News of a Kidnapping

  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 ("Caliban"), 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 Andres. 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 Andres, their son. Only Nicolas, 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 Pachon. 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 Galan'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:

  "Mama! 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."

  He did have paper and pencil ready. He wrote down the address as Maruja gave it to him, but felt that something was not clear and asked to speak to somebody in the family. Borrero's wife gave him the missing details.

  "Thanks very much," said Villamizar. "It's not far. I'm leaving now."

  He forgot to hang up: The iron self-control he had maintained during the long months of tension suddenly melted away. He ran down the stairs two at a time and dashed across the lobby, followed by an avalanche of reporters armed to the teeth with their battle gear. Others, moving in the opposite direction, almost trampled him in the doorway.

  "Maruja's free," he shouted. "Let's go."

  He got into the car and slammed the door so hard he startled the dozing driver. "Let's go pick up the senora," Villamizar said. He gave him the address: Diagonal 107, No. 27-73. "It's a white house on the parallel road west of the highway," he said. But he said it so fast the driver became confused and started off in the wrong direction. Villamizar corrected him with a sharpness that was foreign to his character.

  "Watch what you're doing," he shouted, "we have to be there in five minutes! If we get lost I'll cut off your balls!"

  The driver, who had suffered the awful dramas of the abduction along with him, did not turn a hair. Villamizar caught his breath and directed him along the shortest, easiest roads, for he had visualized the route as he was given directions on the phone to be certain he would not get lost. It was the worst time for traffic, but not the worst day.

  Andres had pulled out behind his father, along with his cousin Gabriel, following the caravan of reporters who cut a path through traffic with fake ambulance sirens. Even though he was an expert driver, he became stuck in traffic, and could not move. Villamizar, on the other hand, arrived in the record time of fifteen minutes. He did not have to look for the house because some of the reporters who had been in his apartment were already arguing with the owner to let them in. Villamizar made his way through the noisy crowd. He did not have time to greet anyone, because the owner's wife recognized him and pointed to the stairs.

  "This way," she said.

  Maruja was in the main bedroom, where they had taken her to freshen up while she waited for her husband. When she went in she had come face-to-face with a grotesque stranger: her reflection in the mirror. She looked bloated and flabby from nephritis, her eyelids swollen, her skin pasty and dry after six months of darkness.

  Villamizar raced up the stairs, opened the first door he came to, and found himself in the children's room filled with dolls and bicycles. Then he opened the door facing him, and saw Maruja sitting on the bed in the checked jacket she had worn when she left the house on the day of her abduction, and freshly made up for him. "He came in like thunder," Maruja has said. She threw her arms around his neck, and their embrace was intense, long, and silent. The clamor of the reporters, who had overcome the owner's resistance and stormed into the house, broke the spell. Maruja gave a start. Villamizar smiled in amusement.

  "Your colleagues," he said.

  Maruja felt consternation. "I spent six months without looking in a mirror," she said. She smiled at her reflection, and it was not her. She stood erect, fluffed the hair pulled back at the nape of her neck, did what she could to make the woman in the mirror resemble the image of herself she had six months earlier. She failed.

  "I look awful," she said, and showed her husband her swollen, misshapen fingers. "I didn't realize because they took my ring."

  "You look perfect," Villamizar said.

  He put his arm around her shoulder and walked her to the living room.

  The reporters attacked with cameras, lights, and microphones. Maruja was dazzled. "Take it easy, guys," she said. "It'll be easier to talk in the apartment." Those were her first words.

  The seven o'clock news said nothing, but President Gaviria learned minutes later when he checked the radio that Maruja Pachon had been freed. He drove to her house with Mauricio Vargas, but earlier they had left an official announcement of the release of Francisco Santos, which they expected at any moment. Mauricio Vargas had read it into the journalists' tape recorders on the condition they not broadcast it until they received official notification.

  At this time Maruja was on her way home. A short while before she arrived, a rumor began to circulate that Pacho Santos had been freed, and the reporters unleashed the dog of the official announcement, which rushed out, barking with jubilation, over every station.

  The president and Mauricio Vargas heard it in the car and celebrated the idea of having prerecorded it. But five minutes later the report was retracted.

  "Mauricio," exclaimed Gaviria, "what a disaster!"

  All they could do, however, was hope that events would occur as announced. In the meantime, since the overflowing crowd made it impossible for them to stay in Villamizar's apartment, they went up one floor to the apartment of Aseneth Velasquez to wait for Pacho's true release after his three false ones.

  Pacho Santos had heard the announcement of Maruja's release, the premature announcement of his own, and the government's blunder. At that moment the man who had spoken to him in the morning came into his room, and led him by the arm, without a blindfold, down to the first floor. He saw that the house was empty, and one of his guards, convulsing with laughter, informed him they had moved out the furniture in a truck to avoid paying the last month's rent. They all said goodbye with huge hugs, and thanked Pacho for everything he had taught them. Pacho's reply was sincere:

  "I learned a lot from you too."

  In the garage they gave him a book to hold up to his face, as if he were reading, and intoned the warnings. If they ran into the police he had to jump out of the car so they could get away. And most important of all: He must not say he had been in Bogota, but somewhere three hours away along a terrible highway. They had a gruesome reason: His captors knew Pacho was astute enough to have formed an idea of where the house was located, and he could not reveal it because the guards had lived openly in the neighborhood, taking no precautions at all, during the long days of his captivity.

  "If you tell," the man in charge of his release concluded, "we'll have to kill all the neighbors to keep them from identifying us later on."

  Across from the police kiosk at the intersection of Avenida Boyaca and Calle 80, the car stalled. They tried to start it again two, three, four times, but it did not turn over until the fifth attempt. They were all in a cold sweat. They drove two more blocks, took away the book, and let Pacho out on the corner with three 2,000-peso bills for the taxi. He took the first one that passed, and its young, amiable driver refused to charge him, and with blasts of the horn and joyful shouts cut a path through the mob waiting outside Pacho's house. The yellow journalists were disappointed: They had been expecting an emaciated, defeated man after 244 days of captivity, and instead they saw a Pancho Santos rejuvenated in spirit and body, and fatter, more reckless, more in love with life than ever. "They returned him exactly the same," declared his cousin Enrique Santos Calderon. Another cousin, infected by the family's jubilant mood, said: "He needed another six months."

  By now Maruja was in her house. She had come home with Alberto, pursued by the mobile units that drove alongside them, preceded them, transmitting directly through all the snarled traffic. The drivers who were following the news on the radio recognized them as they passed and leaned on their horns in greeting, until the ovation spread all along the route.

  Andres Villamizar had tried to go back home when he lost sight of his father, but his driving was so merciless that the engine shook loose and
a rod broke. He left his automobile in the care of the police at the nearest kiosk, and stopped the first car that passed: a dark-gray BMW driven by a sympathetic executive who had been listening to the news. Andres told him who he was and why he needed help, and asked him to get as close to his house as he could.

  "Get in," said the man, "but I warn you, if you're lying I'll make things hard for you."

  At the corner of Carrera Septima and Calle 80, he happened to see a friend driving an old Renault. Andres continued on with her, but the car ran out of steam on the Circunvalar hill. Andres squeezed into the last white Jeep from the National Radio Network (RCN).

  The hill leading to the house was blocked by cars and a crowd of neighbors who had poured into the street. Maruja and Villamizar decided to leave the car and walk the last hundred meters, and without noticing it they got out at the same spot where she had been abducted. The first face Maruja recognized in the excited crowd was Maria del Rosario Ortiz, the originator and director of "Colombia Wants Them Back," which for the first time since its creation did not broadcast that night for lack of a subject. Then she saw Andres, who had jumped out of the Jeep and was trying to get to his house just as a tall, determined police officer ordered the street closed. Andres, in a moment of pure inspiration, looked him in the eye and said in a firm voice:

  "I'm Andres."

  The officer knew nothing about him but let him pass. Maruja recognized him while he was running toward her and they embraced to the sound of applause. Patrol cars had to open a path for them. Maruja, Alberto, and Andres began to climb the hill with full hearts, and were overcome by emotion. For the first time they burst into the tears that all three had wanted to hold back. And who could blame them: As far as the eye could see, a second crowd of good neighbors had hung flags from the windows of the tallest buildings and, with a springtime of white handkerchiefs and an immense ovation, saluted the jubilant adventure of her return home.