“Since my heart is inside yours, I know everything about you. And now that we’ve both won, we can lose our heads together, right? Abracadabra, my darling Marie Antoinette . . .”
When he falls asleep, I check the revolver. It’s loaded with six bullets. I go out onto the terrace and I see that below there are four cars with bodyguards parked on each corner of the street. I know they would give their lives for him. I would, too, without thinking twice. I am now soothed, and I fall asleep happy. When I wake up, he’s already gone.
AFTER AMASSING A COLOSSAL FORTUNE, Pablo’s goal is to use his money to become the most popular political leader of all time. And, how could it be anything else but madness, delusions of grandeur, an overwhelming cult of personality? His aspiration is an unheard-of extravagance; to give away ten thousand houses to homeless families and to end hunger in a city of one million people—a useless expenditure in Colombia, possibly a country with the stingiest tycoons in all of Latin America.
People who possess fabulous riches live in constant doubt as to whether they are loved only for their money. Thus they are almost as insecure and untrusting in matters of the heart as women who are famous for their beauty, who are always wondering if men really need them as wives or girlfriends, or just want to show them off as possessions or hunting trophies. But when it comes to Pablo, he is utterly convinced he is loved not for his wealth but for himself—by his followers, his army, his women, his friends, his family, and, obviously, by me. While he is correct, I can’t help but wonder if his extreme sensitivity, combined with what seems to be a pathologically obsessive personality, will be able to handle the pitfalls of the fame that’s approaching. In particular, the antagonism it will bring him in a country where people proverbially “don’t die of cancer, but of envy.”
I see Pablo for the second time in public at the grand opening of one of his basketball courts. His political movement, Civismo en Marcha (Civic-mindedness in Motion), extols healthy recreation and he has a passion for sports, so Pablo plans to donate a court to all the poorest neighborhoods in Medellín and Envigado, and to install lighting on all the city’s soccer fields. When we met, he had already donated several dozen.
That evening, he introduces me to more of his family, lower-middle-class people without an ounce of evil in their very serious faces. I also meet his twenty-three-year-old wife, Victoria Henao, mother of Juan Pablo, his six-year-old son. The Nanny, “La Tata” as everyone calls her, isn’t pretty, but her face has a certain dignity. Only her earrings—two solitary diamonds of unheard-of size—could give her away as the wife of one of the country’s richest men. She wears her hair very short, she’s dark and small, and her evident timidity contrasts with his poise. Unlike Pablo and me, who feel like fish in water when we’re in a crowd, she doesn’t seem to enjoy the event very much. Something tells me she is starting to view her husband’s growing popularity with some unease. She greets me coldly and with the same mistrust I read in the eyes of almost all of Pablo’s family. She looks at him with absolute adoration, and he stares at her enraptured. I watch them both with a smile, because I have never felt jealous of anyone. Fortunately, my passion for Pablo is not exclusive or possessive; I love him with heart and soul, body and brain, madly but not irrationally, because I love myself above him. And my insight leads me to question if, after seven years of marriage, those mooning lovers’ gazes might not really answer to the need to publicly clear up any doubts about their relationship.
As I study his family with the triple perspective afforded by the lover’s intimacy, the journalist’s objectivity, and the spectator’s distance, I seem to see an enormous shadow hanging over the idyllic scene and the crowd of people pushing toward Pablo to thank him for the thousands of supplies he distributes weekly among the poor. The kind of sadness that accompanies a premonition—inexplicable and heavy with doubt—enfolds me suddenly, and I wonder if those triumphant scenes of multicolored balloons and raucous music could be mere illusions, fireworks, houses of cards. When the shadow moves away, I can clearly see what no one else seems to have noticed: that over Pablo’s whole extended family—dressed in their new clothes and jewelry sprung from a formidable newly born fortune—fear looms. Fear of something that has been gestating for a long time, and that could explode at any moment like a volcano of biblical proportions.
These disturbing feelings pass through me and disappear while Pablo is basking in the warmth of the crowd, the admiration and applause. Things that for me are everyday reality, tokens of my job as a TV host and at countless events, accustomed since age twenty-two to the cries of bravo! in a theater or a jeering stadium. But for Pablo they are oxygen, the only reason for his existence, the first steps on the path to fame. It’s clear that his ardent political discourse touches something deep in the common people’s hearts. As I listen to him, I think of the words of Shakespeare that Mark Antony says at Julius Caesar’s burial: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” I wonder what the fate of this man will be, this strange combination of benefactor and bandit, so young and naive, with whom I’ve also fallen in love. Will he know how to play his cards right? Will he learn someday to speak in public with a less marked accent and a more mannered tone? Will my diamond in the rough polish his elementary speeches to transmit a powerful message that can reach beyond the provinces? Will he manage to find some more controlled form of passion in order to get what he wants, and an even more intelligent one to keep it? After several minutes pass, the joy that has come over all those poor families spreads to me, and I share in their hopes and illusions. I thank God for sending the only large-scale benefactor that Colombia has produced for as long as I can remember, and full of enthusiasm, I join in the people’s celebration.
The program filmed in the dump causes a national sensation. All my colleagues want to interview Pablo Escobar and find out where he gets his money: a thirty-three-year-old alternate congressman who seems to have inexhaustible resources and a generosity never seen before, as well as an unnerving flair for political leadership that comes from his unusual blend of money and heart. Many want to know, as well, the nature of his relationship with a high-society TV star who has always jealously guarded her private life. I roundly deny any romance with a married man, and I advise Pablo not to grant any interviews until after the test I plan to give him before a camera in his TV studio. He agrees, but grudgingly.
“Next week I’m going to invite you to the First Forum Against the Extradition Treaty, here in Medellín,” he tells me. “And at the next one, in Barranquilla, you’ll meet the most important men in my trade, who are also now the richest men in the country. Almost all of them are with us in MAS, and they’re determined to defeat that monstrosity, whatever it takes. By force, if necessary.”
I tell him that that bellicose language is going to win him many enemies in the initial stage of his rising political career. I advise him to study Sun Tzu’s The Art of War so he can learn strategy and patience. I teach him some of the wise philosopher’s maxims, such as “Don’t attack uphill.” He says that when it comes to strategy, he adapts his to the needs of the moment. And anyway, books bore him terribly, and he has me, who has read voraciously since I was little, so he doesn’t have to study. He knows this is the last thing a desirable woman in love wants to hear, so he adds in a merry tone, “I bet you can’t guess the alias I’ve instructed my men to use for you when you land at the airport? None other than . . . ‘Belisario Betancur,’ the president, so you can enter the underworld at the highest level! You can’t complain, my dear V.V.!”
And he laughs with that mischievousness that disarms me, that in one fell swoop erases all my worries and melts me in his arms as if I were a caramel ice cream with vanilla and chocolate chips, left outside on a summer afternoon.
The people who travel in his plane with me are an ever more varied group. One person is coming back from speaking to Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Another passenger, returning from the most recent summit of Non-Aligned