Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (40 page)

The crisis appears to have hit him so badly that he even changed his behaviour regarding something that had always been very dear to him–money: ‘I haven’t paid attention to anything, including one of the things that I really like: money. Just imagine, I don’t know how much is in my bank account, something I’ve always known down to the minutest detail.
I’ve lost interest in sex, in writing, in going to the cinema, in reading, even in the plants I’ve been tending so lovingly for so long and that are now dying because I only water them sporadically.’

If he had lost interest in both money and sex, things were very bad indeed, and so he did what he always did in such situations–he went back to Dr Benjamim, visiting him once a week. Whenever he felt like this, he would always ask Chris the same question: ‘Am I on the right path?’ And so, at the end of 1981, she made a suggestion that struck a chord in his nomadic soul: why not just leave everything and go off travelling with no fixed destination and no date set for their return? Her instincts told her that this was the right path. Years later, Chris would recall: ‘Something was telling me that it would work. Paulo trusted my instinct and decided to drop everything.’ Determined to ‘search for the meaning of life’, wherever it might be, he asked permission to leave his unpaid post with TV Globo, bought two air tickets to Madrid–the cheapest he could find–and promised that he and Chris would return to Brazil only when the last cent of the US$17,000 he took with him had run out.

Unlike all Paulo’s other trips, this one, which was to last eight months, was made without any forward planning. Although he took more than enough for a comfortable trip, with no need to cut corners, he was never one to squander money. He chose Iberia, the airline that not only offered the cheapest flights but added in a free night in a hotel in Madrid. From Spain he and Chris went on to London at the beginning of December 1981, where they rented the cheapest car available, a tiny Citroën 2CV. In London, they also established the first rule of the trip: neither should carry more than 6 kilos of luggage. This meant sacrificing the heavy Olivetti typewriter that Paulo had taken with him; this was shipped back to Brazil.

While pondering what direction to take, Paulo and Chris remained in London until the middle of January 1982, when they took to the road, determined to visit two places: Prague, where he wanted to make a promise to the Infant Jesus, and Bucharest, the capital of Romania and birthplace, 550 years earlier, of the nobleman Vlad Tepeş, who was the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s creation: the most famous of all the vampires, Count Dracula. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 January, they
arrived in Vienna frozen to the bone, after almost a day travelling the 1,200 or so kilometres separating London from the capital of Austria. Their modest 2CV had no heater, which meant that they had to travel wrapped in woollen blankets in order to withstand the low winter temperatures. The stop in Vienna was so that they could obtain visas for Hungary, which they would have to cross in order to reach Romania.

Once this was done, they went to the Brazilian embassy, where Chris needed to sort out a small bureaucratic matter. Paulo waited for her out in the street, smoking and walking up and down. Suddenly, with a sound like a bomb, a vast sheet of ice several metres long slid off the roof of the building five storeys above and crashed on to the street, ripping open the bodywork of a car that was parked only a few centimetres from where Paulo was standing. He had been that close to death.

After spending the night in Budapest, they left for the capital of Yugoslavia, where they decided to stay for three days. Not that Belgrade held any special attraction, but they couldn’t face getting back into the freezing Citroën. The car had become such a problem that they decided to hand it back to the rental company. With the help of the hotel manager they found a real bargain: the Indian embassy was selling a light-blue Mercedes–nine years old, but in good condition–for a mere US$1,000. Although well used, it had a 110-horse-power engine and was equipped with an efficient heating system. This would be the only large expense of the trip. For advice on hotels, restaurants and places to visit, they relied on
Europe on 20 Dollars a Day
.

Now that they had a proper car, the 500 kilometres between Belgrade and Bucharest, the couple’s next destination, could be done in one day. However, precisely because they now had a fast, comfortable car, they chose to take a more roundabout route. Having crossed Hungary and part of Austria, driving a little more than 1,000 kilometres, they arrived in Prague, where Paulo was to make the promise to the Infant Jesus that he would honour almost twenty-five years later. It was only then that they turned towards Romania, which meant another 1,500 kilometres. For anyone not in a hurry or concerned about money, this was wonderful.

During this criss-cross journey across Central Europe, chance placed another destination in their path. It was not until a few weeks after buying
the Mercedes that Paulo discovered that the car had originally come from the old Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany) and that the change of ownership had to be registered at the licensing authority in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. Travelling from Bucharest to Bonn meant a journey of almost 2,000 kilometres, a distance that now held no worries for them. Two days after leaving the capital of Romania, the blue Mercedes was crossing the frontier into West Germany. From Bucharest to Munich, the first German city they went through, the odometer showed that they had driven 1,193 kilometres. Munich was completely covered in snow, it was almost midday and since neither of the travellers was hungry, instead of lunching there, they decided to stop in Stuttgart, about 200 kilometres farther on. Minutes after passing through Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Paulo turned the car off the road into an avenue of bare trees with a sign written in German: ‘Dachau Konzentrationslager’. It had long been in his mind to visit the sadly famous Nazi concentration camp in Dachau–since he was a boy he had been a passionate reader of books and stories about the Second World War–but little did he imagine that this visit, which lasted only a few hours, would radically change his life.

A
LTHOUGH HE WOULD NOT PUBLISH
his first real book until 1987, Paulo Coelho the author was born on 23 February 1982 at the age of thirty-five in Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Five days earlier, he had had a strange experience in Prague. Immediately after making his promise to the Infant Jesus of Prague, he had gone out with Chris for a walk round the city which, like almost all of Central Europe, was covered in snow and with below-zero temperatures. They crossed the river Vltava by the imposing Charles Bridge. One end of the bridge is in the Old City; the other comes out into the Street of Alchemists where, according to legend, lies the entrance to hell through which, naturally, Paulo was determined to go. The object of his interest was a medieval dungeon, which had been opened to the public some years before. In order to get in, he and Chris had to wait until the place had emptied of an enormous group of Soviet recruits–who appeared to be there as tourists.

Minutes after going through the doors of the dark dungeon and entering the cells, Paulo felt as though the ghosts from which he had believed himself to be free were reviving–the electroshock therapy, his supposed meeting with the Devil, his imprisonment by the Dops, his abduction, his cowardly betrayal of Gisa. From one moment to the next, all those events seemed to rise up, as though they had only just happened. He began to
sob convulsively and Chris led him away. The gloomy surroundings had reawakened memories that threatened to propel him into a fit of deep depression, and he was thousands of kilometres from the security provided by his parents, Dr Benjamim’s consulting rooms or Roberto Menescal.

This time, the origins of his torment were not metaphysical but all too real and visible on the pages of the newspapers and on the TV news: dictatorships, the state oppression of people, wars, abductions and clandestine imprisonments, which appeared to be sweeping the planet. Civil war was to claim almost 80,000 lives in the tiny state of El Salvador. In Chile, the savage dictatorship of General Pinochet was about to celebrate ten years of its existence and appeared to be as firmly entrenched as ever. In Brazil, the military dictatorship seemed exhausted, but there was still no guarantee that democracy was within reach. This was the worst possible state of mind in which to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp, but this was precisely how Paulo was feeling when he parked the Mercedes in the visitors’ car park in Dachau.

Dachau was the first camp built by the Third Reich and was the model for the remaining fifty-six scattered across ten European countries. It operated from 1933 until April 1945, when its gates were opened by the Allied troops. Although it was planned to house 6,000 prisoners, on the day of its liberation there were more than 30,000. During that tragic period, about 200,000 people of sixteen nationalities were taken there. Although the majority were Jews, there were also communists, socialists and others opposed to Nazism, as well as Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses. For reasons as yet unknown, the gas chamber in Dachau was never put to use, which meant that any prisoners who were condemned to death had to be taken by bus to Hartheim Castle, halfway between the camp and Linz, in Austria, which had been transformed into a centre of mass execution. The first surprise for Paulo and Chris as they went through the entrance gates of Dachau was that there was absolutely no one there. It was understandable that the freezing wind might have kept away the tourists, but they didn’t see any porters, guards or officials who could give them any information. They were–or they appeared to be–alone in that enormous
180,000-square-metre rectangle surrounded on all sides by walls and empty watch towers. Paulo had not yet gotten over the dark thoughts that had assailed him in Prague some days before, but he didn’t want to miss the opportunity of visiting one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. They followed the arrows and took the suggested route for visitors–the same as that taken by the prisoners. They went into the reception area, where the newly arrived prisoners would receive their uniforms, have their heads shaved and be ‘disinfected’ in a collective bath of insecticide. Then they walked down the corridors lined by cells, in which they saw the hooks attached to the ceiling beams from which the prisoners were hung by their arms during torture sessions; then they went into the sheds where, until the end of the war, bunk beds were stacked three or four high and where the prisoners slept like animals, packed into wooden cages. In total silence, their horror only grew with each new revelation.

Although Paulo was clearly upset, he saw the concentration camps as a tragedy of the past, part of the Nazism that was defeated in a war that had ended even before he was born. However, in the room set aside for the relatives of the dead to pay their respects, he felt that the emotions aroused in Prague were returning. The cards pinned on bunches of fresh flowers that had been put there only a few days earlier were living proof that Dachau was still an open wound. The 30,000 dead were not meaningless names taken from books, but human beings whose cruel deaths were recent enough still to awaken the grief of widows, children, brothers and sisters.

Paulo and Chris returned to the open area of the camp feeling overwhelmed. They walked along an avenue of bare trees whose branches looked like bony claws reaching for the sky. In the north part of the camp there were three small religious buildings–Catholic, Protestant and Jewish–beside which a fourth–Russian Orthodox–was to be built in the 1990s. The couple walked straight past these buildings, following a sign indicating the most chilling place in Dachau: the crematorium. At that point, they noticed a radical change in the landscape. Unlike the barren camp itself, which is a lunar landscape of grey stones with not a hint of greenery, the path leading to the crematorium passes through a small
wood. Even in the hardest of winters this is covered by vegetation of tropical exuberance, with gardens, flowers and pathways between rows of shrubs. Planted in a clearing in the middle of the wood is a modest, rustic, red-brick building, which can only be distinguished from a traditional family house by the chimney, which seems disproportionately large. This was the crematorium oven, where the bodies of more than thirty thousand prisoners would have been burnt after their execution or death from starvation, suicide or illness, such as the typhoid epidemic that devastated the camp a few months before its liberation.

His experience in the medieval prison in Prague was still very clear in Paulo’s mind. He saw all eight red-brick ovens and the metal stretchers on which the bodies would have been piled for incineration, and he stopped in front of a peeling door on which one word was written: ‘Badzimmer’. This was not an old bathroom, as the name indicated, but the Dachau gas chamber. Although it was never used, Paulo wanted to feel for himself the terror experienced by millions in the Nazi extermination camps. He left Chris alone for a moment, went into the chamber and shut the door. Leaning against the wall, he looked up and saw, hanging from the ceiling, the fake showerheads from which the gas would be released. His blood froze and he left that place with the stench of death in his nose.

When he stepped out of the crematorium he heard the small bell of the Catholic chapel chiming midday. He went towards that sound and as he re-entered the harsh grey of the camp, he saw an enormous modern sculpture, which recalled Picasso’s
Guernica
. On it was written in several languages ‘Never again!’ As he read the two words on entering the small church, a moment of peace came to him, as he was to remember many years later: ‘I’m entering the church, my eye alights on that “Never Again!” and I say: Thank God for that! Never again! Never again is that going to happen! How good! Never again! Never again will there be that knock on the door at midnight, never again will people just disappear. What joy! Never again will the world experience that!’

He went into the chapel feeling full of hope and yet in the short space of time between lighting a candle and saying a quick prayer, he suddenly felt overwhelmed again by his old ghosts. In a moment, he went from faith
to despair. As he crossed the frozen camp, a short way behind Chris, he realized that the ‘Never again!’ he had just read was nothing more than a joke in several languages:

While he was thinking these contradictory thoughts, a sentence began going round and round in his head: ‘No man is an island.’ Where had he read that? Slowly, he managed to rebuild and recite to himself almost the entire passage: ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…’ For a moment he could not remember the rest, but when he did, it seemed to have opened all the doors of his memory: ‘and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’. It was from one of John Donne’s
Meditations
, from which Ernest Hemingway took the title for his novel. What happened in the following minutes is something that will remain for ever cloaked in mystery; indeed Paulo himself, on one of the few occasions when he has been urged to describe what occurred, became so emotional that he wept copiously: ‘We were in the middle of a concentration camp, Chris and I, alone, absolutely alone, without another living soul around! At that moment I heard the sign: I felt that the bells of the chapel were ringing for me. That’s when I had my epiphany.’

According to him, the revelation in Dachau took the form of a beam of light, under which a being of human appearance apparently told him something about possibly meeting again in two months’ time. This message was given not in a human voice but, as Paulo himself put it, ‘in a communication of souls’. Even the most sceptical would perhaps agree that something took place in Dachau, so radical was the change in Paulo’s life from that day on. When he reached the car park, he wept as he told Chris what he had just experienced, and the first, horrifying suspicion fell on the OTO. What if what he had seen minutes earlier were the reincarnation of the Beast? Had the ghosts of Crowley and Marcelo Motta returned to frighten him eight years on? When they reached Bonn, six hours later, Paulo settled on the most rational explanation: he would consider the vision as a delirium, a brief hallucination provoked by the fear and tension he was feeling.

The couple planned to stay in Bonn just long enough to sort out the paperwork for the car and to meet Paula, a niece who had been born a few months earlier. Since they were staying at the home of Chris’s sister, Tânia, and so were free of hotel expenses, they decided to extend their stay to a week. In early March, the couple set off once again, this time to cover the 250 kilometres between them and the liberal city of Amsterdam, which had so enchanted Paulo ten years earlier.

They stayed in the Hotel Brouwer, on the edge of the Singel Canal, where they paid US$17 a day for bed and breakfast. In a letter to his parents Paulo talked of the pot shops, ‘cafés where you can freely buy and smoke drugs that are considered soft, like hashish and cannabis, although cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamines, including LSD, are prohibited’, and he took the opportunity to add a subtle apology for the liberalization of the drugs: ‘This doesn’t mean that the Dutch youth are drugged all the time. On the contrary, government statistics show that there are far fewer drug addicts here, proportionally speaking, than in the USA, Germany, England and France. Holland has the lowest rate of unemployment in the whole of Western Europe, and Amsterdam is the fourth largest commercial centre of the world.’

It was in this liberal atmosphere, where the two smoked cannabis until they got tired of it, that Chris tried LSD for the first and only time. Paulo
was so shocked by the devastating effects of heroin on its users–zombies of various nationalities wandered the streets of the city–that he wrote two articles for the Brazilian magazine
Fatos&Fotos
entitled ‘Heroin, the Road of No Return’ and ‘Amsterdam, the Kiss of the Needle’. His relationship with this underworld, however, was strictly professional, that of an investigative reporter. Judging by the letters he sent to his father, their European tour was a hippie journey in appearance only: ‘We haven’t deprived ourselves of anything, lunching and dining every day. And although we have a very thirsty child to support (the 110-horse-power Mercedes), we go to cinemas, saunas, barbers, nightclubs and even casinos.’

There seemed to be no end to the good life. After several weeks in the city, Paulo became bored by so much cannabis. He had tried varieties from places as far away as the Yemen and Bolivia. He had smoked blends of every strength and experimented with plants that had won prizes in the Cannabis Cup, the marijuana world cup which was held once a year in Amsterdam. He had even tried a new product called skunk–cannabis grown in a hot house and fed with fertilizers and proteins. And it was there, in that hippie paradise, that Paulo discovered that the plant had nothing more to offer him. He was, he said, ‘fed up’ with its repetitious effects. He repeated the oath he had made eight years earlier in New York regarding cocaine: he would never again smoke cannabis.

He was explaining all this to Chris in the hotel café when he felt a cold shiver run through him, just as he had in Dachau. He glanced to one side and saw that the shape he had seen in the concentration camp had taken physical form and was there having tea at a table nearby. His first feeling was one of terror. He had heard of societies which, in order to preserve their secrets, would pursue and even kill those who had left. Was he being followed by people belonging to a satanist group from the other side of the world? He suddenly remembered the lesson he had learned during those PE classes in Fortaleza de São João: to avoid unnecessary pain, confront the fear straight away.