Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (28 page)

The
pauteiro
began by reading all the competing newspapers, the first editions of which had been bought at the newspaper stands in the centre
of town, and comparing them with the early edition of
O Globo
, in order to decide which items might be worth including in later editions of
O Globo
. Once this was done, he would listen to the radio news to see what were going to be the major news items of the day and then draw up guidelines for the reporters when they arrived at nine o’clock as to what they should investigate and whom they should interview. He also had to decide which of the night’s events, if any, merited the presence of a reporter or photographer. At first, he longed for something important to happen while he was working. ‘One of these days, some really big news story will break while I’m on duty, and I’ll have to cover it,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I’d prefer a different shift, but working this one isn’t unpleasant, if it weren’t for that bastard Frejat, who keeps me hanging on here in the morning.’ During his six months in the post, only one thing required him to mobilize reporters and photographers: the murder of the footballer Almir Albuquerque, or ‘Pernambuquinho’, a forward in the Flamengo football team, who was shot by Portuguese tourists during a fight in the Rio Jerez restaurant in the South Zone of the city. Mostly, though, the nights passed without incident, which left time for him, as he sat alone in the office, to fill pages of notes that he later stuck into his diary.

Before joining
O Globo
Paulo had agreed to lead the drama course in Mato Grosso, and at the end of 1972, after much insistence, he managed to get the newspaper to give him three weeks’ unpaid leave. However, at the beginning of the following year the problem arose again. ‘I’m going to have to choose between the course in Mato Grosso and the work here on the biggest newspaper in the country,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Caban says I can’t go, and if I have to give up one of them, I’m going to have to leave the paper.’ Besides, Raul Seixas was continuing to pursue him with the idea of working together, and to show that his interest in having him as a lyricist was genuine, Seixas had done a very seductive thing: he let it be known that the song ‘Caroço de Manga’, which he had written for the theme music of the new version of
Beto Rockefeller
, was in fact by him and Paulo Coelho. Although it was not uncommon in the recording world for a composer to ‘share authorship’ of a composition with a friend, this also meant an equal division of any royalties. Raul Seixas was slowly beginning to win a place in his life. Paulo wrote:

As he had foreseen, in April 1973, Paulo had to decide whether or not to continue at
O Globo
. As had become his normal practice whenever he had to make a decision, however unimportant, he left it to the I Ching or the Book of Changes, to choose. He was alone at home and, after a period of concentration, he threw the three coins of the Chinese oracle on the
table and noted in his diary the hexagrams that were revealed. There was no doubt: the I Ching warned him against working on the newspaper and advised him that it would mean ‘a slow and prolonged exercise leading to misfortune’. He needed nothing more. The following morning, his short-lived career on
O Globo
came to an end. The outcome had been good, even as regards his bank balance. The money he had earned by selling his and Gisa’s cartoons, along with what he had been paid for the course at Mato Grosso, their page in
Tribuna
and his work at
O Globo
, not only covered his day-to-day expenses but meant that he, ever cautious, could start investing his modest savings in the stock market. ‘I lost my money buying shares in the Bank of Brazil. I’m ruined…’ he recorded at one stage in his diary, only to cheer up a few days later. ‘The shares in Petrobras that were only 25 when I bought them are at 300 today.’

Between the time when he resigned from
O Globo
and the start of his partnership with Raul Seixas, Paulo did a little of everything. Alongside the various other bits of work he had been doing, he did some teaching and some theatre directing, and worked as an actor in a soft-porn movie. No longer having to spend his nights working in the editorial office, which had meant he had to sleep during the day, he began to meet up with Raul either at his place or his own in order to begin their much-postponed partnership. The thought of working together had another attraction for Paulo: if ‘Caroço de Manga’ was already generating substantial royalties, what would he earn if he were the lyricist on a hit song?

As someone who, in a very short space of time, had composed more than eighty songs recorded by various artistes–although he claimed not to like any of them–Raul had enough experience to be able to rid Paulo of any negative feelings he might still have about writing poetry. ‘You don’t have to say things in a complicated way when you want to speak seriously to people,’ Raul would say during their many conversations. ‘In fact, the simpler you are the more serious you can be.’ ‘Writing music is like writing a story in twenty lines that someone can listen to ten times without getting bored. If you can do that, you’ll have made a huge leap: you’ll have written a work of art everyone can understand.’

And so they began. As the months went by, the two became not just musical partners but great friends or, as they liked to tell journalists, ‘close
enemies’. They and their partners went out together and visited each other often. It did not take much for Raul and Edith to be seduced by the disturbing allure of drugs and black magic. At the time, in fact, drugs had taken second place in Paulo’s life, such was his fascination for the mysteries revealed to him by Frater Zaratustra and the OTO. The much proclaimed ‘close enmity’ between Paulo and Raul wasn’t just an empty expression, and appears to have arisen along with their friendship. While Raul had opened the doors of fame and fortune to his new friend, it was Paulo who knew how to reach the world of secret things, a universe to which ordinary mortals had no access. Raul held the route to fame, but it was Paulo who knew the way to the Devil.

The first fruits of their joint labours appeared in 1973 as an LP,
Krig-Ha, Bandolo!
, the title being taken from one of Tarzan’s war cries. Of the five songs with lyrics by Paulo, only one, ‘Al Capone’, became a hit that people would hum in the street.
Krig-Ha
also revealed Raul Seixas to be an excellent lyricist in his own right. At least three of the songs he composed and wrote–‘Mosca na Sopa’, ‘Metamorfose Ambulante’ and ‘Ouro de Tolo’–continued to be played on the radio years after his death in 1989. The LP may not have been a blockbuster, but it meant that Paulo finally saw money pouring into his bank account. When he asked for his balance at his branch of the Banco do Brasil in Copacabana a few weeks after the launch of
Krig-Ha
, he couldn’t believe it when he saw that the record company, Philips, had deposited no less than 240 million cruzeiros–about US$200,000–which, to him, was a real fortune.

The success of the disc meant that Paulo and Gisa, Raul and Edith could really push the boat out. They flew to the United States and, after spending a childish week at Disney World in Florida, visited Memphis, the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and then spent a glorious, hectic month in New York. On one of their many outings in the Big Apple, the two couples knocked at the door of the Dakota building, the grey, neo-Gothic, somewhat sinister apartment block opposite Central Park where John Lennon lived and which had also provided the setting for that classic of satanism,
Rosemary’s Baby
, directed by Roman Polanski. With typical Brazilian immodesty, Paulo and Raul seemed to assume that the success of
Krig-Ha
was recommendation enough for these two puny rockers to fraternize
with the unassailable writer of ‘Imagine’. On their return to Brazil, Paulo and Raul gave several interviews, some for international publications, in which they gave details of their conversation with Lennon, who despite a heavy cold had, according to them, received them with his wife, Yoko Ono, to chat, swap compositions and even consider the possibility of working together. A press release described their meeting:

It was a complete lie. As time went by the truth behind the story emerged. Paulo and Raul never visited John Lennon’s apartment; nor were they received by Yoko Ono. The nearest they got to John Lennon was the porter at the Dakota building, who merely informed them over the intercom that ‘Mr Lennon is not at home’. The same press release included another invention: that Lennon had been most impressed by the project Paulo and Raul were preparing to launch in Brazil, the Sociedade Alternativa, the Alternative Society.

The plan was to create a community based on an experiment developed by Aleister Crowley at the beginning of the twentieth century in Cefalu, in Sicily. The place chosen as the site of the ‘City of the Stars’, as Raul called it, was Paraíba do Sul, where Euclydes Lacerda, or Frater Zaratustra, lived. Raul had absorbed the world of drugs and magic so quickly that a year after his first meeting with Paulo, there was no sign of the smart businessman who had come to the office of
Pomba
to discuss flying saucers. He now sported a thick beard and a magnificent mane of
black hair, and had started dressing extravagantly as well, favouring flares that were very tight in the leg and very wide at the bottom, and lamé jackets which he wore without a shirt underneath, thus revealing his pale, sunken, bony chest.

When they returned from their American trip, Raul and Paulo began to create what was to be by far their greatest success–the LP
Gita
. Of the eleven songs chosen for the disc, seven had lyrics by Paulo and of these at least three became the duo’s theme tunes–‘Medo da Chuva’, ‘Gita’ and ‘Sociedade Alternativa’. ‘Medo da Chuva’ revealed the lyricist’s somewhat unorthodox views on marriage (‘It’s a pity that you think I’m your slave/Saying that I’m your husband and I can’t leave/Like the stones on the beach I stay at your side/Knowing nothing of the loves life brought me, but that I never knew…’). The title song, ‘Gita’, was no more than a translation of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna found in Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu sacred text which they had just read. The most intriguing song on the album, though, was the sixth, ‘Sociedade Alternativa’–or, rather, what was intriguing was what the words concealed. At first sight, the words appear to be an innocent surrealist game based on a single chorus, which is repeated throughout the song:

It was the refrain that opens and closes the piece that concealed the mystery.

As if wanting to leave no doubt as to their intentions, the authors transcribed word for word entire texts from the
Liber Oz
, finally showing their
hand and making their allegiances crystal clear. While Raul sang the refrain, a backing track of his own voice sang:

Although only the few initiates to the world of Crowley would understand this, Paulo Coelho and Raul Seixas had decided to become the spokesmen of OTO and, therefore, of the Devil. For many of their audience this was a coded message written to confuse the censors and arguing for a new society as an alternative to the military dictatorship. This also seemed to be the government’s view, because when ‘Sociedade Alternativa’ was released, the censors forbade Raul to sing it when he toured Brazil.