News of a Kidnapping (13 page)

Their accumulated debts drove the owners to distraction,
and they had to pawn the television, the VCR, the stereo, whatever, to feed the hostage. The wife’s jewelry began to disappear from her throat, wrists, and ears, until there was nothing left. Once, in the middle of the night, the owner woke Hero Buss to ask for a loan because his wife had gone into labor and he did not have a penny to pay the hospital. Hero Buss lent him his last fifty
thousand pesos.

They freed him on December 11, two weeks after Juan Vitta. For the occasion they bought him a pair of shoes that he could not use because he wore size 46 and the largest they could find, after much searching, was a 44. They bought him a shirt and trousers two sizes smaller because he had lost thirty-five pounds. They returned his camera equipment and the bag with his notebooks
hidden in the lining, and they paid him back the fifty thousand pesos for the birth and another fifteen thousand he had lent them earlier to replace money that had been stolen from them at the market. They offered him a great deal more, but the only thing he asked them for was an interview with Pablo Escobar. They never replied.

The crew that had been with him in recent days drove him away in
a private car. After taking a circuitous route through the best neighborhoods in Medellín, they dropped him half a block from the newspaper
El Colombiano
, with his bags on his back and a message from the Extraditables; it recognized his struggle in defense of human rights in Colombia and other Latin American countries, and reiterated the determination of the Extraditables to accept the capitulation
policy with no conditions other than judicial guarantees of safety for themselves and their families. A journalist
to the end, Hero Buss handed his camera to the first passerby and asked him to take a picture of his release.

Diana and Azucena heard the news on the radio, and their guards said they would be next. But they had been told the same thing so often, they did not believe it. In the event
only one was freed, each woman wrote a letter for the other to give to her family. And then nothing happened, nothing else was said, until two days later—at dawn on December 13—when Diana was awakened by whispers and unusual movements in the house. The feeling that they would be released made her jump out of bed. She alerted Azucena, and before anyone announced anything to them they began to
pack.

Both Diana and Azucena recounted that dramatic moment in their journals. Diana was in the shower when one of the guards, without any ceremony, told Azucena to get ready to go. Only Azucena. In the book she would publish a short while later, she narrated this with admirable simplicity:

I went to the room and put on the clothes I had laid out on the chair while doña Diana was still in the
bathroom. When she came out and saw me she stopped, looked at me, and said:

“Are we going, Azu?”

Her eyes shone, waiting for the answer she longed to hear. And I could not tell her anything. I lowered my head, took a deep breath, and said:

“No. I’m going alone.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Diana said. “I knew it would be this way.”

In her diary, Diana wrote: “I felt as if I had been stabbed in
the heart, but I said I was happy for her, and not to worry.” She gave
Azucena the letter to Nydia she had written earlier, in the event she was not released. In the letter she asked Nydia to celebrate Christmas with Diana’s children. Azucena was crying, and Diana put her arms around her to comfort her. Then she walked with Azucena to the car, and they embraced again. Azucena turned to watch her
through the car window, and Diana waved goodbye.

An hour later, in the car that was taking her to the Medellín airport where she would catch a plane to Bogotá, Azucena heard a reporter on the radio asking her husband what he had been doing when he heard the news of her release. He replied with the truth:

“I was writing a poem for Azucena.”

And so their wish was granted, and they were together
on December 16 to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary.

Ricardo and Orlando, tired of sleeping on the floor of their foul-smelling cell, persuaded the guards to put them in another room. They moved the hostages to the bedroom where they had seen the handcuffed mulatto, whom they never saw again. To their horror, they discovered that the mattress on the bed had large, recent bloodstains
that might have come either from slow tortures or sudden slashes with a knife.

They had learned of the release of other hostages on television and radio. Their guards had said they would be next. Very early on December 17 a boss they knew as the Old Man—and who in fact was the same don Pacho in charge of Diana—walked into Orlando’s room without knocking.

“Put on some clothes because you’re leaving
now,” he said.

He barely had time to shave and dress, and no time to tell Richard, who was in the same house. They gave him a communiqué for the press, put a pair of strong glasses over his eyes, and the Old Man, on his own, drove him with the ritual twists and turns through various neighborhoods in Medellín, gave him five thousand pesos for a cab, and left him at a traffic circle he could
not
identify because he does not know the city. It was nine in the morning on a cool, clear Monday. Orlando could not believe it: Until that moment, while he signaled in vain for cabs that were all occupied, he had been sure it would be cheaper for his captors to kill him than run the risk of freeing him while he was alive. He called his wife from the first telephone he saw.

Liliana was bathing the
baby, and ran to answer the phone with soapy hands. She heard a stranger’s calm voice:

“Slim, it’s me.”

She thought it was a joke and was about to hang up when she recognized his voice. “Oh my God,” she cried. Orlando was in such a hurry he only managed to tell her he was still in Medellín and would be in Bogotá that afternoon. Liliana was tormented the rest of the day because she had not recognized
her husband’s voice. Juan Vitta had told her when he was released that Orlando had changed so much in captivity that it was hard to recognize him, but she never thought the change would affect even his voice. That afternoon at the airport it was even worse when she made her way through the crowd of reporters and did not recognize the man who kissed her. But it was Orlando after four months
of captivity, fat and pale, with a dark, rough mustache. Each of them had decided on their own to have a second child as soon as they were together again. “But there were so many people around we couldn’t that night,” Liliana has said, weak with laughter. “Or the next day either, because of the shock.” But at last they made up for lost time: Nine months after the third day they had another boy,
and twins the following year.

The series of releases—a breath of hope for the other captives and their families—were a convincing sign to Pacho Santos that no reasonable progress had been made in his favor. He thought Pablo Escobar had simply gotten rid of the low cards to increase the pressure for amnesty and non-extradition in the Constituent
Assembly, and was holding on to his three aces:
the daughter of a former president, the son of the publisher of the most important paper in the country, and the sister-in-law of Luis Carlos Galán. Beatriz and Marina, on the other hand, felt renewed hope, though Maruja preferred not to deceive herself with overly optimistic interpretations. Her spirits were low, and the approach of Christmas was devastating. She despised obligatory holidays. She
never put up crèches or Christmas trees, did not send cards or give gifts, and found nothing more depressing than dreary Christmas Eve celebrations when people sing because they’re sad or cry because they’re happy. The majordomo and his wife prepared a ghastly dinner. Beatriz and Marina made an effort to join in, but Maruja took two strong sleeping pills and woke with no regrets.

On the following
Wednesday, Alexandra’s weekly program was devoted to Christmas night at Nydia’s house with the entire Turbay family around the former president, along with the families of Beatriz, and of Maruja and Alberto Villamizar. The children were in the foreground: Diana’s two boys, and Maruja’s grandson—Alexandra’s son. Maruja wept with emotion: The last time she had seen him he barely babbled a few words,
and now he could talk. At the end, Villamizar spoke, slowly and in great detail, about the progress of his efforts. Maruja summed up the program with absolute precision: “It was very nice, and really awful.”

Villamizar’s message raised Marina Montoya’s spirits. She became human again and revealed the greatness of her heart. With a political acumen they had not known she possessed, she began to
show interest in listening to the news and interpreting its significance. Her analysis of the decrees led her to conclude that their chances for freedom were greater than ever. Her health improved so much that she ignored the rules and spoke in her natural voice, which was beautiful and well modulated.

December 31 was their big night. When Damaris brought breakfast she said they would celebrate
with a real party, complete with champagne and a pork roast. Maruja thought it would be the
saddest night of her life, the first New Year’s Eve away from her family, and she sank into depression. Beatriz was in a state of total collapse. The last thing they wanted was a party. Marina, however, was overjoyed by the news and used all her persuasive powers to cheer them up, even the guards.

“We
have to be fair,” she told Maruja and Beatriz. “They’re away from their families too, and our job is to make their New Year’s Eve as pleasant as it can be.”

She had been given three nightgowns on the night of her abduction, but she had used only one and kept the other two in her bag. Later, when Maruja and Beatriz were captured, the three women used sweatsuits as their prison uniform, washing
them every two weeks.

No one thought about the nightgowns again until the afternoon of December 31, when Marina carried her enthusiasm one step further. “I have an idea,” she said. “I have three nightgowns here, and we’ll wear them for good luck in the new year.” And she asked Maruja:

“All right, darling, which color do you want?”

Maruja said it was all the same to her. Marina decided that
green suited her best. She gave the pink gown to Beatriz, and kept the white one for herself. Then she took a cosmetics case out of her bag, and suggested they make each other up. “So we’ll look pretty tonight,” she said. Maruja, who’d had all she could bear with the idea of dressing up in nightgowns, turned her down with sour humor.

“I’ll go so far as to put on the nightgown,” she said. “But
paint myself up like a madwoman, under these circumstances? No, Marina, that’s something I won’t do.”

Marina shrugged.

“Well, I will.”

Because they had no mirror, she handed the case to Beatriz and sat down on the bed to be made up. Beatriz did a complete and tasteful job in the light of the bedside candle, some blush to hide
the deathly pallor of her skin, bright lipstick, eye shadow. They
were both surprised at how attractive this woman, who had been famous for her grace and beauty, could still look. Beatriz settled for her ponytail and schoolgirl appearance.

That night Marina displayed all her irresistible Antioquian charm. The guards followed suit, and they all said what they had to say in their God-given voices, except the majordomo, who even on the high seas of intoxication
still spoke in whispers. Spots, emboldened by drink, found the courage to give Beatriz a bottle of aftershave: “So you can all smell nice when you get a million hugs on the day you’re released,” he said to the women. The boorish majordomo could not let it pass and said it was the gift of a secret admirer. A new terror was added to the many that plagued Beatriz.

The party consisted of the hostages,
the majordomo and his wife, and the four guards. Beatriz had an unbearable lump in her throat. Maruja felt nostalgic and embarrassed, but even so she could not hide her admiration for Marina who looked splendid, rejuvenated by makeup, with her white gown and snowy hair, her delicious voice. It was inconceivable that Marina could be happy, but she made everyone think she was.

She joked with the
guards who lifted their masks to drink. Sometimes, when the heat got to be too much for them, they asked the hostages to turn their backs so they could take a free breath. At midnight, when the fire engine sirens wailed and the church bells rang, they were all crowded into the room, sitting on the bed, on the mattress, sweating in the infernal heat. The national anthem began to play on television.
Then Maruja stood and told them all to get to their feet and sing with her. When it was over she raised her glass of apple wine and made a toast to peace in Colombia. The party ended half an hour later when the bottles were empty and nothing was left on the platter but bones and the remains of some potato salad.

The hostages greeted the replacement crew of guards with a
sigh of relief, for they
were the same ones who had been waiting for them on the night of the abduction and the prisoners knew how to deal with them. Maruja in particular felt a sense of deliverance, for her poor health had kept her in low spirits. At first her terror had taken the form of erratic pains all over her body, which forced her into uncomfortable postures. But then the pain became concrete as a result of the
inhuman regime imposed by the guards. Early in December, to punish her rebelliousness, they would not allow her to use the bathroom for an entire day, and when at last they gave permission, nothing happened. This was the beginning of a chronic cystitis, and then bleeding, which lasted until the end of her captivity.

Marina, who had learned sports massage from her husband, committed her meager
strength to healing her. She still had high spirits left over from New Year’s Eve. She remained optimistic, told stories: She was alive. The inclusion of her name and photograph in a television campaign in support of the hostages restored her sense of hope and joy. She was her old self again: She existed again, she was there. Her picture was always shown in the first segment of the campaign, and
then one day, with no explanation, it did not appear. Maruja and Beatriz did not have the heart to tell her that perhaps she had been removed from the list because no one thought she was still alive.