After a few months, everything seems to return to normal. It’s said that the Organization of American States supported Colombia and opposed the gringo invasion because one Guantánamo base was enough, and two wouldn’t be good for the hemisphere’s stability. Also because who wants to deal with all those whining European environmentalists if the gringos destroy the Darién rain forest, with imperialist arguments disguised as pro–free trade? The entire country, without exception—rebels, students, workers, middle and upper class, and domestic workers—celebrates that the Yankees were left all dressed up with nowhere to go, and the big businessmen start to return to the country and retake the helms of their banks, drugstore chains, and soccer teams.
And who better to know the truth about everything that’s happening with Pablo and his world than Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, his colleague emeritus and lord and master of dozens of journalists? Thank God the Rodríguezes are not enemies of the establishment but rather friends of all the political and bureaucratic elite. They don’t have blood on their hands or torture people—well, it’s rumored that many years ago they participated in the kidnapping of some Swiss people in Cali, but that was so long ago it’s no longer true. Gilberto doesn’t keep his money buried in cans underground, like Pablo and the Mexican, but rather in his own banks. He doesn’t murder ministers but is a personal friend of Belisario Betancur. They call him “the Chess Player” because he has the brain of one and not the mind of a serial killer. He doesn’t wear beige linen in Bogotá but instead navy blue. He doesn’t wear tennis shoes; he wears Bottega Veneta, because he’s John Gotti. And, lately, all my coworkers comment in low voices that after the billion-dollar blow to the owners of Tranquilandia, Gilberto Rodríguez has become the richest man in Colombia.
Rodríguez is spending more and more time in Bogotá, and every time he’s in town he invites me up to his office at Grupo Radial so I can tell him everything that’s going on. He claims he’s just a simple man from the province and not well informed about the latest news of the capital. Of course, Gilberto knows everything, because his three best friends are Rodolfo González García, Eduardo Mestre Sarmiento, and Hernán Beltz Peralta, the crème de la crème of the Colombian political class. All the representatives from the Valle del Cauca and many from other departments call him frequently. He gives ten or fifteen minutes of his time to each one, and I hear their names while I watch him from the sofa across from his desk. What Gilberto really wants to show me is that he is elegant, popular, and powerful, and that he buys ministers and senators by the dozen; that now my lover is just a fugitive from justice, and he has become the power behind the throne in Colombia. To everyone who calls asking for money—and that’s the only thing they call for—he responds in the affirmative. He tells me that to his friends, he sends 100 percent of what he had promised; but to those he doesn’t like, he transfers 10 percent, and once he knows their price, he promises that the rest will come another day. To President Alfonso López Michelsen—whom Gilberto Rodríguez idolizes for possessing what he calls “the most formidable, complete, and perverse intelligence in the country”—he gives first-class tickets to Europe. And President López and his wife, Cecilia Caballero, are always traveling to London and Paris, and to Bucharest for procaine injections from the famous gerontologist Anita Aslan, whose patients have a reputation for staying in a perfect state of health, conservation, alertness, and lucidity until the dawn of their second century.
Gilberto is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. As a child, he and his family had fled from the conservative-led violence in his native Tolima, the rice and coffee region, to settle in the Valle del Cauca, the sugar region. Unlike Escobar and the Ochoas in Antioquia, he owns the entire police force in the valley as well as the security organizations and the army. Gilberto and I talk about everything, but we never mention Pablo by name, not even if the subject is Picasso’s Guernica or Neruda’s “New Love Song for Stalingrad.” Escobar and Rodríguez are polar opposites in almost everything. When Pablo sees me, he only has one thing in mind: get my dress off; the eight hours of conversation will come much later. When Gilberto looks at me, the only thing on his mind is Escobar’s girlfriend. And when I look at Gilberto, I only have one thing in mind: Pablo’s rival. If Pablo is the drama, Gilberto is the comedy, a snake charmer and a box of surprises, one of his Italian shoes in the underworld and the other firmly planted in the establishment. And, for some time now, we have both spoken the same language. We not only enjoy laughing together, but we are also the best-informed people in the country. Ultimately, each of us sympathizes with the other’s cause, and the compassion we feel goes both ways.
“But how could a man have such a beauty, such a queen, such a goddess, as a girlfriend? A woman like you is for marrying! You tend her needs every day and never look at another woman again for the rest of your life. And to think I’m already married…and to such a beast! It’s like living with Kid Pambelé and Pelé, punching all day, kicking all night. Not even in your dreams could you imagine, my queen, what it’s like to have to spend every day putting up with a beast who leads you down such a bitter path, while society and the other bankers beat you with the lash of contempt, like you were a pariah. Thank God you understand me. The rich cry, too, don’t you believe otherwise. You, to be sure, are a refuge of peace!”
The other fundamental difference between Pablo and Gilberto is that the man I still love, and whom I miss so much, has never underestimated me. Pablo doesn’t insult my intelligence, and he doesn’t flatter me except when he sees me undone, suffering for him over things I would never dare talk to him about. Also, Pablo would never accept defeat, not from anyone, even the woman he loves. Pablo doesn’t talk badly about his accomplices, only about the galanistas, his sworn enemies. Pablo always sends 100 percent of what he promises the next day, and he never asks for a receipt. Pablo doesn’t talk about small things and never lowers his guard with anyone, especially with me, because for the two of us, nothing is good enough: everything should be better, a thousand times bigger, the utmost, the maximum. Everything in our world—our relationship, our language, our conversations—is macro. We are equally elemental and earthly, dreamy and ambitious, terrible and insatiable, and the only problems we have are two different codes of ethics that are forever clashing. I tell him that I’m forever frightened by the cruelty of evolution, which made the son of God c0me down to earth to teach us compassion. After a byzantine discussion I have convinced him that his concept of the present should be a hundred years, because for a protagonist of history like him, to live always within the conventional definition of something that doesn’t exist, without analyzing causes or foreseeing consequences, is very dangerous. Pablo and I never cease to surprise each other, to shake, contradict, confront, and scandalize each other, to push one another to the limit and feel, briefly, like an all-powerful, human god for whom nothing is impossible. Because there is nothing, nothing in the world that makes an ego thrill more than finding another one of equal size, as long as that ego is of the opposite gender, and the body that encases it ends up under the body of the other.
One night, Gilberto Rodríguez invites me to the celebration of a historic triumph of América de Cali, the soccer team his brother Miguel owns. Miguel is a friendly and chivalrous man, serious and without an ounce of the charming irony that characterizes his older brother. My instinct tells me that he also lacks Gilberto’s intellectual curiosity, which is extensive and more of the artistic and existential type than political or historical, like Pablo’s. I interview Miguel Rodríguez, chat with him for a few minutes to see how he reacts to my presence—because I’m sure that Gilberto the Big Mouth has already mentioned me to him—and we pose for the photographs. I meet Gilberto’s children from his first marriage, who are all very cordial to me, and I take my leave. He insists on walking me to my car, and I insist it isn’t necessary, because I know that when he sees my Mitsubishi, the Rodríguez family is going to score the only goal they’ve been missing.
&nb
sp; “But, how lovely your car is, my queen!” he exclaims triumphantly, as if he were standing before a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
“Don’t talk nonsense, it’s not Cinderella’s chariot. It’s the little car of a journalist exploited by the Grupo Radial Colombiano. Plus, I think it’s time to admit that…my heart’s not in cars. It’s in planes. A fleet of them, in fact.”
“Uuuuyyy! And whose hangars are those planes kept in, my dear?”
“Those of a man who’s in Australia and will be back soon.”
“But…don’t you know he’s been back for a while now? And that his whole fleet is in just one hangar: the police hangar? And when are you coming to Cali, my love? Let’s see if, finally, you and I can go out to dinner one night.”
I reply that Bogotá has had restaurants since the colonial era, but that on Saturday I’ll be in Cali buying antiques from my friend Clara, and I say good-bye.
I don’t stop crying until seven at night on Saturday, because Clara already knows, through Beatriz—Joaco’s girlfriend and Pablo’s sister’s neighbor—that Pablo returned to Colombia and went straight to the Jacuzzi with a beauty queen or the pair of models seasoned with marijuana. I thank God that Gilberto doesn’t seem to like lesbians or the Dávilas’ Samarian Gold, that he isn’t a fugitive from justice, and that he is, definitively, the absolute crowned king of the Valle del Cauca. And, since I treat kings like pawns and pawns like kings, and he and I have already spent some two hundred hours talking and laughing about everything human and divine, about politics and finance, music and literature, philosophy and religion, with the first sip of whiskey I ask him about the real world—in his condition as importer of supplies and chemicals summa cum laude, and not as banker emeritus or any such nonsense:
“What is the formula for cocaine, Gilberto?”
He accepts the blow and immediately gives me a big smile.
“Well…you’ve sure turned into a mafiosa, my love! Can it be that in all this time, they didn’t give you some intensive classes? What did you talk about with that Australian, then? Did you count sheep, or what?”
“No, we talked about the theory of relativity, which I explained to him step by step until I made him see stars, and he finally understood! And never, ever, ask me about that psychopath again because, on principle, I never talk about one man I’ve loved with another. So let’s have it, your recipe…and I promise not to sell it to anyone for less than a hundred million dollars.”
“Yes…he has never accepted that in this business, like everything in life, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Someone steals two hundred kilos here, three hundred there…and you resign yourself, because what else can you do? He, on the other hand…every time someone steals five kilos, he leaves five people dead! At that rate, he’s going to kill off all of humanity!”
And then he gives me an intensive chemistry course: this much cocaine paste, this much sulfuric acid, this much potassium permanganate, this much ether, this much acetone, et cetera, et cetera. When he finishes, he says, “Well, my love, since we speak the same language…I’m going to propose a perfectly legal business that will make you a multimillionaire. How well do you get along with Gonzalo, the Mexican?”
I reply that all the bosses respect me, that I was the only TV star present at the forums against extradition, that sooner or later that position is going to cost me my career, and that was the reason why I accepted the job at Grupo Radial Colombiano.
“It’s the only parachute I’m going to have the day they take away all my other programs….It’s my tragedy to always see these things coming.”
“No, no, Virginia! Don’t even think about that. A queen like you wasn’t born to worry about such silly things. Look: since I’m spending more and more time in Bogotá and Gonzalo lives there, I’d like you to help me convince him that what’s best for him, after the blow they’ve just been dealt in the Yarí, is to work with us, because we are the country’s biggest chemical importers. Now, he’s truly smart. In Los Angeles, there are a million Mexicans desperate for work of any kind, and they’re the best and most honorable people in the world! The people who move the Mexican’s merchandise don’t steal one gram of it. On the other hand, your friend from Miami has to work with all those Marielitos—the murderers, rapists, and thieves that Fidel Castro sent to the gringos in 1980—and they only understand the hard way. That’s why the man’s gone so crazy! I’m not so ambitious, and I don’t want to win every battle: I’ll settle for the Wall Street market and the rich kids at Studio 54. That’ll give me enough to live in peace for the rest of my life. The things one does for one’s children, mijita…”
I know how Pablo Escobar, Gustavo Gaviria, Jorge Ochoa, and Gonzalo Rodríguez think and act: as a single concrete block, and more so now that the whole world is after them. I’m not in the business of selling chemical supplies, but I do have a passion for the collection, processing, classification, and storage of every kind of information, useful or useless. I don’t miss an opportunity, and I ask Gonzalo for a meeting.
The Mexican receives me at the country training site of the Millonarios Club, his soccer team. He comes out and asks me to wait for him, because he has some generals in his office and he doesn’t want them to see me. I take a walk through the gardens, which are beautiful and dotted with duck ponds. The time passes quickly as I study the behavior of the dominant male with his rivals and the female ducks. I wait patiently until everyone has gone and Gonzalo is free to talk to me. Pablo’s associates have always treated me very well, and I’m delighted at his smile when I tell him I like them all much better than Pablo himself. Gonzalo tells me that he can’t speak freely anymore, even in his offices, because anyone could hide a microphone in there. He is a terrible man who began his career as an emerald dealer in the lowest underworld, and next to him, Pablo looks like the Duchess of Alba. He is two years older than us, very dark, thin, and about five feet seven inches tall. He is silent, calculating, and very crafty. He has seventeen haciendas in the eastern plains on Colombia’s border with Venezuela, and although they are worth much less, some of them are larger than Nápoles. Like every Colombian landowner, he is ferociously anti-communist, with a virulent hatred for the guerrillas who live off kidnapping and livestock theft. That’s why the army is always welcomed to his properties with a ternera a la llanera (roasted veal) and boots for the soldiers, who have holes in theirs because of the army’s tight budget. When I give him Gilberto’s message, the Mexican reflects for a long while, and then he says, “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Pablo, Virginia…I can’t stick my nose into it because he’s my friend, but that man has been crazy for you since he met you. Personally, I think he doesn’t dare show his face to you after what happened. But you have to understand that the blow they hit us with was monumental, the kind no one forgives…and things couldn’t have been left at that, because one has to demand respect.”
And then he starts to tell me everything that’s been happening in Panama, and he explains why, with the help of ex-president Alfonso López, things are going to start righting themselves very soon. He adds that almost all of their planes are already safely in several Central American countries, because that’s what having the Civil Aviation director in your pocket is for. I tell him about the daily threats I have been receiving since Minister Lara’s death, and about the terror I’m living in, and he offers to put men at my disposal to trace the calls and eliminate the people who are turning my life into hell. I respond that I have enough on my conscience with the deaths Pablo is responsible for. And also that, unfortunately for me, I’m the sort who would rather be a victim than a victimizer, and maybe that’s why I perfectly understand people who, in a country like ours, take justice into their own hands. He tells me that I’ll always be able to count on him, especially when Pablo isn’t around, because for the rest of his life he will be grateful for the TV program I made about Medellín sin Tugurios and for my presence at the forums against extradition. I say that h
is friend has never thanked me for anything, and he replies categorically and in a voice that grows more heated with each phrase:
“He doesn’t say anything to you because he’s very proud, and after he won your heart, he thinks he’s king of the world! But he’s talked to me often about your courage and loyalty. That man really needs you, Virginia, because you’re the only educated and adult woman he’s had in his whole life, and the only one who puts him in his place. Or do you think there’s going to be another woman of your caste who bets it all on a criminal like him, without asking anything in return? But, changing the subject…how can you be so naive? Don’t you know that Gilberto Rodríguez is the sneakiest enemy Pablo Escobar has? How can that scoundrel send a princess like you to run mafiosos’ errands? If he wants to be my partner, let him get his hands bloody in MAS, killing kidnappers and communists, and quit acting like some great lord. He’s nothing but an “Indian-made good” like the rest of us, a drugstore messenger with a bike! Unlike him, I know where my territory is and who my partners are. Tell him I have supplies to last till the year 3000, and that this is no business for an angel like you—it’s for a son of a bitch like him, only with balls like Pablo Escobar’s. I want you to know that I don’t plan to say a word to my friend about this meeting. But remind that so-called Chess Player that there is nothing, nothing, more dangerous a man can do in this life than to test the anger of Pablo Escobar!”
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 16
