Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Some weeks after The Zahir’s publication in Iran, 8 million copies of the book, translated into forty-two languages, arrived in bookshops in eighty-three countries. When it was launched in Europe, the novel came to the attention of the newspapers–not in the political pages, as had been the case with the Iranian censorship, but in the gossip columns. In the spring of 2005, a question had been going round the press offices of the European media: who was the inspiration behind the book’s main female character, Esther? The first suspect, put forward by the Moscow tabloid Komsomólskaia Pravda, was the beautiful Russian designer Anna Rossa, who was reported to have had a brief affair with the author. When he read the news, which was reproduced on an Italian literary website, Coelho was quick to send the newspaper a letter, which his friend the journalist Dmitry Voskoboynikov translated:

  Dear readers of Komsomólskaia Pravda

  I was most intrigued to learn from your newspaper that I had an affair with the designer Anna Rossa three years ago and that this woman is supposedly the main character in my new book, The Zahir. Happily or unhappily, we shall never know which, the information is simply not true.

  When I was shown a photo of this young woman at my side, I remembered her at once. In fact, we were introduced at a reception at the Brazilian embassy. Now I am no saint, but there was not and probably never will be anything between the two of us.

  The Zahir is perhaps one of my deepest books, and I have dedicated it to my partner Christina Oiticica, with whom I have lived for twenty-five years. I wish you and Anna Rossa love and success.

  Yours

  Paulo Coelho

  In the face of this quick denial, the journalists’ eyes turned to another beautiful woman, the Chilean Cecília Bolocco, Miss Universe 1987, who, at the time, was presenting La Noche de Cecília, a highly successful chat show in Chile. On her way to Madrid, where she was recording interviews for her programme, she burst out laughing when she learned that she was being named as the inspiration for Esther in The Zahir: ‘Don’t say that! Carlito gets very jealous…’ The jealous ‘Carlito’ was the former Argentine president, Carlos Menem, whom she had married in May 2000, when he was seventy and she was thirty-five. Cecília’s reaction was understandable. Some years earlier, the press had informed readers that she had had an affair with Coelho between the beginning of 1999 and October 2000, when she was married to Menem. Both had vehemently denied the allegations. Suspicions also fell on the Italian actress Valeria Golino.

  However, on 17 April 2005, a Sunday, the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã announced on its front page that the woman on whom Paulo had based the character was the English journalist Christina Lamb, war correspondent for the Sunday Times. When she was phoned up in Harare, where she was doing an interview, she couldn’t believe that the secret had been made public. She was the ‘real-life Esther’, the newspaper confirmed. ‘All last week I fielded phone calls from newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, South Africa, even Britain, asking how I felt being “Paulo Coelho’s muse”,’ she said in a full-page article in the Sunday Times Review, entitled ‘He stole my soul’ and with a curious subtitle: ‘Christina Lamb has covered many foreign wars for the Sunday Times, but she had no defences when one of the world’s bestselling novelists decided to hijack her life.’

  In the article, the journalist says that she met Coelho two years earlier when she was chosen to interview him about the success of Eleven Minutes. At the time, the writer was still living in the Henri IV hotel. This was their only meeting. During the following months, they exchanged e-mails, he in the south of France and she in Kandahar and Kabul, in Afghanistan. Coelho so enjoyed Christina’s The Sewing Circles of Herat that he included it in his ‘Top Ten Reads’ on the Barnes & Noble website. When she checked her e-mails in June 2004 she found, ‘among the usual monotonous updates from the coalition forces in Kabul and junk offering penis enlargement’, a message from Coelho with a huge attachment. It was the Portuguese typescript of his just completed book The Zahir, with a message saying: ‘The female character was inspired by you.’ He then explained that he had thought of trying to meet, but she was always away, so he had used her book and Internet research to create the character. In the article published in the Sunday Times, she describes what she felt as she read the e-mail:

  I was part astonished, part flattered, part alarmed. He didn’t know me. How could he have based a character on me? I felt almost naked. Like most people, I guess, there were things in my life I would not wish to see in print. […]

  So with some trepidation I downloaded the 304-page file and opened it. As I read the manuscript I recognized things I had told him in Tarbes, insights into my private world, as well as concerns I had discussed in my book.

  The first paragraph began: ‘Her name is Esther, she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children.’

  At least he had made me younger.

  What had at first seemed amusing (‘I was starting to enjoy the idea that the heroine was based on me, and now here she was disappearing on page one,’ Christina wrote) was becoming uncomfortable as she read on:

  I was slightly concerned about his description of how Esther and her husband had met. ‘One day, a journalist comes to interview me. She wants to know what it’s like to have my work known all over the country but to be entirely unknown myself…She’s pretty, intelligent, quiet. We meet again at a party, where there’s no pressure of work, and I manage to get her into bed that same night.’

  Astonished by what she had read, Christina told her mother and her husband–a Portuguese lawyer named Paulo:

  Far from sharing my feeling of flattery, he was highly suspicious about why another man should be writing a book on his wife. I told a few friends and they looked at me as though I was mad. I decided it was better not to mention it to anyone else.

  If the Correio da Manhã had not revealed the secret, the matter would have ended there. The revelation would not, after all, have caused any further discomfort for the journalist, as she herself confessed in her article:

  Once I got used to it, I decided I quite liked being a muse. But I was not quite sure what muses do. […] I asked Coelho how a muse should behave. ‘Muses must be treated like fairies,’ he replied, adding that he had never had a muse before. I thought being a muse probably involved lying on a couch with a large box of fancy chocolates, looking pensive. […] But being a muse is not easy if you work full time and have a five-year-old. […] In the meantime, I have learnt that going to interview celebrity authors can be more hazardous than covering wars. They might not shoot you but they can steal your soul.

  The book seemed destined to cause controversy. Accustomed to the media’s hostility towards Coelho’s previous books, Brazilian readers had a surprise during the final week of March 2005. On all the news-stands in the country three of the four major weekly magazines had photos of Coelho on the cover and inside each were eight pages about the author and his life. This unusual situation led the journalist Marcelo Beraba, the ombudsman of the Folha de São Paulo, to dedicate the whole of his Sunday column to the subject.

  The ‘case of the three covers’, as it became known, was deemed important only because it revealed a radical change in behaviour in a media which, with a few rare exceptions, had treated the author very badly. It was as though Brazil had just discovered a phenomenon that so many countries had been celebrating since the worldwide success of The Alchemist.

  Whatever the critics might say, what distinguished Paulo from other best-sellers, such as John Grisham and Dan Brown, was the content of his books. Some of those authors might even sell more books, but they don’t fill auditoriums around the world, as Paulo does. The impact his work has on his readers can be measured by the hundreds of e-mails that he receives daily from all corners of the earth, many of them from people telling him how reading his books has changed their lives. Ordinary letters posted from the most remote
places, sometimes simply addressed to ‘Paulo Coelho–Brazil’, arrive by the sackload.

  In February 2006–as if in acknowledgement of his popularity–Coelho received an invitation from Buckingham Palace–from Sir James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn and Lord Steward of the Household. This was for a state banquet to be given some weeks later for the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during the President’s official visit to Britain. The invitation made clear that the occasion called for ‘white tie with decorations’. As the date of the banquet approached, however, newspapers reported that, at the request of the Brazilian government, both President Lula and his seventy-strong delegation had been relieved of the obligation to wear tails. When he read this, Coelho (who had dusted off his tails, waistcoat and white tie) was confused as to what to do. Concerned that he might make a blunder, he decided to send a short e-mail to the Royal Household asking for instructions: ‘I just read that President Lula vetoed the white tie for the Brazilian Delegation. Please let me know how to proceed–I don’t want to be the only one with a white tie.’

  The reply, signed by a member of the Royal Household, arrived two days later, also by e-mail:

  Mr. Coelho:

  Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II has agreed that President Lula and members of his official suite need not wear white tie to the State Banquet. However, that will be just a small number of people (less than 20). The remainder of the 170 guests will be in white tie, so I can reassure you that you will not be the only person wearing white tie. The Queen does expect her guests to wear white tie and you are officially a guest of Her Majesty The Queen, not President Lula.

  CHAPTER 30

  One hundred million copies sold

  SOME WEEKS AFTER HANDING HIS PUBLISHERS the typescript of The Witch of Portobello, which he had finished a week prior to the banquet at Buckingham Palace, Coelho was preparing for a new test. Two decades had passed since 1986, when he had followed the Road to Santiago, the first and most important of the penances imposed by Jean. In the years that followed, the mysterious Master had, in agreement with Coelho, regularly ordered further trials. At least one of these the author has confessed to having fulfilled purely out of respect for the duty to find disciples to whom he should transmit the knowledge he had received from Jean and show them the route to spiritual enlightenment. ‘I have disciples because I am obliged to, but I don’t enjoy it,’ he told journalists. ‘I’m very lazy and have little patience.’ In spite of this resistance, he has acted as guide to four new initiates as demanded by RAM.

  Besides following the Routes, the name given by members of the order to the different pilgrimages, he was ordered by Jean to submit to various tests. Some of these did not require much willpower or physical strength, such as praying at least once a day with his hands held beneath a jet of flowing water, which could be from a tap or a stream. Coelho does, however, admit to having been given tasks that were not at all easy to perform, such as submitting to a vow of chastity for six months, during which time even masturbation was forbidden. In spite of this deprivation, he speaks with good humour about the experience, which happened in the late 1980s. ‘I discovered that sexual abstinence is accompanied by a great deal of temptation,’ he recalls. ‘The penitent has the impression that every woman desires him, or, rather, that only the really pretty ones do.’ Some of these tests were akin to rituals of self-flagellation. For three months, for example, he was obliged to walk for an hour a day, barefoot and without a shirt, through brushwood in thick scrubland until his chest and arms were scratched by thorns and the soles of his feet lacerated by stones. Compared with that, tasks such as fasting for three days or having to look at a tree for five minutes every day for months on end were as nothing.

  The task Jean set his disciple in April 2006 may seem to a layman totally nonsensical. The time had come for him to take the External Road to Jerusalem, which meant spending four months (or, as the initiates prefer to say, ‘three months plus one’) wandering about the world, wherever he chose, without setting foot in either of his two homes–the house in France and his apartment in Rio de Janeiro. For him this meant spending all that time in hotels. Did this mean that only those with enough money to pay for such an extravagance could join the order? Coelho had been troubled by this very question twenty years earlier, just before setting off along the Road to Santiago, and he recalls Jean’s encouraging reply: ‘Travelling isn’t always a question of money, but of courage. You spent a large part of your life travelling the world as a hippie. What money did you have then? None. Hardly enough to pay for your fare, and yet those were, I believe, some of the best years of your life–eating badly, sleeping in railway stations, unable to communicate because of the language, being forced to depend on others even for finding somewhere to spend the night.’

  If the new Road to Jerusalem was unavoidable, the solution was to relax and put the time to good use. He devoted the first few weeks to carrying out a small number of the engagements that had accumulated in Sant Jordi’s diary, among which was the London Book Fair. While there, he chanced to meet Yuri Smirnoff, the owner of Sophia, his publisher in Russia. Coelho told him that he was in the middle of a strange pilgrimage and that this might be the perfect opportunity to realize an old dream: to take the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway which crosses 9,289 kilometres and traverses 75 per cent of Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Some weeks later, he received a phone call while he was touring in Catalonia, in northern Spain. It was Smirnoff calling to say that he had decided to make Coelho’s dream come true and was offering him a fortnight on one of the longest railway journeys in the world.

  Coelho assumed that the gift would be a compartment on the train. Much to his surprise, when he arrived in Moscow on 15 May, the agreed date for his departure, he discovered that Smirnoff had decided to turn the trip into a luxurious ‘happening’. He had hired two entire coaches. Paulo would travel in a suite in the first, and the other two compartments would be occupied by Smirnoff, his wife and Eva, an admirer of Coelho’s work, who would act as his interpreter during the two-week journey. He was also provided with a chef, two cooks and a waiter, as well as two bodyguards from the Russian government to ensure their guest’s safety. The second coach was to be given over to thirty journalists from Russia and other European countries, who had been invited to accompany the author. Altogether, this kind gesture cost Smirnoff about US$200,000, and it proved to be a very poor investment indeed: some months later Coelho left Sophia for another publisher, Astrel.

  It turned out to be an exhausting fortnight, not just because of the distance covered, but because he was constantly besieged by his readers. At every stop, the platforms were filled by hundreds and hundreds of readers wanting an autograph, a handshake, or even just a word. After crossing the provinces in the far east of Russia and skirting the frontiers of Mongolia and China, on a journey that crossed eight time zones, the group finally arrived in Vladivostok on the edge of the Sea of Japan on 30 May.

  During the interviews he gave while on his Trans-Siberian journey Coelho made it clear that, in spite of the comfort in which he was travelling, it was not a tourist trip. ‘This is not just a train journey,’ he insisted several times, ‘but a spiritual journey through space and time in order to complete a pilgrimage ordered by my Master.’ Despite all these years of being a constant presence in newspapers and magazines across the world, no journalist has ever been able to discover the true identity of the mysterious character to whom Paulo owes so much. Some months after the end of the World Cup in 2006, someone calling himself simply a ‘reader of Paulo Coelho’ sent a photo to the website set up for collecting information for this book. It showed Coelho wearing a Brazilian flag draped over his shoulders, Christina and a third person walking down a street. The third person was a thin man, with grey hair, wearing faded jeans, a Brazilian football shirt and a mobile phone hanging around his neck. It was hard to identify him because he was wearing a cap and sunglasses and his righ
t hand was partly covering his face. The photograph bore a short caption written by the anonymous contributor: ‘This photo was taken by me in Berlin during the 2006 World Cup. The man in the cap is Jean, Paulo Coelho’s Master in RAM.’ When he saw the photo, the author was deliberately vague: ‘What can I say?’ he said. ‘If it isn’t him, it’s very like him.’

  Two months after the end of the World Cup, Brazilian bookshops were receiving the first 100,000 copies of The Witch of Portobello. It was a book full of new ideas. The first of these, to be found right at the beginning, is the method used by the author to relate the travails of Athena, the book’s protagonist. The story of the young Gypsy girl born in Transylvania, in Romania, and abandoned by her biological mother is narrated by fifteen different characters. This device brought eloquent praise for his work in the Folha de São Paulo. ‘One cannot deny that, in literary terms, this is one of Paulo Coelho’s most ambitious novels,’ wrote Marcelo Pen. The book is the story of Athena’s life. Adopted by a Lebanese couple and taken to Beirut, from where the family is driven out by the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 until 1990, she then settles in London. She grows up in Britain, where she is educated, marries and has a son. She works for a bank before leaving her husband and going to Romania in order to find her biological mother. She then moves to the Persian Gulf, where she becomes a successful estate agent in Dubai. On her return to London, she develops and seeks to deepen her spirituality, becoming, in the end, a priestess, who attracts hundreds of followers. As a result of this, however, she becomes a victim of religious intolerance.