Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (8 page)

Lygia and Pedro also had aching hearts, although not because of love. The first months their son had spent at St Ignatius had been disastrous. The days when he brought back his monthly grades were a nightmare. While his sister, Sônia Maria, was getting top marks at her school, Paulo’s marks got steadily worse. With only rare exceptions–usually in unimportant subjects such as choral singing or craftwork–he hardly ever achieved the necessary average of 5 if he was to stay on at the school. It was only when he was forced to study for hours on end at home and given extra tuition in various subjects that he managed to complete the first year, but even then his average was only a poor 6.3. In the second year, things deteriorated still further. He continued to get high marks in choral singing, but couldn’t achieve even the minimum average grade in the subjects that mattered–maths, Portuguese, history, geography, Latin and English. However, his parents were sure that the iron hand of the Jesuits would bring their essentially good-natured son back to the straight and narrow.

As time went by, he became more and more timid, retiring and insecure. He began to lose interest even in the favourite sport of his schoolmates, which was to stand at the gates of the Colégio Jacobina, where his
sister was a pupil, to watch the girls coming out. This was a delight they would all remember for the rest of their lives, as the author and scriptwriter Ricardo Hofstetter, who was also a pupil at the Jesuit college, was to recall:

Nor did Paulo, not at the Jacobina or anywhere else. Apart from innocent flirtations and notes exchanged with the girls on the estate or in Araruama, he reached young adulthood without ever having had a real girlfriend. When his friends got together to brag about their conquests–never anything more than holding hands or a quick kiss or a squeeze–he was the only one who had no adventure to talk of. Fate had not made him handsome. His head was too big for his skinny body and his shoulders narrow. He had fleshy lips, like his father’s, and his nose, too, seemed overlarge for the face of a boy of his age.

He became more solitary with each day that passed and buried himself in books–not those the Jesuits had them read at school, which he loathed, but adventure stories and novels. However, while he may have become a voracious reader, this still did not improve his performance at school. At the end of every year, in the public prize-giving ceremonies, he had become used to seeing his colleagues–some of whom went on to become leading figures in Brazilian public life–receiving diplomas and medals, while he was never once called to go up to the dais. He only narrowly avoided being kept down a year and thus forced to find another school, since at St Ignatius, staying down was synonymous with being thrown out.

While their son proved himself to be a resounding failure, his parents at least lived in hope that he would become a good Christian and, indeed,
he appeared to be well on the way to this. While averse to study, he felt comfortable in the heavily religious atmosphere of the college. He would don his best clothes and happily attend the obligatory Sunday mass, which was celebrated entirely in Latin, and he became familiar with the mysterious rituals such as covering the images of the saints during Lent with purple cloths. Even the dark underground catacombs where the mortal remains of the Jesuits lay aroused his curiosity, although he never had the courage to visit them.

His parents’ hopes were re-awakened during his fourth year, when he decided to go on a retreat held by the school. These retreats lasted three or four days, and took place during the week so that they would not seem like a holiday camp or mere recreation. They were always held at the Padre Anchieta Retreat House, or the Casa da Gávea, as it was known–a country house high up in the then remote district of São Conrado, 15 kilometres from the centre of Rio. Built in 1935 and surrounded by woods, it was a large three-storey building with thirty blue-framed windows in the front. These were the windows of the bedrooms where the guests stayed, each with a magnificent view of the deserted beach of São Conrado. The Jesuits never tired of repeating that the silence in the house was so complete that at any hour of the day or night and in any corner of the building you could hear the waves breaking on the beach below.

It was on a hot October morning in 1962 that Paulo left for his encounter with God. In a small suitcase packed by his mother, he took, as well as his clothes and personal belongings, his new, inseparable companions: a notebook and a fountain pen with which to make the notes that were more and more taking on the form of a diary. At eight in the morning, all the boys were standing in the college courtyard and as they waited for the bus to take them to the retreat house, Coelho was suddenly filled with courage. With two friends he went into the chapel in the dark, and walked round the altar and down the stairs towards the catacombs. Lit only by candles, the crypt, which was full of coffins, looked even gloomier. To his surprise, though, instead of being filled with terror, as he had always imagined he would be, he had an indescribable feeling of wellbeing. He seemed inspired to search for an explanation for his unexpected bravery. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t seeing death in all its terror,’ he wrote in his
notebook, ‘but the eternal rest of those who had lived and suffered for Jesus.’

Half an hour later, they were all at the Casa da Gávea. During the days that followed, Paulo shared with another young boy a bare cubicle provided with two beds, a wardrobe, a table, two chairs and a little altar attached to the wall. In a corner was a china wash basin and above it a mirror. Once they had unpacked, both boys went down to the refectory, where they were given tea and biscuits. The spiritual guide for the group was Father João Batista Ruffier, who announced the rules of the retreat, the first of which would come into force in the next ten minutes: a vow of silence. From then on, until they left at the end of the retreat, no one was allowed to say a single word. Father Ruffier, who was a stickler for the rules, was about to give one of his famous sermons, one that would remain in the memory of generations of those who attended St Ignatius.

‘You are here like machines going into the workshop for a service. You can expect to be taken apart piece by piece. Don’t be afraid of the amount of dirt that will come out. The most important thing is that you put back each piece in its right place with total honesty.’

The sermon lasted almost an hour, but it was those opening words that went round and round in Paulo’s head all afternoon, as he walked alone in the woods surrounding the house. That night he wrote in his diary, ‘I have reviewed all my thoughts of the last few days and I’m ready to put things right.’ He said a Hail Mary and an Our Father, and fell asleep.

Although Father Ruffier had made it clear what the retreat was for–‘Here you will drive away the temptations of life and consecrate yourselves to meditation and prayer’–not everyone was there for Christian reflection. Everyone knew that once dinner was over and after the final prayer of the day had been said, shadows would creep along the dark corridors of the house to meet secretly in small groups for whispered games of poker and pontoon. If one of the boys had managed to smuggle in a transistor radio–something that was expressly forbidden–someone would immediately suggest placing a bet on the races at the Jockey Club. From midnight to dawn the religious atmosphere was profaned by betting, smoking and even drinking contraband whisky concealed in shampoo bottles. Whenever a light in a cubicle warned of suspicious
activities, one of the more attentive priests would immediately turn off the electricity. This, however, didn’t always resolve the problem, since the heretical game would continue in the light from candles purloined from the chapel during the day.

On the second day, Paulo woke at five in the morning, his mind confused, although his spirits improved a little when he opened the bedroom window and saw the sun coming up over the sea. At six on the dot, still not having eaten, he met his colleagues in the chapel for the daily mass, prepared to put things right with God and do something he had been putting off for almost a year: taking communion. The problem was not communion itself but the horror of confession, with which all the boys were familiar. They would arrive at the confessional prepared to reveal only the most banal of sins, but they knew that, in the end, the priest would always ask the inevitable question: ‘Have you sinned against chastity, my son?’ Should the reply be in the affirmative, the questions that followed were more probing: ‘Alone or with someone else?’ If it was with someone else, the priest would continue, to the mortification of the more timid boys: ‘With a person or an animal?’ If the response was ‘with a person’, the sinner was not required to reveal the name of the partner, only the sex: ‘With a boy or with a girl?’

Paulo found this an extremely difficult topic to deal with and he didn’t understand how it could be a sin. He was so convinced that masturbation was not a shameful activity that he wrote in his notebook: ‘No one on this earth can throw the first stone at me, because no one has avoided this temptation.’ In spite of this, he had never had the courage to confess to a priest that he masturbated, and living in a permanent state of sin troubled him deeply. With his soul divided, he preferred merely to say the act of contrition and to receive communion without going to confession.

Following mass, Father Ruffier returned to the charge with a particularly harsh sermon. Before a terrified audience, he painted a terrifying picture of the place intended for all sinners: ‘We are in hell! The fire is burning mercilessly! Here one sees only tears and hears only the grinding of teeth in mutual loathing. I come across a colleague and curse him for being the cause of my condemnation. And while we weep in pain and remorse, the Devil smiles a smile that makes our suffering still greater.
But the worst punishment, the worst pain, the worst suffering is that we have no hope. We are here for ever.’

Paulo was in no doubt: Father Ruffier was talking about him. After twelve months without going to confession–so as not to have to touch on the taboo subject of masturbation–he realized that if he were to die suddenly, his final destiny would be hell. He imagined the Devil looking into his eyes and snickering: ‘My dear boy, your suffering hasn’t even begun yet.’ He felt helpless, powerless and confused. He had no one to turn to, but he knew that a Jesuit retreat was a place of certainties, not of doubts. Faced with a choice between suffering in the flames for all eternity as described by the priest and giving up his solitary pleasure, he chose faith. Deeply moved and kneeling alone on the stone floor of the mirador, he turned to God and made a solemn promise never to masturbate again.

His decision gave him courage and calmed him, but that feeling of calm was short-lived. The following day, the Devil counter-attacked with such force that he could not resist the temptation and, defeated, he masturbated. He left the bathroom as though his hands were covered in blood, knelt in front of the altar and implored: ‘Lord! I want to change, but I can’t stop myself! I’ve said endless acts of contrition, but I can’t stop sinning. I sin in thought, word and deed. Give me strength! Please! Please! Please!’ Full of despair, he only felt relief when, in a whispered conversation in the woods, he found that he had a companion in eternal suffering: a fellow pupil who had also been masturbating during the retreat.

Ashamed of his own weakness, Paulo was subjected to two more sermons from Father Ruffier, which seemed to have been chosen especially to instil fear into the minds of the boys. Once again, the priest deployed dramatic and terrifying images, this time to alert the boys to the perils of clinging on to material values. From the pulpit Father Ruffier gesticulated like an actor, shaking his short, muscular arms and saying: ‘Truly, truly I say unto you, my children: the time will come when we shall all be laid low. Imagine yourselves dying. In the hospital room, your relatives white with fear. The bedside table is crammed with different medicines, all useless now. It is then that you see how powerless you are. You
humbly recognize that you are powerless. What good will fame, money, cars, luxuries be at the fatal hour? What use are those things if your death lies in the hands of the Creator?’ With his fists clenched, and as though possessed by divine fury, he declared vehemently: ‘We must give up everything, my sons! We must give up everything!’

These words should not be confused with an exhortation to embrace socialism or anything of the sort. Not only were the sons of some of the wealthiest families in Rio de Janeiro in the congregation, but the college was politically conservative and was always showing films of executions by firing squads in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in order to show the boys ‘the bloodthirsty nature of communism’. And Father Ruffier himself was proud of the fact that he had had to leave Colombia in a hurry ‘to flee communism’ (he was referring to the popular uprising in Bogotá in 1948, known as the Bogotazo).

While the boys stared at each other in astonishment, the priest spoke again. The subject was, once again, hell. Just in case he had not made himself clear in the first part of his sermon, he once more described the eternal state of suffering to which sinners would be condemned: ‘Hell is like the sea that is there before us. Imagine a swallow coming along every hundred years and taking a drop of water each time. That swallow is you and that is your penance. You will suffer for millions and millions of years, but one day the sea will be empty. And you will say: at last, it’s over and I can rest in peace.’ He paused, then concluded: ‘But then the Creator will smile from the heights and will say: “That was just the beginning. Now you will see other seas and that is how it will be for all eternity. The swallow empties the sea and I fill it up again.”’