Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar by Virginia Vallejo

Author:Virginia Vallejo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

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IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOW, Pablo and I see each other once or twice a week. Every forty-eight hours I’m brought to a different location, and I learn to be even more obsessive about security than he is. I write nonstop, and since I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio or read newspapers, I am ignorant of the fact that Escobar has assassinated Tulio Manuel Castro Gil, the judge who brought the case against him for Rodrigo Lara Bonilla’s death. After he reads my manuscripts and makes observations and clarifications, we burn them. Little by little, I teach him everything I’ve learned about the three large powers that exist in Colombia, and the modus operandi of the country’s richest families. I try to make him see that with the quantities of money and land he possesses, he should start thinking with more “dynastic” criteria.

“Once you get to know them, you realize some of them are so tight-fisted and so cruel that next to them, you’re a decent human being, Pablo. Yes, just how you heard it, and please don’t get offended. If it weren’t for the bloody guerrillas and the magnates’ own lack of greatness, the presidential families and financial groups would have crushed this poor country ages ago. As much as we detest those rebels, they are the only thing that scare and stop the powerful. All of the powers that be, absolutely all, carry the weight of crimes and murders: those they’ve committed, those of their parents during La Violencia, those of their landowning grandparents, those of slave-owning great-grandparents, or their Inquisitor or encomendero great-great-grandparents. Play your cards well, my love; although you’ve lived a lot, you are still a child, and you have time to correct almost all your mistakes, because you are richer, more astute, and braver than all of them put together. Remember that you have almost half a century of life left ahead of you to make this poor country into one of love instead of war. Don’t make any more costly mistakes, Pablo, and use me to your benefit. You and I are much more than a pair of tits and a couple of balls!”

He soaks it in like a sponge, he listens to me and learns, analyzes and questions, compares and memorizes, digests and processes. Writing for myself, editing for him, I store away in my heart the memories and conversations of those days, the last happy ones that he and I will spend together before our 360-degree universe explodes into two 180-degree halves, and finally, into a million atoms that could never be put together again, or even be recognized. Life is cruel and unpredictable, and “God works in mysterious ways.”

“Santofimio is coming tomorrow,” Pablo announces to me one night. “Needless to say, he’s going to ask me for tons of money for the presidential elections next year, and I’m begging you to come to the meeting and make a superhuman effort to hide all that hostility you have toward him.

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