Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar

by Virginia Vallejo

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  SOMETIME LATER I receive in the mail a torn newspaper page: a hairdresser in Cali was killed, stabbed forty-five times—not ten, or twenty, or thirty—during a homosexual orgy. Since the minds who give the orders are a thousand times guiltier than the beasts who carry them out, I say a prayer asking compassion for the dead man’s soul, and I offer up to God all my pain and the humiliation from the mouths of those lowlife elites—who differ neither genealogically nor morally from their hit men and servants. Then I ask Him to use me as a catalyst to eliminate them and their fortunes that were built on the shame of my country, the blood of their victims, and the tears of our women.

  And on January 13, 1988, the war breaks out. While Pablo is in Nápoles, a powerful bomb shakes the Monaco building—his wife and children’s residence in one of the most elegant areas of Medellín—and the surrounding neighborhood to its foundation. Victoria, Juan Pablo, and little Manuela, who were sleeping in their penthouse bedrooms, are miraculously saved from death and emerge unscathed, but two guards lose their lives. Deep Throat tells me that the revenge was the work of Pacho Herrera, the fourth in the hierarchy of the Cali Cartel, and Pablo wanted to chop him to bits the same way he’d done to the Kid at the request of Chepe Santacruz, third in the hierarchy after Gilberto and his brother Miguel. Of the building, occupied entirely by Escobar’s family and bodyguards, only the concrete structure remains; his valuable antique cars and Victoria’s art collection suffer irreparable damage.

  The war is leaving thirty people dead each day, and it’s not unusual for the bodies of young models savagely tortured to appear in the morgues of Cali and Medellín, because the violence even reaches the beauty salons where the cartels hire informants. Pablo’s enemies know I am not with him anymore, but they think I’m very close to his affections; I’m in a doubly vulnerable position because I no longer have his protection. The threats are worse than ever, and changing my phone number no longer does any good. Fewer and fewer people have my number, and I start to cut myself off from the world. The money in the bank runs out quickly, because my priority is to make the payments on my apartment while I wait for one of my paintings to sell, none of which are worth more than a few thousand dollars. And in Colombia, selling an artwork not by one of the half-dozen famous national painters takes months, if not years. When I offer my few gems to the jewelers I’ve frequented since I was twenty, they offer me 10 percent of their value, almost the same as a pawnshop. I decide not to sell my apartment, which has cost me nearly twenty years of work and sacrifice, because I would have to let dozens of curious people into my private life and subject myself to all kinds of indiscreet questions.

  To keep busy, I start to organize my notes for the novel I’ll publish one day if a miracle saves me, but it only serves to indelibly fix in my memory the nostalgia for all that has been lost since that curse named Pablo Escobar crossed my path, and to exacerbate all the shame that was the only thing he left me. After the bomb, in under a week, Pablo has already kidnapped Andrés Pastrana, candidate for mayor of Bogotá and son of the ex-president Misael Pastrana Borrero, and brutally murdered the prosecutor Carlos Mauro Hoyos. Since extradition has been reinstated, and he plans to bring the state to its knees, he’s now paying between $2,000 and $5,000 for every dead policeman or officer. As the war comes into focus, eight hundred members of state institutions are murdered, and to prove that he has enough ammunition for the Cali Cartel and the state at the same time, the bodies of some of his victims carry more than one hundred bullets. It’s clear that the days of low liquidity—unknown to the public—are in the past, and that the “Cuban Connection” is bringing him a true fortune.

  With the parade of terror, threats, and murders, I’ve been sinking further into a deep sadness: almost nothing interests me now, I rarely leave the house, and I decide that as soon as the money in my safe runs out, I’ll fire a bullet into my ear where Pablo taught me to, because I can’t stand the fear of the poverty I see approaching with giant strides. My family only feels contempt for me, and their insults are added to the ones I hear every time I show my face in a supermarket. I know I couldn’t even count on a loaf of bread from any of my three rich siblings, who blame me for the ridicule they have to bear at the Jockey Club, at restaurants, and at parties.

  I’ve gone to say good-bye to Dennis, an astrologer friend from the United States who is leaving soon to go back to his native Texas because he was threatened by kidnappers. I want to ask him, while I’m there, when the terrible suffering I’m going through will end. He looks at my astral chart and some special tables that tell him where the planets will be on future dates, and he announces worriedly, “Your pain is only getting started…and it’s going to last a long time, darling.”

  “Yes, but how many months? Tell me.”

  “Years…years. And you’ll have to be very strong to bear what’s coming. But if you live for a long time, you’ll receive an enormous inheritance.”

  “Are you telling me I’ll be very unhappy, and then I’ll be the widow of a very rich man?”

  “I only know you’re going to love a man from a distant land, from whom you’ll always be separated. And don’t even think about committing any crimes, because you’re going to have legal trouble with foreigners, and they’re going to last years and years, but in the end justice will be on your side. Ohhhh! Not only are you doomed to solitude, but you’ll also lose your eyesight in your final years. You will suffer until Jupiter comes out of the house of hidden enemies, prisons, and asylums, but if you are strong, in around thirty years you’ll be able to say it was all worth it! Fate is written in the stars…and there’s nothing we can do to change it, my dear.”

  “Is what you’re describing a destiny, Dennis? It sounds more like a crucifixion!” I tell him, swallowing my tears. “And you’re saying it’s only getting started? Are you sure the tables aren’t inverted, and the pain is going to end soon?”

  “No, no, no. You have to pay karma because you were born with Chiron in Sagittarius. And like the mythological centaur, you’ll want to die to escape the pain, but you won’t be able to!”

  That night I tell Gloria Gaitán over the phone that I’m thinking of committing suicide to escape the pain of dying of hunger. I tell her I plan to shoot myself so it will be fast and definitive. Since she is a friend of Fidel Castro’s, I don’t mention anything about escaping the pain of having to wait thirty years in a gringo prison until my innocence and that of the Cuban dictator are proven. Or in an insane asylum along with Pablo—a Sagittarius—until my sanity is proven, and on his deathbed that centaur leaves me his fortune for having lectured him for thirty years.

  A couple of weeks later I accept the invitation of an acquaintance of mine to spend a long weekend at her country house. Since I’m convinced that I’ll soon be leaving this world, I want to see nature and animals one last time. When I return to my apartment, where everything is always kept in perfect order, I realize that a thief visited me while I was gone. My desk is in disarray and the first seventy-eight pages of my novel are gone—patiently handwritten over and over, because I don’t have a typewriter and the personal computer hasn’t made it to these parts yet. Also gone are the cassettes from the interviews I did with Pablo in the early days, the cards from his orchids, and the only two letters he ever wrote me. With a terrifying premonition, I run to the safe in my bedroom and find it open. The $30,000 has disappeared—everything I had left in the world—and except for the two apartment keys, the safe is empty. While the velvet cases full of jewelry are open on the desk with nothing missing, the thief has taken my gold heart locket and has also taken my toy boat, the “yacht” Virgie Linda I. But worst of all, what I will never forgive that headstone thief for as long as I live, is that he has taken my Beretta. Yes, it was his, but he knew perfectly well that it had become mine and that it was the last hope I had left.

  The theft of all my money, of months of work as an amanuensis, and of that gun tha
t was my most precious company sinks me into the deepest depression. The cruel man I loved so much has lost his mind and is condemning me to a slow death over months. My mother has gone to Cali to take care of a sick sister and didn’t leave a phone number, because mine is a nonexistent family. I wouldn’t dare ask anyone else for money, or talk about my poverty to friends more remote every day, or relatives who were born distant. I don’t even have the strength left to go out and sell anything, and I decide I won’t wait thirty years until some karma is paid off. I’ll let myself die of hunger, like Eratosthenes when he learned he would soon lose the last light in his eyes.

  Since I know that from somewhere in the cosmos the noble spirits of the immortals can hear the supplicating voices of mere mortals, I beg that wise man of ancient Greece to give me strength to bear the three months that await me if a miracle doesn’t occur. I had read that the worst days are the first ones, and after that you achieve a singular lucidity and almost don’t suffer at all. At first you don’t feel anything, but on the fifth and sixth day, the pain starts. It gets sharper with every hour that passes, with such a feeling of extreme abandonment and desperation, such agony in the heart—now ripped apart, as if all that remained of you were just some strips of flesh seared by flames. It’s not life abandoning your body forever, but rather the little sanity you still have fleeing to hell in horror. And, so as not to lose my mind and to console myself, I turn to the only part of me that still seems full of something:

  Right now, there are almost a billion people feeling the same agony I am. I saw how the richest people on earth live, and I saw how the poorest live in that garbage dump. Now I know how one of every five children who come into this world dies. If some miracle occurs in my life, in thirty years I’ll be able to put all this pain in my heart into a book about God the Father and God the Son that I will call Evolution versus Compassion. Or someday there will be true philanthropists, and I’ll make a TV show about them that I’ll call On Giving.

  From Olympus, where he lives now, the compassionate Eratosthenes seems to have heard me: eleven days later I get a call from my mother, who has returned to Bogotá. When I tell her I haven’t been able to buy food, she lends me all the little money she has. A few weeks later, the miracle happens and a painting sells. Then I decide that to try to recover the millions of dendrites lost during my fast, I urgently have to study something that will challenge my brain.

  Yes, I am going to study German so I can translate the Scholia by the philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, because they are a marvel of wisdom, meter, and synthesis: “The true aristocrat loves his people at all times, not only in times of election.” Could it be that, according to the Colombian wise man of the right who hates modern apparatus, the Pablo Escobar whom I first met was more of an aristocrat than the Alfonso López of always?

  Three months later, my friend Iris, fiancée of the minister-counselor of the German Embassy in Bogotá, gives me some news.

  “There’s a scholarship available at the Institut für Journalismus in Berlin for a journalist who speaks English and has basic German. It seems perfect for someone as passionate about economics as you. Why don’t you take it, Virgie?”

  And in August 1988, I happily leave for Berlin—following the designs of Divine Providence that, according to Dennis, are written in the stars, and that half of fate that, according to Pablo, you’re born with. I don’t go for one reason, no. I happily go for one million reasons, as many reasons as there are stars in the sky.

  The King of Terror

  “THE PEOPLE OF EAST BERLIN are eaten away by boredom and sadness….They can’t take any more, and they’re going to tear that wall down any minute now! I think we’ll see that magnificent avenue joined again in under a year,” I remark to David, who stands beside me on an observation tower looking out at the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.

  “Are you crazy? It’s going to be there longer than Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China!”

  The winds of fate have carried me to West Berlin in the last year of two Germanys, and the year before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Like one of those powerful tsunamis invisible from the water’s surface, all kinds of hidden things are happening in the place that only fifteen months later will become the epicenter of the collapse of communism in Europe. But it’s not exactly for political reasons that now, when I arrive at an international airport, all the alarm bells seem to go off. The DAS in Colombia know that the world’s biggest drug dealer practically exports his tons of drugs in containers, ships cash in industrial freezers, and so far hasn’t needed to use his ex-girlfriend as a “mule,” the lowest rank in the growing and now multinational industry designed by him and a dozen of his billionaire associates and rivals. And I’ve realized that the sudden interest I inspire in the FBI and the European police seems to be coinciding with the fact that lately whenever I travel from Bogotá to another country, members of the drug-trafficking elite occupy a large portion of the plane’s first-class seating.

  I’ve also noticed that every time I return to Berlin after a trip to another city with the German government grantees, when I enter my room at the student pension, the papers and bottles on the vanity are not in the precise order I had left them. The officials of the Institut für Journalismus have started to look at me suspiciously and ask me questions, like why my clothes are more fit for an executive than a student. I know what they’re thinking and what the authorities have been asking about me. I know they have been following me and why. And I’m utterly happy.

  One day I gather my courage and decide to call the American consulate in Berlin—in 1988, the embassy is in Bonn—from a public phone, to offer them my cooperation. I tell the person who answers that I think I have information about a possible conspiracy between Pablo Escobar and the Cubans and Sandinistas. At the other end of the line, the switchboard operator asks, “Pablo who?” She remarks that communist dissidents call all the time to say the Russians are going to blow up the White House with an atomic bomb, and she hangs up. When I turn around, my eyes meet those of a man I think I saw some days earlier in the zoo near the Europa Center, where the institute is. I often go there to delight in thinking how, compared with the one in Berlin, the zoo at Hacienda Nápoles really looks like the little Berlin Wall beside the Great Wall of China.

  A few days later, a man stops me as I am about to board a plane. He identifies himself as an antinarcotics officer from the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), or Interpol Wiesbaden. When he tells me that they would like to ask me some questions, I ask him if they were the ones following me at the zoo and the day I called the American consulate, but he assures me it was not the BKA.

  I meet with him and his superior, and from the start they inform me that I have every right to sue them for invasion of privacy: they have searched my room weekly, listened in on my phone calls, opened every last envelope of my mail, and have investigated every person I’ve been seen with. I explain to them that, far from suing them, what I want is to give them the names and ranks of all, absolutely all, of the drug dealers and money launderers I have met or heard named in my life, because I feel a visceral hatred for those criminals who ruined my good name and that of my country. But first, they need to tell me one thing: Who has been reporting me every time I travel? After days of byzantine discussions, they give me the name: it’s Germán Cano, from DAS.

  I start to talk. The first thing I tell them is that while I was traveling on my student ticket seated in the back rows of the plane, Guillo Ángel, one of the most visible members of the Medellín Cartel, sat in first class with his associate named Abadi, a money launderer and member of one of the richest Jewish families in Colombia. When we arrived at the Frankfurt airport, the two of them went on their way free and clear, while all the police came to examine my suitcases. Presumably, they needed to find out whether the girlfriend or ex-lover of the seventh-richest man in the world had herself a kilo or two, and was risking ten years in jail to earn $5,000 for one more Valentino or Chanel
dress.

  “If Germán Cano still doesn’t know who the top drug kingpins are and who are the big money launderers, it’s because DAS is protecting them. I think the DAS Department of Immigration has people at the airlines who tell them when I’m going to travel; they inform their narco friends, and when the day comes, they use me as a decoy to distract the foreign authorities. This is happening all the time, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  I add that the antinarcotics police in my country have been on the DEA’s payroll for years. I say I won’t ask them if DAS receives anything from Interpol or not, but I imply that it’s perfectly plausible they’re taking money from their European colleagues with one hand and from the top narcos with the other.