Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  The globalization of his literary success was finally introducing the author to another circle–the international jet set. As he had been doing since 1998, Coelho had taken part in the World Economic Forum some weeks earlier. The forum is an organization created in 1971 by the professor and economist Klaus Schwab and every year it brings together in Davos the elite of world politics and economics (at Schwab’s invitation, the author has been a member of the Schwab Foundation since 2000). The most important guest at the 2000 meeting, the American President Bill Clinton, had been photographed some months earlier clutching a copy of The Alchemist as he stepped out of a helicopter in the gardens of the White House. On hearing that Paulo was in Davos as well, Clinton took the opportunity to meet him. ‘It was my daughter Chelsea who gave me the book–in fact she ordered me to read it,’ the President joked. ‘I liked it so much that I gave it to Hillary to read as well,’ he went on, ending the meeting with an invitation that would not in fact be followed up: ‘Let me know if you’re visiting the United States. If I’m home, my family and I would love to have you over for dinner.’ Seven years later, in 2007, at the request of Hillary Clinton’s team, Paulo produced a text in support of her candidature for nomination for the presidency of the United States.

  The meeting in Davos in 2000 and in subsequent years meant that he could personally meet some of his most famous readers–such as the former Israeli prime minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Shimon Peres, the American actress Sharon Stone and the Italian author Umberto Eco–and could mingle with such world-famous names as Bill Gates and political leaders such as the Palestinian Yasser Arafat and the German Gerhard Schroeder. Interviewed during one of the ‘literary teas’ held during the forum, Umberto Eco revealed that he had read Paulo’s works, saying: ‘My favourite book by Paulo Coelho is Veronika. It touched me deeply. I confess that I don’t like The Alchemist very much, because we have different philosophical points of view. Paulo writes for believers, I write for those who don’t believe.’

  In the second half of 2000, the ‘fever’ predicted by Mônica Antunes ten years earlier had spread through all the social, economic and cultural classes regardless of race, sex or age, far less ideology. Some months before, the author had been appalled to read in the English newspaper the Guardian that The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain were the favourite bedside reading of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was at the time being held in England at the request of the Spanish courts, accused of ‘torture, terrorism and genocide’. He declared to the press: ‘I wonder if General Pinochet would continue to read my books if he knew that their author was imprisoned three times during the Brazilian military regime and had many friends who were detained in or expelled from Chile during the Chilean military regime.’ Some time later, when interviewed by the Caracas newspaper El Universal, the Venezuelan Miguel Sanabria, the ideological leader of an organization that supported President Hugo Chávez, revealed the bibliography used in his political degree course: Karl Marx, Simón Bolivar, José Carlos Mariátegui and Paulo Coelho. Books by Coelho appeared in the strangest hands and on the oddest bookshelves, such as those of the Tajik ex-major Victor Bout, who was captured at the beginning of 2008 in Thailand by American agents. In a rare interview, the retired KGB official, who was considered the biggest arms dealer in the world (and who inspired the film Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage), candidly stated to New York Times reporter Peter Landesman that, when not selling anti-aircraft missiles, he would relax by reading Paulo Coelho. In the war launched by the United States against the Al Qaeda network, Coelho’s books were read on both sides. According to the British Sunday Times, The Alchemist was the most borrowed book in the barracks library of the American soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, who were hunting for Osama Bin Laden in the Afghan caves. And on visiting Number 4 concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, where those suspected of having links with Bin Laden were imprisoned, the reporter Patrícia Campos Mello, of O Estado de São Paulo, discovered versions in Farsi of The Pilgrimage among the books offered to the prisoners by their American gaolers.

  Coelho himself was surprised when he saw the film Guantanamera, directed by the Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, to see that, on the protagonist’s long trip across the island in order to bury a relative, he was carrying a copy of The Alchemist. Since his books are not published in Cuba, he did some research and discovered that it was a Spanish copy, sold on the black market for an incredible US$40. ‘I had no qualms about contacting the Cubans and giving up my rights as author, without getting a cent,’ he later told newspapers, ‘just so that the books could be published there at lower prices and more people could have access to them.’ In an incident that shows that rudeness has no ideological colour, in 2007, Paulo was the victim of a gratuitous insult from the Cuban Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, who was responsible for the organization of the Havana Book Fair. ‘We have a problem with Paulo Coelho,’ Prieto declared to a group of foreign journalists. ‘Although he is a friend of Cuba and speaks out against the blockade, I could not invite him because that would lower the tone of the fair.’ Not a man to take insults lying down, the author paid him back on his Internet blog with a six-paragraph article that was immediately reproduced in the daily El Nuevo Herald, the most important Spanish-language newspaper published in Miami, the heart of anti-Castroism. ‘I am not at all surprised by this statement,’ he wrote. ‘Once bitten by the bug of power, those who have fought for liberty and justice become oppressors.’

  His international prominence did not distance him from his country of origin. The choice of the Brazilian Academy of Letters for the launch of The Devil and Miss Prym in October 2000 was seen as a step towards his entry into the Brazilian Academy. This was not the first such step. When Anne Carrière had organized that dinner at the Carrousel du Louvre in 1998, all the members of the Brazilian delegation in Paris had been invited, but only three writers received personal telephone calls from Paulo reiterating the invitation–Nélida Piñon, Eduardo Portela and the senator and ex-president of the Republic José Sarney. Needless to say, all three were members of the Academy.

  For the launch of The Devil and Miss Prym 4,000 invitations were sent out. The size of the crowd meant that the organizers of the event had to increase the security and support services. At the insistence of the author, one thousand plastic glasses of iced mineral water were distributed among those present, and he regretted that he could not do as he had in France, and serve French champagne.

  To everyone’s surprise, the Brazilian critics reacted well to The Devil and Miss Prym. ‘At the age of fifty-three, Paulo Coelho has produced his most accomplished work yet, with a story that arouses the reader’s curiosity and creates genuine tension,’ wrote the reviewer in the magazine Época. One of the exceptions was the astrologist Bia Abramo, in the Folha de São Paulo, who was asked by the newspaper to write a review. ‘Like his other books, The Devil and Miss Prym seems to be a well-worn parable,’ she wrote, ‘that could have been told in three paragraphs, like the various little anecdotes that tend to fill his narratives.’

  Any careful observer of the author at this time would have realized that his energies were focused not on the critics but on being given a chair in the Brazilian Academy. Paulo had no illusions and he knew, from someone else who had been rejected as a candidate, that ‘it’s easier to be elected as a state governor than to enter the Academy’. It was well known that some of the thirty-nine academicians despised him and his work. ‘I tried to read one of his books and couldn’t get beyond page eight,’ the author Rachel de Queiroz, a distant cousin, told newspapers, to which the author replied that none of his books even started on page eight. The respected Christian thinker Cândido Mendes, rector and owner of the Universidade Cândido Mendes (where Paulo had almost obtained a degree in law), gave an even harsher evaluation:

  I have read all his books from cover to cover, from back to front, which comes to the same thing. Paulo Coelho has already had more glory heaped on him in France
than Santos Dumont. But he’s not really from here: he’s from the global world of facile thinking and of ignorance transformed into a kind of sub-magic. Our very pleasant little sorcerer serves this domesticated, toothless imagination. This subculture disguised as wealth has found its perfect author. It isn’t a text but a product from a convenience store.

  Convinced that these views were not shared by the majority of the other thirty-seven electors in the Academy, Paulo did not respond to these provocative comments and went ahead with his plan. He courted the leaders of the several groups and subgroups into which the house was divided, lunched and dined with academics, and never missed the launch of a book by one of the ‘immortals’, as the members of the Academy are known. At the launch of his novel Saraminda, José Sarney, who was also a favourite target of the critics, posed smiling for the photographers as he signed Paulo’s copy, Paulo being the most sought-after by the hundreds of readers queuing to receive a dedication. The fact is that his objective had soon become an open secret. At the end of the year, the celebrated novelist Carlos Heitor Cony, who held seat 3 at the Academy, wrote in the Folha do Sul:

  I wrote an article about the contempt with which the critics treat the singer Roberto Carlos and the writer Paulo Coelho. I think it’s a miracle that the two have survived, because if they had been dependent on the media, they would be living under a bridge, begging and cursing the world. That isn’t quite how it is. Each one has a faithful public, they take no notice of the critics, they simply get on with life, they don’t retaliate and, when they can, they help others. I am a personal friend of Paulo Coelho, and he knows he can count on my vote at the Academy. I admire his character, his nobility in not attacking anyone and in making the most of the success he has achieved with dignity.

  From the moment the idea of competing for a chair at the Academy entered his head, Coelho had nurtured a secret dream: to occupy chair number 23, whose first occupant had been Machado de Assis, the greatest of all Brazilian writers and founder of the Academy. The problem was that the occupant of this chair was the academic whom Paulo most loved, admired and praised, Jorge Amado. This meant that every time the matter came up he had to be careful what he said: ‘Since the chair I want belongs to Jorge, I only hope to put myself forward when I am really old,’ he would say, ‘because I want him to live for many many more years.’

  Already eighty-eight, Jorge Amado had suffered a heart attack in 1993 and, in the years that followed, he was admitted to hospital several times. In June 2001, he was taken into a hospital in Salvador with infections in the kidneys and right lung, but recovered sufficiently to be able to celebrate at home with his family the fortieth anniversary of his election to the Academy. However, only three weeks later, on the afternoon of 6 August, the family let it be known that Jorge Amado had just died. Chair number 23 was vacant. The news reached Coelho that night via a short phone call from the journalist and academic Murilo Melo Filho: ‘Jorge Amado has died. Your time has come.’

  Paulo was filled by strange and contradictory feelings: as well as feeling excited at the thought of standing as a candidate for the Academy, he was genuinely saddened by the death of someone who had been not only one of his idols but also both a friend and faithful ally. However, this was no time for sentimentality. Paulo realized that the race for a chair in the Academy began even before the lilies had withered on the coffin of the deceased incumbent. His first campaign phone call met with disappointment, though. When he called the professor and journalist Arnaldo Niskier, who occupied chair number 18 and was one of the first to have learned, months earlier, of Paulo’s intentions, Niskier poured cold water on the idea. ‘I don’t think it’s the right moment,’ Niskier told him. ‘It looks as if Zélia is going to put herself forward, and if that happens the Academy is sure to vote in her favour.’ Zélia was the writer Zélia Gattai, Jorge Amado’s widow, who had decided to compete for her late husband’s chair.

  Alongside the many obituaries, the following morning, the newspapers announced the names of no fewer than five candidates: Zélia, Paulo, the astronomer Ronaldo Rogério de Freitas Mourão, the humourist Jô Soares and the journalist Joel Silveira. When taking his daily walk along the promenade above Copacabana beach, Coelho heard one of the few voices capable of convincing him to do–or not do–something: that of Chris. With her customary gentleness, she said that she had a bad feeling about the competition: ‘Paulo, I don’t think you’re going to win.’

  This was enough for him to give up the idea. His candidature, which had not even been formally registered, had lasted less than twelve hours. Paulo sent a fax to Zélia expressing his sorrow at her husband’s death, packed his bags and left with Chris for the south of France. The couple were going to fulfil their old dream of spending part of the year in Europe, and the place they had chosen was a region near Lourdes. One of the reasons for the trip was to look for a house to buy. While they were still hunting, their address in France was the modest but welcoming Henri IV hotel in the small city of Tarbes.

  On Tuesday, 9 October, the two were in Odos, a small village 5 kilometres from Saint-Martin, where some months later they would choose to settle. As though tempted by the Devil whom he had long ago driven away, Coelho had decided to add to his property portfolio something more suited to a rock star than to a man of almost monastic habits (a millionaire monk, that is): a castle. The castle the couple had their eye on was Château d’Odos, where Marguerite de Valois, or Margot, the wife of Henri IV, had lived and died. However, the whole affair came to nothing –‘If I bought a castle,’ he said to a journalist, ‘I wouldn’t possess it, it would possess me.’ That afternoon, he left Chris in the hotel in Tarbes and took a train to Pau, where he boarded a flight to Monte Carlo, where he was to be a member of the film festival jury. In the evening, he was having a coffee with the director Sydney Pollack, when his mobile rang.

  On the other end he heard the voice of Arnaldo Niskier: ‘Roberto Campos has just died. May I give the secretary of the Academy the signed letter you left with me putting your name forward for the first position available?’

  ‘If you think it’s the right time, yes.’

  On his return to France a few days later, he stopped off at the chapel of Notre Dame de Piétat, in the small town of Barbazan-Débat, and made a silent prayer: ‘Help me get into the Brazilian Academy of Letters.’

  A few hours later, in his hotel room in Tarbes, he gave a long interview over the telephone to the reporter Marcelo Camacho, of the Jornal do Brasil, an interview that began with the obvious question: ‘Is it true that you’re a candidate for the Brazilian Academy of Letters?’

  He replied without hesitation: ‘Absolutely.’

  And the next day’s Jornal do Brasil devoted the front page of its arts section to the scoop. In the interview, Coelho explained the reasons for his candidature (‘a desire to be a colleague of such special people’); dismissed his critics (‘if what I wrote wasn’t any good my readers would have abandoned me a long time ago, all over the world’); and vehemently condemned George W. Bush’s foreign policy (‘What the United States is doing in Afghanistan is an act of terror, that’s the only word for it, an act of terror’). The campaign for the vacant chair was official, but Coelho told the journalist that, because of a very full international programme, he would not be back in Brazil for another two months, in December, when he would carry out the ritual of visits to each of the thirty-nine electors. This delay was irrelevant, because the election had been set for March 2002, following the Academy’s end-of-year recess.

  In the weeks that followed, two other candidates appeared: the political scientist Hélio Jaguaribe and the ex-diplomat Mário Gibson Barbosa. Both were octogenarians and each had his strong and weak points. The presence in the competition of one of the most widely read authors in the world attracted the kind of interest that the Academy rarely aroused. The foreign media mobilized their correspondents in Brazil to cover the contest. In a long, sardonic article published by the New York Times, the co
rrespondent Larry Rother attributed to the Academy the power to ‘transform obscure and aged essayists, poets and philosophers into celebrities who are almost as revered as soccer players, actors or pop stars’. Rother included statements from supporters of Coelho such as Arnaldo Niskier (‘he is the Pelé of Brazilian literature’), and added:

  Mr Coelho’s public image is not that of a staid academic who enjoys the pomp of the Thursday afternoon teas for which the Academy is famous. He began his career as a rock ’n’ roll songwriter, has admitted that he was heavily into drugs at that time, spent brief periods in a mental institution as an adolescent and, perhaps worst of all, refuses to apologize for his overwhelming commercial success. Brazilian society ‘demands excellence in this house’, the novelist Nélida Piñon, a former president of the Academy, said in the newspaper O Globo in what was interpreted as a slap at Mr Coelho’s popularity. ‘We can’t let the market dictate aesthetics.’

  Ignoring all the intrigues, Paulo did what he had to do. He wrote letters, visited all the academicians (with the exception of Padre Fernando Ávila, who told him curtly that this would not be necessary) and received much spontaneous support, such as that of Carlos Heitor Cony and ex-president Sarney. On the day of the election, involving four successive ballots, none of the three candidates obtained the minimum nineteen votes required under the rules. As tradition directed, the president burned the votes in a bronze urn, announced that chair number 21 was still unoccupied and called for further elections to be held on 25 July.

  That evening, some hours after the announcement of the result of the first round, a group of ‘immortals’ appeared at Paulo’s house to offer the customary condolences. One of them–Coelho cannot remember precisely who–said: