“It’s big . . . and I think it’s very masculine. It’s rigid . . . and hard . . . and it has a duct in the center. But it’s cold, because it’s metal . . . and it’s not made of what you are, is it? And now that you’ve heard what you wanted to hear, I swear to you, Pablo, if you go one millimeter lower I’ll get up from this chair, go back to Bogotá, and you’ll never see me again!”
“Okay, okay, okay,” he says, with a guilty little laugh of resignation. “The things that occur to a guy when he’s got an utterly defenseless sex symbol in his hands. Okay, wet blanket, let’s move on . . . but I warn you that you’ll have to wait for me to finish my job with the duct tape, because I’m almost as much of a perfectionist as you are.”
“And you have to understand that for someone like me, these games are really very elementary. I’ve been waiting days for my surprise, and you’d better hope it’s up to my expectations!”
In an authoritative voice he tells me that here, the only one who decides what is and isn’t elementary is him.
“I know what you’re going to show me: your gun collection, because you’re going to give me one! Like the ones the Bond girls have, of course! Can I take off the blindfold now so I can choose the prettiest and deadliest one?”
“You take the blindfold off when I say! Have you not realized yet that the only one who gives orders here is the murderer who owns the gun, the sadist who owns the camera, the macho who has the brute strength, and the rich man who owns the territory, and not a poor little woman who weighs a hundred and twenty pounds and has an obviously inferior IQ? You only have to wait a few minutes. I’m just going to cover . . . where these last four are from . . . and there we are! It’s for your own good: imagine if in the future someone was torturing you horribly, for days and days, to get information on what you’re about to see. Or what if you turn out to be a Mata Hari, and someday . . . you betray me?”
“They’re stolen diamonds, right, my love? Thousands and thousands of carats, that’s it!”
“Don’t be such an optimist. I would never show you those, because you’d steal the biggest ones and swallow them, and then I’d have to cut you open with these scissors to fish them out of your belly!”
I can’t stop laughing at the image of me choking down diamonds. Then I think of another theory.
“I’ve got it. How did I not think of this sooner? You’re going to show me the kilos of coke ‘made in Colombia’ and packed for exportation to the United States! Do you seal them with duct tape? Finally, I’m going to get to see them. Is it true that each one looks like two pounds of butter and has the brand La Reina?”
“But what a lack of imagination! You’re a real disappointment. Any one of my partners can see that, or my men, my pilots, my customers, even the DEA. I told you that what I’m going to show you, no one has seen—or will ever see. No one but you. Okay . . . we’re ready. Now I can sit at the feet of my queen to watch the reaction on her face. I promise you’re never going to forget this night. One . . . two . . . three: I order you to take off the blindfold!”
There are blue ones, green ones, wine-colored, brown, black ones. And, before I can leap forward to try to examine them up close, a steel handcuff closes with a click! around my right ankle, and my foot is attached to the chair. The only reason I don’t fall face-first on the floor with the chair on top of me is because Pablo jumps up and catches me in the air. He squeezes me in his arms and kisses me again and again, laughing nonstop as he exclaims, “I knew you were dangerous, you tricky panther! You’re going to pay for that! If you want to see them, you have to first tell me that you love me as you’ve never loved anyone before! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Say you adore me. Go on, say it now! If you don’t, I won’t let you look, not up close or from far away!”
“I’m not going to say what you want to hear, I’m going to say what I want, understand? And that is that you are . . . you are . . . you’re a genius, Pablo! The greatest prodigy of the underworld, ever!” And in a nearly inaudible voice, as if someone could be listening to us, I shoot off a barrage of questions, which I know he loves:
“Are they all yours? How many are there? How much do they cost? How do you get them? Let me see the photos and your names! Give me the key to the cuffs, Pablo, they’re hurting my ankle! Let this poor blind girl look at them from up close; don’t be such a sadist, I’m begging you! I want to take the duct tape off the names of all the countries so I can see!”
“No, no, no! I bet you, my prodigy of the up-and-up world, never would have thought someone from my world could be so, so popular that fourteen nations have granted him citizenship!”
“Wooow! Now I know what all that money—along with an exceptional criminal IQ—is good for. It looks like half the UN is fighting for the honor. . . . But I don’t see the United States anywhere, which in your profession must be priority number one, right?”
“Well, my love . . . Rome wasn’t built in a day! And seven percent of all the countries in the world isn’t such a bad start . . . and at my tender age. For now you can only see the photos. My nationalities and names you’ll find out as we use them. Not even I know them yet.”
“You see? I’m the only person you can trust who can help you with the correct pronunciation in five languages! At the tender age of seventeen, I was already a phonetics teacher at the Instituto Colombo Americano. Aren’t I just a treasure of a girlfriend? How are we going to go to a foreign country if you can’t pronounce your own name, Pablo? We have to start practicing now, so you don’t arouse suspicion down the road. You have to understand it’s for your own good, dearest love of my life.”
“No and no, period. For now there’s only one more phase to the surprise, and then comes the champagne reward. The pink rosé that comes in the most beautiful bottle of all, isn’t that right?”
Without taking off the cuffs, he makes me sit back down in the chair, and he kneels down in front of me, facing the double line of passports spread out on the floor six feet away. He has covered the names of the countries with duct tape, and also his own names and birth dates on the inside pages. Then, like a child with new toys on Christmas morning, he starts to show me each of the fourteen photographs. Hypnotized, I watch the parade of unimaginable, inconceivable, unthinkable versions of the face of the man I love.
“In this one I have my head shaved. Here I am with glasses and a goatee, like a Marxist intellectual. I have an Afro in this one. Awful, isn’t it? Here I am as an Arab; my friend the Saudi prince got it for me. I dyed my hair blond for this one; and for this other one, where I’m a redhead, I had to go to a beauty salon, where the women looked at me like I was a marica, a fag. In this one I’m wearing a wig. Here I don’t have a mustache, and here I’ve got a thick beard. How about this one, bald on top and with little glasses, like Professor Calculus in Tintin? It’s great, right? I look horrible in almost all of them, but not even my own mother would recognize me! Which one’s your favorite?”
“All of them, Pablo, all of them! You look hilarious! I’ve never seen a more sensational collection. You’re the most lawless person I’ve met in my life, the biggest bandit who’s walked the face of the earth,” I say in praise, laughing nonstop while he returns his passports to their places. “How could anyone get bored with you? You really know how to have fun!”
He closes the safe, leaves the revolver on the desk, and comes toward me. He caresses my face with great tenderness, and without a word, he removes the cuffs. He kisses my ankle—which now boasts a thick red line—over and over. Then he places me on the bed and gently massages the part of my head that hit the roof of the car.
“You may not believe it, but what I love most in the world isn’t this head or this body that are so . . . multidimensional,” he tells me, now with his usual voice. “And bruised!” he adds, laughing. “It’s all that gold of yours pressed up against me, like this, the way we are now.”
Surprised,