Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  Apart from these fleeting fancies–stamp-collecting was another–Paulo continued to nurture his one constant dream–to become a writer. When he was sixteen, his father, in a conciliatory gesture, offered him a flight to Belém, which, to Paulo, was a paradise on a par with Araruama. Nevertheless, he turned it down, saying that he would rather have a typewriter. His father agreed and gave him a Smith Corona, which would stay with him until it was replaced, first, by an electric Olivetti and, then, decades later, by a laptop computer.

  His total lack of interest in education meant that he was among the least successful students in his class in the first year of his science studies and at the end of the year he once again scraped through with a modest 5.2 average. His report arrived on Christmas Eve. Paulo never quite knew whether it was because of his dreadful marks or an argument over the length of his hair, but on Christmas Day 1963, when the first group of relatives was about to arrive for Christmas dinner, his mother told him bluntly: ‘I’ve made an appointment for the 28th. I’m taking you to a nerve specialist.’

  Terrified by what that might mean–what in God’s name was a nerve specialist?–he locked himself in his room and scribbled a harsh, almost cruel account of his relationship with his family:

  I’m going to see a nerve specialist. My hands have gone cold with fear. But the anxiety this has brought on has allowed me to examine my home and those in it more closely.

  Mama doesn’t punish me in order to teach me, but just to show how strong she is. She doesn’t understand that I’m a nervous sort and that occasionally I get upset, and so she always punishes me for it. The things that are intended to be for my own good she always turns into a threat, a final warning, an example of my selfishness. She herself is deeply selfish. This year, she has never, or hardly ever, held my hand.

  Papa is incredibly narrow-minded. He is really nothing more than the house financier. Like Mama, he never talks to me, because his mind is always on the house and his work. It’s dreadful.

  Sônia lacks character. She always does what Mama does. But she’s not selfish or bad. The coldness I feel towards her is gradually disappearing.

  Mama is a fool. Her main aim in life is to give me as many complexes as possible. She’s a fool, a real fool. Papa’s the same.

  The diary also reveals that the fear induced by the proposed visit to the specialist was unjustified. A day after the appointment he simply mentions the visit along with other unimportant issues:

  Yesterday I went to the psychiatrist. It was just to meet him. No important comment to make.

  I went to see the play Pobre Menina Rica, by Carlos Lyra and Vinicius de Moraes and then I had a pizza.

  I decided to put off my whole literary programme until 1965. I’m going to wait until I’m a bit more mature.

  He managed to achieve the required grades to pass the year and, according to the rules of the house, he therefore had the right to a holiday, which, this time, was to be in Belém. His holidays with his paternal grandparents, Cencita and Cazuza, had one enormous advantage over those spent in Araruama. At a time when a letter could take weeks to arrive and a long-distance phone call sometimes took hours if not days to put through, the distance–more than 3,000 kilometres–between Rio and Belém meant that the young man was beyond the control of his parents or from any surprise visits. Adventures that were unthinkable in Rio were routine in Belém: drinking beer, playing snooker and sleeping out of doors with his three cousins, whose mother had died and who were being brought up by their grandparents. Such was the excitement and bustle of life there that within the first few days of his holiday, he had lost his penknife, his watch, his torch and the beloved Sheaffer fountain pen he had bought with his prize money. One habit remained: no matter what time he went to bed, he devoted the last thirty minutes before going to sleep to writing letters to his friends and reading the eclectic selection of books he had taken with him–books ranging from Erle Stanley Gardner’s detective story The Case of the Calendar Girl, to the encyclical Pacem in Terris, published in March 1963 by Pope John XXIII (‘Reading this book is increasing my understanding of society,’ he wrote).

  He filled his letters to friends with news of his adventures in Belém, but in his letters to his father there was only one subject: money.

  You’ve never put your money to such good use as when you paid for this trip for me. I’ve never had such fun. But if all the money you’ve spent on the trip is to produce real benefits, I need more cash. There’s no point in you spending 140,000 on a trip if I’m not going to have fun. If you haven’t got any spare money, then no problem. But it isn’t right to spend all your money on the house while my short life passes me by.

  Belém appears to have been a city destined to provoke strong feelings in him. Three years before, on another trip there, he had at last had the chance to clarify a question that was troubling him: how were babies made? Earlier, he had plucked up the courage to ask Rui, a slightly older friend, but the reply, which was disconcertingly stark, appalled him: ‘Simple: the man puts his dick in the woman’s hole and when he comes, he leaves a seed in her stomach. That seed grows and becomes a person.’ He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine his father being capable of doing something so perverted with his mother. As this was not something that could be written about in a letter, he waited for the holidays in Belém so that he could find out from an appropriate person–his cousin, Fred, who as well as being older, was a member of the family, someone whose version he could trust. The first chance he had to speak to his cousin alone, he found a way of bringing the subject up and repeated the disgusting story his friend in Rio had told him. He almost had an asthma attack when he heard what Fred had to say: ‘Your friend in Rio is right. That’s how it is. The man enters the woman and deposits a drop of sperm in her vagina. That’s how everyone is made.’

  Paulo reacted angrily. ‘You’re only telling me that because you haven’t got a mother and so you don’t have a problem with it. Can you really imagine your father penetrating your mother, Fred? You’re out of your mind!’

  That loss of innocence was not the only shock Belém had in store for him. The city also brought him his first contact with death. Early on the evening of Carnival Saturday, when he arrived at his grandparents’ house after a dance at the Clube Tuna Luso, he was concerned to hear one of his aunts asking someone, ‘Does Paulo know?’ His grandfather Cazuza had just died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Paulo was extremely upset and shocked by the news, but he felt very important when he learned that Lygia and Pedro–since they were unable to get there in time–had named him the family’s representative at his grandfather’s funeral. As usual, he preferred to keep his feelings to himself, in the notes he made before going to sleep:

  Carnival Saturday, 8th February

  This night won’t turn into day for old Cazuza. I’m confused and overwhelmed by the tragedy. Yesterday, he was laughing out loud at jokes and today he’s silent. His smile will never again spread happiness. His welcoming arms, his stories about how Rio used to be, his advice, his encouraging words–all over. There are samba groups and carnival floats going down the street, but it’s all over.

  That same night he wrote ‘Memories’, a poem in three long stanzas dedicated to his grandfather. The pain the adolescent spoke of in prose and verse appeared sincere, but it was interwoven with other feelings. The following day, with his grandfather’s corpse still lying in the drawing room, Paulo caught himself sinning in thought against chastity several times, when he looked at the legs of his female cousins, who were there at the wake. On the Sunday evening, Cazuza’s funeral took place–‘a very fine occasion’, his grandson wrote in his diary–but on Shrove Tuesday, during the week of mourning, the cousins were already out having fun in the city’s clubs.

  That holiday in Belém was not only the last he would spend there: it also proved to be a watershed in his life. He knew he was going to have a very difficult year at school. He felt even more negative about his studies than he had
in previous years; and it was clear that his days at St Ignatius were numbered and equally clear that this would have consequences at home. There were not only dark clouds hanging over his school life either. At the end of the month, the day before returning to Rio, he flipped back in his diary to the day when he had written of his grandfather’s death and wrote in tiny but still legible writing: ‘I’ve been thinking today and I’ve begun to see the terrible truth: I’m losing my faith.’

  This was not a new feeling. He had experienced his first religious doubts–gnawing away at him implacably and silently–during the retreat at St Ignatius when, troubled by sexual desire and tortured by guilt, he had been gripped by panic at the thought of suffering for all eternity in the apocalyptic flames described by Father Ruffier. He had turned to his diary to talk to God in a defiant tone ill suited to a true Christian: ‘It was You who created sin! It’s Your fault for not making me strong enough to resist! The fact that I couldn’t keep my word is Your fault!’ The following morning, he read this blasphemy and felt afraid. In desperation, he took his fellow pupil Eduardo Jardim to a place where they would not be seen or heard and broke his vow of silence to open up his heart to him.

  His choice of confidant was a deliberate one. He looked up to Jardim, who was intelligent, read a lot and was a good poet without being a show-off. A small group of boys from St Ignatius to which Paulo belonged would meet in the garage at Jardim’s house to discuss what each had been reading. But it was mostly the strength of Jardim’s religious convictions that made him not only a good example but also the perfect confidant for a friend with a troubled soul. Paulo told him that everything had started with one doubt: if God existed and if this God had created him in His own image and likeness, then why did He delight in his suffering? As he asked these questions Paulo had arrived at the really big one–the unconfessable doubt: did God really exist? Fearing that others might hear him, Jardim whispered, as though in the confessional, words that were like salt being rubbed into his friend’s wounds: ‘When I was younger and was scared that my faith in God would disappear, I did everything I could to keep it. I prayed desperately, took cold baths in winter, but my faith was very slowly disappearing, until, finally, it disappeared completely. My faith had gone.’

  This meant that even Jardim had succumbed. The more Paulo tried to drive away this thought, the less he was able to rid his mind of that image of a small boy taking cold baths in the middle of winter just so that God would not disappear–and God simply ignoring him. That day Paulo Coelho hated God. And so that there would be no doubt regarding his feelings he wrote: ‘I know how dangerous it is to hate God.’

  A perfectly banal incident when he was returning from the retreat had soured his relations with God and His shepherds still more. On the way from the retreat house to the school, Paulo judged that the driver of the bus was driving too fast and putting everyone’s life at risk. What started out merely as a concern became a horror movie: if the bus had an accident and he were to die, his soul would be burning in hell before midday. That fear won out over any embarrassment.

  He went to the front of the bus, where his spiritual guide was sitting, and said: ‘Father Ruffier, the driver is driving too fast. And I’m terrified of dying.’

  Furious, the priest snarled at the boy: ‘You’re terrified of dying and I’m outraged that you’re such a coward.’

  As time passed, Paulo’s doubts became certainties. He began to hate the priests (‘a band of retrogrades’) and all the duties, whether religious or scholastic, that they imposed on the boys. He felt the Jesuits had deceived him. Seen from a distance, sermons he had once believed to contain solid truths were now remembered as ‘slowly administered doses of poison to make us hate living’, as he wrote in his diary. And he deeply regretted ever having taken those empty words seriously. ‘Idiot that I was, I even began to believe that life was worthless,’ he wrote, ‘and that with death always watching, I was obliged to go to confession on a regular basis so as to avoid going to hell.’ After much torment and many sleepless nights, at almost seventeen years of age, Paulo knew that he no longer wanted to hear about church, sermons or sin. And he hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming a good student during his second year on the science course. He was equally convinced that he would invest all his beliefs and energy in what he saw not as a vocation but as a profession–that of being a writer.

  One term was more than enough for everyone to realize that the college had lost all meaning for him. ‘I have gone from being a bad pupil to being a dreadful pupil.’ His school report shows that this was no exaggeration. He was always near the bottom of the class, and he managed to do worse in each exam he sat. In the first monthly tests he got an average of just over 5, thanks to a highly suspect 9 in chemistry. In May, his average fell to 4.4, but alarm bells only started to ring in June, when his average fell to 3.7.

  That month, Pedro and Lygia were called to a meeting at the school and asked to bring his report book. The news they received could not have been worse. A priest read out the fifth article of the school rules, which all parents had to sign when their son was admitted to the school and in which it was stated that those who did not achieve the minimum mark required would be expelled. If Paulo continued along the same path, he would undoubtedly fail and his subsequent expulsion from one of the most traditional schools in the country would thereafter blot his scholastic record. There was only one way to avoid expulsion and to save both student and parents from such ignominy. The priest suggested that they take the initiative and move their son at once to another school. He went on to say that St Ignatius had never done this before. This exception was being made in deference to the fact that the pupil in question was the grandson of one of the first pupils at the college, Arthur Araripe Júnior, ‘Mestre Tuca’, who had gone there in 1903.

  Pedro and Lygia returned home, devastated. They knew that their son smoked in secret and they had often smelled alcohol on his breath, and some relatives had complained that he was becoming a bad example for the other children. ‘That boy’s trouble,’ his aunts would whisper, ‘he’s going to end up leading all his younger cousins astray.’ What, up until then, had been termed Paulo’s ‘strange behaviour’ was restricted to the family circle. However, if he were to leave St Ignatius, even without being expelled, this would bring shame upon his parents and reveal them as having failed to bring him up properly. And if, as his father was always saying, a son was a reflection of his family, then the Coelhos had more than enough reason to feel that their image had been tarnished. At a time when corporal punishment was commonplace among Brazilian parents, Pedro and Lygia had never lifted a hand against Paulo, but they were rigorous in the punishments they meted out. So when Pedro announced that he had enrolled Paulo at Andrews College, where he would continue in the science stream, he also told his son that any future holidays were cancelled and that his allowance was temporarily suspended–if he wanted money for cigarettes and beer he would have to work.

  If this was meant as a form of punishment, then it backfired, because Paulo loved the change. Andrews was not only a lay college and infinitely more liberal than St Ignatius but co-educational, which added a delightful novelty to the schoolday: girls. Besides this, there were political discussions, film study groups and even an amateur drama group, which he joined before he even met any of his teachers. He had ventured into the world of the theatre a year earlier, when, during the long end-of-year holiday, he had locked himself in his room, determined to write a play. He would only come out for lunch and dinner, telling his parents that he was studying. After four days, he finished The Ugly Boy, which he pretentiously referred to as ‘a petit guignol à la Aluísio Azevedo’, a synopsis of which he recorded in his diary:

  In this play, I present the ugly person in society. It’s the story of a young man rejected by society who ends up committing suicide. The scenes are played out by silhouettes, while four narrators describe the feelings and actions of the characters. During the interval betwe
en the first and second acts, someone at the back of the stalls sings a really slow bossa nova [a style of Brazilian music that has its roots in samba and cool jazz] whose words relate to the first act. I think it will work really well. This year it’s going to be put on at home in the conservatory.

  Fortunately, his critical sense won out over his vanity, and a week later, he tore up this first incursion into play-writing and gave it a six-word epitaph: ‘Rubbish. I’ll write another one soon.’ And it was as a playwright (as yet unpublished) that he approached the amateur theatre group at Andrews College, known as Taca.

  As for schoolwork, teachers and exams, none of these seemed to have concerned him. On the rare occasions when these topics merited a mention in his diary, he would dismiss them with a short, usually negative sentence: ‘I’m doing badly at school, I’m going to fail in geometry, physics and chemistry’ ‘I can’t even get myself to pick up my schoolbooks: anything serves as a distraction, however stupid’ ‘Classes seem to get longer and longer’ ‘I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s beyond description.’ Admitting that he was doing badly at school was a way of hiding the truth: he was on the slippery slope.