The following morning, he woke in a particularly good mood, since a rumour had been going round at the newspaper that he was going to be taken on officially, which would mean he would be a real journalist, with a press card and a guaranteed salary. When he went downstairs, he was surprised to find his parents already up and waiting for him. Pedro was beside himself with rage, but he said nothing.
It was Lygia who spoke: ‘Paulo, we’re worried about your asthma and so we’ve made an appointment with the doctor for a check-up. Eat your breakfast because we’ve got to leave soon.’
A few minutes later, his father took the Vanguard out of the garage–a rare occurrence–and the three drove along the coast road towards the city centre. Seated in the back, absorbed in thought, Paulo gazed out at the fog over the sea, which made Guanabara bay look simultaneously melancholy and poetic. When they were halfway along Botafogo beach the car took a left turn into Rua Marquês de Olinda, drove another three blocks and drew up alongside a wall more than 3 metres high. The three got out and went over to a wrought-iron gate. Paulo heard his father say something to the gatekeeper and, moments later, saw a nun arrive to take them to a consulting room. They were in the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, a large hospital occupying various buildings and large mansions in the woods at the bottom of a hill.
The nun went ahead, showing his parents the way, with Paulo behind, not understanding what was going on. The four of them took a lift to the ninth floor and, as they walked down a long corridor towards the consulting room, the nun opened a door and showed Pedro and Lygia a bedroom with two beds and a window with an iron grille. She smiled, saying: ‘This is where the boy will sleep. As you can see, it’s a nice bright, spacious room.’
Paulo couldn’t understand what he was hearing and had no time to ask, since, by then, they were all in the doctor’s consulting room. Seated behind a desk was the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gaspar Gomes, a fifty-two-year-old man, bald, with small eyes and a pleasant face.
Astonished, Paulo turned to his parents: ‘If I’ve just come here for asthma tests, why have you booked a room for me?’
Pedro said nothing and Lygia gently tried to explain to her son that he was being admitted to an asylum. ‘You’re not going to school any more, and you’re not going to sleep at home. You left St Ignatius so that you wouldn’t be expelled and you’ve ended up failing at Andrews. On top of that you ran over the boy in Araruama…’
Then his father spoke for the first time: ‘This time, you’ve really overstepped the mark. Forging a signature, as you did mine, isn’t just a prank–it’s a crime.’
Things moved rapidly from then on. His mother said that she and his father had had a long talk with Dr Benjamim–a colleague of Pedro’s and a person whom the family trusted implicitly–and that they were all agreed that he was too excitable and needed medication, so it would be a good idea for him to spend a few days in this ‘rest home’. Before he could recover from the shock, his parents stood up, said goodbye and disappeared down the tiled corridor.
Suddenly he found himself alone, locked up in an asylum with his school file under his arm and a jacket over his shoulders, not knowing what to do. As though he thought it might still be possible to escape from this nightmare, he said to the doctor: ‘You mean you’re going to lock me up like a madman without examining me–no interview, nothing?’
Dr Benjamim smiled: ‘You’re not being admitted as a madman. This is a rest home. You’re just going to take some medicine and rest. Besides, I don’t need to interview you, I have all the information I need.’
No one with any common sense would think that the information given by Paulo’s father could justify this treatment: his parents’ complaints–that he was irritable, hostile, a bad student and ‘even politically opposed to his father’–were not very different from the complaints that nine out of ten parents make about their adolescent children. His mother had more precise concerns and thought that her son ‘had problems of a sexual nature’. The three reasons for this suspicion are surprising, coming as they do from an intelligent and sophisticated woman like Lygia: her son had no girlfriends, he had refused circumcision to correct an overtight foreskin–phimosis–and, finally, it seemed, lately, that his breasts were developing like those of a girl. There was, in fact, an explanation for all of these ‘symptoms’, including the change in his breasts, which was nothing more than the side effect of a growth hormone prescribed by a doctor to whom she herself had taken him.
The only problem of a psychiatric nature that might have concerned his parents was one of which they were in fact unaware. Some months earlier, during one of his many sleepless, anxiety-filled nights, he had decided to kill himself. He went into the kitchen and began to block all the air vents with sticky tape and dusters. However, when it came to turning on the gas inlet from the street to the oven, his courage failed him. He saw with sudden clarity that he didn’t want to die: he only wanted his parents to notice his despair. He describes how, as he removed the last strip of tape from behind the door and started to go back to his room, he realized, terrified, that he had company: it was the Angel of Death. There was good reason for his panic, since he had read somewhere that, once summoned to Earth, the Angel never left empty-handed. He recorded the conclusion to this macabre encounter in his diary:
I could sense the smell of the Angel all around me, the Angel’s breath, the Angel’s desire to take someone away. I remained silent and silently asked what he wanted. He told me that he had been summoned and that he needed to take someone, to give an account of his work. Then I picked up a kitchen knife, jumped over the wall and landed in an empty plot of land where the people in the shanty towns kept their goats running free. I grabbed hold of one of them and slit its throat. The blood spurted up and went right over the wall, splattering the walls of my house. But the Angel left satisfied. From then on, I knew that I would never try to kill myself again.
Unless his parents had been so indiscreet as to read his diary–as he suspected some time later–the sacrifice of the goat, which at the time was attributed to some perverse evil-doer, could not have been one of their reasons for having him admitted to the asylum.
Still absorbing the shock of this new situation, Paulo was led to his room by a male nurse. As he leaned against the iron bars at the window, he was surprised by the beauty to be found in such a wretched place. From the ninth floor he had an unbroken view of the white sands of Botafogo beach, the Flamengo gardens and, in the background, the spectacular outline of Morro da Urca and Pão de Açucar. The bed beside his was empty, which meant that he would have to suffer his torment alone. In the afternoon, someone arrived from his house and handed over at the gate a suitcase with clothes, books and personal possessions. The day passed without incident.
Lying on his bed, Paulo thought of the options open to him: the first, of course, was to continue with his plan to be a writer. If this didn’t work out, the best thing would be to go mad as a convenient means to an end. He would be supported by the state, he wouldn’t have to work any more nor take on any responsibilities. This would mean spending a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, but, after a day wandering the corridors, he realized that the patients at the clinic didn’t behave ‘like the mad people you see in Hollywood films’: ‘Except for some pathological cases of a catatonic or schizophrenic nature, all the other patients are perfectly capable of talking about life and having their own ideas on the subject. Sometimes they have panic attacks, crises of depression or aggression, but they don’t last for long.’
Paulo spent the following days trying to get to know the place to which he had been confined. Talking to the nurses and employees, he discovered that 800 mentally ill people were interned at the clinic, and divided up according to the degree of their insanity and social class. The floor he was on was for the so-called ‘docile mad’ and those referred by private doctors, while the remainder, the ‘dangerously mad’ and those dependent on public health services, were in another building. The former sl
ept in rooms with a maximum of two beds and a private bathroom and during the day they could move freely around the entire floor. However, you could only take the lift, the doors of which were locked, when accompanied by a nurse and a guide nominated by a doctor. All the windows, balconies and verandahs were protected by iron grilles or walls made of decorative air bricks through which one could still see. Those being paid for by social services slept in dormitories of ten, twenty and even thirty beds, while those considered to be violent were kept in solitary confinement.
The Dr Eiras clinic was not only an asylum, as Paulo had originally thought, but a group of neurological, cardiological and detox clinics for alcoholics and drug addicts. Two of its directors, the doctors Abraão Ackerman and Paulo Niemeyer, were among the most respected neurosurgeons in Brazil. While hundreds of workers dependent on social security lined up at their doors waiting for a consultation, famous people with health problems also went there. During his time in the clinic as a patient, Paulo received weekly visits from his mother. On one of these visits, Lygia arrived accompanied by Sônia Maria, who was fifteen at the time and had insisted on going to see her brother in hospital. She left in a state of shock. ‘The atmosphere was horrendous, people talking to themselves in the corridors,’ she was to recall angrily some years later. ‘And lost in that hell was Paulo, a mere boy, someone who should never have been there.’ She left determined to speak to her parents, to beg them to open their hearts and remove her brother from the asylum, but she lacked the courage to do so. If she was unable to argue in defence of her own rights, what could she do for him? Unlike Paulo, Sônia spent her life in submission to her parents–to such a point that, even when married and a mother, she would never smoke in front of her father and concealed from him the fact that she wore a bikini.
As for Paulo’s suffering, this, according to Dr Benjamim, who visited him each morning, was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to ‘a special way he had of getting himself out of difficult situations, even when he was protesting against being interned!’ According to the psychiatrist, ‘the fact that Paulo did not suffer more is because he had a way with words’. And it was thanks to that ‘way with words’ that he avoided being subjected to a brutal treatment frequently inflicted on the mentally ill at the clinic: electroshock treatment. Although he was well informed about mental illnesses and had translated books on psychiatry, Dr Benjamim was a staunch defender of electroconvulsive therapy, which had already been condemned in a large part of the world. ‘In certain cases, such as incurable depression, there is no alternative,’ he would say confidently. ‘Any other therapy is a cheat, an illusion, a palliative and a dangerous procrastination.’ However, while he was a patient, Paulo was subjected to such heavy doses of psychotropic substances that he would spend the whole day in a daze, slouching along the corridor in his slippers. Although he had never experimented with drugs, not even cannabis, he spent four weeks consuming packs and packs of medication that was supposedly detoxifying, but only left him more confused.
Since almost no one knew he was in the asylum, he had little news of his friends. One day, he had an unexpected visit from the friend who was indirectly responsible for his presence there by asking for a reference, and who left the clinic with a mad idea–never carried out: that of rallying the members of the defunct Rota 15 group to kidnap him. However, Paulo’s tortured soul only found true peace when his latest love appeared: Renata Sochaczewski, a pretty girl whom he had met at an amateur theatrical group, who was to become a great actress under the name Renata Sorrah, and whom Paulo affectionately called ‘Rennie’ or ‘Pato’. When she failed to get in to visit him, Renata would furtively send him little love notes. These contained such messages as ‘Stand at the window because I’m waiting to wave goodbye to you’, or ‘Write a list of what you want and give it to me on Friday. Yesterday I phoned but they didn’t tell you.’
When he was allowed out, four weeks after being admitted, Paulo was in a very fragile state, but he nevertheless tried to take a positive lesson from his journey into hell. It was only when he got home that he found the mental energy to make notes in his diary:
In the meantime, I’ve been in Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, where I was admitted for being maladjusted. I spent twenty-eight days there, missed classes, lost my job and was released as if I had been cured, even though there was no reason for my ever having been admitted in the first place. My parents have really done it this time! They ruin my chances at the newspaper, ruin my academic year and spend loads of money only to find that there was nothing wrong with me. What I have to do now is start all over again, accepting what’s happened as a joke and a well-intentioned mistake. (The worst of it is that the day I was admitted, I was going to be given a job on the permanent staff at the newspaper.)
All the same, it was OK. As a patient on my floor said, ‘All experiences are good experiences, even the bad ones.’ Yes, I’ve learned a lot. It gave me a chance to mature and gain in self-confidence, to make a more careful study of my friends and notice things I’d never really thought about before. Now I’m a man.
While Paulo may have left the clinic convinced that there was nothing wrong with him, this was not the opinion of the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gomes. The hospital file in the archives of the clinic held a dark prognosis that read more like a condemnation: ‘A patient with schizoid tendencies, averse to social and loving contact. He prefers solitary activities. He is incapable of expressing his feelings or of experiencing pleasure.’ Judging from this piece of paper, Paulo’s suffering was only just beginning.
CHAPTER 6
Batatinha’s début
THE FEW FRIENDS WHO HAD WITNESSED Paulo’s twenty-eight days of suffering in the clinic were surprised when he was let out. Although physically exhausted and looking more fragile, he made no attempt to hide the fact that he had been admitted to an asylum. On the contrary, when he reappeared in Rua Rodrigo Otávio, he boasted to a circle of friends that he had lived through an experience unknown to any of them: being treated as a madman. His descriptions of the people and events at the clinic, many of them invented, were so extraordinary that some of his friends even expressed envy at not having been in such an interesting place.
Lygia and Pedro were concerned about their son’s behaviour. Fearing that his confinement might stigmatize him at school and at work, they treated the matter with total discretion. His father had decided to tell Andrews College and the Diário de Notícias that Paulo’s absence was due to his having to go away unexpectedly. When they learned that their son was telling everyone the truth, Pedro warned him: ‘Don’t do that. If people get to know that you’ve had mental problems, you’ll never be able to stand as a candidate for President of the Republic.’
Not having the least desire to be president of anything at all, Paulo appeared to have returned from the clinic with a renewed appetite for what he called ‘the intellectual life’. Now he had a new place where he could hang out, besides the amateur theatre at the college and the Cine Paissandu. The director of the Serviço Nacional de Teatro (SNT), Bárbara Heliodora, had got permission from the government to transform the old headquarters of the Students’ Union (which had been ransacked and burned by extreme right-wing groups on the day of the military coup) into the new National Drama Conservatory. Without restoring the building or painting over the marks left by the damage caused by the vandals, the Centro Popular de Cultura, as it had been known, was turned into the Teatro Palcão, a 150-seat theatre which, although it didn’t enjoy the freedom it had previously enjoyed, would once again become a centre of cultural debate permanently filled by workshops, rehearsals and drama group productions. What would later become the Teatro Universitário Nacional (National University Theatre), an occasional drama group comprising only students, was also born there. Paulo’s sole experience in this area was his play The Ugly Boy, which he had torn up soon after writing it, plus two or three other plays that had also gone no further than his own house. However, he was sure that he had some abi
lity in the field and plunged into the newly formed Conservatory.
When he returned to the Diário de Notícias, it became clear to Paulo that his absence of almost a month had put paid to or at least delayed his chances of being taken on as a reporter, but he stayed on, unpaid and uncomplaining. Working in a place that allowed him to write every day, even if only on the trivial topics that usually fell to him, was a good thing. At the end of July 1965, he was sent off to report on the history of the Marian Congregation in Brazil. He was beginning to gain experience as a reporter and had no difficulty in carrying out the task; at the organization’s headquarters, he interviewed members of the community, noted down numbers and wrote a short article describing the history of the Marians from the time they had arrived in Brazil with the first Portuguese Jesuit missionaries. The following morning on his way to school, he bought a copy of the Diário de Notícias at the newspaper stand and smiled proudly when he saw his article. The sub-editors had made some small changes, but they were still essentially his words being read by thousands of readers at that very moment.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 12
