Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Abandoned by his Great Love–as he described Márcia in his diary–he once again fell into depression. His parents were concerned about his state of mind and, taking pity on him, they decided to make an exception. Although holidays in Araruama had been forbidden because of his failure at Andrews College, he would be allowed to spend Carnival there with his cousins. Paulo arrived by bus on the Friday night and spent the weekend feeling miserable, not even wanting to go and see the girls at the dances in the city. On the following Monday evening, he accepted an invitation from three friends to have a beer in a bar near his Uncle José’s house.

  When the table was covered in beer mats, showing how many drinks had been consumed, one of the boys, Carlinhos, had an idea: ‘My parents are away and the car is in the garage just waiting to be taken out. If any of you knows how to drive we can go for a spin round the town.’

  Although he had never driven a car, Paulo announced: ‘I can drive.’

  They paid the bill, went to Carlinhos’s house and took the car. While the four of them were driving up the main street, where there were crowds of people and carnival parades, there was a general power failure. Although it was pitch dark, Paulo drove on through the mêlée of pedestrians and carnival-goers. Suddenly he saw a group of revellers in carnival costumes making their way towards the car.

  Not knowing how to react, he swerved and accelerated. Then one of his friends yelled: ‘Watch out for the boy!’

  It was too late. They all felt something hit the car’s front bumper, but Paulo went on accelerating while his friends looked back, terrified, shouting: ‘Put your foot down, Paulo! Put your foot down! Get out of here! You’ve killed the boy!’

  CHAPTER 5

  First encounter with Dr Benjamim

  THE BOY WAS LUÍS CLÁUDIO, or Claudinho, the son of a tailor, Lauro Vieira de Azevedo. He was seven years old and lived in Rua Oscar Clark, near the house where Paulo was staying. The violence of the collision was such that the boy was thrown some distance, with his stomach ripped open and his intestines exposed. He was taken unconscious to the Casa de Caridade, the only hospital in Araruama, where it was found that the blow had ruptured his spleen. To control the haemorrhaging the doctor in A&E gave him a blood transfusion, but Claudinho experienced a sudden drop in blood pressure and nearly died.

  After the collision, Paulo and his friends had not only failed to go to Claudinho’s aid but also fled the scene of the accident. They took the car back to Carlinhos’s house and, with the city still in darkness, went to the home of another of the boys who had been in the car, Maurício. On their way there, they realized that news of the accident was spreading. Terrified by rumours that the boy had died, they made a pact of silence: no one would ever utter a word about the incident. They all went their separate ways. In order not to arouse suspicion, when Paulo arrived at his uncle’s home, he ‘cynically’ (his own word) acted as though nothing had happened. However, half an hour later came the moment of truth: Maurício and Aurélio, the fourth member of the group, had been named by a witness and arrested, and while in police custody they revealed the identity of the driver.

  Paulo’s uncle took him to a room and told him of the gravity of the situation: ‘The boy’s life is hanging by a thread. We must just hope that he survives, because if he dies, things will get very ugly for you. Your parents have been told everything and they’re on their way from Rio to talk to the police and the magistrate. Meanwhile, you’re not leaving the house. You’re safe here.’

  His uncle knew what the tailor was like and was concerned that he might do something crazy. His fears were confirmed that night. After visiting his dying son in hospital, Lauro appeared at the gates of the house where Paulo was hiding, along with two unpleasant-looking men. A revolver stuck in his belt, Lauro wagged a finger at José and said: ‘Dr Araripe, we don’t know yet whether Claudinho will live or die. As long as that’s the case, your nephew is not to leave Araruama. And if my son dies, Paulo will die too, because I’ll come here personally and kill him.’

  Late that night, Lygia and Pedro arrived in Araruama and, even before going to see their son, they went to the magistrate’s house, who told them that the ‘perpetrator’ could only leave the city with his permission. His parents’ arrival did nothing to alleviate Paulo’s despair and he spent a sleepless night. Lying in bed, he wrote in a tremulous hand:

  This is the longest day of my life. I feel terrible, not knowing how the child is. But the worst thing was when we arrived at Maurício’s house, after the accident, and everyone was saying that the boy was dead. I wanted to run away, to disappear. I can’t think of anything but you, Márcia. I’m going to be charged with driving without a licence. And if the child’s condition worsens, I’ll be tried and might be sent to prison.

  This was hell on earth. On Shrove Tuesday news of the two incidents–the accident and the tailor’s threat–had spread rapidly, drawing inquisitive crowds to Rua Oscar Clark, eager to witness the climax to the drama. Early on, Lygia and Pedro decided to visit Claudinho’s parents to offer their apologies and to get news of the boy’s condition, for Claudinho was still unconscious. Lygia put together a large basket of fruit for the boy’s mother to take to him. As she and her husband were approaching the house, which was on the same side of the road as José’s, Lauro ordered them to turn back, because he was not prepared to talk. He repeated his threat–‘Your son will only leave this town if my son survives’–and he said that Lygia could take the fruit back: ‘No one here is dying of hunger. I don’t want charity, I want my son back.’

  Paulo left his room only to ask for news of the boy. He recorded each piece of information in his notebook:

  They went to the hospital this morning. The boy’s temperature is going down, let’s hope that his father withdraws his complaint to the police.

  […] The whole town knows everything and I can’t leave the house because they’re out looking for me. I heard that yesterday, at the dance, there was a detective waiting for me at the door.

  […] The boy’s temperature has gone up again.

  […] It looks as though I might be arrested at any moment, because someone told the police I’m over eighteen. Everything depends on the boy.

  Claudinho’s temperature rose and fell several times. He regained consciousness on the Wednesday morning, two days after the accident, but it wasn’t until late that night that the agony ended, when the doctors reported that he was out of danger and would be discharged in a few days.

  Early on the Thursday, Pedro Coelho took his son to make a statement to the magistrate, who had him sign an agreement to pay all the medical and hospital expenses. The boy survived and suffered no long-term consequences, apart from an enormous scar on his abdomen that would remain with him for life. Destiny, however, appears to have decided that his meeting with death was to be on Carnival Monday, for thirty-four years later, on 15 February 1999–another Carnival Monday–Luís Cláudio, by this time a businessman, and married with two daughters, was dragged from his house in Araruama by two masked men with guns, who were apparently in the pay of a group of hijackers of transport lorries. He was viciously tortured, then tied up, soaked in petrol, set alight and burned to death.

  Claudinho’s survival in 1965 did nothing to improve Pedro Coelho’s mood. When Paulo returned to Rio, he heard that, as a punishment for having caused the accident and for having lied, he would not be allowed out at night for a month. Added to this, his allowance, which he had regained after leaving his job on the dredger in December, was once again to be stopped until he had repaid his father the 100,000 cruzeiros (some US$1,750 in today’s terms) for the hospital fees.

  Two months after the beginning of term, the first report from Andrews College revived the hopes of the Coelho family: although he had done badly in some subjects, their son had received such good marks in Portuguese, philosophy and chemistry that his average had risen to 6.1, which may have been only so-so, but was certainly an improvement for someone who hadn’t even been able t
o manage a 5. Everyone was hopeful: but in his second report, his average dropped to 4.6 and in the third he managed only 2.5. The days when the reports arrived became days of retribution for Paulo. Pedro Coelho would rant and rave, take away more of Paulo’s privileges and threaten even worse punishments. Paulo, however, appeared indifferent to all of this. ‘I’m fed up with school,’ he would tell his friends. ‘I’ll leave as soon as I can.’

  He channelled all the energy and enthusiasm he failed to put into his schoolwork into the idea of becoming a writer. Unwilling to accept the fact that he was not yet a famous author, and convinced of his own talent, he had decided that his problem could be summed up in four words: a lack of publicity. At the beginning of 1965, he would take long walks with his friend Eduardo Jardim along Copacabana beach, during which he would ponder what he called ‘the problem of establishing myself as a recognized writer’.

  His argument was a simple one: with the world becoming more and more materialistic (whether through communism or capitalism, it made no difference), the natural tendency was for the arts to disappear and, with them, literature. Only publicity could save them from a cultural Armageddon. His main preoccupation was with the written word, as he frequently explained to Jardim. Since it wasn’t as widely disseminated as music, literature was failing to find fertile ground among the young. ‘If someone doesn’t enthuse this generation with a love of literature,’ he would tell his friend, ‘it won’t be around much longer.’ To conclude, he revealed the secret of success: ‘That’s why publicity is going to be the main element in my literary programme. And I’m going to control it. I’m going to use publicity to force the public to read and judge what I write. That way my books will sell more, but, more importantly, I’ll arouse people’s curiosity about my ideas and theories.’ In spite of Jardim’s look of astonishment when he heard this, Paulo continued with his plans for the final phase of his conquest of the reading public: ‘Then, like Balzac, I shall write articles under a pseudonym both attacking and defending my work, but that’s a different matter.’

  Jardim did not appear to agree with anything he was hearing: ‘You’re thinking like a businessman, Paulo. Remember, publicity is an artificial thing that forces people to do what they don’t want.’

  Paulo was so convinced of the effectiveness of his ideas, though, that he had stuck to his desk at home a summary of the tasks he would have to carry out during that year in order to achieve fame:

  Literary programme for the Year 1965

  Buy all the Rio newspapers each day of the week.

  Check the book reviews, who writes them and the names of the editors of the papers.

  Send articles to the relevant people and a covering note to the editors. Telephone them, asking when the article will appear. Tell the editors what my ambitions are.

  Find contacts for publication.

  Repeat this process for magazines.

  Find out whether anyone who has received my texts would like to receive them on a regular basis.

  Repeat the same process with radio stations. Send my own proposal for a programme or send contributions to current programmes. Contact the relevant people by phone, asking when my contribution will be transmitted, if it is.

  Find out the addresses of famous writers and write to them sending my poetry and asking for their comments and for help in placing them in the papers they write for. Write again if there’s no reply.

  Go to all book signings, lectures, first nights of plays, and try to get talking with the big names and get myself noticed.

  Organize productions of plays I’ve written and invite people belonging to the literary circle of the older generation, and get their ‘patronage’.

  Try to get in touch with the new generation of writers, hold drinks parties, go to places where they go. Continue with my internal publicity campaign, keeping my colleagues informed of my triumphs.

  The plan seemed infallible, but the truth is that Paulo continued to be humiliatingly, painfully unknown. He didn’t manage to get anything published; he didn’t get to know any critics, journalists or anyone who could open a door for him or reach out a hand to help him up the ladder of success. To make matters worse, he continued to do badly in his studies and was clearly miserable at having to go to college every day–what was the point when his marks went from bad to worse? He spent the days in a state of abstraction, as if his mind were in another world.

  It was during this state of lethargy that he got to know another boy at school, Joel Macedo, who was studying classics. They were the same age, but Joel was the opposite of Paulo: he was extroverted and politically articulate, and one of the youngest members of the so-called Paissandu generation–film-lovers and intellectuals who would meet at the old-fashioned Paissandu cinema in the Flamengo district. He was a cultural activist, led the Taca drama group and was responsible for Agora, a small newspaper published by the pupils of the college, whose editorial team he invited Paulo to join. The newspaper was at loggerheads with the conservative directors of the college because it criticized the arrests and other arbitrary measures taken by the military government.

  A new world opened up to Paulo. Joining the Paissandu set meant rubbing shoulders with Rio’s intellectual elite and seeing close to the leading lights of the left-wing opposition. The cinema and the two nearby bars–the Oklahoma and the Cinerama–attracted film directors, musicians, playwrights and influential journalists. The latest European films were shown at midnight sessions on a Friday, when the 700 available tickets sold out in minutes. Paulo wasn’t much interested in political or social problems, but his deep existential anxieties fitted the profile of the typical denizen of Paissandu and he quickly made himself at home.

  One day, he was forced to confess to Joel why he never went to the midnight film sessions, which were, after all, the most popular ones. ‘Firstly because I’m not yet eighteen and the films shown there are usually banned for minors,’ he explained, adding: ‘And if I get home after eleven o’clock my father won’t open the door to me.’ Joel couldn’t accept that someone of seventeen had a set time for getting home. ‘The time has come for you to demand your freedom. The problem of your age is easy enough to solve: all you have to do is change your date of birth on your student card, as I did.’ He also offered to solve the problem of the curfew: ‘After the midnight sessions you can sleep in my parents’ house in Ipanema.’ From then on, with his card duly falsified and a guaranteed roof over his head, Paulo was free to enter the enchanted world of Jean-Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

  However, one problem remained: tickets, beer, cigarettes and travel all cost money. Not a fortune, obviously, but with his allowance suspended he didn’t have a penny to his name, nor any idea as to how to get some money. To his surprise, a partial solution came from his father. Pedro was a friend of Luís Eduardo Guimarães, the editor of the Diário de Notícias, which, at the time, was an influential newspaper in Rio. Guimarães was also the son-in-law of its owner, Ondina Dantas. Pedro fixed up a meeting between his son and the journalist, and a few days later Paulo began to work as a cub reporter. The work, alas, would be unpaid until he was given a proper contract. The problem of money remained, therefore, but there was one compensation: the job was a step towards liberating himself from parental control. He was almost never at home. He would go out in the morning to college, return home briefly for lunch, then spend the afternoon at the newspaper office and the evening at the Paissandu. He spent so many nights at Joel’s parents’ apartment that it became his second home.

  As is the case with all publications, the least exciting tasks fell to the juniors, such as reporting on any potholes that were holding up the flow of traffic or any domestic arguments that ended up at the police station, or compiling lists of the dead in the public hospitals for the deaths section in the next day’s edition. It was not unusual for the new boy to arrive at the office and be told by Silvio Ferraz, the chief reporter at the Diário de Notí
cias: ‘Go and talk to shopkeepers to see whether business is suffering from the downturn.’ He may have been earning nothing and dealing only with unimportant matters, but Paulo felt he was an intellectual, someone who wrote every day, no matter about what. There was also another great advantage. When his colleagues at college or someone from the Paissandu set asked what he was doing, he would say: ‘I’m a journalist. I write for the Diário de Notícias.’

  He was so busy with the newspaper, the cinema and amateur dramatics that he had less and less time left for Andrews College. His father was in despair when he discovered that, at the end of April, his son had an average of 2.5 (contributed to by a zero in Portuguese, English and chemistry), but Paulo seemed to be living in another world. He did exactly what he wanted to and came home at night when he wanted. If he found the door unlocked, he would go in. If his father had, as he usually did, carefully locked everything up at eleven, he would simply take the Leblon–Lapa bus and, minutes later, be sleeping in Joel’s house. His parents didn’t know what else they could do.

  In May, a friend asked him for a favour: he wanted a job in the Crédito Real de Minas Gerais bank and needed two references. As this was the bank where Paulo’s father had an account, perhaps he could be persuaded to write one of the necessary letters? Paulo promised to see to it, but when he brought up the subject with his father he received a blunt refusal: ‘Absolutely not! Only you could possibly think that I would support your vagrant friends.’

  Upset and too ashamed to tell his friend the truth, Paulo made a decision: he locked himself in his room and typed up a letter full of praise for the applicant, adding at the bottom ‘Engenheiro Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’. He signed it and put the letter in an envelope–problem solved. Everything went so well that the subject of the letter felt obliged to thank its writer for his kindness with a telephone call. Dr Pedro couldn’t understand what the boy was talking about: ‘Letter? What letter?’ On hearing the words ‘bank manager’, he said: ‘I wrote no letter! Bring that letter here. Bring it here immediately! This is Paulo’s doing! Paulo must have forged my signature!’ He rang off and rushed to the bank, looking for evidence of the crime–the letter, the proof that his son had become a forger, a fraudster. Paulo arrived home that evening, unaware of what had happened. He found his father in a fury, but that was nothing new. Before going to sleep, he wrote a short note in his diary: ‘In a month and a half I’ve written nine articles for Diário de Notícias. I’ve got a trip to Furnas set up for 12th June, when I’m going to meet the most important people in the political world, such as the president, the most important governors and ministers of state.’