Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (37 page)

This may not have been one of the most promising starts to a marriage, but the marriage survived. Sometimes, however, their fights were very noisy, as in the early hours of 24 August, Paulo’s twenty-ninth birthday. Cissa was woken at two in the morning by a loud bang, as if a bomb had gone off in the building. She got up, terrified, and found her husband in the sitting room with a burnt-out firework in his hand. With the inevitable spliff in the other hand, he had decided to let off some rockets, to the despair of the neighbours. Everything was, of course, recorded on tape:

Cissa was in fact an easy person to live with, but she had a strong character and wouldn’t be forced to do anything against her will. She accepted her husband’s ‘Castaneda-inspired ideas’, as Eneida had, and would sometimes even join him in smoking a cannabis joint, but she wouldn’t hear of any marital extravagances, which he called ‘sexual propositions’. One day, Paulo woke late in the morning when, as usual, Cissa was at work. She had left a piece of paper on the bedside table with a handwritten note that seemed to burn his fingers as he read it. It said that if her husband had decided to ‘settle down’, then this certainly hadn’t happened at home.

They hadn’t even been married for a year and already the marriage was floundering.

H
IS MARRIAGE MIGHT BE FALLING APART,
but the same could not be said of Paulo’s professional life. In December 1976, Philips released the fifth LP produced by Paulo and Raul,
Há Dez Mil Anos Atrás
, on which ten of the eleven tracks had lyrics written by him. It immediately became a phenomenal success. The album took its title from ‘I Was Born Ten Thousand Years Ago’, a traditional American song of which there were several versions, the most famous of which had been recorded by Elvis Presley four years earlier. It was also only the second time that Paulo had dedicated a song to anyone; in this case, the dedication was to his father, Pedro Queima Coelho. It was an unusual way of paying him homage, since the lyrics speak of the differences between himself and his father and are slightly condescending. Although he only admitted it years later, anyone who knew a little about his family history would realize that the ‘Pedro’ of ‘Meu Amigo Pedro’ [‘My Friend Pedro’] was his father:

Success was synonymous with money and, as far as Paulo was concerned, money had to be transformed into bricks and mortar. By the end of 1976, he was the owner of a third property, a two-bedroom apartment in Rua Paulino Fernandes, in Flamengo, a few steps from the estate where he had been born and brought up. Despite the pleasure he took in being a property owner, there was a problem in being rich: the possible envy of other people, particularly communists. In this aspect, Paulo had become very conventional indeed. The long-haired hippie who, only a short time before, had challenged the consumer society and written ironical songs about materialism was now terrified of losing the money he had so eagerly accumulated. ‘Today at the cinema I was gripped by this terrible fear of communism coming and taking away all my apartments,’ Paulo confessed to his diary and added bluntly, ‘I would never fight for the people. These words may come back to haunt me, but I would never do that. I fight for free thought and perhaps for an elite of privileged people who choose a society apart.’

The material stability that the world of music gave him, however, never seems to have diverted him from his old dream of becoming a great writer. In anxious moments he got to the point of feeling ‘almost certain’ that he would not achieve this. He was appalled each time he thought how close his thirtieth birthday was, the deadline he had given himself, and beyond which, he believed, he wouldn’t have the slightest chance of
being a literary success. But all it took to restore his enthusiasm was to read that Agatha Christie had accumulated a fortune of US$18 million simply from her book sales. On these occasions Paulo would plunge back into his daydreams: ‘There’s no way I want to publish my novels in Brazil. There’s no market for them here. In Brazil, a book that sells 3,000 copies is deemed a success, while in the United States that would be considered a complete flop. There’s no future here. If I want to be a writer I’m going to have to get out of here.’

Meanwhile, Paulo was obliged to submit to the routine of meetings and trips to São Paulo demanded by his position as a Philips executive. The company had decided to concentrate all its departments in one office, in the then remote Barra da Tijuca, a modern district that was just beginning to develop in Rio. He was against the move, not just because his work would then be 40 kilometres from his home–which meant he had to get over the trauma of that accident in Araruama, buy a car and take his driving test–but also because he was given a really tiny office. He complained to no one except his diary: ‘I’m sitting in my new office, if that’s what you can call the place I’m in now. Me and my team, comprising two secretaries, an assistant and an office boy, occupy an area of 30 square metres, i.e., 5 metres per person. This would be bad enough if it weren’t for the fact that we also have to take into consideration the pile of obsolete furniture that has also been crammed into this small space.’

As well as the distance and discomfort, he realized that his job was all to do with vanity, prestige and squabbles over space in the media. This world of embattled egos and back-stabbings was hardly the ideal place for someone so tormented by fear and paranoia. If some big shot was less than effusive when he met him in the lift, Paulo would immediately see in this a threat to his job. Not being invited to a show or to some major launch in the music world was a guarantee of sleepless nights and page after despairing page in his diary. Being excluded from a company meeting could trigger an asthma attack. His insecurity reached extreme levels. A music producer who ignored him could provoke an internal crisis that almost prevented him from working. When a number of these symptoms coincided, Paulo would lose direction entirely.

His dual role–as lyricist and Philips executive–also became a source of irrepressible fears. Paulo often had to produce lengthy reports for the Philips board containing critical appraisals of the most important artists contracted to the company, namely, his colleagues. Although only Midani, Menescal, Armando Pittigliani and one or two other directors read this information, it made him go cold just to think of that material falling into the hands or reaching the ears of the artists he had assessed. His fear was justifiable, as he was usually niggardly in his praise and harsh in his criticism. Paulo was nevertheless a more than dedicated worker whose enthusiasm for what he was doing often meant working late into the night. His work with Philips was one of the supports on which his fragile emotional stability was balanced. The second was his somewhat shaky marriage and the third, a new interest into which he threw himself body and soul, yoga. As well as this, and when things got too much, he asked for help from Dr Benjamim Gomes, who would get him back on track with an assortment of antidepressants.

In January 1977, Paulo had been convinced that Cissa was different from his previous partners. ‘She is what she is, she’s unlikely to change,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve stopped trying to change her because I can see how
useless that is.’ Gradually, however, he managed to interest his wife in at least one facet of his world–drugs. Cissa would never become a regular consumer, but it was because of him that she smoked cannabis for the first time and then experimented with LSD. Following a ritual similar to that adopted by Vera Richter when she smoked hashish for the first time, they had their first experiment with LSD on 19 March, St Joseph’s feast day, after first kissing the saint’s image. They turned on a tape recorder when Cissa placed the small tablet on her tongue and from then on she described her initial feelings of insecurity, how she felt, at first, sleepy and then experienced itching all over her body, finally reaching a state of ecstasy. At that moment, she began to hear ‘indescribable’ sounds. Sobbing, she tried unsuccessfully to describe what she felt: ‘No one can stop what’s going in my ears. I’ll never forget what I’m hearing now. I need to try and describe it…I know that you heard what I heard. I was looking at the ceiling of our little home. I don’t know…I think it’s impossible to describe it, but I must…Paulo, it’s such an amazing thing.’ Her husband monitored this ‘research’ and also provided the sound track. The opening was a headline from
Jornal Nacional
, on TV Globo, announcing high numbers of traffic accidents in Rio. Then came Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, and Wagner’s Wedding March. To calm his guinea pig he promised that should she have a bad trip, a simple glass of freshly squeezed orange juice would quickly reverse the effects of the lysergic acid.

While drugs may have masked his anxieties, they were not enough to drive them away. It was during one of his deep depressions that a superhero appeared to him in his room, on a mission to save him. This was the heavyweight Rocky Balboa, the character played by Sylvester Stallone in the film
Rocky
. In the early hours, in March 1977, as he and Cissa sat in bed watching the Oscar awards on TV, Paulo was moved to see
Rocky
win no fewer than three statuettes, for best film, best director and best editing. Like Balboa, who had come back from nothing to become a champion, he, too, wanted to be a winner and was determined to win his prize. And still the only thing he was interested in becoming was a writer with a worldwide readership. It was already clear in his mind that the first step on the long road to literary glory was to leave Brazil and write his books abroad. The following day he went to Menescal and told him he
was leaving. If it had been up to Paulo, the couple’s destination would have been Madrid, but Cissa’s preference won the day and in early May 1977, the two disembarked at Heathrow airport in London, the city chosen as the birthplace of his first book.

A few days later, they were settled in a studio flat in 7 Palace Street, halfway between Victoria station and Buckingham Palace, for which they paid £186 a month. It was a tiny apartment, but it was in a good location and there was a further attraction: a bath. When they arrived in London, they opened an account at the Bank of Brazil with US$5,000. Money was not exactly a problem for Paulo, but as well as being known for his parsimony, he had a legal problem, which was the limit of US$300 a month that could be transferred to Brazilians living abroad. In order to get round this, at the end of each month Paulo and Cissa mobilized grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins to each send US$300 to Brazilian friends who were resident in London and they would then deposit the money in the couple’s account in the Bank of Brazil. Thus they received about US$1,500 a month without paying any tax.

Paulo’s incomings included payment for a music column he wrote in the weekly magazine
Amiga
. Cissa did some journalistic work for the Brazilian section of the BBC and published the occasional short, signed article in the
Jornal do Brasil
, as well, of course, as doing all housework, since her husband’s contribution in this area was nil. Worse, he refused to allow any frozen food in the house and politely asked his wife to buy a cookery book. The problem was translating the recipes. The two spent hours trying to understand a recipe so that she could transform it into a meal. A weekly menu listing each day’s meals was solemnly posted in a prominent place on one of the walls of the apartment. From these menus it can be seen that they only allowed themselves meat once a week, although they made up for this with frequent visits to Indian and Thai restaurants.

They never lacked for money and what they received was enough to cover their expenses, including the classes in yoga, photography and vampirism that Paulo attended, as well as outings, short trips and taking in London’s many cultural highlights. Paulo and Cissa were always first in the queue when something was shown that would have been banned by
the censors in Brazil, such as the film
State of Siege
, directed by Costa-Gavras, which was a denunciation of the dictatorship in Uruguay. Three months went by without any real work being done. Paulo wrote: ‘I have worked a maximum two days a week. That means that, on average, in these three months in Europe I’ve worked less than a month. For someone who wanted to conquer the world, for someone who arrived full of dreams and desires, two days’ work a week is very little.’

As there seemed no way to write the wretched, longed-for book, Paulo tried to fill his time with productive activity. The classes in vampirism inspired him to write a film script,
The Vampire of London
. He sent it by post to well-known producers, all of whom replied politely, making it clear that, as far as they were concerned, vampires did not make good box office. One of them very kindly offered ‘to look at the film when it’s finished and give you my opinion as to whether or not we are prepared to distribute it’.

By July, Paulo and Cissa realized that it would not be easy to find friends in London. To compensate for this lack in their lives they had a short visit from his parents. The exchange of correspondence with Brazil was growing, in the form of letters or, as Paulo preferred, tapes, whenever there was someone who could take them back to Brazil. Piles and piles of cassette tapes collected in the houses of his parents and friends, particularly in that of his dearest friend, Roberto Menescal, from whom he learned that Rita Lee had found a new writing partner–which, added to the rejections from producers and publishers, led to pages of lamentation: