Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  Gonzalo knows perfectly well that neither he nor I will say any of that to Gilberto. I thank him for his time and his trust and say good-bye. I have just learned one of the most valuable lessons of recent years: and it’s that the incredibly powerful guild of drug traffickers is much more deeply divided than anyone would believe, and that, wherever Pablo is, the toughest of them will always close ranks around him.

  I never understood how Escobar managed to awaken that fierce loyalty and admiration in other strong men. I only saw Gonzalo three or four times in my life, and when they killed him in 1989, I knew that Pablo had only months left to live. They say the Mexican was just another psychopath, that he murdered an entire left-wing political party, and that he was one of the biggest monsters Colombia has produced in its entire history. All that, and much more, is painfully true. But, in honor of the truth, I must also say that that incredibly ugly and heartless man, who, in the eighties, with the help of the army and security organizations, sent hundreds of souls from the Patriotic Union Party and their presidential candidates off to heaven, had a quality that I rarely encountered in Colombia: the character of a real man. Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha knew how to be a friend. And Gacha, as they called him, as if he were a bastard, was as solid as they come.

  When I return to my apartment, I call Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo. I inform him that the president of his Banco de Occidente, in Cali, roundly opposes opening accounts there for the Rodríguez Orejuela family. They are now the richest in the Valle del Cauca, with a couple billion dollars and dozens of legitimate companies, including the Workers Bank, the First Interamericas of Panama, and several hundred drugstores.

  “Whaaaat?” yells the richest man of the Colombian establishment.

  I see Gilberto again in Cali, because he is convinced that my phone is bugged and I’m being closely watched. I tell him I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that Gonzalo thanked him for the offer but said he had supplies to last until 3000.

  “Which means he told you to tell me to go to hell…and he told you he was the paisa’s partner and not mine, right? And I’m sure he told you I was a marica because I wasn’t a member of MAS. How long did you talk?”

  I tell him it was about a quarter of an hour, because he was very busy. Gilberto exclaims, “Don’t lie to me, my queen. When it comes to a treasure trove of information like you, a guy talks for three hours, with pleasure. No one talks to you for fifteen minutes! What else did he say?”

  “Well, he said that he understands perfectly that you and Miguel are too liberal to kill communists…and that he respects ideological differences…and that you, who are a brilliant man, know what that means, because he feels bad sending the message with a princess like me. But the good news is that Luis Carlos Sarmiento doesn’t see why your drugstores can’t be customers at his banks! I told him that you liked to pay your taxes down to the last cent—you and I know that’s not out of patriotism, don’t we?—and he loved that, because he’s the largest taxpayer in the country. My humble theory is that the more magnates pay taxes for real, the more they’ll relieve the tax burden on everyone. The problem is that except for you two, who are now the richest men in Colombia, everyone hears that and howls, ‘Get back, Satan!’ Sarmiento said to tell you he’ll see you whenever you want.”

  “Well, you really are a marvel! You must be a dream of a girlfriend. No, no, not a girlfriend: you were born for much more important things, my love.”

  “Yes, I was born to be a guardian archangel. To do favors without asking anything in return, not go into the supply business, Gilberto. Someone like me understands perfectly well that no one can have two billion dollars in just one bank. And now that you’re on the right path, don’t even think about getting into MAS with my paisa friends. Ever.”

  Since the occasion calls for celebration, we go dancing at Miguel’s nightclub. That night Gilberto drinks a lot, and I realize that alcohol transforms him into someone else—he loses his self-control completely. Back at the Intercontinental Hotel, he insists on walking me to my room. I feel terribly uncomfortable as we cross the lobby, because everyone in Cali knows him and everyone in the country knows me. When we reach my door, he insists over and over that he open it himself. He pushes me inside, and the rest is history: because of a banderilla thrust into Pablo Escobar’s hide, the Trojan War has just started.

  A few days later Gilberto comes to Bogotá. He apologizes for what happened, saying he doesn’t remember anything, and I tell him I don’t, either, thank God. It’s entirely untrue, because I have a savant’s memory for even the most unremarkable things. He tells me that as proof of how important I am to him, he wants to take me with him to Panama to a meeting with ex-president Alfonso López. He asks me if I know him.

  “Of course. At twenty-two years old, Julio Mario Santo Domingo was already seating me at the main table of the presidential campaign, along with President López and President Turbay. And since Pablo Escobar also sat me at the main table at the two forums against extradition, where you were conspicuous in your absence, I think I am the perfect person to cover the news.”

  In Panama I meet the directors of Gilberto’s companies and his partners. It seems that he has summoned them all to some cardinal conclave, but none of them is named Alfonso López Michelsen. The board is made up of a dozen middle-class men, and the partners seem to be experts in accounting and finance. I can’t help thinking how the people around Pablo are always talking politics, while those around Gilberto only talk business. The last thing that could occur to me is that he’s invited them there so he can show me off. All I know is that when I return to Bogotá four days later, I hear the first version of the story that will pursue me for the next twenty years of my life, and that will eventually cost me my career. In my absence, Jorge Barón Televisión, the production company of El Show de las Estrellas, has received a dozen phone calls from someone whose voice can only be mine, saying I can’t attend the scheduled tapings because my face has been horribly slashed with a razor on orders from Pablo Escobar’s wife, supposedly because she wanted to take away an enormous black SUV that her husband had given me! When I enter the studio looking perfectly tanned and radiant in my long dress, I hear the assistants and technicians commenting in low voices that I’ve just come back from having plastic surgery over the weekend in Rio de Janeiro, and the famous surgeon Ivo Pitanguy worked miracles to save my face. With Pablo’s millions, they say, nothing is impossible. The entire country enjoys the endless versions of the story and the various models and colors of the car I was stripped of (others talk about a fabulous jewelry collection). Society ladies and almost all of my colleagues in the press gripe to each other about how Ivo and I are such good friends, since he operated on my nose in 1982, because he left me looking “younger and better than ever.”

  Many days go by before I realize that a certain female chess player has figured out how she can kill two birds with a single stone: while I haven’t been hit, kicked, or disfigured except in the fantasies of a woman sick with evil—not to mention those of the journalists at El Tiempo and El Espacio, a hundred mic-wielding colleagues with whom I’ve never even gone for coffee, and a million women convinced that youth and beauty are purchased in plastic surgeons’ clinics—I’ve now been made into the protagonist of the most sordid scandals. Plus, Pablo Escobar’s innocent wife has been turned into a dangerous and vengeful criminal, and he is painted as an idiot who lets his girlfriend be violently stripped of his gifts and a coward who didn’t lift one finger to stop it or to punish the guilty parties.

  One night, I return home after a product launch for a publicity agency. After examining me under magnifying glasses for five hours, everyone has concluded that with my long white Mary McFadden gown and my hair pulled into an updo, I look ever so much better than I did two weeks ago. When I enter my apartment, I am surprised to see light coming from the living room. I look in, and there he is. Paging through my photo albums and, one presumes, relieved to see me so intact and
unscathed. Happy as can be, as if he hadn’t murdered Minister Lara. Smiling, as if I hadn’t spent months listening to threats of torture and rape, and fifteen days setting straight stories of beatings and mutilations. Delighted, as if a century hadn’t passed since the last time we saw each other. Radiant, as if among eight million Colombians he were my only suitor. Expectant, as if I were his Penelope pining for her Odysseus’s return, obliged to rush to him and melt in his arms like passion fruit ice cream with bits of cherry. Just because he’s in the newspaper every day and on the covers of magazines flaunting that movie villain’s face, the face of a murderer, a psychopath, of an extraditable criminal and fugitive from Bogotá’s Modelo prison!

  I immediately realize that he doesn’t know about the fleeting affair with Gilberto, because there isn’t an ounce of reproach in his gaze, only the most absolute adoration. He also immediately realizes that I’m not the same as before. And he succumbs to the temptation of asinine flattery that he’d never used with me before: how I’m the most beautiful thing he’s seen in his whole life, how he never imagined that in a long gown and with my hair pulled up I could look like a goddess descended from Olympus, et cetera, et cetera. I pour myself an enormous drink and reply that looking like that and speaking even better have been how I’ve made a living my whole life. He tells me he’s been looking at my magazine covers and wondering why among the five dozen of them none show me as I look in real life. I tell him that, since Colombian magazines don’t have the budgets to pay Hernán Díaz—a genius of photography with perfect taste—Semana magazine has started the trend of putting serial killers on the cover and turning them into modern myths.

  His face is darkening as I go on.

  “How did it go in Panama with the magazine owner’s father? Is it true that your trade is going to turn over planes and routes and invest fortunes in the country, if Belisario Betancur withdraws the extradition treaty? And how does Alfonso López suggest they’ll control the inflation that’s going to hit us after an infusion of capital that is more than the entire external debt?”

  “Who told you all that? And who is calling you every fifteen minutes at this hour, Virginia?”

  I tell him we’ll wait for the next call so that, if we’re lucky, he can listen to a complete torture session. In his most persuasive voice he tells me not to worry, because the threats can only come from a bunch of harmless galanistas. When I don’t say a word, he quickly changes his subject and tone.

  “What did you do with the things you brought me from Rome? Beatriz says you didn’t leave anything with her and that Clara is her witness.”

  I am stunned, destroyed.

  “That’s all I need right now, Pablo! Those gifts were worth over $10,000. I think by now you know of my generosity and integrity, but if you want to question them, you’re free to do so. But what is this horror? And to think that before I went to Rome I gave both those witches $1,000 to go shopping at Saks! They thought you were gone for good…or that you and I would never talk again…and since they’re both dealers, they stole your suitcase to sell it all, including the bronze, God knows for how much!”

  He asks me not to say a word to anyone, because for both of our safety, no one can know that he is back and that we saw each other. He adds that it’s time I accept that someone like me cannot have girlfriends, and that people like Clara and Beatriz are capable of doing anything for $10,000. Suddenly, he opens a suitcase and tosses a dozen and a half audiocassettes onto the floor. He informs me that they are my phone conversations and that they were recorded by the police’s F2 unit, who work for him. He says they can’t be listened to because they’re scrambled. When he sees I don’t believe him, that I’m neither surprised nor alarmed, and that I’m too emotionally exhausted to get any more furious, he begins asking in a threatening voice:

  “Who is the husband of that mafiosa who’s calling the media to say that my wife cut you? Because we both know perfectly well that this is not the work of Bogotá snobs but of some criminal’s wife!”

  “I think they’re just galanistas, Pablo…and don’t underestimate yourself so much, because my lover, on principle, is, has been, and will always be the richest man in Colombia, not ‘some mafioso’! You can ask the F2 for the original tapes to find out what his name is. I’m pleased to know you arrived safely. I’ve spent the past five hours listening to the most refined insults disguised as adulation, and I’m very tired. Good night.”

  He tells me I’ll never see him again in my life. Without answering, I go up to my room, and I hear the elevator going down. To take my mind off the night’s events, I put in a cassette with my favorite songs and throw all the bath salts I can find into the tub. I close my eyes, thinking it was lucky that he saw me for the last time in a long gown and not in pajamas, and with my hair in an updo instead of curlers. I ask myself why the hell I need a mafioso serial killer like him, and I answer that I don’t, I don’t, not for anything except help killing myself, of course! But…then why am I crying like this while I listen to Sarah Vaughan’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and Shirley Bassey’s “Something”? And I tell myself it’s only because I’m doomed to never trust anyone, condemned to the most utter solitude, to a life surrounded by vipers….Yes, because that’s what all those fat journalists are, and those society women on endless diets, and those spurned men, and that pair of thieves I’d thought were my best friends.

  An object falls heavily into the tub. It makes a splash! and I open my eyes, terrified. And there, floating in a cloud of bubbles and foam, is the Virgie Linda I, the most beautiful toy boat in the world, its sails with striped colors and her name written in white letters.

  “It’s your first yacht, and if you don’t tell me that mafioso’s name, I’ll take it away right now! No…better to drown you in that tub. Yes…too bad there’s a wall and I can’t stand in front of your feet, grab them, and lift them up together…slowly…nice and slow…and you couldn’t do anything about it. No, that would get your elegant hairdo all wet, and we want you to look divine in your posthumous photo in El Espacio, next to all those other cadavers oozing blood, under a headline that reads…mmm…‘Good-bye, Goddess’! Do you like that? Better than ‘Murdered Mafiosa,’ right? What shall we do so you’ll tell me who that son of a bitch is, so I can cut him into little pieces? And so I can have his woman’s face sliced up, so she’ll learn not to mess with my woman’s? And with my wife!”

  “Bravo, Pablo! That’s the way to talk! We’ll look for that galanista mafiosa all over Colombia, and we’ll leave her in pieces like a puzzle, yes sir. And the guy’s girlfriend, too!” I exclaim, waving my fists up high and unable to contain an attack of laughter while I try to reach for my little sailboat.

  Furious, he snatches it away with one hand and with the other grabs the tape player. He kneels next to the tub and says it isn’t a joke, that he only came back to electrocute me, even if he has to spend the rest of his life regretting it. This man I have before me, arms out like he’s been crucified, the terror of having lost me to another on every inch of his expression, seems to me the funniest and most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. I also think I see in his eyes something of the same desperation that only he, among so many dozens of people, saw in mine that day of the whirlpool. Suddenly, much as I say that the past and the future are the only things that exist, I realize that he is the only thing that fills my existence with the present, the only thing that overflows it and contains it, the only thing that justifies every one of my past sufferings and all those that may await me. I reach toward him, and tugging on his shirt so I can put my arms around his neck, I tell him, “Hey, Pablo, why don’t we electrocute ourselves together…and you and I can go to heaven, once and for all…eternity?”

  He sways and for a moment I think he’s going to slip into the tub, radio, toy ship, and all. Swiftly, he drops them to the floor and lifts me out of the water, swears that he will only be accepted into hell, wraps me in a towel, and starts rubbing me furiously. And as if all
that had nothing to do with me, I start singing to him my translated version of “Fever,” the song that’s playing now. I admire the tiny details of the toy of my dreams and tell him that the Virgie Linda II is going to have to be worthy of a real mafiosa and measure at least a hundred feet….Then, trying to recover every instant of the present we had lost, all his demon fantasies and all the nightmares of my poor archangel start up again, to the rhythm of “Cocaine Blues” and those macho songs Johnny Cash sang for convicted murderers. I don’t have the slightest intention of translating those for him, because how could a person, in a moment like that, sing to Pablo Escobar in his own language:

  I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die?

  Not That Pig Who’s Richer Than Me!

  “BETTER A TOMB IN COLOMBIA than a jail cell in the United States!” roar the press releases put out by a newly formed insurgent group: Los Extraditables. Although the media outlets claim that its members’ names are unknown, the identity of its founders, the profession they share, their proven capacity for revenge, and the amount of capital they have are known in the last town of the most remote corner of Colombia, down to the last village idiot. The detonator of the declaration of war is the new minister of justice, the galanista Enrique Parejo: a few days after taking over as Rodrigo Lara’s replacement, Parejo has signed the extradition of Carlos Lehder, and of Hernán Botero, banker and the principal stockholder of the Atlético Nacional soccer team, requested by the U.S. government for laundering more than fifty million dollars. Lehder flees the country, but Botero is extradited. All the soccer games are canceled in mourning, and his photo, with feet and hands in chains while FBI agents drag him away, becomes the symbol of the nationalist cause of Los Extraditables.