The following day, although they had had lunch with the group and been present at rehearsals, the Americans’ attitude towards them remained unchanged. ‘Julian Beck and Judith Malina continue to treat us with icy indifference,’ he wrote. ‘But I don’t blame them. I know it must have been very difficult to get where they are.’ The next Paulo heard of the group and its leaders was some months later, when he heard that they had been arrested in Ouro Preto, in Minas Gerais, accused of possession and use of cannabis. The couple had rented a large house in the city and turned it into a permanent drama workshop for actors from all over Brazil. A few weeks later, the police surrounded the house and arrested all eighteen members of the group and took them straight to the Dops prison in Belo Horizonte.
In spite of protests from the famous across the world–Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard and Umberto Eco among others–the military government kept the whole group in prison for sixty days, after which they expelled all the foreign members, accusing them of ‘drug trafficking and subversion’.
As for Paulo, some months after he and Vera had first been introduced to cannabis, the artist Jorge Mourão gave them a tiny block the size of a packet of chewing gum that looked as though it were made of very dark, almost black, wax. It was hashish. Although it comes from the same plant as cannabis, hashish is stronger and was always a drug that was consumed more in Europe and North Africa than in South America, which meant that it was seen as a novelty among Brazilian users. Obsessive as ever about planning and organizing everything he did, Paulo decided to convert a mere ‘puff’ into a solemn scientific experiment. From the moment he inhaled the drug for the first time he began to record all his sensations on tape, keeping a note of the time as well. He typed up the final result and stuck it in his diary:
Brief notes on our Experiment with Hashish
To Edgar Allan Poe
We began to smoke in my bedroom at ten forty at night. Those present: myself, Vera and Mourão. The hashish is mixed with ordinary tobacco in a ratio of approximately one to seven and put into a special silver pipe. This pipe makes the smoke pass through iced water, which allows for perfect filtration. Three drags each are enough. Vera isn’t going to take part in the experiment, as she’s going to do the recording and take photos. Mourão, who’s an old hand at drugs, will tell us what we must do.
3 minutes–A feeling of lightness and euphoria. Boundless happiness. Strong inner feelings of agitation. I walk backwards and forwards feeling totally drunk.
6 minutes–My eyelids are heavy. A feeling of dizziness and sleepiness. My head is starting to take on terrifying proportions, with images slightly distorted into a circular shape. At this phase of the experiment, certain mental blocks (of a moral order) surfaced in my mind. Note: the effects may have been affected by over-excitement.
10 minutes–An enormous desire to sleep. My nerves are completely relaxed and I lie down on the floor. I start to sweat, more out of anxiety than heat. No initiative whatsoever: if the house caught fire, I’d rather die than get up from here.
20 minutes–I’m conscious, but have lost all sense of where sounds come from. It’s a pleasant phase that leads to total lack of anxiety.
28 minutes–The sense of the relativity of time is really amazing. This must be how Einstein discovered it.
30 minutes–Suddenly, I lose consciousness entirely. I try to write, but I fail to realize that this is just an attempt, a test. I begin to dance, to dance like a madman; the music is coming from another planet and I exist in an unknown dimension.
33 minutes–Time is passing terribly slowly. I wouldn’t have the courage to try LSD…
45 minutes–The fear of flying out of the window is so great that I get off my bed and lie on the floor, at the back of the room, well away from the street outside. My body doesn’t require comfort. I can stay lying on the floor without moving.
1 hour–I look at my watch, unable to understand why I’m trying to record everything. For me this is nothing more than an eternity from which I will never manage to escape.
1 hour 15 minutes–A sudden immense desire to come out of the trance. In the depths of winter, I’m suddenly filled by courage and I decide to take a cold bath. I don’t feel the water on my body. I’m naked. But I can’t come out of the trance. I’m terrified that I might stay like this for ever. Books I’ve read about schizophrenia start parading through the bathroom. I want to get out. I want to get out!
1 hour and a half–I’m rigid, lying down, sweating with fear.
2 hours–The passage from the trance to a normal state takes place imperceptibly. There’s no feeling of sickness, sleepiness or tiredness, but an unusual hunger. I look for a restaurant on the corner. I move, I walk. One foot in front of the other.
Not satisfied with smoking hashish and recording its effects, Paulo was brave enough to try something which, in the days when he was under his father’s authority, would have ended in a session of electroshock therapy in the asylum: he made a copy of these notes and his parents almost died of shock when he gave it to them to read. From his point of view, this was perhaps not simply an act of provocation towards Lygia and Pedro. Although he confessed to his diary that he had ‘discovered another world’ and that ‘drugs are the best thing in the world’, Paulo considered himself to be no ordinary cannabis user but, rather, ‘an activist ideologue of the hippie movement’ who never tired of repeating to his friends the same extravagant claim: ‘Drugs are to me what the machine gun is to communists and guerrillas.’ As well as cannabis and hashish, the couple had become frequent users of synthetic drugs. Since the time when he had first been admitted to the clinic, he had been prescribed regular doses of Valium. Unconcerned about the damage these drug cocktails might cause to their nervous systems, the lovers became enthusiastic users of Mandrix, Artane, Dexamil and Pervitin. Amphetamines were present in some of these drugs and acted on the central nervous system, increasing the heartbeat and raising blood pressure, producing a pleasant sensation of muscular relaxation, which was followed by feelings of euphoria that would last up to fourteen hours. When they became tired, they would take some kind of sleeping drug such as Mandrix, and crash out. Drugs used in the control of epileptic fits or the treatment of Parkinson’s disease guaranteed never-ending ‘trips’ that lasted days and nights without interruption.
One weekend at Kakiko’s place in Friburgo, 100 kilometres from Rio, Paulo carried out an experiment to find out how long he could remain drugged without stopping even to sleep, and was overjoyed when he managed to complete more than twenty-four hours, not sleeping and completely ‘out of it’. Only drugs seemed to have any importance on this dangerous path that he was following. ‘Our meals have become somewhat subjective,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We don’t know when we last ate and anyway we don’t seem to miss food at all.’
Just one thing seemed to be keeping him connected to the world of the normal, of those who did not take drugs: the stubborn desire to be a writer. He was determined to lock himself up in Uncle José’s house in Araruama and just write. ‘To write, to write a lot, to write everything’ was his immediate plan. Vera agreed and urged him on, but she suggested that before he did this, they should relax and take a holiday. In April 1970, the couple decided to go to one of the Meccas of the hippie movement, Machu Picchu, the sacred city of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes, at an altitude of 2,400 metres. Still traumatized by his journey to Paraguay, Paulo feared that something evil would happen to him if he left Brazil. It was only after much careful planning that the couple finally departed. Inspired by the 1969 film Easy Rider, they had no clear destination or fixed date of return.
On 1 May they took a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano aeroplane to La Paz for a trip that involved many novelties, the first of which Paulo experienced as soon as he got out at El Alto airport, in the Bolivian capital: snow. He was so excited when he saw everything covered by such a pure white blanket that he could not resist throwing himself on the ground and eating t
he snow. It was the start of a month of absolute idleness. Vera spent the day in bed in the hotel, unable to cope with the rarefied air of La Paz at 4,000 metres. Paulo went out to get to know the city and, accustomed to the political apathy of a Brazil under a dictatorship, he was shocked to see workers’ demonstrations on Labour Day. Four months later, Alfredo Ovando Candia, who had just named himself President of the Republic for the third time, was ousted.
Taking advantage of the low cost of living in Bolivia, they rented a car, stayed in good hotels and went to the best restaurants. Every other day, the elegant Vera made time to go to the hairdresser’s, while Paulo climbed the steep hills of La Paz. It was there that they encountered a new type of drug, which was almost non-existent in Brazil: mescalito, also known as peyote, peyotl or mescal–a hallucinogenic tea distilled from cut, dried cactus. Amazed by the calmness and tranquillity induced by the drink, they wallowed in endless visual hallucinations and experienced intense moments of synaesthesia, a confusion of the senses that gives the user the sense of being able to smell a colour or hear a taste.
They spent five days in La Paz drinking the tea, visiting clubs to listen to local music and attending diabladas, places where plays in which the Inca equivalent of the Devil predominated. They then caught a train to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, where they took a boat across and then the train to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, after which they went by plane to Lima.
In Lima, they rented a car and headed for Santiago de Chile, passing through Arequipa, Antofagasta and Arica. The plan was to spend more time on this stretch, but the hotels were so unprepossessing that they decided to carry on. Neither Paulo nor Vera enjoyed the Chilean capital–‘a city like any other’, he wrote–but they did have the chance to see Costa-Gavras’s film Z, which denounced the military dictatorship in Greece and was banned in Brazil. At the end of their three-week trip, still almost constantly under the influence of mescalito, they found themselves in Mendoza, in Argentina, on the way to Buenos Aires. Paulo was eaten up with jealousy when he saw the attractive Vera being followed by men, particularly when she began to speak in English, which he still could not understand that well. In La Paz it had been the sight of snow that had taken him by surprise; in Buenos Aires it was going on the metro for the first time. Accustomed to low prices in the other places they had visited, they decided to dine at the Michelangelo, a restaurant known as ‘the cathedral of the tango’, where they were lucky enough to hear a classic of the genre, the singer Roberto ‘Polaco’ Goyeneche. When they were handed a bill for $20–the equivalent of about US$120 today–Paulo almost fell off his chair to discover that they were in one of the most expensive restaurants in the city.
Although his asthma had coped well with the Andean heights, in Buenos Aires, at sea level, it reappeared in force. With a temperature of 39°C and suffering from intense breathing difficulties, he had to remain in bed for three days and began to recover only in Montevideo, on 1 June, the day before they were to leave for Brazil. At his insistence, they would not be making the return journey on a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano flight. This change had nothing to do with superstition or with the fact that they would have to travel via La Paz. Paulo had seen the bronze statue of a civilian pilot at La Paz airport in homage ‘to the heroic pilots of LAB who have died in action’: ‘I’d be mad to travel with a company that treats the pilots of crashed planes as heroes! What if our pilot has ambitions to become a statue?’ In the end, they flew Air France to Rio de Janeiro, where they arrived on 3 June in time to watch the first round of the 1970 World Cup, when the Brazilian team beat Czechoslovakia 4–1.
The dream of becoming a writer would not go away. Paulo placed nowhere in the short story competions he entered. He wrote in his diary: ‘It was with a broken heart that I heard the news…that I had failed to win yet another literary competition. I didn’t even get an honourable mention.’ However, he did not allow himself to be crushed by these defeats and continued to note down possible subjects for future literary works, such as ‘flying saucers’, ‘Jesus’, ‘the abominable snowman’, ‘spirits becoming embodied in corpses’ and ‘telepathy’. All the same, the prizes continued to elude him, as he recorded in his notes: ‘Dear São José, my protector. You are witness to the fact that I’ve tried really hard this year. I’ve lost in every competition. Yesterday, when I heard I’d lost in the competition for children’s plays, Vera said that when my luck finally does arrive, it will do so all in one go. Do you agree?’
On his twenty-third birthday, Vera gave him a sophisticated microscope and was pleased to see what a success it was: hours after opening the gift, Paulo was still hunched over it, carefully examining the glass plates and making notes. Curious to know what he was doing, she began to read what he was writing: ‘It’s twenty-three years today since I was born. I was already this thing that I can see under the microscope. Excited, moving in the direction of life, infinitesimally small but with all my hereditary characteristics in place. My two arms, my legs and my brain were already programmed. I would reproduce myself from that sperm cell, the cells would multiply. And here I am, aged twenty-three.’ It was only then that she realized that Paulo had put his own semen under the microscope. The notes continue: ‘There goes a possible engineer. Another one that ought to have become a doctor is dying. A scientist capable of saving the Earth has also died, and I’m impassively watching all this through my microscope. My own sperm are furiously flailing around, desperate to find an egg, desperate to perpetuate themselves.’
Vera was good company, but she could be tough too. When she realized that, if he had anything to do with it, Paulo would never achieve anything beyond the school diploma he had got at Guanabara, she almost forced him to prepare for his university entrance exams. Her vigilance produced surprising results. By the end of the year, he had managed to be accepted by no fewer than three faculties: law at Cândido Mendes, theatre direction at the Escola Nacional de Teatro and media studies at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Rio.
This success, needless to say, could not be attributed entirely to Vera: it had as much to do with Paulo’s literary appetite. Since he had begun making systematic notes of his reading four years earlier, he had read more than three hundred books, or seventy-five a year–a vast number when one realizes that most Brazilians read, on average, one book a year. He read a great deal and he read everything. From Cervantes to Kafka, from Jorge Amado to Scott Fitzgerald, from Aeschylus to Aldous Huxley. He read Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Brazilians who were on police files such as the humourist Stanislaw Ponte Preta. He would read, make a short commentary on each work and rate them accordingly. The highest accolade, four stars, was the privilege of only a few writers, such as Henry Miller, Borges and Hemingway. And he blithely awarded ‘zero stars’ to books as varied as Norman Mailer’s American Dream, Régis Debray’s Revolution in Revolution and two Brazilian classics, Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands] by Euclides da Cunha and História Econômica do Brasil [An Economic History of Brazil] by Caio Prado, Jr.
In this mélange of subjects, periods and authors, there was one genre that appeared to arouse Paulo’s interest more than others: books dealing with the occult, witchcraft and satanism. Ever since he had read a short book written by the Spanish sorcerer José Ramón Molinero, The Secret Alchemy of Mankind, he had devoured everything relating to the invisible world beyond the human senses. When he finished reading The Dawn of Magic by the Belgian Louis Pauwels and the French-Ukrainian Jacques Bergier, he began to feel he was a member of this new tribe. ‘I’m a magician preparing for his dawn,’ he wrote in his diary. At the end of 1970, he had collected fifty works on the subject. During this time he had read, commented on and given star ratings to all six of the Hermann Hesse books published in Brazil, as well as to Erich von Däniken’s best-sellers The Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars, Goethe’s Faust, to which he gave only three stars, and to absurd books such as Black Magic and White Magic by a certai
n V.S. Foldej, which didn’t even merit a rating.
One of the most celebrated authors of this new wave was Carlos Castaneda. Not only did he write on the occult: his own story was shrouded in mystery. He was said to have been born in 1925 in Peru (or in 1935 in Brazil, according to other sources) and had graduated in anthropology at the University of California, in Los Angeles. When he was preparing his doctoral thesis he decided to write autobiographical accounts of his experiences in Mexico on the use of drugs such as peyote, mushrooms and stramonium (known as devil’s weed) in native rituals. The worldwide success of Castaneda, who even featured on the cover of Time magazine, attracted hordes of hippies, in search of the new promised land, from the four corners of the earth to the Sonora desert on the border where California and Arizona meet Mexico, where the books were set.
For those who, like Paulo, did not believe in coincidences, the fact that it was at precisely this moment that his mother made him the gift of a trip to the United States seemed like a sign. His grandmother Lilisa was going to Washington to visit her daughter Lúcia, who was married to the diplomat Sérgio Weguelin, and he would go with her and, if he wanted, extend the trip and go travelling alone or with his cousin Serginho, who was a few years younger. Besides giving him the opportunity to get to know first-hand the area about which Castaneda had written, the trip was useful in another way. His relationship with Vera appeared to be coming to an end. ‘Life with her is getting complicated,’ he complained at the beginning of 1971 in his diary. ‘We don’t have sex any more, she’s driving me mad, and I’m driving her mad. I don’t love her any more. It’s just habit.’ Things had reached such a low ebb that the two had stopped living together. Vera had returned to her apartment in Leblon and he had moved from Santa Teresa back to his grandparents’ house before moving to Copacabana. Besides this, he announced in his diary that he was ‘half-married’ to a new woman, the young actress Christina Scardini, whom he had met at drama school and with whom he swore he was passionately in love. This was a lie, but during the month and a half he was away in America, she was the recipient of no fewer than forty-four letters.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 21