Mrs Escobar by Victoria Eugenia Henao

Author:Victoria Eugenia Henao
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473561939
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter 6

The Hacienda Nápoles That Nobody Knows

The first time I went to see the land Pablo had just bought turned out to be a terrifying experience.

It was a Saturday morning in February 1979, and I flew there in a small, flimsy Hughes helicopter with one of my sisters, Gustavo Gaviria and his wife. After less than an hour we landed in a muddy corral, and when we got out my boots sank into the muck so far that Pablo had to come and retrieve me.

I was furious. My husband had an impish look on his face. We reached a rustic house that was hidden in the forest, very basic, with red window frames, white walls and a concrete floor. Since there wasn’t really anything to see – just jungle everywhere you looked – we stayed in the house waiting for nightfall. To make things worse, there was no electricity. Several of Pablo’s employees lit a bonfire and prepared beans, rice, pork crackling, beef, green plantains and arepas.

The dim light of the candles illuminated huge insects and snakes prowling outside the narrow windows, but they didn’t come any closer because the men had placed lit wicks in jugs of diesel around the perimeter. Even so, I had a horrible night because the place scared me – I felt like I was in danger, like I could get bitten by a snake and die. I was shouting and unable to sleep in the unbearable heat. Pablo became irritable because he thought I was being melodramatic and immature.

I prayed silently, begging for dawn to come so that one of the worst nights of my life so far would be over. Luckily, the sun rose before six and I felt my soul return to my body.

Where was I? Pablo told us we were at the Valledupar estate, more than 2,000 acres owned by Jorge Tulio Garcés, who’d sold the property to Pablo and Gustavo for 35 million pesos – US$820,000 at the time. Fully in character, my husband told what sounded like a fantastical story, claiming that a highway would soon connect Medellín and Bogotá, and that the area, Puerto Triunfo, would become a tourist site right in the heart of Colombia.

‘This land will be priceless, I’m telling you, Tata. It’s got plenty of water, mountains, jungle … It’s paradise, you’ll see,’ he said.

Pablo seemed to have fulfilled a dream he’d mentioned to me many times: to own a piece of property like the one he’d just found. I remember he and Gustavo used to travel around in the first helicopter he bought, spending many weekends visiting different parts of Antioquia – Santa Fe de Antioquia, Caucasia, Bolombolo – but they hadn’t found one they really liked.

But one day Alfredo Astado went to his office and showed him a classified in El Colombiano newspaper selling a farm in the town of Puerto Triunfo, near the future Medellín–Bogotá highway. Astado explained it was a beautiful area of the country and was guaranteed to thrive because the highway construction was about to start.

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