News of a Kidnapping (24 page)

In February, the possibility that the Constituent Assembly would decide in favor of non-extradition and an amnesty was becoming a probability. Escobar knew it and concentrated more energies in that direction than on the government. Gaviria must have turned out to be tougher than he had supposed.
Everything relating to the capitulation decrees was kept current in the Office of Criminal Investigation, and the justice minister was prepared to deal with any judicial emergency. For his part, Villamizar acted not only on his own but at his own risk, though his close collaboration with Rafael Pardo kept open a direct channel to the government, which did not compromise him, and in fact allowed
him to move forward without making concessions. At this time Escobar must have realized that Gaviria would never appoint an official representative to hold talks with him—which was his golden dream—and he clung to the hope that the Constituent Assembly would
issue him a pardon, either as a repentant trafficker, or under the aegis of some armed group. It was not a foolish calculation. Before the
swearing-in of the Constituent Assembly, the political parties had agreed on an agenda of closed subjects, and the government, using legal arguments, had succeeded in keeping extradition off the list because they needed it as a bargaining chip for their capitulation policy. But when the Supreme Court reached the spectacular decision that the Constituent Assembly could deal with any subject, without
any restrictions whatsoever, the question of extradition reemerged from the ruins. Amnesty was not mentioned, but it was also possible: There was room for everything in the infinite.

President Gaviria was not one of those men who could leave a subject hanging and go on to another. In six months he had imposed on his colleagues a personal system of communicating by means of notes written on scraps
of paper in cryptic sentences that summarized everything. Sometimes only the name of the individual he was writing to was on the note, which was handed to the closest person, and the addressee knew what he had to do. For his advisers, this method also had the terrifying virtue of making no distinction between work and leisure. Gaviria could not conceive of the difference, since he rested with
the same discipline he applied to work, and continued sending his scraps of paper when he was at a cocktail party or as soon as he came up from diving. “A tennis game with him was like a meeting of the Council of Ministers,” said one of his advisers. He could fall into a deep sleep for five or ten minutes, even sitting at his desk, and wake refreshed, while his colleagues collapsed with exhaustion.
This method, however random it might appear, could trigger action with more urgency and energy than formal memos.

The system proved very useful when the president tried to parry the Supreme Court’s blow against extradition with the argument
that it was a question of law, not a constitutional issue. At first the government minister, Humberto de la Calle, succeeded in convincing the majority. But
in the end, the things that interest individuals become more important than the things that interest governments, and people had been correct in identifying extradition as a contributing factor to social unrest, and in particular to the savagery of terrorism. And so, after much twisting and turning, it was at last included on the agenda of the Commission on Rights.

In the meantime, the Ochoas
still feared that Escobar, pursued by his own demons, would decide to immolate himself in a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. Their fear was prophetic. Early in March, Villamizar received an urgent message from them: “Come immediately. Something very serious is going to happen.” They had received a letter from Pablo Escobar threatening to set off fifty tons of dynamite in the historic district
of Cartagena de Indias if there were no sanctions against the police who were devastating the slums of Medellín: 100 kilos for each boy killed outside of combat.

The Extraditables had considered Cartagena an untouchable sanctuary until September 28, 1989, when an explosion shook the foundations of the Hotel Hilton, blowing out windows and killing two physicians at a convention in session on another
floor. From then on, it was clear that not even this historical treasure was safe from the war. The new threat did not permit a moment’s hesitation.

Villamizar informed Gaviria a few days before the deadline. “Now we’re not fighting for Maruja but to save Cartagena,” he said, to provide the president with an argument. Gaviria’s response was that he thanked him for the information, said the government
would take steps to prevent the disaster, but under no circumstances would he give in to blackmail. And so Villamizar traveled to Medellín one more time, and with the help of the Ochoas succeeded
in dissuading Escobar. It was not easy. Days before the deadline, Escobar guaranteed in a hurried note that for the moment nothing would happen to the captive journalists, and postponed the detonation
of bombs in large cities. But he was also categorical: If police operations in Medellín continued past April, no stone would be left standing in the very ancient and noble city of Cartagena de Indias.

Alone in the room, Maruja knew she was in the hands of the same men who may have killed Marina and Beatriz, and were refusing to return the radio and television to keep her from finding that out. She moved from earnest pleading to enraged demands;
she confronted her guards, shouting loud enough for the neighbors to hear; she refused to walk and threatened to stop eating. The majordomo and the guards, surprised by the unthinkable, did not know what to do. They conferred in whispers, went out to make phone calls, and came back even more indecisive. They tried to reassure Maruja with illusory promises, or intimidate her with threats, but they
could not break her resolve not to eat.

She had never felt more self-possessed. It was clear that her guards had instructions not to mistreat her, and she gambled on their needing her alive at any cost. Her calculations were correct: Three days after Beatriz’s release, the door opened very early in the morning and the majordomo came in carrying the radio and the television. “You’ll learn something
now,” he said. And in an unemotional voice he announced:

“Doña Marina Montoya is dead.”

In contrast to what she herself had expected, Maruja heard the news as if she had always known it. The astonishing thing for her would have been if Marina were alive. When the truth reached her heart, however, she realized how much she had loved her, how much she would have given to have it not be true.

“Murderers!” she screamed at the majordomo. “That’s all you are: murderers!”

At that moment the “Doctor” appeared in the doorway and tried to calm Maruja with the news that Beatriz was safe at home, but she would not believe him until she saw it with her own eyes on television or heard it on the radio. Yet he seemed to have been sent to allow her to give vent to her feelings.

“You haven’t been
back,” she said. “And I can understand that: You must be very ashamed of what you did to Marina.”

He needed a moment to recover from his surprise.

“What happened?” Maruja provoked him. “Was she condemned to death?”

Then he said it had been a question of taking revenge for a double betrayal. “Your case is different,” he said. And repeated what he had said earlier: “It’s political.” Maruja listened
to him with the strange fascination that the idea of death holds for those who believe they are going to die.

“At least tell me how it happened,” she said. “Did Marina know?”

“I swear to you she didn’t,” he said.

“How could that be?” Maruja insisted. “How could she not know?”

“They told her they were taking her to another house,” he said with the urgency of someone who wants to be believed.
“They told her to get out of the car, and she kept walking and they shot her in the back of the head. She couldn’t have known anything.”

The image of Marina with her hood on backward stumbling blindly toward an imaginary house would pursue Maruja through many sleepless nights. More than death itself, she feared the lucidity
of the final moment. The only thing that gave her some consolation was
the box of sleeping pills that she had saved as if they were precious pearls, and would swallow by the handful before allowing herself to be dragged off to the slaughter.

At last, on the midday news, she saw Beatriz surrounded by her family in a flower-filled apartment that she recognized in spite of all the changes: It was her own. But her joy at seeing it was ruined by her dislike for the new
decoration. She thought the library was well done and just in the place she wanted it, but the colors of the walls and carpets were awful, and the Tang Dynasty horse was placed precisely where it would most be in the way. “How stupid they are!” she shouted. “It’s just the opposite of what I said!” Her longing to be free was reduced for a moment to wanting to scold them for the poor job they had
done.

In this whirlwind of contrary sensations and feelings, the days became intolerable, the nights interminable. Sleeping in Marina’s bed unnerved her: Covered by her blanket, tormented by her odor, as she began to fall asleep she could hear in the darkness, beside her in the bed, the buzz of Marina’s whispering. One night it was not a hallucination but miraculous and real. Marina grasped her
arm with her warm, gentle, living hand, and breathed into her ear in her natural voice: “Maruja.”

She did not consider it a hallucination because in Jakarta she had also had what seemed to be a fantastic experience. At an antiques fair she had bought the life-size sculpture of a beautiful youth who had one foot resting on the head of a conquered boy. Like the statues of Catholic saints, the figure
had a halo, but this one was tin, and the style and material made it look like a shoddy afterthought. Only after keeping it for some time in the best spot in her house did she learn it was the God of Death.

One night Maruja dreamed she was trying to pull the halo off the statue because it seemed so ugly, but could not. It was soldered onto the bronze. She woke feeling troubled by the bad memory,
hurried to look at the statue in the living room, and found the god
uncrowned and the halo on the floor, as if this were the conclusion of her dream. Maruja—who is a rationalist and an agnostic—accepted the idea that she herself, in an episode of sleepwalking she could not recall, had torn the halo off the God of Death.

At the beginning of her captivity, she had been sustained by the rage she
felt at Marina’s submissiveness. Later it became compassion for her bitter fate and a desire to give her the will to live. She was sustained by having to pretend to a strength she did not have when Beatriz began to lose control, and the need to maintain her own equilibrium when adversity overwhelmed them. Someone had to take command to keep them from going under, and she had been the one to do it,
in a grim, foul-smelling space that measured three meters by two and a half meters, where she slept on the floor, ate kitchen scraps, and never knew if she would live to see the next minute. But when no one else was left in the room, she no longer had any reason to pretend: She was alone with herself.

The certainty that Beatriz had told her family how to communicate with her on radio and television
kept her alert. In fact, Villamizar appeared several times with his words of encouragement, and her children comforted her with their imagination and wit. Then, with no warning, that contact had been broken off for two weeks. This was when a sense of abandonment paralyzed her. She caved in. She stopped walking. She lay with her face to the wall, removed from everything, eating and drinking
only enough to keep from dying. She experienced the same distress she had felt in December, the same cramps and shooting pains in her legs that had made the doctor’s visit necessary. But this time she did not even complain.

The guards, involved in their personal conflicts and internecine quarrels, paid no attention to her. Her food grew cold on the plate, and both the majordomo and his wife seemed
oblivious. The days became longer and emptier, so much so that she sometimes missed the worst moments of the early days. She lost
interest in life. She cried. One morning she woke to discover in horror that her right arm had lifted by itself.

The change of guards in February was providential. As replacements for Barrabás’s crew, they sent four new boys who were serious, well disciplined, and
talkative. They had good manners and an ease of expression that were a relief to Maruja. As soon as they came in they invited her to play Nintendo and other video games. The games brought them together. From the start she knew they shared a common language, and that facilitated communication. They had, no doubt, been instructed to overcome her resistance and raise her morale with a different kind
of treatment, for they tried to persuade her to follow the doctor’s orders and walk in the courtyard, to think of her husband and children and not disappoint them when they were hoping to see her soon, and in good condition.

The atmosphere lent itself to confidences. Aware that they too were prisoners, and perhaps needed her as well, Maruja told them stories about her three sons, who had already
gone through adolescence. She recounted the significant events in their lives as they were growing up and going to school, and talked about their habits and tastes. And the guards, feeling more confident, told her about themselves.

They had all finished secondary school, and one had completed at least a semester of college. In contrast to the previous guards, they said they were from middle-class
families, but in one way or another had been marked by the culture of the Medellín slums. The oldest, a twenty-four-year-old whom they called Ant, was tall, good-looking, and rather reserved. His university studies had been interrupted when his parents died in a car accident, and his only recourse had been to join a gang of killers. Another, called Shark, recounted with amusement that he had
passed half his courses in secondary school by threatening his teachers with a toy revolver. The most cheerful of this team, and of all the guards who
had worked there, was called Top, and that, in effect, was what he resembled. He was very fat, with short, thin legs, and his love of dancing bordered on the maniacal. Once, after breakfast, he put a salsa tape in the cassette player and danced
without a break, and with frenetic energy, until the end of his shift. The quietest one, whose mother was a schoolteacher, read books and newspapers and was well informed on current events. He had only one explanation for being in that life: “Because it’s so cool.”

Just as Maruja had first suspected, however, they were not insensible to human relationships. This, in turn, not only gave her back
the will to live, but also the wit to gain advantages that the guards themselves may not have foreseen.

“Don’t think I’m going to try anything stupid with you,” she told them. “Believe me, I won’t do any of the things I’m not allowed to, because I know this business will be over soon and turn out fine. So it doesn’t make sense to put so many restrictions on me.”

With an autonomy that none of
the earlier guards—not even their bosses—had shown, the new guards dared to relax the rules much more than even Maruja had hoped. They let her move around the room, speak in a more natural voice, go to the bathroom without following a fixed schedule. The new regime gave her back the desire to take care of herself, which she attributed to her experience with the statue in Jakarta. She made good use
of classes on Alexandra’s program that had been prepared for her by a gymnastics teacher and were called, with her in mind, exercises in confined spaces. Her enthusiasm was so great that one of the guards asked with a suspicious look: “Is that program sending you some message?” Maruja had a hard time convincing him that it was not.

During this time she was also moved by the unexpected appearance
of “Colombia Wants Them Back,” which seemed not only well conceived and well produced, but also the best way to keep up the morale of the last two hostages. She felt more in touch with her family and friends. She thought about how she would have done the program, as a campaign, as a remedy, as a means of
swaying public opinion, and began to make bets with the guards about who would appear on the
screen the next day. Once she wagered it would be Vicky Hernández, the great actress and her close friend, and she won. The greater prize, in any case, was that just seeing Vicky and listening to her message produced one of the few happy moments of her captivity.

Her walks in the courtyard also began to bear fruit. The German shepherd, overjoyed at seeing her again, tried to squeeze under the
gate to play with Maruja, but she calmed him down, petting and talking to him, afraid the guards would become suspicious. Marina had told her that the gate led to a quiet yard with sheep and chickens. Maruja confirmed this with a rapid glance in the moonlight. But she also saw a man with a rifle standing guard outside the enclosure. The hope of escaping with the complicity of the dog had been canceled.

On February 20, when life seemed to have reestablished its rhythm, the radio reported that the body of Dr. Conrado Prisco Lopera—a cousin of the gang’s bosses, who had disappeared two days earlier—had been found in a field in Medellín. Another cousin, Edgar de Jesús Botero Prisco, was murdered four days later. Neither man had a criminal record. Dr. Prisco Lopera was the physician who had tended
to Juan Vitta without concealing his name or his face, and Maruja wondered if he was the same masked doctor who had examined her earlier.

Like the death of the Prisco brothers in January, these killings had a serious effect on the guards and increased the anxiety of the majordomo and his family. The idea that the cartel would exact the life of a hostage as payment for their deaths, as it had
with Marina Montoya, moved through the room like an ominous shadow. The majordomo came in the next day for no apparent reason, and at an unusual hour.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” he told Maruja, “but something very serious has happened: A butterfly’s been on the courtyard gate since last night.”

Maruja, a skeptic regarding invisible forces, did not understand what he meant. The majordomo
explained with calculated theatricality.