Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (29 page)

With or without censorship, the fact is that everything was going so well that Paulo concluded that his days of material and emotional penury were over. That evening, as he sometimes did, instead of writing, he recorded his diary on tape, talking as if he were on stage:

While he was waiting for his other wishes to come true, he enjoyed the money, fame and love that had already come his way. At the beginning of May, Raul invited him and Gisa to go to Brasília, where he was going to do three shows during the Festival of the Nations being held in the federal capital on 10, 11 and 12 May. At the same time, they were going to start promoting the LP
Gita
, which was to be launched a few weeks later. A slave to the I Ching, Paulo threw the three coins several times until it was confirmed that the trip would present no danger.

They were staying at the smart Hotel Nacional when, on the Friday afternoon, the day of the first show, the two were summoned by the Federal Police to be given the usual talk by the censors as to what could and could not be sung in public. The colonel and bureaucrat who received them explained that in their case the only banned song was ‘Sociedade Alternativa’. The sports stadium where the show was to be held was packed, and the first two shows passed off without incident. On the Sunday, the night of the final show, Raul, after spending the afternoon and evening smoking cannabis, had what he called ‘a turn’. He was unable to remember a single word of the songs on the programme. While the band kept the audience entertained, he squatted at the edge of the stage and whispered to his partner, who was sitting in the first row: ‘Help me, will you? I’m in deep shit. Get up here and keep the public quiet for a while, while I go and splash my face with water.’ With the microphone in his hand, Raul introduced Paulo to the crowd as ‘my dear partner’ and left him to deal with the problem. Since the audience were already clapping in time to the band, shouting out the banned refrain, Paulo simply did the same and began to sing along with them:

When he returned to Rio, he described the weekend in Brasília in just a few lines: ‘It was a very quiet trip. On Friday we talked to the censor and a colonel from the Federal Police. On Sunday, I talked to the crowd for the first time, although I was completely unprepared. Any mention of the Alternative Society is restricted to interviews.’

During that week Paulo made an important decision: he formalized his acceptance into the OTO as a probationer or novice, when he swore ‘eternal devotion to the Great Work’. From 19 May ‘of the year 1974 of the Common Era’ onwards, for followers of the Devil, Paulo Coelho de Souza’s ‘profane name’ would disappear and be replaced by the ‘magical name’ that he himself had chosen: Eternal Light, or Staars, or, simply, 313. After sending his oath off in the post, he noted in his diary: ‘Having been invoked so often, He must be breathing fire from his nostrils somewhere near by.’ He was. On the morning of 25 May, six days after his entrance into the world of darkness, Paulo was finally to have his much-desired meeting with the Devil.

T
HE LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY
that Philips had deposited in Paulo’s bank account the previous year was just a hint of what was to come. Following the enormous success of
Krig-Ha, Bandolo!
the recording company launched a single featuring ‘Gita’ and ‘Não Pare na Pista’, the latter written on the Rio–Bahia highway when the two were returning from a few days’ rest in Dias d’Ávila, in the interior of Bahia, where Raul’s parents lived. The aim of the single was merely to give the public a taster of the LP that would be released in June, but in less than a month it had sold more than a hundred thousand copies, which won the creators an unexpectedly early Gold Disc, the first of six prizes that the two songs went on to win. Each time a radio station unwittingly made an invocation to the Devil as they played the refrain ‘Viva! Viva a Sociedade Alternativa!’ meant more money for Raul and Paulo. In April 1974, Paulo bought a large apartment in Rua Voluntários da Pátria, in Botafogo, a few blocks from the estate where he had been born and spent his childhood, and he moved in there with Gisa.

On Friday, 24 May, two weeks after their short stay in Brasília, Raul telephoned to say that he had been ordered to go to the political police–known as the Dops–on the following Monday in order to ‘provide some information’. Being accustomed to frequent invitations to discuss which
songs could appear in shows or on records, he didn’t appear to be worried, but just in case, he asked his partner to go with him. As soon as he rang off, Paulo consulted the I Ching as to whether there was any risk in going to the Dops. Since the answer seemed to be ‘No’–or at least so it seemed, for according to its followers, the interpretation of the oracle is not always very precise–he thought no more about the matter.

When he woke on the Saturday morning, Paulo found a note on the bedside table from Gisa, saying that she had gone out early and would be back soon. As he scanned the front page of the
Jornal do Brasil
, the date on the masthead caught his eye: it was exactly two years since he had met Raul, a meeting that had totally changed his life. He drank a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, glanced through the window from where he could see the sun beating down on the pavement below and then went into his bedroom to put on some shorts before going for his usual hour-long walk. He could detect a slight smell of burning and checked the sockets and domestic appliances, but found nothing wrong. And yet the smell was getting stronger. No, it wasn’t the smell of a fuse blowing, it was something else, something very familiar. He felt a chill in his stomach as his memory took him back to the place where he had smelled the same smell now filling the apartment: the morgue in the Santa Casa de Misericórdia that he had visited daily for some months when collecting data for the obituary page of
O Globo
. It was the macabre smell of the candles that appeared to be permanently burning in the hospital morgue. The difference was that the odour permeating everything around him now was so strong that it seemed to be coming from 100, even 1,000, candles all burning at the same time.

As he bent down to do up his trainers, he had the impression that the parquet floor was rising up and coming dangerously close to his face. In fact, his legs had unexpectedly given way beneath him, as if he were about to faint, throwing his chest forwards. He almost crashed to the ground. When the dizziness intensified, he tried to remember whether he had eaten anything strange, but no, it was nothing like that: he wasn’t feeling nauseous, he was simply caught up in a kind of maelstrom that seemed to be affecting everything around him. As well as the attacks of giddiness, which came and went, he realized that the apartment was full
of a dark mist, as though the sun had suddenly disappeared and the place was being invaded by grey clouds. For a moment, he prayed that he was merely experiencing the moment most feared by drug addicts–a bad trip, provoked by the use of LSD. This, however, was impossible. He hadn’t taken LSD in ages, and he’d never heard of cannabis causing such hellish feelings.

He tried to open the door and go outside, but fear paralysed him. It might be worse outside than in. By now, along with the dizziness and the smoke, he could hear terrifying noises, as though someone or some being were breaking everything around him, and yet everything remained in its place. Terrified and lacking the strength to do anything, he felt his hopes revive when the telephone rang. He prayed to God to let it be Euclydes Lacerda–Frater Zaratustra–who could put an end to his suffering. He picked up the phone, but almost immediately put it down again when he realized that he was invoking God’s name in order to speak to a disciple of the Devil. It was not Euclydes: the person calling was his friend Stella Paula, whom he had also recruited into the OTO. She was sobbing, as terrified as he was, and was calling to ask for help because her apartment was filled with black smoke, a strong smell of decomposition and other vile smells. Paulo broke down into uncontrollable sobs. He rang off and, remembering what he usually did when he’d had too much cannabis, he went to the refrigerator and drank several glasses of milk, one after the other, and then put his head under the cold-water tap in the bathroom. Nothing happened. The smell of the dead, the smoke and the dizziness continued, as did the noise of things breaking, which was so loud that he had to cover his ears with his hands to deaden it.

It was only then that he began to understand what was happening. Having broken all ties with Christianity, he had spent the last few years working with negative energies in search of something that not even Aleister Crowley had achieved: a meeting with the Devil. What was happening that Saturday morning was what Frater Zaratustra called a ‘reflux of magical energies’. All his prayers had been answered. Paulo was face-to-face with the Devil. He felt like throwing himself out the window, but jumping from the fourth floor might not necessarily kill him, and might do terrible damage and perhaps leave him crippled. Crying like an aban
doned baby, his hands shielding his ears and his head buried between his knees, he recalled fragments of the threats that Father Ruffier had pronounced from the pulpit of the chapel at St Ignatius College.

That was it: he was in hell–a hell far worse than Father Ruffier had promised and which he seemed to be condemned to suffer alone. Yes, how long had this been going on–two hours? three? He had lost all notion of time, and there was still no sign of Gisa. Had something happened to her? In order to stop thinking, he began to count the books in the apartment, and then the records, the pictures, the knives, spoons, forks, plates, pairs of socks, underpants…When he reached the end, he started again. He was standing bent over the kitchen sink with his hands full of cutlery when Gisa returned. She was as confused as he was, shivering with cold, and with her teeth chattering. She asked him what was happening, but Paulo didn’t know. She became angry, saying: ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You know everything!’

They clung to each other, knelt down on the kitchen floor and began to cry. When he heard himself confessing to Gisa that he was afraid to die, the ghosts of St Ignatius College again rose up before him. ‘You’re afraid of dying?’ Father Ruffier had bawled at him once in front of his classmates. ‘Well, I’m shamed by your cowardice.’ Gisa found his cowardice equally shameful, especially in a man who, until recently, had been the great macho know-it-all, and who had encouraged her to become involved with the crazy warlocks of the OTO. However, in the midst of that mayhem, Paulo really didn’t care what that priest or his girlfriend or his parents might think of him. The only thing he knew was that he didn’t want to die, far less deliver his soul to the Devil.

He finally plucked up the courage to whisper in Gisa’s ear: ‘Let’s go and find a church! Let’s get out of here and go straight to a church!’

Gisa, the left-wing militant, couldn’t believe her ears. ‘A church? Why do you need a church, Paulo?’

He needed God. He wanted a church so that he could ask God to forgive him for having doubted His existence and to put an end to his suffering. He dragged Gisa into the bathroom, turned on the cold-water tap of the shower and crouched beneath it with her. The evil smell, the grey clouds and the noise continued. Paulo began to recite out loud every prayer he knew–Hail Mary, Our Father, Salve Regina, the Creed–and eventually she joined in. They couldn’t remember how long they stayed there, but the tips of their fingers were blue and wrinkled by the time Paulo got up, ran into the sitting room and grabbed a copy of the Bible. Back in the shower, he opened it at random and came upon verse 24, chapter 9, of St Mark’s gospel, which he and Gisa began to repeat, like a mantra, under the showerhead:

They repeated these words out loud hundreds, possibly thousands of times. Paulo renounced and forswore, again out loud, any connection with OTO, with Crowley and with the demons who appeared to have been unleashed that Saturday. When peace returned, it was dark outside. Paulo felt physically and emotionally drained.

Terrified by what they had experienced, the couple did not dare to sleep in the apartment that night. The furniture, books and household objects were all in their usual places, as if that emotional earthquake had never taken place, but it seemed best not to take any chances and they went to spend the weekend with Lygia and Pedro in Gávea. Since she had been with Paulo, Gisa had become a regular visitor to the Coelho household and was always made welcome, particularly by Lygia. Gisa’s one defect–in the eyes of Paulo’s parents–was her political radicalism. During the long Sunday lunches in Gávea when Paulo’s parents, aunts,
uncles and grandparents would meet, Gisa would always defend her ideas, even though she knew she was among supporters of Salazar, Franco and the Brazilian military dictatorship. Although everything indicates that she had gradually distanced herself from the political militancy of her student days, her views had not changed. When the couple left on Monday morning, Lygia invited them to a small dinner she was going to hold that evening for her sister Heloísa, ‘Aunt Helói’. The two took a taxi back to their apartment–for Paulo had still not learnt to drive. There were no smells, no mists, no shards of glass, nothing to indicate that two days earlier the place had been the scene of what both were sure had been a battle between Good and Evil. When he chose the clothes he was going to wear after his shower, Paulo decided that he would no longer be a slave to superstition. He took from his wardrobe a pale blue linen shirt with short sleeves and pockets trimmed with embroidery, which was a present his mother had given him three years earlier and which he had never worn. This was because the shirt had been bought on a trip his parents had made to Asunción, the capital of the neighbouring country whose name, since his imprisonment in Ponta Grossa, he had never again pronounced. In wearing that shirt from Paraguay he wanted, above all, to prove to himself that he was free of his esoteric tics. He had lunch with Gisa and, at two in the afternoon, went over to Raul’s apartment to accompany him to the Dops.

It took more than half an hour to travel the traffic-ridden 15 kilometres that separated Jardim de Alah, where Raul lived, and the Dops building in the centre of the city, and the two men spent the time discussing plans for the launch of their LP
Gita
. A year earlier, when the
Krig-Ha, Bandolo!
album had been released, the two, at Paulo’s suggestion, had led a ‘musical march’ through the streets of the commercial area in old Rio, and this had been a great success. This ‘happening’ had garnered them valuable minutes on the TV news as well as articles in newspapers and magazines. For
Gita
they wanted to do something even more extravagant.

Calmly going to an interview with the political police when Brazil still had a military dictatorship, without taking with them a lawyer or a representative of the recording company, was not an irresponsible act. Besides being reasonably well known–at least Raul was–neither had
any skeletons in the cupboard. Despite Paulo’s arrest in Ponta Grossa in 1969 and their skirmishes with the censors, they could not be accused of any act that might be deemed to show opposition to the dictatorship. Besides, the regime had eradicated all the armed combat groups operating in the country. Six months earlier, at the end of 1973, army troops had destroyed the last centres of guerrilla resistance in Araguaia in the south of Pará, leaving a total of sixty-nine dead. Having annihilated all armed opposition, the repressive machinery was slowly being wound down. The regime was still committing many crimes and atrocities–and would continue to do so–but on that May Monday morning in 1974, it would not have been considered utter madness to keep an appointment with the political police, especially since any allegations of torture and the killing of prisoners were mostly made against the intelligence agencies and other sectors of the army, navy and air force.

When the taxi left them at the door of the three-storey building in Rua da Relação, two blocks away from the Philips headquarters, it was three on the dot on 27 May. While Paulo sat on a bench, reading a newspaper, Raul showed the summons to the man at a window and then disappeared off down a corridor. Half an hour later, the musician returned. Instead of going over to Paulo, who was getting up ready to leave, he went over to a public telephone opposite, pretended to dial a number, and began to sing in English: ‘My dear partner, the men want to talk to you, not to me…’

When Paulo failed to understand that Raul was trying to alert him to the fact that he might be in danger, Raul continued tapping his fingers on the telephone and repeating, as though it were a refrain: ‘They want to talk to you, not to me…They want to talk to you, not to me…’