Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (52 page)

Convinced that these views were not shared by the majority of the other thirty-seven electors in the Academy, Paulo did not respond to these provocative comments and went ahead with his plan. He courted the leaders of the several groups and subgroups into which the house was divided, lunched and dined with academics, and never missed the launch of a book by one of the ‘immortals’, as the members of the Academy are known. At the launch of his novel
Saraminda
, José Sarney, who was also a favourite target of the critics, posed smiling for the photographers as he signed Paulo’s copy, Paulo being the most sought-after by the hundreds of readers queuing to receive a dedication. The fact is that his objective had soon become an open secret. At the end of the year, the celebrated novelist Carlos Heitor Cony, who held seat 3 at the Academy, wrote in the
Folha do Sul
:

From the moment the idea of competing for a chair at the Academy entered his head, Coelho had nurtured a secret dream: to occupy chair number 23, whose first occupant had been Machado de Assis, the greatest of all Brazilian writers and founder of the Academy. The problem was that the occupant of this chair was the academic whom Paulo most loved, admired and praised, Jorge Amado. This meant that every time the matter came up he had to be careful what he said: ‘Since the chair I want belongs to Jorge, I only hope to put myself forward when I am really old,’ he would say, ‘because I want him to live for many many more years.’

Already eighty-eight, Jorge Amado had suffered a heart attack in 1993 and, in the years that followed, he was admitted to hospital several times. In June 2001, he was taken into a hospital in Salvador with infections in the kidneys and right lung, but recovered sufficiently to be able to celebrate at home with his family the fortieth anniversary of his election to the Academy. However, only three weeks later, on the afternoon of 6 August, the family let it be known that Jorge Amado had just died. Chair number 23 was vacant. The news reached Coelho that night via a short phone call from the journalist and academic Murilo Melo Filho: ‘Jorge Amado has died. Your time has come.’

Paulo was filled by strange and contradictory feelings: as well as feeling excited at the thought of standing as a candidate for the Academy, he was genuinely saddened by the death of someone who had been not only one of his idols but also both a friend and faithful ally. However, this was no time for sentimentality. Paulo realized that the race for a chair in the
Academy began even before the lilies had withered on the coffin of the deceased incumbent. His first campaign phone call met with disappointment, though. When he called the professor and journalist Arnaldo Niskier, who occupied chair number 18 and was one of the first to have learned, months earlier, of Paulo’s intentions, Niskier poured cold water on the idea. ‘I don’t think it’s the right moment,’ Niskier told him. ‘It looks as if Zélia is going to put herself forward, and if that happens the Academy is sure to vote in her favour.’ Zélia was the writer Zélia Gattai, Jorge Amado’s widow, who had decided to compete for her late husband’s chair.

Alongside the many obituaries, the following morning, the newspapers announced the names of no fewer than five candidates: Zélia, Paulo, the astronomer Ronaldo Rogério de Freitas Mourão, the humourist Jô Soares and the journalist Joel Silveira. When taking his daily walk along the promenade above Copacabana beach, Coelho heard one of the few voices capable of convincing him to do–or not do–something: that of Chris. With her customary gentleness, she said that she had a bad feeling about the competition: ‘Paulo, I don’t think you’re going to win.’

This was enough for him to give up the idea. His candidature, which had not even been formally registered, had lasted less than twelve hours. Paulo sent a fax to Zélia expressing his sorrow at her husband’s death, packed his bags and left with Chris for the south of France. The couple were going to fulfil their old dream of spending part of the year in Europe, and the place they had chosen was a region near Lourdes. One of the reasons for the trip was to look for a house to buy. While they were still hunting, their address in France was the modest but welcoming Henri IV hotel in the small city of Tarbes.

On Tuesday, 9 October, the two were in Odos, a small village 5 kilometres from Saint-Martin, where some months later they would choose to settle. As though tempted by the Devil whom he had long ago driven away, Coelho had decided to add to his property portfolio something more suited to a rock star than to a man of almost monastic habits (a millionaire monk, that is): a castle. The castle the couple had their eye on was Château d’Odos, where Marguerite de Valois, or Margot, the wife of Henri IV, had lived and died. However, the whole affair came to nothing
–‘If I bought a castle,’ he said to a journalist, ‘I wouldn’t possess it, it would possess me.’ That afternoon, he left Chris in the hotel in Tarbes and took a train to Pau, where he boarded a flight to Monte Carlo, where he was to be a member of the film festival jury. In the evening, he was having a coffee with the director Sydney Pollack, when his mobile rang.

On the other end he heard the voice of Arnaldo Niskier: ‘Roberto Campos has just died. May I give the secretary of the Academy the signed letter you left with me putting your name forward for the first position available?’

‘If you think it’s the right time, yes.’

On his return to France a few days later, he stopped off at the chapel of Notre Dame de Piétat, in the small town of Barbazan-Débat, and made a silent prayer: ‘Help me get into the Brazilian Academy of Letters.’

A few hours later, in his hotel room in Tarbes, he gave a long interview over the telephone to the reporter Marcelo Camacho, of the
Jornal do Brasil
, an interview that began with the obvious question: ‘Is it true that you’re a candidate for the Brazilian Academy of Letters?’

He replied without hesitation: ‘Absolutely.’

And the next day’s
Jornal do Brasil
devoted the front page of its arts section to the scoop. In the interview, Coelho explained the reasons for his candidature (‘a desire to be a colleague of such special people’); dismissed his critics (‘if what I wrote wasn’t any good my readers would have abandoned me a long time ago, all over the world’); and vehemently condemned George W. Bush’s foreign policy (‘What the United States is doing in Afghanistan is an act of terror, that’s the only word for it, an act of terror’). The campaign for the vacant chair was official, but Coelho told the journalist that, because of a very full international programme, he would not be back in Brazil for another two months, in December, when he would carry out the ritual of visits to each of the thirty-nine electors. This delay was irrelevant, because the election had been set for March 2002, following the Academy’s end-of-year recess.

In the weeks that followed, two other candidates appeared: the political scientist Hélio Jaguaribe and the ex-diplomat Mário Gibson
Barbosa. Both were octogenarians and each had his strong and weak points. The presence in the competition of one of the most widely read authors in the world attracted the kind of interest that the Academy rarely aroused. The foreign media mobilized their correspondents in Brazil to cover the contest. In a long, sardonic article published by the
New York Times
, the correspondent Larry Rother attributed to the Academy the power to ‘transform obscure and aged essayists, poets and philosophers into celebrities who are almost as revered as soccer players, actors or pop stars’. Rother included statements from supporters of Coelho such as Arnaldo Niskier (‘he is the Pelé of Brazilian literature’), and added:

Ignoring all the intrigues, Paulo did what he had to do. He wrote letters, visited all the academicians (with the exception of Padre Fernando Ávila, who told him curtly that this would not be necessary) and received much spontaneous support, such as that of Carlos Heitor Cony and ex-president Sarney. On the day of the election, involving four successive ballots, none of the three candidates obtained the minimum nineteen votes required under the rules. As tradition directed, the president burned the votes in a bronze urn, announced that chair number 21 was still unoccupied and called for further elections to be held on 25 July.

That evening, some hours after the announcement of the result of the first round, a group of ‘immortals’ appeared at Paulo’s house to offer
the customary condolences. One of them–Coelho cannot remember precisely who–said:

Since he had received a modest ten votes as opposed to the sixteen given to Jaguaribe, the group was somewhat taken aback by their host’s immediate reaction: ‘I’m not going to wait for another opportunity. I’m going to register my candidature tomorrow. I’m going to stand again.’

It’s likely that the date of the new election was of no significance to the majority of the academicians, but Coelho saw in it an unmistakable sign that he should put himself forward as a candidate: 25 July is the feast day of St James of Compostela, the patron saint of the pilgrimage that had changed his life. Nevertheless there was no harm in asking for confirmation from the old and, in his opinion, infallible I Ching. He threw the three coins of the oracle several times, but they always gave the same result: the hexagram of the cauldron, synonymous with certain victory. The I Ching had also made a strange recommendation: ‘Go travelling and don’t come back for a while.’ He did as he was told.

Paulo flew to France, installed himself in the hotel in Tarbes and for the following three months conducted his campaign with mobile phone and notebook in hand. When he arrived, he saw on the Internet that he was only going to have one opponent in the contest: Hélio Jaguaribe. Christina recalls being surprised by Paulo’s self-confidence: ‘I discovered that Paulo had negotiating skills about which I knew nothing. His sangfroid in taking decisions and talking to people was a side of him I didn’t know.’

Although many of Paulo’s supporters thought it risky to run his campaign from a distance, the I Ching insisted: ‘Do not return.’ The pressure to return to Brazil grew stronger, but he remained immovable. ‘My sixth sense was telling me not to go back,’ the writer recalls, ‘and faced by a choice between my sixth sense and the academicians, I chose the former.’ But the campaign began to get serious when one of his supporters started canvassing votes during the Thursday afternoon teas using a
seductive argument: ‘I’m going to vote for Paulo Coelho because the corn is good.’ In the jargon of the Academy, ‘good corn’ was a metaphor used to refer to candidates who, once elected, could bring both prestige and material benefits to the institution. From that point of view, the ‘immortal’ argued, the author of
The Alchemist
was very good corn indeed. There was not only his indisputable international fame, evidenced by the extraordinary interest in the election shown by the foreign media: what softened even the most hardened of hearts was the fact that the millionaire Paulo Coelho had no children, something which fuelled the hope that, on his death, he might choose the Academy as one of his heirs–as other childless academicians had in the past.

Unaware that there were people with an eye on the wealth it had cost him such effort and energy to accumulate, three weeks before the election, Coelho returned to Rio de Janeiro. There, contrary to what the oracles had been telling him, he was not greeted with good news. His opponent’s campaign had gained ground during his absence and even some voters whom he had considered to be ‘his’ were threatening to change sides.

On the evening of 25 July 2002, the photographers, reporters and cameramen crowding round the door of the building in Avenida Atlântica in Copacabana were invited up to the ninth floor to drink a glass of French champagne with the owners of the apartment: Paulo had just been elected by twenty-two votes to fifteen. Jaguaribe appeared not to have taken in his defeat, and was not exactly magnanimous when expressing his dismay at the result. ‘With the election of Paulo Coelho, the Academy is celebrating the success of marketing,’ he moaned. ‘His sole merit lies in his ability to sell books.’ To one journalist who wanted to know whether he would be putting his name forward again, Jaguaribe was adamant: ‘The Academy holds no interest for me any more.’ Three years later, though, once he had got over the shock, he returned and was elected to the chair left vacant by the economist Celso Furtado. A year after that, it was the turn of Celso Lafer, the foreign minister, who took the chair left vacant by Miguel Reale.