Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (34 page)

I
T WAS NOT UNTIL THIRTY YEARS LATER,
with the country’s return to democracy, that Paulo learned he had been kidnapped by a commando group of the DOI-Codi (Department of Information Operations–Centre for Internal Defence Operations). Pedro Queima Coelho was concerned about the damage all this might inflict on his son’s fragile emotional state and made a point of being at home so that he would be there to receive Paulo when he was freed. He spent a sleepless night beside a silent telephone and at eight in the morning took a taxi to the Dops. When he arrived, he was astonished to be told by the officer at the desk:

‘Your son and his girlfriend were freed at ten o’clock last night.’

When Paulo’s father stared at him in disbelief, the agent opened a file and showed him two stamped sheets of paper. ‘This is the document for release and here are their signatures,’ he said, trying to appear sympathetic. ‘He was definitely released. If your son hasn’t come home, it’s probably because he’s decided to go underground.’

The nightmare had begun. Paulo and Gisa had been added to the list of the regime’s ‘disappeared’. This meant that whatever might happen to them, it was no longer the responsibility of the state, since both had been released safe and sound after signing an official release document.

What happened after their kidnapping is still so swathed in mystery that in 2007, when he turned sixty, the author still had many unanswered questions. Records kept by the security police confirm that Raul was not detained and that on 27 May the Dops arrested the couple, having identified and questioned them during the night and throughout the day of the twenty-eighth. Documents from the army also show that following their kidnapping outside the Hotel Glória, Paulo and Gisa were taken separately to the 1st Battalion of the Military Police in Rua Barão de Mesquita, in the north of Rio, where the DOI-Codi had its offices, although there is no information about how long they were held at the barracks. Some family members state, albeit not with any certainty, that he could have spent ‘up to ten days’ in the DOI-Codi, but on Friday, 31 May, Paulo was in Gávea writing the first entry in his diary following his release: ‘I’m staying at my parents’ house. I’m even afraid of writing about what happened to me. It was one of the worst experiences of my life–imprisoned unjustly yet again. But my fears will be overcome by faith and my hatred will be conquered by love. From insecurity will come confidence in myself.’

However, among the documents taken from the archives of Abin, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (the successor to the SNI, the National Intelligence Service), is a long interrogation with Paulo lasting from eleven o’clock on the night of 14 June until four in the morning of 15 June in the offices of the DOI-Codi. The mystery lies in the fact that he swears that he never returned to the DOI-Codi following his release. The lawyer Antônio Cláudio Vieira also states with equal certainty that he never accompanied him to Rua Barão de Mesquita; nor was he called a second time by the Coelho family to help their son. The same version is corroborated by Pedro, Paulo’s sister Sônia Maria and her ex-husband, Marcos, who witnessed everything at close hand. Any suspicion that Paulo, in his terror, had betrayed his friends or put others in danger and now wanted to remove this stain from his record does not stand up to a reading of the seven pages typed on the headed notepaper of the then 1st Army. The first four pages are filled with a reiteration of the statement that Paulo had made in the Dops, a detailed history of his life up until then: schools, work in the theatre, trips within Brazil and abroad, prison in Paraná,
O Globo
, the course in Mato Grosso,
A Pomba
, his partnership with Raul…
The part referring to his and Raul’s membership of the OTO is so incomprehensible that the clerk had to write ‘
sic
’ several times, just to make it clear that this really was what the prisoner had said:

When the police asked him to give the names of people he knew with left-wing tendencies, Paulo could recall only two: someone who used to go to the Paissandu, ‘known by everyone as the Philosopher’, and an ex-boyfriend of Gisa’s in the student movement, whose name he also could not remember, but which he believed ‘began with the letter H or A’. The certainty with which everyone states that he did not return to the DOI-Codi after being kidnapped is corroborated by his diary, in which there is absolutely no record of his making a further statement on the night of 14–15 June. The theory that the clerk had typed the wrong date doesn’t hold up when one considers the fact that the statement is seven pages long, with the date–14 June–typed on every page. The definitive proof that Paulo was indeed at the DOI-Codi on some date after 27 May, however, is to be found in one small detail: when he was photographed and identified in the Dops some hours after his arrest on 27 May, he had a moustache and goatee beard. On 14 June, he is described as having ‘beard and moustache shaven off’.

As for Gisa, during the time in which she remained in the DOI-Codi she underwent two interrogations. The first started at eight on the morning of 29 May and only ended at four in the afternoon, and the second was held between eight and eleven on the morning of the following day, Thursday. On both occasions, she was treated as a militant member of the radical group Ação Popular (Popular Action) and of the Brazilian Communist Party, but, as in Paulo’s case, she had little or nothing to tell them, apart from her work in the student movement when she was involved in several left-wing organizations.

During one of the nights when they were being held in the DOI, something happened that caused the final break between the two. With his head covered by a hood, Paulo was being taken to the toilet by a policeman when, as he walked past a cell, he heard someone sobbing and calling him: ‘Paulo? Are you there? If it’s you, talk to me!’

It was Gisa, probably also with a hood on her head: she had recognized his voice. Terrified at the thought that he might be placed naked in the ‘refrigerator’–the closed cell where the temperature was kept deliberately low–he stayed silent.

His girlfriend begged for his help: ‘Paulo, my love! Please, say yes. Just that, say that it’s you!’

Nothing.

She went on: ‘Please, Paulo, tell them I’ve got nothing to do with all this.’

In what he was to see as his greatest act of cowardice, he didn’t even open his mouth.

One afternoon that week, probably Friday, 31 May, a guard appeared with his clothes, told him to get dressed and to cover his head with the hood. He was put on the rear seat of a car and, having been driven some way, thrown out in a small square in Tijuca, a middle-class district 10 kilometres from the barracks where he had been held.

The first days in his parents’ house were terrifying. Every time someone knocked on the door, or the telephone rang, Paulo would lock himself in his room, afraid of being taken away again by the police, the military or whoever it was who had kidnapped him. In order to calm him a little, Pedro, touched by his son’s paranoia, had to swear that he would not allow
him to be imprisoned again, whatever the consequences. ‘If anyone comes to take you without a legal summons,’ he promised, ‘he’ll be greeted with a bullet.’ Only after two weeks holed up in Gávea did Paulo have the courage to go out in the street again, and even then he chose a day when it would be easy to spot if someone was following him: Thursday, 13 June, when Brazil and Yugoslavia were playing the first match of the 1974 World Cup in Germany, and the whole country would be in front of the television supporting the national team. With Rio transformed into a ghost town he went by bus to Flamengo and then, after much hesitation, he plucked up the courage to go into the apartment where he and Gisa had lived until the Saturday on which they believed they had received a visit from the Devil. It was exactly as the police had left it on the Monday evening after searching it. Before the referee blew the final whistle of the match, Paulo was back in the shelter of his parents’ home. One of the penances he imposed on himself, though, so that everything would return to normal as quickly as possible, was not to watch any of the World Cup matches.

The most difficult thing was finding Gisa. Since that dreadful encounter in the DOI-Codi prison he had had no more news of his girlfriend, but her voice crying ‘Paulo! Talk to me, Paulo!’ kept ringing in his head. When he eventually managed to call her old apartment, where she had gone back to live, it suddenly occurred to him that the phone might be tapped and so he didn’t dare to ask whether she had been tortured or when she had been released. When he suggested a meeting in order to discuss their future, Gisa was adamant: ‘I don’t want to live with you again, I don’t want you to say another word to me and I would prefer it if you never spoke my name again.’

Following this, Paulo fell into such a deep depression that his family again sought help from Dr Benjamim Gomes, the psychiatrist at the Dr Eiras clinic. Luckily for Paulo, this time the doctor decided to replace electric shocks with daily sessions of analysis, which, during the first weeks, were held at his home. Paulo’s persecution mania had become so extreme that, on one outing, he became so frightened that he fainted in the street in front of a bookshop in Copacabana and was helped by passers-by. When Philips sent him the proofs for the record sleeve for
Gita
, which
was about to be released, he couldn’t believe his eyes: it was a photo of Raul with a Che Guevara beret bearing the red five-pointed star of the communists. Appalled, he immediately phoned Philips and demanded that they change the image; if they didn’t, he would not allow any of his songs to appear on the record.

When they asked why, he replied so slowly that he seemed to be spelling out each word: ‘Because I don’t want to be arrested again and with that photo on the record sleeve, they’ll arrest me again. Understood?’

After much discussion, he accepted that Raul could be shown wearing the Che beret, but he demanded a written statement from Philips stating that the choice was the entire responsibility of the company. In the end, a suggestion by a graphic artist won the day: the red star was simply removed from the photo, so that it looked as though the beret was merely an innocent beret with no sinister communist connotations.

Since Gisa refused to answer his calls, Paulo began to write her letters each day, asking forgiveness for what he had done in the prison and suggesting that they live together again. In one of these letters he wrote of his feelings of insecurity during the three years they had spent together:

Gisa never replied, but he continued to write. One day, his father, clearly upset, took him to one side. ‘Look, Gisa phoned me at the office,’ he told him, his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘She asked me to tell you not to write to her again.’ Paulo ignored the request and went on writing: ‘Today my father told me that you don’t want to see me again. I also learned that you’re working, which is good, and I felt both hurt and happy. I had just
heard “Gita” on the radio. I was wondering whether you think of me when you hear that song. I think they were the most beautiful lyrics I’ve written so far. It contains all of me. Now I don’t read, don’t write and I’ve no friends.’

This was one of the symptoms of his paranoia, that all his friends had supposedly abandoned him for fear of being close to someone who had been seized and imprisoned by the security police. Whether this was real or imagined, what mattered was his belief that, apart from Raul, only two people held out a hand to him: the journalist Hildegard Angel and Roberto Menescal, one of the creators of the bossa nova and, at the time, a director of Polygram. Together with Phonogram, Polydor and Elenco, the company was one of the Brazilian arms of the Dutch multinational Philips, and one of its greatest rivals in Brazil was CBS, a subsidiary of the American company Columbia. Hilde, as she was and is known, continued to be a friend to Paulo even though she had painful reasons to avoid risking any more confrontations with the dictatorship: three years earlier, her youngest brother, Stuart Angel, who was a member of the guerrilla group MR-8, had been brutally asphyxiated at an air force barracks, with his mouth pressed to the exhaust pipe of a moving jeep. His wife, the economist Sônia Moraes Angel, a member of the ALN (National Liberationist Movement), had also died while being tortured by the DOI-Codi in São Paulo a few months earlier, at the end of 1973. As if these two tragedies were not enough for one family, Hilde and Stuart’s mother, the designer Zuzu Angel, was to die two years later in a car accident that had all the hallmarks of an assassination attempt and became the subject of the film
Zuzu Angel
.