Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  As stated in the attached agreement, Shogun will send copies of Poetas Brasileiros de Hoje to the best-known literary critics in the country, and publicity material will be sent to more than two hundred important newspapers and magazines. Copies of the first edition will also be donated to state and municipal libraries, thus ensuring that thousands of readers will, over the years, have access to your poetry.

  Lord Byron, Lima Barreto, Edgar Allan Poe and other great names in Literature had to finance the publication of their own books. Now, with this system of sharing the costs, it is possible to produce the book quite cheaply and for it to be read and commented upon throughout the country. In order to take part in Poetas Brasileiros de Hoje, all you have to do is fill in the attached agreement, sign it and send it with the stated amount to Shogun.

  If you have any questions, please write to us.

  Christina Oiticica

  The Shogun anthologies grew in popularity, and poets of every sort sprang up in every corner of the country. On the evenings when the diplomas and other awards were handed out, there were so many present that the publisher was forced to hire the Circo Voador in Lapa, one of the newest venues in Rio, to accommodate the winning bards and their guests. Chris also organized public events, usually held in busy places, where the authors would recite their prize-winning poetry to passers-by, who would stop, genuinely interested, to listen to the poetry. There was, of course, always some problem, such as those who took a long time to pay or the poet who wrote a letter of protest to the Jornal do Brasil:

  I took part in the Fifth Raimundo Correia Poetry Competition and was awarded a prize for my poem ‘Ser humano’. In order for my poem to be published, I had to pay a fee of Cr$380,000 in four instalments, for which I would receive ten copies of the book. When I paid the final instalment, I received the books. When I saw them and opened them, I was so disappointed that I didn’t even want to read them. I realized, then, that I had fallen for a confidence trick.

  The book uses very old-fashioned typography, and the design itself is one of the worst I’ve ever seen, muddled and ugly. It is Shogun’s philosophy that he who does not pay is not published. I know of several people who were excluded because they couldn’t pay all the instalments. 116 poets were published. By my calculations, Shogun have made a total of Cr$44 million, and have the right to use our money as they wish from the very first instalment.

  Considering the amount we paid, we deserved something better. I work in the field of graphic design myself, and so feel able to make these criticisms. I wouldn’t give the book away as a present or even sell it to my worst enemy.

  Rui Dias de Carvalho–Rio de Janeiro

  A week later, the Jornal do Brasil published Shogun’s reply in which the director Christina Oiticica stated that the printers who produced their books were the same as those who worked for such publishing giants as Record and Nova Fronteira. As for making money from the anthology, she responded by saying that this was used to finance projects that would never interest large publishers, such as Poesia na Prisão (a competition held among prisoners within the Rio de Janeiro prison system), without depending upon public funds: ‘We do not beg for support from the state for our cultural activities. We are independent and proud of the fact, because all of us–publishers and poets–are proving that it is possible for new artists to get their work published.’

  The complaints did not seem to be shared by other authors published by Shogun. Many years later, the poet Marcelino Rodriguez recalled proudly in his Internet blog seeing his ‘Soneto Eterno’ included in the publisher’s anthology: ‘My first literary venture was produced by Shogun, owned by Paulo Coelho (who is now our most important writer, although many “academics” do not recognize his worth, perhaps because they do not understand the content of his work) and Christina Oiticica, who is a highly talented artist (I still haven’t forgotten the smile she gave me when I visited the office once).’

  The fact is that, as well as encouraging young authors, the project proved to be a successful business enterprise. By organizing four anthologies a year, Shogun could earn some 160 million cruzeiros a year. Between 1983 and 1986, there was a boom in anthologies and poetry competitions, and so these sums may have been even greater, particularly when Shogun doubled the number of prize-winners. At the age of nearly forty, Paulo’s life finally seemed to be working out. Chris was proving to be a wonderful partner–their relationship grew more solid by the day–and business was flourishing. All that was needed to complete his happiness was to realize his old dream of becoming a world-famous writer. He continued to receive spiritual guidance from Jean, but this did not prevent him from reading about and entering into public debates on esoteric subjects and indulging his old curiosity for vampirism. It was as a vampirologist that, in 1985, he accepted an invitation to give a talk in the largest conference centre in the city, Riocentro, which was holding the first Brazilian Esoteric Fair, an initiative by the guru Kaanda Ananda, the owner of a shop selling esoterica in the Tijuca district in Rio, who had invited Paulo to open the meeting with a talk on vampirism.

  When he arrived on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 October, Paulo was greeted by the reporter Nelson Liano, Jr, who had been selected by the Sunday magazine of the Jornal do Brasil to interview him. Although he was only twenty-four, Liano had worked on the main Rio publications and, like Paulo, had experimented with every type of drug. If there is such a thing as love at first sight between esoterics, this is what happened between Paulo and Liano. Such was their reciprocal delight in each other’s company that their conversation ended only when Kaanda Ananda told them for the third time that the auditorium was full and that an impatient public was waiting for Paulo. The two exchanged phone numbers and took their leave of each other with a warm embrace. While Paulo went into the auditorium, Liano headed off to have a coffee with his friend Ernesto Emanuelle Mandarino, the owner of the publishing house Editora Eco.

  Eco was a small publishing house founded in the 1960s. Although it was unknown in intellectual circles, during its twenty years in existence, it had become a reference point for anyone interested in umbanda and candomblé (the Brazilian forms of voodoo), magic, etc. Over coffee with Mandarino, Liano told him that he had just interviewed a vampirologist. ‘The guy’s called Paulo Coelho and he trained in vampirism in England. He’s talking at the moment to a packed auditorium of people on the subject. Don’t you think it might make a book?’

  Mandarino opened his eyes wide: ‘Vampirism? It sounds like something out of the movies. Would a book like that sell? When he finishes his talk bring him over here to the stand for a coffee.’

  Minutes after being introduced to Paulo, Mandarino told him point-blank: ‘If you write a book on vampirism, Eco will publish it.’

  Paulo replied: ‘I’ll do it, if Nelson Liano will write it with me.’

  Mandarino was astonished: ‘But Nelson told me that you had only just met!’

  Paulo chuckled: ‘That’s true, but we’re already life-long friends.’

  The deal was done. The two left, having agreed to write a book entitled Manual Prático do Vampirismo [Practical Manual on Vampirism]. The work was to be arranged in five parts, the first and fifth to be written by Paulo, the second and fourth by Liano and the third divided between the two. Paulo and Chris wondered afterwards whether it wouldn’t be better if Shogun published the book, but they were dissuaded from this idea by Liano, who felt that only a publisher of Eco’s standing would be able to market such a book, whereas Shogun’s speciality was poetry anthologies. On the assumption that it would be a best-seller, Paulo demanded changes to Eco’s standard contract. Concerned about inflation, he asked to receive monthly rather than quarterly accounts. Even though Liano was going to write half the book and edit the final text, Paulo asked Mandarino’s secretary to add this clause at the bottom of the contract: ‘Only the name Paulo Coelho will appear on the cover, with the words “Edited by Nelson Liano, Jr.” on the title page under the title.’

 
In effect, Liano was going to write half the book and edit the whole thing, but was to appear only as its coordinator (and this only on the inside pages). And, following a final addendum suggested by Paulo, he was to receive only 5 per cent of the royalties (0.5 per cent of the cover price of the book), the remaining 95 per cent going to Paulo. As though anticipating that this was going to be the goose that laid the golden egg, Mandarino patiently accepted his new author’s demands and since Liano also made no objections, they signed the contract a week after their first meeting. However, only Liano handed in his chapters on the agreed date. Saying that he had too much work at Shogun, Paulo had not written a single word of his part. Time went on, and still the text did not appear. It was only after much pressure and when he realized that all deadlines had passed that Paulo finally handed his text to Eco. At the last minute, perhaps feeling that he had been unfair to his partner, he allowed the inclusion of Liano’s name on the cover, but in small print, as though he were not the co-author but only an assistant.

  The launch of the Manual, with waiters serving white wine and canapés, was held in the elegant Hotel Glória, in front of which, eleven years earlier, Paulo had been seized by the DOI-Codi. The cover, designed by Chris, bore the title in gothic characters over a well-known photograph of the Hungarian-American actor Béla Lugosi who, in 1931, had become world-famous when he played Count Dracula in the Tod Browning film. The texts covered subjects ranging from the origins of vampirism to the great ‘dynasties’ of human bloodsuckers, which were divided into the Romanian, British, German, French and Spanish branches. One chapter explained how to recognize a vampire. At social gatherings this could be done by observing certain habits or gestures. For example, if you come across a person with a particular liking for raw or undercooked meat, who is also studious and rather verbose, you should be on your guard: he could be a true descendant of the Romanian Vlad Tepeş. It would be even easier, the Manual explained, to know whether or not you were sleeping with a dangerous bloodsucker because vampires don’t move their pelvis during the sexual act and the temperature of their penis is many degrees below that of ordinary mortals.

  The Manual concealed some even greater mysteries. None of the guests in the lobby of the Hotel Glória could know that, although his name appeared in larger print than Liano’s on the cover, Paulo had not written a single word, a single syllable, of the 144 pages of the Manual. The author never revealed that, under pressure of the deadline and disinclined to keep his part of the agreement, he had secretly taken on someone else to write his parts of the book.

  His choice fell on a strange man from Minas Gerais, Antônio Walter Sena Júnior, who was known in the esoteric world as ‘Toninho Buda’ or ‘Tony Buddha’, a somewhat inappropriate name for a very skinny man who never weighed more than 55 kilos. He had graduated in engineering at the Universidade Federal in Juiz de Fora, where he still lived, and had met Paulo in 1981 during a debate on vampirism at the Colégio Bennett in Rio. He had studied subjects such as magic and the occult, had closely followed the career of Paulo and Raul Seixas, and dreamed of resurrecting the old Sociedade Alternativa. He felt greatly honoured at the thought of seeing his name alongside that of Paulo Coelho in a book and he accepted the task in exchange, as he said later, ‘for the price of lunch in a cheap restaurant in Copacabana’. He wrote all the chapters that Paulo was supposed to write.

  On 25 April 1986, Toninho Buda was recovering after being run over some weeks earlier. He was shocked to read in a column in the Jornal do Brasil that Paulo Coelho would be signing his new book, Manual Prático do Vampirismo, that evening in the Hotel Glória. He thought it rude that he hadn’t been invited to the launch, but preferred to believe that the invitation had not arrived on time. Still walking with the aid of a stick, he decided to go to the launch of a book that was, after all, also his. He went to the bus station, took the bus and, after two hours on the road, arrived in Rio de Janeiro as night was falling. He crossed the city by taxi and hobbled up the four white marble steps at the main entrance of the Hotel Glória. It was only then that he realized that he was the first to arrive: apart from the employees of the publishing house, who were stacking books on a stand, there was no one else there, not even the author.

  He decided to buy a copy–as well as receiving no invitation he hadn’t even been sent a complimentary copy–and sat in an armchair at one end of the room to enjoy his creation in peace. He admired the cover, ran his eyes over the first pages, the frontispiece, the two flaps, but his name did not appear anywhere in the book, of which half had been entirely written by him. He was about to take a taxi back to the bus station when he saw Paulo enter, smiling, with Chris, Liano and Mandarino.

  At that moment, he decided that he wasn’t going to waste the journey and so he gave vent to his feelings: ‘Dammit, Paulo! You didn’t even put my name on the book, man, and that was the only thing I asked for! The only thing I asked for, man!’

  Paulo pretended not to understand, asked to see a copy of the Manual, flipped quickly through it and said regretfully: ‘It’s true, Toninho. They didn’t add your name. But I promise you: I’ll ask for a special stamp to be made and we’ll stamp the whole of the first edition. I’ll correct it in the next edition, but with this one, we’ll stamp every book. Forgive me.’

  Although deeply upset, Toninho Buda didn’t want to ruin Paulo’s evening and felt it best to end the conversation there: ‘Paulo, I’m not an idiot. Don’t talk to me about a stamp, man. Go off to your launch, where there are loads of people wanting your autograph. Go on and I’ll just leave.’

  Toninho swallowed the insult in the name of a higher ambition: to get Paulo interested in reinstituting the Sociedade Alternativa. His strategy was a simple one: to use public debates and popular demonstrations to gain the attention of the media and public opinion. Some months earlier, he had written a long letter to Paulo from Juiz de Fora suggesting ‘public actions’ by the group, among which he suggested rushing on to the stage of the first international rock concert in Rio on the night when stars such as Whitesnake, Ozzy Osbourne, the Scorpions and AC/DC were performing. Toninho’s plan was to seize the microphone and start talking about the Sociedade Alternativa: ‘This will depend almost entirely on you and your contacts in Rio. I’m prepared to go there myself. If you agree, you can start to work on things, but please don’t forget to keep me informed as to how it’s going.’

  In January 1986, some months after the book signing, the threesome had taken part in an event in Rio. They decided to use a protest by inhabitants of the South Zone against the decision of the Prefecture to close a public park in order to announce the launch of a newspaper, Sociedade Alternativa, the first draft of which had been designed entirely by Toninho. It was he who enrolled with the organizers of the demonstration in order to get his message heard. As soon as his name was called, he went up to the improvised rostrum in suit and tie and in front of the television cameras began to read what he had entitled ‘Manifesto Number 11’. It was an entire page of statements such as ‘Free space, everyone should occupy their space’ ‘Time is free, everyone has to live in their time’ and ‘The artistic class no longer exists: we are all writers, housewives, bosses and employees, radicals and conservatives, wise and mad’. It wasn’t the content that mattered though, but the manner of his performance. As Toninho Buda read out each sentence, paragraph or thought, Chris carefully and silently cut off a piece of his clothing: first his tie, then a sleeve of his suit, then a leg of his trousers, then another sleeve, a collar, another sleeve…When he pronounced the final sentence (something like ‘The great miracle will no longer be being able to walk on water, but being able to walk on the earth’) he was completely naked, without a square centimetre of cloth on his body.

  That night, when they were all celebrating the repercussions of their ‘public action’ in the park, Paulo was still muttering about the need to do something even more scandalous, with greater impact. However, Chris and Paulo were flabbergasted when Toninho told them th
at what he hoped to do would, in his words, ‘leave the Sociedade Alternativa engraved for ever in the memory of millions of Brazilians’: neither more nor less than blowing the head off the statue of Christ the Redeemer. He explained the plan to explode the monument’s 3.75-metre-high, 30-ton head, a monument which, in 2007, would be named one of the seven new wonders of the modern world. Any normal person would have thrown such a madman out of the house, but Paulo didn’t do that. On the contrary, he simply said: ‘Go ahead.’

  This was what Toninho wanted to hear. ‘Just imagine the population of Rio de Janeiro waking up one morning and seeing Christ there, without his head and with that great mound of twisted iron struts sticking out of his neck towards the indigo sky! Think of the Pope’s edict for making amends, the crowds climbing up Corcovado looking for pieces to keep as a relic. Imagine that! The Church collecting tithes for the miracle of its reconstruction! That’s when we would go in singing “Viva, Viva, Viva a Sociedade Alternativa!” and distributing the first edition of our newspaper with the hot news on the dreadful episode…’

  This was a heresy too far, particularly for someone who was in the process of reconciliation with the Church, and Paulo preferred to bring the conversation to a close and never return to the subject. As Toninho would only find out months later, Paulo was very close to being admitted as a Master of RAM, the religious order to which Jean had introduced him. His first failed attempt to acquire this rank in the secret organization had occurred in January that year. Taking advantage of a business trip to Brazil, Jean had appointed 2 January 1986 as the date for a secret ceremony during which Paulo would receive a sword, the symbol of his ordination as a Master. The site for this was to be the summit of one of the mountains in Mantiqueira, on the frontier between Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, next to one of the highest points in Brazil, the peak of Agulhas Negras. As well as Jean and Paulo, Chris, a hired guide and another man who was to be initiated into the order were also to be there. The sole instruction Paulo had received was to take with him the old sword that he had been using for years in his esoteric exercises.