Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Now a full-time playwright–he had managed to complete his course at Guanabara, but had no plans as yet to take the university entrance exam–he turned the dining room of his new apartment into a workshop for scenery, costumes, compositions and rehearsals. He annoyed his neighbours by painting in Italian over the front door–which he never used–the words written above the gates of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate’ [‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’]. He translated plays, directed and worked as an actor. The more successful productions made up for the failures, and so he was able to live without depending exclusively on support from his parents. When he needed more funds, he tried to make money at poker and snooker tables and by betting on horses at the Jockey Club.

  At the end of 1968, he resolved to try the only aspect of theatre he had not yet worked on: production. He adapted the classic Peter Pan, which he wanted to direct and in which he also wanted to perform, but he was shocked to find that his savings were not nearly enough to cover the production’s costs. He was still pondering how to resolve the problem when Fabíola came to his apartment one night, opened her bag and took out bundles of notes in rubber bands–more than 5,000 cruzeiros (US$11,600), which she scattered over the bed, explaining: ‘This is my present for your production of Peter Pan.’

  Fabíola told him that as she was about to turn eighteen, she had decided to tell her mother, grandmother and all her other relatives and friends that instead of clothes and presents she would prefer money. She had contacted people everywhere–her mother’s rich clients and godparents whom she hadn’t seen for years–and here was the result: the bundles on the bed were not a fortune, but the money was more than enough to make putting on the play a viable proposition. Paulo was overwhelmed by the gift: ‘One girlfriend swapped me for two dresses and now you’ve exchanged all the dresses and presents for me. Your action has entirely changed my view of women.’

  Fabíola not only got the money for the production but also sold advertising space in the programme and came to an agreement with the restaurants around the Teatro Santa Terezinha in the Botanical Gardens: in exchange for their names being printed on any advertising material, they would allow the actors and technicians to have dinner for free. Paulo repaid all he owed her by inviting her to take the title role. He was to be Captain Hook. With a score by Kakiko, Peter Pan played to packed houses throughout its run, which meant that every cent invested was recovered. And contrary to the notion that says that public success means critical failure, the play went on to win a prize at the first Children’s Theatre Festival in the state of Guanabara. Paulo’s dream remained the same–to be a great writer–but meanwhile, he had no alternative but to live by the theatre. These cheering results made him decide to turn professional, and soon he was a proud member of the Brazilian Society of Theatre Writers (SBAT).

  In 1969, he was invited to work as an actor in the play Viúva porém Honesta [A Widow but Honest], by Nelson Rodrigues. In a break in rehearsals, he was drinking a beer in the bar beside the Teatro Sérgio Porto when he noticed that he was being watched by an attractive blonde woman seated at the counter. He pretended to look away, but when he turned round again, there she was, with her eyes fixed on him and with a discreet smile on her lips. This flirtation cannot have lasted more than ten minutes, but she made such an impression on Paulo that he wrote in his diary: ‘I can’t say how it all started. She appeared suddenly. I went in and immediately felt her looking at me. Despite the crowd, I knew that she had her eyes fixed on me and I didn’t have the courage to look straight back at her. I had never seen her before. But when I felt her gaze something happened. It was the beginning of a love story.’

  The beautiful mysterious blonde was Vera Prnjatovic Richter, eleven years Paulo’s senior, who at the time was trying to end her fifteen-year marriage to a rich industrialist. She was always well dressed, she had a car–which was still fairly rare among women at the time–and she lived in a huge apartment in one of the most expensive areas of Brazil, Avenida Delfim Moreira, in Leblon. From Paulo’s point of view she had only one obvious defect–she was going out with the actor Paulo Elísio, a bearded Apollo known for his bad temper and for being a karate black belt. However, the feelings recorded in his diary were to prove stronger than any martial arts.

  CHAPTER 10

  Vera

  BRAZIL BEGAN 1969 immersed in the most brutal dictatorship of its entire history. On 13 December 1968, the President of the Republic, Artur da Costa e Silva–the ‘superannuated marshal’ to whom Paulo had referred in his interview–had passed Institutional Act number 5, the AI-5, which put paid to the last remaining vestiges of freedom following the military coup of 1964. Signed by the President and countersigned by all his ministers, including the Minister of Health, Leonel Miranda, the owner of the Dr Eiras clinic, the AI-5 suspended, among other things, the right to habeas corpus and gave the government powers to censor the press, the theatre and books, as well as closing down the National Congress.

  It was not only Brazil that was about to erupt. In its sixth year of war in Vietnam, where more than half a million soldiers had been sent, the United States had elected the hawkish Richard Nixon as president. In April 1968, the black civil right’s leader Martin Luther King, Jr, had been assassinated, and sixty-three days later it was the turn of Robert Kennedy. One of the symbols of counterculture was the musical Hair, in which, at one point, the actors appeared naked on stage. In May, French students had occupied the Sorbonne and turned Paris into a battlefield, forcing General Charles de Gaulle to hold talks with the French military chiefs in Baden-Baden, Germany. This worldwide fever had crossed the Iron Curtain and reached Czechoslovakia in the form of the Prague Spring, a liberalizing plan proposed by the Secretary General of the Czech Communist Party, Alexander Dubček, which was crushed in August by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s military alliance with its political satellites.

  In Brazil, opposition to the dictatorship was beginning to grow. Initially, this took the form of peaceful student marches, in which Paulo rarely participated and, when he did so, it was more for fun and for the adventure of ‘confronting the police’ than as an act of political commitment. The political temperature rose with a rash of strikes called by workers in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, and reached alarming levels when the military intelligence services detected a growth in the number of guerrilla groups, which the regime loosely termed ‘terrorists’. By the end of the year, there were, in fact, at least four armed urban guerrilla organizations: the Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária (VAR-Palmares), Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN), Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR) and the Comando de Libertação Nacional (Colina). The Brazilian Communist Party, which took its inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party, had sent its first militants to Xambioá, in the north of Goiás (now on the frontier with the state of Tocantins), to mount a rural guerrilla assault in the region of the Araguaia River, on the edge of the Amazon rain forest. The extreme left attacked banks and set off bombs in barracks, while the extreme right organized attacks on one of the most visible centres of opposition to the regime: the theatre. Theatres in São Paulo and Rio were attacked or destroyed and there were an increasing number of arrests at street demonstrations as well as arrests of prominent people such as the ex-governor of Guanabara and civil leader of the 1964 coup, Carlos Lacerda, the composers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and the journalist Carlos Heitor Cony, whose article Paulo had plagiarized in Aracaju.

  Although he boasted of being ‘the communist in the group’, and although he was a witness to the violence being perpetrated on his profession–he was, after all, a playwright now and a member of the theatre union–Paulo seemed quietly indifferent to the political storm ravaging Brazil. As with the military coup, the new law and its consequences didn’t merit a mention in his diaries. The first words he wrote in 1969 are revealing as to the focus of his energies: ‘It’s New Year’s Day. I spent the evening with adulterers, homosexuals, lesbians an
d cuckolds.’

  In 1964, he could have attributed his lack of interest in politics to his youth, but now he was nearly twenty-two, the average age of most of those leading the political and cultural movements rocking the country. If any important change was occurring in his life, it was due not to the political maelstrom Brazil found itself in but to his new passion, Vera Richter.

  Petite, blonde and elegant, she had been born in 1936 in Belgrade, the capital of the then kingdom of Yugoslavia (now the capital of Serbia), the daughter of a wealthy landowning family. Until the age of twenty, she had lived a normal upper-class life; then, when she was in her first year at the theatre studies department of the university, she began to sense political changes occurring across Central Europe. That, and the collectivization program begun in Yugoslavia by Tito, seemed to indicate that it was time for the rich to leave the country.

  Since they had friends living in Rio de Janeiro, the Prnjatovic family–widowed mother, elder sister and Vera–decided this was to be their destination. Her mother and sister went first, and it was only some months later, when they were settled in Copacabana, that they sent a ticket for Vera. Speaking only English and the Italianate dialect of the area in which she had lived, she felt uncomfortable in Brazil. She ended up agreeing to a marriage arranged by her family–to a Yugoslav millionaire twelve years her senior. She recalled years later that even those who didn’t know her well noticed how incompatible the two were. Like most twenty-year-old girls, she liked dancing, sports and singing, whereas her husband was shy and quiet and, when he wasn’t running his import/export business, loved reading and listening to classical music.

  When her eyes met Paulo’s that night in the theatre bar, Vera’s marriage was merely a formality. She and her husband lived under the same roof, but were no longer a couple. She had been attracted to the Teatro Carioca by an announcement in the newspaper saying that a young director from Bahia, Álvaro Guimarães, was selecting students for a drama course. Almost four decades later, she recalls that her first impression of Paulo was not exactly flattering. ‘He looked like Professor Abronsius, the scientist with a big head in Roman Polanski’s film Dance of the Vampires– an enormous head on a tiny body. Ugly, bony, big lips and protruding eyes, Paulo was no beauty.’ But he had other charms: ‘Paulo was a Don Quixote! He was crazy. Everything seemed easy for him, everything was simple. He lived in the clouds, he never touched the ground. But his one obsession was to be someone. He would do anything to be someone. That was Paulo.’

  At the time of Vera’s arrival on the scene, Paulo’s relationship with Fabíola was doomed anyway, but it finally ended when she caught him with Vera. Fabíola suspected that Paulo was secretly meeting a young Dutch actress who had appeared during rehearsals and she decided to find out if her suspicions were true. One night, she sat on the doorstep of the apartment in Rua Raimundo Correa and did not move until late in the morning when he finally left with Vera. Deeply hurt, she ended the affair. Some months later, she scandalized Lygia and Pedro, to whom she had become quite close, by appearing nude on the cover of the satirical weekly Pasquim.

  As Paulo was to recall some years later, it was the experienced Vera who really taught him how to make love, to speak a little English and to dress a little better. But she could not help him overcome the trauma of Araruama: he still shook at the mere thought of driving a car. Their convergence of tastes and interests extended to their professional lives, and Vera’s money was the one thing that had been lacking in Paulo’s attempts to become immersed in the theatre. He divided his time between his Copacabana apartment and Vera’s luxurious apartment in Leblon, where he would sleep almost every night, and where he bashed away for weeks on end at his typewriter until he was able to announce proudly to his partner that he had completed his first play for adults, O Apocalipse [The Apocalypse]. The couple seemed made for each other. Vera not only understood the entire play (a feat achieved by very few) but liked it so much that she offered to put it on professionally, acting as its producer–the person investing the money–while Paulo would be the director.

  Everything went so well that, at the end of April 1969, the critics and editors of the arts sections of newspapers received an invitation to the preview and a copy of the programme listing the cast, in which Vera had the star part. Paulo’s friend Kakiko, who had recently qualified as an odontologist and divided his time between his dental practice and his music, was to write the score.

  Along with their invitation and the programme, journalists and critics received a press release written in pretentious, obscure language but which gave some idea of what The Apocalypse would be about. ‘The play is a snapshot of the present moment, of the crisis in human existence, which is losing all its individual characteristics in favour of a more convenient stereotype, since it dogmatizes thought,’ the blurb began, and it continued in the same incomprehensible vein. It then promised a great revolution in modern drama: the total abolition of characters. The play began with scenes from a documentary on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon, after which the cast performed dance that was described as ‘tribal with oriental influences’. Actors followed one another on to the stage, spouting excerpts from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Gospels. At the end, before hurling provocative remarks at the audience, each actor acted himself, revealing traumatic events in his childhood.

  The Apocalypse meant that Paulo would, for the first time, experience the thing that would persecute him for the rest of his life: negative criticism. On the days that followed the preview, the play was slated in every Rio newspaper. The Apocalypse was as big a disaster with the public as it was with the critics. It played for only a few weeks and left a large hole in the accounts of Paulo’s first joint initiative with Vera–a hole that she quickly decided to fill.

  The production coincided with an important change in their life as a couple. Vera’s marriage had rapidly deteriorated, but since her husband continued to live in their shared apartment, she decided to put an end to that rather awkward situation and move with her lover to a place that had become a symbolic address in the counterculture movement in Rio at the end of the 1960s: Solar Santa Terezinha. Originally created as a night shelter for beggars, the Solar was a vast rectangular building with a central courtyard around which people had their bedrooms. It had the look of a large, decadent refuge, but it was considered ‘hip’ to live there. In the majority of cases each tenant had to share a bathroom with half a dozen other residents, but Paulo and Vera occupied a suite–a room with a bathroom–for which the monthly rent was about 200 cruzeiros (US$210).

  At the end of July 1969, they decided to do something different. In the middle of August, the Brazilian football team was going to play Paraguay in Asunción in a World Cup qualifier, the finals of which were to be held in Mexico in 1970. Although he wasn’t that interested in football, one Sunday, Paulo thrilled his foreign girlfriend by taking her to a match between Flamengo and Fluminense at the packed Maracanã stadium. Vera was mesmerized and began to take an interest in the sport, and it was she who suggested that they drive to Paraguay to watch the match. Paulo didn’t even know that Brazil was going to play, but he loved the idea and started making plans.

  He immediately discounted the idea of just the two of them driving the almost 2,000 kilometres to Asunción, a marathon journey on which Vera would be the only driver, since he had still not summoned up the courage to learn to drive. The solution was to call on two other friends for the adventure: the musician-dentist Kakiko and Arnold Bruver, Jr, a new friend from the theatre. They thought of Kakiko for another reason too: as well as being able to drive, he could guarantee hospitality for all in Asunción, in the home of a Paraguayan girlfriend of his father’s. Bruver, like almost all those in Paulo’s circle, was an unusual fellow. The son of a Latvian father and a Galician mother, he was thirty-three, a dancer, musician, actor and opera singer, and had been ejected from the navy, in which he had reached the rank of captain, for alleged subvers
ion. It was only after accepting the invitation that Arnold revealed that he couldn’t drive either. The next precaution was to ask Mestre Tuca, who had travelled with Lilisa by car to Foz do Iguaçu, on the frontier with Paraguay, to give them a route with suggestions of places to fill up the car with petrol, have meals and sleep.

  On the cold, sunny morning of Thursday, 14 August, the four got into Vera’s white Volkswagen. The journey passed without incident, with Vera and Kakiko taking turns at the wheel every 150 kilometres. It was evening when the car stopped at the door of the small hotel in Registro in the state of São Paulo. After twelve hours on the road they had covered 600 kilometres, about a third of the total distance. The locals eyed any strangers with understandable suspicion. Since the Department of Political and Social Order (the political police of the time, known as Dops) had disbanded the Student Union Congress some months earlier in Ibiúna, 100 kilometres from there, the small towns in the region were often visited by strangers and the locals had no way of telling if they were police or something else entirely. However, the four travellers were so tired that there was no time for their presence to arouse anyone’s curiosity, for, on arriving, they went straight to bed.

  On the Friday, they woke early, because the next stretch of the journey was the longest and they hoped to cover it in just a day. If all went well, by suppertime they would be in Cascavel, in the western region of Paraná, a 750-kilometre drive from there, and the last stop before reaching Asunción. But all did not go well: they were slowed down by the number of trucks on the road. The result was that, by ten o’clock that night, they were all starving and still had 200 kilometres to go.