Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (54 page)

In February 2006–as if in acknowledgement of his popularity–Coelho received an invitation from Buckingham Palace–from Sir James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn and Lord Steward of the Household. This was for a state banquet to be given some weeks later for the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during the President’s official visit to Britain. The invitation made clear that the occasion called for ‘white tie with decorations’. As the date of the banquet approached, however, newspapers reported that, at the request of the Brazilian government, both President Lula and his seventy-strong delegation had been relieved of the obligation to wear tails. When he read this, Coelho (who had dusted off his tails, waistcoat and white tie) was confused as to what to do. Concerned that he might make a blunder, he decided to send a short e-mail to the Royal Household asking for instructions: ‘I just read that President Lula vetoed the white tie for the Brazilian Delegation. Please let me know how to proceed–I don’t want to be the only one with a white tie.’

The reply, signed by a member of the Royal Household, arrived two days later, also by e-mail:

S
OME WEEKS AFTER HANDING HIS PUBLISHERS
the typescript of
The Witch of Portobello
, which he had finished a week prior to the banquet at Buckingham Palace, Coelho was preparing for a new test. Two decades had passed since 1986, when he had followed the Road to Santiago, the first and most important of the penances imposed by Jean. In the years that followed, the mysterious Master had, in agreement with Coelho, regularly ordered further trials. At least one of these the author has confessed to having fulfilled purely out of respect for the duty to find disciples to whom he should transmit the knowledge he had received from Jean and show them the route to spiritual enlightenment. ‘I have disciples because I am obliged to, but I don’t enjoy it,’ he told journalists. ‘I’m very lazy and have little patience.’ In spite of this resistance, he has acted as guide to four new initiates as demanded by RAM.

Besides following the Routes, the name given by members of the order to the different pilgrimages, he was ordered by Jean to submit to various tests. Some of these did not require much willpower or physical strength, such as praying at least once a day with his hands held beneath a jet of flowing water, which could be from a tap or a stream. Coelho does, however, admit to having been given tasks that were not at all easy to perform, such as submitting to a vow of chastity for six months, during
which time even masturbation was forbidden. In spite of this deprivation, he speaks with good humour about the experience, which happened in the late 1980s. ‘I discovered that sexual abstinence is accompanied by a great deal of temptation,’ he recalls. ‘The penitent has the impression that every woman desires him, or, rather, that only the really pretty ones do.’ Some of these tests were akin to rituals of self-flagellation. For three months, for example, he was obliged to walk for an hour a day, barefoot and without a shirt, through brushwood in thick scrubland until his chest and arms were scratched by thorns and the soles of his feet lacerated by stones. Compared with that, tasks such as fasting for three days or having to look at a tree for five minutes every day for months on end were as nothing.

The task Jean set his disciple in April 2006 may seem to a layman totally nonsensical. The time had come for him to take the External Road to Jerusalem, which meant spending four months (or, as the initiates prefer to say, ‘three months plus one’) wandering about the world, wherever he chose, without setting foot in either of his two homes–the house in France and his apartment in Rio de Janeiro. For him this meant spending all that time in hotels. Did this mean that only those with enough money to pay for such an extravagance could join the order? Coelho had been troubled by this very question twenty years earlier, just before setting off along the Road to Santiago, and he recalls Jean’s encouraging reply: ‘Travelling isn’t always a question of money, but of courage. You spent a large part of your life travelling the world as a hippie. What money did you have then? None. Hardly enough to pay for your fare, and yet those were, I believe, some of the best years of your life–eating badly, sleeping in railway stations, unable to communicate because of the language, being forced to depend on others even for finding somewhere to spend the night.’

If the new Road to Jerusalem was unavoidable, the solution was to relax and put the time to good use. He devoted the first few weeks to carrying out a small number of the engagements that had accumulated in Sant Jordi’s diary, among which was the London Book Fair. While there, he chanced to meet Yuri Smirnoff, the owner of Sophia, his publisher in Russia. Coelho told him that he was in the middle of a strange pilgrimage
and that this might be the perfect opportunity to realize an old dream: to take the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway which crosses 9,289 kilometres and traverses 75 per cent of Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Some weeks later, he received a phone call while he was touring in Catalonia, in northern Spain. It was Smirnoff calling to say that he had decided to make Coelho’s dream come true and was offering him a fortnight on one of the longest railway journeys in the world.

Coelho assumed that the gift would be a compartment on the train. Much to his surprise, when he arrived in Moscow on 15 May, the agreed date for his departure, he discovered that Smirnoff had decided to turn the trip into a luxurious ‘happening’. He had hired two entire coaches. Paulo would travel in a suite in the first, and the other two compartments would be occupied by Smirnoff, his wife and Eva, an admirer of Coelho’s work, who would act as his interpreter during the two-week journey. He was also provided with a chef, two cooks and a waiter, as well as two bodyguards from the Russian government to ensure their guest’s safety. The second coach was to be given over to thirty journalists from Russia and other European countries, who had been invited to accompany the author. Altogether, this kind gesture cost Smirnoff about US$200,000, and it proved to be a very poor investment indeed: some months later Coelho left Sophia for another publisher, Astrel.

It turned out to be an exhausting fortnight, not just because of the distance covered, but because he was constantly besieged by his readers. At every stop, the platforms were filled by hundreds and hundreds of readers wanting an autograph, a handshake, or even just a word. After crossing the provinces in the far east of Russia and skirting the frontiers of Mongolia and China, on a journey that crossed eight time zones, the group finally arrived in Vladivostok on the edge of the Sea of Japan on 30 May.

During the interviews he gave while on his Trans-Siberian journey Coelho made it clear that, in spite of the comfort in which he was travelling, it was not a tourist trip. ‘This is not just a train journey,’ he insisted several times, ‘but a spiritual journey through space and time in order to complete a pilgrimage ordered by my Master.’ Despite all these years of being a constant presence in newspapers and magazines across the world,
no journalist has ever been able to discover the true identity of the mysterious character to whom Paulo owes so much. Some months after the end of the World Cup in 2006, someone calling himself simply a ‘reader of Paulo Coelho’ sent a photo to the website set up for collecting information for this book. It showed Coelho wearing a Brazilian flag draped over his shoulders, Christina and a third person walking down a street. The third person was a thin man, with grey hair, wearing faded jeans, a Brazilian football shirt and a mobile phone hanging around his neck. It was hard to identify him because he was wearing a cap and sunglasses and his right hand was partly covering his face. The photograph bore a short caption written by the anonymous contributor: ‘This photo was taken by me in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup. The man in the cap is Jean, Paulo Coelho’s Master in RAM.’ When he saw the photo, the author was deliberately vague: ‘What can I say?’ he said. ‘If it isn’t him, it’s very like him.’

Two months after the end of the World Cup, Brazilian bookshops were receiving the first 100,000 copies of
The Witch of Portobello
. It was a book full of new ideas. The first of these, to be found right at the beginning, is the method used by the author to relate the travails of Athena, the book’s protagonist. The story of the young Gypsy girl born in Transylvania, in Romania, and abandoned by her biological mother is narrated by fifteen different characters. This device brought eloquent praise for his work in the
Folha de São Paulo
. ‘One cannot deny that, in literary terms, this is one of Paulo Coelho’s most ambitious novels,’ wrote Marcelo Pen. The book is the story of Athena’s life. Adopted by a Lebanese couple and taken to Beirut, from where the family is driven out by the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 until 1990, she then settles in London. She grows up in Britain, where she is educated, marries and has a son. She works for a bank before leaving her husband and going to Romania in order to find her biological mother. She then moves to the Persian Gulf, where she becomes a successful estate agent in Dubai. On her return to London, she develops and seeks to deepen her spirituality, becoming, in the end, a priestess, who attracts hundreds of followers. As a result of this, however, she becomes a victim of religious intolerance.

The second innovation was technological. The book appeared on the author’s website before the printed version reached the Brazilian and
Portuguese bookshops, and in just two days his web page received 29,000 hits, which took everyone, including the author, by surprise. ‘It was just amazing, but it proved that the Internet has become an obligatory space for a writer to share his work with the readers,’ he told newspapers. To those who feared that the initiative might rob bookshops of readers, he replied: ‘In 1999, I discovered that the edition of
The Alchemist
published in Russia was available on the Internet. Then I decided to confront piracy on its own ground and I started putting my books on the web first. Instead of falling, sales in bookshops increased.’

As though wanting to reaffirm that these were not empty words, the site where he began to make his books available (www.piratecoelho.wordpress.com) has a photo of the author with a bandana on his head and a black eye patch, as though he were a real pirate. Convinced that someone only reads books on-screen if he has no other option, and that printing them out at home would cost more than buying them in the bookshops, Coelho began to make all his books available online. ‘It has been proved that if people read the first chapters on the Internet and like it,’ he states, ‘they will go out and buy the book.’

Since the middle of 2006, he and Mônica and Chris, as well as some of his publishers, had been hoping that the number of books sold would pass the 100-million mark around the feast day of St Joseph, 19 March, the following year, when he had decided he would celebrate his sixtieth birthday. As it turned out, the 100-millionth book was not sold until five months later, in August, which was his real birthday. Although he had told the newspapers that being sixty was no more important than being thirty-five or forty-seven, in February, he decided that he would celebrate St Joseph’s day in the Hotel El Peregrino, in Puente la Reina, a small Spanish town 20 kilometres from Pamplona, halfway along the Road to Santiago. That day he announced on his blog that he would be glad to welcome the first ten readers to reply in Puente la Reina. When the messages began to arrive–coming from places as far away as Brazil, Japan, England, Venezuela and Qatar–Paulo feared that those who replied might think that the invitation included air trips and accommodation, and hastened to clarify the situation. To his surprise, they had all understood what he meant and were prepared to bear the cost. On the actual day, there were
five Spaniards (Luís Miguel, Clara, Rosa, Loli and Ramón), a Greek (Chrissa), an Englishman (Alex), a Venezuelan (Marian), a Japanese (Heiko) and an American who lived in northern Iraq (Nika), as well as the ex-football star Raí and Paulo’s old friends, among them Nelson Liano, Jr, his partner on the
Manual do Vampirismo
, and Dana Goodyear, the American journalist. In his blog, Liano summed up the atmosphere at El Peregrino:

Five months later, as his real birthday was approaching, the team led by Mônica at Sant Jordi was working flat out on the preparation of a smart forty-page folder in English, the cover of which bore a photo of a beaming Paulo Coelho and the words ‘PAULO COELHO–100,000,000 COPIES’. The urgency was due to the fact that the folder had to be ready by the first week of October, for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

While the people at Sant Jordi were engaged on this, on 24 August, the man himself was, as usual, devoting himself to more spiritual matters. Anyone strolling along the narrow, sunny little streets in Barbazan-Debat, 10 kilometres from Saint-Martin, at three o’clock that afternoon, might not even have noticed the presence of the man with close-cropped white hair, wearing trainers, T-shirt and bermudas. Coelho had just come out of the small chapel of Notre Dame de Piétat and sat down on a wooden bench, where he placed a notebook on his lap and began to write. The few tourists who drove past would have found it hard to associate that slight, rather monk-like figure with the author courted by kings, emirs and Hollywood stars and acclaimed by readers all over the world. Christina, who was watching from a distance, went over to him and asked what he was writing.

‘A letter,’ he replied, without looking up.

‘Who to?’ she went on.

‘To the author of my biography.’

Posted some hours later at Saint-Martin post office, the letter is reproduced in its entirety below.