LITMIR.BIZ

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tree.

      “Bet we can knock that one down, too!” shouts Escobar, delighted, steamrolling the poor tree without compassion, arguing that anything that can’t stand up under his attack doesn’t deserve to live and should return to the earth and become food.

      On the way back to the house, we pass a car riddled with bullet holes; it looks to be a Ford from the late twenties.

      “It’s Bonnie and Clyde’s!” he informs us proudly.

      I ask if he means the real couple’s or the one from the movie, and he replies that it’s the original—he doesn’t buy fakes. When we say that it looks like it was shot with a machine gun, Escobar explains that the six policemen who caught the lovers to claim the reward had shot it up with automatic rifles for over an hour, leaving more than one hundred bullet cartridges around the car.

      Clyde Barrow, the American Robin Hood, was the U.S. government’s public enemy number one in 1934. He robbed banks, and four months before his death he successfully orchestrated the jailbreak of several members of his gang. Bonnie Parker accompanied him in the robberies but never participated in the police killings, which increased as the search for the couple spread through more states and the reward for them grew. When they died, she was twenty-four years old and he was twenty-three. The couple’s naked bodies were displayed before hundreds of photographers on the morgue floor, in a spectacle that raised angry protests not only because it was morbid but also because of the dozens of bullet holes in the body of the young woman whose crime and fate had been to love an eternal fugitive from justice. Bonnie and Clyde were the first underworld couple to be immortalized in literature and film, and their legend came to be a true modern version of Romeo and Juliet. Twenty thousand people accompanied Bonnie’s funeral procession after her mother decided she couldn’t be buried beside Clyde, as she had wanted.

      As we approach the entrance to Hacienda Nápoles, we see perched on the enormous gate, like a giant tightrope-walking butterfly, a white-painted, single-engine plane. Escobar slows down and stops. I hear a hatch opening above us, and out of the corner of my eye I notice my companions move to the sides and back of the Rolligon. In seconds, gallons and gallons of freezing water are dumped over me, leaving me stunned, breathless, and sputtering. When I manage to recover my speech, I can only ask him, shivering, “And that turn-of-the-century shell—is it Lindbergh’s plane, or Amelia Earhart’s, Pablo?”

      “Now, that one was mine, and it brought me good luck, just like you had today when I saved your life! Ha, ha, ha! I always collect on my favors, and now you’ve been ‘baptized’! Now we’re even, my dear Virginia!” he exclaims, rolling with laughter, while his dozen accomplices go on celebrating the prank.

      That night, as I’m getting dressed for dinner, someone knocks very softly on the door of our room. Thinking it’s Aníbal’s little girl, I tell her to come in, but the person who shyly pokes his head in without letting go of the doorknob is the owner of the house. In a concerned tone that’s trying to be sincere, he apologizes and asks how I’m feeling. I reply that I feel cleaner than ever because, in the past twelve hours, I’ve been obliged to take five baths at various temperatures. He laughs, relieved, and I ask him about the wildcats, which we hadn’t seen at any point during the tour.

      “Ohhh . . . those. Well . . . I have to admit that there are no carnivorous animals in my zoo: they would eat the others, which makes them difficult to import . . . legally. But now that I think about it, I do believe I saw a furious panther shivering and soaked under a plane, and three tigresses in the salon, about ten minutes ago. Ha, ha, ha!”

      And he’s gone. When I realize that the whole episode on the runway was a show, I can’t help thinking with happy incredulity that this man’s ability to make mischief is comparable only to his bravery.

      When I walk into the dining room, looking golden and radiant in my turquoise silk tunic, Aníbal praises my appearance by exclaiming in front of everyone, “This is the only woman in the world who wakes up looking like a rose. . . . It’s like seeing a miracle of creation every morning.”

      “Just look at them!” says the Singer to Escobar. “Two sex symbols, together . . .”

      Pablo looks at us, smiling. Then he stares straight at me. I lower my eyes.

      Back in our room that night, Aníbal comments in a low voice, “Really, a guy who can smuggle three giraffes here all the way from Kenya is capable of getting tons of anything into the United States!”

      “Such as what, love?”

      “Coke. Pablo is the King of Coke, and there is so much demand that he’s on his way to becoming the richest man in the world!” he exclaims, raising his eyebrows in admiration. I tell him I would have sworn Pablo financed that lifestyle of his with politics.

      “No, no, my darling, it’s the other way around: he finances the politics with this!”

      And half closing his eyes, rapturous with pleasure after his fortieth line of the day, he shows me a fifty-gram rock of cocaine that Pablo gave him.

      I am exhausted, and I fall deeply asleep. When I wake up the next day, Aníbal is still there, but the rock isn’t. His eyes are bloodshot, and he’s looking at me with enormous tenderness. I only know I love him.

       Presidential Aspirations

      A FEW WEEKS LATER, Aníbal gets a call from Escobar, inviting us to visit the hacienda and zoo of Jorge Luis Ochoa, near Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Ochoa is Escobar’s best friend and his partner in the social project Medellín sin Tugurios (Medellín Without Slums). Pablo sends a plane for us, and when we land we see that he is already waiting for us, and only the crew of his own plane is with him. It’s clear that, not being the owner of the house, he is there to join us as one more guest in the group, which again includes our friend Ángela. We weren’t able to bring Aníbal’s children this time because their mother was truly horrified when she heard about the adventures we’d had in Nápoles; she strictly forbade him from bringing the kids on “weekends with those extravagant nouveau riche people.”

      There is very little traffic on the highway that leads from the airport to Ochoa’s hacienda. After a few minutes of driving under a merciless sun, with Escobar at the wheel of a convertible jeep, we reach the checkpoint where the toll is the equivalent of three U.S. dollars. Our driver slows down, greets the collector with his widest grin, and keeps right on going, relaxed and slow, leaving the poor boy stupefied. First he stands openmouthed with the ticket in his hand, and then he runs after us, waving his arms uselessly to get us to stop. Surprised, we ask Pablo why he voló el peaje, as Colombians say, or “blew the toll.”

      “Because if there are no police in the booth, I don’t pay. I only respect authority when it’s armed!” he cries triumphantly, in the tone of a schoolteacher giving a lesson to his little students.

      The Ochoas are renowned breeders and exporters of champion horses; thousands of them can be found in La Loma, their hacienda near Medellín that’s run by their father, Fabio. This ranch, La Veracruz, is dedicated to breeding fighting bulls. Although the size of their property and its zoo can’t compare with Nápoles, the house is beautifully decorated, and everywhere I see those little electric Ferraris and Mercedeses, red and yellow, that so many children dream of. The oldest of the three Ochoa brothers is Jorge Luis—his friends call him El Gordo—an affable man the same age as Pablo. He’s married to a tall, pretty woman, María Lía Posada, cousin of the soon-to-be minister of communications, Noemí Sanín Posada. While Jorge doesn’t display the same magnetic quality as Escobar when he sets out to have fun, it’s clear the two men share a great affection and deep respect, born of loyalty that has been repeatedly put to the test over the years.

      After a day spent eating and touring the grounds, we said good-bye, and I told Jorge that I wish I could see his famous champion horses. With his wide smile, he promises to plan something special very soon, and that I won’t be disappointed.

      We go back to Medellín in another

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