Читать книгу Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar - Virginia Vallejo - Страница 11

Ask Me for Anything!

IT IS LIKE THE STENCH of ten thousand bodies on a battlefield three days after a historic defeat. Miles before we get there, we can already smell it. The Medellín dump is not a mountain covered with garbage: it is a mountain made of millions and millions of metric tons of decomposing trash. It is the stench of organic matter accumulated over centuries, in every state of putrefaction. It is the smell of gas emanations erupting all around us. It is the reek of all that remains of the animal and vegetable world after it mixes with chemical waste. It is the smell of every form of absolute poverty, the stench of injustice, corruption, arrogance, and utter indifference. It impregnates every molecule of oxygen around us, entering our pores and shaking our bodies to their core. It is the sweetish aroma of death, a perfume made for Judgment Day.

We start up along the same ash-gray road used by the trucks to deposit their cargo at the peak. Pablo drives, as always. I can feel him observing me every minute, scrutinizing my reactions: those of my body, of my heart, of my mind. I know what he’s thinking, and he knows what I’m feeling: a fleeting glance catches us by surprise; a certain smile confirms it. I know that with him by my side I’ll be able to stand everything that awaits us; but, as we approach our destination, I begin to wonder if the cameraman and my assistant, Martita Bruges, will be able to work the full four or five hours in that nauseating environment, on that unventilated stage, in that stifling heat enclosed by the metal walls of a cloudy day that was more oppressive and suffocating than any I remember.

The smell was only the preface to a spectacle that would make the toughest of men recoil in disgust. The Dante’s inferno that spreads before us seems to measure several square miles, and the mountaintop is terror itself: above us, against a dirty gray sky that no one would think to associate with heaven, swarm thousands of buzzards and vultures with razor-like beaks under cruel little eyes and revolting feathers that haven’t been black for a long time. Haughtily—as if they were eagles—the members of this underworld’s reigning dynasty take a few seconds to evaluate the state of our health, then go back to feasting on horse carcasses with wet viscera glinting in the sun. Below, hundreds of newly arrived dogs greet us by baring teeth sharpened by chronic hunger; beside them, other, more veteran canines—less skinny and more indifferent—wag their tails or scratch their patchy, flea-infested fur. The whole mountain seems to tremble with undulating and frenetic movement: it is the thousands of rats, big as cats, and millions of mice of all sizes. A swarm of flies hovers above us, and storm clouds of gnats and mosquitoes celebrate the arrival of fresh blood. For the lower species of the animal world, this place seems to be a paradise of nutrients.

Some ashy figures, different from the rest, start to appear. First, out peek curious little ones with swollen bellies, full of worms; then, some males with sullen expressions; and, finally, some females so gaunt that only the pregnant ones seem alive. And almost all the younger women are expecting. The drab creatures seem to emerge from all around us, first by the dozen and then by the hundred; they circle us to block our way or prevent us from fleeing, and in a matter of minutes they have us surrounded. Suddenly, that close, oscillating tide explodes in a clamor of joy, and a thousand white sparks illuminate their faces.

“It’s him, it’s don Pablo! Don Pablo is here! And he’s brought the lady from TV! Are you going to put us on TV, don Pablo?”

Now they look radiant with happiness and excitement. Everyone comes to greet him, to hug him, to touch him, as though wanting to keep a piece of him for themselves. At first glance, only those miraculous smiles separate these dirty and emaciated people from the rest of the animal kingdom; but in the following hours those beings will teach me one of the most splendid lessons that life has seen fit to give me.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE my Christmas tree, miss?” asks a little girl, tugging at my silk blouse.

I imagine she’s going to show me a branch from some fallen tree, but it turns out to be a little frosted Christmas tree, nearly new and made in the USA.

Pablo explains that Christmas arrives here almost two weeks late, that all of these people’s possessions come from the garbage, and that rich people’s boxes and castoffs are treasures and construction materials for the poorest.

“I want to show you my Nativity scene, too!” says another little girl. “It’s finally finished!”

Baby Jesus is a one-eyed, one-legged giant, the Virgin Mary is medium-sized, and Saint Joseph is small. The plastic donkey and ox obviously belong to commercial models. I try to hold back my laughter on seeing this pleasant incarnation of a modern family, and I continue my tour.

“Can I invite you to see my house, Miss Virginia?” one affable woman asks with the same self-assuredness of any middle-class Colombian woman.

I imagine a shack of cardboard and tin like the Bogotá shanties, but I’m wrong: the little house is made of bricks held together with cement, and the roof is made of plastic tiles. Inside, it has a kitchen and two bedrooms, with furniture that’s worn but clean. Her twelve-year-old son is doing his homework at the table.

“I got lucky—someone threw out their whole living room set!” she tells me. “And look at my dishes: they have different patterns, but six of us can eat on them. The silverware and glasses don’t match like yours do, ma’am, but mine were free!”

I smile and ask if they also get their food from the garbage.

She replies, “Ugh, no, no. We would die! And in any case, the dogs get to the food first. We go down to the market and buy food with the money we earn recycling.”

A youth with the look of a gang leader, sporting American jeans and modern tennis shoes in perfect condition, proudly shows me his 18K-gold chain; I know that in any jewelry store it would cost $700, and I ask how he managed to find something so valuable, and so small, amid millions of metric tons of garbage.

“I found it with these clothes in a plastic bag. I didn’t steal it, miss, I swear to God! Some angry woman threw out her man along with all of his stuff, right down to the kitchen sink. . . . These paisa women are fierce, my God!”

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found?” I ask the group of children following us.

They look at one another and then answer almost in unison:

“A dead baby! The rats were eating it when we got there. Then there was the body of a little girl who had been raped; but it was much farther away, up by the spring.” They point toward the place. “But those are things bad people from the outside do. The people here are good, right, don Pablo?”

“Right you are: the best in the world!” he says, with absolute conviction and without an ounce of paternalism.

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, I have forgotten almost everything that Pablo Escobar said to me in that interview, his first for national media, about the twenty-five hundred families who lived in that inferno. A videotape of his enthusiastic words and my face bathed in sweat must still exist somewhere. Only my heart and my senses still hold the memories of those hours that forever changed my scale of material values, my concept of what human beings need in order to experience a little happiness. Counteracting that omnipresent stench, there was Pablo’s guiding hand on my forearm, transmitting his strength to me. A few of those survivors were clean, most were fairly dirty, and they all seemed proud of their ingenuity and grateful for their luck. They told stories about where their humble possessions had come from or how they’d discovered some small treasure. The women’s faces lit up as they described the houses they could soon call home; the men were eager to recover the respect of a society that had treated them like scum, and young boys were hopeful at the prospect of leaving that place behind and growing up into honest men. They all shared collective dreams of faith in a leader who would inspire them and a politician who wouldn’t betray them.

HAPPINESS HAS SPREAD through the place, and something like a festive air floats around us now. My initial impression of horror has given way to other emotions and to a new understanding. The elementary sense of dignity of these human beings, their courage, their nobility, their capacity to dream, all intact in an environment that would plunge any one of us into the deepest chasms of desperation and defeat, have turned my compassion into admiration. At some point along that dusty path, one that perhaps I’ll find again in some other time or space, an infinite tenderness for all those people suddenly knocks on the doors of my consciousness and floods every fiber of my spirit. And I no longer care about the stench or the shock of that dump, or how Pablo gets his tons of money, but the thousand forms of magic that he makes with it. And like a spell, his presence beside me erases the memory of every man I had loved before then. He is my present and my past and my future, and my only everything. Now only he exists.

“What did you think?” he asks me as we walk toward the cars.

“I am deeply moved. It was an enriching experience, like nothing else. From afar they seem to live like animals; from up close, they seem like angels . . . and all by yourself you’re going to return them to their human condition, right? Thank you for inviting me to meet them. And thank you for what you’re doing for them.”

He is silent for a long time. Then he puts his arm around my shoulders and says, “No one says things like that to me. . . . You’re so different! What do you say you have dinner with me tonight? And since I think I know what you’re going to say . . . I took the liberty of making sure the beauty salon is open until whatever time you want, so you can get that skunk smell out of your hair.”

I tell him that he stinks like a zorrillo, too, and laughing happily, he exclaims that he could never be anything that ended in the diminutive “illo.” Because he is nothing more and nothing less than . . . Zorro!

OUR ENTRANCE into the restaurant leaves a wake of stunned looks and a crescendo of whispers. We’re led to the table farthest from the door, where we’ll have a view of everyone who enters. I mention that I have never gone out with an interviewee, much less with a politician, and he says that there’s a first time for everything. Then, staring at me and smiling, he adds, “You know? Lately, anytime I’m sad or worried . . . I start to think about you. I think of you yelling at all those tough men in the middle of that cloud of tear gas: ‘Aren’t you ashamed? Have a little dignity; you’re like little girls!’ as if you were Napoleon at Waterloo. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in my entire life! I laugh to myself for a good while, and then . . .”

While he pauses to pique my curiosity, I mentally prepare my answer.

“I think about you soaked in freezing water and turned into a panther, with that tunic stuck to your body. I laugh for a while again . . . and I say to myself that you are, really, a very . . . very . . . brave woman.”

Before I can reply that no one has ever recognized that virtue in me, he goes on: “And you have a capacity for gratitude that’s very rare, because beautiful women aren’t in the habit of being grateful for anything.”

I tell him that I have an excessive capacity for gratitude because, since I’m not beautiful, no one has ever given me anything or recognized any talent in me. He asks me what I am, then, and I reply that I’m a collection of rare defects that for the moment aren’t noticeable, but will be with the passage of time. He asks me to tell him why I started the programming company with Margot.

I explain that, in 1981, it seemed to be my only option for professional independence. I had quit my job as the anchor of the 7:00 p.m. newscast 24 Horas, because when director Mauricio Gómez had tried to make me refer to the M-19 as a “criminal band,” I changed the terms to “guerrilleros,” “insurgents,” “rebels,” or “subversive group.” Mauricio reprimanded me almost daily, threatening to fire me and reminding me that I earned the equivalent of $5,000 a month. I replied that he might be the grandson of Colombia’s most archconservative president and the son of Álvaro Gómez, who was possibly the next, but right now, he was a journalist. One fine day, I blew up and left the best-paid job in TV, and although I know I made a tremendous mistake, I would die before admitting it to anyone.

Pablo says he’s grateful I could confide in him and asks whether the “insurgents,” “rebels,” or “subversives” know about what happened. I tell him they have no idea; I don’t even know them. And in any case, I didn’t quit out of political sympathies, but rather on principle of journalistic rigor and linguistic integrity.

“Well, they don’t have your principles: they kidnapped Jorge Ochoa’s sister, among others. I do know them, very well . . . and now they know me, too.”

I tell him I’d read something about the rescue and ask him to tell me how he managed it.

“I got eight hundred men and placed them at every one of the eight hundred public phones in Medellín. Then we followed everyone who made a call at six p.m., the appointed time for the kidnappers to call and discuss how the twelve-million-dollar ransom would be paid. Through tracking, we ruled out the innocent people one by one until we found the guerrilleros. We located the leader of the band and kidnapped his entire family. We rescued Martha Nieves, and the ‘rebels,’ ‘insurgents,’ or ‘subversives’ found out they can’t mess with us.”

Astonished, I ask how one manages to find eight hundred trustworthy people.

“It’s a simple matter of logistics. It wasn’t easy, but it was the only way. In the next few days, if you let me take you to see my other civic and social projects, you’ll see just where all those people came from. But tonight I just want to talk about you: What happened with Aníbal? You two seemed so happy together.”

I tell him that the rocks of coke that he gave to Aníbal as a gift led me to decide that a woman like me could not live with an addict. And I add that, on principle, I don’t talk about a man that I’ve loved with another. He notes that that is an unusual trait, then asks if it’s true that I was married to an Argentine director who was twenty years older than me. I admit that, unfortunately, I’m still married to him.

“Even though we’ve split our property, he absolutely refuses to sign the divorce papers, so I can’t get married again and he cannot marry the new woman in his life.”

He looks at me in silence, as though memorizing my words. Then he transforms, and in a tone that leaves no room for the slightest argument, he tells me what I have to do.

“Tomorrow, your lawyer is going to call David Stivel and tell him he has until Wednesday to sign the divorce papers, or there will be consequences. You and I will talk after the notaries close, and you can tell me what happens.”

With my eyes shining in the amber light of the candles, I ask if Zorro would be able to kill the ogre keeping the princess locked in the tower. Taking my hand in his, he replies very seriously, “Only if the ogre is brave. Because I don’t waste lead on cowards. But you’re worth dying for . . . aren’t you, my love?”

With those words, and the question in his eyes and the touch of his skin, I finally know that he and I are leaving our friendship behind, because we are destined to become lovers.

WHEN HE CALLS on Wednesday night, my news is not good.

“So he didn’t sign, then. . . . He’s a stubborn che, isn’t he? He sure wants to complicate our lives. This is a serious problem! But before we figure out what to do about it, I need to ask you something: Once you’re finally a free woman, will you have dinner with me again, at my friend Pelusa Ocampo’s restaurant?”

I reply that it’s fairly improbable that in the year 2000 I’ll still be free, and he persists, “No, no, no! I’m talking about Friday, day after tomorrow, before some other ogre beats me to it.”

With a resigned sigh, I note that this is the kind of problem that cannot be solved in forty-eight hours.

“Day after tomorrow you will be a free woman, and you’ll be here with me. Good night, love.”

ON FRIDAY, when I come home for lunch after spending hours in the studio editing the program we’d filmed at the dump, my housekeeper informs me that my lawyer, Hernán Jaramillo, has called three times because he needs to speak with me urgently. When I call him, he exclaims, “Stivel called this morning, desperate to tell me he had to sign the divorce papers before noon, or he was dead! The poor guy came to the notary pale as wax and shaking like a leaf; he looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He almost couldn’t sign his name! Then, without a word, he ran away like a bat out of hell. I can’t believe you’ve been married for three years to such a chicken! But anyway . . . you’re a free woman now. Congratulations, and let me know about the next one. Just make sure he’s rich and good-looking this time.”

At two thirty in the afternoon, my housekeeper announces that six men are here bearing flowers; the arrangement won’t fit in the elevator and they’re asking for permission to carry it up the stairs, which seems suspicious to her. I tell her it’s possible the man who sent them isn’t just suspicious but “a criminal.” I ask her to put our minds at ease and run down to reception to find out who they’re from. She comes back and hands me the card:

For my freed Panther Queen,

from El Zorro. P.

WHEN THE MEN LEAVE, I’m confronted by a thousand cattleya trianae, Colombia’s national flower, and orchids in every shade of purple, lavender, lilac, and pink, with white phalaenopsis here and there like foam in a vivid violet sea. My housekeeper’s only comment, with arms crossed and brow furrowed: “I didn’t like those characters one bit . . . and your friends would say that this is the most ostentatious thing they’ve seen in their lives!”

In fact, I know that if I showed them something so splendid, they would die of envy. I tell her that this arrangement could only have been done by the famous silleteros of Medellín, the artists of the Flower Festival.

At three in the afternoon, the phone rings; without bothering to ask who’s calling, I ask where he’d pulled a revolver on David. At the other end of the line, I sense surprise and then happiness. He bursts out laughing and tells me he has no idea what I’m talking about. Then he asks what time I want him to pick me up at the hotel to go to dinner. Glancing at the clock, I remind him that the Medellín airport closes at 6:00 p.m. and the last flight on Friday must have about twenty people on the wait list.

“Oh hell . . . I hadn’t realized. . . . And here I was hoping to celebrate your freedom! What a shame! Well, we’ll have dinner another day, maybe in the year 2000.”

And he hangs up. Five minutes later, the phone rings again. This time I pray to God it isn’t one of my friends when, without waiting for him to identify himself, I say that his thousand orchids are overflowing out the windows, and they’re the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life. I ask him how long it took to pick them.

“They’re just like you, my love. And I’ve had people gathering them since . . . the day I saw you with Band-Aids on your face and knees, remember? Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that Pegasus has been waiting for you since last night. You can fly him today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow, in a week or a month, because he’s not going to move from there until you’re on him. I’m only going to hope . . . and wait for you.”

Now, this is really a carriage for a modern Cinderella: a brand-new Learjet, white and shining, with three handsome and smiling pilots instead of six white shire horses. It’s 5:15 p.m., and we have just enough time to get to Medellín before the airport closes. I could have made him wait a week or a month, but I also love him, and I can’t wait a single day. While I slide through the clouds, I wonder if Pablo will make me suffer the way a couple of other men I’d loved ages before had, cruel men who were perhaps richer than him. Then I remember the words of Françoise Sagan: “I’d rather cry in a Mercedes than on a bus,” and I tell myself happily:

“Well, I’d rather cry in a Learjet than in a Mercedes!”

There are no unicorn-drawn carriages or moonlit dinners beneath the Eiffel Tower, no emeralds or rubies, no fireworks displays. Only him close to me, confessing that the first time he felt me holding on to his whole body in the Río Claro, he knew he hadn’t saved my life just so I could belong to another man, but so that I would be his. Now he is begging me, pleading, imploring, repeating over and over:

“Ask me for anything, everything you want! Just tell me what you desire most,” as if he were God, and I’m telling him that he’s only a man, and not even he could stop time to freeze or draw out for a second longer that flood of golden moments that the gods’ splendid generosity has decided to pour over us.

That secret night at Hacienda Nápoles is the last of my innocence and the first of my reverie. When he falls asleep, I go out onto the balcony and look up at the bright stars shimmering in all that unfathomable cobalt expanse. Flooded with happiness, I smile as I remember the conversation between Pilar and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I think about the earth trembling beneath the bodies of earthly lovers. Then I turn to go back to the arms that await me, my universe of flesh and blood, the only thing I have and the only thing that exists.