sisters. Each of them spoke of their wishes, although Pelolindo asked for nothing, and then returned to the living room. As they were about to leave Pablo asked her to return to his room. Her two sisters moved with her but he stopped them, “I didn’t call you.” When they were in his room he wondered why she hadn’t asked for something. Everybody always asked him for something, he said.
“I don’t see you like that,” she said. “I’m not here to ask you for anything. I don’t like to do that.” In response he planned and sponsored her high school graduation trip to a Colombian island in the Caribbean, San Andrés. All that he asked in return was that she would call him when she returned.
When she returned from the island he invited her to come back. This time she went with her cousin. To go up the mountain they were hidden in a false area of a jeep. “I went up there because I felt something special with him. I know he felt something too. But he was always respectful to me. And it did not feel like we were in a prison; instead I felt like we were in a very private place. I was nervous and anxious. But then I began to visit him often, sometimes four or five times a week. One day with him felt like a week.” And this continued for several months.
The truth is that their relationship never was sexual. Many stories have been written about Pablo and young women, but he was very quiet about that. In public he was always a gentleman. And with Pelolindo it remained sweet and innocent. When she came to the Cathedral they would take walks and talk. As she remembers, “Sometimes at night we would go to the soccer field and he would turn on the lights, and the two of us would play soccer. He’d pretend to be the goalkeeper and he would challenge me to score a goal. Score a goal! After showing me he could stop me, he would let me score.
“Sometimes after that we would cuddle and hug and watch TV,” she tells. But there was never sex between them. “If he had not been killed that probably would have happened in time, but it did not.” This girl suggested to Pablo that he put together albums of all the political cartoons about his life, an idea he embraced, and together they began putting together these books by hand. A few hundred were done, but only ten were done by hand and those had Pablo’s signature and thumbprint in gold on the cover. One night as they were working together she said to him, “The way I know you, sweet and romantic and caring, I can’t believe the other side of you is true.”
He smiled, she said, then responded, “Do you know who I am? Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“I know. But right now I see you as Pablo Escobar.” Often he asked to give her things. Once two of his men showed up at her school with a new car for her. And Pablo gave his word that he would use his contacts to help her have a successful career as a singer. Pablo’s wife knew about these visits and was not happy about them. But there was nothing she could do—and it remained a flirtation. A happy innocence.
He never told Perolindo he loved her or he’d missed her when she wasn’t there. But each night when she left he wanted to know exactly when she was coming back.
Pablo eventually came to trust her so much that he allowed her to have the combination to the safe in which he kept many thousands of dollars and pesos. Several times he let her open the trapdoor below his bed and go down alone into the hidden room where cash was kept. There was always a lot of money going out of the room, she remembers, but it stayed full of piles of cash.
Within a few months she began cutting his hair and taking care of his nails. In fact, there was a night Pablo decided he should be a blond, so she returned the next time with blond dye—but also black in case he didn’t like it. She dyed his hair blond to hide his white hairs. He looked in the mirror and hated it. He would be even more of a target as a blonde than black-haired. “Put it