Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar
Page 41
“What would you tell Pablo if you could see him for five minutes?” I’m asked by a sweet girl who came into the world on Christmas Eve 1993, three weeks after Pablo’s death.
Feeling again the pain of the two women whom he first adored and then destroyed—murdered or ruined by Pablo, exposed to the threats of his worst enemies, vilified by the most profane journalists, targets of mockery from his low-born family, slandered by gutless thugs—I reply without hesitating:
“I would ask him who he’s been reincarnated as: one of those terrified little girls in Darfur, torn apart by twenty animals like him?…Or as an angel of compassion like my friend Sister Bernadette of the Missionaries of Charity?…Or as the next, or definitive, version of the Antichrist? I think, from that unfathomable eternity made of the freezing nights and endless solitude of those who have no possible redemption, his voice would almost certainly say to me: ‘Well, my love…you, better than anyone, know that we demons were once angels!’ And then, before disappearing forever in some firmament of deepest midnight, now with no moon and no stars, that black soul would very possibly add: ‘You know, I finally understand the law of cause and effect. You were right, Virginia! Maybe…if down there on earth you pulled a petal from one million lilies, from here I could make one million stars tremble…’
“My firmament, liebchen, is always lit,” I tell her, smiling at that wise creature who understands all.
*
—
EIGHTY-SIX DAYS HAVE PASSED since my arrival, and I’m settling into a small apartment with spectacular views that I have always dreamed of. Thirty-five floors below lies the financial district of Brickell, and around it, several dozen luxury condominiums on avenues lined by palms that look cloned. Finally, any time of day I can look out at the sea that I’ve always needed like a second skin, the sailboats and yachts that pass on their way to crossing under the bridge, and the seagulls that dance outside my balcony against the background of a perfect, cobalt-blue sky. I am deeply and immensely happy, and I can’t believe that, after bearing twenty years of insults and threats and living eight years in fear of poverty, I can finally enjoy so much beauty, so much freedom, and such peace, before the light leaves my eyes forever.
When night falls, I go out on the balcony to contemplate the moon and stars. With the eyes of a fascinated child, I watch planes go by overhead, arriving from all over the world loaded with tourists, business, and hopes, and the helicopters that come and go between South Beach and the airport. Farther on, in Key Biscayne, someone is celebrating their birthday with a profusion of fireworks that from this side of the water I receive like an unexpected gift from God. The ships’ foghorns sound in the distance, and above and below me the murmur of motors vanishing in the distance is a lively music that joins the smell of salt and the warm breeze to wrap me in a rhapsody whose notes I thought I had forgotten. A thousand lights from banks and condominiums have turned on above the city that glimmers below, and with my heart flooded with gratitude, I observe the enormous Nativity scene of this tropical future Manhattan. It seems that now my remaining visible nights will shine like Christmas Day.
The scene is a celebration of the senses, and I wonder if someday I will also passionately love or sing to this privileged land where I have been so happy and where nearly all dreams are possible: the nation of the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon, of Cahokia and California and New York, of the universities where a hundred Nobel Prize laureates teach future winners to think; the nation of inventors and architects and visionary engineers, of giants of cinema and music and sports, of trips to the moon and the Hubble and the Galileo, of titanic philanthropists and a thousand ethnicities and sounds with the flavors of every corner of the earth; the nation of the persecuted members of the human race, and of the enterprising people who once arrived here with empty pockets and built a country through ambition and sacrifice, with an obstinate idea in their heads, a dream of freedom in their hands, a song of faith in their hearts.
I am just one of the many refugees who on a day like any other—though historic in their own lives—set foot on its beaches, fleeing from enemies or hunger. And from the place where I arrived on an unforgettable day in 2006, I could finally tell the story of a man and a woman from two opposing worlds who once loved each other in a country at war. It would have been impossible for me to start to tell it, to finish writing it, or to even dream of publishing it in the country where I was born and that I had to abandon forever that July day.
A month after I arrive, Diego Pampín and Cristóbal Pera of Random House Mondadori, one of the world’s most prestigious publishers, enthusiastically welcome my idea of relating my intimate view of the most terrifying and complex criminal mind of recent history.
Pablo will not be written into my books again, but Blacksoul the Beast will always live in them—in my new stories of love and war in that country of one million dead and five million displaced, inhabited by the cruelest and the sweetest people on earth, at the eternal mercy of armed bands and dynasties that, with their pack of accomplices, courtiers, and henchmen, passed down power and treasure from generation to generation. Stories of a political class that one fine day discovered the business of building golden bridges between criminal bands and presidential ones, and of a media that would soon discover another, even juicier business: the frenzy of hiding imperfect pasts and howling accusations at anyone who dares uncover them. As Oscar Wilde said of the aggressors of his time:
What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.
Me working as a radio and television journalist, 1981.
With Álvaro Gómez, eternal aspirant to the presidency of the Conservative Party—assassinated in 1995. The photo is from 1986.
Talking with President Belisario Betancur, 1984.
The laughter of those happy years, 1984.
From left to right: Julio Mario Santo Domingo, me, Senator Miguel Faciolince, and President Turbay listening to the candidate, Alfonso López Michelsen, 1972.
In my gondola in Venice, announcing the stockings of Di Lido, one month before the assassination of Rodrigo Lara in 1984.
All that I had left of Pablo was this love poem.
The vain hopes of my friend, for Pablo.
Dedication from Santofimio to Virginia.
A portrait of me by Hernán Díaz, 1987.
One of Pablo’s favorites, 1972.
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