Daily life returned to the old style of keeping weapons at the ready if orders were not obeyed instantly. Barrabas never spoke to Maruja without aiming his submachine gun at her head. She, as always, responded by threatening to denounce him to his superiors.
"I'm not going to die just because you fire a bullet by mistake," she said. "You take it easy or I'll complain."
This time the strategy did not work. It seemed clear, however, that the disorder was not deliberate or meant to intimidate, but was the result of a system corroded from within by profound demoralization. Even the frequent, colorful arguments between the majordomo and Damaris became frightening. He would come home at all hours--if he came home at all--stupefied by drink, and have to confront his wife's obscene recriminations. Their screams and shouts, and the crying of their young daughters wakened from sleep, could be heard all over the house. The guards made fun of them with theatrical imitations that added to the noise. It seemed inconceivable that with all the uproar, no one was curious enough to come to the house.
The majordomo and his wife each came to Maruja for advice: Damaris, because of a plausible jealousy that gave her no peace, and he, to find some way to calm her down without giving up his escapades. But Maruja's good offices did not last beyond the majordomo's next fling.
During one of their many fights, Damaris clawed at her husband's face like a cat, and it was a long time before the marks disappeared. He hit her so hard she went through the window. It was a miracle he did not kill her, but she managed to hold on at the last minute and was left dangling from the balcony over the courtyard. It was the end. Damaris packed her bags and left with the girls for Medellin.
The house was now in the sole care of the majordomo, who sometimes stayed away until nightfall, when he showed up with yogurt and bags of potato chips. Every once in a while he would bring back a chicken. The guards, tired of waiting, would ransack the kitchen and come back to the room with stale crackers and some raw sausage for Maruja. Boredom made them touchy, and more dangerous. They railed against their parents, the police, society in general. They told about their gratuitous crimes and deliberate sacrileges to prove to one another that God did not exist, and went to insane lengths in recounting their sexual exploits. One of them described the aberrations he had inflicted on one of his girlfriends as revenge for her mocking and humiliating him. Resentful and out of control, they took to smoking marijuana and crack until the dense air in the room became unbreathable. They played the radio at ear-splitting volume, slammed the door when they went in or out, shouted, sang, danced, cavorted in the courtyard. One of them looked like a professional acrobat in a traveling circus. Maruja warned them that the noise would attract the attention of the police.
"Let them come and kill us," they shouted in chorus.
Maruja felt ready to snap, above all because of the crazed Barrabas, who liked to wake her by pressing the barrel of his machine gun against her temple. Her hair began to fall out. The pillow covered with strands of hair depressed her from the moment she opened her eyes at dawn.
She knew that each of the guards was different, but they all were susceptible to insecurity and mutual distrust. Maruja's fear exacerbated these feelings. "How can you live like this?" she would demand without warning. "What do you believe in? Do you have any idea of what friendship means?" Before they could respond she cornered them: "Does the word loyalty mean anything to you?" They did not reply, but the answers they gave themselves must have been disquieting, because instead of becoming defiant they deferred to Maruja. Only Barrabas stood up to her. "You rich motherfuckers!" he once shouted. "Did you really think you'd run things forever? Not anymore, damn it: It's all over!" Maruja, who had been so afraid of him, met the challenge with the same rage.
"You kill your friends, your friends kill you, you all end up killing each other," she screamed. "Who can understand you? Find me one person who can say what kind of animals you people are."
Driven, perhaps, to desperation because he could not kill her, Barrabas smashed his fist into the wall and damaged the bones in his wrist. He bellowed like a savage and burst into tears of fury. Maruja would not allow herself to be softened by compassion. The majordomo spent the entire afternoon trying to calm her down, and made an unsuccessful effort to improve supper.
Maruja asked herself how, with so much commotion, they could still believe it made sense to talk in whispers, confine her to the room, ration out the radio and television for reasons of security. Tired of all the madness, she rebelled against the meaningless rules of her captivity, spoke in her natural voice, went to the bathroom whenever she wanted. But her fear of sexual attack intensified, above all when the majordomo left her alone with the two guards on duty. It culminated one morning when a masked guard burst into the bathroom while she was in the shower. Maruja managed to cover herself with a towel, and her terrified scream must have been heard for miles around. He froze and stood like a statue, his heart in his mouth for fear of how the neighbors would react. But no one came, not a sound was heard. He backed out of the room on tiptoe, as if he had opened the bathroom door by mistake.
The majordomo showed up one day with another woman to run the house. But instead of controlling the disorder, they both helped to increase it. The woman joined him in his fierce bouts of drinking that tended to end in blows and smashed bottles. Meals were served at improbable hours. On Sundays they went out carousing and left Maruja and the guards with nothing to eat until the next day. One night, while Maruja was walking alone in the courtyard, the four guards went to raid the kitchen and left the machine guns in the room. An idea made her shudder. She relished it as she talked to the dog, petted him, whispered to him, and the overjoyed animal licked her hands with complicitous growls. A shout from Barrabas brought her back to reality.
It was the end of an illusion. They replaced the dog with a new one that had the face of a killer. They prohibited her walks, and Maruja was subjected to a regime of constant surveillance. What she feared most then was that they would shackle her to the bed with a plastic-wrapped chain that Barrabas moved back and forth in his hands like an iron rosary. Maruja tried to anticipate their next move.
"If I had wanted to leave, I would have done it a long time ago," she said. "I've been left alone lots of times, and if I didn't run away it's because I didn't want to."
Somebody must have complained, because one morning the majordomo appeared in the room, full of suspect humility and all kinds of excuses: that he could die of shame, that the boys would behave themselves from now on, that he had sent for his wife and she was coming back. And it was true: Damaris returned, the same as always, with her two girls, her Scottish bagpiper's miniskirts, and her endless lentils. Two bosses with masks and the same conciliatory attitude arrived the next day, shoved the four guards out, and imposed order. "They won't be back again," one of them said with hair-raising decisiveness. And it was over.
That same afternoon they sent the crew of high school graduates, and it was like a magical return to the peace of February: unhurried time, entertainment magazines, the music of Guns N' Roses, and Mel Gibson movies watched with hired gunmen well versed in unrestrained passions. Maruja was moved by the fact that the adolescent killers watched and listened with as much devotion as her children.
Toward the end of March, without any announcement, two strangers appeared, their faces hidden under hoods lent them by the guards. One, with barely a greeting, began to measure the floor with a tailor's metric tape, while the other tried to ingratiate himself with Maruja.
"I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, Senora," he said. "We're here to carpet the room."
"Carpet the room!" Maruja shouted in a blind fury. "You can go to hell! What I want is to get out of here! Right now!"
What troubled her was not the carpet but what it could mean: an indefinite postponement of her release. One of the guards would say later that Maruja's interpretation had been mistaken, since it could have meant she would be leaving soon and they were renova
ting the room for more important hostages. But at that moment Maruja was sure a carpet could only mean another year of her life.
Pacho Santos also had to use all his wits to keep his guards occupied, because when they were bored with playing cards, seeing the same movie ten times in a row, and recounting their sexual exploits, they began to pace the room like caged lions. Through the holes in their hoods he could see their reddened eyes. The only thing they could do then was take a few days off--that is, stupefy themselves with alcohol and drugs during a week of nonstop parties, and come back worse than before. Drugs were prohibited and their use was punished with great severity, and not only during working hours, but the addicts always found a way around the vigilance of their superiors. The most common drug was marijuana, but their prescription for difficult times were Olympiads of crack that made him fear a calamity. One of the guards, after a night of carousing in the street, burst into the room and woke Pacho with a shout. He saw the devil's mask almost touching his face, the bloodshot eyes, the coarse hairs bristling from his ears, and smelled the sulfurous stink of hell. One of his guards wanted to finish up the party with Pacho. "You don't know how bad I am," he said while they drank a double aguardiente together at six in the morning. For the next two hours the guard, without being asked, told Pacho the story of his life, driven by the uncontrollable compulsion of his conscience. At last he passed out, and if Pacho did not escape then it was because he lost his courage at the last minute.
His most heartening reading in captivity were the personal notes that El Tiempo, on Maria Victoria's initiative, published for him, without concealment or reticence, on its editorial pages. One was accompanied by a recent photograph of his children, and in the heat of the moment he wrote them a letter filled with those thunderous truths that seem ridiculous to anyone who has not lived through them: "I'm sitting here in this room, chained to a bed, my eyes full of tears." From then on he wrote his wife and children a series of letters from the heart, which he could never send.
Pacho had lost all hope after the deaths of Marina and Diana, and then the possibility of escape came out to meet him without his looking for it. By now he was certain he was in one of the neighborhoods near Avenida Boyaca, to the west of the city. He knew these districts because he would make detours through them when traffic was very heavy on his way home from the newspaper, and he had been driving that route on the night he was abducted. Most of its structures were clusters of residences built in rows, the same house repeated many times over: a large door to the garage, a tiny garden, a second floor overlooking the street, and all the windows protected by wrought-iron gates painted white. And in one week he managed to find out the exact distance to the pizzeria, and learned that the factory was none other than the Bavaria Brewery. A disorienting detail was the demented rooster that at first crowed at any hour, and as the months passed crowed at the same hour in different places: sometimes far away at three in the afternoon, other times next to his window at two in the morning. It would have been even more disorienting if he had known that Maruja and Beatriz also heard it in a distant section of the city.
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 Bogota, one heard only the slow wheeze of the brewery or the sudden wail of an ambulance speeding down Avenida Boyaca. 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 Pachon de Galan 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 communiques, 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.