The children at Our Lady Victorious ranged in age from seven to eleven, and the school made a point of inculcating the pupils with a belief in the values of hard work and of respect for one’s fellows. The children had to learn by heart the school rules, one of which was: ‘It shows a lack of politeness, Christian charity and fellowship to wound less talented or less intelligent colleagues by words or laughter.’ Coelho loathed all the subjects he was taught, without exception. The only reason he put up with the torment of spending his days bent over his books was that he had to get good marks in order to move up to the next year. In the first two years he spent at Our Lady Victorious, he managed to achieve well-above-average marks. However, from the third year on, things began to slip, as can be seen in a letter he sent to Pedro on Father’s Day in 1956:
Papa,
I only got one in my maths test, so I’m going to have to study with you every night. My averages in the other subjects improved though. In religion I went from zero to six, in Portuguese from zero to six and a half, but in maths I went from four and a half to two and a half. My overall place in the class was still pretty bad, but I improved a bit, moving from twenty-fifth to sixteenth.
Love,
Paulo
Twenty-fifth was, in fact, bottom of the class, given that the classes at Our Lady Victorious had a maximum of twenty-five boys in them. However, the fact that he was bottom of the class didn’t mean that the Coelhos were bringing up a fool. On the contrary. Their son may have hated studying, but he loved reading. He would read anything and everything, from fairy tales to Tarzan, and whatever his parents bought him or his friends lent him. Little by little, Coelho became the estate’s resident storyteller. Years later, his aunt, Cecília Dantas Arraes, would recall the ‘boy with skinny legs and baggy, wide-legged trousers’: ‘When he wasn’t thinking up some mischief, he would be sitting on the pavement with his friends around him while he told stories.’
One night, he was with his parents and grandparents watching a quiz programme, The Sky’s the Limit. A professor was answering questions about the Roman Empire and when the quiz master asked the professor who had succeeded Julius Caesar, Paulo jumped up and, to everyone’s astonishment, said: ‘Octavius Augustus’, adding: ‘I’ve always liked Octavius Augustus. He was the one August was named after, and that’s the month I was born in.’
Knowing more than his friends was one way of compensating for his physical weakness. He was very thin, frail and short, and both on the estate and at school he was known as ‘Pele’–‘skin’–a Rio term used at the time for boys who were always getting beaten up by their classmates. He may have been his peers’ favourite victim, but he soon learned that knowing things no one else knew and reading stories none of his peers had read was one way of gaining their respect.
He realized that he would never come top in anything at school, but when he learned that there was to be a writing competition for all the boys in the third year, he decided to enter. The subject was ‘The Father of Aviation’, Alberto Santos Dumont. This is what Coelho wrote:
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alberto Santos Dumont. Every day, early in the morning, Alberto would watch the birds flying and sometimes he would think: ‘If eagles can fly, why can’t I, after all, I’m more intelligent than the eagles.’ Santos Dumont then decided to study hard, and his father and his mother, Francisca Dumont, sent him to an aeromodelling school.
Other people, such as Father Bartholomew and Augusto Severo, had tried to fly before. Augusto Severo flew in a balloon that he had built, but it fell to earth and he died. But Santos Dumont did not give up. He built a balloon that was a tube filled with gas and he flew, went round the Jefel [sic] Tower in Paris and landed in the same place he had taken off from.
Then he decided to invent an aeroplane that was heavier than air. Its shell was made of bamboo and silk. In 1906, in Champs de Bagatelle, he tried out the aeroplane. Lots of people laughed, convinced he would never fly. But Santos Dumont with his 14-bis travelled along for more than 220 metres and suddenly the wheels left the ground. When the crowd saw it there was a cry of ‘Ah!’ And that was it, aviation had been invented.
The best composition was to be chosen by a vote among the pupils. Paulo was so lacking in confidence that when it came to voting, he ended up choosing the work of another pupil. When the votes were counted, though, he was astonished to find that he was the winner. The pupil for whom he had voted came second, but was later disqualified when it was discovered that he had copied the text from a newspaper article.
However, Paulo’s performance in the competition was not reflected in other subjects. When the time came for him to take the entrance exam for St Ignatius, the strict discipline and sacrifices imposed by the harsh regime at Our Lady Victorious proved useless and he failed. As punishment, in order to prepare for the retake, he was forced to stay in Rio having private lessons. This meant he had to forgo the annual family holiday in Araruama, where one of his uncles lived. To make sure that he had no spare time, his mother, who was also concerned by his lack of physical strength, decided that in the mornings he would attend PE classes at a holiday camp in Fortaleza de São João, an army unit in the peaceful, romantic area of Urca in the central region of Rio. Forced to do the two things he most hated–physical exercise in the morning and studying in the afternoon–Paulo felt as if he were spending two months in hell.
Every morning, Lygia took a bus with her son that went directly from Botafogo to Urca, where she handed him over to his tormentors. The climax of the nightmare was the dreaded jump into the river, which the boys–about fifty of them–were forced to do every day at the end of a seemingly endless session of bending, running and bar work. The boys, who were always accompanied by adult instructors, were placed in line and forced to jump from a bridge into the icy water of the river that cuts through the woods around the fortress. Even though he knew there was no chance of drowning or being hurt, the mere thought of doing this made Paulo panic. Initially, he was always last in line. His heart would pound, the palms of his hands would sweat and he felt like crying, calling for his mother, even peeing his pants: he would have done anything to avoid making that leap were it not for the fact that he was even more afraid of looking like a coward. Then he discovered the solution: ‘If I was first in line, I would suffer for less time.’ Problem solved. ‘Not that I got over my fear of jumping,’ he recalled years later, ‘but the suffering ended and I learned my first lesson in life: if it’s going to hurt, confront the problem straight away because at least then the pain will stop.’
These were, in fact, wasted days, in terms of both money and suffering, since he again failed the entrance exam. After spending the whole of 1958 preparing, however, he finally passed and did so with the excellent average mark of 8.3. High marks not only guaranteed admission to the school but also meant being given the title of ‘Count’. If his performance improved still more he could become a ‘Marquis’ or even, as all parents dreamed of their children becoming, a ‘Duke’, a title reserved for those who ended the year with an average of 10 in all subjects.
But he never fulfilled his parents’ dream. The entrance exam was the one moment of glory in his educational career. A graph based on his school reports for 1959 onwards shows a descending curve that would only end when he completed his science course in 1965 at one of the worst colleges in Rio de Janeiro. It was as though he were saying to his parents: ‘Your dream of having a son at St Ignatius has come true, now leave me in peace.’ As he himself remarked many years later, that mark of 8.3 was his final act in the world of the normal.
CHAPTER 3
Schooldays
IF THE DEVIL WAS HIDING in the hallowed walls of St Ignatius, paradise was 100 kilometres from Rio in Araruama, where Paulo Coelho usually spent the school holidays, almost always with his sister, Sônia Maria, who was two years younger. When family finances allowed, which was rare, they would go to Belém do Pará, where their paternal grandparents lived. Araruama, famous for i
ts long beaches, was chosen by the Coelhos not for its natural beauty but because they had a guaranteed welcome at the home of Paulo’s great-uncle, the eccentric José Braz Araripe. He had graduated in mechanical engineering and, in the 1920s, had been employed by the state-owned navigation company Lóide Brasileiro to run the ship repair yard owned by the company in the United States. With the help of another Brazilian engineer, Fernando Iehly de Lemos, Araripe spent all his free time in the Lóide laboratories working on the development of an invention that would change his life, as well as that of millions of consumers worldwide: the automatic gear box. Araripe based his invention on a prototype created in 1904 by the Sturtevant brothers in Boston, which was never taken up because it had only two speeds and would only work when the engine was on full power. It was not until 1932, after countless hours of tests, that Araripe’s and Lemos’s revolutionary invention was finally patented. That year, General Motors bought the rights from them for mass production, which began in 1938 when GM announced that the Oldsmobile had as an option the greatest thing since the invention of the automobile itself: the Hydra-Matic system, a luxury for which the consumer would pay an additional US$70, about a tenth of the total price of the car. Some say that the two Brazilians each pocketed a small fortune in cash at the time, and nothing else; others say that both opted to receive a percentage of each gearbox sold during their lifetime. Whatever the truth of the matter, from then on, money was never a problem for Araripe, or ‘Uncle José’, as he was known to his great-nephew and -niece.
With no worries about the future, Uncle José left Lóide and returned to Brazil. It might have been expected that he would live in Rio, close to his family; however, during his time in the United States, he had suffered a slight accident at work, which caused him to lose some movement in his left arm, and someone told him that the black sands of Araruama would be an infallible remedy. He moved there, bought a large piece of land on one of the main streets in the city, and built a six-bedroom house in which all the walls and furniture were retractable. At the command of their owner, walls, beds and tables would disappear, turning the residence into a large workshop where Uncle José worked and built his inventions.
In summer, walls and furniture would be restored in readiness to receive the children. One night a week during the holidays, the walls would disappear again in order to create an area for watching 35mm films on a professional film projector and the workshop would become a cinema. Some summers, Uncle José would have more than twenty guests, among them his great-nephews and -nieces, friends, and the few adults who had the impossible job of keeping an eye on the children. The children’s parents were appalled by the man’s unconventional behaviour, but the comfort he offered them outweighed their concerns. Anxious mothers whispered that, as well as being an atheist, José held closed sessions of pornographic films when there were only boys in the house–which was, indeed, true–and he took off his oil-stained dungarees (under which he never wore underpants) only on special occasions; but he was open and generous and shared the eccentricities of his house with his neighbours. When he learned that the television he had bought was the only one in town, he immediately turned the screen to face the street and thus improvised a small auditorium where, from seven to ten at night, everyone could enjoy the new phenomenon.
Michele Conte and Jorge Luiz Ramos, two of Coelho’s friends in Araruama, recall that, every year, Coelho would arrive from Rio bearing some new ‘toy’. Once, it was a Diana airgun with which he shot his first bird, a grassquit whose black wings he carefully plucked and stuck to a piece of paper with the date and a note of the bird’s characteristics (a trophy that was to remain among his childhood mementoes in his house in Rio). The following year, he appeared with a diving mask and flippers, which prompted Uncle José to make him a submarine harpoon, its shafts propelled by a wire spring like a medieval man-of-war.
Like the other children, visitors and locals, Paulo woke every day when it was still dark. The town’s residents recall a boy with skinny legs, knee-length socks and baggy shorts. The group would disappear off into the woods, explore the lakes, steal boats and go fishing, invade orchards or explore grottoes and caves. On returning home at the end of the day, they would hand over the spoils of their expedition–doves brought down with shot or fish spiked with Uncle José’s harpoon–to Rosa, the cook, who would clean and prepare them for dinner. They would often return bruised or scratched or, as was the case once with Paulo, having been arrested by the forest rangers for hunting wild animals.
When Lygia arrived at the weekend to see her children, she would find herself in a party atmosphere. She would take up her guitar and spend the nights playing songs by Trini Lopez and by the rising star Roberto Carlos, accompanied by the children. The only thing Paulo did not enjoy was dancing. He found the parades in Rio fun, but hated dancing, and felt ridiculous when forced by his friends to jump around at Carnival dances in Araruama. To avoid humiliation, he would go straight to the toilets when he arrived at the club, hold his shirt under the tap and put it on again, soaking wet. If anyone invited him to dance he had his excuse ready: ‘I’ve just been dancing. Look how sweaty I am. I’m going to take a break–I’ll be back soon.’
Araruama was the place where he made various adolescent discoveries, like getting drunk for the first time. He and two friends went to one of the town’s deserted beaches and swiftly downed two bottles of rum he had bought secretly in Rio and concealed among his clothes at the bottom of his suitcase. As a result, he fell asleep on the beach and woke with his body all swollen with sunburn. He was ill for several days. So bad was the hangover that, unlike most boys of his generation, he never became a serious drinker.
He also experienced his first kiss on one of these holidays. Although he liked to boast theatrically to his friends that destiny had reserved something rather different for his first kiss, namely a prostitute, that kiss in fact took place in the innocent atmosphere of Araruama and was shared with the eldest sister of his friend Michele, Élide–or Dedê–who was a little younger than he. It was in Araruama, too, that he experienced his first sexual impulses. When he discovered that his uncle had made the walls of the rooms of very light, thin wood so that they could easily be raised, Paulo managed secretly to bore a hole in one wall large enough for him to enjoy the solitary privilege, before falling asleep, of spying on his female cousins, who were sleeping naked in the next room. He was shocked to see that girls had curly hair covering their private parts. In his amazement, he grew breathless, his heart pounded and his legs shook, so much so that he feared that he might have an asthma attack and be caught in flagrante.
The respiratory problems he had suffered from since birth had developed, with puberty, into a debilitating asthma. The attacks, which were caused by a variety of things–changes in the weather, dust, mould, smoke–were unpredictable. They began with breathlessness, a cough and a whistling in his chest, and culminated in terrible feelings of asphyxia, when his lungs felt as if they were about to burst. He had to make sure that he always had his bag full of cough syrups, medication to dilate the bronchial tubes (usually in the form of cortisone tablets) and a ‘puffer’ to alleviate the symptoms.
Quite often his parents would take it in turns to sit by his bed at night in order to be there during an emergency and once, in despair, Lygia took him to a faith healer who had been recommended by friends. When they arrived at the consulting room, the man gazed fixedly into Paulo’s eyes and said just five words: ‘I can see Dr Fritz.’* This was enough for Lygia to take her son by the hand and leave, muttering: ‘This is no place for a Christian.’ When the asthma manifested itself in Araruama, far from his mother’s care, the exchange of letters between Paulo and his mother became more frequent and, at times, worrying: ‘Could you come with Aunt Elisa to look after me?’ he asked, tearfully. Such requests would provoke anxious telegrams from Lygia to the aunt who looked after the children on holiday, one saying: ‘I’m really worried about Paulo’s asthma. The doctor said he sh
ould be given one ampoule of Reductil for three days and two Meticorten tablets a day. Let me know how things are.’
Although he said that he loved receiving letters, but hated writing them, as soon as he could read and write, and when he was away from home, Paulo would fill page after page, mostly addressed to his parents. Their content reveals a mature, delicate child concerned with his reputation as a bad, ill-behaved student. His letters to Lygia were mawkish and full of sentimentality, like this one, sent on Mother’s Day 1957, when he was nine:
Dear Mama: No, no, we don’t need May 8th to remember all the good things we’ve received from you. Your constant love and dedication, even though we’re, very often, bad, disobedient children.
[…] The truth is, it’s your love that forgives us. That resilient love that never snaps like chewing gum. May God keep you, darling Mama, and forgive my errors because I’m still only small and I promise to improve very very soon.
Lots of love,
Paulinho
The letters he sent to his father were more formal, even down to the signature, and written in a rather complaining tone.
Papa,
Have you sent my leaflets to be printed? And how is the new house going? When are we going to move in?
I’m counting on your presence here the next time you come.
Love,
Paulo Coelho
As time went by, letter-writing became a regular thing for him. He would write to his parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and friends. If he had no one to write to, he would simply jot down his ideas on small pieces of paper and then hide his scribbled thoughts in a secret place away from prying eyes. When he was about twelve he bought a pocket diary in which he began to make daily entries. He would always write in ink, in a slightly wobbly hand, but with few grammatical errors. He began by recording typical adolescent tasks–‘tidy my desk’, ‘Fred’s birthday’ and ‘send a telegram to Grandpa Cazuza’–and gradually he also began to record things he had done, seen or merely thought. Sometimes these were short notes to himself, such as ‘swap s. with Zeca’, ‘papa: equations’ and ‘do part E of the plan’. This was also the first time he sketched a self-portrait:
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 6