“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