He lets go of me quickly and changes the subject. He asks what I think of his new girlfriend. I tell him I’m happy he has such a sweet and pretty girl to take care of him and love him. But I also warn him about a proven fact that he’s already experienced with blood, sweat, and tears:
“Don’t forget that in this country, there are certain women of lesser means who, when they know they’re loved by a man like you, only seem to have one thing in mind: a baby, a baby, a baby, as if humanity would go extinct without them! Remember that by Colombian law, every child of yours, legitimate or not, is worth one billion dollars. I know that heirs horrify you almost as much as me, and I think that’s why you and I lasted so long together: it never would have occurred to me to possess you, Pablo, or to get rich off of you.”
He is lost in thought for a long while, and I know he’s thinking of Wendy. When I turn to look at him, I see that he seems deeply sad, as if suddenly he’s been left alone in the world and has nowhere to go. He comes toward me, puts an arm around my shoulders, and pulls me to him. Looking off into the distance, he starts to talk to me with a longing I have never seen in him.
“It wasn’t because of that. It was because you gave me the kind of love that really mattered to me. You were my intelligent love…with that head and heart the whole universe fit inside. With that voice, that skin…you made me so incredibly happy that I think you’re going to be the last woman I love madly. I’m well aware that there will never be anyone else like you. I’ll never be able to replace you, Virginia, while you will marry a better man….”
His words move me to the last fiber of my soul and I tell him that coming from the man I’ve loved most, they are an homage that I’ll keep as a treasure in the most hidden corner of my heart. But I’ve forgotten that Pablo Escobar always collects on his moments of gallantry with gallons of cold water: next thing I know, and with the utmost calm, he lets me know that all of that is precisely why he’s decided to leave me with my hands completely empty.
“That way when you write about me, no one will be able to say you’re writing an apology because I bought your heart or soul. Because we both know that they’ll always say I bought your beauty with my money.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I tell him that after his words of recognition, memorable and sublime, after all his generosity toward me—with his words, time, and money—this is nothing but crude revenge with roots in an absurd jealousy. Without looking at me, his voice now heavy with sadness, he replies that he has never been jealous. He says that someday I’ll be grateful for his decision, because he always knows everything that is going to happen. I am distraught, and I just want to be alone so I can cry in peace. I tell him that we’ve been talking for two hours now, and there are a lot of people waiting for him.
With his body leaning out and his hands resting on the balcony railing, he stares silently at the horizon as if contemplating his destiny. Ignoring the passing of the hours, he starts to tell me that he is on a path of no return toward outright war against the state that could be the end of him. But before he dies, he plans to finish off the Cali Cartel and everyone else who gets in his way; starting now, things aren’t going to happen with lead but with dynamite, even if the innocent pay for the guilty. Standing next to him and looking out in the distance as well, I listen to him in horror, my face bathed in tears, wondering why this man who is so incredibly rich has a heart burdened by such enormous hatred, such a need to punish us all, such ferocity and so much desperation. I ask myself why he can’t ever rest, and whether all that rage built up and about to explode like a volcano is really just his impotence to change a society that’s driven by others nearly as pitiless and unscrupulous as him. Suddenly, he turns toward me.
“Now stop blubbering. You won’t be my widow!”
“Do you really think I could cry for someone like you? I’m crying for myself and for the fortune you’re going to leave to your widow, who won’t know what to do with it! Why do you want so much money if you have to live like this? And I’m crying for our country! Dynamite against this poor nation just for your selfish cause? How evil you are, Pablo. You could just strengthen your security and be done with it. Do you think that some platoon of brave soldiers is going to dare come looking for you?”
He replies that he does. That platoons and platoons are going to come for him sooner or later, and that it’s for all of them that he needs dynamite and missiles. I comment that if someone were to hear him talking they would lock him up, not in a prison but in an insane asylum, and that we should thank God that until now he’s had me to listen to all those crazy things he thinks of. Because every day he’s seeming more like Juan Vicente Gómez, the multimillionaire Venezuelan tyrant from the beginning of the century.
“On her deathbed, his mother made him swear he would forgive all his enemies and stop torturing and murdering his opponents. When the old lady breathed her last, the president-for-life came out of the room and told his flunkies about that request: ‘Of course I could swear it by God, because that poor old thing didn’t know anything about politics: the last of my enemies has been buried for twenty years!’ The difference between him and you, Pablo, is that Gómez lasted almost eighty years, while at the rate you’re going, you won’t even last five more.”
“And you’re sounding like one of those old wives who don’t do anything but lecture!”
Calmly I reply that those old wives are always right about everything, because their old husbands are brutish and stubborn. And I remind him that Josefina was ten years older than Napoleon, while he and I are equally “old.” Though I look ten years younger because I have a twenty-four-inch waist, he looks older because he’s turning into a fat man like Santofimio from eating so many beans. And I end by saying that we’ve been talking for three hours now and that Gilberto Rodríguez warned me that one of these days he would have me killed. Yes, even me! Like any Juan Vicente Gómez, for supposedly being on the enemy’s side and for giving lectures!
“You, my love? He’s even more miserable than I thought! I only ask God that the day I end his life you’re not with him, because if I have to see you in the morgue beside him, I will want to shoot myself.” After a pause, he asks me, “Has he promised you anything? Tell me the truth, Virginia.”
I tell him only the production and distribution of a shampoo with my name, and he exclaims, “A shampoo?! No wonder! Only a marica would notice your hair. With labs of my own, and that face and that head of yours, I would build an empire! The guy is a coward, my love. He’s more afraid of that witch he’s married to than of me, and you’re going to find that out sooner than you think….”
I beg him, then, not to force me to ask anything from his enemy, the only person who offers to finance me, though possibly with a miserable sum. I remind him that I am terrified of poverty and that I practically have no family left, or friends, or anyone else in the world. Again and again I implore him not to subject me, either, to the sight of all the terror he’s been describing:
“Why don’t you save me from so much suffering, Pablo, and just send one of those hit men who obey all your orders as if you were God? We both know you’ve wanted to. Why don’t you just do it, my love, before someone else does it first?”
It seems that this last plea finally touches some fiber of that leaden heart, because when he hears it, he smiles tenderly and comes to the end of the balcony where I am. Standing behind me, he wraps me in his arms and whispers in my ear, “But no one kills their biographer, my love! And I couldn’t bear the sight of such a beautiful cadaver, and with a twenty-four-inch waist! Do you think I’m made of stone? What if I wanted to revive it and I couldn’t?” And, kissing my hair, he adds: “Now, that would be a worse tragedy than Romeo and Juliet! No, more like Othello and Desdemona. Yes, them and Iago, Iago Santofimio!”
On learning that he’d found out who Iago was, I can’t help but laugh. Relieved, he comments with a sigh that over those years we really taught each other many things and
grew a lot together. I tell him he and I had been like two little bamboo trees, but I don’t tell him what I’m thinking: that this will be the last time I feel his arms around my body, the last time we would laugh together, the last time he will see me cry…I know that whatever happens and whatever he does, for the rest of my life I will miss all that happiness Pablo and I shared together. And since I feel that inexplicable pain on having to leave him, that terror of being unable to forget him, that fear I will start hating him, I insist that if he sent someone to kill me with one shot, I wouldn’t feel a thing, and he could throw my remains in the whirlpool with some wildflowers. I add that I could watch over him better from heaven than I can from Bogotá, and even do some public relations for him with all those he sent there. He breathes in my perfume and is silent for a while, then tells me that he’s never felt so insulted: he would never, ever leave me without a good headstone! A luxurious, stolen one that would say:
Here lie the delicious flesh and exquisite bones
That adorned Cleansoul, the Beauty
While she was the guardian angel
Of Blacksoul, the Beast.
I celebrate his singular talent for composing instantaneous verses and epitaphs, and his genetic predisposition for all things related to the mortuary business. And he explains that it is just habit: every day he composes dozens of death threats for all his enemies and sends them by mail with his fingerprints on them so no one can dispute his intellectual authorship. I remark that one of those people is going to end up cutting me with a razor, and it occurs to me to ask him if I can keep his Beretta…at least for a while.
“I’ve always said you shouldn’t separate from it even in the shower, my love.”
I feel an enormous relief, and I decide not to ask him for my key chain with the gold heart until the day he sends for his gun. He caresses both my cheeks, swears that as long as he’s alive no one will touch a hair on my head, and gives me an argument more lapidary than all those marble headstones put together.
“Anyone who dares touch this little face, I’ll cut both his little hands off with a chainsaw! And then I will do the same to his horrible daughters, his mother, wife, girlfriend, and sisters. And to his father and brothers, too, so you can rest easy.”
“Now, that’s going to be some consolation prize, Pablo! ‘Blacksoul, the Beast’…that’s going to be the perfect name for the protagonist of my novel, a bandit just like you but with Tirofijo’s face…”
“Then I would toss you into the whirlpool, and alive, Virginia! But, if you give him the face of ‘Commander Papito’ of the M-19, you would sell more books. And those Italians would make a movie out of it and you can send me a copy dedicated ‘to my Fairy-Godfather, who inspired this story. Alias Cinderella.’ ”
We laugh together and he looks at the clock. He says that since it’s now 2:00 p.m., he’s going to take me to the hotel so his boys can pick me up at three. But that first I’m going to put some makeup on my red nose, which looks like a strawberry after so much crying, because the employees at reception are going to whisper that he beat me up to try to take my diamond away.
Since we’ll never see each other again, now I can ask him why I was the only woman he never gave furs or jewels to. He takes me in his arms, kisses me on the lips, and says into my ear that it was to maintain the illusion that he never had to buy the most beautiful woman of all. And the bravest and most loyal, although, it’s true, somewhat unfaithful…I powder my nose with a little smile of satisfaction while he watches me with a proud expression. He comments that the makeup is really a marvel, and that it’s a shame he only has coke labs and not cosmetics labs, like that marica from Cali. He adds that if I “pirated” his formula and gave it my name, I’d get richer than him. Laughing, I ask when he’s ever going to come up with some legal business, and with a loud peal of laughter he replies, “Never, my love! Never ever! My whole life I will be the world’s greatest outlaw!”
Before leaving the little house—and with a strange gleam in his eyes—he announces a surprise he has for me so I don’t go away sad: he wants me to spend an entire month in Miami so I can take a break from all the death threats.
“Carlos Aguilar, ‘El Mugre,’ is there with another one of my trusted men, and they will take care of picking you up at the airport and taking you back, so I know you won’t run off to Switzerland! Have a nice time, and when you come back, I’ll call you to talk about something they’re going to show you. I think you’re going to love it, and I’d like to know your thoughts.”
We set off with him at the wheel, followed by another car with only two of his men in it. I am surprised at what seem to be minimal security measures, and he explains that he now inspires so much respect in Medellín that no one would dare touch him. I note that in my language “respect” is sometimes called terror, and I ask who he’s going to assassinate this time while I’m gone. Pinching my cheek, he replies that he doesn’t like to be spoken to like that.
I tell him that according to what I’ve been told, those stories about narco-traffickers taking yachts from me seem to have come from his office after what happened with Vieira. Shrugging, Pablo replies that he can’t control every word his boys say. And since the Cali gentleman’s wife had originally designed that formula to make him look like an idiot and his wife look like a psycho, it’s not his fault that now anyone can call a radio station and say that “Tarzan” is a narco, his old boat a yacht, and my emergency in the sea a suicide attempt.
“And you have to accept that now, thanks to that viper, the media will always label any man who gets close to you a drug trafficker.”
“No, Pablo, don’t be so sure! A few months ago, Felipe López asked me to marry him; and you must already know that, because you have my phones bugged. He’s the son of the most powerful former president of Colombia, tall and beautiful, and a fledgling Citizen Kane. And Semana magazine has always treated you suspiciously well, considering that you’re more than…a mere rival of the owner.”
I don’t even turn to look at him. After a few seconds, he asks what “Cinderella’s” reply was. And I tell him word for word what I said.
He laughs hard and comments that Felipe López would be capable of anything to get his hands on all his secrets…and those of the stingy moguls.
“Better, more like the secrets of the drug cartels’ generous contributions to his father,” I say. And I tell him that the Lópezes rigorously follow the advice Winston Churchill gave George VI: One day, the king asked his prime minister why he had stuffed his cabinet with “all those awful Labour Party members.” Churchill, who used the same language as George VI because he was the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough—and, in any case, they were among men—replied, accompanying his words with an elegant gesture of two 180-degree arcs, there and back:
“Sire: because it’s better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in!”
We went on laughing, and he remarks that what he’s going to miss the most are all my stories. I reply that his are even better, and that’s precisely why he wants to keep me in “the Cabinet.” He says he will never forget that I was the only woman who opened elevator doors as if I were Superman and who didn’t cry at tear gas but cried rivers at everything else, without worrying about her makeup. He adds that he’s never met anyone who had twenty lives, and I tell him what he should never forget is that he only has one and that the day he loses it I’m going to want to shoot myself, too. We go on playing the same verbal ping-pong that we’ve played a thousand times before, but this will be the last time. We stop at a red light, having rarely if ever done that before, because at night he always drove like a fugitive from justice and not at this leisurely afternoon pace. I look out the window to my right, and I notice that the driver of the car next to us has recognized us and can’t believe her eyes. We both wave at her, and Pablo blows her a big kiss. She smiles, enchanted, and I tell him that now that he’s on his way to becoming a sex symbol, he has to swear to me th
at he will make more love and less war. He laughs, takes my hand, kisses it, and thanks me for having given him so much happiness. With the last of his mischievous looks, he promises that from now on he’s going to try to eat fewer beans. And I tell him, “Tonight, when that happy woman tells her husband that you flirted with her, he’ll just tell her to make an appointment with a shrink or the eye doctor. In a mocking voice, and without taking his eyes from the newspaper, he will tell her she’s a liar who needs to go on a diet, or that you are an adulterer and I am a sinner. That’s why husbands are so boring….”
And since when it comes to him I have nothing to lose, I take advantage of all that happiness to go back to the original reason for my visit.
“Pablo: Luis Carlos Galán is going to be the next president, and the next day he’s going to reinstate extradition. You need to make a peaceful alliance with Gilberto and design a formula for peace with him and the M-19, who are intelligent people and friends of both of yours.”
“No, my dear: Galán will never be president!”
“Stop fooling yourself, he will be elected in ’90. But all Colombians have a price, and if anyone knows that, it’s you.”
“Maybe he’ll be elected, but he won’t take his oath! And are you perhaps suggesting that I buy him?”
“No, you couldn’t. I think Galán’s price could be a peace accord, if the Mexican would forget his blind hatred of communists and try to have a truce with the Patriotic Union and the FARC, and you would leave that stupid war with Cali and join with Gilberto and the M. If you kill Galán, on the other hand, history will turn him into another Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and you into another Roa Sierra. That’s not what you are, my love, and I don’t want to see you die like that, because you don’t deserve that fate. You’re a formidable leader, you have stature, a national presence, and you can handle the media. A lot of people need you, Pablo, thousands of poor people. You can’t just leave them to their fates.”
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 33
