News of a Kidnapping (30 page)

The advisers raised the issue because of the fear that Father García Herreros would come to the twelve o’clock meeting with an unacceptable, eleventh-hour demand, without which Escobar would not surrender and not release the journalists. For the government, it would be an almost irreparable fiasco. Gabriel Silva, the adviser on foreign affairs,
made two self-protective recommendations: first, that the president not attend the meeting alone, and second, that he issue as complete a communiqué as possible as soon as the meeting was over in order to forestall speculation. Rafael Pardo, who had flown to New York the day before, agreed by telephone.

The president received Father García Herreros at a special noon meeting. On one side were
the priest, two clerics from his community, and Alberto Villamizar with his son Andrés; on the other, the president with his private secretary, Miguel Silva, and Mauricio Vargas. The presidential palace information services took photos and videos to give to the press if things went well. If not, at least the evidence of their failure would not be left up to the media.

The father, very conscious
of the significance of the moment, told the president the details of his meeting with Escobar. He had no doubt at all that Escobar was going to turn himself in and free the hostages, and he backed up his words with the notes the two
of them had written. For reasons of security that Escobar himself had outlined, his only condition was that the prison be the one in Envigado, not Itagüí.

The president
read the notes and returned them to the father. He was struck by the fact that Escobar did not promise to release the prisoners but agreed only to raise the issue with the Extraditables. Villamizar explained that this was one of Escobar’s many precautions: He had never admitted to holding the hostages so it could not be used as evidence against him.

The father asked what he should do if Escobar
asked him to be present at his surrender. The president agreed that he should go. When the father raised doubts concerning the safety of the operation, the president replied that no one could provide better guarantees than Escobar for the safety of his own operation. Finally, the president indicated to the father—whose companions seconded the idea—that it was important to keep public statements
to a minimum in order to avoid the damage that an inopportune word might create. The father agreed and even made a veiled final offer: “I’ve wanted to be of service in this, and I am at your disposal if you need me for anything else, like making peace with the other priest.” It was clear to everyone that he was referring to the Spanish priest, Manuel Pérez, commander of the National Army of Liberation.
The meeting took twenty minutes, and there was no official communiqué. Faithful to his promise, Father García Herreros displayed exemplary restraint in his statements to the press.

Maruja watched his news conference and learned nothing new. The television newscasts again showed reporters waiting at the houses of the hostages, which may well have been the same images shown the day before. Maruja
also repeated the previous day’s routine minute by minute, and had more than enough time to watch the afternoon soap operas. Damaris, energized by the official
announcement, had granted her the privilege of choosing the menu for lunch, like condemned prisoners on the eve of their execution. Maruja said, with no touch of irony, that anything would be fine except lentils. But time grew short, Damaris
could not go shopping, and there were only lentils with lentils for their farewell lunch.

For his part, Pacho put on the clothes he had been wearing the day of the kidnapping—these were too tight, since a sedentary life and bad food had made him put on weight—and sat down to listen to the news and smoke one cigarette after the other. He heard all kinds of stories about his release. He heard the
corrections, the outright lies of his colleagues made reckless by the tension of waiting. He heard that he had been incognito in a restaurant, but the man eating there turned out to be one of his brothers.

He reread the editorials, the commentaries, the reports he had written on current events so he would not forget his trade, thinking he might publish them as a document of his captivity when
he was freed. There were more than a hundred of them. He read one to his guards that had been written in December, when the traditional political class began its rantings against the legitimacy of the Constituent Assembly. Pacho lashed out at them with an energy and independence that were undoubtedly the product of his thinking in captivity: “We all know how you get votes in Colombia, and how countless
parliamentarians won their elections,” he said in an editorial note. He said that buying votes was rampant throughout the country, especially along the coast, that raffling off home appliances in exchange for electoral favors was the order of the day, and that many elected officials paid for their election through other kinds of political corruption, like charging fees over and above their
public salaries and parliamentary compensation. And this was why, he said, the same people were always elected, and they, “faced with the possibility of losing their privileges, are now in an uproar.” And he concluded with criticism that included
himself: “The impartiality of the media—including
El Tiempo
—which was making progress after a long, hard struggle, has vanished.”

The most surprising
of his notes, however, was the one he wrote on the reactions of the political class when the M-19 won more than 10 percent of the vote for the Constituent Assembly. “The political aggression against the M-19,” he wrote, “the strictures (or rather, discrimination) against it in the media, show how far we are from tolerance and how far we still have to go in modernizing what matters most: our minds.”
He said that the political class had celebrated electoral participation by the former guerrillas only to seem democratic, but when the votes amounted to more than 10 percent they turned to denunciations. And he concluded in the style of his grandfather, Enrique Santos Montejo (“Calibán”), the most widely read columnist in the history of Colombian journalism: “A very specific and traditional sector
of Colombians killed the tiger and were frightened by its skin.” Nothing could have been more surprising in someone who since elementary school had stood out as a precocious example of the romantic Right.

He tore up all his notes except for three that he decided to keep, for reasons he has not been able to explain. He also kept the rough drafts of the messages to his family and the president,
and of his will. He would have liked to take the chain they had used to confine him to the bed, hoping that the artist Bernardo Salcedo could make a sculpture with it, but he was not allowed to keep it in case there were incriminating prints on it.

Maruja, however, did not want any memento of that hideous past, which she intended to erase from her life. But at about six that evening, when the
door began to open from the outside, she realized how much those six months of bitterness were going to affect her. Since the death of Marina and the departure of Beatriz, this had been the hour of liberations or executions: the same in both cases. With her heart in her mouth she waited for the sinister
ritual sentence: “We’re going, get ready.” It was the “Doctor,” accompanied by the second-in-command
who had been there the night before. They both seemed rushed.

“Now, now!” the “Doctor” urged Maruja. “Move it!”

She had imagined the moment so often that she felt overwhelmed by a strange need to gain some time, and she asked about her ring.

“I sent it with your sister-in-law,” said the low-ranking boss.

“That’s not true,” Maruja replied with absolute calm. “You told me you had seen it after
that.”

More than the ring, what she wanted then was to embarrass him in front of his superior. But the “Doctor” pretended not to notice because of the pressure of time. The majordomo and his wife brought Maruja the bag that held her personal effects and the gifts that various guards had given her during her captivity: Christmas cards, the sweatsuit, the towel, magazines, a book or two. The gentle
boys who had guarded her in the final days had nothing to give but medals and pictures of saints, and they asked her to pray for them, not to forget them, to do something to get them out of their bad life.

“Anything you want,” said Maruja. “If you ever need me, get in touch with me and I’ll help you.”

The “Doctor” could do no less: “What can I give you to remember me by?” he said, rooting through
his pockets. He took out a 9mm shell and handed it to Maruja.

“Here,” he said, not really joking. “The bullet we didn’t shoot you with.”

It was not easy to free Maruja from the embraces of the majordomo and Damaris, who raised her mask as high as her nose to kiss her and ask that she not forget her. Maruja felt a sincere emotion. This was, after all, the end of the longest, most awful time of
her life, and its happiest moment.

They covered her head with a hood that must have been the dirtiest, most foul-smelling one they could find. They put it on
with the eye holes at the back of her head, and she could not avoid recalling that this was how they put the hood on Marina when they killed her. She was led, shuffling her feet in the darkness, to a car as comfortable as the one used for
the abduction, and they sat her in the same spot, in the same position, and with the same precautions: her head resting on a man’s knees so she could not be seen from the outside. They warned her that there were several police checkpoints, and if they were stopped Maruja had to take off the hood and behave herself.

At one that afternoon, Villamizar had eaten lunch with his son Andrés. At two-thirty
he lay down for a nap, and made up for lost sleep until five-thirty. At six he had just come out of the shower, and was dressing to wait for his wife, when the telephone rang. He picked up the extension on the night table and said no more than “Hello?” An anonymous voice interrupted: “She’ll arrive a few minutes after seven. They’re leaving now.” He hung up. The announcement was unexpected
and Villamizar was grateful for it. He called the porter to make sure his car was in the garden, and the driver ready.

He put on a dark suit and a light tie with a diamond pattern to welcome his wife. He was thinner than ever, for he had lost nine pounds in six months. At seven he went to the living room to talk to the journalists while Maruja was arriving. Four of her children were there, and
Andrés, their son. Only Nicolás, the musician in the family, was missing, and he would arrive from New York in a few hours. Villamizar sat in the chair closest to the phone.

By this time Maruja was five minutes away from her release. In contrast to the night of the abduction, the drive to freedom was rapid and uneventful. At first they had taken an unpaved road,
making the kinds of turns not
recommended for a luxury car. Maruja could tell from the conversation that in addition to the man beside her, another was sitting next to the driver. She did not think that any of them was the “Doctor.” After fifteen minutes they had her lie on the floor and stopped for about five minutes, but she did not know why. They came out onto a large, noisy avenue filled with heavy seven o’clock traffic, then
turned with no difficulties onto another avenue. After no more than forty-five minutes altogether, they came to a sudden stop. The man next to the driver gave Maruja a frantic order:

“Now, get out, move.”

The man sitting beside her tried to force her out of the car. Maruja struggled.

“I can’t see,” she shouted.

She tried to take off the hood but a brutal hand stopped her. “Wait five minutes
before you take it off,” he shouted. He shoved her out of the car. Maruja felt the vertigo of empty space, and terror, and thought they had thrown her over a cliff. Solid ground let her breathe again. While she waited for the car to drive away, she sensed she was on a street with little traffic. With great care she raised the hood, saw the houses among the trees with lights in the windows, and then
she knew the truth of being free. It was 7:29, and 193 days had passed since the night she had been abducted.

A solitary automobile came down the avenue, made a U-turn, and stopped across the street, just opposite Maruja. Like Beatriz before her, she thought it could not be a coincidence. That car had to have been sent by the kidnappers to make sure her release was completed. Maruja went up to
the driver’s window.

“Please,” she said, “I’m Maruja Pachón. They just let me go.”

She only wanted someone to help her find a taxi. But the man let out a yell. Minutes earlier, listening to news on the radio about their imminent release, he had wondered: “Suppose I run into
Francisco Santos and he’s looking for a ride?” Maruja longed to see her family, but she let him take her to the nearest
house to use the telephone.

The woman in the house and her children all cried out and embraced her when they recognized her. Maruja felt numb, and everything that happened around her seemed like one more deception arranged by her kidnappers. The man who had taken her to the house was named Manuel Caro, and he was the son-in-law of the owner, Augusto Borrero, whose wife, a former activist in the
New Liberalism Party, had worked with Maruja in Luis Carlos Galán’s electoral campaign. But Maruja was seeing life from the outside, as if she were watching a movie screen. She asked for
aguardiente
—she never knew why—and drank it in one swallow. Then she telephoned her house, but had trouble remembering the number and misdialed twice. A woman answered right away: “Who is it?” Maruja recognized
the voice and said, without melodrama:

“Alexandra, darling.”

Alexandra shouted:

“Mamá! Where are you?”

Alberto Villamizar had jumped up from his chair when the phone rang but Alexandra, who was passing by, picked it up first. Maruja had begun to give her the address, but Alexandra did not have paper or pencil nearby. Villamizar took the receiver and greeted Maruja with stunning casualness:

“What do you say, baby. How are you?”

Maruja answered in the same tone:

“Fine, sweetheart, no problems.”