Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  At eleven on the dot, he joined the half-dozen Japanese tourists who were also waiting and followed the arrows to the room with high, curved walls like a church nave, where the Gokstad, Oseberg and Borre were displayed. There was only one other person there–a pretty blonde woman of about forty, who seemed to be absorbed in reading a plaque on one of the walls. When she heard his footsteps, she turned, revealing that she was holding something long, like a walking stick or a sword. She said nothing, but walked towards him, took a silver ring bearing the image of an ouroboros–the snake that devours its own tail–from the ring finger of her left hand and placed it on the middle finger of his left hand. She then traced an imaginary circle on the floor with the stick or sword, indicating that Paulo should stand inside it. Then, she made a gesture as if pouring the contents of a cup into the circle. She moved her right hand across Paulo’s face without touching it, indicating that he should shut his eyes. ‘At that moment I felt that someone had liberated stagnant energies,’ he said years later, ‘as though the spiritual floodgate of a lake had been opened, allowing fresh water to enter.’ When he opened his eyes again, the only sign left by the mysterious woman was the strange ring, which he would wear for the rest of his life.

  Paulo would only be in contact with Jean again much later, when he returned to Brazil. At the end of April 1982, he was supposed to return to his job with TV Globo, but after discussing it at length with Chris, he decided not to return to work but to remain in Europe. They had more than enough money to allow them to stay for another three months in Amsterdam.

  And so it wasn’t until the middle of July that they drove the 1,900 kilometres from Amsterdam to Lisbon–a journey of three days–from where they would take a plane to Brazil. However, the first visible change in Paulo Coelho’s behaviour following his meeting with his Master took place on European soil. Only some supernatural force could have persuaded someone as careful with money as he was to donate the Mercedes to a charitable institution, the Sisterhood of the Infant Jesus for the Blind, rather than selling it and pocketing the thousand dollars.

  CHAPTER 22

  Paulo and Christina–publishers

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN RIO, reinvigorated by their eight long months in Europe, Paulo and Chris settled back into the ground-floor apartment in Rua Raimundo Correia, in which her parents had been living since their departure. He began his initiation tasks. These so-called ordeals, which would lead to his being admitted to RAM, would arrive in either a letter or a phone call from Jean. The first of these, ‘the ritual of the glass’, involved a short ceremony that he was to perform alone each day for six months, always at the same hour. He had to fill a glass that had never been used with water, and place it on the table. He then had to open the New Testament at any page, read out loud a paragraph at random and drink the water. The passage he had read was to be marked with the date of the reading. If, on the following days, he alighted on the same text, then he should read the following paragraph. If he had read that one too, then he was to find another that had not been previously read. Paulo chose the early morning as the best time to perform this penance, so that it would not clash with anything else. And since no specific instruction had been given as to the size or shape of the glass, he bought a small shot glass, which could, if necessary, be discreetly carried around with a copy of the New Testament.

  Fortunately, none of the trials demanded by Jean prevented him from leading a normal life. Money continued to be no problem, but his partnership with Raul had clearly fallen out of fashion. Their records continued to sell, but royalties from the recording company were not pouring in as they had before. Although a regular income from the five apartments he rented out guaranteed a comfortable lifestyle, his lack of activity was likely to propel him once more into depression. Therefore the best thing to do would be to find some more work as soon as possible.

  A year before his trip to Europe, Paulo had persuaded Chris that she should start a company, Shogun Editora e Arte Ltda, which was primarily created for tax purposes to cover the architectural work she was doing, but which also meant that they both had business cards, letterheads and envelopes stating that they were a legal entity. In addition, as he said, when the time came for him to write his books, why not publish them himself? On returning to Brazil, he decided to put this idea into action and rented two rooms in a building on Rua Cinco de Julho in Copacabana, two blocks from the apartment where they lived. Although it managed to grow and even to bring in some income, Shogun was never more than a small family firm whose day-to-day business was handled by its two owners, with the accounts done by Paulo’s father, who had just retired. They had only one paid employee–an office boy.

  Less than three months after their return to Brazil, in October 1982, the publishing house launched its first book: Arquivos do Inferno [Archives of Hell], a collection of sixteen texts written by the proprietor, Paulo Coelho. On the cover was a picture of the author sitting cross-legged in front of a typewriter, holding a cigarette and apparently deep in thought, while beside him are two young women with bare breasts: one was Chris, and the other was Stella Paula, his old colleague from his Crowley witchcraft days. In the photo she had such long hair that it not only covered most of her breasts but fell below her waist. Although it was little more than a booklet (it was only 106 pages long), Arquivos do Inferno was certainly a record-breaker in terms of prefaces, forewords and notes on the inside flaps. The preface, entitled ‘Preface to the Dutch Edition’, was signed by the pop genius Andy Warhol (who, as Paulo confessed years later, never read the book):

  I met Paulo Coelho at an exhibition of mine in London, and discovered in him the kind of forward-looking nature one finds in very few people. Rather than being a literary man in search of clever ideas, he coolly and accurately touches on the concerns and preoccupations of the present time. Dear Paulo, you asked for a preface to your book. I would say that your book is a preface to the new era that is just beginning, before the old one has even ended. Anyone who, like you, strides forward, never runs the risk of falling into a hole, because the angels will spread their cloaks out on the ground to catch you.

  The second was written by Jimmy Brouwer, the owner of the hotel where the couple had stayed in Amsterdam; the third by the journalist Artur da Távola, Paulo’s colleague at Philips; the fourth by the psychiatrist Eduardo Mascarenhas, who at the time was the presenter of a television programme and a Member of Parliament; and the fifth by Roberto Menescal, who was one of the book’s two dedicatees, the other being Chris. Nothing about the book quite fits. According to the cover, it was supposedly a co-edition by Shogun with a Dutch publisher, the Brouwer Free Press, a firm that apparently never existed. A press release distributed by Shogun confused things still more by stating that the book had been published abroad, which was not true: ‘After its successful launch in Holland, where it was acclaimed by critics and public alike after only two months in the shops, Arquivos do Inferno, by Paulo Coelho, will be in all the bookshops in Brazil this month.’ The information given about the author’s previous works muddied the waters still further, including as it did something entitled Lon: Diário de um Mago, which had apparently been published by Shogun in 1979, even though the firm did not exist at that time and Diário de um Mago (translated as The Pilgrimage in English) wasn’t published until 1987. On one of the few occasions, years later, when he spoke about the matter, Paulo gave a strange explanation: ‘It can only have been a prophecy.’ On the imprint page, in tiny print, is another peculiarity: ‘300 copies of the first editions in Portuguese and Dutch will be numbered and signed by the author and sold at US$350 each, the money to be donated to the Order of the Golden Star.’

  The book did not contain a single chapter or essay that dealt with the theme mentioned in the title–hell. The sixteen texts are a jumble of subjects arranged in no particular order, covering such disparate matters as the proverbs of the English poet William Blake, the rudiments of homoeopathy and astrology, and passages from manuscripts by a c
ertain Pero Vaz and from Paulo’s own works, such as ‘The Pieces’:

  It is very important to know that I have scattered parts of my body across the world. I cut my nails in Rome, my hair in Holland and Germany. I saw my blood moisten the asphalt of New York and often my sperm fell on French soil in a field of vines near Tours. I have expelled my faeces into rivers on three continents, watered some trees in Spain with my urine and spat in the English Channel and a fjord in Oslo. Once I grazed my face and left some cells attached to a fence in Budapest. These small things–created by me and which I shall never see again–give me a pleasant feeling of omnipresence. I am a small part of the places I have visited, of the landscapes I have seen and that moved me. Besides this, my scattered parts have a practical use: in my next incarnation I am not going to feel alone or unprotected because something familiar–a hair, a piece of nail, some old, dried spit–will always be close by. I have sown my seed in several places on this earth because I don’t know where I will one day be reborn.

  The most striking feature of the book is the second chapter, entitled ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’. Paulo makes it clear that this was not written by him, but was dictated by the spirit of Torquemada, the Dominican friar who was in charge of the trials held by the Holy Office in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. As though wanting to clear himself of any responsibility for its content, the author explains that not only the spelling and the underlinings but also ‘some syntactical errors’ were retained exactly as dictated by the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor. The eight pages of the chapter are filled with celebrations of torture and martyrdom as instruments in the defence of the faith:

  It is therefore most just that the death penalty be applied to those who obstinately propagate heresy and so ensure that the most precious gift of man, Faith, is lost for ever!

  […] Anyone who has the right to command also has the right to punish! And the authority that has the power to make laws also has the power to ensure that those laws are obeyed!

  […] Spiritual punishment is not always enough. The majority of people are incapable of understanding it. The Church should, as I did, have the right to apply physical punishment!

  Apparently wanting to attribute a scientific character to this psychic writing, Paulo ends the text with a curious parenthetical observation: ‘[After these words, no other communication was made by what called itself the “spirit of Torquemada”. As it is always important to note the conditions in which a transmission was made–with a view to future scientific investigations–I recorded the ambient temperature (29°C), the atmospheric pressure (760 mmHg), weather conditions (cloudy) and the time the message was received (21h15m to 22h07m)].’

  This was not the first occasion on which Paulo had shown an interest in the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In September 1971, he had thought of writing a play on the subject and during his research he came across a book by Henrique Hello, published by Editora Vozes in 1936 and reprinted in 1951, the title of which was The Truth about the Inquisition. The ninety-page text is a long peroration in defence of the objectives and methods used by the Inquisition. Part had been quoted in the preface to O Santo Inquérito [The Holy Inquisition], written in 1966 by the playwright Dias Gomes. When he finished reading it, Paulo had concluded ironically: ‘I set to work on the play about the Inquisition. It’s an easy play. It simply plagiarizes what someone called Henrique Hello said about it. No, it doesn’t plagiarize, it criticizes. The guy wrote a book called The Truth about the Inquisition in favour of the Inquisition!’

  Probably because of his imprisonment and abduction in 1974, Paulo held back from criticizing the author and simply transcribed his words. A comparison between the content of Arquivos do Inferno and the 1936 publication shows that if it was in fact an example of psychic writing, the spirit that dictated ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’ was that of Henrique Hello and not Torquemada, since 95 per cent of the text is simply copied from Hello’s work.

  None of this, however, surpasses the extraordinary piece of information the author gives at the beginning of ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’. He states there that the automatic writing had occurred ‘on the night of 28 May 1974’. The fact is that, between 21.15 and 22.07 on the night of 28 May 1974, Paulo was lying handcuffed on the floor of a car with his head covered by a hood and was being driven to the buildings of the DOI-Codi. It is hard to believe that the prison guards of one of the most violent prisons of the Brazilian dictatorship would have allowed a prisoner to write such an essay, even though it was a treatise in praise of torture. The author seems to have realized that Arquivos do Inferno would not stand up to scrutiny, and once the first, modest print run had sold out, he did not publish it again. When he had become an international name, the work was mentioned discreetly on his website: ‘In 1982 he published his first book, Arquivos do Inferno, which made no impact whatsoever.’

  A quarter of a century after this major failure, Arquivos became a rarity sought by collectors in auctions on the Internet with starting prices of about US$220, as though Paulo’s initial fantasy were finally coming to fruition.

  The lack of success of Shogun’s debut book acted as an important lesson, since it made it clear that this was an undertaking requiring a professional approach. Determined to do things properly, Paulo took over the management of the business, and his first step was to take a seven-week correspondence course on financial planning. The course seems to have borne fruit, since in 1984, two years after it was set up, Shogun was ranked thirty-fourth among Brazilian publishers listed in the specialist magazine Leia Livros, rivalling traditional publishing houses such as Civilização Brasileira and Agir, and even Rocco (which some years later would become Paulo’s publisher in Brazil). Shogun rented stands at book fairs and biennials and had a backlist of more than seventy titles.

  Among the authors published, besides the proprietors themselves, there were only two well-known names, neither of whom was exactly a writer: the rock singer Neusinha Brizola, the daughter of the then governor of Rio, Leonel Brizola (O Livro Negro de Neusinha Brizola [The Black Book of Neusinha Brizola]), and the ever-present ‘close enemy’, Raul Seixas (As Aventuras de Raul Seixas na Cidade de Thor [Raul Seixas’ Adventures in the City of Thor]). Shogun’s success was, in fact, due to hundreds and thousands of anonymous poets from all over Brazil who, like the owner of Shogun, had dreamed for years of one day having a book of their poetry published. In a country where hundreds of young authors were desperate to publish, Shogun came up with the perfect solution: the ‘Raimundo Correia Poetry Competition’.

  Paulo placed small advertisements in newspapers and left flyers at the doors of theatres and cinemas, inviting unpublished poets from across Brazil to take part in the competition, which had been named after the street in which Paulo and Chris lived, in turn named after an influential Brazilian poet who had died in 1911. The rules were simple. The competition was open to poems written in Portuguese by ‘authors, whether amateur or professional, published or not, and of any age’. Each person could submit up to three poems of a maximum length of two pages double-spaced, and a ‘committee of critics and experts of high standing’ (whose names were never revealed) would select those to be included in an anthology to be published by Shogun. Those selected would receive a contract under which they committed themselves to paying US$175, for which they would receive ten copies. To the couple’s surprise, one of the competitions received no fewer than 1,150 poems, of which 116 were selected for a book entitled Poetas Brasileiros. The publishers ran no financial risk at all, because the work was published only after the authors had paid up. Each contributor would receive, along with the books, a certificate produced by Shogun and signed by Chris, and a handwritten note from Paulo:

  Dear So and So,

  I have received and read your poems. Without going into the merits of the material–which, as you yourself know, is of the highest quality–I should like to compliment you on not having let your poems stay in a drawer. In today’s wo
rld, and during this particularly exceptional period of History, it is necessary to have the courage to make one’s thoughts public.

  Once again my congratulations,

  Paulo Coelho

  What at first sight had appeared to be an amateur enterprise turned out to be very good business indeed. When the couple sent off the last package of books in the post, Shogun had earned the equivalent of US$187,000. The success of an apparently simple idea encouraged Paulo and Chris to repeat the project on a larger scale. A few weeks later, Shogun announced competitions to select poems to be published in four new anthologies, entitled Poetas Brasileiros de Hoje, A Nova Poesia Brasileira, A Nova Literatura Brasileira and Antologia Poética de Cidades Brasileiras. In order to motivate those who had been rejected in the first anthology, Chris sent each of them an encouraging letter in which she explained that the number of poems to be awarded the prize of publication was to rise from 116 to 250:

  Rio de Janeiro, 29 August 1982

  Dear Poet,

  A large number of the works that failed to be placed in the Raimundo Correia Poetry Competition were of very high quality. Therefore, although we are forced to restrict the number of winning poems to 250, we have decided to find a solution for those poems which, either because they did not comply with the rules or because they were not selected by the Committee of Judges, were not included in the Anthology.

  The book Poetas Brasileiros de Hoje–another Shogun publication–is to be published this year. We would love one of your poems to be included in this anthology. Each of the authors will pay the amount stated in the attached agreement and, in exchange, will receive ten copies of the first edition. This means that, for each copy, you will be paying only a little more than you would pay for a weekly news magazine, and you will be investing in yourself, increasing the sphere of influence of your work and, eventually, opening doors to a fascinating career.