Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Paulo spent the rest of the day with these words echoing in his head. He went into the woods that surrounded the retreat house and tried to distract himself with the beauty of the view, but Father Ruffier’s words only resonated inside him more loudly. That night, he set down his thoughts before finally falling asleep, and the notes he made appear to demonstrate the efficacy of the spiritual retreat.

  Here, I’ve completely forgotten the world. I’ve forgotten that I’m going to fail maths, I’ve forgotten that Botafogo is top of the league and I’ve forgotten that I’m going to spend next week on the island of Itaipu. But I feel that with every moment spent forgetting, I’m learning to understand the world better. I’m going back to a world that I didn’t understand before and which I hated, but which the retreat has taught me to love and understand. I’ve learnt here to see the beauty that lies in a piece of grass and in a stone. In short, I’ve learnt how to live.

  Most important was the fact that he returned home certain that he had acquired the virtue which–through all the highs and lows of his life–would prove to be the connecting thread: faith. Even his parents, who appeared to have lost all hope of getting him back on the straight and narrow, were thrilled with the new Paulo. ‘We’re very happy to see that you finally appear to have got back on the right track,’ Lygia declared when he returned. Her son’s conversion had been all that was missing to complete domestic bliss, for a few months earlier, the family had finally moved into the large pink house built by Pedro Coelho with his own hands.

  In fact, the move to Gávea happened before the building was completed, which meant that they still had to live for some time among tins of paint, sinks and baths piled up in corners. However, the house astonished everyone, with its dining room, sitting room and drawing room, its ensuite bathrooms in every bedroom, its marble staircase and its verandah. There was also an inner courtyard so large that Paulo later thought of using it as a rehearsal space for his plays. The move was a shock to Paulo. Moving from the estate in Botafogo, where he was born and where he was the unchallenged leader, to Gávea, which, at the time, was a vast wasteland with few houses and buildings, was a painful business. The change of district did nothing to lessen his parents’ earlier fears, or, rather, his father’s, and, obsessively preoccupied with the harm that the ‘outside world’ might do to his son’s character and education, Pedro thought it best to ban him from going out at night. Suddenly, Paulo no longer had any friends and his life was reduced to three activities: sleeping, going to classes at St Ignatius and reading at home.

  Reading was nothing new. He had even managed to introduce a clause concerning books in the Arco statutes, stating that, ‘besides other activities, every day must include some recreational reading’. He had begun reading the children’s classics that Brazilian parents liked to give their children; then he moved on to Conan Doyle and had soon read all of Sherlock Holmes. When he was told to read the annotated edition of The Slum by Aluísio Azevedo at school, he began by ridiculing it: ‘I’m not enjoying the book. I don’t know why Aluísio Azevedo brings sex into it so much.’ Some chapters later, however, he radically changed his mind and praised the work highly: ‘At last I’m beginning to understand the book: life without ideals, full of betrayal and remorse. The lesson I took from it is that life is long and disappointing. The Slum is a sublime book. It makes us think of the sufferings of others.’ What had initially been a scholastic exercise had become a pleasure. From then on, he wrote reviews of all the books he read. His reports might be short and sharp, such as ‘weak plot’ when writing about Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan, or, in the case of Vuzz by P.A. Hourey, endless paragraphs saying how magnificent it was.

  He read anything and everything, from Michel Quoist’s lyrical poems to Jean-Paul Sartre. He would read best-sellers by Leon Uris, Ellery Queen’s detective stories and pseudo-scientific works such as O Homem no Cosmos by Helio Jaguaribe, which he classed in his notes as ‘pure, poorly disguised red propaganda’. Such condensed reviews give the impression that he read with one eye on the aesthetic and the other on good behaviour. Remarks such as ‘His poetry contains the more degrading and entirely unnecessary aspects of human morality’ (on Para Viver um Grande Amor by Vinicius de Moraes) or ‘Brazilians aren’t yet ready for this kind of book’ (referring to the play Bonitinha, mas Ordinária by Nelson Rodrigues) were frequent in his listings. He had even more to say on Nelson Rodrigues: ‘It’s said that he’s a slave to the public, but I don’t agree. He was born for this type of literature, and it’s not the people who are making him write it.’

  Politically his reactions were no less full of preconceptions. When he saw the film Seara Vermelha, which was based on the book of the same name by Jorge Amado, he regretted that it was a work that was ‘clearly communist in outlook, showing man’s exploitation of man’. He was pleasantly surprised, however, when he read Amado’s best-seller Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; indeed, he was positively intoxicated: ‘It’s so natural…There’s not a trace of communism in its pages. I really liked it.’ He felt that Manuel Bandeira was the greatest Brazilian poet (‘because he leaves aside unhealthy aspects of life, and because of his simple, economical style’); he loathed João Cabral de Melo Neto (‘I read some of his verses and I shut the book immediately’); and he confessed that he didn’t understand Carlos Drummond de Andrade (‘He has a confused, abstract style, which makes it hard to interpret his poetry’).

  It was apparently at this time, when he was thirteen or fourteen, that Paulo showed the first signs of an undying idée fixe, a real obsession that he would never lose–to be a writer. Almost half a century later, as one of the most widely read authors of all time, he wrote in The Zahir:

  I write because when I was an adolescent, I was useless at football, I didn’t have a car or much of an allowance, and I was pretty much of a weed…I didn’t wear trendy clothes either. That’s all the girls in my class were interested in, and so they just ignored me. At night, when my friends were out with their girlfriends, I spent my free time creating a world in which I could be happy: my companions were writers and their books.

  In fact, he saw himself as a writer well before he said as much. Besides being the winner of the writing competition at Our Lady Victorious, from the time he could read he had become a full-time poet. He would write short verses and poems for his parents, grandparents, friends, cousins, girlfriends and even the saints revered by his family. Compositions such as ‘Our Lady, on this febrile adolescent night/I offer you my pure childhood/That the fire is now devouring/And transforming into smoke so that it may rise up to you/And may the fire also free me from the past’, which was inspired by the Virgin Mary; or four-line verses written for his parents: ‘If the greatest good in the world/Is given to those who are parents/Then it is also a certain truth/That it is they who suffer most.’ If there was no one to whom he could dedicate his verses, he would write to himself: ‘The past is over/And the future has not yet arrived/I wander through the impossible present/Full of love, ideals and unbelief/As if I were simply/Passing through life.’

  When, at a later age, he grew to know more about books and libraries, he came across a quote attributed to Émile Zola, in which the author of J’Accuse said something along the lines of ‘My poetic muse has turned out to be a very dull creature; from now on, I shall write prose’. Whether or not these words were true of Zola, Paulo believed that the words were written precisely for him. He wrote in his diary: ‘Today I ended my poetic phase in order to devote myself solely to the theatre and the novel.’ He made a bonfire in the garden of everything he had written up to then–vast quantities of poems, sonnets and verses.

  Such a promise, if meant seriously, would have been a proof of great ingratitude to the art of verse, for it was a poem he wrote–‘Mulher de Treze Anos’ [‘Thirteen-year-old Woman’]–that rescued him from anonymity among the 1,200 students at St Ignatius. One of the Jesuit traditions was the Academy of Letters of St Ignatius (ALSI), which had been created in 194
1 and was responsible for cultural development of the students. Great names in Brazilian culture attended the events held by the ALSI. At the age of fourteen, Paulo appeared for the first time in the pages of the magazine Vitória Colegial, the official publication of the ALSI, with a small text entitled ‘Why I Like Books’. It was an unequivocal defence of writers, whom he portrayed dramatically as people who spent sleepless nights, ‘without eating, exploited by publishers’, only to die forgotten:

  What does a book represent? A book represents an unequalled wealth of culture. It is the book that opens windows on to the world for us. Through a book we experience the great adventures of Don Quixote and Tarzan as though we ourselves were the characters; we laugh at the hilarious tales of Don Camilo, we suffer as the characters in other great works of world literature suffer. For this reason, I like to read books in my free time. Through books we prepare ourselves for the future. We learn, just by reading them, theories that meant sacrifice and even death for those who discovered them. Every didactic book is a step in the direction of the country’s glorious horizon. This is why I like books when I’m studying. But what did it take for that book to arrive in our hands? Great sacrifice on the part of the author, whole nights spent starving and forgotten, their room sometimes lit only by the spluttering flame of a candle. And then, exploited by their publishers, they died forgotten, unjustly forgotten. What willpower on the part of others was needed for them to achieve a little fame! This is why I like books.

  Months later, the ALSI announced the date for entries for its traditional annual poetry prize. Paulo had just seen the Franco-Italian film Two Women, directed by Vittorio de Sica, and left the cinema inspired. Based on the novel La Ciociara, by Alberto Moravia, the film tells the story of Cesira (Sophia Loren) and her thirteen-year-old daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), both of whom have been raped by Allied soldiers during the Second World War. Paulo based his poem ‘Thirteen-year-old Woman’ on the character of Rosetta, and it was that poem which he then entered for the competition.

  The day the poems were to be judged was one of endless agony. Paulo could think of nothing else. That evening, before the meeting when the three prize-winners were to be announced, he overcame his shyness and asked a member of the jury, a Portuguese teacher, whom he had voted for. He blushed at the response: ‘I voted for you, Átila and Chame.’

  Twenty poems were selected for the final. Paulo knew at least one of the chosen poems, ‘Introduce’, by José Átila Ramos, which, in his opinion, was the favourite. If his friend won, that would be fine, and if he himself managed at least third place, that would be wonderful. At nine in the evening, the auditorium was full of nervous boys soliciting votes and calculating their chances of winning. There was total silence as the jury, comprising two teachers and a pupil, began to announce in ascending order the three winners. When he heard that in third place was ‘Serpentina and Columbina’ and in second ‘Introduce’, he felt sure he hadn’t been placed at all. So he almost fell off his chair when it was announced: ‘The winner, by unanimous vote, is the poem…“Thirteen-year-old Woman”, by Paulo Coelho de Souza!’

  First place! He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Heart pounding and legs shaking, the slight young boy crossed the room and stepped up on to the stage to receive the certificate and the prize, a cheque for 1,000 cruzeiros–about US$47. Once the ceremony was over, he was one of the first to leave the college, desperate to go straight home and for once give his parents some good news. On the tram on the way back to Gávea, he began to choose his words and work out the best way to tell his father that he had discovered his one and only vocation–to be a writer.

  He was therefore somewhat surprised on reaching the house to find his father standing outside on the pavement, angrily tapping his watch and saying: ‘It’s almost eleven o’clock and you know perfectly well that in this house the doors are closed at ten, no argument.’

  This time, though, Paulo had up his sleeve a trump card that would surely move his father’s cold heart. Smiling, he brandished the trophy he had just won–the cheque for 1,000 cruzeiros–and told his father everything: the prize, the unanimous vote, the dozens of contestants, the discovery of his vocation.

  But even this failed to win over his grim father. Apparently ignoring everything his son had said, Pedro poured cold water on the boy’s excitement, saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you got good marks at school and didn’t come home so late.’

  The thought that at least his mother would be thrilled by his win was dispelled in an instant. When he saw her waiting at the front door, he told her, eyes shining, what he had just told his father. To her son’s dismay, Lygia quietly gave him the same lecture: ‘My boy, there’s no point dreaming about becoming a writer. It’s wonderful that you write all these things, but life is different. Just think: Brazil is a country of seventy million inhabitants, it has thousands of writers, but Jorge Amado is the only one who can make a living by writing. And there’s only one Jorge Amado.’

  Desperately unhappy, depressed and close to tears, Paulo did not get to sleep until dawn. He wrote just one line in his diary: ‘Mama is stupid. Papa is a fool.’ When he woke, he had no doubt that his family was determined to bury for ever what he dramatically called ‘my only reason for living’–being a writer. For the first time, he seemed to recognize that he was prepared to pay dearly to realize his dream, even if this meant clashing with his parents. Lygia and Pedro Queima Coelho were not going to have long to wait.

  CHAPTER 4

  First play, first love

  AT THE END OF 1962, at his father’s insistence, Paulo was forced to enrol in the science stream rather than the arts as he had hoped. His scholastic performance in the fourth year had been disastrous, and he had finished the year having to re-sit maths, the subject at which his father so excelled. In the end, he passed with a 5–not a decimal point more than the mark required to move on to the next year and remain at St Ignatius. In spite of this and Paulo’s declared intention to study the arts, his parents insisted that he study engineering and, following his appalling scholastic performance, he was in no position to insist.

  However, from his point of view, the practical Pedro Coelho had reasons for hoping that his son might yet be saved and become an engineer. These hopes lay not only in the interest Paulo had shown in his grandfather’s success as a mechanic–professional and amateur. As a boy, Paulo had frequently asked his parents to buy him copies of the magazine Mecânica Popular, a publication dating from the 1950s that taught readers how to do everything from fixing floor polishers to building boats and houses. When he was ten or eleven he was so passionate about aeroplane modelling that any father would have seen in this a promising future as an aeronautical engineer. The difference was that, while lots of children play with model aeroplanes, Paulo set up the Clube Sunday, of which he and his cousin Fred, who lived in Belém, were sole members. Since a distance of 3,000 kilometres separated them and their aeroplanes, the club’s activities ended up being a chronological list of the models each had acquired. At the end of each month, Paulo would record all this information in a notebook–the names and characteristics of the small planes they had acquired, the serial number, wing span, date and place of purchase, general construction expenses, the date, place and reason for the loss of the plane whenever this occurred. Not one of these pieces of information served any purpose, but ‘It was best to keep things organized,’ Paulo said. When the glider Chiquita smashed into a wall in Gávea, it was thought worthy of special mention: ‘It only flew once, but since it was destroyed heroically, I award this plane the Combat Cross. Paulo Coelho de Souza, Director.’

  This fascination for model aeroplanes rapidly disappeared, but it gave way to another mania, even more auspicious for anyone wanting his son to be an engineer: making rockets. For some months Paulo and Renato Dias, a classmate at St Ignatius, spent all their spare time on this new activity. No one can say how or when it began–not even Paulo can remember–but the two spent any free time durin
g the week in the National Library reading books about such matters as ‘explosive propulsion’, ‘solid fuels’ and ‘metallic combustibles’. On Sundays and holidays, the small square in front of the Coelho house became a launch pad. As was almost always the case with Paulo, everything had to be set down on paper first. In his usual meticulous way, he started a small notebook entitled ‘Astronautics–Activities to be Completed by the Programme for the Construction of Space Rockets’. Timetables stated the time taken on research in books, the specifications of materials used in the construction and the type of fuel. On the day of the launch, he produced a typewritten document with blank spaces to be filled in by hand at the time of the test, noting date, place, time, temperature, humidity and visibility.

  The rockets were made of aluminium tubing about 20 centimetres in length and weighing 200 grams and had wooden nose cones. They were propelled by a fuel the boys had concocted out of ‘sugar, gunpowder, magnesium and nitric acid’. This concentrated mixture was placed in a container at the base of the rocket, and the explosive cocktail was detonated using a wick soaked in kerosene. The rockets were given illustrious names: Goddard I, II and III, and Von Braun I, II and III, in homage, respectively, to the American aeronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard and the creator of the German flying bombs that devastated London during the Second World War, Werner von Braun. However, although the rockets were intended to rise up to 17 metres, they never did. On launch days, Paulo would take over a part of the pavement outside their house ‘for the public’ and convert a hole that the telephone company had forgotten to close up into a trench where he and his friend could shelter. He then invited his father, the servants and passers-by to sign the flight reports as ‘representatives of the government’. The rockets failed to live up to the preparations. Not one ever rose more than a few centimetres into the air and the majority exploded before they had even got off the ground. Paulo’s astronautical phase disappeared as fast as it had arrived and in less than six months the space programme was abandoned before a seventh rocket could be constructed.