Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  “Pull a petal from a lily and you’ll make a star tremble.”

  Under the Sky of Nápoles

  THE PLANE is as big as all eleven of Pablo Escobar’s combined, and the man who descends from it, surrounded by his crew and by four young couples, looks like an emperor. He is sixty-five years old, walks as if he were the king of the world, and carries a months-old baby in his arms.

  It is the beginning of 1985, and I find myself in the Bogotá airport chatting with dozens of people invited to Miami and Caracas for the book launch of Love in the Time of Cholera, the most recent work by Nobel Prize–laureate Gabriel García Márquez, and of the collection “Maestros de la Literatura Universal” (“Masters of World Literature”). Both will be distributed by Bloque De Armas of Venezuela. We—guests of the Colombian branch of the publishing house—are chatting with the editorial czar’s local managers who will travel with us and several others who have come to the airport just to greet their boss. Armando de Armas distributes a large portion of all the books published in the Spanish language, and he owns dozens of magazines as well as newspapers and broadcasters in Venezuela. The baby he is holding isn’t his grandson, but the youngest of his many children. And, it would seem, the baby’s mother stayed behind in Caracas.

  Once on the plane, De Armas finds out that I am the most well-known TV journalist in Colombia and that the recent edition of Cosmopolitan with me on the cover sold out in a day. Shortly before takeoff he receives a phone call; when he returns to his seat, he looks at me, and in seconds I understand just what one of his helpful managers on the ground has warned him of. It’s clear that this man thirty years older than me is not afraid of anything and understands perfectly well that no woman who wears a $3,000 dress, crocodile accessories worth $5,000 more, and jewelry worth $30,000 or $40,000 could be “loaded up” with drugs. Much less if she is known by twenty million people and travels with three suitcases on the largest private airplane in Latin America to spend five days in Miami and Caracas. With the first glass of Cristal rosé champagne I ask Armando for the cover of Bazaar, “the only one missing in my collection.” And to prove that he couldn’t care less about what they say about a woman who looks like me, he responds, “Done!” In the first half hour after we meet, and in front of a dozen people who haven’t noticed a thing, we have laid out the rules of the game for a strange and conflictive friendship that will last for years.

  When we reach Miami, De Armas and a spectacular model who is traveling with us get into a wine-colored Rolls-Royce that is waiting for them by the plane’s stairs. That night, at a very long table where he presides, I learn from his indiscreet managers that “Carolina Herrera,” a Bloque de Armas brand that bears the name of his elegant compatriot, is generating considerable losses. The designer, whom I had met recently at a dinner given by the Crespi counts in New York that I attended with David, is married to Reinaldo Herrera, whose friendship with all the richest and most elegant people in the world is invaluable for someone as powerful and ambitious as Armando. While we are in Miami, De Armas asks the famous fashion photographer Iran Issa-Khan, cousin of the Shah of Iran, to take my photo for the cover of Bazaar and shoot an extreme close-up to show the world that I have no razor cuts or disfigurations. She spends hours and hours on the photo, but the results leave me terribly disappointed: though it’s elegant, indeed, that serious face looks nothing like me. By the time we’re in Caracas, and after a long conversation far from the rest of the group, De Armas tells me he is falling in love with me and wants to see me again as soon as possible.

  Armando doesn’t call me every day, no: he calls once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and again at night. He wakes me up at 6:00 a.m., and I don’t complain. At 3:00 p.m. he wants to know who I was lunching with—because I have invitations almost every day—and between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. he calls to say good night, because he is in the habit of getting up at 3:00 a.m., when we tireless young are just going to bed. The problem is, that is precisely the hour chosen by an extraditable psycho-rapist to call and beg my forgiveness—and, incidentally, to be sure that I am at home and in the arms of no one but the God of Sleep. I hang up the phone, thinking that this is what it’s like to be caught between a devil with a fleet of airplanes and the deep blue sea. And that the generational time difference between these two men—one in Caracas and the other in Medellín—is going to end up driving me crazy.

  I am working on the noon newscast now, the only one in Colombia that wanted to hire me as anchor. With a superhuman effort and a subhuman budget, we have managed to raise the rating from four points to fourteen, which still doesn’t bring veteran journalist Arturo Abella, director and owner of the program, enough to pay fees to Inravisión, the official broadcasting entity. My romance with Pablo is an open secret in both of our professions, but it isn’t commonly known, particularly among the type of Bogotá or European friends with whom I often have lunch at Pajares Salinas or La Fragata; in any case, both of us have always categorically denied it. For the past two years I have begged my closest colleagues not to refer to Escobar as a “drug trafficker” but rather as a “former congressman.” Almost all of them have reluctantly agreed, perhaps with the secret hope that someday Pablo will grant them something more than an interview.

  Every week, a mariachi band comes to serenade me, and following one of these visits, an “anonymous” call comes from a familiar strangler phoning to tell me the credit goes to “The Mexican,” who is a world authority in ranchera music and who advised him, because he himself prefers hard rock and doesn’t understand much about traditional Latin American music. I hang up. His next strategy is to appeal to my deep compassion for the poor and the suffering: “I only have eight planes left, they took the rest away!” he exclaims, and sends eighty orchids to accompany his words. I hang up without a word. Then, “Now I only have six planes left!” with sixty flowers of another color. I hurl the poor telephone in rage, wondering what those gadgets are made of so I can buy stock in the company. The next week it’s “You see I’m a poor boy now, with only four planes?” and he sends forty phalaenopsis, as if I didn’t know that the planes that aren’t in the police hangar are in Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. Or as if I were ignorant of the fact that he has the resources to buy several replacements and, in passing, to give me a set of rubies or emeralds instead of so many patriotic cattleya trianae. And he keeps going, with “Cucurrucucú paloma” and “Tres meses sin verte, mujer,” and “María Bonita” and the whole songbook of José Alfredo Jiménez, Lola Beltrán, Agustín Lara, and Jorge Negrete. Again and again, I tell myself, What does a woman like me need a rapist with a personal airline for, when she has at her feet an honest man with only one airplane and a hundred magazines, who is always surrounded by pretty people, who finances Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, and calls three times a day to tell her he’s crazy for her?

  “Just imagine if you became Carolina’s boss!” laughs David from London, in a complimentary tone.

  Armando informs me that a Miami channel is looking for an anchor to launch their news program and they want me to try out. I fly there, give an impeccable presentation, and they tell me they’ll let me know in a few months if I got the job. That night I have dinner with Cristina Saralegui, who works for Armando, and her husband, Marcos Ávila, who is happy because his band, with Gloria Estefan leading it, has become the sensation of the moment thanks to “La Conga.” After several months of courting over the phone, I finally accept Armando’s invitation to go to Mexico. This time we travel alone, and at the airport there’s a red carpet from the plane’s steps to the customs doorway, as if we were the president and first lady of the Andean Community. Since the superrich don’t go through customs anywhere—unless they are rock stars suspected of some inspired hallucination—we head to his empire’s Mexican facilities, surrounded by another cloud of managers. From an interior balcony I peer down at what looks like a supermarket with thousands of books and magazines grouped in tower after tower, several feet
high. I ask what all that is, and Armando tells me they’re the titles that will be distributed that week.

  “In a week?” I exclaim. “And how much do you earn per book?”

  “Fifty percent. The writer earns between ten and fifteen.”

  “Wow! So it’s better to be you than García Márquez or Hemingway.”

  We reach the presidential suite of the María Isabel Sheraton, which has two bedrooms, and that’s where the czar of distribution states the true purpose of all that love: he wants to fill me with children. He adores them, and he’s chosen me as the lucky mother of the last, and surely the most spoiled, of his fertile existence, in which a dozen extramarital offspring coexist beside the children of his marriage.

  “Ask me for whatever you want! You could live like a queen for the rest of your life!” he tells me happily, gazing at me as if I were the champion Holstein cow at the agriculture and cattle fair.

  I reply that I love kids, too, but I wouldn’t have bastards even with Carlos V, king of Spain and emperor of Germany, or with Louis XIV, the Sun King. He asks me if I would marry him and if once we were married we would have children. After examining his face I tell him no, not if we were married, either, but that I’m sure we would have a grand time.

  He gets furious and starts to repeat what they’ve always said about me in the press:

  “I’d heard that you hated children and that you didn’t want to have them so you wouldn’t ruin your figure! And to top it off you’ve brought me bad luck, because a strike has just broken out!”

  “Well, if you don’t have a ticket back to Colombia for me tomorrow, I’ll join the picket lines and shout ‘Down with foreign exploitation!’ in front of all of Televisa’s cameras. I don’t want to hear another word about moguls with airlines or planes: they’re all a bunch of tyrants! Good-bye, Armando.”

  A week later, he calls me from Caracas at six in the morning to tell me he passed through Colombia to see me after he settled the strike, but he’d had to flee because Pablo Escobar had tried to kidnap him.

  “Pablo Escobar has three billion dollars, not three hundred million like you. He is thirty-five years old, like me, not sixty-five like you. He has a dozen planes and not one, like you. Don’t confuse Escobar with Tirofijo, because by simple math it should be you thinking about kidnapping Pablo, not the other way around. And stop calling me at this hour! I get up at ten, like he does, not at three in the morning like you.”

  “So that’s why you didn’t want to be the mother of my children! You’re still in love with the King of Coke. My managers told me you were that criminal’s lover!”

  I answer that if I were the lover of the seventh-richest man in the world, I would never have set foot on his plane—not in January with his group of guests, and much less go to Mexico with him—and I say good-bye.

  I don’t believe a word about the supposed kidnapping attempt. Two days later I find ten orchids, a newspaper clipping of my favorite photo, and a note from a man who tells me he now has only one little plane and can’t spend the rest of his life without seeing that face on his pillow once more. He calls again and I hang up, and the next long weekend I decide it’s time to stop suffering from so much maniacal stalking and return to the peace and calm of traditional values: in the Fountainbleu of Miami, David Metcalfe is waiting for me with a sun umbrella and a rum punch with its own umbrella. Julio Mario Santo Domingo arrives the next day, and when he sees me, he hugs me and spins me around twice, exclaiming, “Look at her, David! Now this is a woman! She came back; she came back! She’s left the world of the richest men on the planet and come back to us, the poor ones!”

  And, while David watches us with something that looks like the first twinge of jealousy in his entire life, Julio Mario sings laughingly:

  “Helloooo, Dolly! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong! You’re looking sweeelll, Dolly, we can teeelll, Dolly…”

  In the taxi to the airport where we’re going to take the flight back on Avianca, Santo Domingo’s airline, he and David are happy, laughing at Ivo Pitanguy’s patients who are friends of both of theirs. Julio Mario says that since David saved him a fortune by paying the bill on his room, he is so happy that he’d “gladly stay in that marvelous taxi laughing with us for the rest of his life.” When we reach Bogotá, I say good-bye to them, and I watch them as they’re whisked away by an army of bodyguards in a dozen and a half vehicles that were waiting for them at the door to the plane. They don’t go through customs, either, and someone who works for the Grupo Santo Domingo takes my passport and leads me quickly to another car. I think that it’s people like Julio Mario and Armando—not like Pablo and Gilberto—who are the real masters of the world.

  A couple of days later a journalist acquaintance of mine asks to see me. He wants to ask for a big favor, with the utmost discretion. I tell him I have a black-tie dinner to attend but that I’d be happy to see him. His name is Édgar Artunduaga, he had been director of El Espacio, the evening newspaper of bloody cadavers, and over time he will become a “Father of the Nation.” He pleads with me to ask Pablo to help him financially. He says that after he helped Pablo go public with the video of Evaristo Porras’s check to minister Rodrigo Lara, no one wants to hire him, and his situation is critical. I explain that dozens of journalists have asked me for similar favors, and that I’ve always referred them directly to Pablo. I’m not interested in learning of my colleagues’ penury, and I don’t like acting as intermediary with those kinds of donations. But in his case, I will make an exception, because what he tells me not only moves me deeply but also seems to require an urgent solution.

  Pablo knows that I never call a man I’m interested in romantically, not even to return his calls. When I dial his private number and he himself answers, I immediately realize that he’s delighted to hear my voice. But when I tell him I have Artunduaga in front of me and I explain what he’s come for, he starts to howl like a raging lunatic, and for the first time ever he addresses me with the formal “usted.”

  “Get that sewer rat out of your house before he contaminates it! I’m calling back in fifteen minutes, and if he’s still there, I’ll borrow three boys from the Mexican, who lives ten blocks away from you, and send them there to kick him out!”

  I don’t know if Artunduaga can hear Pablo’s shrieks and epithets on the other end of the line: he calls him everything from viper to blackmailer, swine, hyena, extortionist, small-time thug. I feel terribly uncomfortable, and when I hang up, I can only tell him that Escobar was annoyed because he doesn’t usually touch on matters of third-party payments with me. I add that, if he likes, the next day I can talk with Arturo Abella to see if he’ll appoint him as the political editor of the newscast. To bolster his spirits, I tell him I know the director will be happy to accept, because, it seems, he is negotiating the sale of a block of the company’s shares to a group of very rich investors.

  When Pablo calls back, I’ve already left for a dinner with David Metcalfe, where I see President López, who asks me who the tall Englishman with me is. I tell him he’s the grandson of Lord Curzon, and godson of Edward VIII, and I introduce them. The next day, Arturo Abella tells me that the new prospective owner of the newscast, Fernando Carrillo, wants to invite us to dinner at Pajares Salinas, and that he wants to meet Artunduaga to decide about hiring him. He tells me that Carrillo, main owner of the Santa Fe soccer team of Bogotá, is a personal friend of such dissimilar people as César Villegas, right hand of Álvaro Uribe in Civil Aviation, and Triofijo. He adds that Carrillo has offered to lend us his helicopter so that a colleague and I can interview the legendary rebel leader in the FARC’s encampment. Something tells me not to touch this subject in front of Artunduaga, and a couple of hours later I say good-bye to them because I figure David must have finished his business dinner and will be waiting for me so we can see each other before he returns to London.

  Abella calls to ask me to stop by his office instead of going to the studio, because he has news
. When I arrive he hands me a letter of dismissal, and he informs me that Artunduaga convinced Carrillo to cancel my contract and hire him as anchor. I can’t believe my ears or my eyes! Arturo thanks me for the increase of almost ten rating points while I was in front of the camera and explains that the government’s costs have ruined him. With tears in his eyes, he tells me he’s had no other choice but to sell the entire news program to “those soccer gentlemen.” When we say good-bye, I predict that the program will be off the air in six months, because no one turns on the TV, especially at lunchtime, to look at the face of Édgar Artunduaga, whom Pablo Escobar describes as a “sewer rat.” (Before the year is over, the company will file for bankruptcy and Carrillo will lose all of his multimillion-dollar investment paying off the station’s debts to the government.)

  A solitary violinist plays outside my window: “Por una Cabeza,” my favorite tango. He plays it three times in a row and then disappears. Two days later, Pablo calls again.

  “I heard that someone saw you getting out of an Avianca plane with Santo Domingo and a foreigner. I’m not an airline owner like him, but I’ve had my own plane since I was thirty! You know I can’t go to Bogotá for you; but we’re going to stop this foolishness now, because life is very short and neither of us gives a damn about that jailbird. I am dying for the mind behind that face of yours, and I don’t have the slightest intention of letting someone else have it, period! If you don’t get on my last airplane now—so you can come and tell me why you’re out of work—you will have to buy a ticket from Avianca, and that greedy old man Santo Domingo will become one hundred dollars richer with your money!”