Читать книгу Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar - Virginia Vallejo - Страница 12

Death to Kidnappers!

I RETURN TO BOGOTÁ to tape my TV programs, and the next weekend I’m back in Medellín. This pattern will repeat for fifteen months, the happiest of my life and, according to Pablo, the fullest of his. What neither of us realizes is that this brief time will contain the last perfect, easy days of either of our existences.

“You have my eleven planes and my two helicopters at your disposal. And you can ask me for anything you want. Anything, my love. What do you need first?”

I reply that I’ll just need one of his planes to bring my assistant and cameraman back to Medellín. I want to take some more shots to fill out the report, and I’d like to ask him a few more questions in a different setting: a political meeting, perhaps.

Again and again he insists that he wants to give me a fabulous gift, saying I am the only woman who hasn’t asked him for anything in the first week. He tells me to choose the most beautiful penthouse in Bogotá and whatever Mercedes I want.

“And how would I explain that to the Treasury Department? Or my friends, my colleagues, my family? I would look like a kept woman, my love. Plus, I don’t drive, because if I did they’d lock me up for life. Thank you, Pablo, but I have my little Mitsubishi and my chauffeur, and I don’t need anything else. I’m definitely not a car lover, and in this country a luxury car is just an invitation to kidnappers.”

He insists so much that I decide to give him two options: either a Pegasus like his—I am turning into a plane lover, it seems—or a million kisses. He bursts out laughing and chooses the latter, but instead of counting one by one, he counts hundred by hundred, then thousand by thousand, and, finally, a hundred thousand by a hundred thousand. When he finishes in a couple of minutes, I accuse him of being a kiss thief, and I ask him what I can give him in return. After thinking about it a few seconds, he says I could teach him how to give interviews, because over the course of his life he’ll have to give more than a few; he praises mine and asks what my secret is. I tell him there are three: the first is to have something important, interesting, or original to say, and also something witty, because everyone likes to laugh. As for the second and the third, since I like to take things slow, I categorically refuse to share them in the first week.

He takes the bait, and with a smile that’s something between mischievous and guilty he swears that if I teach him my professional secrets, he’ll confide some of his own to me.

Fast as lightning I reply that the second secret is not to answer every question the journalist asks, but instead to say what you want to say. But I insist that to play ball well you need years of practice; that is, years of fame. Someone like him should not grant interviews except to media editors or directors—since they know where curiosity ends and insult begins—or to journalists who are friends.

“Purebred bulls are for expert bullfighters, not banderilleros. Since you’re still what a Hollywood insider would call a ‘civilian,’ I recommend for now that you don’t give interviews except to a matador who knows some of your professional secrets and who loves you with all his heart in spite of them. Now, you’re going to tell me when you stopped stealing headstones and stripping stolen cars, and started exporting ‘snuff.’ Because that’s what really marked a turn in your philanthropic activity. . . . Isn’t that right, my love?”

Offended, he looks at me and lowers his eyes. I know I’ve caught him off guard and crossed a line, and I wonder if I’ve touched his Achilles’ heel too soon. But I also know that Pablo has never been in love with a woman his age or of my class. And I know that if we’re going to love each other on completely equal terms, I’ll have to teach him from the start where the fun and games of two overgrown kids ends, and where the relationship between an adult man and woman begins. The first thing I tell him is that a senator has to submit to scrutiny from the press—and that in his case, it will be unrelenting.

“Okay, what do you want to know? Let’s play ball,” he says, raising his head defiantly.

I explain that when the program we filmed airs, the whole country is going to wonder not only how he made his fortune but also what the real purpose of all that generosity is. And with a simple phone call to Medellín, any journalist will be able to learn a couple of open secrets in a matter of minutes. I warn him that the owners of media companies are going to shoot to kill when they see him strutting around with his millions, showing off his charity projects. The media elite have been feeding off the people for years, and Pablo’s generosity will be a threat to the avarice of nearly all the established powers in Colombia.

“Fortunately, you have a formidable mental quickness, Pablo. And I’ll tell you from the start none of the big Colombian tycoons could admit the whole truth about where their own fortunes came from. That’s why the superrich don’t give interviews, not here or anywhere else. What sets you apart from them is the size of your social projects, and that’s what you’ll have to mention when everyone starts going after you.”

Animated now, he starts to tell me his story: When he was still a boy, he directed a massive fund-raising drive to build a school in the La Paz neighborhood in Envigado, near Medellín, because he didn’t have anywhere to study. The result was a school building for eight hundred students. When he was little he rented bicycles, as a boy he sold used cars, and at a very young age he started out in land speculation in Magdalena Medio. At one point he stops and asks if I think he’s lying; I reply that, though I’m sure it’s all true, it could hardly be the origin of such a colossal fortune. I ask him to tell me what his parents did. He says that his father was a worker on the hacienda of Joaquín Vallejo, a well-known industrial leader, and his mother was a rural schoolteacher.

I recommend, then, that he start by saying something like: “From my father, an honest Antiochian peasant, I learned the ethic of hard work, and from my mother, a teacher, the importance of solidarity with the weakest among us.” But I remind him that no one likes to have their intelligence insulted; he has to prepare for the day when some veteran reporter will ask him, in front of a camera and the entire country:

“How many marble headstones do you need for a new bicycle? Or is it the other way around: How many secondhand bicycles can be bought with a good gravestone, a real beauty, Honorable Father of the Nation?”

He replies that he would say, without a second’s hesitation: “Why don’t you go and find out how much both of them cost? You can do the numbers yourself. Then get your own group of kids who aren’t afraid of gravediggers or the dead, send them into the cemetery at night, and have them carry those damned stones that weigh a ton!”

And I exclaim that with stone-faced arguments like that, any journalist would have no choice but to recognize his unique talent, his innate leadership, his heroic bravery and unusual strength.

Pablo asks me whether, if we had met each other when he was poor and anonymous, I would have fallen in love with him. Laughing, I tell him definitely not: we never would have met! No one in their right mind would have thought to introduce me to a married man because while he was sanding names off tombstones, I was going out with Gabriel Echavarría, the most beautiful man in Colombia and son of one of the ten richest. When he was stripping cars, I was already dating Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a bachelor, heir to the largest fortune in the country, and the most handsome man of his generation.

He points out that if those are my parameters, I must really love him. And I admit that it’s precisely because of the points of comparison that I love him so much. With a caress and a grateful smile, he tells me I am the most brutally honest and generous woman he’s met, and that’s why I make him so happy.

Over and over we practice the answers, serious or hilarious, that he would give in order to publicly account for his donations, his planes, and especially his giraffes. We conclude that he’s going to need the parameters of logic, used by the Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago. Because to justify his fortune he’ll have to forget about “land speculation in Magdalena Medio” and start thinking in terms of “real estate investments in Florida,” even if no one believes it, and even if it could bring everyone from the DIAN in Colombia to the IRS and the Pentagon in the United States down on him.

“Fame, good or bad, is forever, my love. Why don’t you keep a low profile, at least for now, and wield power from the shadows, like capi di tutti capi all over the world? Why do you need to be well known, when it’s far better to be a quadruple-millionaire? And in Colombia, fame only brings you mountains of envy. Just look at me.”

“At you? But all the women in this country would love to be in your shoes!”

I tell him we’ll talk about that another day, not now. To change the subject, I tell him I find it very hard to believe that the rescue of Martha Nieves Ochoa was done only through exhaustive tracking. He seems surprised at my frankness, and he replies that it’s also a matter for another day.

I ask him to explain to me what MAS is. Lowering his eyes, and in a voice full of determination, he tells me that “Muerte a Secuestradores!” (Death to Kidnappers!) was founded at the end of 1981 by the big drug traffickers, and that it already has many supporters among the rich landowners and some state organizations: the DAS (Administrative Department of Security), the B-2 unit of the army (military intelligence), the GOES (Grupo Operativo Antiextorsión y Secuestro, or Operative Group Against Extortion and Kidnapping), and the F2 unit of the police. MAS wants to keep rich people’s money from going to Miami, and their partners’ and associates’ money from having to stay out of the country. To that end, they were determined to end a plague that exists only in Colombia.

“We all want to invest our money in the country, but with that sword of Damocles hanging over us it’s impossible! That’s why we’re not going to let a single kidnapper go free: every time we catch one, we’ll hand him over to the army to deal with. No drug trafficker wants to go through what I did with my father’s kidnapping, or what happened with the Ochoas’ sister, or the torture my friend Carlos Lehder del Quindío had to endure in the flesh. Everyone is joining together around MAS and Lehder and making large contributions: we already have an army of almost twenty-five hundred men.”

I suggest that starting now, and given that his associates are also farmers, businessmen, exporters, or industrialists, he should try to always refer to them as his “professional colleagues.” I express my horror about what happened to his father and ask if Pablo also managed to free him in record time.

“Yes, yes. We got him back safe and sound, thank God. Some other time I’ll tell you how.”

I’m learning to leave for another day any question about what seems to be rescue methods of exceptional force and effectiveness. But I express my skepticism about the MAS’s ability to achieve the same results in every one of the three thousand kidnappings that happen each year in Colombia. I tell him that to end all the abductions he would first have to get rid of several guerrilla groups that total more than thirty thousand men. In a third of a century of trying, the army hasn’t been able to eradicate them. Rather, their numbers seem to grow with every day that passes. I tell him that the rich establishment is going to be happy with MAS—because they won’t have to provide a single peso, or a bullet, or a life—while he will have to bear the costs, the enemies, and the deaths.

He shrugs and replies he doesn’t care. The only thing he’s interested in is being the leader of his profession and having his colleagues’ support in backing a government that would end the extradition treaty with the United States.

“In my line of work, everyone’s rich. And now, I want you to rest so you’ll be very beautiful tonight. I invited two of my partners—my cousin Gustavo Gaviria and my brother-in-law Mario Henao—and a small group of friends. I’m going to go check on the work they’re finishing up with on the soccer field we’re donating next Friday. You’ll meet my whole family there. Gustavo is like a brother to me. He’s very intelligent, and he’s the one who practically runs the business. That way I have time to dedicate myself to the things that really interest me: my causes, my social work, and . . . your lessons, my love.”

“What’s your next goal . . . after the Senate?”

“I’ve told you enough for today. If I’m going to give you all of those million kisses I owe you, we’re going to need about a thousand and one nights. See you later, Virginia.”

A while later I hear a helicopter’s propeller as it moves off over the vast expanse of his little republic, and I wonder how this man with the heart of a lion is going to manage to balance all those contradictory interests and achieve such out-sized goals in just one lifetime.

Well, at his age he has all the time in the world ahead of him. . . . I sigh, observing a flock of birds that also disappears over a limitless horizon.

I know that I am attending the birth of a series of events that is going to split the history of my country in two, that the man I love is going to be the protagonist of many of them, and that almost no one seems to be aware of it. I don’t know if this man that God or Fate has placed in my path—so utterly sure of himself, so ambitious, so passionate about every one of his causes and about everything—one day will make me cry oceans the same way he makes me laugh now. But he certainly has all of the elements to become a formidable leader. Luckily for me, he isn’t beautiful or educated, and he’s not a man of the world: Pablo is, simply and completely, fascinating. And I think to myself, He has the most masculine personality I have ever known. He’s a diamond in the rough, and I think he’s never had a woman like me. I am going to try to polish him and teach him everything I’ve learned. And I’m going to make him need me like water in the desert.

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Pablo’s partners and family members takes place that night on the terrace of Hacienda Nápoles.

Gustavo Gaviria Rivero is inscrutable, silent, secretive, distant. Every bit as sure of himself as his cousin Pablo Escobar is, this race-car champion rarely smiles. Though he’s the same age as us, he is, without a doubt, more mature than Pablo. From the first moment my eyes meet those of that small, thin man with straight hair and a fine mustache, everything about him warns me that he doesn’t touch the subject of his business with “civilians.” He seems to be a great observer, and I know he’s there to evaluate me. My intuition quickly tells me that not only is he uninterested in Pablo’s aspiration to fame, but he’s also beginning to worry about his partner’s exorbitant spending on social projects. Unlike his cousin, who is a liberal, Gustavo is affiliated with the Conservative Party. Both of them consume alcohol in minimal quantities, and I notice that they are not interested in music or dancing, either. They are alert: all business, politics, power, and control.

They are capos recently arrived in the world of the very rich and the even more ambitious, and they have just acquired a new connection: an exquisite diva who by profession is an insider of the most select ranks of political and economic power and who is related to the Holguines, Mosqueras, Sanz de Santamarías, Valenzuelas, Zuletas, Arangos, Caros, Pastranas, Marroquines. And so, as if hypnotized, for the next six hours, none of the three men will glance at another table, another woman, a man, or anything else, not even for an instant.

Mario Henao, brother of Pablo’s wife, Victoria, has an exhaustive knowledge of and furious adoration for the opera. I realize that he wants to impress me and maybe even instruct me on the subject that would least interest Pablo or Gustavo. And since I know he’s the last ally someone in my position could aspire to, without the slightest consideration for Caruso or Toscanini or La Divina—or for the Capones’ and Gambinos’ legendary passion for those three gods—I steer the conversation directly to Pablo’s and Gustavo’s competencies.

It takes me hours to get that ice king Gustavo to lower his guard, but my effort bears fruit. I spend nearly two and a half hours interviewing him, and almost as long listening to an enthusiastic lesson about the discipline and precision needed to control a car going 150 miles per hour—the life-or-death, split-second decisions that must be made in order to leave the competition behind and come in first. In the end, both of us know we have won, if not the affection, at least the respect of a key ally. And I have learned where Pablo and his partner get that fierce determination to always be number one, rolling right over anyone who stands in their way, which seems to extend to each and every aspect of their lives. Around us, two dozen tables are occupied by people with last names like Moncada or Galeano, whose first names and faces it would be impossible for me to remember today. Toward midnight, two boys armed with automatic long-range rifles and soaked in sweat run up to where the four of us are talking and yank us back to reality.

“Mr. X’s wife is here looking for him,” they tell Pablo, “and he’s here with his girlfriend. Imagine the problem, boss! The woman’s mad as a hornet. She’s here with two friends, and they’re demanding we let them in. What should we do?”

“Tell her to learn to act like a lady. Tell her no self-respecting woman goes looking for a man—whether husband, boyfriend, or lover—anywhere, especially at night. Tell her to be smart and go home and wait there with the frying pan and the rolling pin so she can beat him up when he gets there. But she cannot come inside.”

The boys return after a while and inform Pablo that the women are determined to get in; they say he knows them.

“I do know that kind of wild animal, and very well . . .,” he says with a sigh, as if he had suddenly remembered an episode that made him deeply sad. Then, without hesitation or holding back because of my presence, he orders them:

“Fire two shots in the air very close to the car. If they keep coming, aim directly at them. And if they still don’t stop, shoot to kill without hesitation. Is that clear?”

We hear four gunshots. I imagine them reappearing with at least three bodies, and then I wonder who the fourth one might be. Some twenty minutes later, the boys come in panting and sweaty, their hair disheveled. They have scratches all over their faces, hands, and forearms.

“What a fight, boss! They didn’t get scared even with the gunshots: they punched and kicked us, and you can’t imagine those nails like tigresses’ claws! We had to march them out at gunpoint, with help from two other guys. Poor guy, with what’s waiting for him when he gets home, completely drunk.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Get a room ready for him so he can spend the night here,” orders Pablo, flaunting his masculine solidarity with his long-suffering peers. “Otherwise, tomorrow we’ll have to bury him!”

“These paisas women are fierce, aren’t they? Ave María!” say the three little angels with me, sighing in resignation.

I’m like Alice in Wonderland as I learn more and more about Pablo’s world. I find out that many of these tough and rich men are literally kicked around by their wives . . . and I think I can guess why. I wonder about that other “wild animal” he knew so well, and something tells me that it is not his wife.

With a group of Pablo and Gustavo’s friends, we decide to go out one Sunday and play with the Rolligon. Looking around while we knock over trees with the giant caterpillar-tractor, I long for the laughter of my own friends from seven months ago. I feel nostalgia for my “beautiful people,” the ones I’ve always lived among and with whom I feel at ease anywhere in the world, no matter the language. But the truth is I don’t have time to miss them much because, as we hit a tree trunk, a black and buzzing swarm about three feet wide comes charging at us like a train. I don’t know why—maybe because of that singular destiny God has reserved for me—in a fraction of a second I free-fall out of the Rolligon, hide in the tall grass, and stay so still that I don’t dare to breathe until a quarter of an hour later.

What seems like a million wasps go flying after those dozen and a half people who derive their living from the traffic of cocaine. Miraculously, not a single one stings me. When Pablo’s men find me an hour later, thanks to my lavender dress, they tell me that some of the guests even had to be hospitalized.

IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS I would spend a thousand hours by his side and maybe another thousand in his arms, but for reasons that I would only come to understand many months later, from that afternoon on Pablo and I would never return to Nápoles to enjoy time with friends in the place where I had thrice been on the verge of dying, and had almost died of happiness as well. Only once—and to live the most perfect day of his existence and mine—would we return to that paradise where he had saved me from that whirlpool because he wanted all my life for himself. He had decided to steal me from the arms of another man and take over the unexplored spaces of my imagination, the already forgotten times of my memory, and every single inch of skin that in those days housed my existence.

Eleven years later, all those men who were the age of Christ on the cross would be dead. And this “chronicler of the Indies” survived them all, it’s true; but if someone were to paint today the picture of Alice in Wonderland in that hall of mirrors and mirages, he would see, repeated to the infinite, only the shattered reflections of Munch’s The Scream, my hands clasped to my ears to blot out the blasting of bombs and the moans of the dying, the buzzing of chainsaws and cries of the tortured, the explosions of airplanes and the weeping of mothers, my mouth open in a cry of impotence that only a quarter of a century later has finally managed to escape from my throat, my eyes wide open in horror and fright under the red skies of a country ablaze.

That huge hacienda still exists—it’s also true—but from the place of reverie where, for a fleeting moment, we shared the most delicious expressions of freedom and beauty, the most loving moments of joy and generosity, and all those of passion and tenderness, the magic vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived. All that is left of that enchanted Eden is the longing of the earthly senses for the colors and the caresses, the laughter and the stars. Hacienda Nápoles would soon become the stage for the legendary conspiracies that would forever change the destiny of my country and its relationship to the rest of the world. But—as in those first scenes of Chronicle of a Death Foretold or The House of the Spirits—today that paradise of the damned is populated only by ghosts.

All those young men have now been dead for quite some time. But, when it comes to their loves and their hatreds, their pleasures and their pains, their causes and their utopias, their struggles and their battles, allies and rivals, loyalties and betrayals, triumphs and defeats, when it comes to the lives and the deaths that comprise the rest of this story, all this chronicler can tell you is that she wouldn’t dream of trading this story for a briefer time or a less plentiful space.