Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (15 page)

During his first rehearsal, he chose to wear a ragged pair of dungarees and an old hat and waited in the wings to make his entrance. The only instruction he had received from the director, the Argentine Luís Maria Olmedo, who was known as Cachorro, was to improvise. When the
curtain fell for the first scene-change, he went on stage, pulling funny faces, and said whatever came into his head: ‘When Little Potato starts to grow, he spreads across the ground. When Little Mama falls to sleep she puts her hand upon her heart.’

From then on, to his friends in the theatre he was known as Batatinha, or Little Potato. Although he considered himself to be a useless actor, during the following weeks he worked so hard at his role that when
Pinocchio
was about to open, his appearances had become so much part of the show that his name appeared in the programme and on the posters. At each rehearsal, he elaborated a little more on his performance–although always sticking to the time allowed for the scene-change–inventing strange names, making faces, jumping around and shouting. Deep down, he thought the whole thing ridiculous, but if that was the door that would allow him to enter the world of the theatre, he would go through it. In Grupo Destaque he worked with professionals who made their living from the theatre. After the rehearsals, the cheerful, lively group would leave the Miguel Lemos theatre, walk along the beach to Rua Sá Ferreira, four blocks away, and make an obligatory stop at the Gôndola bar, where the actors, technicians and directors who packed the stages of Copacabana’s twenty theatres would meet every night.

Paulo felt he was in heaven. He was eighteen now, which meant he could drink when he wanted, go to any film or play and stay out all night without having to answer to anyone. Except, of course, to his father, Pedro Coelho, who took a dim view of his son’s burgeoning theatrical vocation. This was not only because he hardly ever went to school and was on the verge of being expelled again. For his parents, the world of the theatre was a ‘den of homosexuals, communists, drug addicts and idlers’ with whom they would prefer their son not to mix. At the end of December, though, they gave in and accepted his invitation to the preview of
Pinocchio
. After all, this was a children’s classic, not the indecent, subversive theatre that was enjoying such success in the country.

Paulo had reserved seats for his parents, his sister and his grandparents and, to his surprise, they all turned up. On the first night, the cultural section of the
Jornal do Brasil
published an article and his name appeared in print for the first time. He was last on the list, but for someone who
was just beginning it was the right place. He recorded the feeling of being on stage in a short but emotional note in his diary: ‘Yesterday was my début. Excitement. Real excitement. It was just unbelievable when I found myself there in front of the audience, with the spotlights blinding me, and with me making the audience laugh. Sublime, truly sublime. It was my first performance this year.’ The family’s attendance at the first night did not mean an armistice, however. When they learned that Paulo had failed at Andrews, his parents forced him to attend group therapy three times a week, still convinced that he had mental problems.

Indifferent to the hostility on the domestic front, he was having a wonderful time. In a matter of weeks, he had practically created a new character in the play. When the curtain fell on one scene, he would sit on the edge of the stage, unwrap a delicious toffee or sweet and start to eat it.

The children would watch greedily and when he asked one of the children in the front row: ‘Would you like one?’ the whole audience would yell: ‘I want one! I want one!’

To which he would reply heartlessly: ‘Well, too bad. I’m not going to give you one!’

Batatinha would take another bite or lick and turn to the audience again: ‘Would you like one?’

More shouting, and again he would refuse. This would be repeated until the curtain rose for the next act.

A month and a half after the first night,
Pinocchio
moved to the Teatro Carioca, which was on the ground floor of an apartment block in Flamengo, a few metres from the Paissandu cinema. One afternoon when he was rehearsing, Paulo noticed that a very beautiful girl with blue eyes and very long hair had sat down in one of the rear stalls seats and seemed to be watching him closely. It was Fabíola Fracarolli, who lived on the eighth floor of the building, had noticed the open door and, out of curiosity, gone in to take a look. The following day, Fabíola returned and, on the third day, Paulo decided to approach her. She was sixteen and she lived in a small rented apartment with her widowed mother, who was a dressmaker, and her maternal grandmother, a nutty old woman who sat all day clutching a bag full of old papers, which she said were ‘her fortune’.

Up to the age of fifteen, Fabíola had been afflicted with an enormous, grotesque nose à la Cyrano de Bergerac. When she learned that the only boy she had managed to attract had been paid to take her out by her cousins, she didn’t think twice. She climbed on to the window ledge and said to her mother: ‘Either you pay for plastic surgery or I’ll jump!’ Weeks later, when she had recovered from the surgery, she was parading a neat, sculptured nose. It was this new Fabíola who fell madly in love with Paulo.

Things were going well for Paulo when it came to women. While continuing his relationship with Renata Sorrah, he had decided to forgive Márcia and take her back as a girlfriend. This didn’t stop him beginning a steady relationship with Fabíola. Her mother seemed to take pity on the puny young man with breathing problems and welcomed him into the family. He would have lunch and dinner with them almost every day, which made his life as Batatinha all the more comfortable. As if such kindness were not enough, soon Fabíola’s mother, Beth, moved her bed into her sick mother’s bedroom, thus freeing up a small room, which Paulo began to use as a studio, office and meeting room. To make the place seem less domestic, he covered the walls, ceiling and even the floor with pages from newspapers. When Beth was not around, his workspace became the bedroom where Fabíola had her first sexual experience. However, Paulo still could not understand why such a beautiful girl like her would be attracted to the rather sickly person he thought himself to be.

Riddled with insecurity and driven by what was certainly a mad streak, he gave her an ultimatum: ‘I can’t believe that a woman as beautiful as you, with your charm, your beautiful clothes, can be in love with me. I need to know that you really love me.’

When Fabíola replied confidently ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do’, he said: ‘If you really love me, let me stub this cigarette out on your thigh. And you’re not to cry.’

The girl lifted the edge of her long Indian wrapover skirt, like someone waiting to have an injection. Then she smiled at him without saying a word. Paulo took a long drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out on her smooth, tanned leg. With her eyes closed, Fabíola heard the hiss and smelled the repellent stench of the hot ash burning her skin–she would
bear the scar for the rest of her life–but she didn’t utter a sound or shed a tear. Paulo said nothing, but thought: She really does love me.

Although he made constant declarations of love, his feelings for Fabíola were ambiguous. While, on the one hand, he was proud to be seen in the fashionable places of Rio hand-in-hand with such a beautiful girl, on the other, he was embarrassed by her silliness and her extraordinary ignorance about almost everything. Fabíola was what, in those days, was known as a
cocota
or bimbo. When she announced over a few beers that Mao Tse Tung was ‘the French couturier who created the Mao suits’, Paulo wished the ground would open up and swallow him. But it was such a comfortable relationship, which made no demands on him, and she was so pretty that it was worth putting up with her stupid remarks with good grace.

The day she was invited to his house, she was astonished. Judging by her boyfriend’s ragged appearance and his lack of money (she often gave him some of her allowance so that he could buy cigarettes and take the bus), Fabíola had always imagined that he was poor and homeless. Imagine her surprise, then, when she was received by a butler wearing white gloves and a jacket with gold buttons. For a moment, she assumed Paulo must be the son of one of the employees, but no, he was the son of the master of the house–‘an enormous pink house with a grand piano and vast courtyard gardens’, she said later, recalling that day. ‘Just think–in the middle of the drawing room there was a staircase that was identical to the one in
Gone With the Wind
…’

Although he was eighteen and enjoying relative independence, Paulo still sometimes behaved like a child. One night, he stayed late at Márcia’s house, listening to recordings of poetry (her family had given in and decided to accept him), and on returning home, which was only a few metres away, he came across what he called ‘a group of nasty-looking individuals’. In fact, they were simply some boys with whom he’d had words a few days earlier when he complained about the noise they were making playing football. However, when he saw them armed with sticks and bottles, he was terrified, went back to Márcia’s apartment and called home, waking his irascible father. Dramatic and theatrical as ever, he begged: ‘Papa, come and collect me from Márcia’s house. But come with
a revolver because twelve criminals are threatening to kill me.’ He would not leave until he looked out of the apartment window and saw his father in pyjamas, with a catapult in his hand, thus guaranteeing him a safe return home.

This paternal zeal did not mean that the situation at home had improved. Things were still as tense as ever, but his parents’ control over his life had slackened. His performance during the second term at Andrews had been so dreadful that he wasn’t actually allowed to take the end-of-year exams and was thrown out. The only solution was to take the route Pedro had sworn never to accept: to look for a college that was ‘less demanding’. The choice was Guanabara, in Flamengo, where Paulo hoped to finish his schooling and then apply for a university course, although not in engineering, as his father so wanted. By opting to take the evening course at the college, he forced his parents to relax their vigilance on his timekeeping and give him a key to the house, but this freedom was won at a price: if he wanted independence and to choose a college for himself, to do drama and get home whenever he wanted, then he would have to find work. Pedro found his son a job where he could earn money selling advertising space in the programmes for the Jockey Club races, but after weeks and weeks of trying, the new entrant into the world of work hadn’t managed to sell a single square centimetre of advertising space.

His lack of success did not dismay his father, who suggested another option, this time with Souza Alves Acessórios, a company specializing in the sale of industrial equipment. Although he hated doing anything he was forced to do, Paulo decided to agree for the sake of financial independence, because this was a job with a fixed salary and he wouldn’t have to sell anything to anyone. On the first day, he turned up in a suit and tie with his unruly hair slicked down. He wanted to know where his desk would be and was surprised when the manager led him to an enormous shed, pointed to a broom and told him: ‘You can start here. First you can sweep out this storeroom. When you’ve finished, let me know.’

Sweep out a storeroom? But he was an actor, a writer. Had his father fixed him up with a job as a cleaner? No, this must be some kind of joke, a prank they played on all the new employees on their first day at work. He decided to play the game, rolled up his sleeves and swept the floor
until lunchtime, by which time his arms were beginning to ache. When the job was finished, he put on his jacket and, smiling, told his boss that he was ready. Without even looking at the new employee, the man handed him a sales slip and pointed to the door: ‘Get twenty boxes of hydrometers from that room and take them to dispatch, on the ground floor, with this sales slip.’

This could only have been done deliberately to humiliate him: his father had found him work as a mere factory hand. Despondently, he did what he had been ordered to do and, after a few days, discovered that the routine was always the same: carrying boxes, packing water and electricity meters, sweeping the floor of the storeroom and the warehouse. Just as when he had worked on the dredger, he again felt like Sisyphus. As soon as he finished one thing, he was given something else to do. Weeks later, he wrote in his diary: ‘This is like a slow suicide. I’m just not going to cope with waking up at six every morning, starting work at seven thirty to sweep the floor and cart stuff around all day without even stopping for lunch, and then having to go to rehearsals until midnight.’

He survived only a month and a half in the job and had no need to ask if he could leave. The manager decided to call Pedro and tell him that the boy was no good ‘for this type of work’. When he left the building for the last time, Paulo had 30 cruzeiros in his pocket–the wages to which he was entitled. It was understandable that he couldn’t do the work. Apart from performing in
Pinocchio
, which was on six days a week, he had begun rehearsing another children’s play,
A Guerra dos Lanches
[
The War of the Snacks
], which was also directed by Luís Olmedo. ‘I’ve got a role in this new play,’ he wrote proudly, ‘thanks to my spectacular performance as Batatinha in
Pinocchio
.’ Now he was going to work as a real actor, sharing the stage with his friend Joel Macedo and a pretty brunette called Nancy, the sister of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the perfect student who had come first in almost every subject at St Ignatius. After the tiring routine of rehearsals, the play had its first night in the middle of April 1966. Seeing how nervous Paulo was, Luís Olmedo kissed him on the forehead and said: ‘You can do it, Batatinha!’

Paulo got off to a good start. Dressed as a cowboy, all he had to do was to step on to the stage to provoke roars of laughter from the audi
ence, and so it continued. When the show ended, he was fêted as the best actor of the night. As the compliments came flooding in, Luís Olmedo hugged and kissed him (much to the embarrassment of Paulo’s parents, who had attended the first night), saying: ‘Batatinha, there are no words to describe your performance tonight. You were the hit of the evening, you had the audience eating out of your hand. It was wonderful.’