It did not take long, though, for him to fall once more into depression. He had US$300,000 in the bank and five apartments bringing in a regular income, he was in a stable relationship and he had just received the sword of a Master or Magus, but he was still unhappy. In spite of the busy life he was leading, he found time to fill more than five hundred pages of his diary between September and January, when he was due to return to Brazil. Most of these pages repeated for the umpteenth time the monotonous complaint he had been making for the last twenty years, which had now become a tearful mantra: ‘I’m still not an established writer.’
At the end of October, Chris came to Madrid for a few weeks and rubbed more salt into his wounds. One day, when Paulo was saying how prolific Picasso was, she said: ‘Look, Paulo, you have as much talent as he has, but since we got together six years ago, you haven’t produced anything. I’ve given and I’ll continue to give you all the support you need. But you have to have a concrete objective and pursue it tenaciously. That’s the only way you’ll get where you want to be.’
When Chris returned to Brazil at the beginning of December, Paulo was in an even worse mental state than before. He was lamenting the fact that he had lost the ability to tell ‘even stories about myself or my life’. He found his diary ‘boring, mediocre and empty’, but eventually recognized that, if he did, this was his own fault: ‘I haven’t even written here about the Road to Santiago. Sometimes I think about killing myself because I’m so terrified of things, but I have faith in God that I shall never do that. It would be exchanging one fear for a greater fear. I’ve got to get away from the idea that writing a book would be an important thing to do in Madrid. Perhaps I could dictate a book to someone.’
In the middle of December, Chris phoned to say that she could no longer stand working with Pedro: ‘Paulo, your father is being very difficult. I need you to come back here straight away.’
Pedro Queima Coelho did not agree with the expenses that the publishing house incurred in advertising, and this created permanent friction between him and Chris. The phone call was an ultimatum for Paulo to start the countdown and think about returning, with or without his book. He handed over this final responsibility to God, begging in his diary for the Creator to give him a sign when the time came to start writing.
Some days later, one icy Tuesday morning, he left early to go for a walk in the Retiro Park. When he returned home, he went straight to his diary and wrote: ‘I had hardly gone any distance when I saw the particular sign I had asked God for: a pigeon feather. The time has come for me to give myself entirely to that book.’
In biographies and on official websites, The Pilgrimage is described as having been written in Rio during the Carnival of 1987, but there are clear indications in the author’s diary that he began to write the first lines of the book when he was still in Spain. A day after receiving what he believes to have been a sign from heaven he wrote:
15/12–I can’t write this book as though it were just any book. I can’t write this book just to pass the time, or to justify my life and/or my idleness. I have to write this book as though it were the most important thing in my life. Because this book is the beginning of something very important. It’s the beginning of my work of indoctrination in RAM and that is what I must devote myself to from now on.
18/12–I wrote for an hour and a half. The text came easily, but there are lots of things missing. It seemed very implausible, very Castaneda. Using the first person worries me. Another alternative would be an actual diary. Perhaps I’ll try that tomorrow. I think the first scene is good, so I can make variations on that theme until I find the right approach.
The miracle was apparently taking place.
CHAPTER 24
The Alchemist
PAULO’S FIRST MOVE when he returned to Brazil was to persuade his father to leave Shogun so that Chris could work in peace, which he managed to do without causing any resentment. During his absence, she had dealt very competently with the firm’s business, and knowing that Chris was looking after the firm as well as or even better than he could was a further inducement for Paulo to dedicate himself entirely to the book. He was still full of doubts, though. Was he really just writing a book about his pilgrimage? Weren’t there enough books on that topic? Why not abandon the idea and try writing something else, such as a Manual of Practical Magic? And whatever the subject, should the book be published by Shogun or given to Eco, as had been the case with Manual Pratico do Vampirismo?
These uncertainties lasted until 3 March 1987, a Tuesday during Carnival. That day Paulo sat down in front of his typewriter, determined to leave the apartment only when he had put the final full stop on the last page of The Pilgrimage. He worked frenetically for twenty-one days, during which time he did not set foot outside the house, getting up from his chair only to eat, sleep and go to the toilet. When Chris arrived home on the twenty-fourth, Paulo had a package in front of him containing 200 pages ready to be sent to the printer. The decision to have Shogun publish it was growing in his mind and he even put some small classified ads in the Saturday edition of Jornal do Brasil announcing: ‘It’s on its way! The Pilgrimage–Editora Shogun.’
The person who once again dissuaded him from the idea of being at once author and publisher was the journalist Nelson Liano, Jr, who advised him to knock on Ernest Mandarino’s door. Paulo thought about it for a few days, and it wasn’t until mid-April that he signed the contract for the first edition of O Diário de um Mago, or The Pilgrimage, standing at the counter of a small bar next to the publisher’s office in Rua Marquês de Pombal.
The contract contains some odd things. First, Paulo demanded that, instead of the usual five-or seven-year contract, he should have a contract that would be renewed with every edition (the first had a print run of 3,000 copies). He did not, as he had with Manual Prático do Vampirismo, ask for monthly rather than quarterly accounts, but accepted what he was offered, even though inflation in Brazil had reached almost 1 per cent a day. The other strange thing is that at the foot of the contract the author put in an apparently meaningless addendum–which would, however, prove to be prophetic: ‘Once the book has sold 1,000 (one thousand) copies, the publisher will be responsible for the costs of producing the book in Spanish and English.’ If, among his gifts, Paulo had had the ability to predict the future, he could have taken the opportunity to make it Mandarino’s responsibility to produce versions not only in English and Spanish but also in the other forty-four languages into which The Pilgrimage would subsequently be translated, among them Albanian, Estonian, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay and Marathi.
Although sales got off to a very slow start, they soon overtook all of Eco’s other titles. Years later, when he was retired and living in Petrópolis, 70 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, Ernesto Mandarino was to recall how much of this success was due to a virtue that few authors possess–a desire to publicize the book: ‘Authors would leave the finished manuscript with the publisher and do nothing to publicize their work. Paulo not only appeared in all the media, newspapers, radio and television, but gave talks on the book wherever he was asked.’
On the advice of his friend the journalist Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos, Paulo took an initiative rare even among established authors: at his own expense he employed the twenty-year-old journalist Andréa Cals to work exclusively on publicizing the book in the media. The salary was modest–8,000 cruzados a month, the equivalent in 1987 of about US$400–but he offered a tempting bonus. Should the book sell 20,000 copies by the end of 1987, Andréa would get a return flight from Rio to Miami. The contract also included the publicity for an exhibition of art by Chris entitled ‘Tarô’, and if all twenty-two works on show were sold before the exhibition closed, Andréa would earn a further 5,000 cruzados. Meanwhile, Paulo and Chris printed flyers about The Pilgrimage, which they themselves handed out nightly in cinema, theatre and stadium queues.
All this was an attempt to make up for the resistance of large media companies to give space to
something as specific as The Pilgrimage–which seemed to be of interest only to the shrinking underground press. Andréa recalls trying in vain to get a copy of The Pilgrimage included in Mandala, a TV soap being shown by Globo and whose theme was in some ways similar to that of the book, but it was down to her hard work that the book got its first mention in one of the major newspapers. Beside the very brief mention in the Jornal do Brasil was a photo of the author who, at Joaquim’s suggestion, was wearing a black cape and holding a sword. The picture caught the attention of the producers of Sem Censura, a chat show that went out every afternoon on the national television network Educativa, to which Paulo was invited.
In response to a question from the presenter, Lúcia Leme, and in front of millions of television viewers, Paulo revealed for the first time in public the secret that had been known only to a few friends and his diary: yes, he was a magus and among his many powers was that of making it rain. The strategy worked. The reporter Regina Guerra, from the newspaper O Globo, saw the programme and suggested to her boss an interview with this new individual on the Rio cultural scene: the writer who could make it rain. Her boss thought it all complete nonsense, but when his young reporter persisted, he gave in. The result was that, on 3 August, the cultural section of the newspaper devoted its entire front page to Paulo Coelho, who was given the title of ‘the Castaneda of Copacabana’. In a sequence of photos, he appears among the leaves of his garden wearing the same black cloak and dark glasses and holding a sword. The text preceding the interview seems made to order for someone claiming to have supernatural powers:
The thick walls of the old building mean that the apartment is very quiet, in spite of the fact that it’s in one of the noisiest parts of the city–Copacabana, Posto Quatro. One of the bedrooms acts as a study and opens on to a miniature forest, a tangle of bushes, climbing shrubs and ferns. To the question–‘Are you a magus?’ Paulo Coelho, who has just launched The Pilgrimage, his fifth book, replies with another: ‘Is it windy outside?’
A glance at the dense leaves is enough to make one shake one’s head and murmur a casual ‘No’, implying that it really doesn’t matter if there’s a breeze outside or not: ‘Right, take a look’–he remains as he was, seated on a cushion and leaning against another, doing nothing.
First, the tip of the highest leaf of a palm tree starts to sway gently. In the next instant, the whole plant moves, as does all the vegetation around. The bamboo curtain in the corridor sways and clicks, the reporter’s notes fly off her clipboard. After one or two minutes, the wind stops as suddenly as it began. There are a few leaves on the carpet and a question: was it coincidence or is he really a magus who knows how to summon up the wind? Read on and find out more.
Apart from O Globo, the only other coverage the rain-making author received was in Pasquim and the magazine Manchete. He was always friendly and receptive towards journalists, posing in a yoga position and allowing himself to be photographed behind smoking test tubes and putting on or removing his cloak and sword according to the demands of his clients. The barriers began to fall. His telephone number was soon in the diaries of social columnists, among them his friend Hildegard Angel, and he was often reported as having been seen dining in such-and-such a restaurant or leaving such-and-such a theatre. For the first time Paulo could feel the wind of fame in his face–something he had never experienced even at the height of his musical success, since, at the time, the star of the partnership was Raul Seixas. This media exposure did increase the sales of the book, but The Pilgrimage still seemed far from becoming a best-seller.
In order to try and capitalize on his new-found ‘almost-fame’, as he himself called it, Paulo and the astrologer Cláudia Castelo Branco, who had written the preface to The Pilgrimage, joined forces with the specialist travel firm Itatiaia Turismo to organize a spiritual package holiday named ‘The Three Sacred Roads’, which were to be Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Those interested would be guided by Paulo and Cláudia on a journey that would start in Madrid and end in Santiago de Compostela, via a zigzag route through Egypt (Cairo and Luxor), Israel (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), France (Lourdes) and then back to Spain (Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos, León, Ponferrada and Lugo). Whether it was the fault of the dreadful advertisement published in the newspapers (which did not even say how long the excursion would last) or the high price of the package (US$2,800), they received not a single enquiry. However, although it produced no results, the project had cost them both time and money, and in order to pay them for their work, the agency gave them a half-price trip to the Middle East, one of the places suggested for the failed magical mystery tour.
Paulo and Cláudia set off on 26 September with Paula, Chris’s mother, but as soon as they arrived in Cairo, he decided to continue alone with Paula. On their second day in the Egyptian capital, he hired a guide named Hassan and asked him to take them to the Moqattam district, in the southwest of the city, so that he could visit the Coptic monastery of St Simon the Shoemaker. From there they crossed the city by taxi, and night was falling when, after driving through an enormous slum, they reached the sandy fringe of the largest desert on the planet, the Sahara, a few hundred metres from the Sphinx and the famous pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos. They left the taxi and continued their journey to the pyramids on horseback (Paulo was frightened of falling off a camel, the only other available means of transport from there on). When they drew near, Paulo decided to proceed on foot, while Hassan looked after the horses and read the Koran. Paulo says that, near one of the illuminated monuments, he saw a woman in the middle of the desert wearing a chador and carrying a clay pot on her shoulder. This, according to him, was very different from what had occurred in Dachau. ‘A vision is something that you see and an apparition is something almost physical,’ he explained later. ‘What happened in Cairo was an apparition.’ Although used to such phenomena, he found what he had seen strange. He looked at the endless stretch of sand surrounding him on that moonlit night and saw no one else apart from Hassan, who was still reciting sacred verses. As the shape approached Paulo, it disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. However, it left such a strong impression that, months later, he could reconstruct the apparition in detail when describing it in his second book.
When he flew back to Brazil some weeks later, he received the first major news regarding his career while still on the plane. The stewardess handed him a copy of O Globo from the Saturday before, and he placed the folded newspaper on his lap, closed his eyes, meditated for a moment and only then opened the paper at the arts section–and there was The Pilgrimage on that week’s best-sellers’ list. Before the end of the year, he would sign contracts for five new editions of the book, the sales of which went on to exceed 12,000 copies. This success encouraged him to enter The Pilgrimage for the Prêmio Instituto Nacional do Livro, an award supported by the Ministry of Education for published novels. The jury that year was to meet in Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo, and its members were the poet Ivan Junqueira, the writer Roberto Almada, and the journalist Carlos Herculano Lopes. The Pilgrimage didn’t even appear on the list of finalists and only got Junqueira’s vote. ‘The book was unusual for us, because it mixed reality with fantasy,’ the poet recalled later. ‘For me personally it was interesting in that I like travel literature very much and also this kind of half-ghost-story.’
Immediately after the results were announced, Paulo suffered yet another disappointment. The magazine Veja had published a long report on the boom in esoteric books in Brazil and made no mention of The Pilgrimage. This was such a hard blow that Paulo once again thought of giving up his career as a writer. ‘Today I seriously thought of abandoning everything and retiring,’ he wrote in his diary. Weeks later, however, he seemed to have recovered from those two setbacks and returned to the I Ching, already with an idea for a new book. He wrote a question in his diary: ‘What should I do to make my next book sell 100,000 copies?’ He threw the three coins on the table and stared in delight at the result.
Usually vague and metaphorical in its responses, the Chinese oracle was, according to Paulo, astonishingly clear: ‘The great man brings good luck.’
That piece of good luck–the new book–was already in his head. The next work by Paulo Coelho was to be based on a Persian fable that had also inspired the Borges story ‘Tale of the Two Dreamers’, published in 1935 in A Universal History of Infamy. It is the tale of Santiago, a shepherd who, after dreaming repeatedly of a treasure hidden near the Egyptian pyramids, resolves to leave the village where he was born in search of what the author calls a ‘personal legend’. On the journey to Egypt Santiago meets various characters, among them an alchemist, and at each meeting he learns a new lesson. At the end of his pilgrimage he discovers that the object of his search was in the very village he had left. Paulo had also chosen the title: O Alquimista, or The Alchemist. It’s odd to think that a book that would become one of the greatest best-sellers of all time–at the beginning of 2000 it had sold more than 35 million copies–started out as a play that would combine Shakespeare and the Brazilian humourist Chico Anysio, as the author recorded in his diary in January 1987:
Menescal and [the actor] Perry [Salles] called me asking me to write a play for one actor alone on the stage. By coincidence, I was watching Duel on video, which is a film about a man alone.
I had an idea: a large laboratory in which an old man, an alchemist, is searching for the philosopher’s stone, for wisdom. He wants to discover what man can achieve through inspiration. The alchemist (perhaps that would be a good title) recites texts by Shakespeare and by Chico Anysio. He will perform songs and hold dialogues with himself, playing more than one character. He could be an alchemist or a vampire. I know through personal experience that vampires really excite the human imagination, and it’s some time since I’ve seen anything that combines horror and humour on the stage.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 41
