Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Even the monthly literary tabloid Leia Livros, a cult publication edited by Caio Graco Prado, found itself bowing to the sheer force of numbers. On the cover of the December 1989 edition, Paulo appeared with sword in hand, hair bristling and gazing Zen-like into infinity. The treatment meted out to him by Leia Livros, however, was no different from the approach normally adopted by other members of the press. Of the twelve pages of the article, eleven were taken up with a detailed profile of the author, with no evaluation of his work. The actual review, signed by Professor Teixeira Coelho of the University of São Paulo, occupied only half a page. The average Brazilian–as one presumes most readers of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist were–might have had difficulty in understanding whether Paulo was being praised or insulted, so convoluted was the reviewer’s language:

  The time when vision, imagination, the non-rational (albeit with its own rationality) were considered an integral part of the real and came ‘from above’ it was just a mental habit. This norm defined a cultural paradigm, a way of thinking and knowing about the world. This paradigm was replaced by the new rationalist paradigm of the eighteenth century. Today, it is this paradigm that appears to be (temporarily) exhausted. The Paulo Coelho phenomenon is a symbol of the decadence of this paradigm and implies a distrust of rationalism as we have known it over the last two centuries.

  […] I prefer to see in the sales success of Paulo Coelho’s works the primacy of the imagination, which continues to exert its power in different forms (religions, ‘magic’, ‘alternative’ medicine and sex, the poetic road to knowledge), forms that old-fashioned emblematic Cartesian thinking would designate as ‘irrational’.

  […] Within the Paulo Coelho genre, Lawrence Durrell with his ‘Avignon Quintet’ is a better writer, and Colin Wilson more intellectual. However, such judgements are superfluous.

  While the press was racking its brains as to how to understand the phenomenon, it continued to grow. In a rare unguarded moment–especially when it came to money–Paulo revealed to the Jornal da Tarde that the two books had so far earned him US$250,000. It may well have been more. Assuming that the amounts he and Rocco disclosed were true, the 500,000 copies sold up until then would have brought him at least $350,000 in royalties.

  With two best-sellers, a new publisher, hundreds of thousands of dollars or more invested in property and his international career showing signs of taking off, Paulo was summoned by Jean to fulfil another of the four sacred paths that initiates to RAM must follow. After the Road to Santiago, he had performed a further penance (the trip to the Mojave Desert), but there was still the third and penultimate stage, the Road to Rome. The fourth would be the road towards death. The so-called Road to Rome was merely a metaphor, since it could be followed anywhere in the world, with the added advantage that it could be undertaken by car. He chose Languedoc, on the edge of the Pyrenees in southwestern France, where a Christian religious sect, Catharism or Albigensianism, had flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, only to be stamped out by the Inquisition. Another peculiarity of the Road to Rome was that the pilgrim must always follow his dreams. Paulo thought this too abstract and asked for more information, but the reply was less than illuminating: ‘If you dream of a bus stop during the night, the following morning go to the nearest bus stop. If you dream of a bridge, your next stop should be a bridge.’

  For a little more than two months he wandered through the valleys and across the mountains and rivers of what is one of the most beautiful regions of Europe. On 15 August he left the Hotel d’Anvers in Lourdes, where he had been staying, and continued on towards Foix, Roquefixade, Montségur, Peyrepertuse, Bugarach and dozens of other tiny villages which were, in the majority of cases, no more than a handful of houses. Since Jean had made no restrictions on the matter, Paulo travelled part of the route in the company of Mônica, who skipped work in Barcelona for a week in order to go with him.

  On the evening of 21 August 1989, when they reached Perpignan, he used a public phone to call Chris in Brazil, because he was missing her. Chris told him that his ex-partner Raul Seixas had died in São Paulo from pancreatitis, brought on by alcoholism.

  This was an enormous loss for Paulo. After not seeing one another for several years, he and Raul had met up again four months earlier in Rio de Janeiro during a show Raul was giving in Canecão, which would prove to be one of his last. It was not a reconciliation, since they had never quarrelled, but it was an attempt on the part of Raul’s new musical partner, the young rock star Marcelo Nova, to bring them back together again. During the show, Paulo was called up on to the stage to sing the chorus ‘Viva! Viva! Viva a Sociedade Alternativa!’ with the band. According to his ex-slave Toninho Buda, the author sang with his hands in his pockets, ‘because he was being forced to sing Crowley’s mantra in public and had to keep his fingers crossed’. Parts of the show were filmed by an amateur fan and put on the Internet years later. They show a shaky Raul Seixas, his face puffy and with all the appearance of someone ruined by drink.

  The last work the two had done together was the LP Mata Virgem, which had been recorded long ago, in 1978. In 1982 the Eldorado label, based in São Paulo, tried to revive the duo with a new album, but as a Rio journalist put it, they both seemed to be ‘inflicted by acute primadonnaitis’: Paulo lived in Rio and Raul in São Paulo, and both refused to travel to where the other was in order to start work. Solomon-like, Roberto Menescal suggested a solution. He had been invited to produce the record and suggested meeting exactly halfway between the two cities in the Itatiaia national park. They arrived at the Hotel Simon on a Sunday, and when Paulo woke early on the Monday, before even having a coffee, he left a note under the door of Raul’s room: ‘I’m ready to start work.’ Raul didn’t even show his face. The same thing happened again on Tuesday. On the Wednesday, the owner went to Paulo, concerned that Raul had been shut up in his room for three days, drinking and not even touching the sandwiches he had ordered by phone. Any hope of reuniting the duo who had revolutionized Brazilian rock music died there and then.

  Six days after the news of the death of his ‘close enemy’, still shaken and still on the Road to Rome, Paulo had what he describes as another extrasensory experience. He was heading for one of the small towns in the region where he was to take part in the so-called ritual of fire, during which invocations are made in the light of a bonfire. On the way, he says, he felt the presence beside him of no less a person–or thing–than his guardian angel. It wasn’t a tangible or audible being, nor even an ectoplasm, but a being whose presence he could clearly feel and with whom he could only communicate mentally. According to his recollection, it was the being that took the initiative, and a non-verbal dialogue took place.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Paulo kept his eyes on the road and said: ‘I want my books to be read.’

  ‘But in order for that to happen you’re going to have to take a lot of flack.’

  ‘But why? Just because I want my books to be read?’

  ‘Your books will bring you fame, and then you’re really going to get it in the neck. You’ve got to decide whether that really is what you want.’

  Before disappearing into the atmosphere, the being said to him: ‘I’m giving you a day to think about it. Tonight you will dream of a particular place. That’s where we shall meet at the same time tomorrow.’

  In the hotel where he was staying in Pau, he dreamed of a small ‘tram’ taking passengers to the top of a very high mountain. When he woke the following morning, he learned at reception that one of the city’s attractions was precisely that: a cable car, the Funiculaire de Pau, which set off only a few metres from the hotel, next to the railway station. The hill where the dark-green cable car let off its thirty or so passengers every ten minutes was not as high as the one in his dream, but there was no doubt that he was on the right route. When it was getting dark, more or less twenty-four hours after the apparition of the previous day, Paulo joined a short queue and minutes later, reached
a terrace surrounded by fountains–the Fontaine de Vigny, where he had an amazing view of the lights in the city coming on. The writer recalls clearly not only the date–‘It was 27 September 1989, the feast-day of Cosmos and Damian’–but also what he said to the apparition: ‘I want my books to be read. But I want to be able to renew my wish in three years’ time. Give me three years and I’ll come back here on 27 September 1992 and tell you whether I’m man enough to continue or not.’

  The seemingly interminable seventy days of the pilgrimage were drawing to a close, when one night, following the ‘ritual of fire’, a fair-skinned, fair-haired young woman went up to him and began a conversation. Her name was Brida O’Fern, and she was a thirty-year-old Irish woman who had reached the rank of Master in RAM and, like him, was following the Road to Rome. Brida’s company proved to be not only a pleasant gift that would alleviate his weariness as he completed the pilgrimage, for Paulo was so delighted by the stories she told him that he decided to base his third book on her, which, like her, would be called Brida. Writing about the Road to Rome could come later.

  Once he had completed the trial set by Jean, he set about writing Brida, using a method he would continue to use from then on: he would ponder the subject for some time and then, when the story was ready, write the book in two weeks. The novel tells the story and adventures of the young Brida O’Fern, who, at twenty-one, decides to enter the world of magic. Her discoveries start when she meets a wizard in a forest 150 kilometres from Dublin. Guided by the witch Wicca, she starts her journey and, after completing all the rituals, finally becomes a Master in RAM. In the very first pages the author warns his readers:

  In my book The Diary of a Magus, I replaced two of the practices of RAM with exercises in perception learned in the days when I worked in drama. Although the results were, strictly speaking, the same, I received a severe reprimand from my Teacher. ‘There may well be quicker or easier methods, that doesn’t matter; what matters is that the Tradition remains unchanged,’ he said. For this reason, the few rituals described in Brida are the same as those practised over the centuries by the Tradition of the Moon–a specific tradition, which requires experience and practice. Practising such rituals without guidance is dangerous, inadvisable, unnecessary and can greatly hinder the Spiritual Search.

  Encouraged by the success of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist, Rocco, when he learned that Paulo had a new book on the boil, took the initiative and offered him US$60,000 for Brida. Although the amount offered was high by Brazilian standards, it certainly didn’t break any records (a few months earlier Rocco had paid US$180,000 for the right to publish Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities). What was so different was the way in which Paulo proposed that the money should be divided up, a method he would continue to use in almost all negotiations over his future publications in Brazil: US$20,000 would be spent by the publisher on promotion and advertising; a further US$20,000 would be used to cover the journeys he would have to make within Brazil to promote the book; and only US$20,000 would go to him as an advance against royalties. The biggest surprise, which was kept secret by the publisher until a few days before its launch during the first week of August 1990, was that the first edition of Brida would have a print run of 100,000 copies–a run surpassed among Brazilian authors only by Jorge Amado, whose novel Tieta do Agreste [translated as Tieta, the Goat Girl] was launched in 1977 with an initial print run of 120,000 copies.

  The angel Paulo met near Pau was absolutely right when he predicted that the author would be massacred by the critics. The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist had been treated fairly gently by the press, but when Brida was launched, the critics appeared to want blood. Merciless and on many occasions almost rude, the main newspapers in Rio and São Paulo seemed determined to demolish him:

  The author writes very badly. He doesn’t know how to use contractions, his use of pronouns is poor, he chooses prepositions at random, and doesn’t know even simple things, like the difference between the verbs ‘to speak’ and ‘to say’.

  (Luiz Garcia, O Globo)

  In aesthetic terms, Brida is a failure. It is an imitation of Richard Bach’s tedious model seasoned with a little Carlos Castaneda. Paulo Coelho’s book is full of stereotypes.

  (Juremir Machado da Silva, O Estado de São Paulo)

  What he should perhaps announce more boldly is that he can make it rain. For that is precisely what Paulo Coelho does–on his own garden.

  (Eugênio Bucci, Folha de São Paulo)

  …one of those books which, once you’ve put it down, you can’t pick up again.

  (Raul Giudicelli, Jornal do Commercio)

  The insults came from all sides, not only from newspapers and magazines. A few days after the launch of Brida, the author was interviewed on a popular Brazilian television chat show, Jô Soares Onze e Meia, which was broadcast nationally by SBT. Although they were friends and had worked together on the soft-porn movie Tangarela, a Tanga de Cristal, the presenter joined the attack on Paulo Coelho and opened the programme with a list of dozens of errors he had discovered in The Alchemist. The interview provoked a parallel squabble. Two days later, the Rio newspaper O Dia carried a note in the column written by Artur da Távola, Paulo’s ex-colleague in the working group at Philips and someone who had contributed a preface to Arquivos do Inferno, entitled ‘Credit where credit’s due, Jô’:

  Although we weren’t given due credit–he did, after all, go into the studio with a fax of the article published in this paper listing the eighty-six [grammatical] mistakes found in The Alchemist, requested from us by the producers of their programme on SBT–Jô Soares interviewed the writer Paulo Coelho the day before yesterday going on about the errors overlooked by Editora Rocco.

  The magus justified the publisher’s editorial laxity by stating that all the errors had been made on purpose. ‘They’re codes,’ said Paulo Coelho. ‘If they weren’t, they would have been corrected in later editions.’

  There remained, however, a faint hope that someone in the media might read his books with the same unprejudiced eyes as the thousands of people who were flocking to bookshops across the country looking for one of his three books. Perhaps it would be Brazil’s most widely read and influential weekly, Veja, which had decided to put him on its next cover? After giving a long interview and posing for photographs, the writer waited anxiously for Sunday morning, when the magazine would arrive on the news-stands in Rio. The first surprise was seeing the cover, where, instead of his photo, he found the image of a crystal ball under the title ‘The Tide of Mysticism’. He quickly leafed through the magazine until he came to the article, entitled ‘The All-High Wizard’ and illustrated with a photograph of him in a black cloak and trainers and holding a crook in his hand. He began to skim-read, but needed to go no farther than the tenth line to realize that the journalist (the article was unsigned) was using heavy artillery fire: Brida, The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist were all classed as ‘books with badly told metaphysical stories steeped in a vague air of mysticism’. In the following six pages, the bombardment continued with the same intensity, and hardly a paragraph went by that did not contain some criticism, gibe or ironic remark: ‘crazy superstitions’ ‘it’s impossible to know where genuine belief ends and farce begins’ ‘yet another surfer on the lucrative wave of mysticism’ ‘he pocketed US$20,000 as an advance for perpetrating Brida and is already thinking of charging for his talks’ ‘surely the worst of his books’ ‘pedestrian fiction’. Not even his faith was spared. Referring to the religious order to which he belonged, Veja stated that Regnum Agnus Mundi was nothing more than ‘an assemblage of Latin words that could be translated approximately as Kingdom of the Lamb of the World’. Despite the hours of interviewing time he had given them, only one sentence was used in its entirety. When he was asked what was the reason for his success, he had replied: ‘It’s a divine gift.’

  The author reacted by writing a short letter to Veja, saying: ‘I should like to make just one correction to the ar
ticle “The All-High Wizard”. I do not intend to charge for my talks to the public. The remainder came as no surprise: we are all idiots and you are very intelligent.’ He sent a long article to the journalist Luiz Garcia of O Globo, which was published under the headline ‘I am the Flying Saucer of Literature’, and in which for the first time Paulo complained about the treatment he had received from the media:

  At the moment I am the flying saucer of literature–regardless of whether or not you like its shape, its colours and its crew. So I can understand the astonishment, but why the aggression? For three years the public has been buying my books in ever greater numbers and I really don’t think I could fool so many people in so many age groups and from all social classes at the same time. All I’ve done is try to show my truth and the things in which I sincerely believe–although the critics haven’t even spared my beliefs.

  The author of the review replied on the same page, at the end of which he adopted as abrasive a tone as he had before: ‘Resigned to the fact that he will continue, as he says in his all too mistakable style, to “fight the good fight”, I would simply advise him not to persist with his thesis that writing simply and writing badly are the same thing. It does him no favours.’

  Fortunately for Paulo, the bacteria of the critics’ remarks did not infect sales. While the journalists, magnifying glass in hand, searched for misused verbs, doubtful agreements and misplaced commas, the readers kept buying the book. A week after it went on the market, Brida topped the best-seller lists throughout the country, bringing the author a new record, that of having three books simultaneously in the national best-seller lists. The popular phenomenon that Paulo Coelho had become meant that public figures, intellectuals and artists had to have an opinion about him. Curiously enough, to judge by the statements in various newspapers and magazines of the time, while the critics may have been unanimous, the world of celebrities seemed divided: