Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  As was usually the case with his fragile emotional state, when his work was going well, his emotional life wasn’t–and vice versa. This time was no different. The clear skies he was enjoying professionally clouded over when he returned home. The bitterness between him and Cissa gave way to ever more frequent arguments, and then came the endless silences that could last for days. In February 1979, he decided to go alone on a boat trip to Patagonia. When the liner anchored in Buenos Aires on the way back to Brazil, he phoned Cissa and suggested that they separate. Given how concerned he was with signs, it’s surprising that he failed to realize that, three years earlier, he had proposed marriage to her by telephone and from Buenos Aires.

  The separation took place on 24 March 1979, when Cissa left the apartment in Rua Senador Eusébio, and it was legally ratified on 11 June in a family court 50 metres from St Joseph’s Church, where they had married. The hearing nearly didn’t take place. Firstly, because Cissa had to go out at the last minute to buy a skirt, because the judge would not allow jeans in the court. Then, the lawyer had forgotten a document, which meant that they had to bribe an employee in the register office in order to get their certificate of legal separation.

  Setting aside their disagreements, the two went out afterwards to have a civilized lunch in a restaurant. They each had a very different memory of the end of their marriage. Paulo wrote: ‘I don’t know how unhappy she is, but she certainly cried a lot. I didn’t find the procedure in the least traumatic. I left and went back to work in other offices, other rooms, other worlds. I had a good dinner and enjoyed it more than I have for a long time, but that had nothing to do with the separation. It was all down to the cook, who made a really delicious meal.’ Cissa, on the other hand, set down her feelings in a brief note written in English, which she posted to him. She found fault with him in the one area where he considered himself to be good–in bed: ‘One of our main problems, in my view, was sex. I never understood why you didn’t think about me in bed. I could have been much better if I had felt that you were thinking about my pleasure in bed. But you didn’t. You never thought about it. So I began not to think about your pleasure either.’

  For someone whose emotional stability was so dependent on a stable relationship with a woman who would help him through his psychological storms, the end of the marriage was sure to presage more depression and more melancholy. Not that he lacked for women–on the contrary. The problem now was that Paulo had got it into his head that they were sucking out the energy that he should be putting into his career as a writer. ‘I’ve gone out a lot, had sex a lot, but with female vampires,’ he wrote, ‘and I don’t want that any more.’

  The person who appears to have been most seriously shaken by the separation was his mother. During Easter she wrote a long letter to her son, typewritten in single spacing. It does not appear to have been written by ‘a fool’, as Paulo called his mother more than once. The document reveals someone who had a knowledge of psychoanalytical jargon, which was unusual in a non-professional. She also insisted that it was he who was responsible for the separation, with his insecurities and his inability to recognize what he had lost:

  My dearest son,

  We have much in common, including the ease with which we express ourselves in letters. That’s why, on this Easter Sunday, I’m sending you these lines in the hope that they will be of some help to you or at least let you know how much I love you, which is why I suffer when you suffer and am happy when you’re happy.

  As you can well imagine, you and Cissa are much on my mind. There’s no need to tell me again that it’s your problem and that I should simply keep out of it. That’s why I don’t really know whether I’ll actually send you this letter.

  When I say that I know you well I’m basing this simply on my mother’s intuition, because much of you, unfortunately, was created far from us, and so there are lots of things I don’t know. You were repressed during childhood and then suffocated by your own problems and ended up having to break off close relationships, break with convention and start from scratch. And although you were anxious, fearful, insecure, you succeeded. And how! But you also let go of a very repressed side to you, something you didn’t know how to live with.

  I only know Cecília a little, but she seems to me a practical woman. Strong. Fearless. Intuitive. Uncomplicated. It must have been a real shock to you when she paid you back in kind…with her dependency, her hang-ups, her needs. She refused to carry your burden any more and that’s what tipped the balance in your relationship. I don’t know how it all ended, but you took it as a rejection, as lack of love, and couldn’t accept it. There is only one way of resolving the problem: recognizing it. Identifying it. You told me that you don’t know how to lose. We can only live life fully if we accept winning and we accept losing.

  Lygia

  Note: As you can see, I’m still a dreadful typist. But I’ve decided to beard the lion in his den, and I’m sending the letter.

  My dear son: I prayed a lot for you today in my way. I prayed that God would encourage in you the certainty that it’s in your hands to build your life, and that your life will always be the same as it has been up to now: full of conscious and honest decisions and full of moments of happiness and joy.

  Much love,

  L.

  As he himself often wrote in his diary, there is nothing new under the sun. And as had been the case so often before in his life, the only way of compensating for an emotional defeat was to find new victories at work. So it seemed like a gift from God when he received an invitation in April 1979–not even a month after his separation–to swap his job at Philips for that of product manager with their largest competitor, CBS. Included in the proposal was the prospect of prompt promotion to the post of artistic director. Following a succession of amorous and professional failures–the poor performance of the Mata Virgem album, the short-lived engagement to Eneida, the literary sterility in London, the end of his marriage–the invitation was a great relief, in large part because it would put him back in the media world of Rio and São Paulo, a world he hadn’t frequented for some time. But it also awoke an unfamiliar and unpleasant side to his character: arrogance. Since one of his duties was to reorganize the artistic department, he started by rocking the boat. ‘It’s true, I did behave very arrogantly when I started work there,’ he was to recall years later. ‘I went round giving orders and giving the yes-men a really hard time; pure authoritarianism!’ He suspected that money was being channelled out of the company and began to refuse to sign notes and invoices about which there might be any doubt.

  Unaware that he was digging his own grave, he hired and fired, cut costs and closed departments, adding fuel to what was already a bonfire of egos and vanities. Meanwhile, those who had suffered most in his clean-up operation were plotting against him. One Monday, 13 August 1979, after two months and ten days in the job, he arrived at the company late in the morning and, having sent yet more heads rolling, was summoned to the office of Juan Truden, the president of CBS in Brazil. He was standing waiting for Paulo, smiling, his hand outstretched and with these words on his lips: ‘My friend, you’re fired.’ Nothing more. No ‘Good afternoon’, no ‘Hope it goes well’.

  The impact was enormous, not simply because of the coldness of the dismissal but because he knew that this meant the end of his career as a recording executive. ‘I was dismissed from the highest post, from the highest position in the profession, and I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t go back to being what I was at the beginning,’ Paulo recalled years later in a statement at the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro. ‘There were only six recording companies in Brazil and all the six positions I might really want were occupied.’ Before packing his bags, he wrote a long, angry letter to Truden in which he said that, in view of the lack of structure in the company, ‘CBS artists at the moment enjoy the dubious pleasure of being the most poorly served in the Brazilian market.’ He finished dramatically, using an expression that had remained in the p
opular imagination since it had been used by the ex-president Jânio Quadros in his letter of resignation: ‘And the same hidden forces that are responsible for my dismissal will one day have to face the truth. For you cannot hide the sun with a sieve, Sr Juan Truden.’

  His dismissal (‘for incompetence’, as he learned later) was celebrated by the group of disaffected individuals he had created as manager, and would cause him still more humiliation. Some days later, at a social function, Paulo met Antônio Coelho Ribeiro, who had just been made president of Philips, the company Coelho had left in order to try his luck with CBS. When he saw him, Ribeiro said, in front of everyone: ‘You always were a bluffer.’

  Ten months later, Antônio Ribeiro, too, got the sack. When he heard the news, Paulo took from a drawer a present he had bought shortly after Ribeiro had publicly insulted him. He went to the Ribeiros’ apartment and, when Ribeiro opened the door, Paulo hurriedly explained the reason for his presence there: ‘Do you remember what you said to me when I was sacked? Right, now you can repeat those words every day as you look into your own eyes.’ He unwrapped the object and handed it to Ribeiro. It was a wall mirror on which he had had the wretched words painted in capitals: ‘YOU ALWAYS WERE A BLUFFER.’ Once he had returned the insult, he turned, took the lift and left.

  It was time for Paulo to heal his wounds. Now that he had been ejected from the world of show business, his name did not appear again in the press until the end of the year, when the magazine Fatos&Fotos published an article entitled ‘Vampirology: a Science that Now Has its Own Brazilian Master’. He was the master, presenting himself as a specialist in the subject, and he announced that he was writing the script for a feature film on vampires, which was, in fact, never made. His unexpected dismissal from CBS had caught him unawares, and with the scars from the recent breakdown of his marriage still open he was unable to bear the setback alone. In his solitude, his mind oscillated between delusions of grandeur and feelings of persecution, which, at times, he managed to bring together in his diary in one sentence: ‘Every day it seems harder to achieve my great ideal: to be famous and respected, to be the man who wrote the Book of the Century, the Thought of the Millennium, the History of Humanity.’

  This seemed to be simply a repeat of what various doctors had diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia or manic depression. The problem was that it was nearly time for his traditional end-of-year taking stock and, at thirty-two, he had still not succeeded in realizing his dream. There were moments when he seemed to accept being a writer like any other. ‘Sometimes I think about writing an erotic story, and I know it would get published,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Besides which, I could devote myself to that one genre, which is gaining ground here now that pornographic magazines are being published again. I could think up some really good pseudonym.’ These plans were followed by questions he could not answer. Why write erotic books? To earn money? He was already earning money and he still wasn’t happy. In order not to have to accept that his problems were caused by no one but himself, he returned to the old story: he hadn’t written before because he was married and Cissa didn’t help. Now it was because he was alone and loneliness was preventing him from writing.

  I carry on with the same plans, which haven’t yet died in me. I can resuscitate them whenever I want to; all I have to do is find the woman of my life. And I really do want to find her soon…

  […] I’ve been very, very lonely. I can’t be happy without a woman at my side.

  […] I’m tired of searching. I need someone. If I had a woman I could love, I’d be all right.

  In his misery Paulo seemed to be confirming the popular belief that there’s none so blind as those who will not see, because ‘the woman of his life’ had been right there before him for more than ten years without ever receiving from him a smile or even a handshake. It’s surprising that such a pretty girl–petite, with dark hair, gentle eyes and porcelain skin–had gone unnoticed for such a long time by Paulo, the confirmed womanizer.

  Paulo had met Christina Oiticica in 1968, when her uncle, Marcos, asked Sônia, Paulo’s sister, to marry him. At Lygia’s insistence, all the women invited to the formal engagement dinner were to wear long dresses. For the men, including Paulo, who was sporting a great dark mane of hair at the time and appeared to be completely out of it on drugs during the supper, she demanded dark suits. Christina and Paulo met several times in the years that followed at family gatherings and dinners without either really noticing the other. Naturally, one of these celebrations was for the marriage of Cissa and Paulo. When Paulo’s sister took him to Christmas lunch in 1979 at Christina’s parents’ house, she was going out with Vicente, a young millionaire whose inheritance included, among other luxuries, a vast yacht. Destiny, however, had decided that she was to be the woman Paulo had so longed for. A week later, just as in a fairy tale, the two were together for ever.

  CHAPTER 20

  Christina

  AFTER HER PRIMARY EDUCATION, Christina had been to Bennett College, a traditional Protestant establishment, where the Bible stories told during the Religious Knowledge lessons were the only thing that awoke in her a flicker of interest. She consistently failed in all other subjects, which meant that she had to leave the college and go from school to school until, like Paulo, she gave up completely. When she was seventeen, however, she was able to take a different educational route that would allow her to complete her secondary school studies in less than a year. It was only then that she returned to Bennett College, which had become a college of higher education, where she studied art and architecture. And at the end of 1979, when Paulo arrived at her parents’ house for Christmas dinner, she was working as an architect.

  Although they were practising Christians, Christina’s parents were exceptionally liberal. If she wanted to go to lessons, she went. If she preferred to go to the cinema, no problem. And as soon as she was old enough, she was allowed to have her boyfriends sleep over at her parents’ house without any objections on their part. Not, however, that she had that many boyfriends. Although she was very pretty, Chris was no flirt. She was a thoughtful girl, who enjoyed reading and, although she was not particularly religious, joined a choir at one of the Protestant churches. On the other hand, she also went to see films at the Paissandu, bought clothes at Bibba, the fashion boutique in Ipanema, and consumed large quantities of whisky at Lama’s. She went out every night and would often not get home until dawn, her legs unsteady. ‘My drug was alcohol,’ she confessed years later. ‘I simply loved alcohol.’

  It was growing dark by the time coffee was being served at the end of Christmas lunch in the Oiticica household. Paulo had had his eye on Chris since he arrived and, even though she was going out with someone else, he decided to use his cousin Sérgio Weguelin, who was also present, to find out whether or not she was doing anything that evening. When it was time to leave, he asked his cousin to invite her to go with them to see Woody Allen’s latest hit, Manhattan. She was taken by surprise and didn’t know what to say. The next thing she knew, she was alone in the cinema with Paulo, not watching Manhattan, which was sold out, but a re-run of Airport, which had been released almost ten years earlier.

  Paulo behaved like a true gentleman throughout the film, and didn’t even try to hold Chris’s hand. When they left, they found the square outside the cinema full of jugglers, fortune-tellers, tarot readers, chiromancers, fire-eaters and, of course, several religious choirs each singing a different hymn. They walked along until they came to a fake Indian sitting in front of a wicker basket in which was coiled a terrifying reptile 6 metres in length. It was an enormous anaconda, a non-poisonous snake that was, however, capable of asphyxiating an ox or a human, swallowing it whole and spending weeks digesting the remains of its prey.

  With a mixture of fear and disgust for the creature the couple went up to the Indian. As naturally as if he were merely asking the time, Paulo said to Chris: ‘If I kiss the snake on the mouth will you kiss me on the mouth?’

  S
he couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Kiss that monster? Are you mad?’

  When she realized that he was serious, she accepted the dare. ‘Fine: if you kiss the snake, I’ll kiss you on the mouth.’

  To her astonishment and to that of the Indian and all the bystanders, Paulo stepped forward, grabbed the head of the snake in both hands and kissed it. Then, in front of dozens of wide-eyed spectators, he turned, took Chris in his arms and gave her a long, movie-style kiss on the lips, a kiss that was greeted with a round of applause by those present. Paulo got more than a kiss. A few hours later, the two were sleeping together in his apartment.

  On the last day of the year–having first consulted the I Ching–he invited her to spend New Year with him in the sixth of the properties he owned, a small, pleasant summer house he had just bought in the seaside resort of Cabo Frio. The little white chalet, with red windows and a thatched roof, was exactly the same as the other seventy-four in a condominium called Cabana Clube designed by Renato Menescal, the architect brother of Paulo’s friend Roberto. On their way there, Paulo told Christina that the previous night he had dreamed of a voice that kept saying over and over: ‘Don’t spend New Year’s Eve in the cemetery.’ Since neither could work out what this meant, and since they had no plans to see in the New Year in a cemetery, the matter was forgotten.

  Immediately after they arrived in Cabo Frio, they both sensed a strange atmosphere in the house, although they were unable to pinpoint what it was. It wasn’t something they could smell or see; it was what Paulo would call negative energy. As night fell, they began to hear noises, but couldn’t work out where they were coming from–it sounded as though some creature, human or animal, was dragging itself through the rooms, but apart from the two of them there was no one else there. Feeling both intrigued and frightened, they went out for dinner.