Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (22 page)

Just one thing seemed to be keeping him connected to the world of the normal, of those who did not take drugs: the stubborn desire to be a writer. He was determined to lock himself up in Uncle José’s house in Araruama and just write. ‘To write, to write a lot, to write everything’ was his immediate plan. Vera agreed and urged him on, but she suggested that before he did this, they should relax and take a holiday. In April 1970,
the couple decided to go to one of the Meccas of the hippie movement, Machu Picchu, the sacred city of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes, at an altitude of 2,400 metres. Still traumatized by his journey to Paraguay, Paulo feared that something evil would happen to him if he left Brazil. It was only after much careful planning that the couple finally departed. Inspired by the 1969 film
Easy Rider
, they had no clear destination or fixed date of return.

On 1 May they took a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano aeroplane to La Paz for a trip that involved many novelties, the first of which Paulo experienced as soon as he got out at El Alto airport, in the Bolivian capital: snow. He was so excited when he saw everything covered by such a pure white blanket that he could not resist throwing himself on the ground and eating the snow. It was the start of a month of absolute idleness. Vera spent the day in bed in the hotel, unable to cope with the rarefied air of La Paz at 4,000 metres. Paulo went out to get to know the city and, accustomed to the political apathy of a Brazil under a dictatorship, he was shocked to see workers’ demonstrations on Labour Day. Four months later, Alfredo Ovando Candia, who had just named himself President of the Republic for the third time, was ousted.

Taking advantage of the low cost of living in Bolivia, they rented a car, stayed in good hotels and went to the best restaurants. Every other day, the elegant Vera made time to go to the hairdresser’s, while Paulo climbed the steep hills of La Paz. It was there that they encountered a new type of drug, which was almost non-existent in Brazil: mescalito, also known as peyote, peyotl or mescal–a hallucinogenic tea distilled from cut, dried cactus. Amazed by the calmness and tranquillity induced by the drink, they wallowed in endless visual hallucinations and experienced intense moments of synaesthesia, a confusion of the senses that gives the user the sense of being able to smell a colour or hear a taste.

They spent five days in La Paz drinking the tea, visiting clubs to listen to local music and attending
diabladas
, places where plays in which the Inca equivalent of the Devil predominated. They then caught a train to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, where they took a boat across and then the train to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, after which they went by plane to Lima.

In Lima, they rented a car and headed for Santiago de Chile, passing through Arequipa, Antofagasta and Arica. The plan was to spend more time on this stretch, but the hotels were so unprepossessing that they decided to carry on. Neither Paulo nor Vera enjoyed the Chilean capital–‘a city like any other’, he wrote–but they did have the chance to see Costa-Gavras’s film
Z
, which denounced the military dictatorship in Greece and was banned in Brazil. At the end of their three-week trip, still almost constantly under the influence of mescalito, they found themselves in Mendoza, in Argentina, on the way to Buenos Aires. Paulo was eaten up with jealousy when he saw the attractive Vera being followed by men, particularly when she began to speak in English, which he still could not understand that well. In La Paz it had been the sight of snow that had taken him by surprise; in Buenos Aires it was going on the metro for the first time. Accustomed to low prices in the other places they had visited, they decided to dine at the Michelangelo, a restaurant known as ‘the cathedral of the tango’, where they were lucky enough to hear a classic of the genre, the singer Roberto ‘Polaco’ Goyeneche. When they were handed a bill for $20–the equivalent of about US$120 today–Paulo almost fell off his chair to discover that they were in one of the most expensive restaurants in the city.

Although his asthma had coped well with the Andean heights, in Buenos Aires, at sea level, it reappeared in force. With a temperature of 39°C and suffering from intense breathing difficulties, he had to remain in bed for three days and began to recover only in Montevideo, on 1 June, the day before they were to leave for Brazil. At his insistence, they would not be making the return journey on a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano flight. This change had nothing to do with superstition or with the fact that they would have to travel via La Paz. Paulo had seen the bronze statue of a civilian pilot at La Paz airport in homage ‘to the heroic pilots of LAB who have died in action’: ‘I’d be mad to travel with a company that treats the pilots of crashed planes as heroes! What if our pilot has ambitions to become a statue?’ In the end, they flew Air France to Rio de Janeiro, where they arrived on 3 June in time to watch the first round of the 1970 World Cup, when the Brazilian team beat Czechoslovakia 4–1.

The dream of becoming a writer would not go away. Paulo placed nowhere in the short story competions he entered. He wrote in his diary: ‘It was with a broken heart that I heard the news…that I had failed to win yet another literary competition. I didn’t even get an honourable mention.’ However, he did not allow himself to be crushed by these defeats and continued to note down possible subjects for future literary works, such as ‘flying saucers’, ‘Jesus’, ‘the abominable snowman’, ‘spirits becoming embodied in corpses’ and ‘telepathy’. All the same, the prizes continued to elude him, as he recorded in his notes: ‘Dear São José, my protector. You are witness to the fact that I’ve tried really hard this year. I’ve lost in every competition. Yesterday, when I heard I’d lost in the competition for children’s plays, Vera said that when my luck finally does arrive, it will do so all in one go. Do you agree?’

On his twenty-third birthday, Vera gave him a sophisticated microscope and was pleased to see what a success it was: hours after opening the gift, Paulo was still hunched over it, carefully examining the glass plates and making notes. Curious to know what he was doing, she began to read what he was writing: ‘It’s twenty-three years today since I was born. I was already this thing that I can see under the microscope. Excited, moving in the direction of life, infinitesimally small but with all my hereditary characteristics in place. My two arms, my legs and my brain were already programmed. I would reproduce myself from that sperm cell, the cells would multiply. And here I am, aged twenty-three.’ It was only then that she realized that Paulo had put his own semen under the microscope. The notes continue: ‘There goes a possible engineer. Another one that ought to have become a doctor is dying. A scientist capable of saving the Earth has also died, and I’m impassively watching all this through my microscope. My own sperm are furiously flailing around, desperate to find an egg, desperate to perpetuate themselves.’

Vera was good company, but she could be tough too. When she realized that, if he had anything to do with it, Paulo would never achieve anything beyond the school diploma he had got at Guanabara, she almost forced him to prepare for his university entrance exams. Her vigilance produced surprising results. By the end of the year, he had managed to be accepted by no fewer than three faculties: law at Cândido Mendes,
theatre direction at the Escola Nacional de Teatro and media studies at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Rio.

This success, needless to say, could not be attributed entirely to Vera: it had as much to do with Paulo’s literary appetite. Since he had begun making systematic notes of his reading four years earlier, he had read more than three hundred books, or seventy-five a year–a vast number when one realizes that most Brazilians read, on average, one book a year. He read a great deal and he read everything. From Cervantes to Kafka, from Jorge Amado to Scott Fitzgerald, from Aeschylus to Aldous Huxley. He read Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Brazilians who were on police files such as the humourist Stanislaw Ponte Preta. He would read, make a short commentary on each work and rate them accordingly. The highest accolade, four stars, was the privilege of only a few writers, such as Henry Miller, Borges and Hemingway. And he blithely awarded ‘zero stars’ to books as varied as Norman Mailer’s
American Dream
, Régis Debray’s
Revolution in Revolution
and two Brazilian classics,
Os Sertões
[
Rebellion in the Backlands
] by Euclides da Cunha and
História Econômica do Brasil
[
An Economic History of Brazil
] by Caio Prado, Jr.

In this mélange of subjects, periods and authors, there was one genre that appeared to arouse Paulo’s interest more than others: books dealing with the occult, witchcraft and satanism. Ever since he had read a short book written by the Spanish sorcerer José Ramón Molinero,
The Secret Alchemy of Mankind
, he had devoured everything relating to the invisible world beyond the human senses. When he finished reading
The Dawn of Magic
by the Belgian Louis Pauwels and the French-Ukrainian Jacques Bergier, he began to feel he was a member of this new tribe. ‘I’m a magician preparing for his dawn,’ he wrote in his diary. At the end of 1970, he had collected fifty works on the subject. During this time he had read, commented on and given star ratings to all six of the Hermann Hesse books published in Brazil, as well as to Erich von Däniken’s best-sellers
The Chariots of the Gods
and
Return to the Stars
, Goethe’s
Faust
, to which he gave only three stars, and to absurd books such as
Black Magic and White Magic
by a certain V.S. Foldej, which didn’t even merit a rating.

One of the most celebrated authors of this new wave was Carlos Castaneda. Not only did he write on the occult: his own story was
shrouded in mystery. He was said to have been born in 1925 in Peru (or in 1935 in Brazil, according to other sources) and had graduated in anthropology at the University of California, in Los Angeles. When he was preparing his doctoral thesis he decided to write autobiographical accounts of his experiences in Mexico on the use of drugs such as peyote, mushrooms and stramonium (known as devil’s weed) in native rituals. The worldwide success of Castaneda, who even featured on the cover of
Time
magazine, attracted hordes of hippies, in search of the new promised land, from the four corners of the earth to the Sonora desert on the border where California and Arizona meet Mexico, where the books were set.

For those who, like Paulo, did not believe in coincidences, the fact that it was at precisely this moment that his mother made him the gift of a trip to the United States seemed like a sign. His grandmother Lilisa was going to Washington to visit her daughter Lúcia, who was married to the diplomat Sérgio Weguelin, and he would go with her and, if he wanted, extend the trip and go travelling alone or with his cousin Serginho, who was a few years younger. Besides giving him the opportunity to get to know first-hand the area about which Castaneda had written, the trip was useful in another way. His relationship with Vera appeared to be coming to an end. ‘Life with her is getting complicated,’ he complained at the beginning of 1971 in his diary. ‘We don’t have sex any more, she’s driving me mad, and I’m driving her mad. I don’t love her any more. It’s just habit.’ Things had reached such a low ebb that the two had stopped living together. Vera had returned to her apartment in Leblon and he had moved from Santa Teresa back to his grandparents’ house before moving to Copacabana. Besides this, he announced in his diary that he was ‘half-married’ to a new woman, the young actress Christina Scardini, whom he had met at drama school and with whom he swore he was passionately in love. This was a lie, but during the month and a half he was away in America, she was the recipient of no fewer than forty-four letters.

At the beginning of May, after a celebratory farewell dinner given by his parents, he took a Varig flight with his grandparents to New York, where they were to catch an internal flight to Washington. When they arrived at Kennedy airport, Paulo and his grandmother couldn’t understand why Tuca was in such a hurry to get the eleven o’clock plane to
Washington, for which the check-in was just closing. Lilisa and her grandson argued that there was no reason to rush, because if they missed that plane they could take the following flight, half an hour later. Out of breath from running, the three boarded the plane just as the doors were about to be closed. Tuca only calmed down once they were all sitting with their seatbelts buckled. That night, when they were watching the news at his uncle’s house, Paulo realized that the hand of destiny had clearly been behind Tuca’s insistence that they catch the 11.00 flight. The 11.30 flight, a twin-engined Convair belonging to Allegheny (later US Airways), had experienced mechanical problems and when the pilot tried to make an emergency landing near New Haven, 70 kilometres from New York, the plane had crashed, killing the crew and all thirty passengers on board.

While staying at his diplomat uncle’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, half an hour from Washington, instead of writing a travel diary Paulo decided to use his copious correspondence with Christina to record his impressions. He seemed to be astounded by everything he saw. He could stand for ages, gazing at the automatic vending machines for stamps, newspapers and soft drinks, or spend hours on end in department stores without buying anything, amazed by the sheer variety of products. In his very first letter he regretted not having taken with him ‘a sack of change’ from Brazil, since he had discovered that all the machines accepted the Brazilian 20 centavo coin as if it were a 25 cent piece, even though it was worth only one fifth of the value. ‘I’d have made great savings if I’d brought more coins,’ he confessed, ‘because it costs me 25 cents to buy a stamp for Brazil from the vending machines and to get in to see the blue movies they show in the porn shops here.’

Everything was new and everything excited him, from the supermarket shelves stacked with unnecessary items to the works of art at the National Gallery, where he wept as he actually touched with his own hands the canvas of
Death and the Miser
by Hieronymus Bosch. He knew perfectly well that touching a painting is a cardinal sin in any serious museum, but he placed his fingers not only on Bosch’s 1485 work but on several other masterpieces too. He would stand in front of each work for some minutes, look around and, when he was certain he wasn’t being
watched by the security guards, commit the heresy of spreading all ten fingers out on the canvas. ‘I touched a Van Gogh, a Gauguin, and a Degas, and I felt something growing in me, you know,’ he told his girlfriend. ‘I’m really growing here. I’m learning a lot.’