Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  It was very good of you to put yourself forward as a candidate, and our short time together has been most enjoyable. Perhaps on another occasion you could try again.

  Since he had received a modest ten votes as opposed to the sixteen given to Jaguaribe, the group was somewhat taken aback by their host’s immediate reaction: ‘I’m not going to wait for another opportunity. I’m going to register my candidature tomorrow. I’m going to stand again.’

  It’s likely that the date of the new election was of no significance to the majority of the academicians, but Coelho saw in it an unmistakable sign that he should put himself forward as a candidate: 25 July is the feast day of St James of Compostela, the patron saint of the pilgrimage that had changed his life. Nevertheless there was no harm in asking for confirmation from the old and, in his opinion, infallible I Ching. He threw the three coins of the oracle several times, but they always gave the same result: the hexagram of the cauldron, synonymous with certain victory. The I Ching had also made a strange recommendation: ‘Go travelling and don’t come back for a while.’ He did as he was told.

  Paulo flew to France, installed himself in the hotel in Tarbes and for the following three months conducted his campaign with mobile phone and notebook in hand. When he arrived, he saw on the Internet that he was only going to have one opponent in the contest: Hélio Jaguaribe. Christina recalls being surprised by Paulo’s self-confidence: ‘I discovered that Paulo had negotiating skills about which I knew nothing. His sangfroid in taking decisions and talking to people was a side of him I didn’t know.’

  Although many of Paulo’s supporters thought it risky to run his campaign from a distance, the I Ching insisted: ‘Do not return.’ The pressure to return to Brazil grew stronger, but he remained immovable. ‘My sixth sense was telling me not to go back,’ the writer recalls, ‘and faced by a choice between my sixth sense and the academicians, I chose the former.’ But the campaign began to get serious when one of his supporters started canvassing votes during the Thursday afternoon teas using a seductive argument: ‘I’m going to vote for Paulo Coelho because the corn is good.’ In the jargon of the Academy, ‘good corn’ was a metaphor used to refer to candidates who, once elected, could bring both prestige and material benefits to the institution. From that point of view, the ‘immortal’ argued, the author of The Alchemist was very good corn indeed. There was not only his indisputable international fame, evidenced by the extraordinary interest in the election shown by the foreign media: what softened even the most hardened of hearts was the fact that the millionaire Paulo Coelho had no children, something which fuelled the hope that, on his death, he might choose the Academy as one of his heirs–as other childless academicians had in the past.

  Unaware that there were people with an eye on the wealth it had cost him such effort and energy to accumulate, three weeks before the election, Coelho returned to Rio de Janeiro. There, contrary to what the oracles had been telling him, he was not greeted with good news. His opponent’s campaign had gained ground during his absence and even some voters whom he had considered to be ‘his’ were threatening to change sides.

  On the evening of 25 July 2002, the photographers, reporters and cameramen crowding round the door of the building in Avenida Atlântica in Copacabana were invited up to the ninth floor to drink a glass of French champagne with the owners of the apartment: Paulo had just been elected by twenty-two votes to fifteen. Jaguaribe appeared not to have taken in his defeat, and was not exactly magnanimous when expressing his dismay at the result. ‘With the election of Paulo Coelho, the Academy is celebrating the success of marketing,’ he moaned. ‘His sole merit lies in his ability to sell books.’ To one journalist who wanted to know whether he would be putting his name forward again, Jaguaribe was adamant: ‘The Academy holds no interest for me any more.’ Three years later, though, once he had got over the shock, he returned and was elected to the chair left vacant by the economist Celso Furtado. A year after that, it was the turn of Celso Lafer, the foreign minister, who took the chair left vacant by Miguel Reale.

  If, in fact, any of the ‘immortals’ really had voted for Paulo Coelho in the hope that ‘the corn’ would be good, they would have been bitterly disappointed. In the first place, the international spotlight that followed him around never once lit up the Academy, for the simple reason that he has attended only six of the more than two hundred sessions held in the Academy since his election, which makes him the number one absentee. Those who dreamed that a percentage of his royalties would flow into the Academy’s coffers were also in for a disappointment. In his will, which Paulo has amended three times since his election, there is no reference to the Academy.

  Enjoying a honeymoon period following his victory, and being hailed by an article in the weekly American Newsweek as ‘the first pop artist of Brazilian literature to enter the Academy, the house which, for the past 105 years, has been the bastion of the Portuguese language and a fortress of refined taste and intellectual hauteur’, Coelho began to write his speech and prepare for his investiture, which was set for 28 October. He decided to go to Brasília in person to give President Fernando Henrique his invitation to his inauguration. He was cordially received at Planalto Palace, and was told that the President had appointments in his diary for that day, but would send a representative. While waiting for his plane at Brasília airport, he visited the bookshop there and saw several of his books on display–all of them produced by Editora Rocco and not one by Objetiva. At that moment, he began to consider leaving Objetiva and going back to his previous publisher.

  At the inaugural ceremony, the guests wore black tie while the academicians wore the uniform of the house, an olive-green gold-embroidered cashmere jacket. To complete the outfit, the ‘immortals’ also wore a velvet hat adorned with white feathers and, at their waist, a golden sword. Valued at US$26,250, the uniform used by Paulo had been paid for, as tradition decreed, by the Prefecture of Rio, the city where he was born. Among the hundreds of guests invited to celebrate the new ‘immortal’ were Paulo’s Brazilian publishers, Roberto Feith and Paulo Rocco. The polite remarks they exchanged gave no hint of the conflict to come. The episode in the bookshop at Brasília airport had brought to the surface concerns that had, in fact, been growing for a while. Something similar had occurred some months earlier, when Paulo’s agent Mônica, on holiday with her husband Øyvind in Brazil, decided to extend their trip to Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte. Mônica discovered that there were no books by Coelho on sale anywhere in the capital of Rio Grande (which at the time had more than six hundred thousand inhabitants), not even in the bookshop in the city’s international airport.

  However, the author had far more substantial reasons to be concerned. According to his calculations, during the period between 1996 and 2000 (when Objetiva launched The Fifth Mountain, Veronika and The Devil and Miss Prym), he had lost no fewer than 100,000 readers. The book whose sales he used as a reference point for this conclusion was not his blockbuster The Alchemist but By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, which was the last book published by Rocco before his move to Objetiva. What he really wanted to do was to leave Objetiva immediately and go back to Rocco; there was, however, a problem: the typescript of his next novel, Eleven Minutes, was already in the hands of Objetiva and Roberto Feith had already suggested small changes to which the author had agreed.

  As so often before, though, Paulo let the I Ching have the last word. Four days after taking his place in the Academy, he posed two questions: ‘What would happen if I published my next book, Eleven Minutes, with Editora Objetiva?’ and ‘What would happen if I published my next book and my entire backlist with Rocco?’ When the three coins had been thrown, the answer didn’t appear to be as precise as the questions: ‘Preponderance of the small. Perseverance furthers. Small things may be done; great things should not be done. The flying bird brings the message: It is not well to strive upward, it is well to remain below. Great good fortune.’ On reading this response, most people would prob
ably have been as confused as ever, but for Paulo Coelho the oracle was as clear as day: after seven years and four books, the time had come to leave Objetiva and return to Rocco.

  Annoyed by the news of the change, and particularly by the author’s decision to take with him a book that was ready for printing, Roberto Feith decided that he would only release the typescript of Eleven Minutes if Objetiva were reimbursed for the production costs. Paulo saw this as a threat and unsheathed his sword: he took on a large law firm in Rio and prepared for a long and painful legal battle. He announced that he was going back to Rocco–the publisher who, he stated, would launch Eleven Minutes during the first few months of 2003–and left for Tarbes with Chris, leaving the Brazilian publishing market seething with rumours. Some said that he had left Objetiva out of pique, because Luís Fernando Veríssimo was now their main author. Others said that Rocco had offered him US$350,000 to return.

  Things only began to calm down when Chris, on her daily walk with Paulo, advised him to bring an end to the conflict with Feith. ‘It looks as though you want a fight more than he does! What for? Why?’ she asked. ‘Do what you can to see that it ends amicably.’ After some resistance, Paulo finally gave in. He stopped in front of a crucifix and asked God to remove the hatred from his heart. A few weeks later, after some discussion between representatives of the two parties, Feith not only released Eleven Minutes but also returned to Paulo the four titles in his backlist that Paulo wanted to go to Rocco. There was just one point on which the owner of Objetiva dug in his heels: he refused to allow the insertion of his suggestions in the Rocco edition and in any foreign versions. This obliged Mônica to take back the copies of the text that had already been sent to translators in several countries. The problem had been resolved, but Coelho and Feith haven’t spoken to each other since.

  The book that had caused the uproar had its origins some years earlier, in 1997, in Mantua, in the north of Italy, where Coelho had given a lecture. When he arrived at his hotel, he found an envelope that had been left by a Brazilian named Sônia, a reader and fan who had emigrated to Europe in order to work as a prostitute. The packet contained the typescript of a book in which she told her story. Although he normally never read such typescripts, Coelho read it, liked it and suggested it to Objectiva for publication. The publisher, however, wasn’t interested. When Sônia met him again three years later in Zurich, where she was living at the time, she organized a book signing such as probably no other writer has ever experienced: she took him to Langstrasse, a street where, after ten at night, the pavement teems with prostitutes from all parts of the world. Told of Coelho’s presence in the area, dozens of them appeared bearing dog-eared copies of his books in different languages, the majority of which, the author noted, came from countries that had been part of the former Soviet Union. Since she also worked in Geneva, Sônia suggested a repetition of this extraordinary event in the red light district there. That was where he met a Brazilian prostitute whom he called Maria and whose life story was to provide the narrative for Eleven Minutes: the story of a young girl from northeastern Brazil who is brought to Europe in order, she thinks, to be a nightclub dancer, but who, on arriving, discovers that she is to be a prostitute. For the author, this was ‘not a book about prostitution or about the misfortunes of a prostitute, but about a person in search of her sexual identity. It is about the complicated relationship between feelings and physical pleasure.’

  The title he chose for the 255-page book is a paraphrase of Seven Minutes, the 1969 best-seller in which Irving Wallace describes a court case involving an attempt to ban a novel about sex. Seven minutes, according to Wallace, was the average time taken to perform a sexual act. When Eleven Minutes was published in the United States, a reporter from USA Today asked Paulo why he had added four minutes. With a chuckle, he replied that the American’s estimate reflected an Anglo-Saxon point of view and was therefore ‘too conservative by Latin standards’.

  Eleven Minutes was launched in Brazil during the first quarter of 2003 and was received by the media with their customary irony–so much so that a month before its launch the author predicted the critics’ reaction in an interview given to IstoÉ: ‘How do I know that the critics aren’t going to like it? It’s simple. You can’t loathe an author for ten of his books and love him for the eleventh.’ As well as not liking Eleven Minutes, many journalists predicted that it would be the author’s first big flop. According to several critics, the risqué theme of the book, which talks of oral sex, clitoral and vaginal orgasms, and sadomasochistic practices, was too explosive a mixture for what they imagined to be Paulo Coelho’s average reader. Exactly the opposite happened. Before the initial print run of 200,000 copies had even arrived in Brazilian bookshops in April 2003, Sant Jordi had sold the book to more than twenty foreign publishers after negotiations that earned the author US$6 million. Three weeks after its launch, Eleven Minutes was top of the best-seller lists in Brazil, Italy and Germany. The launch of the English edition attracted 2,000 people to Borders bookshop in London. As had been the case with the ten previous books, his readers in Brazil and the rest of the world gave unequivocal proof that they loved his eleventh book as well. Eleven Minutes went on to become Paulo Coelho’s second-most-read book, with 10 million copies sold, losing out only to the unassailable Alchemist.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Zahir

  PAULO AND CHRIS spent the first few months of 2004 working on making the old mill they had bought in Saint-Martin habitable. The plan to spend four months there, four in Brazil and four travelling had been scuppered by the suggested programme Mônica had sent at the beginning of the year. Sant Jordi had been overwhelmed by no fewer than 187 invitations for Paulo to present prizes and participate in events, signings, conferences and launches all over the world. If he were to agree to even half of those requests there would be no time for anything else–not even his next book, which was just beginning to preoccupy him.

  He had been working on the story in his head during the second half of the year, at the end of which time just two weeks were enough for him to set down on paper the 318 pages of O Zahir, or The Zahir, the title of which had been inspired by a story by Jorge Luís Borges about something which, once touched or seen, would never be forgotten. The nameless main character, who is easily recognizable, is an ex-rock star turned world-famous writer, loathed by the critics and adored by his readers. He lives in Paris with a war correspondent, Esther. The narrative begins with the character’s horror when he finds out that she has left him. Written at the end of 2004, in March of the following year, the book was ready to be launched in Brazil and several other countries.

  However, before it was discovered by readers around the world, Brazilians included, The Zahir was to be the subject of a somewhat surprising operation: it was to be published first in, of all places, Tehran, capital of Iran, where Coelho was the most widely read foreign author. This was a tactic by the young publisher Arash Hejazi to defeat local piracy which, while not on the same alarming scale as in Egypt, was carried out with such impunity that twenty-seven different editions of The Alchemist alone had been identified, all of them pirate copies as far as the author was concerned, but none of them illegal, because Iran is not a signatory to the international agreements on the protection of authors’ rights. The total absence of any legislation to suppress the clandestine book industry was due to a peculiarity in the law, which only protects works whose first edition is printed, published and launched in the country. In order to guarantee his publishing house, Caravan, the right to be the sole publisher of The Zahir in the country, Hejazi suggested that Mônica change the programme of international launches so that the first edition could appear in bookshops in Iran.

  Some days after the book was published, it faced problems from the government. The bad news was conveyed in a telephone call from Hejazi to the author, who was with Mônica in the Hotel Gellert in Budapest. Speaking from a public call box in order to foil the censors who might be bugging his phone, t
he terrified thirty-five-year-old publisher told Coelho that the Caravan stand at the International Book Fair in Iran had just been invaded by a group from the Basejih, the regime’s ‘morality police’. The officers had confiscated 1,000 copies of The Zahir, announced that the book was banned and ordered him to appear two days later at the censor’s office.

  Both publisher and author were in agreement as to how best to confront such violence and ensure Hejazi’s physical safety: they should tell the international public. Coelho made calls to two or three journalist friends, the first he could get hold of, and the BBC in London and France Presse immediately broadcast the news, which then travelled around the world. This reaction appears to have frightened off the authorities, because, a few days later, the books were returned without any explanation and the ban lifted. It was understandable that a repressive and moralistic state such as Iran should have a problem with a book that deals with adulterous relationships. What was surprising was that the hand of repression should touch someone as popular in the country as Paulo Coelho, who was publicly hailed as ‘the first non-Muslim writer to visit Iran since the ayatollahs came to power’–that is, since 1979.

  In fact, Coelho had visited the country in May 2000 as the guest of President Mohamed Khatami, who was masterminding a very tentative process of political liberalization. When they landed in Tehran, and even though it was three in the morning, Paulo and Chris (who was wearing a wedding ring on her left hand and had been duly informed of the strictures imposed on women in Islamic countries) were greeted by a crowd of more than a thousand readers who had learned of the arrival of the author of The Alchemist from the newspapers. It was just before the new government was about to take office and the political situation was tense. The streets of the capital were filled every day with student demonstrations in support of Khatami’s reforms, which were facing strong opposition from the conservative clerics who hold the real power in the country. Although accompanied everywhere by a dozen or so Brazilian and foreign journalists, Coelho was never far from the watchful eyes of the six security guards armed with machine guns who had been assigned to him. After giving five lectures and various book signings for Brida, with an audience of never fewer than a thousand, he was honoured by the Minister of Culture, Ataolah Mohajerani, with a gala dinner where the place of honour was occupied by no less a person than President Khatami. When the seventy-year-old Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dolatabadi turned down an invitation to be present at the banquet given in honour of his Brazilian colleague, of whom he was a self-confessed admirer, he referred to the limitations and the fragility of Khatami’s liberalization process. Hounded by the government, he refused to fraternize with its censors. ‘I cannot be interrogated in the morning,’ he told the reporters, ‘and in the evening have coffee with the president.’