetian commercial will become one of the most memorable in the history of Colombian advertising. For the rest of my life, and because of that unforgettable trip and my high fees, my colleagues will say contemptuously that I was “just a model.” The evil tongues of my country will even say that “to cut travel and hotel costs, Alas Publicidad had to reconstruct much of Venice on the Magdalena River!”

  Pablo calls me twice a week to tell me that all is well and things are calmer now. Back home, I am counting the hours until I see him, when we’ll melt into each other’s arms and say how much we missed each other. I’ll give him his gifts and rave about life’s generosity, and about how marvelous people are to me when I leave Colombia, because in other countries it’s not a crime to always look radiant with happiness. And I know he’ll smile at me with tenderness and look at me proudly, because he understands me like no one else, and he knows more than anyone the harm envy can do.

  After almost a month away, and with so many reasons to celebrate and be happy, who could have imagined the dimensions of the rage and hatred of the owners of a twelve-hundred-acre citadel after it was lost? And at the seizure of a trifling fourteen or sixteen tons of coke at $40,000 or $50,000 a kilo in the streets of the United States, plus the planes, the supplies, and the rest? How could I have guessed that Tranquilandia also belonged to Pablo, and that the losses amounted to nearly a billion dollars at the time, around $2.5 billion today?

  And the shot that is fired the day after I return to Bogotá rings out in every corner of Colombia, on all the news programs and in all the newspapers of the planet. It explodes in my head, my happiness dissolves into atoms, and all my hopes are shattered. It explodes in my ears, and my world crumbles in seconds, my dreams crushed. And I know nothing will ever be the same again. That as long as I live, I will never know another day of complete happiness. That the man I have most loved in my life has stopped living and has condemned us to merely survive. That from now on, the freest being on earth will be a mere fugitive from justice, and the man I love will be an eternal outlaw until the day they capture him or the night they kill him.

  Why didn’t I realize the day of the Beretta that he planned to kill the minister of justice? Why did I go to Italy instead of staying at his side and giving him a million arguments against making a mistake like that? Why is he only surrounded by idiots who don’t see the consequences of their actions and assassins for hire who obey him in everything as if he were a god? And why do you punish me so, Lord, when I never hurt a soul? And why is life so cruel, and everything so fleeting? Why does nothing last? And why did you put him in my path to be my cross to bear, when he already had a family and women, partners and politicians, followers and an army, while I had no one and nothing?

  At Rodrigo Lara Bonilla’s funeral, President Belisario Betancur announces the extradition treaty with the United States will be signed and will go into effect ipso facto. Over and over I see the young, widowed Nancy Lara on TV, her face bathed in tears like mine. Two hours later Pablo calls me. He asks me not to talk, not to interrupt him, and to memorize every one of his words:

  “You know they’re going to put that death on me, and I have to leave the country. I’m going to be very far away, and I won’t be able to write or call, because from now on you’ll be the most watched woman in Colombia. Keep that ivory I gave you with you at all times, and practice everything I taught you. Don’t trust anyone, especially girlfriends and journalists. Anyone asks about me, you’re going to tell them, without exception, that you haven’t seen me in almost a year and that I’m in Australia. Leave the presents from Italy at the house of a friend, and I’ll send for the suitcases later. If I can’t come back to Colombia, I’ll send for you as soon as things calm down. And you’ll see that with time, everything does calm down. Remember that I love you with all my soul and I’m going to miss you every day. See you soon, Virginia.”

  *

  —

  “VAYA CON DIOS, mi vida. Vaya con Dios, mi amor,” sings Connie Francis in that heartbreaking good-bye that, I don’t know why, has moved every fiber of my heart since I was a little girl. But…how could I tell a murderer to go with God, knowing that my idealist, my leader of the people, is dead, and this heartless avenger has been born?

  All I know is that I’m only an impotent woman. That starting now he will be ever more a stranger, less and less mine…that he will be ever more absent, ever more distant…that his self-defense will make him ever more merciless, and his thirst for revenge will turn him more ruthless every day…and that from now on, every one of his dead will also be mine, and bearing them all is perhaps my only fate.

  Cocaine Blues

  IN THE WEEKS AFTER Rodrigo Lara Bonilla’s assassination, there are hundreds of arrests and raids; confiscated planes, helicopters, yachts, and luxury cars. For the first time ever in Colombia, driving a Mercedes through the city or a Ferrari on the highway is enough to make the police stop you on suspicion, yank you out of the car, barking insults, and unceremoniously cart you away. The proverbial “palm greasing” doesn’t work anymore, because the army is everywhere. The Colombians who pay taxes proudly say that finally! the country is changing and all the corruption is coming to an end, we couldn’t take any more, we were being Mexicanized, and Colombia’s image is in the trash. The big bosses flee in a stampede to someplace that, it’s rumored, could be Panama, because that’s where they have their money stashed so the gringos can’t confiscate it. Everyone assumes that the United States is going to invade us to build a naval base on the Pacific coast, because the Panama Canal is drying up and they have to start thinking about its replacement, and about clearing the Darién to build the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Patagonia. Supposedly they’re also going to build a military base on the Atlantic coast just like Guantánamo, because the guerrillas are building up such strength that all our neighbors—how embarrassing!—are already complaining that their countries are being Colombianized. The nation is inflamed, the mood is heated, and everyone understands that decent people are in favor of both bases, because 60 percent of those against them are narco-traffickers or communists.

  For several weeks my life becomes an authentic hell: every half hour some unidentified person calls to scream in my ear everything they could never say to Pablo, things very much like those he had recited into my ear on that night of the Beretta and the mirrors. Over time I get used to the insults and threats, and to the days passing with no news of him; I also stop crying, I grow stronger, and I think things are better this way, because that murderer was no good for me and maybe it’s best for him to stay in Australia raising sheep and to
leave Colombians—the best and most hardworking people in the world—in peace. And since life is very short, and in the end we only have our experiences—“what we’ve lived, what we ate and how we danced.” As a test to see if Pablo has stopped hurting me, I go with David Metcalfe to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahía to eat moqueca baiana and hear Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil, and all the other marvels of that subcontinent, a place that must have been created in heaven by some merciful god and intended for the most hedonistic people on earth. We tour Brazil’s city of artists and thinkers, which has recently been painted in every color because of the success of Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos, the film with Sonia Braga, whom I have just interviewed on one of my TV programs. David looks great in his resort wear—his Savile Row blazers and his pink, coral, and canary pants from Palm Beach—and in the cidade maravillosa cheia de encantos mil (the wonderful city of a thousand delights) I debut all the pareo wraps and bikinis I had bought in Italy, and I feel like the Girl from Ipanema as I gaze out at the lagoon, shining under the starry sky of the carioca night. I don’t dance samba, because a member of White’s Club who stands six foot six inches tall and is twenty-two years older than me may drink caipirinhas, but he roundly refuses to dance to samba, salsa, reggae, vallenato, and all that “Spanish music” of Latin Americans from my generation. For a few short days I feel like I’m in paradise, and I think that finally, after crying a river for Pablo and another for myself, one for the people Pablo has killed and another for our country, life is smiling on me again.