Free News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Page B

heard on the radio that Pope John Paul II had called for the release of the hostages, one of the guards shouted:
    “What the hell is that son of a bitch sticking his nose in for?”
    Another guard jumped to his feet, offended by the insult, and the hostages had to intervene to keep them from pulling out their guns and shooting each other. Except for that incident, Hero Bussand Richard took everything as a joke to avoid bad feelings. Orlando, for his part, thought he was odd man out, that his name headed the list of those who would be executed.
    At this time the captives had been divided into three groups in three different houses: Richard and Orlando in one, Hero Buss and Juan Vitta in another, and Diana and Azucena in a third. The first two groups were transportedby taxi in plain view through snarled midtown traffic, while every security agency in Medellín was hunting for them. They were put in a house that was still under construction, into one two-by-two-meter room that was more like a cell, with a filthy unlit bathroom, and four men guarding them. They slept on two mattresses on the floor. In an adjoining room that was always locked, there was anotherhostage for whom—the guards said—they were demanding millions of pesos in ransom. A stout mulatto with a heavy gold chain around his neck, he was kept handcuffed and in total isolation.
    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 privateconversations, 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 forgottento 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 werefamily and gave them medals and pictures of miracle-working saints in the hope they would help themgo 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 asbricklayers. 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 isolatedact, 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 publicationbut of a