He looks at me, stupefied, and lowers his eyes in silence. Since I see that he doesn’t want to fight me, I go on: I tell him that I understand him like no one else, because I am also the sort who never forgives or forgets, but that if we all decided one day to finish off those who have done us harm, the world would be deserted in seconds. I try to make him see that with his luck in business, in family, in politics, and in love, he should consider himself the most fortunate man on earth, and I beg him to forget about that thorn he carries around festering in his heart, because it will end up infecting his soul with gangrene.
He stands up as if spring-loaded. He takes me in his arms and rocks me a long time. There is nothing, nothing in the world that could make me happier—ever since the day Pablo saved my life, those arms bestow all the security and protection a woman could ever want. He kisses my forehead, breathes in my perfume, runs his hands over my back again and again, and tells me he doesn’t want to lose me, because he needs me at his side for many things. Then, looking me in the eyes and smiling, he tells me, “You’re completely right. I’m sorry! Let’s go back to the living room.” And my soul returns to my body. It seems to me that he and I are growing side by side, like two little bamboo trees.
Many years later I will wonder if behind Pablo’s long, downcast silences there really lay that thirst for revenge he always talked about, or just a terrifying and unspeakable presentiment. Could he have been seeing, perhaps, visions from a future that was bearing down on us like an out-of-control train, and that we were helpless to avoid?
When we go downstairs, everyone is happy, and Clara and Santofimio are reciting the most famous verses of Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems in unison.
Pablo and I interrupt them and ask them to let us choose our own.
“Dedicate this one to me,” I say, laughing. “I only want your wings, your twenty-four wings, those of the eleven airplanes and the two on the jumbo jet!”
“So that’s what you want, you rascal, to escape from me? Don’t even dream about it! I want all of you, and this is your real Neruda verse, autographed and everything!”
After signing his name, he says that now he wants to give me a poem of his own that is exclusively for me. He thinks for a few seconds and writes:
Virginia:
Don’t think that if I don’t call you,
I don’t miss you a lot.
Don’t think that if I don’t see you,
I don’t feel your absence.
Pablo Escobar G.
I think that so much repetition of “don’t” is a bit strange, but I keep my comments to myself. I praise his mental agility and thank him for the gift with my most radiant smile. Santofimio also dedicates the book to me: “To Virginia: the discreet voice, the majestic figure, the [two illegible words] of our Pablo. AS.”
Around eight at night, the capi di tutti capi say good-bye because they have to attend a social engagement of a “very, very high level.” Clara is happy because she sold the Christ to Pablo for $10,000, and she writes a dedication in the book of Neruda poems that she can’t wait to see him become president of the republic. When she leaves and his associates have gone downstairs, Pablo tells me that his whole group is now headed to the apartment of ex-president Alfonso López Michelsen and his wife, Cecilia Caballero de López, but he asks me not to tell anyone.
“Good for you, my love! Why worry about those galanistas when you have access to the most powerful, most intelligent, richest, and, especially, the most pragmatic president? Don’t even think about Galán or Lara. Just keep going with Civic-mindedness in Motion and Medellín Without Slums. As the Bible says: ‘You will know them by their works.’”
He asks me if I’m going to go out campaigning with him, and with a kiss, I tell him he can count on me there. Always.
“We start this week. I want you to know that I can’t call you every day to tell you all the crazy things that occur to me, because my phones are tapped. But I think about you all the time. Don’t ever forget, Virginia, that ‘You are like nobody else since I love you.’”
IT’S APRIL 28, 1983, and I receive a call from Pablo in my office. He announces that he’s going to give me some historically important news, but he asks me not to report on it or share it with anyone in the media; only with Margot, if I want to. In an excited tone that’s unusual in him, Escobar informs me that the plane of Jaime Bateman Cayón, head of the guerrilla movement M-19, has exploded over the Darién Gap while it was flying between Medellín and Panama City. I ask him how he knows, and he tells me that he’s in the loop about everything that goes on at the Medellín airport. But, he adds, Bateman’s death is the only part of the news that will be on all the international programs in a few hours. The part no one knows is that the rebel leader was carrying a suitcase with $600,000 in cash, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere. I’m disconcerted and I tell him so. How can anyone know, a few hours after a plane accident over one of the densest jungles on the planet, whether a suitcase turned up among the plane’s wreckage or alongside some incinerated bodies? From the other end of the line, Escobar laughs slyly and says that he knows perfectly well what he’s talking about, for the simple reason that one of his planes already found the wreckage of Bateman’s!
“Pablo, finding destroyed airplanes in the middle of the jungle takes weeks, if not months. Those pilots of yours are some real marvels, to be sure!”
“That’s right, my love. And since you are another marvel, I’ll leave you with that information so you can connect the dots! Say hi to Margot and Martita, and I’ll see you on Saturday.”
THE COLOMBIAN GOVERNMENT would take nine months to recover the bodies. On Bateman’s death it was learned that the M-19’s account in a Panamanian bank was under the name of the founder’s mother, Ernestina Cayón de Bateman, an important fighter in the cause of human rights. She and the group’s leaders would later get tangled up in a bitter conflict over a million dollars her son had deposited in Panama. Years later, an Ecuadorean banker designated as a go-between would end up with nearly all the money.
Pablo and I would never speak again about the mysterious suitcase. But I’d learned a valuable lesson from the only gravestone thief and auto mechanic with an aerial fleet I’ve ever met: helicopters and small planes belonging to controversial people who have many enemies rarely crash because of technical failures of divine origin; they almost always crash because of human intervention. Thus, the importance of tracking. About that $600,000—a figure from twenty-five years ago—today I can only cite that famous gringo saying: “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and talks like a duck . . . it’s a duck!”
COUNTLESS SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES have been joining Santofimio’s movement, including many of my acquaintances from Bogotá, like María Elena de Crovo, one of ex-president López’s best friends; Ernesto Lucena Quevedo; Consuelo Salgar de Montejo, my father’s first cousin; and Jorge Durán Silva, “the People’s Mayor” and my fifth-floor neighbor. We spend many weekends out campaigning, and in every region we visit,