Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (24 page)

After five ‘mind-blowing’ days, the cousins caught another bus in the direction of the Grand Canyon. They got off halfway there, in Los Angeles, but as it was 4 July, Independence Day, the city was dead, and they stayed only a few hours. ‘Nothing was open, and it was almost impossible to find somewhere to have a coffee,’ he complained. ‘The famous Hollywood Boulevard was a complete desert, with no one on the streets, but we did see how luxurious everything here is, even the most ordinary bar.’ And since the cost of living in Los Angeles was incompat
ible with the backpackers’ funds, they didn’t stay the night. They took another bus and, twenty-four hours after leaving San Francisco, reached Flagstaff, the entrance to the Grand Canyon.

The extortionate prices of the hotels and restaurants were almost as impressive as the beauty of the canyon. Since there were no YMCA hostels in the area, they bought a nylon tent, which meant a 19-dollar hole in their tiny stash of savings, and spent the first night in a hippie camp, where at least free hashish was guaranteed. As soon as the sun began to rise, they took down their tent, filled their rucksacks with bottles of water and tinned food, and left on foot for the Grand Canyon. They walked all day beneath the blazing sun and when they decided to stop, exhausted and hungry, they discovered that they were at the widest point of the Canyon, which measures 20 kilometres from side to side. It is also the deepest; between them and the river was a drop of 1,800 metres. They pitched their tent, lit a small bonfire to heat up their tins of soup and fell asleep, exhausted, not waking until dawn the next day.

When Sérgio suggested they go down to the river, Paulo was terrified. As there was absolutely no one around, apart from them, and they were on a path little used by tourists, he was worried that should they get into difficulties, there would be no one to come to their aid. However, Sérgio was determined: if Paulo didn’t want to, he would go alone. He put all his stuff in his rucksack and began the descent, oblivious to his cousin’s protests: ‘Serginho, the problem isn’t going down, but coming back! It’s going to get really hot and we’ve got to climb the equivalent of the stairs in a 500-storey building! In the blazing sun!’

Impervious, his cousin didn’t even turn round. There was nothing for Paulo to do but pick up his rucksack and follow him down. The beauty of the area dispelled some of his fears. The Grand Canyon looked like a 450-kilometre gash in the desert of red sand, at the bottom of which was what appeared to be a tiny trickle of water. This was, in fact, the torrential Colorado River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains in the state of Colorado and flows more than 2,300 kilometres until it runs into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, crossing six more American states (Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming). To be down there was indescribable.

After walking for some five hours, Paulo stopped and suggested to his cousin that they end their adventure there and begin the climb back up, saying: ‘We didn’t eat much last night, we haven’t had a proper breakfast and up to now we haven’t had any lunch. Take a look and see how far we’ve got to climb.’

His cousin remained determined. ‘You can wait for me here, because I’m going down to the river bank.’

He continued walking. Paulo found some shade where he could sit, smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the splendour of the landscape as he sat in total silence. When he looked at his watch, he realized it was midday. He walked on a few metres, trying to see Sérgio, but there was no sign of him. Indeed, as far as the eye could see, there was no one, no tourist, no Indians, not a soul for kilometres and kilometres. He realized that if he were to go down a little farther, he would come to a rocky ledge from where he would have a wider view of the area. However, even from there, he couldn’t see his cousin. He began to shout out his name, waiting a few seconds after each shout, before shouting again. His voice echoed between the walls of red stone, but there was neither sign nor sound of his cousin. He was beginning to think that they had taken the wrong path. From fear to panic was but a step. Feeling entirely defenceless and alone, he became terrified. ‘I’m going to die here,’ he kept saying: ‘I’m going to die. I can’t take any more. I’m not going to get out of here. I’m going to die here, in this wonderful place.’

He was aware that, in midsummer, the temperatures around the Grand Canyon could be over 50°C. His water had run out and it was unlikely that there would be a tap in the middle of that desert. Added to which, he had no idea where he was, since there were so many intersecting paths. He started to shout for help, but no one appeared, and he heard nothing but the echo of his own voice. It was past four in the afternoon. Desperate to find his cousin, he began to run, stumbling, in the direction of the river, knowing that every step he took meant another he would have to climb up on his return.

The sun was burning his face when he finally reached a sign of civilization. Fixed to a rock was a metal plate with a red button and sign saying: ‘If you are lost, press the red button and you will be rescued by
helicopters or mules. You will be fined US$500.’ He had only 80 dollars left and his cousin must have about the same in his pocket, but the discovery of the sign made him certain of two things: they were not the first to be so foolish as to take that route; and the risk of dying began to fade, even though it might mean a few days in jail until their parents could send the money for the fine. However, first of all, Paulo had to find Sérgio. He went another 200 metres farther down, never taking his eyes off the red button, which was his one visible reference mark, and after a bend in the path, he came across a natural belvedere where there was a metal telescope with a coin slot. He inserted 25 cents, the lens opened and he began to scan the river banks, looking for his travel companion. There he was, in the shadow of a rock and apparently as exhausted as Paulo. He was sound asleep.

Rejecting the idea of summoning a helicopter, they climbed up to the top again, and it was midnight by the time they got there. They were exhausted, their skin was puffy with sunburn, but they were alive. After the long day, the idea of spending another night in the hippie camp was so appalling that Paulo made a suggestion: ‘I think we deserve two things tonight: dinner in a restaurant and a night in a hotel.’

They found a comfortable, cheap motel, left their rucksacks in their room and went into the first restaurant they came to, where each ordered a T-bone steak so big it barely fitted on the plate. It cost 10 dollars–the amount they usually spent each day. They barely had the strength to pick up knife and fork. They were both starving, though, and ate as quickly as they could. Five minutes later, however, they were in the toilet, throwing up. They returned to the motel and collapsed on to their beds for the last night they would spend together on their journey: the following day Sérgio would be returning home to Washington and Paulo was to go on to Mexico.

The original reason he had accepted his mother’s gift of a plane ticket had been that it would give him the chance to make a pilgrimage to the mysterious deserts that had inspired Carlos Castaneda, but he had been so thrilled by the novelty of the country as a whole that he had almost forgotten this. Now, with his entire body aching after his adventure in the Grand Canyon, and with money fast running out, he felt a great temptation to
return to Brazil. His Greyhound pass was still valid for a few more days, though, and so he carried on as planned. Grown accustomed to the wealth of America, he was appalled by the poverty he found in Mexico, which was much like Brazil. He tried all the mushroom syrups and hallucinogenic cactus teas that he could, and then caught the bus back to New York, where he spent three more days, after which he flew home to Brazil.

A
WEEK AFTER RETURNING TO BRAZIL,
having recovered from his trip, Paulo had still not decided what to do with his life. One thing was certain: he was not going back to the law faculty, so he left the course in the middle of the academic year. He continued to attend classes in theatre direction at the Guanabara State Faculty of Philosophy–which would later become the University of Rio de Janeiro–and he did everything he could to get his articles published in Rio newspapers. He wrote an article about the liberal attitude towards drugs in the United States and sent it to the most popular humorous weekly of the period,
Pasquim
, which went on to become an influential opponent of the dictatorship. He promised St Joseph that he would light fifteen candles to him if the text was published and, every Wednesday, he was the first to arrive at the newspaper stand on the corner near his home. He would avidly leaf through the magazine only to return it to the pile, disheartened. It was not until three weeks later that he realized the article had been rejected. Although this rejection tormented him for days, it was not enough to put paid to his dream of becoming a writer. When he realized that
Pasquim
’s silence was a resounding ‘No’, he made a strange note in his diary: ‘I’ve been thinking about the problem of fame and have concluded that my good fortune hasn’t yet turned up. When it does, it’s going to be quite something.’

The problem was that while he waited for it to turn up, he needed to earn a living. He still enjoyed working in the theatre, but the returns weren’t usually enough even to cover the costs of putting on the production. This led him to accept an invitation to teach on a private course preparing students for the entrance exam for theatre courses given by the Federation of Isolated State Schools in the State of Guanabara. It wouldn’t contribute anything to his future plans, but, on the other hand, it wouldn’t take up much time and it guaranteed him a monthly salary of 1,600 cruzeiros, some US$350.

On 13 August 1971, a little more than a month after his return from the United States, Paulo received a phone call from Washington. His grandfather, Arthur Araripe or Tuca, had just died. He had suffered severe cranial trauma when he fell down the stairs at his daughter’s house in Bethesda, where he was staying, and had died instantly. Appalled by the news, Paulo sat in silence for a few minutes, trying to collect his thoughts. One of the last images he had of Tuca, smiling and sporting a beret as they arrived at the airport in Washington, seemed so fresh that he could not accept that the old man had died. Paulo felt that if he went out on to the verandah he would find Tuca dozing there, mouth open, over a copy of the
Reader’s Digest
. Or, as he loved to do, provoking his hippie grandson with his reactionary ideas, saying for instance that Pelé was ‘an ignorant black man’ and that Roberto Carlos was ‘an hysterical screamer’. Then he would defend right-wing dictators, starting with Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain (on these occasions, Paulo’s father would join in and insist that ‘any idiot’ could paint like Picasso or play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix). Instead of getting annoyed, Paulo would roar with laughter at his obstinate grandfather’s over-the-top remarks, because, for all his conservatism, and perhaps because he himself had been a bit of a bohemian during his youth, he was the only member of the family who respected and understood the strange friends Paulo went around with. Having known him for so many years, and having built a closer relationship with him during the time he spent in his grandparents’ small house, Paulo had come to consider Tuca to be almost a second father to him. A generous, tolerant father, the very opposite of his real father, the harsh and irascible Pedro. For these reasons, his grandfather’s unexpected death
was all the more painful, and the wound opened up by that loss would take time to heal.

Paulo continued to teach and to go to his theatre course, with which he was beginning to find fault. ‘In the first year, the student learns to be a bit of a chiseller and to use personal charm to achieve whatever he or she wants,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘In the second year, the student loses any sense of organization he had before and in the third, he becomes a queer.’ His proverbial paranoia reached unbearable levels when he learned that the detective Nelson Duarte, who was accused of belonging to the Death Squad, was going around the Escola Nacional de Teatro looking for ‘cannabis users and communists’. On one such visit, the policeman was confronted by a brave woman, the teacher and speech and hearing therapist Glória Beutenmüller, who wagged her finger at him and said: ‘My students can wear their hair as long as they like–and if you arrest one of them, they’ll have to be dragged out of here.’

Protected by the secrecy of his diary, Paulo made a solitary protest against these arbitrary arrests:

In fact, he had already made plenty of notes showing that he didn’t share the ideas of many of his left-wing friends who opposed the dictatorship. His diary was peppered with statements such as: ‘There’s no point getting rid of this and replacing it with communism, which would just be the same shit’ and ‘Taking up arms never solved anything’. But the repression of any armed conflict was at its height
and mere sympathizers as well as their friends were being rounded up. Censorship meant that the press could not publish anything about the government’s use of violence against its opponents, but news of this nevertheless reached Paulo’s ears, and the shadow cast by the security forces seemed to get closer by the day. One of his friends was imprisoned by the political police merely because he had renewed his passport in order to go to Chile during the period of Salvador Allende’s rule. A year earlier, Paulo had learned that a former girlfriend of his, Nancy Unger, had been shot and apprehended in Copacabana while resisting arrest. He found out that Nancy, along with sixty-nine other political prisoners, had been exiled from Brazil, in exchange for the Swiss ambassador Enrico Giovanni Bucher, who had been kidnapped by command of the Popular Revolutionary Front. In the end, the repression became too much even for those who weren’t part of the armed resistance. Persecuted by the censors, the composer Chico Buarque went into self-imposed exile in Italy. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso moved to London after having their heads shaved in an army barracks in Rio. Gradually, Paulo was starting to hate the military, but nothing would make him overcome his fear and open his mouth, and say in public what he felt. Appalled that he could do nothing against a regime that was torturing and killing people, he fell into depression.

In September 1971, the army surrounded and killed Captain Carlos Lamarca in the interior of Bahia. When Paulo read excerpts from the dead guerrilla’s diary that were published by the press, he wrote a long and bitter outburst that gives a faithful picture of his inner conflicts. Once again, he confessed that he avoided talking about the police in his diary for one reason only: fear. But how could he continue not protesting against what was going on around him? It was when he was alone, locked in his room that he gave expression to his pain:

Sometimes he would spend all day locked in his room at the back of his grandmother’s house, smoking cannabis and trying to make a start on that dreamed-of book, or at least a play, or an essay. He had notebooks full of ideas for books, plays and essays, but something was missing–inclination? inspiration?–and when evening came, he still hadn’t written a line. Otherwise, he taught for three hours a day and then went to the university. He would go in, talk to various people and, when he got fed up
with doing that, end up alone in a bar near by, drinking coffee, chain-smoking and filling pages of notebooks with ideas.

It was on one such evening that a girl appeared, wearing a miniskirt and high boots. She had very long, thick dark hair. She sat down beside Paulo at the bar, ordered a coffee and struck up a conversation with him. She had just qualified as an architect and her name was Adalgisa Eliana Rios de Magalhães, or Gisa, from Alfenas in Minas Gerais; she was two years older than Paulo. She had left Minas for Rio in order to study at the Federal University and was now working for the Banco Nacional da Habitação, although what she liked best was drawing comic strips. She was as slender as a catwalk model, and had an unusual face in which her dark melancholy eyes contrasted with a sensual mouth. They talked for some time, exchanged telephone numbers and parted. Once again, Paulo dismissed any possibility of a relationship developing, writing: ‘She’s ugly and has no sex appeal.’

Unlike Paulo–and this was something he never knew–Gisa had been an active militant in opposition to the military regime. She had never taken part in armed action or anything that might involve risking her life–and this, in the jargon of repression, meant that she was a ‘subversive’, rather than a ‘terrorist’–but following her first year in architecture, she had been a member of several clandestine left-wing cells that had infiltrated the student movement. It was through the students’ union at the university that she joined the Brazilian Communist Party, or PCB, where she handed out pamphlets at student assemblies with copies of
Voz Operária
[
The Worker’s Voice
]. She left the party and joined the Dissidência da Guanabara, which changed its name in 1969 to Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro, or MR-8, and was one of the groups responsible for the kidnapping of the United States ambassador Charles Elbrick. Although she herself was never anything more than a low-ranking militant, Gisa was nevertheless an activist, and, when she met Paulo, she was having an affair with a young architect from Pernambuco, Marcos Paraguassu de Arruda Câmara. He was the son of Diógenes de Arruda Câmara, a member of the elite in the Partido Comunista do Brasil, who had been in prison in Rio since 1968, and was himself a militant.

In spite of Paulo’s scornful remark after their first meeting, over the next few days, the two met up again every night in the small bar next to the theatre school. A week later, he walked her back to the apartment where she lived with her brother, José Reinaldo, at Flamengo beach. She invited him up, and they listened to music and smoked cannabis until late. When her brother arrived home at two in the morning, he found them lying naked on the sitting-room carpet. Less than a month later, Gisa broke up with Marcos Paraguassu: she and Paulo had decided to live together. Paulo moved in three weeks later, once she had managed to get rid of her brother, and immediately proposed that they get married in a month and a half, on Christmas Eve. Gisa accepted, despite feeling slightly uncomfortable about the speed with which he had moved into her home and his habit of walking around the apartment naked.

Hoping perhaps that marriage would help her son to settle down, Paulo’s mother reacted as warmly as she had with his previous girlfriends. Then, on 22 November, three months after they had met, Paulo recorded in his diary: ‘Gisa is pregnant. It looks as though we’re going to have a son.’ The fact that the baby would be a boy born under the sign of Leo appears to have made him still more excited at the thought of fatherhood. ‘My powers will be re-born with this son,’ he wrote delightedly. ‘In the next eight months I’ll redouble my energy and climb higher and higher.’

The dream lasted less than a week. After his initial excitement, Paulo began to feel a sense of horror whenever he thought of it, which was all the time. When reality dawned, and he saw that it would be absolute madness to have a child when he had no permanent employment and no means of supporting a family, the first person to be told of his decision was not Gisa but his mother. To Paulo’s surprise, Lygia turned out to be not quite the committed Catholic when he told her that he was going to suggest to his girlfriend that she have an abortion. She agreed that having the child was not a good idea. Gisa resisted at first, before agreeing that she, too, was convinced that it would be irresponsible to have the baby. With the help of friends they found a clinic that specialized in clandestine abortions–abortion being a crime–and arranged the operation for 9 December 1971.