Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Unaware that they were to be used as guinea pigs in the experiments of a satanic sect, the people of Mato Grosso received him with open arms. The local press heralded his arrival at each of the towns participating in the project with praise, hyperbole and even a pinch of fantasy. After comparing him with Plínio Marcos and Nelson Rodrigues, two of the greatest names in Brazilian drama, the Campo Grande Diário da Serra congratulated the government for having invited Paulo to bring to Mato Grosso a course ‘that was crowned with success in Rio de Janeiro, Belém do Pará and Brasília’. The treatment conferred on him by the Jornal do Povo, in Três Lagoas, was even more lavish:

  Now it’s the turn of Três Lagoas. We have the opportunity to experience one of the great names in Brazilian theatre: Paulo Coelho. He may not look it, but Paulo Coelho is a great man! The prototype of concrete art, in which everything is strong, structured and growing…Such a figure could not help but be noticed, and that is what drives him on and what makes of him a natural communicator. While not wishing to exaggerate, we could compare him symbolically with Christ, who also came to create.

  He had not received such reverential attention since Aracaju, when he had plagiarized an article by Carlos Heitor Cony. Cast in the role of full-time missionary, Paulo took advantage of his few free hours to become still more steeped in mysticism, and it didn’t much matter to him how he gained access to this mysterious world. In Três Lagoas, ‘with the help of a Tibetan who is there fulfilling a mission’, he went to the headquarters of the Brazilian Society of Eubiosis, a group that argued for living in harmony with nature, and also the Masonic lodge of the Grand Order of Brazil. When he learned that there was a village of acculturated Indians on the edge of the city, he decided to visit them in order to find out about native witchcraft. After his three weeks were up, he recorded the first results of his time there:

  At the beginning my work with the Emerald Tablet was a real disappointment. No one really understood how it worked (not even me, despite all the workshops and improvisations I had done). All the same the seed was sown in the minds of the students and some of them really changed their way of thinking and began to think in different ways. One female pupil went into a trance during a class. The vast majority reacted negatively and the work only took on some meaning on the last day of the classes when I managed one way or another to break down their emotional barriers. Obviously, I’m talking about a purely theatrical use of the Tablet. Perhaps if the last day had been the first I could have done something interesting with them.

  Ah, before I forget: one day, I went for a walk in the city to collect some plants (I had just finished reading Paracelsus and was going to perform a ceremony) and I saw a cannabis plant growing outside a branch of the Bank of Brazil. Imagine that!

  On his return to Rio, Paulo learned from a colleague at Tribuna that the editorial team at O Globo was looking for staff. The idea of writing for what claimed to be ‘the greatest newspaper in the country’ was very tempting, and he managed to arrange an interview with Iran Frejat, the much-feared editor. If he got a job there, he would have at his disposal a fantastic means of spreading the ideals of the OTO. Several times in his correspondence with Frater Zaratustra he had suggested allowing the weekly page in Tribuna to be used by the sect, but they had never asked him to do so. When he told Raul Seixas of his interest in a position at O Globo, his friend tried to dissuade him from the idea, again suggesting a musical partnership: ‘Forget it. Don’t go and work for some newspaper, let’s write music. TV Globo are going to re-record Beto Rockefeller [an innovative and very successful soap opera that was shown on the now defunct TV Tupi from 1968 to 1969] and they’ve asked me to write the soundtrack. Why don’t we do it together? I’ll write the music and you can write the lyrics.’

  While Paulo was still torn between the supernatural and the need to earn a living, Raul was building his career as a singer, devoting himself entirely to music. He had an LP on sale–Sociedade da Grã Ordem Kavernista, which was recorded almost secretly at CBS a few weeks before he resigned–and he was getting ready for the seventh International Song Festival being put on by Rede Globo. For Paulo, accepting a partnership would mean going back to poetry, which he had sworn never to do. For the moment at least the position at O Globo seemed more achievable and this was what he was going to try for.

  He turned up at the appointed time for his interview with Frejat, introduced himself to the chief reporter, who appeared to be in a very bad mood, and sat down in a corner of the office waiting to be called. Before leaving home, he had put a book of poems by St John of the Cross in his bag to help take his mind off things while waiting. At two in the afternoon, an hour after he had arrived, Frejat had still not even so much as glanced at him, although he had walked past him several times, giving orders and handing out papers to various desks. Paulo stood up, got himself a coffee, lit a cigarette and sat down again. When the clock showed three he lost patience. He ripped the pages out of the book he was reading, tore them into tiny pieces, gathered them up and deposited them on Frejat’s desk.

  This unexpected gesture caught the journalist by surprise, and he burst out laughing and said: ‘What’s up, boy? Have you gone mad?’

  Paulo said quietly, but forcefully: ‘I’ve been waiting for two hours–didn’t you notice? Are you behaving like this just because I want a job? That’s so disrespectful!’

  Frejat’s response was a surprising one: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were here for the job. Well, let’s give you a test. If you pass it, the job’s yours. You can start now. Go to the Santa Casa and count the dead.’

  The dead? Yes, one of his daily tasks would be to go to the Santa Casa de Misericórdia and to two other large hospitals in Rio to get lists of the names of the dead, which would then appear on the newspaper’s obituary pages the following day. In spite of his previous experience on Diário de Notícias and Tribuna, he was going to start at O Globo as a cub reporter. As a trainee, on the lowest rung of the ladder, he would work seven hours a day, with one day off a week, for a salary of 1,200 cruzeiros a month–some US$408. His first weeks at the paper were spent on ‘reports on still lives’, or ‘coverage of a pacifist demonstration’ as he called his daily visits to the city’s mortuaries. The famous, such as politicians and artists, were the domain of the more experienced reporters, who would write obituaries or ‘memorials’. When this macabre daily round finished early he would go to the red light district of Mangue to chat to the prostitutes.

  Although he didn’t have a formal contract, which was the case with the majority of cub reporters on most Brazilian newspapers (meaning that they had no form of social security), he could have his meals at O Globo’s very cheap canteen. For a mere 6 cruzeiros–US$1.75–he could have lunch or dinner in the canteen, along with the owner of O Globo, Roberto Marinho. A few days after meeting Marinho in the canteen queue, Paulo learned from Frejat that ‘Dr Roberto’, as he was known, had issued an ultimatum: either Paulo cut his hair, which at the time was down to his shoulders, or he need not return to the office. Working on O Globo was more important than having long hair, and so he gave in to the demand without protest and trimmed his black mane.

  Paulo was, in fact, used to reporting on two or three emergency situations, which meant that his superiors could see that this cub reporter with dark circles under his eyes knew how to write and had the confidence to carry out an interview. While he was never singled out to report on matters of major importance, he went out on to the streets every day with the other more experienced reporters, and, unlike some of them, he almost never returned empty-handed. What his superiors didn’t know was that when he failed to find the interviewees he needed, he simply made them up. On one such occasion, he was told to file a report on people whose work centred on Carnival. He spent the day out in the streets, returned to the office and, in the early evening, handed to his editor, the experienced Henrique Caban, five pages of interviews with, among others, ‘Joaquim de Souza, nightwatchman’, ‘Alice Perei
ra, waitress’ and ‘Adilson Lopes de Barros, bar owner’. The article ended with an ‘analysis of the behaviour of the inhabitants of Rio during Carnival’, a statement made by a ‘psychologist’ going by the highly suspicious name of ‘Adolfo Rabbit’. That night Paulo noted at the top of his carbon copy of the article, which he had taken home, something that neither Caban nor anyone else would ever know: ‘This material was COMPLETELY invented.’

  While he may occasionally have resorted to such low stratagems, he was, in fact, doing well at the newspaper. Less than two months after starting work, he saw one of his interviews–a real one this time–with Luis Seixas, the president of the National Institute of Social Security (INPS), on the front page of the next day’s edition of O Globo: ‘Free medicine from the INPS’. Following this he was given the news that if he moved to being pauteiro de madrugada (sub-editor on the early-morning shift), he would receive a 50-per-cent salary increase. Most applicants for the position were put off by having to work every day from two until nine in the morning; however, for an insomniac like him, this was no problem.

  The pauteiro began by reading all the competing newspapers, the first editions of which had been bought at the newspaper stands in the centre of town, and comparing them with the early edition of O Globo, in order to decide which items might be worth including in later editions of O Globo. Once this was done, he would listen to the radio news to see what were going to be the major news items of the day and then draw up guidelines for the reporters when they arrived at nine o’clock as to what they should investigate and whom they should interview. He also had to decide which of the night’s events, if any, merited the presence of a reporter or photographer. At first, he longed for something important to happen while he was working. ‘One of these days, some really big news story will break while I’m on duty, and I’ll have to cover it,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I’d prefer a different shift, but working this one isn’t unpleasant, if it weren’t for that bastard Frejat, who keeps me hanging on here in the morning.’ During his six months in the post, only one thing required him to mobilize reporters and photographers: the murder of the footballer Almir Albuquerque, or ‘Pernambuquinho’, a forward in the Flamengo football team, who was shot by Portuguese tourists during a fight in the Rio Jerez restaurant in the South Zone of the city. Mostly, though, the nights passed without incident, which left time for him, as he sat alone in the office, to fill pages of notes that he later stuck into his diary.

  I don’t think Frejat likes me. He told someone that I’m a ‘pseudo-intellectual’.

  […] As I said to Gisa, what I like about journalism is that no one lasts long…Frejat’s fall is long overdue and it’s going to happen, because the whole production team is pressing for it. There are no nice people in journalism. Anyone nice is basically fucked.

  […] I read in the newspaper that someone knifed his wife to death because she never did anything. I’m going to cut out the article and leave it for Gisa to read. I hope she gets the message.

  […] Adalgisa went to Minas leaving the house a complete tip. She didn’t hand in our pages to Tribuna, she didn’t pay the electricity bill and she didn’t even wash any clothes. These things make me so angry. It seems that she hasn’t got the slightest idea of what living together means. Now I’ve got no cash to pay the electricity bill and the house is going to be in darkness. When she spoke to me on the phone she said that she’s had too much work, but it’s nothing to do with that. She’s just completely irresponsible.

  Before joining O Globo Paulo had agreed to lead the drama course in Mato Grosso, and at the end of 1972, after much insistence, he managed to get the newspaper to give him three weeks’ unpaid leave. However, at the beginning of the following year the problem arose again. ‘I’m going to have to choose between the course in Mato Grosso and the work here on the biggest newspaper in the country,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Caban says I can’t go, and if I have to give up one of them, I’m going to have to leave the paper.’ Besides, Raul Seixas was continuing to pursue him with the idea of working together, and to show that his interest in having him as a lyricist was genuine, Seixas had done a very seductive thing: he let it be known that the song ‘Caroço de Manga’, which he had written for the theme music of the new version of Beto Rockefeller, was in fact by him and Paulo Coelho. Although it was not uncommon in the recording world for a composer to ‘share authorship’ of a composition with a friend, this also meant an equal division of any royalties. Raul Seixas was slowly beginning to win a place in his life. Paulo wrote:

  It’s so peaceful working at night. I didn’t take a bath today. I slept from nine in the morning until seven at night. I got up to find that Gisa hadn’t done any work. We telephoned Raul telling him that we can’t meet him today.

  […] I’m tired. I spent all day typing and now I can’t remember the music I promised Raul.

  […] Raul is full of silly scruples about writing commercial music. He doesn’t understand that the more you control the media, the more influence you have.

  As he had foreseen, in April 1973, Paulo had to decide whether or not to continue at O Globo. As had become his normal practice whenever he had to make a decision, however unimportant, he left it to the I Ching or the Book of Changes, to choose. He was alone at home and, after a period of concentration, he threw the three coins of the Chinese oracle on the table and noted in his diary the hexagrams that were revealed. There was no doubt: the I Ching warned him against working on the newspaper and advised him that it would mean ‘a slow and prolonged exercise leading to misfortune’. He needed nothing more. The following morning, his short-lived career on O Globo came to an end. The outcome had been good, even as regards his bank balance. The money he had earned by selling his and Gisa’s cartoons, along with what he had been paid for the course at Mato Grosso, their page in Tribuna and his work at O Globo, not only covered his day-to-day expenses but meant that he, ever cautious, could start investing his modest savings in the stock market. ‘I lost my money buying shares in the Bank of Brazil. I’m ruined…’ he recorded at one stage in his diary, only to cheer up a few days later. ‘The shares in Petrobras that were only 25 when I bought them are at 300 today.’

  Between the time when he resigned from O Globo and the start of his partnership with Raul Seixas, Paulo did a little of everything. Alongside the various other bits of work he had been doing, he did some teaching and some theatre directing, and worked as an actor in a soft-porn movie. No longer having to spend his nights working in the editorial office, which had meant he had to sleep during the day, he began to meet up with Raul either at his place or his own in order to begin their much-postponed partnership. The thought of working together had another attraction for Paulo: if ‘Caroço de Manga’ was already generating substantial royalties, what would he earn if he were the lyricist on a hit song?

  As someone who, in a very short space of time, had composed more than eighty songs recorded by various artistes–although he claimed not to like any of them–Raul had enough experience to be able to rid Paulo of any negative feelings he might still have about writing poetry. ‘You don’t have to say things in a complicated way when you want to speak seriously to people,’ Raul would say during their many conversations. ‘In fact, the simpler you are the more serious you can be.’ ‘Writing music is like writing a story in twenty lines that someone can listen to ten times without getting bored. If you can do that, you’ll have made a huge leap: you’ll have written a work of art everyone can understand.’

  And so they began. As the months went by, the two became not just musical partners but great friends or, as they liked to tell journalists, ‘close enemies’. They and their partners went out together and visited each other often. It did not take much for Raul and Edith to be seduced by the disturbing allure of drugs and black magic. At the time, in fact, drugs had taken second place in Paulo’s life, such was his fascination for the mysteries revealed to him by Frater Zaratustra and the OTO. The much proclaimed ‘close en
mity’ between Paulo and Raul wasn’t just an empty expression, and appears to have arisen along with their friendship. While Raul had opened the doors of fame and fortune to his new friend, it was Paulo who knew how to reach the world of secret things, a universe to which ordinary mortals had no access. Raul held the route to fame, but it was Paulo who knew the way to the Devil.

  The first fruits of their joint labours appeared in 1973 as an LP, Krig-Ha, Bandolo!, the title being taken from one of Tarzan’s war cries. Of the five songs with lyrics by Paulo, only one, ‘Al Capone’, became a hit that people would hum in the street. Krig-Ha also revealed Raul Seixas to be an excellent lyricist in his own right. At least three of the songs he composed and wrote–‘Mosca na Sopa’, ‘Metamorfose Ambulante’ and ‘Ouro de Tolo’–continued to be played on the radio years after his death in 1989. The LP may not have been a blockbuster, but it meant that Paulo finally saw money pouring into his bank account. When he asked for his balance at his branch of the Banco do Brasil in Copacabana a few weeks after the launch of Krig-Ha, he couldn’t believe it when he saw that the record company, Philips, had deposited no less than 240 million cruzeiros–about US$200,000–which, to him, was a real fortune.