I can’t tell him that, nine or ten years before, that criminal had spent more than two million dollars on airplane fuel so he could have me at his side or in his arms for more than two thousand hours. Nor can I explain that—with a woman who loves and understands him with the intelligent perspective of a free heart—a man lets vulnerabilities show that no one else knows. To the human being listening to me, I can only confess that I know every fold in that monster’s mind better than anyone in the world, just as I know his Achilles’ heels. At the other end of the line I can feel his surprise and then shock. I continue:
“He’s going to go crazy looking for a country that will take his family in, because his enemies, the Pepes, have sworn to exterminate them all like cockroaches. Some people in his organization already fled to Germany, and if you allow entry to the only people in the world who really matter to him, sooner or later, he’ll come after them, and the Pepes will come after him. Escobar is now the best kidnapper in the world, and if he goes there, the days of Baader-Meinhof will seem like child’s play! If you don’t want to believe me, ask your brother to show you the letter Pablo Escobar sent three years ago.”
With something of reproach in his voice, he tells me, “He lives in the United States now, kid. He got tired of waiting for you, and…he got remarried in March. I’m going to talk to him first, and then with a friend of mine in Washington who specializes in counterterrorism and who can tell me what’s going on….He’s someone who knows a lot about these things. I still don’t understand why you’re so sure those people are coming to Germany. But I’m going to look into it, and as soon as I know anything, I’ll call you.”
It’s not only on a clear day that you can see forever. Also on a dark one, and a black one, and one of the saddest of my life. Why did I need to make that call, my God? To receive news like that, punishment like that, such a bucket of cold water over my head?
On the way to the radio station in the rain, I think how I am the most solitary woman on earth and how terrible it is not to have anyone with whom to vent so much suffering. That night I cry myself to sleep, but the next morning I am awakened by a call from my ex-fiancé. He tells me he knows how I’m feeling with the news of his wedding, and I can only reply that I know how he’s feeling with the news of the police net closing around the man who separated us. In French, he tells me that his brother has started to make inquiries in Washington: everything seems to indicate that the krimi is really nearing its end, and he’s going to try to convince the German minister to keep a close watch on the Frankfurt airport I’d always flown into. I congratulate him on his marriage, and when I hang up, I know the only feeling I have for Pablo is the most fervent wish that someone kill him very soon.
At lunchtime I get a call from Strasbourg, and my friend asks me to talk from a public phone. He says that he finally understands what happened between his mother and me, and he asks if I think Escobar would retaliate against European citizens or companies. I reply that now that his brother is in the United States I feel deep relief, because he would have been Escobar’s first abduction target in Germany. I explain that in other times he would have surely blown up the embassy in Bogotá, and the Bayer, Siemens, and Mercedes buildings there. But he has always been utterly ignorant in German matters, and in his present circumstances, to plan large attacks in Bogotá he would need to tend to many communications fronts and prepare very complicated logistics. His desperation to get his family out of the country, on the other hand, is going to lead him to focus on that one thing, which will be a real blessing for the people who are tracing his calls.
“Oh! Warn Berlin that they will definitely travel on a Sunday, so as not to give the governmental agencies time to decide to block their entry. Flying on a commercial airline would be suicide, because everyone would find out. That’s why I’m sure they will try to travel in a private plane, although in Colombia—aside from a few tycoons who would never lend them—no one I know of has planes with that kind of flight autonomy. But the cartel has been renting planes for fifteen years, and there must be dozens available in Panama…I can only tell you that I’ll eat my hat if they don’t go to Europe. And if you let them into Frankfurt, in less than one month the Pepes will be bombing the Escobar family, and Escobar will be blowing up the Cologne Cathedral! This is a guy who’s spent years dreaming of blowing up the Pentagon—you heard me right. Tell them that his only Achilles’ heel is the family, the family, the family. He would give his life for his family!”
On Sunday, November 28, a phone call wakes me up. From New York, I receive some stunning news.
“You were right, kid. They flew to my country, but you were wrong about one thing: they made the mistake of flying on Lufthansa! My brother already talked to the highest level of government, and he wanted me to tell you that an entire army is waiting for them and won’t let them set foot there or in any other European country. They are going to send that family of his back to Colombia so they can meet the same fate as the families of all of Escobar’s victims. It’s confirmed, and only a dozen people know. For your own safety and for ours, you can’t open your mouth. The Washington experts say he’s going to go crazy looking for someone to take them in, that he’s surrounded and they don’t give him one month. Now cross your fingers for Bayer, Schwarzkopf, and Mercedes!”
Thursday night, when I come home from work, the phone rings.
“Bravo, kid! The wicked witch is dead!”
Then, for the first time in eleven years, everything in my life goes quiet.
Pablo has lain dead since three in the afternoon.
There’s a Party in Hell Today
THROUGH THE WINDOW of the U.S. government’s small plane, I look out for the last time in my life at the ground of my homeland and the sky of my country. A nine-hour flight may seem an eternity to someone else, but I’m used to spending entire days without talking to anyone. During that time, all the reasons why I am going to the United States and will never return to Colombia, except to be buried there, go parading through my memory….All the events of recent days have conspired to turn me into a key witness of the attorneys general in both countries, and in past and future criminal cases of exceptional significance: the assassination of a presidential candidate in Colombia, a trial in the United States over more than 2.1 billion dollars, the holocaust of judicial power in my country, a multimillion-dollar money-laundering operation in thirty-eight countries….Now, I’m headed toward the nation that has saved my life because, had Pablo Escobar not been my lover, I wouldn’t have just two quarters in my wallet and all the names of his biggest accomplices in my memory.
How could I forget what happened after his family was returned from Germany? Pablo’s voice on all the radio stations the next day, threatening to turn German citizens, tourists, and companies into “military targets”? If you knew all his subtleties, you knew it was the voice of a man exhausted, cornered, overwhelmed by suffering, now unable to terrorize anyone. A man whose family had been run out of the elegant Santa Ana neighborhood and was now hiding in the Tequendama Hotel, property of a compassionate police department that fulfilled its duty to protect the wife and children of their victimizer while the entire country protested, enraged.
At my microphone during the day, silent in front of my TV at night, I waited patiently for the denouement.
*
—
THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, four days after the family’s return and desperate because no country will accept the only human beings in the world he cares about, Pablo talks to his sixteen-year-old son for twenty minutes, something that in other circumstances he would never have done. Since his flight from the Cathedral, he has maintained obsessive discipline in his communications, and he rarely uses phones. But now he starts desperately making calls in search of a way to relocate his family, whom the Pepes have sworn to exterminate. In his eternal obsession with manipulating the media, Pablo explains to his son in detail how to answer questions sent to him by Semana, the magazine
that over the years has honored him time and again with its cover. An efficient police officer who has been tirelessly tracing his communications for fifteen months finally locates him through radio triangulation and immediately passes the information to the Search Bloc. Minutes later, the police locate the house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, and they can see Escobar through a window while he’s talking on the phone. He and his bodyguards also see them, and a wild shootout begins; like Bonnie and Clyde’s, it lasts one hour. Gun in hand, Escobar goes running out barefoot and half-dressed and tries to jump from the roof to a neighboring house, but it’s no use: seconds later he collapses on the roof with two bullets in his head and several more in his body. Now the most wanted man in the world, the number one public enemy of the nation’s entire history, the man who for more than ten years subjected the rule of law to all the deliriums of his megalomania, is only a two-hundred-fifty-pound monster who bleeds out in front of two dozen enemies who celebrate their victory with rifles in the air, delirious with pride and crazed by unprecedented joy.
The paroxysm spreads to thirty million Colombians, and the verses of the national anthem with “Cesó la horrible noche” (“The horrible night has ended”) resound from all the radio stations in the country. I can only remember two previous events that were similar to the collective phenomenon that followed Pablo’s death: the fall of the dictatorship of General Rojas Pinilla when I was seven years old and the riots after a soccer game against Argentina that Colombia won 5–0 that left eighty people dead. Watching and listening to all that, from the silence imposed on me by the jubilant director of the Todelar newscast on the payroll of Gilberto Rodríguez, can only be compared to the dimensions of that explosion of joy described by Pablo eight years ago, on a noonday and under the sky of Nápoles, when he had sworn to me to take to Hell in the instant of his death only the vision of our two bodies merged in the epicenter of 360 degrees multiplied by one trillion trillions.
But that was a long time ago, because when you’ve suffered so much, eight years can seem like an eternity….And that man who had come into my arms still a child, and had left them a man determined to become a monster to go down in history as a legend, had done it in the end: now the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, congratulates the Search Bloc, and “all of humanity”—as the national anthem would put it—congratulates Colombia. The celebrations throughout the country last for days and days, and while in Cali the Rodríguez Orejuela family cry tears of joy for the victory, in Medellín, dozens of mourners, hundreds of drunkards, and thousands of poor people throw themselves at Pablo’s coffin as if wanting to keep something of him for themselves, the same way they had in that garbage dump where, eleven years ago, I had fallen in love with him. Back when he was a human being and looked like one, when he didn’t flaunt his riches before me, but rather displayed all the bravery and heart he possessed at that time. Now I see that body with its face disfigured by selfishness, fat, and evil, and with a mustache like Adolf Hitler’s; the Search Bloc had kept one end as a souvenir and the DEA the other. His own mother had exclaimed, “That man is not my son!”
And beholding that repugnant and loathsome sight, I also said to myself, crying, “That monster was not my lover, either.”
Now my phone has stopped ringing. I have no friends left, and Pablo’s enemies have finally let me rest. None of my colleagues call me, because they know I would hang up without a word. Sit in the doorway of your house and watch the dead body of your enemy pass by, I say to myself as I watch that human tide on TV, the twenty-five thousand people who attend his burial: There goes my torturer and that of my whole country, wrapped in visceral hatred, covered in infamy, surrounded by the scum of society. Yes, those people are the families of his hit men and all those young men who thought he was God because he brought a weak and corrupt state to its knees…because he was rich and audacious like no one else…because he kept the gringos in check. Yes, one mourner for each of his victims, that’s all.
A while later, trying to find a plausible explanation, I say to myself incredulously: But…twenty-five thousand…isn’t it a lot of people for someone who did so much evil? What if he had done good? Are those crowds a mix of sicarios and also…thousands of grateful poor? Could it be that eleven years ago, when everything started, I wasn’t so wrong after all?
And I start to remember how Pablo had been when he was still so young and I was still so innocent…how he had planned to make me fall in love with him in that dump, and not in the Seychelles or in Paris…how he’d sent his Pegasus for me every week so he could have me for hours and hours in his arms…how—because love makes us good—each of us had inspired the best in the other and he told me I would be his Manuelita…how he loved me and while I loved him he had dreamed of being a great man…how it was that our dreams were shattered and those who destroyed them ended up dead…
Because, once the initial jubilation has passed, my heart has been turned into a giant red onion, just a poor onion of raw and bloody flesh, and every sixty minutes someone rips off another nerve layer without anesthesia, and then wraps it pitilessly with yards of barbed wire until the next hour. Then I go to my library and look for Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems, the only thing of his that Pablo couldn’t take away the day he took my money, my manuscript, the letters, the cassettes, the Virgie Linda I, and the Beretta, because it was mixed in with my hundreds of books. And reading Neruda again, and Silva, my beloved and suicidal poet, I let myself be wrapped in their verses. And I remember Pablo as he was during that last autumn when, six years before, we had seen each other for the last time, and my voice still tried to find the wind to touch his ear.
And I remember the night of one of those days when my thirty-three-year-old lover received nearly a hundred million dollars a month, was loved by the most famous, elegant beauty of his country, and, proud as could be, left her house with all his best friends on the way to the home of Colombia’s most powerful president, with the secret dream of also being president someday…that night as ominous as Silva’s “Nocturne,” with the videocassette of the future Minister Lara, when Pablo had first presaged, perhaps seen with true horror, the possibility of losing everything that had fallen into his hands and arms, almost as suddenly as it had arrived…that night, impossible to forget, when all the happy attendees ignored Neruda’s “Song of Despair,” the poem so heavy with tenderness that it inspired Il Postino….Now that all his premonitions have come true, all his terrors have materialized, I sink into the heartrending sorrow and the oceanic depths that describe like nothing else the ignominy of his destiny, condemned and cursed as Judas, and all the tragedy of that destiny of ours…his impotence to change anything and my impotence to change him.
Now he is asleep for all eternity, and in that rigid earth he lies alone. And I start to remember how, when he thought I was asleep, he would kiss me gently so as not to wake me up…and then again and again, to see if I was awake. How he told me that the whole universe fit inside my heart, and I replied that I only wanted all of his to fit…that man’s enormous heart of gold that, before my terrified eyes and with me unable to stop it, turned into the enormous lead heart of a monster…that lion’s heart that couldn’t change anything, but did teach me to feel everything and to cry for what couldn’t be changed so that, one clear and not-too-distant day, all that rage and those longings of his could travel alongside my sufferings, in my books and in my story.
That little old poetry book I was on the verge of burning a hundred times, with its two signatures and a sad quatrain, its cover damaged by the tears I still shed ten years and ten months after that night, would be the mute continent of two star-crossed lovers’ broken dreams. Perhaps one day it will end up under thick glass in the museum where the remains of failed loves and doomed passions rest. With time, it will be all I have left of Pablo, because five years later, in Buenos Aires, two muggers would snatch off the watch that had accompanied me for almost fifteen years. I haven’t missed it for
one single second of one single day, because I will never miss the lost possessions, only “the lost birds that return from beyond to meld with a sky I will never get back again.”
*
—
IN NOVEMBER 2004, as I watch on television an extradited man in handcuffs boarding a DEA plane headed for the United States, accused of trafficking two hundred thousand kilos of cocaine, I say to myself: There’s a party in Hell today, Gilberto!
Like him and his brother, I also came to this sky and this land in a DEA plane, but for different reasons: in September 2006, without going to court and before I can testify against them, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers plead guilty to all charges. They receive a sentence of thirty years, and their fortune of $2.1 billion is split equally between the Colombian and U.S. governments.
Today I can only say that God works in the most mysterious ways, and that sometimes he condemns us to the deepest and most prolonged forms of suffering because he has chosen us as catalysts for strange, perhaps even historic, events.
*
—
THEY PULL A SKULL from the dirt, all that’s left of Pablo, his horrible skull coated in infamy. Thirteen years after his death, against the wishes of his mother, they have exhumed his remains for a paternity test. I wonder who the mother of that child of his could be, and I feel only deep compassion for the women who once loved him and now argue over his fortune, because none of them want his name. I think about the three who directly or indirectly had something to do with his death, and the pain of those of us who really made him dream and suffer, laugh and rage: his wife, Wendy, and me. Pablo sacrificed his life for the wife who, now jailed for a time in Argentina, repudiated the name Escobar and the names he chose for their children—but not his fortune—and in doing so left him without succeeding generations. Wendy, murdered by Popeye, a cowardly sicario who envied Pablo’s lovers and dressed like a woman. And me, condemned to die of hunger and solitude, and thrown to the wolves to let them tear me apart.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 40
