In 1967, the world still did not know who Paulo Coelho was; indeed, it ran the risk of losing him, judging by his frequent bouts of depression and the insistence with which he spoke of death and suicide. At the end of June, after enduring another sleepless night, he had a sudden attack of rage. He put his diary away in the drawer, locked his bedroom door and began to break everything. He started with his guitar, which he smashed over his desk with a crash that sounded like a bomb exploding. The neighbours, who at that time, around six in the morning, had not yet got up, were astonished to hear the racket coming from the Coelho household. He broke his portable red plastic tape recorder and his short-wave radio and anything else he came across.
There was nothing left to destroy, but his fury was not yet spent. He went over to his bookcase and set to work on the ten volumes of his Sherlock Holmes collection. He ripped them up one by one and then went to the shelf containing books by Brazilian authors and continued his destruction until the bedroom floor was covered in the tattered remains of books. He went into the small bathroom next door and, using the fingerboard of his guitar as a cudgel, smashed the mirror. When the noise stopped for a moment, he heard his father pounding on the door, demanding that he open up, but he would not stop. He ripped down and tore into tiny pieces the two texts he had stuck on his door–a prayer by St Francis of Assisi and the words of ‘Barbara’ by the French poet Jacques Prévert, and then he did the same thing with the posters decorating his room: Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, Bosch’s Garden of Delights and The Crucifixion by Rubens. Panting, he saw that only one thing had remained intact: the white armchair where, as he once wrote, he would sit and cry or look up at the starry sky. Having nothing he could use to smash it, he opened the window and hurled it out into the garden at the side of the house. It was only then, when there was nothing left standing or intact, that he decided to open the door. He hardly had time to notice that it was no longer his father who was knocking. Two male nurses held him down and one injected him with what seemed to be a powerful sedative.
When he opened his eyes, he recognized the peeling paint on the ceiling. He was back lying on a bed on the ninth floor of the clinic. The first precaution the nurses had taken as soon as he came round from sedation was to take him to the liftmen and tell them: ‘This is the patient who ran away from here last year. Take a good look at his face and this time be more careful.’
Nothing in the clinic had changed since his previous stays there. Except for Flávio, who had tried to kill himself with whisky and ether spray, they were all there, including Luís Carlos, his companion in flight. The faces were the same as before, as was the suffering. On the first day, Paulo was submitted to a session of electroshock therapy so strong that when Fabíola came to visit him some hours later, he was still unconscious, drooling and with his face contorted by the violence of the electrical charges to his brain. In spite of the love and care shown him by his girlfriend–this time, Fabíola was the only person, apart from his parents, to visit him–he could not get the absent Geni and the baby out of his mind.
A week after being admitted to the clinic, during which time he was subjected to three electroshock sessions, Paulo was once again thinking of running away. And once again his chosen companion was Luís Carlos, who was unable to bear the routine of the hospital any longer. The opportunity arose on a day when a member of Dr Benjamim’s team was checking his mouth and noticed that a wisdom tooth was coming through. He thought that he had found the cause of Paulo’s problems: ‘Now I know what’s wrong. It’s a tooth coming through and causing pressure in your head. That’s what’s making you agitated and causing your crises. I’m going to ask the dentist to take out the tooth and then you’ll be all right.’
While they were looking for a nurse to take him to the dental clinic, he found Luís Carlos and told him: ‘It’s now or never! They’re going to take me to the dentist and I’m going to try to escape. See if you can too. If all goes well, we’ll meet in an hour at the café opposite the clinic.’
He walked down the paths separating the different clinic buildings, constantly watched by the male nurse, who, when they reached the door of the consulting room, looked at his watch and agreed with the dentist that since the extraction would take about half an hour, he would go to the toilet and then return straight away to take the patient back to the unit housing the mentally ill. However, the consultation lasted less than five minutes. After a quick examination, the dentist told him he could go: ‘I don’t know who invented such a stupid story! Since when has a wisdom tooth made anyone mad? You can sit outside and wait for the nurse to take you back to your floor.’
This was the moment. Paulo hurried along the corridors and, keeping his head down, crossed the woods on the edge of the complex and joined the crowd of visitors and doctors at the gate. Minutes later, he was free.
He ran to the café on the corner of Rua Assunção and Rua Marquês de Olinda and, to his surprise, saw Luís Carlos waiting for him with a glass of beer in his hand–it was all he could afford with the few coins he had in his pocket. They celebrated their success and decided to get out of the café before anyone on the ninth floor noticed they were missing and came looking for them (security seems to have been somewhat lax that day, since it was only two days later, on 9 July, that the doctors realized the two had disappeared). As they were leaving, Paulo managed to sell his wristwatch at the bar, although since there was no time for haggling, he received only 300 new cruzeiros (US$380), less than half its true value. The fugitives walked three blocks along Rua Marquês de Olinda, sat on the grass and spent hours in silence, enjoying the delicious pleasure of seeing the shimmering Urca beach with Sugar Loaf Mountain in the background. It was exactly the same view that they had from the windows of the asylum, only now there was no grille in front of them.
Paulo told Luís Carlos what he was planning: ‘I’m going to the bus station to buy a ticket to Aracaju. I need to find a girlfriend of mine who is or was expecting my baby. If you want to come with me, the money from the watch is enough to pay for you, too.’
Luís Carlos was surprised at the thought of such a long journey, but having no better plan and having nowhere to go, he accepted the invitation. As the bus did not leave until eight the following morning, the pair spent the night on the benches at the bus station. The tickets had cost them 80 cruzeiros, leaving more than enough money to buy food on the long bus ride. Luís Carlos wanted to know how they were going to survive when they reached their destination, but Paulo reassured him, saying: ‘There are people there who will take care of that.’ After crossing the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Bahia, with stops at fifteen towns along the way, two days later, on the morning of 9 July 1967, they arrived in Aracaju. It was only then that Luís Carlos learned that Paulo had no address, telephone number or any other way of finding his beloved Genivalda in a town of 170,000 inhabitants. His sole local reference was the name of Mário Jorge Vieira, a young poet and militant member of the banned Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).
Thanks to the lies he invented, a day later, Paulo and his friend, whom he introduced as ‘my dumb secretary’, were installed in journalist Marcos Mutti’s comfortable home, and he appeared in the social columns of the local press, described either as ‘university student and actor’ or as ‘young playwright from Rio’. These references were always accompanied by extravagant stories: ‘Mingling with the artistic community of Aracaju is the theatre actor Paulo Coelho, who recently appeared in Rio in the play Oedipus Rex alongside Paulo Autran. It seems that Coelho has come to admire our green landscape and to plant new seeds in the region’s almost non-existent theatrical history.’
After a week of searching, he lost all hope of finding Geni. He heard nothing of her until many years later, when he learned that she had indeed had an abortion and that, some time later, when still young, she had been run over and killed. Frustrated in the one objective that had taken him to Aracaju, he planned to return to Rio, but the hospitality he was receiving wa
s such that he stayed on. Treated with the respect granted to a star, he gave a long interview to the Gazeta de Sergipe, in which he was presented to the newspaper’s readers: ‘A strange individual arrived here on the 9th. Long-haired, unshaven, thin, and rather odd-looking, but with lots of ideas in his head, lots of hope and an enormous desire to propagate art throughout Brazil. He is, in short, an artist. A young man of twenty who has left his home (he is the son of one of the best-known families in Rio de Janeiro) for the love of art. His is a mind turned towards Humanity.’
Feeling himself to be at a safe distance (or protected perhaps by the impunity granted to the mad, to children and to native Indians), Paulo suddenly grew courageous and made use of the piece in the newspaper in order, for the first time, to criticize the military dictatorship–or rather, even more dangerous, the then President of the Republic, Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva. ‘I’m not going to keep quiet just because some superannuated marshal picks up a rifle and claims to be defending the morals and freedom of a people who don’t even know what freedom is.’ This was starting to look less like an interview and more like a manifesto, a call to arms. ‘I haven’t travelled thousands of kilometres to Aracaju in order to keep quiet. I won’t lie to myself or to those around me.’ The result of this vehemence was that he was offered a space in the newspaper to write a signed political article for the following Saturday’s edition.
On the Friday, however, he discovered that there were two people in the city who were looking for ‘the guy from Rio’, wanting to kill him. He was convinced that these must be Geni’s relatives, intent on defending their daughter’s honour by spilling the blood of her abuser, and his courage disappeared in a flash. He decided to make a run for it and was just about to leave when Luís Carlos reminded him about the article he had promised for the newspaper. Paulo opened up the leather bag he was wearing slung over his shoulder and took out a cutting from a Rio newspaper he had picked up on a bench at the bus station in Vitória da Conquista, in Bahia, one of the fifteen stops on the way to Aracaju. He asked his hosts whether he could use their typewriter and copied, word for word, an article castigating the military dictatorship for having disenfranchised Brazilians. He kept the title and simply changed the author’s name to his. Still with Luís Carlos, he spent the remainder of his money on two bus tickets to Salvador–the furthest his money would take him.
Years later, furious to learn that they had been duped and the article plagiarized, the people in Sergipe who had met Paulo at the time gave a rather different account of his sudden departure from Aracaju. ‘He and his so-called dumb secretary didn’t take a shower for two weeks and smoked cannabis all day,’ recalls Ilma Fontes. ‘That’s why Paulo Coelho was thrown out of Marcos Mutti’s house: for spending the day smoking cannabis in a strictly residential street.’ Two weeks without washing was not perhaps anything new in his life, but smoking cannabis was certainly not one of Paulo’s habits in July 1967.
When they got off the bus in the Salvador capital of Bahia without a penny in their pockets, the two men walked 10 kilometres to the Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce, a charitable institution known throughout Brazil. After joining a long line of beggars holding aluminum bowls for their daily soup ration, they went up to a small table, where the poor were received individually by the nun, to whom Paulo referred in his diary as ‘Irma la Douce’. He explained to the sad-eyed little nun that he needed money to buy two bus tickets to Rio. The ragged appearance of these two mendicants spoke volumes, and so she asked no questions and wrote in tiny writing on a piece of paper bearing the name of the institution:
These young men are requesting free transport to Rio.
Irmã Dulce–21/7/67
All they needed to do was to exchange the slip of paper at the bus station for two tickets. In Bahia, any piece of paper signed by the nun had the value of a voucher for a plate of food, having a relative taken into hospital or, as in their case, a bus ticket.
Paulo spent the forty-hour journey from Salvador to Rio drawing up the synopsis of a book about their escape and their journey to the northeast of the country. No–not just one book: in keeping with his megalomaniac temperament, he planned to write no fewer than nine books, each with twelve chapters. By the end of the journey, he had filled fifteen pages of his diary with details of each volume and their chapter titles (‘Preparing the Escape’ ‘My Travelling Companions’ ‘The General’s Son’ ‘My Long Hair and Other People’s Short Ideas’ ‘Pedro’s Pistol, or When the Bahians Shit Themselves’ ‘Sleeping in Kerosene Cans at 7° Centigrade’…), but the project never got any further than that.
At the Rio bus station, he and Luís Carlos sadly parted company. Once again, Paulo was going home and the ‘dumb’ man was on his way back to the clinic, where he was to remain, playing the part of madman, for as long as it took to gain his dreamed-of pension.
Less than a year later, Paulo was plunged into misery and despair again, and he again smashed up his room. This time, when he opened his door, he found not the male nurses bearing syringes or straitjackets but a pleasant young doctor, who asked politely: ‘May I come in?’
It was the psychiatrist Dr Antônio Ovídio Clement Fajardo, who often used to send patients for treatment at the Dr Eiras clinic. When Lygia and Pedro had heard the first sounds of things being broken in their son’s room, they had called Dr Benjamim, but when he couldn’t be found and since it was an urgent matter, they had contacted Dr Fajardo. When he spoke on the telephone to Pedro, the doctor had asked for basic information about Paulo.
‘Is he armed?’
‘No.’
‘Is he an alcoholic?’
‘No.’
‘Is he a drug addict?’
‘No.’
This made matters simpler.
Fajardo asked again: ‘May I come in?’
Hearing this unusual question repeated, Paulo didn’t know how to respond. ‘Come in? But haven’t you come to take me to the clinic?’
The doctor replied: ‘Only if you want me to. But you haven’t answered my question: may I come in?’
Seated on the bed, the doctor looked around the room, as though assessing the extent of the damage, and continued quite naturally: ‘You’ve broken everything, haven’t you? Excellent.’
Paulo couldn’t understand what was going on. The doctor went on, explaining in professorial tones: ‘What you’ve destroyed is your past. That’s good. Now that it’s no longer here, let’s begin to think about the future, all right? My suggestion is that you start coming to see me twice a week so that we can talk about your future.’
Paulo was astonished. ‘But doctor, I’ve just smashed up my room again. Aren’t you going to send me to the clinic?’
The doctor replied dispassionately: ‘Everyone has their mad side. I probably do, but you don’t put people away just like that. You’re not mentally ill.’
Only after this episode did peace return to the Coelho household. Much later, he wrote: ‘I think my parents were convinced I was a hopeless case and preferred to keep an eye on me and to support me for the rest of my life. They knew I would get into “bad company” again, but it didn’t enter their heads to have me re-admitted to the clinic.’ The problem was that their son was not prepared to continue living under parental control. He was ready to accept anything but a return to his grandfather’s depressing studio flat in the city centre. The short-term solution, which would last for a few months, came once again from his grandparents. Some years earlier, Tuca and Lilisa had moved into a house near by, which had over the garage a small apartment with a bedroom, bathroom and independent entrance. If Paulo wished–and if his father was in agreement–their grandson could move in there.
Their grandson wanted this so much that, before his father had time to say no, he had moved everything that remained from the wreck of his room into his new home–his bed, his desk, his few clothes and his typewriter, which he had carefully protected from his frenzy. He soon realized that the apartment was like a gateway to para
dise: given his grandparents’ extreme liberality, he could come and go as he pleased and, within the broad limits of decency, he could entertain whomever he wanted, day or night. His grandparents’ tolerance was such that, years later, Paulo vaguely recalled that it was probably there that he tried cannabis for the first time.
With no control over their son and with his grandparents making no attempt to control his behaviour either, some months later, Paulo’s father suggested he should move somewhere more comfortable. If interested, he could go back to living alone, not in Tuca’s studio but in a comfortable apartment Pedro had been given in payment for a building he had constructed in Rua Raimundo Correa in Copacabana. Paulo was suspicious of this generosity, and discovered that the offer concealed another reason: his father wanted to get rid of a tenant who was frequently late in paying his rent. Since the law said that a contract could only be broken by the landlord if the dwelling was to be used by a close relative of the owner, this was the solution to two problems, both Paulo’s and his father’s. Like almost any offer coming from Pedro, it had its drawbacks: Paulo could use only one of the three bedrooms, since the other two were permanently locked and empty. Also, access was always to be by the door in the basement, since the main entrance was to be kept locked and the key to remain with his father. Paulo had only to go to a local second-hand shop to buy some lamps and a bookcase and the place was ready to live in.
Paulo retained happy memories of the days he spent in Rua Raimundo Correa. Other affairs with other girls began and ended, but Fabíola remained faithful to him. She swallowed her jealousy and, as she later recalled, put up with the ‘Renatas, Genis and Márcias…but in the difficult times, I was there for him, it was pure love–pure love.’ Many years later, when he was famous, Paulo recalled that time with nostalgia: ‘I experienced a period of enormous happiness, enjoying the freedom I needed in order, finally, to live the “artist’s life”. I stopped studying and devoted myself exclusively to the theatre and to going to bars frequented by intellectuals. For a whole year, I did exactly what I wanted. That was when Fabíola really came into my life.’
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 18
