Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Sects had also become an obsession with Paulo. It might be Children of God or Hare Krishnas, followers of the Devil’s Bible or even the faithful of the Church of Satan, whom he had met on his trip to the United States. All it took was a whiff of the supernatural–or of sulphur, depending on the case. Not to mention the myriad groups of worshippers of creatures from outer space or UFO freaks. He became so absorbed in the esoteric world that he eventually received an invitation to write in a publication devoted to the subject, the magazine A Pomba. Published by PosterGraph, a small publishing house dedicated to underground culture and printing political posters, this contained a miscellany of articles and interviews on subjects of interest to hippie groups: drugs, rock, hallucinations and paranormal experiences. Printed in black and white, every issue carried a photographic essay involving some naked woman or other, just like men’s magazines, the difference being that the models for A Pomba appeared to be women recruited from among the employees in the building where the magazine was produced. Like dozens of other, similar publications, A Pomba had no influence, although it must have had a reasonable readership, since it managed to survive for seven months. For half the salary he received at the school, Paulo accepted the position of jack-of-all-trades on the magazine: he would choose the subjects, carry out the interviews, write articles. The visual aspect–design, illustrations and photographs–was Gisa’s job. It appears to have been a good idea, because after only two issues under Paulo’s editorship, the owner of PosterGraph, Eduardo Prado, agreed to his proposal to launch a second publication, entitled 2001. With two publications to take care of, his salary doubled, and he had to give up teaching.

  While he was doing research for an article on the Apocalypse, it was suggested to Paulo that he should go and see someone who called himself ‘the heir of the Beast in Brazil’, Marcelo Ramos Motta. He was surprised to find that the person he was to interview lived in a simple, austere apartment with good furniture and bookcases crammed with books. There was just one eccentric detail: all the books were covered with the same grey paper, without any indication as to the content apart from a small handwritten number at the foot of the spine. The other surprise was Motta’s appearance. He wasn’t wearing a black cloak and brandishing a trident, as Paulo had expected, but instead had on a smart navy-blue suit, white shirt, silk tie and black patent-leather shoes. He was sixteen years older than Paulo, tall and thin, with a thick black beard, and a very strange look in his eye. His voice sounded as if he were trying to imitate someone. He did not smile, but merely made a sign with his hand for the interviewer to sit down, and then sat down opposite him.

  Paulo took his notepad out of his bag and, to break the ice, asked: ‘Why are all the books covered in grey paper?’

  The man did not appear in the mood for small talk and said: ‘That’s none of your business.’

  Startled by his rudeness, Paulo began to laugh: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just curious.’

  Motta continued in the same vein: ‘This is no matter for children.’

  When the interview was over, Paulo wrote and published his article, but he couldn’t stop thinking about that strange man and his library of books with blank spines. After several refusals, Motta agreed to meet him again and this time he opened the conversation by saying: ‘I’m the world leader of a society called AA–Astrum Argentum.’ He got to his feet, picked up a copy of The Beatles’ record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and pointed out one of the figures on the crowded collage on the cover. This was a bald, elderly man, the second along in the photo, next to an Indian guru: ‘This man is called Aleister Crowley, and we are the proponents of his ideas in the world. Go and find out about him, and then we’ll talk again.’

  It was only after searching through libraries and second-hand bookshops that Paulo discovered that there were very few books available in Brazil about the old man on the cover of The Beatles’ album, lost among the images of Mae West, Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler, Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley. While he was preparing to go back to speak to the mysterious Motta, he continued to produce the two magazines with Gisa. Since the budget was not enough to take on even one collaborator, he wrote almost everything. So that the readers would not realize what a tiny budget the magazines had to survive on, he used a variety of pseudonyms as well as his own name.

  At the beginning of 1972, a stranger appeared in the office, which was a modest room on the tenth floor of a commercial building in the centre of Rio de Janeiro. He was wearing a shiny suit–one of those crease-resistant ones–and a thin tie, and carried an executive briefcase, and he announced that he wanted to talk to ‘the writer Augusto Figueiredo’. At the time, Paulo did not connect the visitor with the person who had phoned him some days earlier, also asking for Augusto Figueiredo. It was enough to awaken his dormant paranoia. The man had the look of a policeman and must have come there after a tip-off, looking for drugs, perhaps. The problem was that Augusto Figueiredo did not exist; it was one of the names Paulo used to sign his articles.

  Terrified, but trying to appear calm, he attempted to get rid of the visitor as quickly as possible, saying: ‘Augusto isn’t here. Do you want to leave a message?’

  ‘No. I need to talk to him. Can I sit and wait for him?’

  The man was definitely a policeman. He sat at a table, picked up an old copy of A Pomba, lit a cigarette and started to read, with the air of someone with all the time in the world. An hour later, he was still there. He had read every past copy of the magazine, but showed no sign of wanting to leave. Paulo recalled the lesson he had learned as a child, when jumping off the bridge into the river: the best way to curtail suffering was to face the problem head on. He decided to tell the truth–for he was absolutely certain this man was a policeman. First, though, he took the precaution of going through all the drawers in the office to make sure that there were no butts left over from cannabis joints.

  He summoned up his courage and, blinking nervously, confessed that he had lied: ‘You must forgive me, but there is no Augusto Figueiredo here. I’m the person who wrote the article, Paulo Coelho. What can I do for you?’

  The visitor smiled broadly, held out his arms as if about to embrace him and said: ‘Well, you’re the person I want to talk to, man. How do you do? My name is Raul Seixas.’

  CHAPTER 14

  The Devil and Paulo

  A PART FROM THEIR INTEREST in flying saucers and having both been disastrous students during their adolescence, Raul Seixas and Paulo Coelho appeared to have little in common. Seixas was working as a music producer for a multinational recording company, CBS; his hair was always tidy and he was never seen without a jacket, tie and briefcase. He had never tried drugs, not even a drag on a cannabis joint. Coelho’s hair, meanwhile, was long and unruly, and he wore hipsters, sandals, necklaces, and spectacles with octagonal purple lenses. He also spent much of his time under the influence of drugs. Seixas had a fixed address, and was a real family man, with a daughter, Simone, aged two, while Paulo lived in ‘tribes’ whose members came and went according to the seasons–in recent months his ‘family’ had been Gisa and Stella Paula, a pretty hippie from Ipanema who was as fascinated as he was by the occult and the beyond.

  The differences between the two men were even more marked when it came to their cultural baggage. At twenty-five, Paulo had read and given stars to more than five hundred books, and he wrote articulately and fluently. As for Raul, despite having spent his childhood surrounded by his father’s books–his father worked on the railways and was an occasional poet–he didn’t seem particularly keen on reading. However, one date in their lives had different meanings but was equally important to each of them. On 28 June 1967, when Paulo was drugged and taken to the ninth floor of the Dr Eiras clinic for his third admission, Seixas was twenty-two and getting married to the American student Edith Wisner in Salvador, Bahia, where he was born. Both believed in astrology, and if they had studied their respective astrological charts they would have seen
that the zodiac predicted one certain thing: the two were destined to make a lot of money, whatever they did.

  When Raul Seixas entered his life, Paulo Coelho was immersed in the hermetic and dangerous universe of satanism. He had begun meeting Marcelo Ramos Motta more frequently and, after devouring weighty volumes on pentacles, mystical movements, magical systems and astrology, he could understand a little of the work of the bald man on The Beatles’ LP cover. Born in Leamington Spa, England, on 12 October 1875, Aleister Crowley was twenty-three when he reported that he had encountered in Cairo a being who transmitted to him the Liber AL vel Legis [The Book of the Law], which was his first and most important work on mysticism, the central sacred text of Thelema.

  The Law of Thelema proclaimed the beginning of an era in which man would be free to realize all his desires. This was the objective contained in the epigraph ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, which was considered the basic rule of conduct by Crowley’s followers. Among the instruments recommended to achieve this state were sexual freedom, the use of drugs and the rediscovery of oriental wisdom. In 1912, Crowley entered the sect known as Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a Masonic, mystical, magical type of organization of which he soon became the head and the principal theorist. He called himself ‘the Beast’, and built a temple in Cefalu, in Sicily, but was expelled from Italy by the Mussolini government in 1923, accused of promoting orgies. During the Second World War, Crowley was summoned by the writer Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and an officer in British Naval Intelligence, to help the British consider how superstitions and mysticism among the Nazi leaders could be put to good use by the Allies. It was also Aleister Crowley who, through Fleming, suggested to Winston Churchill that he should use the V for Victory sign, which was, in fact, a sign of Apophis-Typhon, a god of destruction capable of overwhelming the energies of the Nazi swastika.

  In the world of music it was not only The Beatles who became, in their case only briefly, Thelemites, which was the name given to Crowley’s followers. His satanic theories attracted various rock artists and groups such as Black Sabbath, The Clash, Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne (who wrote the classic ‘Mr Crowley’). The famous Boleskine House, where Crowley lived for several years, later became the property of Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist. But the English Beast’s ideas also inspired terrible tragedies: in August 1969, his American disciple Charles Manson headed the massacre of four people who were shot, stabbed and clubbed to death in a mansion in Malibu. Among the victims was the actress Sharon Tate, aged twenty-six, who was expecting a baby by her husband, the director Roman Polanski.

  Paulo appeared to be so influenced by these readings and supernatural practices that not even the atrocities committed by Manson brought him back down to earth. The murderer of Sharon Tate was described as ‘the most evil man on Earth’ by the jury that condemned him to death, although this sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. When he read the news, Paulo wrote in his diary: ‘The weapons of war nowadays are the strangest you can find. Drugs, religion, fashion…It’s something against which it’s impossible to fight. When looked at like this, Charles Manson is a crucified martyr.’

  Until he met Paulo Coelho, Raul Seixas had never heard of Crowley or of the nomenclature used by those people. He knew nothing about Astrum Argentum, OTO or Liber Oz. He liked reading about flying saucers, but the main object of his interest had always been music, and more precisely rock and roll, a musical genre with which Paulo had only a glancing relationship–he liked Elvis Presley, knew the most famous groups and that was it. Seixas’s passion for rock music had meant he had to repeat his second year at São Bento College in Salvador three times, and at eighteen he had had some success in performances in Bahia as leader of the group Os Panteras–The Panthers. However, at the insistence of his future father-in-law, an American Protestant pastor, he abandoned his promising musical career and returned to his studies. He made up for lost time with a revision course, and when he took his entrance exams for the law faculty, he was among the top entrants. ‘I just wanted to prove to people, to my family, how easy it was to study and pass exams,’ he said many years later, ‘when for me it wasn’t important in the least.’ During the first months of his marriage, he supported the family by giving guitar and English lessons. Before he was even three months into his marriage, though, Seixas succumbed to temptation.

  In October 1967, the singer Jerry Adriani went to Salvador after being hired for a show at the smart Bahian Tennis Club, where the muse of bossa nova, Nara Leão, was also performing, along with the comedian Chico Anysio. Adriani was, by then, regarded as a national star among the youth music movement, Jovem Guarda, but dismissed by more sophisticated audiences as tacky. On the day of the show, a tennis club employee told the singer that his performance had been cancelled: ‘The group you’ve hired has got several black musicians in it, and no blacks are allowed in the club.’

  Although the Afonso Arinos law had been in place since 1951, making racial discrimination a crime, ‘Blacks didn’t enter the Club even through the kitchen door’, in the words of the song ‘Tradição’, by another famous Bahian, Gilberto Gil. This prejudice was even harsher here, since this was a club in Bahia, a state where more than 70 per cent of the population were black and of mixed race. Instead of calling the police, the show’s impresario chose to hire another group. The first he could think of were the defunct Os Panteras, who in the past few months had changed their name to The Panthers. Seixas was thrilled at the idea of reviving the group and went off into the city to look for his old accompanists: the bassist Mariano Lanat, the guitarist Perinho Albuquerque and the drummer Antônio Carlos Castro, or Carleba–all of them white. The show was a great success, and Os Panteras left the stage to loud applause. At the end of the show, Nara Leão whispered in Jerry Adriani’s ear: ‘That group are really good. Why don’t you ask them to play with you?’

  When, that evening, he received an invitation from the singer for the group to go with him on a tour of the north and the northeast, due to start the following week, Seixas was thrilled. An invitation to tour with a nationally famous artist such as Jerry Adriani wasn’t one that was likely to come around twice. However, he also knew that accepting the proposal would be the end of his marriage, and that was too high a cost.

  He said he was sorry, but he had to refuse: ‘It would be an honour to go on tour with you, but if I leave home now, my marriage will be finished.’

  Jerry Adriani doubled the stakes: ‘If that’s the problem, then problem solved: your wife is invited too. Bring her with you.’

  As well as giving the couple a rather amusing, unusual honeymoon, the tour was so successful that when it ended, Jerry Adriani convinced Raul and his musicians to move to Rio and turn professional, and at the beginning of 1968 they were all in Copacabana. This adventure did not end happily. Although they managed to record one LP of their own, in the years that followed, the only work that came their way was playing as a backing group to Adriani. There were times when Seixas had to ask his father for a loan to pay the rent on the house where he, Edith and the other members of the group were living. Going back to Bahia because they had run out of money was a very hard thing to do, particularly for Raul, the leader of the group, but there was no other solution. Much against his will, he started giving English lessons again and was beginning to think that his musical career was over when a proposal came from Evandro Ribeiro, the director of CBS, to return to work in Rio, not as a band leader but as a music producer. His name had been suggested to the management of the record company by Jerry Adriani, who was interested in getting his friend back on the Rio–São Paulo circuit, which was the centre of Brazilian music production. Wanting to get even with the city that had defeated him, Seixas did not think twice. He asked Edith to organize the move and, a few days later, he was working, in jacket and tie, in the polluted city centre of Rio, where the CBS offices were. Within a few months, he had become music producer to various well-known artists
, starting with Adriani.

  At the end of May 1972, Raul had walked the seven blocks between the CBS building and the offices of A Pomba not merely to praise the non-existent Augusto Figueiredo’s writings on extraterrestrials. He had in his briefcase an article that he himself had written on flying saucers and wanted to know if A Pomba might be interested in publishing it. Paulo politely accepted it, said that he would indeed be happy to publish the article, and drew him out on the subject of UFOs and life on other planets. He had an ulterior motive for this. The mention of CBS had sparked a rather more materialistic interest: since Raul enjoyed the magazine and was an executive in a multinational, he might well be persuaded to place advertisements for CBS in A Pomba. The short meeting ended with Raul inviting Paulo to dinner at his house the following night, a Thursday. At the time, Coelho never took any decision without consulting his ‘family’, Gisa and their flatmate, Stella Paula. Even something as banal as whether or not to go to someone’s house was subjected to a vote: ‘We had a truly ideological discussion in that tiny hippie group to decide whether or not we should go and have a drink at Raul’s house.’

  Even though he realized that, apart from an interest in UFOs, the two appeared to have nothing in common, Paulo, with one eye on the possibility of getting some advertising revenue from CBS, decided to accept the invitation. Gisa went with him, while Stella Paula, who was outvoted, felt no obligation to go along as well. On that Thursday evening, on his way to supper, Paulo stopped at a record shop and bought an LP of Bach’s Organ Preludes. The bus taking them from Flamengo to Jardim de Alah–a small, elegant district between Ipanema and Leblon, in the south of Rio, where Raul lived–was stopped at a police checkpoint. Since the crackdown by the dictatorship in December 1968, such checks had become part of life for Brazilians in the large cities. However, when Gisa saw the police get on the bus and start asking the passengers to show their papers, she felt it was a bad sign, a warning, and threatened to call off the meeting. Paulo, however, would not be moved, and at eight that evening, as agreed, they rang the bell of Raul’s apartment.