Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (13 page)

As is the case with all publications, the least exciting tasks fell to the juniors, such as reporting on any potholes that were holding up the flow of traffic or any domestic arguments that ended up at the police station, or compiling lists of the dead in the public hospitals for the deaths section in the next day’s edition. It was not unusual for the new boy to arrive at the office and be told by Silvio Ferraz, the chief reporter at the
Diário de Notícias
: ‘Go and talk to shopkeepers to see whether business is suffering from the downturn.’ He may have been earning nothing and dealing only with unimportant matters, but Paulo felt he was an intellectual, someone who wrote every day, no matter about what. There was also another great advantage. When his colleagues at college or someone from the Paissandu set asked what he was doing, he would say: ‘I’m a journalist. I write for the
Diário de Notícias
.’

He was so busy with the newspaper, the cinema and amateur dramatics that he had less and less time left for Andrews College. His father was in despair when he discovered that, at the end of April, his son had an average of 2.5 (contributed to by a zero in Portuguese, English and chemistry), but Paulo seemed to be living in another world. He did exactly what he wanted to and came home at night when he wanted. If he found the door unlocked, he would go in. If his father had, as he usually did, carefully locked everything up at eleven, he would simply take the Leblon–Lapa bus and, minutes later, be sleeping in Joel’s house. His parents didn’t know what else they could do.

In May, a friend asked him for a favour: he wanted a job in the Crédito Real de Minas Gerais bank and needed two references. As this was the bank where Paulo’s father had an account, perhaps he could be persuaded to write one of the necessary letters? Paulo promised to see to it, but when he brought up the subject with his father he received a blunt refusal: ‘Absolutely not! Only you could possibly think that I would support your vagrant friends.’

Upset and too ashamed to tell his friend the truth, Paulo made a decision: he locked himself in his room and typed up a letter full of praise for
the applicant, adding at the bottom ‘Engenheiro Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’. He signed it and put the letter in an envelope–problem solved. Everything went so well that the subject of the letter felt obliged to thank its writer for his kindness with a telephone call. Dr Pedro couldn’t understand what the boy was talking about: ‘Letter? What letter?’ On hearing the words ‘bank manager’, he said: ‘I wrote no letter! Bring that letter here. Bring it here immediately! This is Paulo’s doing! Paulo must have forged my signature!’ He rang off and rushed to the bank, looking for evidence of the crime–the letter, the proof that his son had become a forger, a fraudster. Paulo arrived home that evening, unaware of what had happened. He found his father in a fury, but that was nothing new. Before going to sleep, he wrote a short note in his diary: ‘In a month and a half I’ve written nine articles for
Diário de Notícias
. I’ve got a trip to Furnas set up for 12th June, when I’m going to meet the most important people in the political world, such as the president, the most important governors and ministers of state.’

The following morning, he woke in a particularly good mood, since a rumour had been going round at the newspaper that he was going to be taken on officially, which would mean he would be a real journalist, with a press card and a guaranteed salary. When he went downstairs, he was surprised to find his parents already up and waiting for him. Pedro was beside himself with rage, but he said nothing.

It was Lygia who spoke: ‘Paulo, we’re worried about your asthma and so we’ve made an appointment with the doctor for a check-up. Eat your breakfast because we’ve got to leave soon.’

A few minutes later, his father took the Vanguard out of the garage–a rare occurrence–and the three drove along the coast road towards the city centre. Seated in the back, absorbed in thought, Paulo gazed out at the fog over the sea, which made Guanabara bay look simultaneously melancholy and poetic. When they were halfway along Botafogo beach the car took a left turn into Rua Marquês de Olinda, drove another three blocks and drew up alongside a wall more than 3 metres high. The three got out and went over to a wrought-iron gate. Paulo heard his father say something to the gatekeeper and, moments later, saw a nun arrive to take them to a consulting room. They were in the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, a
large hospital occupying various buildings and large mansions in the woods at the bottom of a hill.

The nun went ahead, showing his parents the way, with Paulo behind, not understanding what was going on. The four of them took a lift to the ninth floor and, as they walked down a long corridor towards the consulting room, the nun opened a door and showed Pedro and Lygia a bedroom with two beds and a window with an iron grille. She smiled, saying: ‘This is where the boy will sleep. As you can see, it’s a nice bright, spacious room.’

Paulo couldn’t understand what he was hearing and had no time to ask, since, by then, they were all in the doctor’s consulting room. Seated behind a desk was the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gaspar Gomes, a fifty-two-year-old man, bald, with small eyes and a pleasant face.

Astonished, Paulo turned to his parents: ‘If I’ve just come here for asthma tests, why have you booked a room for me?’

Pedro said nothing and Lygia gently tried to explain to her son that he was being admitted to an asylum. ‘You’re not going to school any more, and you’re not going to sleep at home. You left St Ignatius so that you wouldn’t be expelled and you’ve ended up failing at Andrews. On top of that you ran over the boy in Araruama…’

Then his father spoke for the first time: ‘This time, you’ve really overstepped the mark. Forging a signature, as you did mine, isn’t just a prank–it’s a crime.’

Things moved rapidly from then on. His mother said that she and his father had had a long talk with Dr Benjamim–a colleague of Pedro’s and a person whom the family trusted implicitly–and that they were all agreed that he was too excitable and needed medication, so it would be a good idea for him to spend a few days in this ‘rest home’. Before he could recover from the shock, his parents stood up, said goodbye and disappeared down the tiled corridor.

Suddenly he found himself alone, locked up in an asylum with his school file under his arm and a jacket over his shoulders, not knowing what to do. As though he thought it might still be possible to escape from this nightmare, he said to the doctor: ‘You mean you’re going to lock me up like a madman without examining me–no interview, nothing?’

Dr Benjamim smiled: ‘You’re not being admitted as a madman. This is a rest home. You’re just going to take some medicine and rest. Besides, I don’t need to interview you, I have all the information I need.’

No one with any common sense would think that the information given by Paulo’s father could justify this treatment: his parents’ complaints–that he was irritable, hostile, a bad student and ‘even politically opposed to his father’–were not very different from the complaints that nine out of ten parents make about their adolescent children. His mother had more precise concerns and thought that her son ‘had problems of a sexual nature’. The three reasons for this suspicion are surprising, coming as they do from an intelligent and sophisticated woman like Lygia: her son had no girlfriends, he had refused circumcision to correct an overtight foreskin–phimosis–and, finally, it seemed, lately, that his breasts were developing like those of a girl. There was, in fact, an explanation for all of these ‘symptoms’, including the change in his breasts, which was nothing more than the side effect of a growth hormone prescribed by a doctor to whom she herself had taken him.

The only problem of a psychiatric nature that might have concerned his parents was one of which they were in fact unaware. Some months earlier, during one of his many sleepless, anxiety-filled nights, he had decided to kill himself. He went into the kitchen and began to block all the air vents with sticky tape and dusters. However, when it came to turning on the gas inlet from the street to the oven, his courage failed him. He saw with sudden clarity that he didn’t want to die: he only wanted his parents to notice his despair. He describes how, as he removed the last strip of tape from behind the door and started to go back to his room, he realized, terrified, that he had company: it was the Angel of Death. There was good reason for his panic, since he had read somewhere that, once summoned to Earth, the Angel never left empty-handed. He recorded the conclusion to this macabre encounter in his diary:

Unless his parents had been so indiscreet as to read his diary–as he suspected some time later–the sacrifice of the goat, which at the time was attributed to some perverse evil-doer, could not have been one of their reasons for having him admitted to the asylum.

Still absorbing the shock of this new situation, Paulo was led to his room by a male nurse. As he leaned against the iron bars at the window, he was surprised by the beauty to be found in such a wretched place. From the ninth floor he had an unbroken view of the white sands of Botafogo beach, the Flamengo gardens and, in the background, the spectacular outline of Morro da Urca and Pão de Açucar. The bed beside his was empty, which meant that he would have to suffer his torment alone. In the afternoon, someone arrived from his house and handed over at the gate a suitcase with clothes, books and personal possessions. The day passed without incident.

Lying on his bed, Paulo thought of the options open to him: the first, of course, was to continue with his plan to be a writer. If this didn’t work out, the best thing would be to go mad as a convenient means to an end. He would be supported by the state, he wouldn’t have to work any more nor take on any responsibilities. This would mean spending a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, but, after a day wandering the corridors, he realized that the patients at the clinic didn’t behave ‘like the mad people you see in Hollywood films’: ‘Except for some pathological cases of a catatonic or schizophrenic nature, all the other patients are perfectly capable of talking about life and having their own ideas on the subject. Sometimes they have panic attacks, crises of depression or aggression, but they don’t last for long.’

Paulo spent the following days trying to get to know the place to which he had been confined. Talking to the nurses and employees, he discov
ered that 800 mentally ill people were interned at the clinic, and divided up according to the degree of their insanity and social class. The floor he was on was for the so-called ‘docile mad’ and those referred by private doctors, while the remainder, the ‘dangerously mad’ and those dependent on public health services, were in another building. The former slept in rooms with a maximum of two beds and a private bathroom and during the day they could move freely around the entire floor. However, you could only take the lift, the doors of which were locked, when accompanied by a nurse and a guide nominated by a doctor. All the windows, balconies and verandahs were protected by iron grilles or walls made of decorative air bricks through which one could still see. Those being paid for by social services slept in dormitories of ten, twenty and even thirty beds, while those considered to be violent were kept in solitary confinement.

The Dr Eiras clinic was not only an asylum, as Paulo had originally thought, but a group of neurological, cardiological and detox clinics for alcoholics and drug addicts. Two of its directors, the doctors Abraão Ackerman and Paulo Niemeyer, were among the most respected neurosurgeons in Brazil. While hundreds of workers dependent on social security lined up at their doors waiting for a consultation, famous people with health problems also went there. During his time in the clinic as a patient, Paulo received weekly visits from his mother. On one of these visits, Lygia arrived accompanied by Sônia Maria, who was fifteen at the time and had insisted on going to see her brother in hospital. She left in a state of shock. ‘The atmosphere was horrendous, people talking to themselves in the corridors,’ she was to recall angrily some years later. ‘And lost in that hell was Paulo, a mere boy, someone who should never have been there.’ She left determined to speak to her parents, to beg them to open their hearts and remove her brother from the asylum, but she lacked the courage to do so. If she was unable to argue in defence of her own rights, what could she do for him? Unlike Paulo, Sônia spent her life in submission to her parents–to such a point that, even when married and a mother, she would never smoke in front of her father and concealed from him the fact that she wore a bikini.

As for Paulo’s suffering, this, according to Dr Benjamim, who visited him each morning, was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to ‘a
special way he had of getting himself out of difficult situations, even when he was protesting against being interned!’ According to the psychiatrist, ‘the fact that Paulo did not suffer more is because he had a way with words’. And it was thanks to that ‘way with words’ that he avoided being subjected to a brutal treatment frequently inflicted on the mentally ill at the clinic: electroshock treatment. Although he was well informed about mental illnesses and had translated books on psychiatry, Dr Benjamim was a staunch defender of electroconvulsive therapy, which had already been condemned in a large part of the world. ‘In certain cases, such as incurable depression, there is no alternative,’ he would say confidently. ‘Any other therapy is a cheat, an illusion, a palliative and a dangerous procrastination.’ However, while he was a patient, Paulo was subjected to such heavy doses of psychotropic substances that he would spend the whole day in a daze, slouching along the corridor in his slippers. Although he had never experimented with drugs, not even cannabis, he spent four weeks consuming packs and packs of medication that was supposedly detoxifying, but only left him more confused.