News of a Kidnapping (26 page)

At the end of the hallway, to the right of his room, he could jump from a window that opened onto a small, enclosed courtyard, and then climb the vine-covered adobe wall next to a tree with sturdy branches. He did not know what lay on the other side of the wall, but since it was a corner house, it had to be
a street. And almost certainly it was the street with the grocery store, the pharmacy, and an auto repair shop. This shop, however, could be a negative factor, since it might be a front for the kidnappers. In fact, Pacho once heard a conversation about soccer coming from that direction, and was sure the two voices belonged to his guards. In any case, climbing the wall would be easy, but the rest
was unpredictable. The better alternative was the bathroom, which had the undeniable advantage of being the only place they let him go without the chain.

It seemed clear that his escape had to take place in the middle of the day, because he never went to the bathroom after getting into bed for the night—even if he stayed awake watching television
or writing—and any deviation could betray him.
Then too, the businesses closed early, the neighbors were in for the night after the seven o’clock news, and by ten there was not a soul on the streets. Even on Friday nights, which are very noisy in Bogotá, one heard only the slow wheeze of the brewery or the sudden wail of an ambulance speeding down Avenida Boyacá. And at night it would not be easy to find immediate refuge on the deserted streets,
and the doors of businesses and houses would be locked and bolted against the dangers of the night.

However, the opportunity—stark and plain—presented itself on March 6, and it came at night. One of the guards had brought in a bottle of
aguardiente
and invited him to have a drink while they watched a program about Julio Iglesias on television. Pacho drank little and only to humor him. The guard,
who had come on duty in the afternoon, had already been drinking and passed out before the bottle was emptied, and before he could put the chain on Pacho, who was collapsing with fatigue and did not see the chance that had fallen from the skies. Whenever he wanted to go to the bathroom at night, the guard on duty had to accompany him, but Pacho preferred not to disturb his blissful drunken stupor.
He went out into the hallway in all innocence, just as he was, barefoot and in his underwear, and held his breath as he passed the room where the other guards were sleeping. One was snoring like a chainsaw. Pacho had not been aware until then that he was running away without realizing it, and that the most difficult part was over. A wave of nausea rose from his stomach, froze his tongue, and
emptied out his heart. “It wasn’t the fear of escaping but the fear of not daring to,” he would say later. He went into the darkened bathroom and closed the door, his decision irrevocable. Another guard, still half-asleep, pushed the door open and shined a flashlight in his face. Both were astonished.

“What are you doing?” asked the guard.

Pacho responded in a firm voice:

“Taking a shit.”

It was the only thing that occurred to him. The guard shook his head, not knowing what to think.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Enjoy yourself.”

He stayed at the door, shining the flashlight on him, not blinking, until Pacho pretended he had finished.

During that week, in the throes of depression at his failure, he resolved to escape in a radical and irremediable way. “I’ll take the blade from the
razor, cut my veins, and they’ll find me dead in the morning,” he told himself. The next day, Father Alfonso Llanos Escobar published his weekly column in
El Tiempo,
addressed it to Pacho Santos, and ordered him in the name of God not to even consider suicide. The article had been on Hernando Santos’s desk for three weeks; without really knowing why, he had been unable to decide if he should publish
it, and on the previous day—again without knowing why—he resolved at the last minute to use it. Each time he tells the story, Pacho again experiences the stupefaction he felt that day.

A low-ranking boss who visited Maruja at the beginning of April promised to intercede to allow her to receive a letter from her husband, something she needed as if it were a medicine for her soul and her body.
The response was astounding: “No problem.” The man left around seven in the evening. At twelve-thirty, after her walk in the courtyard, the majordomo knocked with some urgency at the door, which was locked on the inside, and handed her the letter. It was not one of several sent by Villamizar with Guido Parra, but the one sent through Jorge Luis Ochoa, to which Gloria Pachón de Galán had added a consolatory
postscript. On the back of the paper, Pablo Escobar had written a note in his own hand: “I know this has been terrible for you and your family, but my family and I have also suffered a great deal. But don’t worry, I promise that nothing will happen to you, whatever else happens.” And he concluded with a marginal confidence that Maruja found
unbelievable: “Don’t pay attention to my press communiqués,
they’re only to keep up the pressure.”

Her husband’s letter, however, disheartened her with its pessimism. He said that things were going well, but that she must be patient because the wait might be even longer. Certain that someone else would read it before it was delivered to her, Villamizar had concluded with words meant more for Escobar than Maruja: “Offer up your sacrifice for the peace
of Colombia.” She became furious. She had often intercepted the mental messages that Villamizar sent to her from their terrace, and she had responded with all her heart: “Get me out of here, I don’t know who I am anymore after so many months of not seeing myself in a mirror.”

The letter gave her one more reason for writing in her reply that what the hell did he mean by patience, damn it, she’d
already shown more than enough and suffered more than enough during hideous nights when the icy fear of death would wake her with a start. She did not know it was an old letter, written between his failure with Guido Parra and his first interviews with the Ochoas, at a time when he saw no glimmer of hope. Not the kind of optimistic letter he would have written now, when the road to her freedom seemed
clear and defined.

Fortunately, the misunderstanding allowed Maruja to realize that her anger was caused not so much by the letter as by an older, less conscious rancor toward her husband: Why had Alberto permitted them to release only Beatriz if he was the one handling the process? In the nineteen years of their life together, she had not had time, or reason, or courage to ask herself that kind
of question, and her answer to herself made Maruja see the truth: She had been able to withstand captivity because of the absolute certainty that her husband was devoting every moment of his life to her release, and that he did this without rest and even without hope because of his absolute certainty that she knew what he was doing. It was—though neither of them realized it—a pact of love.

They
had met nineteen years earlier at a business meeting
when they were both young publicists. “Alberto appealed to me right away,” Maruja says. Why? She doesn’t have to think twice: “Because he looks so helpless.” It was the last answer one would expect. At first glance, Alberto seemed a typical nonconformist university student of the time, with hair down to his shoulders, a two-day growth of beard,
and one shirt that was washed when it rained. “Sometimes I bathed,” he says today, with a laugh. At second glance, he was a drinker and a womanizer, and had a short temper. But at third glance, Maruja saw a man who could lose his head over a beautiful woman, especially if she was intelligent and sensitive, and most especially if she had more than enough of the only thing lacking to turn the boy
into a man: an iron hand and a tender heart.

Asked what he had liked about her, Villamizar answers with a growl. Perhaps because Maruja, apart from her visible charms, was not the best-qualified person to fall in love with. In the bloom of her early thirties, she had married in the Catholic Church at the age of nineteen, and had given her husband five children—three girls and two boys—born fifteen
months apart. “I told Alberto everything right away,” Maruja says, “so he’d know he was entering a mine field.” He listened with another growl, and instead of asking her to lunch, he had a mutual friend ask them both. The next day he asked her to lunch, along with the same friend, on the third day he asked her alone, and on the fourth day they saw each other without having lunch. And so they
continued to meet every day, with the best of intentions. When Villamizar is asked if he was in love or only wanted to take her to bed, he answers in pure Santanderese: “Don’t screw around, it was serious.” Perhaps not even he imagined just how serious it was.

Maruja had a marriage with no surprises, no arguments, a perfect marriage, but perhaps it was missing the gram of inspiration and risk
she needed to feel alive. She made time for Villamizar by saying she was at the office. She invented more work than she had, even on Saturdays from noon until ten at night. On Sundays and
holidays they improvised children’s parties, lectures on art, midnight cinema clubs, anything, just so they could be together. He had no problems: He was single and available, came and went as he pleased, and
had so many Saturday sweethearts it was as if he had none at all. He needed only to write his final thesis to be a surgeon like his father, but the times favored living one’s life more than curing the sick. Love had escaped the confines of boleros, the perfumed love letters that had endured for four centuries were a thing of the past, as were tearful serenades, monogrammed handkerchiefs, the language
of flowers, and empty movie theaters at three in the afternoon, and the whole world seemed protected from death by the inspired lunacy of the Beatles.

A year after they met they began to live together, with Maruja’s children, in an apartment that measured a hundred square meters. “It was a disaster,” says Maruja. And with reason: They lived amid free-for-all quarrels, the crash of breaking plates,
jealousies and suspicions on the part of both children and adults. “Sometimes I hated him with all my heart,” says Maruja. “I felt the same about her,” says Villamizar. “But never for more than five minutes,” Maruja laughs. In October 1971, they were married in Ureña, Venezuela, and it was as if they had added one more sin to their life, because divorce did not exist and very few believed in
the legality of civil ceremonies. After four years Andrés was born, the only child they had together. The difficulties continued but caused them less grief: Life had taken on the task of teaching them that the joy of love was not meant to lull you to sleep, but to keep you struggling together.

Maruja was the daughter of Alvaro Pachón de la Tone, a star reporter of the 1940s who died with two
well-known colleagues in a car crash of historic importance to the profession. Her mother was dead, and she and her sister Gloria had been on their own from the time they were very young. Maruja had been a draftsman and painter at the age of twenty, a precocious publicist, a director and scriptwriter for radio and television, the head of public relations
or advertising for major companies, and
always a journalist. Her artistic talent and impulsive nature attracted immediate attention, helped along by a gift for command that was concealed behind the quiet pools of her Gypsy eyes. Villamizar, for his part, forgot about medicine, cut his hair, threw out his one shirt, put on a tie, and became an expert in the mass marketing of anything they gave him to sell. But he did not change his nature.
Maruja acknowledges that more than any of life’s blows, it was he who cured her of the formalism and inhibitions of her social milieu.

They had separate, successful careers while the children were in school. Maruja came home every night at six to spend time with them. Smarting from her own strict, conventional upbringing, she wanted to be a different kind of mother who did not attend parents’
meetings at school or help with homework. The girls complained: “We want a mommy like all the others.” But Maruja pushed them in the opposite direction toward the independence and education to do whatever they wanted. The curious thing is that they all wanted to do precisely what she would have chosen for them. Mónica studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and is a painter and graphic designer.
Alexandra is a journalist and a television producer and director. Juana is a scriptwriter and director for television and films. Nicolás composes music for movies and television. Patricio is a psychologist. Andrés, a student of economics, was bitten by the scorpion of politics thanks to his father’s bad example, and at the age of twenty-one was elected by popular vote to the alderman’s seat on
the town council of Chapinero, in northern Bogotá.

The complicity of Luis Carlos Galán and Gloria Pachón, dating back to the days before their marriage, proved decisive in the political career that Alberto and Maruja never expected. Galán, at the age of thirty-seven, ran for the presidential candidacy of the New Liberalism Party. His wife, Gloria, who was also a journalist, and Maruja, experienced
in promotion and publicity, conceived and directed advertising strategies for six electoral campaigns. Villamizar’s
experience in mass marketing had given him a logistical knowledge of Bogotá that very few politicians possessed. As a team, the three of them created, in one frantic month, the first New Liberalism campaign in the capital, and swept away more seasoned candidates. In the 1982 elections,
Villamizar was listed sixth in a slate that did not expect to elect more than five representatives to the Chamber, but in fact elected nine. Unfortunately, that victory was the prelude to a new life that would lead Alberto and Maruja—eight years later—to her abduction and its gruesome test of their love.

Some ten days after the letter, the important boss they called the “Doctor”—acknowledged
by now as the man in charge of her abduction and captivity—paid Maruja an unannounced visit. After seeing him in the house where she had been taken on the night of the kidnapping, he had come back about three times prior to Marina’s death. He and Marina would have long whispered conversations together, as if they were old friends. His relationship to Maruja had always been strained. For any remark
of hers, no matter how simple, he had a haughty, brutal reply: “You have nothing to say here.” When the three hostages were still together, she tried to register a complaint with him about the wretched conditions in the room, to which she attributed her persistent cough and erratic pains.