Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

  Never have I heard a more convincing argument. Pablo may be the most wanted man in the world, but when it comes to the conditions of our relationship, I am the one who sets them. And I exclaim happily, “I’ll come. But you’d better not be waiting for me in the airport! I’ll come straight back to Bogotá in the first wheelbarrow I can find!”

  This plane is a small one, and only the young pilot and I are flying. After a while a torrential rain starts to fall, and suddenly we’re left without a radio. There is zero visibility, and with an inexplicable feeling of peace I prepare myself mentally and spiritually for the possibility of death. For a moment, I remember Jaime Bateman’s plane in the Panama jungle. The boy asks me to come and sit in the copilot’s seat, because four eyes see better than two. I ask him if we could land after 6:00 p.m., when the Medellín airport is closed and the possibility of crashing into another plane will be minimal, and he replies that that is, precisely, what he intends to do. When the weather clears up and we manage to visually locate the landing strip, we touch down with no problem.

  I know that Pablo can’t even get close to the airport, but two men are waiting for me in the same place as always. They bring me to the office first, to make sure that no one has followed me. If Armando de Armas’s business looks like a supermarket, the offices of Pablo’s cousin and partner look like a fast-food restaurant at lunchtime. Gustavo Gaviria alternates between pleasure at seeing me return to the excitement of nontraditional values and the telephonic handling of what seems to be a crisis of excess demand:

  “It’s so good to have you back, Virginia! Things are crazy around here today….What happened with Negro’s seven hundred kilos, huh?…I’m sending off half a dozen planes today, all rented, of course…Mona’s four hundred, Holy Mother of God! If they don’t fit, that woman will castrate me tomorrow!…Pablo isn’t about to change for anyone, but you didn’t hear that from me….Yáider’s six hundred, remember!…How do you always manage to look so well rested, huh?…The last one is full?….You can’t imagine the stress of this profession….Now, that’s tragedy, brother!…I mean, this work feeds a hundred thousand people, and indirectly a million….Get me another plane, dammit!…You can’t even imagine our responsibility with all those people….Did this country run out of planes, or what? We’re going to have to rent Santo Domingo’s jumbo!…And the satisfaction of being able to serve the customers…oh, God! What are we going to do with the two hundred fifty for Smurfie? He’s a new client and I forgot to include him!…Oh, they’ve come to get you, Virginia….That asshole cousin of mine sure is a lucky man, not a poor slave like me!”

  Finally I understand why Pablo sent that little plane. It wasn’t the last one he had left: it was the last one in all of Colombia! On the way to see him I think about how the moguls’ financial groups create one or two thousand jobs each, and feed around ten thousand people, and I wonder if figures like the ones Gustavo has just given me won’t end up altering the scale of values. One million people…after some two hours on the road, three cars appear from nowhere and surround us. Horrified, I think I’m being kidnapped, or that the Dijín followed me. Someone takes my suitcase and demands I get into another car. After a few seconds of panic, I see that Pablo is driving! He kisses me happily, and we speed off toward Hacienda Nápoles while he tells me, “All I needed, after all these months, was for you to turn into Amelia Earhart on me! The pilot said you never complained for a second, and that you only made him feel calm and serene. Thank you, my love. I don’t let rented planes on my landing strip because my security measures are becoming stricter by the hour. You can’t imagine how careful I have to be now, and I have to be sure no one is following you! We’re going to take advantage of you not having to work, and we’ll spend many days together and get back the time we lost with all this stupidity, okay? Promise me you’ll forget what happened last year, and that we’ll never talk about any of that? Will you?”

  I tell him I can’t forget anything, but that I stopped thinking about all that a long time ago. Later, already in his arms, I ask him if we’re not starting to be like Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter, and I tell him the story: Years after World War II ends, a beautiful woman of around thirty is married to an orchestra director. One day, Bogarde, the guard who used to rape her in a concentration camp, attends a concert of the famous musician. Rampling and Bogarde recognize each other, and in that instant it begins, a relationship of the most obsessive and perverse sexual dependency between the elegant lady and the now respectable ex-Nazi. I don’t tell Pablo that the roles of victim and victimizer are now reversed. It would be too sophisticated a concept for the criminal mind of a man who sleeps with paid teenagers because they remind him of the wife he fell in love with when she was thirteen and slender.

  “But what horrible movies you’ve seen,” he replies. “No, no, my love, you have never been unfaithful to your husbands, and I am not a Nazi rapist! Tomorrow I’m going to take you to the most beautiful place in the world so you’ll see paradise on earth. I discovered it fairly recently, and I’ve never shown it to anyone. I know that you’ll start to heal there, and to forget what I did to you that night. I know I’m a devil…and I couldn’t control myself…but now I only want to make you happy, immensely happy. I promise.”

  He asks me to tell him in detail what happened with Jorge Barón and Arturo Abella. He listens to me in complete silence, and as I give him my version of recent events, his face darkens. I tell him, “I think it was Ernesto Samper’s revenge for you going public with the checks you made out to him for Alfonso López’s presidential campaign. Samper sent Artunduaga, who is his and López’s lackey, to find out if it was true that I passed on bribes to journalists. That’s the gossip of all those fat, ugly colleagues of mine who would give anything to fly in your jet and sleep in your bed. They all pretend to be my friends so they can get dirt about you and me, and I leave them hanging, because I never talk to anyone about you. Since you asked me to tell him that you wouldn’t give him one penny, Artunduaga reported to Samper that you and I still saw each other—that is, you still tell me everything. Ernesto Samper called in a favor from his close friend César Villegas; Villegas asked a favor from his close friend Fernando Carrillo, and Carrillo bought one hundred percent of the newscast’s stock. Samper and Artunduaga left me without work: one, because you gave him a ton of cash; and the other, because you didn’t give him anything. I don’t know how you know people so well, Pablo, but you’re never wrong! You should stop counting so much on the people in your trade, because those guys are more jealous of you than my colleagues are of me—all those journalists who could never inspire the love of a millionaire.”

  Pablo tells me he can talk to Carrillo, who is just another client of the Mexican’s, and have Artunduaga fired and rehire me for the spot.

  I thank him, but I beg him to understand that I couldn’t go back to TV because of a favor from him: I built my career alone, based on my talent, elegance, and independence, and I have never been part of a political deal or gone out with anyone from that world, even for a cup of coffee. I try to make him see how incredible it all is: now that his guild is taking mine over, the third-class mafiosos are allying with the politicians whom Il Capo di Tutti Capi had bought off and denounced, and they’re calling for my head in the vocation that had put food on my table for thirteen years.

  “They’re taking revenge on you, Pablo, but it’s no good for you to confront that wretched crook that ‘Doptor Varito’ left you in Civil Aviation, for my sake. Watch out, because if an insignificant associate of the Mexican’s and a buddy of Alvarito’s do this to me, what can you expect from the rest of that ungrateful guild you lead and defend with your life? In any case, I should tell you that I am almost certain that they’re going to hire me as the anchorwoman of the newscast of a new Miami channel that’s starting up soon. The people who saw the tape say I might be the best Spanish-language news anchor working today. And I think I need to leave Colombia before it�
��s too late.”

  “But what are you saying? You can’t leave me now, my love—you’ve just come back! You’ll see—they’ll start calling you for other programs soon. How are you going to live in Miami, when you can’t drive a car and a Hispanic channel isn’t going to give you a chauffeur? Anyway, they’ll hire a Cuban, just watch. I’ll die if you leave: I might have myself extradited just so you can come see me in Miami! And what are all the Florida newspapers going to say when they discover that a big TV star is visiting this poor prisoner every Sunday? It would be a scandal: they would fire you from the channel, deport you to Colombia, and separate us forever! We would both end up losing, don’t you see, my love? Just wait; tomorrow you’ll start to heal from all that suffering….Starting now, you and I are going to be very happy, and you won’t want for anything. I swear it on what I love most, which is my daughter, Manuela!”

  The outdoor part of the next day—the only twenty-four hours of perfect happiness I ever knew when I lived in Colombia—begins at nearly noon, on a spectacular machine driven by one of the best motorcyclists in the world. At first I clutch his torso with both arms as if I were stuck to him with Krazy Glue, with my hair in the wind and my eyes squeezed shut in terror. But after an hour I feel calmer, and only occasionally grab hold of his shirt and his waist. With gradually opening eyes, I start to look out over all that he has never before wanted to share with anyone.

  The most beautiful place that God created on earth is glimpsed from the top of a hill carpeted in perfect grass, neither very tall nor very short, where we are protected from the tropical sun, and also hidden, in the shade of a medium-sized tree. The temperature is also perfect and is unaltered by the occasional breeze that is the only reminder that time has not stopped just to please two lovers. There are nearly 360 degrees of plains for miles, green as jade velvet, with dots of water here and there reflecting the sun. There is not a trace of a human being, not a path, not a house or a sound or any domestic animals. There are no signs that 10,000 years of civilization have preceded us or ever existed at all. We go along discovering it together, pointing to things here and there, and we tell each other that we could be experiencing the first day of creation as Adam and Eve in earthly paradise. We talk about how cruel that couple’s fate was, and I tell him that if God exists he must be a sadist. After all, He cursed Humanity to suffer unnecessarily, and he made it cruel to force it to evolve. I ask Pablo if all the land that extends to the horizon is part of Hacienda Nápoles, or if it’s a new acquisition. He smiles and says that nothing is really his; then, looking out at the horizon, he adds that God merely gave him the task of caring for it, of keeping it intact and protecting its animals. He thinks for a while, and suddenly he asks me, “Do you really think we’re cursed? Do you think that I was born evil, like Judas…or like Hitler? And how could you be cursed, when you’re like an angel?”

  I reply that I can be a devil myself, and I have my little horns. He smiles, and before he can come up with any reciprocal ideas, I add that as long as we’re condemned to survive we will be cursed, and that no living being under the sky can escape that destiny. Contemplating all that beauty, an idea occurs to me:

  “Do you know the lyrics of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’? He must have written it at a moment like this…and in a place like this…but unlike in the song, everything that you and I are seeing really is worth killing or dying for! Right, Pablo?”

  “That’s right. For this whole sky, too…and I have to take care of it, because I think from now on I won’t be able to leave much.”

  These last words cut to my soul. Since he doesn’t realize it, I tell him that with all those passports he has, he should leave Colombia now and live like a king with a new identity.

  “What for, my love? Here I can speak my own language, here I’m in charge, and here I can buy off almost anyone. I have the most profitable business on the planet, and I live in an earthly paradise. And here, on all this land of mine and beneath all my sky, you are with me. Where else am I going to get the most beautiful woman in the country to love me like you love me and say the things to me that you do? Where, tell me, where, if when I die the only thing from earth I’m going to be able to bring to hell is the vision of all this perfection, with you at the epicenter of three hundred sixty degrees multiplied by a trillion trillions?”

  I am only human, and the truth is that such enormous tenderness cures the most bruised heart in an instant. On that day in May, everything is transparent, the air is diaphanous, and skin doesn’t lie. Looking at that sky in raptures, something occurs to me:

  “You know what I’m going to call the novel I’ll write someday with your story, when you and I are old and have seen it all? Heaven of the Damned!”

  “Ohhh noo! What a horrible name, Virginia. It sounds like a Greek tragedy! Don’t play tricks on me, we’re working on my biography.”

  “But don’t you realize that any journalist could write your biography if they put their mind to it? Your story, Pablo, is something different: it’s the story of all the forms of power that people in this country have at their fingertips and manipulate like puppeteers. I think I could write it, because I know the stories of your profession and la petite histoire of the presidential families…and the rest.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about all that while we’re here these days?”

  “What will you give me in return?”

  He thinks for a while and then, with a sigh and a caress on my cheek, he says, “You will be the witness to things that no one else will know, because…if I die before you…maybe you could tell many truths. Look around. Since you have no sense of direction and you never know where you are, I think I can admit that all this is indeed mine. Beyond the horizon, too, so I have no weak flanks. Now look up: What do you see?”

  “The sky…and the birds…and a cloud there, look! The enormous piece of sky that God lent you so you could protect everything below it, and so it would take care of you.”

  “No, my love. You are a poet, I am a realist: all this we’re looking at above us is called airspace of the Colombian government! If I don’t take down extradition, that’s going to be my problem. That’s why I believe I have to be thinking about getting a missile as soon as possible….”

  “A missile? But you sound like some kind of modern Genghis Khan, Pablo! Promise me you’re not going to talk about these things with anyone else, because they’d think you’ve lost your mind! Anyway, even if you did get one—because with your money you can buy anything, and with your landing strip you can bring it all home—I don’t think it would do you much good, my love. As far as I know, a missile can’t be reloaded. So now: let’s assume that with one missile—or ten!—you brought down all the air force’s planes as they came to violate your airspace. What are you going to do with the gringos who invade us the next day, fire a hundred missiles, and don’t leave an atom of paradise behind?”

  He is silent for a moment. Then, almost as though thinking aloud, he says very seriously, “Yes…I’d have to go straight for a worthwhile target….”

  “Stop thinking about all that insanity. It would be easier and cheaper to pay the forty percent of Colombians in poverty to vote ‘Pablo for President,’ and take down extradition yourself! So tell me, what will I be witness to, and when?”

  “Yes, you’re right…forget it. And surprises aren’t meant to be spoiled, my dear.”

  Now we’ve stopped being one and returned to two; like Adam and Eve, we feel cold and cover ourselves. He is absorbed, contemplating that airspace with his hands interlaced behind his neck; I am absorbed, contemplating that heaven of the damned with my head resting on his chest. He is dreaming of a missile, I of my book; he is working on his chess game, I’m putting my puzzle together again and again. Now our bodies form a T and I think to myself that we’re immensely happy, that all this perfection will also be the vision of paradise that I take to heaven when I die. But…how could there be a heaven for me, if he won’t be there with me
?

  *

  —

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOW, Pablo and I see each other once or twice a week. Every forty-eight hours I’m brought to a different location, and I learn to be even more obsessive about security than he is. I write nonstop, and since I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio or read newspapers, I am ignorant of the fact that Escobar has assassinated Tulio Manuel Castro Gil, the judge who brought the case against him for Rodrigo Lara Bonilla’s death. After he reads my manuscripts and makes observations and clarifications, we burn them. Little by little, I teach him everything I’ve learned about the three large powers that exist in Colombia, and the modus operandi of the country’s richest families. I try to make him see that with the quantities of money and land he possesses, he should start thinking with more “dynastic” criteria.

  “Once you get to know them, you realize some of them are so tightfisted and so cruel that next to them, you’re a decent human being, Pablo. Yes, just how you heard it, and please don’t get offended. If it weren’t for the bloody guerrillas and the magnates’ own lack of greatness, the presidential families and financial groups would have crushed this poor country ages ago. As much as we detest those rebels, they are the only thing that scare and stop the powerful. All of the powers that be, absolutely all, carry the weight of crimes and murders: those they’ve committed, those of their parents during La Violencia, those of their landowning grandparents, those of slave-owning great-grandparents, or their Inquisitor or encomendero great-great-grandparents. Play your cards well, my love; although you’ve lived a lot, you are still a child, and you have time to correct almost all your mistakes, because you are richer, more astute, and braver than all of them put together. Remember that you have almost half a century of life left ahead of you to make this poor country into one of love instead of war. Don’t make any more costly mistakes, Pablo, and use me to your benefit. You and I are much more than a pair of tits and a couple of balls!”