News of a Kidnapping (7 page)

The large, comfortable house where Diana and Azucena were taken and held for most of their captivity seemed to be the private residence of a high-ranking boss. They ate at the family table, took part in private
conversations, listened to the latest CDs, Rocío Durcal and Juan Manuel Serrat among them, according to Azucena’s notes. This was the house where Diana saw a television program filmed in her own apartment in Bogotá, which reminded her that she had hidden the keys to the armoire but could not recall if they were behind the cassettes or the television in the bedroom. She also realized she had forgotten
to lock the safe in the rush to leave on her calamitous trip. “I hope nobody’s rummaging around in there,” she wrote in a letter to her mother. A few days later, on what seemed an ordinary television program, she received a reassuring reply.

Life in the house did not seem affected by the presence of the hostages. There were visits from women they did not know who treated them as if they were
family and gave them medals and pictures of miracle-working saints in the hope they would help them
go free. There were visits from entire families with their children and dogs who scampered through all the rooms. The worst thing was the bad weather. The few times the sun shone they could not go outside to enjoy it because there were always men working. Or, perhaps, they were guards dressed as
bricklayers. Diana and Azucena took pictures of each other in bed, and there was no sign yet of any physical changes. In another taken of Diana three months later, she looked very thin and much older.

On September 19, when she learned of the abductions of Marina Montoya and Francisco Santos, Diana understood—with no access to information from the outside—that her kidnapping was not an isolated
act, as she thought at first, but a long-term political operation to force the terms for Escobar’s surrender. Don Pacho confirmed this: There was a select list of journalists and celebrities who would be abducted as necessary to further the interests of the abductors. It was then she decided to keep a diary, not so much to narrate her days as to record her states of mind and interpretations of events.
She wrote down everything: anecdotes of her captivity, political analyses, human observations, one-sided dialogues with her family or with God, the Virgin, the Holy Infant. Several times she transcribed entire prayers—including the Our Father and Hail Mary—as an original, perhaps more profound way of saying prayers in writing.

It is obvious that Diana was not thinking about a text for publication
but of a political and personal journal that the dynamic of events transformed into a poignant conversation with herself. She wrote in her large, rounded hand, clear-looking but difficult to decipher, that completely filled the spaces between the lines in her copybook. At first she wrote in secret, in the middle of the night, but when the guards discovered what she was doing they gave her enough
paper and pencils to keep her busy while they slept.

She made the first entry on September 27, a week after the kidnapping of Marina and Pacho, and it read: “Since Wednesday the 19th, when the man in charge of this operation came here, so
many things have happened that I can hardly catch my breath.” She asked herself why their abduction had not been acknowledged by those responsible, and her
reply to herself was so that perhaps they could kill them with no public outcry in the event the hostages did not serve their ends. “That’s my understanding of it and it fills me with horror,” she wrote. She was more concerned with her companions’ condition than with her own, and was interested in news from any source that would allow her to draw conclusions about their situation. She had always been
a practicing Catholic, like the rest of her family, her mother in particular, and as time passed her devotion would become more intense and profound until it reached mystical states. She prayed to God and the Virgin for everyone who had anything to do with her life, even Pablo Escobar. “He may have more need of your help,” she wrote to God in her diary. “May it be your will that he see the good
and avoid more grief, and I ask you to help him understand our situation.”

There is no doubt that the most difficult thing for everyone was learning to live with the guards. The four assigned to Maruja and Beatriz were young, uneducated, brutal, and volatile boys who worked in twos for twelve-hour shifts, sitting on the floor, their submachine guns at the ready. All in T-shirts with advertisements
printed on them, sneakers, and shorts they had cut themselves with shears. When the shift came in at six in the morning, one could sleep until nine while the other stood guard, but both would almost always fall asleep at the same time. Maruja and Beatriz thought that if a police assault team raided the house early in the morning, the guards would not have time to wake up.

The boys’ common condition
was absolute fatalism. They knew they were going to die young, they accepted it, and cared only about living for the moment. They made excuses to themselves for their reprehensible work: It meant helping the family,
buying nice clothes, having motorcycles, and ensuring the happiness of their mothers, whom they adored above all else in the world and for whose sakes they were willing to die. They
venerated the same Holy Infant and Lady of Mercy worshipped by their captives, and prayed to them every day with perverse devotion, for they implored their protection and forgiveness and made vows and sacrifices so that their crimes would be successful. Second only to the saints, they worshipped Rohypnol, a tranquilizer that allowed them to commit movie exploits in real life. “You mix it with beer
and get high right away,” explained one guard. “Then somebody lends you a good knife and you steal a car and go for a ride. The fun is how scared they look when they hand you the keys.” They despised everything else: politicians, the government, the state, the law, the police, all of society. Life, they said, was shit.

At first it was impossible to tell them apart because the only thing the women
could see was their masks, and all the guards looked the same. In other words, like only one guard. In time they learned that masks can hide faces but not character. This was how they individualized them. Each mask had a different identity, its own personality, an unmistakable voice. Even more: It had a heart. Without wanting to, they came to share the loneliness of confinement with them. They
played cards and dominoes and helped each other solve crosswords and puzzles in old magazines.

Marina was submissive to her jailers’ rules, but she was not impartial. She was fond of some and despised others, gossiped to them about the others as if she were their mother, and sooner or later provoked internal discord that threatened peace in the room. But she obliged them to pray the rosary, and
they all did.

Among the guards on duty during the first month, there was one who suffered from sudden and recurrent fits of rage. They called him Barrabás. He adored Marina and caressed and flirted with her. But from the first day he was Maruja’s bitter enemy. With
no warning he would go wild, kicking the television and banging his head against the wall.

The strangest guard was somber, silent,
very thin, and almost six and a half feet tall. He wore a second dark-blue sweatshirt hood on top of his mask, like a demented monk. And that’s what they called him: Monk. For long periods he would crouch down in a kind of trance. He must have been there a long time because Marina knew him very well and singled him out for special favors. He would bring her gifts when he came back from his time
off, including a plastic crucifix that Marina hung around her neck on the ordinary string it had when she received it. She was the only hostage who had seen his face: Before Maruja and Beatriz arrived, none of the guards wore a mask or did anything to hide his identity. Marina had interpreted this as a sign she would not leave her prison alive. She said he was a good-looking teenager with the most
beautiful eyes she had ever seen, and Beatriz believed it because his lashes were so long and curly they protruded from the holes in his mask. He was capable of the best and worst actions. It was he who discovered that Beatriz wore a chain with a medal of the Virgin of Miracles.

“No chains are allowed here,” he said. “You have to give that to me.”

Beatriz protested, distraught.

“You can’t take
it away,” she said. “That would be a really bad omen, something awful will happen to me.”

Her distress was contagious and affected him. He said medals were not allowed because they might have long-distance electronic trackers inside. But he found the solution:

“Here’s what we can do,” he proposed. “You keep the chain but give me the medal. I’m sorry, but those are my orders.”

Spots, on the
other hand, suffered panic attacks and was obsessed by the idea that he would be killed. He heard imaginary noises, and he pretended to have a huge scar on his face, perhaps
to confuse anyone trying to identify him. He cleaned everything he touched with alcohol so he would leave no fingerprints. Marina made fun of him, but he could not control his manias. He would wake with a start in the middle
of the night. “Listen!” he whispered in terror. “It’s the cops!” One night he put out the candle and Maruja walked into the bathroom door, hitting her head so hard she almost passed out. To make matters worse, Spots shouted at her for not knowing how to walk in the dark.

“Cut it out,” she stood up to him. “This isn’t a gangster movie.”

The guards seemed like hostages too. They were not allowed
in the rest of the house, and when they were not on duty they slept in another room that was padlocked so they could not escape. They were all from the Antioquian countryside, they did not know Bogotá, and one said that when they had time off, every three or four weeks, they were blindfolded or put in the trunk of the car so they would not know where they were. Another was afraid he would be killed
when he was no longer needed, a guarantee he would take his secrets to the grave. Bosses in hoods and better clothes would put in irregular appearances to receive reports and give instructions. Their decisions were unpredictable, and both the hostages and the guards were at their mercy.

The captives’ breakfast—coffee and a corncake with sausage on top—would arrive at any hour. For lunch they
had beans or lentils in grayish water, bits of meat in puddles of grease, a spoonful of rice, and a soda. They had to eat sitting on the mattress because there was no chair in the room, and they had to use only a spoon because knives and forks were not allowed for reasons of security. At supper they made do with reheated beans and other leftovers from lunch.

The guards said that the owner of
the house, whom they called the majordomo, kept most of their allotment of money. He was a robust man in his forties, of medium height, whose satyr’s face could be guessed at from his nasal voice and the tired, bloodshot
eyes visible through the holes in his hood. He lived with a short, shrill woman who wore shabby clothes and had rotting teeth. Her name was Damaris, and she sang salsa,
vallenatos,
and
bambucos
all day at the top of her lungs and with the ear of an artilleryman but with so much enthusiasm it was impossible not to imagine her dancing alone to her own music in every room of the house.

The plates, glasses, and sheets were used over and over again without being washed until the hostages protested. The toilet could be flushed only four times a day, and the bathroom was locked
on Sundays when the family went out so the neighbors would not hear the sound of running water. The guards urinated in the sink or the shower drain. Damaris attempted to conceal her negligence only when she heard the bosses’ helicopter, and then she moved like lightning, using a fireman’s technique to wash down floors and walls with a hose. She watched soap operas every morning until one, the hour
when she tossed the food for lunch into a pressure cooker—meat, vegetables, potatoes, beans all mixed together—and heated it until the whistle blew.

Her frequent arguments with her husband displayed a capacity for rage and an originality in creating curses that sometimes reached inspired heights. She had two daughters, aged nine and seven, who attended a nearby school and on occasion invited
other children to watch television or play in the courtyard. Their teacher dropped in from time to time on Saturdays, and other noisier friends came by any day of the week and had impromptu parties with music. Then the door of the room was padlocked and those inside had to turn off the radio, watch television without the sound, and not use the bathroom even in an emergency.

Toward the end of
October, Diana Turbay observed that Azucena was distracted and melancholy. She had not spoken the whole day, and was in no frame of mind to talk about anything. This was not unusual: Her powers of concentration were extraordinary,
above all when she was reading, in particular if the book was the Bible. But this time her silence coincided with her alarming mood and exceptional pallor. After some
urging, she revealed to Diana that for the past two weeks she had been afraid she was pregnant. Her calculations were exact. She had been a hostage for more than fifty days, and had missed two periods in a row. Diana was overjoyed at the good news—a typical reaction for her—but took responsibility for Azucena’s distress.

On one of his early visits, don Pacho had promised them that they would
be released on the first Thursday in October. They believed him because major changes occurred: better treatment, better food, greater freedom of movement. And yet there was always some pretext for shifting the date. After the Thursday had passed, they were told they would be freed on December 9 to celebrate the election of the Constituent Assembly. And so it continued—Christmas, New Year’s Day, Epiphany,
somebody’s birthday—in a string of delays that seemed like little spoonfuls of consolation.

Don Pacho continued to visit them in November. He brought new books, current newspapers, back issues of magazines, and boxes of chocolates. He spoke about the other hostages. When Diana learned she was not the prisoner of Father Pérez, she was determined to have an interview with Pablo Escobar, not so
much to publish it—if in fact it was true—as for the chance to discuss with him the terms of his surrender. At the end of October, don Pacho said her request had been approved. But the newscasts of November 7 struck the first mortal blow to her illusions: The broadcast of the soccer game between Medellín and El Nacional was interrupted by the announcement that Maruja Pachón and Beatriz Villamizar
had been abducted.