Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (12 page)

Immersed in these lofty ideas, he viewed with horror the prospect of going back to Andrews College. Tormented by the mere thought of it, he dreamed up a plan which, if it succeeded, would free him from school for a good two years: to get a study grant and leave the country, as several of his schoolfriends had done. His parents found renewed hope when he applied to join the American Field Service, a cultural exchange programme that was much in vogue at the time. Judging by his marks, he wasn’t entirely useless at English (a subject in which, by his standards, he always did fairly well), and that would certainly help in obtaining the grant. For two weeks, he dedicated his free time to getting together all the necessary documents: school certificates, passport-size photos, references. When the exams came around, the seven other applicants in his group for the one place were whittled down until there remained only Paulo and two others who were to take the decisive test–the interview in English with someone from the United States.

On the day, he was so nervous that as he sat down in front of the examiner–a girl his own age–he felt a jolt, as though he had been punched in the chest. He set aside his atheism and silently begged God to let this be a false alarm. It was not: he was having an asthma attack. A dry whistle rose from his lungs while, eyes bulging, he patted his pockets, searching for his inhaler. He tried to talk, but all that came out was a whisper. The American
girl didn’t know what to do. After a few minutes, the attack subsided. Pulling himself together, he managed to complete the interview, but he left with misgivings: ‘I think that asthma attack has ruined my chances.’ Indeed, a month before he would have been due to leave for the United States, a telegram arrived informing him that he had not been selected. Instead of feeling downhearted at this failure, Paulo attributed it not to his poor performance but to the fact that his mother had visited the States earlier. ‘I think they’d prefer people whose relatives have never been to the United States,’ he wrote, finishing with a statement worthy of the fox in the fable when faced with the bunch of grapes he cannot reach: ‘They believe, at least this is how I interpret it, that I’m too much of an intellectual for America.’

It was at this time that a new, overwhelming passion entered his life: a flesh-and-blood passion with brown eyes and long legs and answering to the name of Márcia. At seventeen, Paulo was still skinny and rather short, even by Brazilian standards. He weighed 50 kilos, which was at least 10 kilos below the ideal for his height of 1.69 metres (he remains this height to this day). Added to this, he was not an attractive adolescent. ‘I was ugly, skinny, lacking in charm and incapable of getting a girlfriend,’ he has said in various interviews throughout his life. ‘I had an inferiority complex about the way I looked.’ While the majority of boys wore short-sleeved, close-fitting shirts, to show off their muscles, he would always wear a long-sleeved shirt that concealed his narrow shoulders and thin arms. A disproportionately wide leather belt held up his faded jeans which, as fashion decreed, were tight on the legs. He wore the same metal-framed spectacles with tinted lenses that, years later, would become the trademark of the Beatle John Lennon. His hair was almost shoulder-length, and he had started to cultivate a thin moustache and a tuft of hair under his lower lip.

Márcia was a year younger than Paulo and lived almost next door. She was also a pupil at Andrews College and a member of Rota 15. In spite of vigilance on the part of her parents and older brother, she was seen by her colleagues as a fun-loving girl and was, therefore, in great demand. With his self-confidence at rock bottom, Paulo didn’t even notice her looking at him when he was arguing with the other ‘intellectuals’ in the
group about films, books and plays. Although the majority of the group didn’t even know the meaning of the word, they almost all felt that they were ‘existentialists’. Paulo never wore smart clothes, he didn’t have a car and he wasn’t strong, but Márcia melted whenever she heard him talking about books or reciting famous poems. He, however, was oblivious to this until she took the initiative.

On New Year’s Eve 1964, Paulo closed yet another notebook with the melancholy words: ‘Today is the last day of 1964, a year that’s coming to an end with a sob hidden in the dark night. A year crowned with bitterness.’ And it was in this same downbeat mood that he met up with his friends two days later, on a Saturday, to go to the show
Opinião
, featuring the singer Nara Leão, at the Arena Theatre in Copacabana. The group took their seats and Márcia happened to sit next to him. When the lights dimmed and Nara began to sing, Márcia felt something brush her hand. She glanced sideways and saw Paulo’s hand lying close to hers. She immediately entwined her fingers in his and squeezed lightly. He was so astonished that his first reaction was one of panic: what if he had an asthma attack right there? However, he calmed down. ‘I was certain that God had guided Márcia’s hand towards mine,’ he recalled later. ‘In that case, why would He give me an asthma attack?’ So he began to breathe like any mortal and the two fell desperately in love.

When the show came to an end, Nara Leão gave several encores, but, still holding hands, the young couple took advantage of the dark, and escaped from the crowded theatre. They took off their shoes and walked barefoot, hand-in-hand, along Copacabana beach. Paulo put his arms around her and tried to kiss her, but Márcia pulled back gently, saying: ‘I’ve never been kissed on the mouth before.’

He reacted like a veritable Don Juan: ‘Don’t worry. I’ve kissed lots of girls. You’ll like it.’

In the suffocating heat and under the starry Rio night, the two liars shared a long kiss, which both would remember warmly more than forty years later. The year 1965 could not have got off to a more encouraging start.

Paulo’s relationship with Márcia brought him a peace of mind he had never known before, not even during the best times in Araruama and
Belém. He wasn’t even upset when he learned that he hadn’t been placed in a poetry competition held by the Instituto Nacional do Mate. ‘Who cares about prizes,’ he wrote magnanimously, ‘when they’re loved by a woman like Márcia?’ He now filled whole pages of his diary with drawings of hearts pierced by love’s arrow and with their two names written on them.

This happiness was short-lived. Before the summer was over, Márcia’s parents found out the name of her boyfriend, and they were adamant that he was not the one for her. And when she wanted to know the reason for this ban, her mother was disconcertingly frank: ‘In the first place he’s really ugly. I can’t understand what a pretty girl like you could see in such an ugly, awkward boy. You’re someone who likes parties, and he doesn’t even know how to dance and would be embarrassed to ask a girl to dance. The only thing he’s interested in is books. Added to that, he looks rather sickly…’

Márcia retorted that he was perfectly healthy. He had asthma, like millions of others, but it could be cured and certainly wasn’t a blot on his character. Her mother feared that he might have other, contagious illnesses: ‘I’ve even been told that he’s an existentialist and a communist. So we’re not going to discuss it any further.’

For her daughter, the matter was far from being closed. She recounted the entire episode to her boyfriend and the two decided to deal with the situation as best they could. They began to meet secretly in the homes of mutual friends, but because there were very few safe places, their intimate moments together were exceedingly rare and usually occurred in a pedalo on Lake Rodrigo de Freitas. Not that they ever went beyond the preliminaries. Paulo pretended to be experienced, but in fact up until then he had had only one sexual relationship, some months earlier, when, taking advantage of his parents’ absence, he had managed to convince Madalena, a pretty maid whom his mother had recently employed, to go up to his room with him. Although she was only eighteen, Madá–as she was known–was experienced enough for the boy to retain a happy memory of that first night.

When they learned that their daughter was still meeting ‘that creature’ behind their backs, Márcia’s parents increased their vigilance and
refused to allow her to speak to Paulo on the phone. However, it was soon discovered that they had each put an alarm clock under their pillow to wake them at four in the morning when, in the silence of the night, they could whisper words of love, their mouths pressed to the receiver. The punishment for this disobedience was still harsher: she was to remain in the house for a month. Márcia refused to give up. With the help of the maid she would send notes to her boyfriend in which she would say when he should go and stand beneath the window of her room, where she was shut away. One morning, she woke to find a declaration of love scrawled in the tarmac in enormous letters: ‘M: I love you. P.’

Márcia’s mother returned to the charge: Paulo wasn’t right for her, it wouldn’t work out, he had no future and no prospects. The girl responded, undaunted, that she would certainly not break up with her boyfriend. She planned to marry Paulo one day. On hearing this, one of her aunts suggested that a sickly boy like him might not have the physical strength to fulfil his conjugal obligations. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, my dear,’ she went on. ‘Marriage, sex, children…Do you think that, weak as he is, he’ll be able to lead a normal life?’ Márcia appeared unconcerned by such threats. As soon as she had served her term of punishment, she went back to meeting Paulo. They had discovered an ideal spot: the church of Our Lady of the Conception, which was close to both their houses. They never sat next to each other, but one would sit in front of the other so that they wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and there they would talk in whispers. Despite all their precautions, they were caught by Márcia’s father, who dragged her home screaming and punished her by beating her with a belt.

She, however, seemed firmly determined to love, become engaged to and marry her Prince Charming. His parents weren’t over-enthusiastic about their son’s choice either. Since it was usual for his friends to hold small parties in their homes, Paulo managed to persuade his parents to allow him to hold one in theirs. It was a disaster. When they saw their son dancing cheek-to-cheek with his girlfriend, his father stood, arms crossed, beside them, staring angrily until Márcia, embarrassed, moved away and joined a group of girlfriends. And he did the same with Paulo’s other guests. If he saw a boy and girl dancing too close or with the boy’s hand
below the girl’s waist, he would stand right next to them until they ‘showed some manners’. In addition, the master of the house had forbidden all alcohol, even an innocent beer.

This was the first and last party held in the Coelhos’ large pink house. But nothing could shake Paulo’s happiness. Márcia’s birthday was approaching, and their love was not yet two months old, when her mother suggested they have a talk. Not being a believer in corporal punishment, she tried another tack: ‘If you break up with him, you can go to the best boutique in Rio and buy all the clothes you want.’ Her mother knew her daughter’s weak spot: vanity. Márcia’s initial reaction was that the suggestion was unacceptable–‘downright blackmail’. However, after some reflection, she decided that she had more than proved her love and that they both knew that they couldn’t pursue their love against their parents’ wishes. They were both under age and dependent–there was no future in it. If she had to give in, then at least it was at a good price. She accepted. When he read Márcia’s letter telling him that their romance was over, Paulo burst into tears and wrote of his frustration: ‘For someone like me, who dreamed of transforming Gávea into a Brazilian Verona, there could be no sadder end than being thrown over for a couple of dresses.’

Abandoned by his Great Love–as he described Márcia in his diary–he once again fell into depression. His parents were concerned about his state of mind and, taking pity on him, they decided to make an exception. Although holidays in Araruama had been forbidden because of his failure at Andrews College, he would be allowed to spend Carnival there with his cousins. Paulo arrived by bus on the Friday night and spent the weekend feeling miserable, not even wanting to go and see the girls at the dances in the city. On the following Monday evening, he accepted an invitation from three friends to have a beer in a bar near his Uncle José’s house.

When the table was covered in beer mats, showing how many drinks had been consumed, one of the boys, Carlinhos, had an idea: ‘My parents are away and the car is in the garage just waiting to be taken out. If any of you knows how to drive we can go for a spin round the town.’

Although he had never driven a car, Paulo announced: ‘I can drive.’

They paid the bill, went to Carlinhos’s house and took the car. While the four of them were driving up the main street, where there were
crowds of people and carnival parades, there was a general power failure. Although it was pitch dark, Paulo drove on through the mêlée of pedestrians and carnival-goers. Suddenly he saw a group of revellers in carnival costumes making their way towards the car.

Not knowing how to react, he swerved and accelerated. Then one of his friends yelled: ‘Watch out for the boy!’

It was too late. They all felt something hit the car’s front bumper, but Paulo went on accelerating while his friends looked back, terrified, shouting: ‘Put your foot down, Paulo! Put your foot down! Get out of here! You’ve killed the boy!’

T
HE BOY WAS LUÍS CLÁUDIO,
or Claudinho, the son of a tailor, Lauro Vieira de Azevedo. He was seven years old and lived in Rua Oscar Clark, near the house where Paulo was staying. The violence of the collision was such that the boy was thrown some distance, with his stomach ripped open and his intestines exposed. He was taken unconscious to the Casa de Caridade, the only hospital in Araruama, where it was found that the blow had ruptured his spleen. To control the haemorrhaging the doctor in A&E gave him a blood transfusion, but Claudinho experienced a sudden drop in blood pressure and nearly died.

After the collision, Paulo and his friends had not only failed to go to Claudinho’s aid but also fled the scene of the accident. They took the car back to Carlinhos’s house and, with the city still in darkness, went to the home of another of the boys who had been in the car, Maurício. On their way there, they realized that news of the accident was spreading. Terrified by rumours that the boy had died, they made a pact of silence: no one would ever utter a word about the incident. They all went their separate ways. In order not to arouse suspicion, when Paulo arrived at his uncle’s home, he ‘cynically’ (his own word) acted as though nothing had happened. However, half an hour later came the moment of truth: Maurício and Aurélio, the fourth member of the group, had been named
by a witness and arrested, and while in police custody they revealed the identity of the driver.

Paulo’s uncle took him to a room and told him of the gravity of the situation: ‘The boy’s life is hanging by a thread. We must just hope that he survives, because if he dies, things will get very ugly for you. Your parents have been told everything and they’re on their way from Rio to talk to the police and the magistrate. Meanwhile, you’re not leaving the house. You’re safe here.’

His uncle knew what the tailor was like and was concerned that he might do something crazy. His fears were confirmed that night. After visiting his dying son in hospital, Lauro appeared at the gates of the house where Paulo was hiding, along with two unpleasant-looking men. A revolver stuck in his belt, Lauro wagged a finger at José and said: ‘Dr Araripe, we don’t know yet whether Claudinho will live or die. As long as that’s the case, your nephew is not to leave Araruama. And if my son dies, Paulo will die too, because I’ll come here personally and kill him.’

Late that night, Lygia and Pedro arrived in Araruama and, even before going to see their son, they went to the magistrate’s house, who told them that the ‘perpetrator’ could only leave the city with his permission. His parents’ arrival did nothing to alleviate Paulo’s despair and he spent a sleepless night. Lying in bed, he wrote in a tremulous hand:

This was hell on earth. On Shrove Tuesday news of the two incidents–the accident and the tailor’s threat–had spread rapidly, drawing inquisitive crowds to Rua Oscar Clark, eager to witness the climax to the drama. Early on, Lygia and Pedro decided to visit Claudinho’s parents to offer their apologies and to get news of the boy’s condition, for Claudinho was
still unconscious. Lygia put together a large basket of fruit for the boy’s mother to take to him. As she and her husband were approaching the house, which was on the same side of the road as José’s, Lauro ordered them to turn back, because he was not prepared to talk. He repeated his threat–‘Your son will only leave this town if my son survives’–and he said that Lygia could take the fruit back: ‘No one here is dying of hunger. I don’t want charity, I want my son back.’

Paulo left his room only to ask for news of the boy. He recorded each piece of information in his notebook:

Claudinho’s temperature rose and fell several times. He regained consciousness on the Wednesday morning, two days after the accident, but it wasn’t until late that night that the agony ended, when the doctors reported that he was out of danger and would be discharged in a few days.

Early on the Thursday, Pedro Coelho took his son to make a statement to the magistrate, who had him sign an agreement to pay all the medical and hospital expenses. The boy survived and suffered no long-term consequences, apart from an enormous scar on his abdomen that would remain with him for life. Destiny, however, appears to have decided that his meeting with death was to be on Carnival Monday, for thirty-four years later, on 15 February 1999–another Carnival Monday–Luís Cláudio, by this time a businessman, and married with two daughters, was dragged from his house in Araruama by two masked men with guns,
who were apparently in the pay of a group of hijackers of transport lorries. He was viciously tortured, then tied up, soaked in petrol, set alight and burned to death.

Claudinho’s survival in 1965 did nothing to improve Pedro Coelho’s mood. When Paulo returned to Rio, he heard that, as a punishment for having caused the accident and for having lied, he would not be allowed out at night for a month. Added to this, his allowance, which he had regained after leaving his job on the dredger in December, was once again to be stopped until he had repaid his father the 100,000 cruzeiros (some US$1,750 in today’s terms) for the hospital fees.

Two months after the beginning of term, the first report from Andrews College revived the hopes of the Coelho family: although he had done badly in some subjects, their son had received such good marks in Portuguese, philosophy and chemistry that his average had risen to 6.1, which may have been only so-so, but was certainly an improvement for someone who hadn’t even been able to manage a 5. Everyone was hopeful: but in his second report, his average dropped to 4.6 and in the third he managed only 2.5. The days when the reports arrived became days of retribution for Paulo. Pedro Coelho would rant and rave, take away more of Paulo’s privileges and threaten even worse punishments. Paulo, however, appeared indifferent to all of this. ‘I’m fed up with school,’ he would tell his friends. ‘I’ll leave as soon as I can.’

He channelled all the energy and enthusiasm he failed to put into his schoolwork into the idea of becoming a writer. Unwilling to accept the fact that he was not yet a famous author, and convinced of his own talent, he had decided that his problem could be summed up in four words: a lack of publicity. At the beginning of 1965, he would take long walks with his friend Eduardo Jardim along Copacabana beach, during which he would ponder what he called ‘the problem of establishing myself as a recognized writer’.

His argument was a simple one: with the world becoming more and more materialistic (whether through communism or capitalism, it made no difference), the natural tendency was for the arts to disappear and, with them, literature. Only publicity could save them from a cultural Armageddon. His main preoccupation was with the written word, as he
frequently explained to Jardim. Since it wasn’t as widely disseminated as music, literature was failing to find fertile ground among the young. ‘If someone doesn’t enthuse this generation with a love of literature,’ he would tell his friend, ‘it won’t be around much longer.’ To conclude, he revealed the secret of success: ‘That’s why publicity is going to be the main element in my literary programme. And I’m going to control it. I’m going to use publicity to force the public to read and judge what I write. That way my books will sell more, but, more importantly, I’ll arouse people’s curiosity about my ideas and theories.’ In spite of Jardim’s look of astonishment when he heard this, Paulo continued with his plans for the final phase of his conquest of the reading public: ‘Then, like Balzac, I shall write articles under a pseudonym both attacking and defending my work, but that’s a different matter.’

Jardim did not appear to agree with anything he was hearing: ‘You’re thinking like a businessman, Paulo. Remember, publicity is an artificial thing that forces people to do what they don’t want.’

Paulo was so convinced of the effectiveness of his ideas, though, that he had stuck to his desk at home a summary of the tasks he would have to carry out during that year in order to achieve fame:

The plan seemed infallible, but the truth is that Paulo continued to be humiliatingly, painfully unknown. He didn’t manage to get anything published; he didn’t get to know any critics, journalists or anyone who could open a door for him or reach out a hand to help him up the ladder of success. To make matters worse, he continued to do badly in his studies and was clearly miserable at having to go to college every day–what was the point when his marks went from bad to worse? He spent the days in a state of abstraction, as if his mind were in another world.

It was during this state of lethargy that he got to know another boy at school, Joel Macedo, who was studying classics. They were the same age, but Joel was the opposite of Paulo: he was extroverted and politically articulate, and one of the youngest members of the so-called Paissandu generation–film-lovers and intellectuals who would meet at the old-fashioned Paissandu cinema in the Flamengo district. He was a cultural activist, led the Taca drama group and was responsible for
Agora
, a small newspaper published by the pupils of the college, whose editorial team he invited Paulo to join. The newspaper was at loggerheads with the conservative directors of the college because it criticized the arrests and other arbitrary measures taken by the military government.

A new world opened up to Paulo. Joining the Paissandu set meant rubbing shoulders with Rio’s intellectual elite and seeing close to the
leading lights of the left-wing opposition. The cinema and the two nearby bars–the Oklahoma and the Cinerama–attracted film directors, musicians, playwrights and influential journalists. The latest European films were shown at midnight sessions on a Friday, when the 700 available tickets sold out in minutes. Paulo wasn’t much interested in political or social problems, but his deep existential anxieties fitted the profile of the typical denizen of Paissandu and he quickly made himself at home.

One day, he was forced to confess to Joel why he never went to the midnight film sessions, which were, after all, the most popular ones. ‘Firstly because I’m not yet eighteen and the films shown there are usually banned for minors,’ he explained, adding: ‘And if I get home after eleven o’clock my father won’t open the door to me.’ Joel couldn’t accept that someone of seventeen had a set time for getting home. ‘The time has come for you to demand your freedom. The problem of your age is easy enough to solve: all you have to do is change your date of birth on your student card, as I did.’ He also offered to solve the problem of the curfew: ‘After the midnight sessions you can sleep in my parents’ house in Ipanema.’ From then on, with his card duly falsified and a guaranteed roof over his head, Paulo was free to enter the enchanted world of Jean-Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

However, one problem remained: tickets, beer, cigarettes and travel all cost money. Not a fortune, obviously, but with his allowance suspended he didn’t have a penny to his name, nor any idea as to how to get some money. To his surprise, a partial solution came from his father. Pedro was a friend of Luís Eduardo Guimarães, the editor of the
Diário de Notícias
, which, at the time, was an influential newspaper in Rio. Guimarães was also the son-in-law of its owner, Ondina Dantas. Pedro fixed up a meeting between his son and the journalist, and a few days later Paulo began to work as a cub reporter. The work, alas, would be unpaid until he was given a proper contract. The problem of money remained, therefore, but there was one compensation: the job was a step towards liberating himself from parental control. He was almost never at home. He would go out in the morning to college, return home briefly for lunch, then spend the
afternoon at the newspaper office and the evening at the Paissandu. He spent so many nights at Joel’s parents’ apartment that it became his second home.