In The London Review of Books, Jessica Loudis reviews the memoir of Victoria Eugenia Henao, Pablo Escobar’s wife. The book offers “a cautious reckoning polished by decades of therapy”:

Victoria Eugenia Henao​ was 12 years old when she first saw Pablo Escobar. It was 1972 and they were both living in Envigado, a working-class town half an hour south of Medellín in Colombia. Escobar was 23 and had a reputation as a ladies’ man: he would drive around on a Vespa wearing a white paisa poncho and cheap hair tonic. One day he noticed Henao in the street and started sending her gifts – chocolate bars, romantic albums, a pearl ring. By the time she was 15, they were married.

The Henaos grudgingly accepted their new son-in-law, but they weren’t happy about it. Her mother asked whether she wanted to spend her life ‘taking meals to Pablo in prison’. But Henao was willing to ignore her family’s disapproval as well as her new husband’s transgressions. ‘Being with a man I loved but who was a womaniser,’ she writes, ‘I came to accept that many situations are never to be spoken about.’ When he cheated, she wrote love letters to win him back; when he was arrested with 26 kilos of coca paste, she went by plane and overnight bus to take him lunch in prison (her mother had been right). In 1977, she gave birth to a son – her waters broke during a high-school English test – whom they named Juan Pablo, after the leading man in a soap opera about a couple whose love prevails over hardship.

Mrs. Escobar, Henao’s record of her years as the long-suffering wife of the world’s most infamous drug trafficker, opens with a question she has often been asked: ‘How could you sleep with that monster?’ Her answer is that she loved him, and, in retrospect, that she was too afraid to leave. Henao has lived with Escobar’s legacy far longer than she lived with Escobar, who was killed in 1993. She changed her name and the names of her children (Juan Pablo is now Sebastían, Manuela is Juana and she is María Isabel), fled Colombia, went into hiding and fought lawsuits, blackmail and media attacks. To cope with the stress, she studied for a diploma in ‘leadership and ontological coaching’ and came to rely on the services of an astrologer to Latin America’s elite, Mauricio Puerta, who has written the introduction to her book. (He attributes Escobar’s testy personality to being ‘a Sagittarius with Pisces rising, one of the most difficult combinations in the zodiac’.) She also corresponded with the families of several of her husband’s victims and began to understand what exactly Pablo was doing when he vanished for months at a time. This curiosity about the past was new. For many years, accepting that certain things were never to be discussed was a central tenet not only of her relationship, but of her life.

In his own memoir, published in 2014, Juan Pablo wrote that while he considered himself one of his father’s victims, he placed himself at the very bottom of the list. Henao makes no such claims: she chose to marry Escobar, even if she was a child at the time. But her story gets darker as it progresses, alternating between outlandishness and horror, between descriptions of extreme luxury and accounts of the violence and isolation they endured.

In other news: When Inigo Philbrick was arrested in Vanuatu last week, he was walking casually down the street in swim shorts and t-shirt. He had been using his real name for months on the island—to book tennis lessons and volunteer in an animal shelter. Everyone knew who he was. Why wasn’t he more cautious?

Amit Majmudar on an “evolutionary theory of poetry”: “In poetry, the earliest literary form, the earliest religions have left their traces. These traces are not mere prehistoric flora and fauna; they are the landscape itself, the mountains and valleys shaped by glaciers long since retreated. This has nothing to do with scriptural allusion or ‘religious imagery.’ (I suppose that to a pantheist poet, or a poet who located the divine in nature, like many a Romantic, all imagery would be religious.) There are, in religious poetry of any tradition, readily visible points of contact between the poem and the religion. We could fill a short book pointing out the ways this or that line of Milton’s echoes or alludes to scripture; we could track the figure of the angel in poetry from Dante to Rilke. All that would call for is a feat of meticulous erudition. What I want to examine lies deeper, in the elements that distinguish the art: metaphor, meter, rhyme. Poetry and religion have sprung from the same part of the mind; these two impulses, the poetic and the religious, are, if not the same, then twinned. And this shows up in how poetry works.”

John Wilson surveys the work of Stanislaw Lem: “Which of the six books should you take up to see if he’s your cup of tea? I nominate The Invincible, which happens to be one of my five favorites among Lem’s many books.”

Making sense of the sudden rise of the trans cult: “If you want to understand why suddenly it seems that (mostly) young girls from (mostly) white middle- or upper-class backgrounds (many of whom are in the same friend groups) have decided to start dressing like boys, cutting their hair short, changing their name to a masculine one, and even taking hormones, using chest compressors, and getting themselves surgically altered, you must read Abigail K. Shrier’s urgent new book, Irreversible Damage.”

Do the Pilgrims still matter? Nathanael Blake reviews John G. Turner’s They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty: “Beginning with the separatist movement in England and continuing until Plymouth was incorporated into Massachusetts in 1691, Turner provides an engaging account of the Pilgrims, from Calvinist theology to colonial politics. While validating some criticisms, he asserts that the Pilgrims matter for more than their legend, and he deftly uses the history of Plymouth to explore ideas of liberty in the American colonies.”

Is college worth it? Jonathan Zimmerman reviews five recent books on the topic: “Every fall I begin my freshman seminar on higher education by asking students to guess how many colleges in the United States admit fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. Estimates range from several hundred to a thousand. The correct answer is forty-six. These schools represent between 1 and 2 percent of the roughly three thousand four-year higher-education institutions in the country. But they include the colleges that I attended, as did my parents and my children; I imagine that many readers of these pages attended them as well. I would also wager that many of us went to college when we were around eighteen, lived on campus, majored in the arts and sciences rather than in preprofessional fields, and received our degrees in four years. We’re the exception, not the rule. Of the roughly 70 percent of American high school graduates who enroll in college, 40 percent attend community college, which is almost never residential; more than a quarter of undergraduates are twenty-five or older; most major in business, the health sciences, or other preprofessional subjects; and they take an average of six years to complete college, if they finish it at all.”

Photos: Iowa

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