Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (36 page)

His new financial and professional security did not, however, have the effect of comforting his tortured soul. Until May 1974, he had just about managed to live with his feelings of persecution and rejection, but following his imprisonment, these appeared to reach an unbearable level.
Of the 600 pages of his diary written during the twelve months following his release, more than 400 deal with the fears resulting from that black week. In one notebook of 60 pages chosen at random, the word ‘fear’ is repeated 142 times, ‘problem’ 118 times, and there are dozens of instances of words such as ‘solitude’, ‘despair’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘alienation’. He wrote at the bottom of one page, quoting Guimarães Rosa: ‘It is not fear, no. It’s just that I’ve lost the will to have courage.’ In May 1975, on the first anniversary of his release from the DOI-Codi, he paid for a mass of thanksgiving to be celebrated at the church of St Joseph, his protector.

Since leaving prison, the person who gave him the greatest sense of security–more even than Dr Benjamim and even perhaps his father–was the lawyer Antônio Cláudio Vieira, whom Paulo considered responsible for his release. As soon as he returned from the United States, he asked his father to make an appointment for him to thank Vieira for his help. When he arrived at the lawyer’s luxurious apartment with its spectacular view of Flamengo, Paulo was completely bowled over by the lawyer’s dark, pretty daughter, Eneida, who was a lawyer like her father and worked in his office. During that first meeting, the two merely flirted, but exactly forty-seven days later, Paulo proposed to Eneida, and she immediately accepted. According to the social values of the time, not only was he in a position to marry, but he was also a good prospect–someone with enough money to maintain a wife and children. The new album he had made with Raul,
Novo Aeon
, had been released at the end of 1975. The two had written four of the thirteen tracks (‘Rock do Diabo’, ‘Caminhos I’, ‘Tú És o MDC da Minha Vida’ and ‘A Verdade sobre a Nostalgia’). The record also revealed Raul’s continued involvement with the satanists of the OTO: the ill-mannered Marcelo Motta had written the lyrics of no fewer than five of the tracks (‘Tente Outra Vez’, ‘A Maçã’, ‘Eu Sou Egoísta’, ‘Peixuxa–O Amiguinho dos Peixes’ and ‘Novo Aeon’). Although Raul and his followers considered the record a masterpiece,
Novo Aeon
was not a patch on the previous albums, and sold only a little over forty thousand copies.

Paulo clearly had enough money to start a family, but asking for the girl’s hand so quickly could only be explained by a burning passion, which,
however, was not the case. As far as Paulo was concerned, he had not only found a woman he could finally marry and ‘settle down’ with–as he had been promising himself he would do since leaving prison–but he would also have the guarantor of his emotional security, Antônio Cláudio Vieira, as his father-in-law. On the evening of 16 June 1975, after smoking a joint, Paulo decided that it was time to resolve the matter. He called Eneida, asking her to tell her parents that he was going to formalize his offer of marriage: ‘I just need time to go home and pick up my parents. Then we’ll come straight over.’

His parents were fast asleep, but were hauled out of their beds by their crazy son who had suddenly decided to become engaged. Whether it was the effects of the cannabis, or whether it was because he had never before played such a role, the fact is that when it came to speaking to his future father-in-law, Paulo’s mouth went dry, and he choked and stammered and was unable to say a single word.

Vieira saved the situation by saying: ‘We all know what you want to say. You’re asking for Eneida’s hand in marriage, aren’t you? If so, the answer is “Yes”.’

As they all toasted the engagement with champagne, Paulo produced a beautiful diamond ring that he had bought for his future wife. The following day, Eneida reciprocated Paulo’s present by sending to his house an Olivetti electric typewriter, which the author continued to use until 1992, when he changed to working on a computer.

Not even three weeks had passed before his diary began to reveal that the engagement had perhaps been over-hasty: ‘I have serious problems with my relationship with Eneida. I chose her for the security and emotional stability that she would give me. I chose her because I was looking for a counter-balance to my naturally unbalanced temperament. Now I understand the price I have to pay for this: castration. Castration in my behaviour, castration in my conversation, castration in my madness. I can’t take it.’

To go back on his word and break off the engagement did not even enter his head, because it would mean not only losing the lawyer but gaining an enemy–the mere thought of which made his blood run cold. But Paulo realized that Eneida was also getting fed up with his strange habits.
She didn’t mind if he continued to smoke cannabis, but she didn’t want to use it herself, and Paulo was constantly at her to do just that. As for his ‘sexual propositions’, she made it quite clear: he could forget any ideas of having a
ménage à trois
. Eneida was not prepared to allow his girlfriends to share their bed. A split was, therefore, inevitable. When the engagement was only forty days old Paulo recorded in his diary that it had all come to an end:

The companion on whom he had his eye was a trainee, Cecília Mac Dowell, who was working on the press team at Philips. But before declaring himself to Cissa, as she was known, Paulo had a lightning romance with Elisabeth Romero, who was also a journalist and had interviewed him for a music magazine. They started going out together, and the affair took off. Beth rode a large Kawasaki 900 motorbike, and Paulo took to riding pillion. Although the affair was short-lived, it allowed Beth to witness an episode which Paulo was to describe dozens, if not hundreds of times in interviews published in the international press: the meeting he never had with his idol Jorge Luis Borges.

With the Christmas holidays approaching, Paulo invited Beth to go with him to Buenos Aires, where he intended to visit the great Argentinean writer. He had been putting off the trip for some time, reluctant to go to the police in order to ask for an exit visa to travel to the
neighbouring country, fearing that he might be arrested again. They made no attempt to get in touch with Borges beforehand or to obtain some kind of letter of introduction, but the couple were nevertheless prepared to put up with the forty-eight-hour bus journey between Rio and Buenos Aires, armed only with Borges’s address: Calle Maipu 900. As soon as they arrived, Paulo went straight there. The porter of the apartment block, in the centre of the city, told him that Don Jorge Luis was on the other side of the road having a coffee in the bar of an old hotel. Paulo crossed the road, went into the lobby and saw through the window the unmistakable silhouette of the great author of
El Aleph
, then seventy-six years old, seated alone at a table, drinking an espresso. Such was his excitement that Paulo didn’t have the courage to go up to him. Creeping out as silently as he had entered, he left without saying a word to Borges–something he would always regret.

At the age of twenty-eight, he was to spend his first Christmas away from his family. On the path to Christian reconversion, on 24 December he invited Beth to go with him to midnight mass. Surprised by her refusal–she preferred to spend the night walking through the streets of Buenos Aires–he simply ended the relationship. He telephoned Cissa in Rio on the pretext of wishing her a happy Christmas and declared: ‘I’m in love with you and I’ll be home in three days’ time. If you promise to meet me at the airport, I’ll take a plane so we can be together as soon as possible.’

Small, like him, with brown eyes and a slightly aquiline nose, Cecília Mac Dowell was nineteen and doing media studies at university in Rio de Janeiro when she met Paulo. She was the daughter of Patrícia Fait, an American, and the wealthy and respected TB specialist Afonso Emílio de la Rocque Mac Dowell, the owner of a large clinic in Jacarepaguá. She had been educated at the traditional Colégio Brasileiro de Almeida in Copacabana, which had been set up and run by Nilza Jobim, the mother of the composer Tom Jobim. Although she came from a conservative background–her father came from the northeast and her mother had received a strict Protestant education–the Mac Dowells welcomed with open arms the hippie who had fallen in love with their youngest child. As the months went by, Patrícia and Afonso Emílio shut their eyes to the fact that Cissa spent every weekend with her boyfriend (who had rented out
his apartment in Voluntários da Pâtria and moved to the two-roomed apartment in noisy Barata Ribeiro). Thirty years later, Cissa would look back and see some ulterior motives behind her parents’ broad-mindedness: ‘I think that because my two older sisters hadn’t married, my parents lowered their expectations regarding future sons-in-law. They thought it best not to frighten off any potential candidates.’

Whatever her parents’ reasoning, the fact is that at the end of the week, when the Mac Dowells went to their country house in Petrópolis, Cissa would put a few clothes and possessions into a cloth bag and set off to the apartment in Barata Ribeiro. The memory of his disastrous engagement to Eneida, however, continued to trouble Paulo whenever such a situation threatened to reappear: He wrote in his diary: ‘This evening, we’re having supper at Cissa’s house and I hate that because it looks like we’re engaged, and the last thing I want at the moment is to be someone’s fiancé.’ During one of his sessions with the psychiatrist, which he continued to attend frequently, Dr Benjamim Gomes suggested that his nervous tension arose from his problems with sexual relationships: ‘He said that my lack of interest in sex is causing the tension I’m experiencing. In fact, Cissa is a bit like me: she doesn’t insist that much on having sex. This suited me fine because I wasn’t under any obligation, but now I’m going to use sex as a therapy to relieve tension. Dr Benjamim told me that the curve on the graph produced by electroshock treatment is the same as for an orgasm or for an epileptic fit. That’s how I discovered sex as therapy.’

Although he still avoided any mention of an engagement, in March 1976, when his girlfriend returned from a three-week trip to Europe, Paulo proposed marriage. Cissa accepted with genuine happiness, but she laid down certain conditions: she wanted a real marriage, both in a register office and in church, with a priest, and with the bride in white and the groom in jacket and tie. He burst out laughing, telling her that he would accept all her demands in the name of love; ‘besides I really needed to do something conventional and there was nothing better than marriage for that’.

Before the ceremony Paulo consulted the I Ching several times to discover whether he was doing the right thing, and he recorded in his
diary his feelings of insecurity: ‘Yesterday I was filled with a real dread of marriage and I was terrified. I reacted violently. We were both feeling a bit suspicious of each other and things turned ugly.’ Two days later, his state of mind was quite different: ‘I’ve been sleeping away from the apartment because I’m suffering from paranoia. I’m desperate for Cissa to come and live with me now. We really do love each other and understand each other and she’s a very easy person to be with. But before she can do that, we have to go through the farce of the wedding.’

On 2 July, however, Paulo was even more dressed up than his fiancée had demanded. Punctually, at seven in the evening, as Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 was playing, he took his place to the right of the priest in St Joseph’s Church. Compared with the Paulo Coelho who had allowed himself to be photographed drunk and dishevelled in New York two years earlier, the man at the altar looked like a prince. With short hair, and his moustache and goatee neatly trimmed, he was wearing a modern morning suit, with a double-breasted jacket, striped trousers, black shoes, a white shirt with cufflinks and a silver tie–identical clothes to those worn by his father and father-in-law, although not by his two best men, Roberto Menescal and Raul Seixas.

To the sound of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, five bridesmaids led the way for the bride, who arrived on her father’s arm and wearing a long white dress. Among the dozens of guests filling the church, Raul Seixas was a most striking figure, in dark glasses, red bowtie and a jacket with matching red stitching. At the blessing of the rings, music filled the nave and the ceremony ended to the chords of Albinoni’s Adagio. Afterwards, everyone went back to the bride’s parents’ apartment, where the civil ceremony was performed, followed by a magnificent dinner.

The honeymoon was nothing special. Since both had to get back to work, they spent a week in a summer house that belonged to Paulo’s parents on the island of Jaguanum, off the Rio de Janeiro coast. Neither has particularly fond memories of that time. There is no reference to the trip in Paulo’s diaries, and Cissa commented: ‘Paulo wasn’t very happy. I don’t think he wanted all that formality…He agreed to it, but only, I think, because I insisted. But it wasn’t the sort of honeymoon, where you’d say, oh, it was marvellous, we were so in love. No. No, I don’t recall
that. I know we spent a few days there, I can’t say how many, and then went back to our little life in Rio.’

Their ‘little life’ was to start with a slight disagreement between husband and wife. Paulo insisted on living in his two-room apartment in Barata Ribeiro, not because it was cheap, but because it was near his parents, who had sold their house in Gávea and moved to a new apartment in Rua Raimundo Correia, in Copacabana, just a block away. The memories Cissa has of the first months of her marriage are not very encouraging: