“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.
PART TWO
Days of Splendor and Fear
PABLO ESCOBAR had belonged to that small group of privileged children who knew from the tenderest age exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up. He also knew what he didn’t want to be: little Pablo never dreamed of being a pilot or a fireman or a policeman.
“I just wanted to be rich, richer than the Echevarrías of Medellín and richer than any of the rich people in Colombia, whatever it cost, using all my resources and every one of the tools life placed at my disposal. I swore to myself that if I didn’t have a million dollars by the time I was thirty I would kill myself. With a bullet to the brain,” he confesses to me one day while we’re boarding his Learjet, parked in its private hangar in the Medellín airport along with the rest of his fleet. “Someday soon I’m going to buy a jumbo and fit it out as a flying office, with several bedrooms, bathrooms with showers, a living area, bar, kitchen, and dining room. Sort of a flying yacht. That way, you and I can travel all over the world without anyone knowing or bothering us.”
Once we’re on the plane, I ask him how we’ll manage to fly around incognito in an aerial palace. He replies that when we get back I’ll find out, because, from now on, every time we see each other he’s going to have a surprise for me that I’ll never forget. He tells me he’s noticed something very interesting: as he tells me his secrets, my own seem to parade across my face, especially my eyes. He adds that when I burst out in joy at discovering something new, my happiness and excitement make him