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.