Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  I have entrusted the students with the adaptation of my novel Capitães da Areia and have done so confidently and gladly: students nowadays are in the vanguard of everything that is good in Brazil. They are the untiring fighters for democracy, for the rights of man, for progress, for the advance of the Brazilian people, against dictatorship and oppression. In the novel on which they have based their play, I also conveyed my faith in the Brazilian people and registered my protest against all forms of injustice and oppression. The first edition of Capitães da Areia was published a week before the proclamation of the ‘Estado Novo’, a cruel and ignorant dictatorship–which seized and banned the book. The novel was a weapon in the struggle. Today it has taken on a new dimension: the stage, which makes contact with the public all the more immediate. I can only wish the students of the Teatro Universitário Nacional the greatest success, certain that they are, once again, working for the good of democracy and of Brazil.

  It was obvious that there would be problems. The first was with the Juizado de Menores (the Juvenile Court), which acted in the interests of minors and threatened to ban the rehearsals unless those under eighteen were able to show that they had permission from their parents. This meant all the young people in the group, starting with the show’s director. Then, just a few days before the first night, the rehearsals were interrupted by the arrival of Edgar Façanha, Member of Parliament and the head of censorship in Rio, together with a member of the Serviço Nacional de Informações, or SNI, who wanted to see a certificate from the censor’s office, without which the play could not be performed. When it became clear that no such certificate existed, during the ensuing argument the police arrested one of the actors, Fernando Resky, and left a warning that if they wanted to open on 15 October 1966, as planned, they should submit a copy of the script to the censor as soon as possible. Days later, the script was returned with certain words deleted–‘comrade’, ‘dialogue’, ‘revolution’ and ‘freedom’–and one entire sentence cut: ‘All homes would be open to him, because revolution is a homeland and a family for all.’ As they had already had such difficulty putting on the play, the group thought it best to accept the cuts without protest or appeal.

  Although there were thirty actors in the play, Paulo had a reasonably prominent part. He was Almiro, the homosexual lover of Barandão, who dies of smallpox at the end of the play. Jorge Amado had promised to be at the preview, but as he was in Lisbon for the launch of his most recent novel, he asked no less a figure than ‘Volta Seca’, one of the street boys from Salvador who had been the inspiration for the main characters in the book, to represent him. The news in the Rio papers that Capitães da Areia had been censored proved a magnet to audiences. On the first night, all 400 seats in the Teatro Serrador in the centre of Rio were filled. Only two of the people Paulo had invited were missing: Renata and Dr Benjamim.

  After his second period at the clinic, Paulo had formed a strange relationship with the psychiatrist. It wasn’t just affection, despite all that Paulo had been through there: it was more that being close to the doctor and being able to talk to him about his doubts gave him a sense of security he hadn’t felt before. At the time, such a relationship between doctor and patient was considered one of the side effects of retrograde amnesia. Many years later, however, Paulo himself diagnosed it as what came to be called Stockholm Syndrome, the sudden and inexplicable feelings of emotional dependence some hostages feel towards their hostage-takers. ‘I established the same relationship of hostage and hostage-taker with Dr Benjamim,’ he said in an interview. ‘Even after leaving the clinic, during the great crises of my youth and problems with my love life, I would go and talk to him.’

  Capitães da Areia ran for two months. Apart from that first night, it wasn’t a wild success, but the takings were large enough to pay the expenses and there was even some money left over to be shared out among the actors and technicians. There was also praise from respected critics.

  After the euphoria of the production, Paulo once again became depressed. He felt empty and lost, and frequently kicked to pieces anything that got in his way in his grandfather’s apartment. Alone in that hostile, unfamiliar neighbourhood, with no one to turn to during his periods of melancholy and no one to share his rare moments of joy, he would often fall into despair. When these crises arose, he poured out his heart to his diary. Once, he sat up all night filling page after page with something he called ‘Secrets of a Writer’: ‘Suddenly my life has changed. I’ve been left high and dry in the most depressing place in Brazil: the city, the commercial centre of Rio. At night, no one. During the day, thousands of distant people. And the loneliness is becoming such that I’ve begun to feel it’s like something alive and real, which fills every corner and every street. I, Paulo Coelho, aged nineteen, am empty-handed.’

  His proximity to the red light district meant that he became a regular client in the brothels that lined the streets from the bottom of the Lapa to Mangue. It didn’t matter that these women weren’t very elegant and bore no physical resemblance to the rich girls he fancied. He could talk about anything to a prostitute and realize all his secret fantasies without scandalizing anyone–even when these fantasies meant doing absolutely nothing, as he recorded in his diary:

  Yesterday I went with the oldest woman in the area–and the oldest woman I’ve slept with in my whole life (I didn’t screw her, I just paid to look). Her breasts looked like a sack with nothing in it and she stood there in front of me, naked, stroking her cunt with her hand. I watched her, unable to understand why she made me feel both pity and respect. She was pure, extremely kind and professional, but she was a really old woman, you can’t imagine just how old. Perhaps seventy. She was French and had left a copy of France Soir lying on the floor. She treated me with such care. She works from six in the evening to eleven o’clock at night; then she catches a bus home and there she’s a respectable old lady. No one says, Oh my God! I can’t think of her naked because it makes me shudder and fills me with such a mixture of feelings. I’ll never forget this old woman. Very strange.

  While sometimes he would pay and not have sex, on other occasions he would have sex and pay nothing, or almost nothing (‘Yesterday I was on inspired form and I managed to get a prostitute without paying anything–in the end she took a sweater that I’d pinched from a friend’). Then, for weeks on end, he devoted every page in his diary to his crazed love for a young prostitute. One day, the woman disappeared with another client, without telling him, and once again he went crazy. He may have been an adult, but only the innocence of a boy in matters of love could explain his jealousy at having been betrayed by a prostitute. ‘I wanted to cry as I’ve never cried before, because my whole being resided in that woman,’ he moaned. ‘With her flesh I could keep loneliness at bay for a while.’ On hearing that his loved one had returned and that she was revealing intimate facts about him to all and sundry, he wrote: ‘I’ve heard that she’s slandering me…I’ve realized that as far as she’s concerned, I’m a nobody, a nothing. I’m going to give away the name of the woman to whom I gave everything that was pure in my putrefied being: Tereza Cristina de Melo.’

  During the day, Paulo continued to live the life of his dreams: girlfriends, rehearsals, study groups, debates about cinema and existentialism. Although he had hardly set foot in his new college, he had managed to move up a year, which allowed him to think of taking the entrance exam for a degree. On the few occasions when he appeared at the family home–usually in order to scrounge a meal or ask for money–he made up stories in order to shock his parents, saying that he had been in the most outlandish places in Rio. ‘I read in the newspapers about the places frequented by free-living young people and lied, saying that I had been there, just to shock my father and mother.’ Although he almost never played his guitar, he took it with him everywhere, ‘just to impress the girls!’

  When night fell, though, the bouts of melancholy and loneliness returned. There came a time when he could take them no more. For three mo
nths, night after night, he had done battle with a constant nightmare, and he felt he had to take a step back. He packed up all his belongings in a box and, sad and humiliated, he asked his parents to have him back in the house to which he had never imagined he would return.

  CHAPTER 9

  The great escape

  THE EASE WITH WHICH HE MIXED with women of all classes, from prostitutes in Mangue to elegant young bimbos at the Paissandu, gave everyone the impression that Paulo had no doubts about his sexual proclivities. This, however, was merely an impression. His life in the world of the theatre, where homosexuality was practised freely, had aroused a doubt so secret that he didn’t even reveal it to his diary: did he have ‘sexual problems’, as his mother had suspected when she had first had him admitted to the clinic? Or, in plain language, was he homosexual? Although he was almost twenty, this was still a dark, mysterious area for Paulo. Unlike most Brazilian boys of the time, he had had his first sexual encounter with a woman, the sexually precocious and experienced Madá, rather than with a male friend. He had never felt the desire to have physical relations with a man, and had never even fantasized about such an encounter. Several times, though, when he saw groups of homosexual friends talking during intervals in rehearsals, he tormented himself with troubling questions: ‘What if they’re right? What if their sexual choice is better than mine?’

  Life had taught him that it was better to be the first to jump into the icy river than to suffer in line until it was his turn. Instead of continuing to torment himself with endless doubts, he knew that there was only one way to resolve the problem: try it out. When he read a text from Marx saying something like ‘practice is the deciding factor’, he interpreted it as a prompt to take action. One evening, when he was still living in his grandfather’s apartment in the city centre, he summoned up his courage and went round the various gay bars until, fortified by a few whiskies, he decided to take the plunge. He went up to a boy of his age, a professional, who was waiting for customers, and got straight to the point.

  ‘Hi. How do you fancy going to bed with me?’

  Paulo was ready for anything, but certainly not the reply he got: ‘No. I don’t want to.’

  Paulo felt as surprised as if he had been punched. How come? He was going to pay, after all! The boy turned his back on him and left him standing, glass in hand. When he tried again in another nightclub and received a second ‘No’, he brought his brief homosexual experiment to an end. Weeks later, frantically engaged in work, he appeared to have forgotten the matter.

  While the career of Paulo Coelho the writer continued to be an evident failure, the same could not be said about Coelho the playwright and producer. His first solo foray into the world of the arts, in children’s theatre, was a production of a cinema classic, The Wizard of Oz. He not only adapted the script but also directed the play and cast himself as the Lion. Lacking funds for costly props and costumes, he simply painted whiskers on his face and stuck two cloth ears on his head; the tail was a rope sewn on to his trousers, the end of which he would twist round his forefinger during the show. Almost the only thing he took from the film was the song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. The remainder of the score was composed by Antônio Carlos Dias, or Kakiko, a musician and actor with whom Paulo had shared a dressing room during the production of Capitães da Areia. To everyone’s surprise, The Wizard of Oz took in enough to cover the costs of the production and the salaries of actors and technicians and made a profit–money that Paulo squirreled away for their next production. Having his name appear on the entertainment pages of the newspapers was also something akin to success: on one day in 1967, his name appeared in three different places in the cultural sections of the Rio press. At the Teatro de Arena he was the author and director of O Tesouro do Capitão Berengundo [The Treasure of Captain Berengundo]; at the Santa Terezinha his name was on the posters for an adaptation of his Aladdin and His Magic Lamp; and at the Teatro Carioca he was appearing as an actor in Walmir Ayala’s A Onça de Asas [The Winged Jaguar].

  Children’s plays brought in a little money, but it was only in adult theatre that he could achieve the fame and prestige he craved. The production of Capitães da Areia had made this clear. In March, he was asked to act in a big production of Brecht and Weil’s The Threepenny Opera. The show had been a great success in São Paulo with a cast of famous actors, and the Rio cast did not lag far behind, and was also full of well-known stars. The play was to be the first production at the theatre in the Sala Cecília Meirelles. Paulo played a blind beggar, a role that needed little acting ability, but his name would be printed in the programme alongside all the big names.

  After several weeks of rehearsal, they were ready for the first night. A few days before, the company was invited to give a live performance of the play in the studios of TV Rio, the most important of the city’s television stations. When it was due to go out, someone realized that the actor Oswaldo Loureiro, who was to sing the theme song, was missing. Since Paulo was the only one of the group who knew the words of ‘Mack the Knife’ by heart, he received the most exposure on the programme. The reasonable success of the production established him further in his new profession.

  He was back in his parents’ house and the play was still showing when the Devil of homosexuality decided to tempt him again. This time the initiative was not his but that of an actor of about thirty who was also working on the play. In fact the two had only exchanged a few words and looks, but one night, after the show, the older man approached him.

  He came straight to the point: ‘Would you like to come back to my place and have sex?’

  Nervous and rather taken aback, Paulo said the first thing that came into his head: ‘Yes, I would.’

  They spent the night together. Although much later, Paulo recalled feeling rather disgusted to find himself exchanging caresses with a man, he nevertheless had sex with him, penetrating and being penetrated. Paulo returned home the following day even more confused than before. He had felt no pleasure and yet he still remained unsure as to whether or not he was homosexual. Some months later, he decided to try again and chose someone from among his stage friends. In the man’s studio flat in Copacabana, he felt horribly embarrassed when his partner suggested they take a bath together. His feelings of unease continued throughout the night, and they only managed to have full sex when the sun was already coming up. Paulo Coelho was now convinced, once and for all, that he was not homosexual.

  Despite his doubts about his sexuality, he continued to find success with women. He had left Márcia and finished his friendship with Renata, but he continued his relationship with Fabíola, who seemed to be growing more beautiful by the day. He had become a gifted bigamist, though, having fallen for Genivalda, from Sergipe, the ugly, brilliant Geni whose witty comments delighted the intelligentsia who hung out at the Paissandu. After besieging her unsuccessfully for weeks, he finally took her away for a weekend at Uncle José’s house in Araruama. On their first night together, he was surprised to hear Geni, who seemed such a woman of the world, asking him in a whisper to be gentle because this was her first sexual experience. Since there was no suitable place for them to meet, the first months of their ‘honeymoon’ were awkward, but they were fruitful: at the beginning of June, Geni telephoned him to say that she was pregnant with his child. Paulo immediately decided that he wanted the child, but had no time to say so, as she immediately announced that she was going to have an abortion. He suggested a meeting so that they could talk, but Geni was determined: she had made her decision and, besides, she wanted to put an end to their relationship. She rang off and disappeared from his life as if she had never existed.

  Paulo entered another downward spiral. Upset by the news of the pregnancy and Geni’s sudden disappearance, he set about looking for her everywhere until he learned that she had returned to her hometown of Aracaju, where she was intending to have the abortion. Keen to dissuade her, but with no means of finding her when she was almost 2,000 kilometres away, he onc
e again succumbed to fits of depression, interrupted by short periods of euphoria. Pages and pages of his diary, written during sleepless nights, reflect this:

  I breathe solitude, I wear solitude, I crap solitude. It’s awful. I’ve never felt so alone. Not even during the long bitter days of my adolescence. Not that solitude is anything new. It’s just that I’m getting tired of it. Soon I’ll do something mad that will terrify the world.

  I want to write. But what for? Why? Alone, my brain fills with existential problems, and I can only make out one thing in all that noise and confusion: a desire to die.

  This rather melodramatic vein also appears in his moments of happiness. He recorded these rare and short-lived moments of optimism with a total lack of modesty: ‘My hour to give birth has arrived, as foreseen in a poem I wrote in the clinic. This morning I was born, along with the morning light. The time has come for me to show the world who I am.’