Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (10 page)

A
T THE END OF
1962, at his father’s insistence, Paulo was forced to enrol in the science stream rather than the arts as he had hoped. His scholastic performance in the fourth year had been disastrous, and he had finished the year having to re-sit maths, the subject at which his father so excelled. In the end, he passed with a 5–not a decimal point more than the mark required to move on to the next year and remain at St Ignatius. In spite of this and Paulo’s declared intention to study the arts, his parents insisted that he study engineering and, following his appalling scholastic performance, he was in no position to insist.

However, from his point of view, the practical Pedro Coelho had reasons for hoping that his son might yet be saved and become an engineer. These hopes lay not only in the interest Paulo had shown in his grandfather’s success as a mechanic–professional and amateur. As a boy, Paulo had frequently asked his parents to buy him copies of the magazine
Mecânica Popular
, a publication dating from the 1950s that taught readers how to do everything from fixing floor polishers to building boats and houses. When he was ten or eleven he was so passionate about aeroplane modelling that any father would have seen in this a promising future as an aeronautical engineer. The difference was that, while lots of children play with model aeroplanes, Paulo set up the Clube Sunday, of which he and his
cousin Fred, who lived in Belém, were sole members. Since a distance of 3,000 kilometres separated them and their aeroplanes, the club’s activities ended up being a chronological list of the models each had acquired. At the end of each month, Paulo would record all this information in a notebook–the names and characteristics of the small planes they had acquired, the serial number, wing span, date and place of purchase, general construction expenses, the date, place and reason for the loss of the plane whenever this occurred. Not one of these pieces of information served any purpose, but ‘It was best to keep things organized,’ Paulo said. When the glider Chiquita smashed into a wall in Gávea, it was thought worthy of special mention: ‘It only flew once, but since it was destroyed heroically, I award this plane the Combat Cross. Paulo Coelho de Souza, Director.’

This fascination for model aeroplanes rapidly disappeared, but it gave way to another mania, even more auspicious for anyone wanting his son to be an engineer: making rockets. For some months Paulo and Renato Dias, a classmate at St Ignatius, spent all their spare time on this new activity. No one can say how or when it began–not even Paulo can remember–but the two spent any free time during the week in the National Library reading books about such matters as ‘explosive propulsion’, ‘solid fuels’ and ‘metallic combustibles’. On Sundays and holidays, the small square in front of the Coelho house became a launch pad. As was almost always the case with Paulo, everything had to be set down on paper first. In his usual meticulous way, he started a small notebook entitled ‘Astronautics–Activities to be Completed by the Programme for the Construction of Space Rockets’. Timetables stated the time taken on research in books, the specifications of materials used in the construction and the type of fuel. On the day of the launch, he produced a typewritten document with blank spaces to be filled in by hand at the time of the test, noting date, place, time, temperature, humidity and visibility.

The rockets were made of aluminium tubing about 20 centimetres in length and weighing 200 grams and had wooden nose cones. They were propelled by a fuel the boys had concocted out of ‘sugar, gunpowder, magnesium and nitric acid’. This concentrated mixture was placed in a container at the base of the rocket, and the explosive cocktail was detonated using a wick soaked in kerosene. The rockets were given illustrious
names: Goddard I, II and III, and Von Braun I, II and III, in homage, respectively, to the American aeronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard and the creator of the German flying bombs that devastated London during the Second World War, Werner von Braun. However, although the rockets were intended to rise up to 17 metres, they never did. On launch days, Paulo would take over a part of the pavement outside their house ‘for the public’ and convert a hole that the telephone company had forgotten to close up into a trench where he and his friend could shelter. He then invited his father, the servants and passers-by to sign the flight reports as ‘representatives of the government’. The rockets failed to live up to the preparations. Not one ever rose more than a few centimetres into the air and the majority exploded before they had even got off the ground. Paulo’s astronautical phase disappeared as fast as it had arrived and in less than six months the space programme was abandoned before a seventh rocket could be constructed.

Apart from these fleeting fancies–stamp-collecting was another–Paulo continued to nurture his one constant dream–to become a writer. When he was sixteen, his father, in a conciliatory gesture, offered him a flight to Belém, which, to Paulo, was a paradise on a par with Araruama. Nevertheless, he turned it down, saying that he would rather have a typewriter. His father agreed and gave him a Smith Corona, which would stay with him until it was replaced, first, by an electric Olivetti and, then, decades later, by a laptop computer.

His total lack of interest in education meant that he was among the least successful students in his class in the first year of his science studies and at the end of the year he once again scraped through with a modest 5.2 average. His report arrived on Christmas Eve. Paulo never quite knew whether it was because of his dreadful marks or an argument over the length of his hair, but on Christmas Day 1963, when the first group of relatives was about to arrive for Christmas dinner, his mother told him bluntly: ‘I’ve made an appointment for the 28th. I’m taking you to a nerve specialist.’

Terrified by what that might mean–what in God’s name was a nerve specialist?–he locked himself in his room and scribbled a harsh, almost cruel account of his relationship with his family:

The diary also reveals that the fear induced by the proposed visit to the specialist was unjustified. A day after the appointment he simply mentions the visit along with other unimportant issues:

He managed to achieve the required grades to pass the year and, according to the rules of the house, he therefore had the right to a holiday, which, this time, was to be in Belém. His holidays with his paternal grandparents, Cencita and Cazuza, had one enormous advantage over those spent in Araruama. At a time when a letter could take weeks to
arrive and a long-distance phone call sometimes took hours if not days to put through, the distance–more than 3,000 kilometres–between Rio and Belém meant that the young man was beyond the control of his parents or from any surprise visits. Adventures that were unthinkable in Rio were routine in Belém: drinking beer, playing snooker and sleeping out of doors with his three cousins, whose mother had died and who were being brought up by their grandparents. Such was the excitement and bustle of life there that within the first few days of his holiday, he had lost his penknife, his watch, his torch and the beloved Sheaffer fountain pen he had bought with his prize money. One habit remained: no matter what time he went to bed, he devoted the last thirty minutes before going to sleep to writing letters to his friends and reading the eclectic selection of books he had taken with him–books ranging from Erle Stanley Gardner’s detective story
The Case of the Calendar Girl
, to the encyclical
Pacem in Terris
, published in March 1963 by Pope John XXIII (‘Reading this book is increasing my understanding of society,’ he wrote).

He filled his letters to friends with news of his adventures in Belém, but in his letters to his father there was only one subject: money.

Belém appears to have been a city destined to provoke strong feelings in him. Three years before, on another trip there, he had at last had the chance to clarify a question that was troubling him: how were babies made? Earlier, he had plucked up the courage to ask Rui, a slightly older friend, but the reply, which was disconcertingly stark, appalled him: ‘Simple: the man puts his dick in the woman’s hole and when he comes, he leaves a seed in her stomach. That seed grows and becomes a person.’
He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine his father being capable of doing something so perverted with his mother. As this was not something that could be written about in a letter, he waited for the holidays in Belém so that he could find out from an appropriate person–his cousin, Fred, who as well as being older, was a member of the family, someone whose version he could trust. The first chance he had to speak to his cousin alone, he found a way of bringing the subject up and repeated the disgusting story his friend in Rio had told him. He almost had an asthma attack when he heard what Fred had to say: ‘Your friend in Rio is right. That’s how it is. The man enters the woman and deposits a drop of sperm in her vagina. That’s how everyone is made.’

Paulo reacted angrily. ‘You’re only telling me that because you haven’t got a mother and so you don’t have a problem with it. Can you really imagine your father penetrating your mother, Fred? You’re out of your mind!’

That loss of innocence was not the only shock Belém had in store for him. The city also brought him his first contact with death. Early on the evening of Carnival Saturday, when he arrived at his grandparents’ house after a dance at the Clube Tuna Luso, he was concerned to hear one of his aunts asking someone, ‘Does Paulo know?’ His grandfather Cazuza had just died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Paulo was extremely upset and shocked by the news, but he felt very important when he learned that Lygia and Pedro–since they were unable to get there in time–had named him the family’s representative at his grandfather’s funeral. As usual, he preferred to keep his feelings to himself, in the notes he made before going to sleep:

That same night he wrote ‘Memories’, a poem in three long stanzas dedicated to his grandfather. The pain the adolescent spoke of in prose and verse appeared sincere, but it was interwoven with other feelings. The following day, with his grandfather’s corpse still lying in the drawing room, Paulo caught himself sinning in thought against chastity several times, when he looked at the legs of his female cousins, who were there at the wake. On the Sunday evening, Cazuza’s funeral took place–‘a very fine occasion’, his grandson wrote in his diary–but on Shrove Tuesday, during the week of mourning, the cousins were already out having fun in the city’s clubs.

That holiday in Belém was not only the last he would spend there: it also proved to be a watershed in his life. He knew he was going to have a very difficult year at school. He felt even more negative about his studies than he had in previous years; and it was clear that his days at St Ignatius were numbered and equally clear that this would have consequences at home. There were not only dark clouds hanging over his school life either. At the end of the month, the day before returning to Rio, he flipped back in his diary to the day when he had written of his grandfather’s death and wrote in tiny but still legible writing: ‘I’ve been thinking today and I’ve begun to see the terrible truth: I’m losing my faith.’

This was not a new feeling. He had experienced his first religious doubts–gnawing away at him implacably and silently–during the retreat at St Ignatius when, troubled by sexual desire and tortured by guilt, he had been gripped by panic at the thought of suffering for all eternity in the apocalyptic flames described by Father Ruffier. He had turned to his diary to talk to God in a defiant tone ill suited to a true Christian: ‘It was You who created sin! It’s Your fault for not making me strong enough to resist! The fact that I couldn’t keep my word is Your fault!’ The following morning, he read this blasphemy and felt afraid. In desperation, he took his fellow pupil Eduardo Jardim to a place where they would not be seen or heard and broke his vow of silence to open up his heart to him.