Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (47 page)

‘Paulo, stop writing that book.’

‘What!’

‘I love the book. The problem is that it’s all about Evil. I know Evil is fascinating, but you can’t go on writing it.’

He tried to talk her out of this crazy idea ‘first, with arguments and then by kicking anything that happened to be near’: ‘You’re mad, Chris! You might have told me that on page 10, not page 600!’

‘OK, I’ll tell you the reason for my concerns: I looked at Our Lady of Aparecida, and she said that you can’t write this book.’ (She was referring to the black patron saint of Brazil.)

After much discussion, Chris’s point of view won the day, as usually happened. When he decided that the wretched work would die, unpublished, Paulo printed out one version of the book and then deleted all traces of it from his computer.

He arranged to have lunch with his publisher, Paulo Rocco, in the elegant Portuguese restaurant Antiquarius, in Leblon, and put the great thick tome on the table, saying: ‘Here’s the new book. Open it at any page.’

Rocco, out of superstition, normally never read any of Paulo’s original texts before sending them off to the printer; this time, though, he thought that he should do as the author suggested. He opened the typescript at random and read the page, and when he finished, Paulo said: ‘Besides myself and Christina, you will have been the only person to read any part of this book, because I’m going to destroy it. The only reason I’m not asking the waiter to flambé it right here and now is because I don’t want the negative energy to turn to fire. I’ve already deleted it from my computer.’

After lunch, Paulo went alone to Leblon beach, looking for somewhere to bury the book for good. When he saw a rubbish truck chewing up the contents of the litter bins outside the buildings along the seafront, he went up to it, threw the package containing the original into the rotating drum and, in a matter of seconds, the book that would never be read had been utterly destroyed.

D
ESTROYING A BOOK
laden with so much negative energy may have saved Paulo from future metaphysical problems, but it presented him and his publisher with a new problem: what to launch in 1991 in order to capitalize on the phenomenal success of the three previous best-sellers. Paulo suggested to Rocco that he adapt and translate into Portuguese a small book, little more than a pamphlet, containing a sermon given in England in 1890 by the young Protestant missionary Henry Drummond:
The Greatest Thing in the World
, based on St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in which the author talks of the virtues of patience, goodness, humility, generosity, kindness, surrender, tolerance, innocence and sincerity as manifestations ‘of the supreme gift given to Humanity: love’. It was given the new title of
The Supreme Gift
[
O Dom Supremo
] and despite being published with little fuss and almost entirely ignored by the media, in a matter of weeks,
The Supreme Gift
had entered the best-seller lists, where his other three books,
The Pilgrimage
,
The Alchemist
and
Brida
, had become permanent fixtures.

Its success did not, however, appear to satisfy the author. In the long run, this was not a work of his own but a translation produced in order to fill a gap. Paulo decided on a story that had been in his mind since 1988: his adventure with Chris in the Mojave Desert. The task that had
been entrusted to him by Jean, Paulo says, was precise: he and Chris were to spend forty days in the Mojave Desert, one of the largest of the American national parks. The desert is known for its hostile climate and its unique geological formations, notably the Valley of Death; it is a place where the rivers and lakes disappear for half the year, leaving behind only dried-up beds. In order to fulfil the trial set by the Master–to find his guardian angel–the writer would have to employ a guide in the immense desert that stretches across California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The person chosen by Jean was Took.

On 5 September 1988, the couple landed at Los Angeles airport, where they hired a car and drove south towards the Salton Sea, a saltwater lake 50 kilometres long and 20 wide. After hours of driving, they reached one of those half-abandoned gas stations that are so common in films about the American West. ‘Is it far to the desert?’ Paulo asked the girl who was working the pump. She said no, they were about 30 kilometres from the small town of Borrego Springs, on the edge of the desert, and gave them some important advice: not to turn on the air-conditioning when the car was stationary, to avoid overheating the engine; to put four gallons of water in the boot; and not to leave the vehicle should anything unforeseen happen. Paulo was astounded to learn that the desert was so close: ‘The climate there was comfortable and the vegetation was a luxuriant green. I found it hard to believe that a fifteen-minute drive away everything would change so radically, but that is precisely what happened: as soon as we crossed a chain of mountains the road began to descend and there in front of us lay the silence and the immensity of the Mojave.’

During the forty days they spent camping or, when they could, staying in hotels, Paulo and Chris lived with the historical remnants that form part of the legend of the desert: abandoned gold mines, the dusty carcasses of pioneers’ wagons, ghost towns, hermits, communities of hippies who spent the day in silent meditation. Besides these, the only living beings they came across were the so-called Mojave locals: rattle snakes, hares and coyotes–animals that come out only at night in order to avoid the heat.

The first two weeks of the forty days were to be spent in total silence, with the couple not being allowed to exchange so much as a
‘good morning’. This period was to be entirely devoted to the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. These exercises, which were approved by the Vatican in 1548, are the fruit of the personal experience of the founder of the Society of Jesus. It is a spirituality that is not to be preached about or intellectualized but experienced. ‘It is through experience that the mystery of God will be revealed to each person, in a singular, individual form,’ the manuals produced by the Jesuits explain, ‘and it is this revelation that will transform your life.’ St Ignatius’ aim was that each individual practising these exercises should become a contemplative during this time, ‘which means seeing in each and every thing the figure of God, the presence of the Holy Trinity constructing and reconstructing the world’. And that was what Paulo and Chris did during the first two weeks, offering up prayers and reflections in their search for God.

One night, a week after their arrival, they were sitting immersed in this atmosphere of spirituality, beneath a sky filled with millions of stars, when a great crash shattered the peace and silence, immediately followed by a second, and then another and another. The deafening noise was coming from the sky and was caused by gigantic balls of fire exploding and breaking up into thousands of coloured fragments, briefly illuminating the entire desert. It took a few seconds for them to be convinced that this was not Armageddon: ‘Startled, we saw brilliant lights falling slowly from the sky, lighting up the desert as if it were day. Suddenly, we began to hear crashes around us: it was the sound of military planes breaking the sound barrier. Illuminated by that phantasmagorical light, they were dropping incendiary bombs somewhere on the horizon. It was only the next day that we learned that the desert is used for military exercises. It was terrifying.’

At the end of those first two weeks of spiritual practices, and still following the instructions given by Jean, they finally reached Took’s old trailer, permanently parked near Borrego Springs. Both Paulo and Chris were surprised to see that the powerful paranormal to whom Jean had referred was a young man of twenty. Guided by the young magus, Paulo was to travel through dozens of small towns on the frontier between the United States and Mexico until he met a group known in the region as the ‘Valkyries’. These were eight very attractive women who wandered
through the towns of the Mojave dressed in black leather and driving powerful motorbikes. They were led by the eldest of the eight, Valhalla, a former executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, who, like Paulo and Took, was also an initiate in RAM. It was through contact with her that, on the thirty-eighth day of their journey, Paulo–without Chris this time–came across a blue butterfly and a voice which, he says, spoke to him. After this, the author states, he saw his angel–or at least the materialization of part of his angel: an arm that shone in the sunlight and dictated biblical words which he wrote down, shaking and terrified, on a piece of paper. Trembling with emotion, he could not wait to tell Chris what he had experienced and to explain that ‘seeing the angel was even easier than talking to it’. ‘All you had to do was to believe in angels, to need angels, and there they were, shining in the morning light.’

To celebrate the event, Paulo drove into the desert with Chris and Took to a village known as Glorieta Canyon. After walking across an area of barren, stony ground, the author stopped in front of a small grotto. Then he took bags of cement and sand and a flagon of water from the boot of the car and began to prepare some mortar. When it was the right consistency, he covered the floor of the grotto with the cement and, before the mixture began to harden, he affixed a small image of Our Lady of Aparecida, which he had brought with him. At the foot of the image he wrote in the still-wet cement the following words in English: ‘THIS IS THE VIRGIN OF APARECIDA FROM BRAZIL. ASK FOR A MIRACLE AND RETURN HERE.’ He lit a candle, said a quick prayer and left.

On his return to Brazil, Paulo was to spend three more years pondering those events in the Mojave Desert. It was only at the end of 1991, when he felt that the typescript he had destroyed required a replacement, that he decided to write
The Valkyries
. According to the records of his computer’s word-processing program, he typed the first words of the book at 23.30 on 6 January 1992. After seventeen uninterrupted days of work, as had become his custom, he typed the final sentence of the 239th and final page of the work: ‘And only then will we be able to understand stars, angels and miracles.’

On 21 April, when the book had gone through all the editorial processes and was ready to be printed, Paulo sent a fax from his apartment
in Rio to Editora Rocco saying that Jean was not suggesting but ‘ordering’ and ‘demanding’ changes to the text:

Besides Jean, the author and Paulo Rocco, no one would ever know what the censored passages contained. The removal of those passages doesn’t in any way appear to have compromised the success of
The Valkyries
. Less than twenty-four hours after the book’s launch in August 1992, 60,000 copies of the initial 120,000 print run had vanished from the bookshop shelves. A fortnight later,
The Alchemist
lost its number one spot in the best-seller lists, where it had remained for 159 consecutive weeks, to give way to
The Valkyries
. The author was breaking one record after another. With
The Valkyries
, he became the first Brazilian to have no fewer than five books in the best-seller lists. Besides the new launch, there were
The Alchemist
(159 weeks),
Brida
(106 weeks),
The Pilgrimage
(68 weeks) and
The Supreme Gift
(19 weeks)–something which had only been bettered at the time by Sidney Sheldon. What most caught the attention
of the press, apart from the astonishing sales figures, were the details of the author’s contract with Rocco. One newspaper stated that Paulo was to receive 15 per cent of the cover price of the book (as opposed to the usual 10 per cent), while another revealed that he would have a bonus of US$400,000 when sales passed the 600,000 mark. A third speculated about the money spent by the publisher on publicity and said that, in order to protect himself against inflation, the author had demanded payments every fortnight. The
Jornal do Brasil
stated that in the wake of the success of
The Valkyries
the market would be ‘inundated with plastic knickknacks with the inscription “I believe in angels”, posters announcing that “the angels are among us” and china replicas of the author, complete with goatee, as well as 600 shirts with a company logo and the Archangel Michael’. One Rio columnist said that the author had supposedly turned down a payment of US$45,000 to appear in an advertisement for an insurance company in which he would say: ‘I believe in life after death, but, just in case, get some insurance.’ A further novelty was that, from then on, Paulo was also able to influence the cover price of the book–an area in which, generally speaking, authors do not become involved. Concerned to keep his work accessible to those with less buying power, he went on to set a ceiling price for his books which, in the case of
The Valkyries
, was US$11.

Once the initial interest in numbers, records and figures had passed, the criticisms started to pile in, couched in much the same terms as the reviews of his earlier books:

In the midst of this bombardment, however, the newspapers had quietly let it be known that the Ministry of Education in Rio wanted to use Paulo Coelho’s works as a means of getting students to read. The two reactions to the idea, both published in the
Jornal do Brasil
, were even harsher than the words of the critics. In the first of these, entitled ‘Stupidities’, the journalist Roberto Marinho de Azevedo said that he was astounded and accused the ministry of ‘feeding these innocents with eighth-hand mysticism written in sloppy Portuguese’. Even worse was the illustration accompanying the article, a caricature of a student with the ears of a donkey holding a copy of
The Pilgrimage
. Having published four books and become one of the greatest literary successes of all time in Brazil, Paulo could count on the fingers of one hand the positive reviews he had received. Unable to offer readers an explanation as to why an author whom they considered mediocre was so successful, the media flailed around for answers. Some preferred to put it all down to publicity, but this left one question unanswered: if it was so simple, why didn’t other authors and publishers adopt the same formula? When she was travelling in Brazil before the launch of
The Valkyries
, Mônica Antunes was sought out by the
Jornal do Brasil
and asked the same old question: to what do you attribute Paulo Coelho’s success? She replied with the prophetic words: ‘What we are witnessing is only the start of a fever.’