At the beginning of May, after a celebratory farewell dinner given by his parents, he took a Varig flight with his grandparents to New York, where they were to catch an internal flight to Washington. When they arrived at Kennedy airport, Paulo and his grandmother couldn’t understand why Tuca was in such a hurry to get the eleven o’clock plane to Washington, for which the check-in was just closing. Lilisa and her grandson argued that there was no reason to rush, because if they missed that plane they could take the following flight, half an hour later. Out of breath from running, the three boarded the plane just as the doors were about to be closed. Tuca only calmed down once they were all sitting with their seatbelts buckled. That night, when they were watching the news at his uncle’s house, Paulo realized that the hand of destiny had clearly been behind Tuca’s insistence that they catch the 11.00 flight. The 11.30 flight, a twin-engined Convair belonging to Allegheny (later US Airways), had experienced mechanical problems and when the pilot tried to make an emergency landing near New Haven, 70 kilometres from New York, the plane had crashed, killing the crew and all thirty passengers on board.
While staying at his diplomat uncle’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, half an hour from Washington, instead of writing a travel diary Paulo decided to use his copious correspondence with Christina to record his impressions. He seemed to be astounded by everything he saw. He could stand for ages, gazing at the automatic vending machines for stamps, newspapers and soft drinks, or spend hours on end in department stores without buying anything, amazed by the sheer variety of products. In his very first letter he regretted not having taken with him ‘a sack of change’ from Brazil, since he had discovered that all the machines accepted the Brazilian 20 centavo coin as if it were a 25 cent piece, even though it was worth only one fifth of the value. ‘I’d have made great savings if I’d brought more coins,’ he confessed, ‘because it costs me 25 cents to buy a stamp for Brazil from the vending machines and to get in to see the blue movies they show in the porn shops here.’
Everything was new and everything excited him, from the supermarket shelves stacked with unnecessary items to the works of art at the National Gallery, where he wept as he actually touched with his own hands the canvas of Death and the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch. He knew perfectly well that touching a painting is a cardinal sin in any serious museum, but he placed his fingers not only on Bosch’s 1485 work but on several other masterpieces too. He would stand in front of each work for some minutes, look around and, when he was certain he wasn’t being watched by the security guards, commit the heresy of spreading all ten fingers out on the canvas. ‘I touched a Van Gogh, a Gauguin, and a Degas, and I felt something growing in me, you know,’ he told his girlfriend. ‘I’m really growing here. I’m learning a lot.’
Nothing, however, seems to have struck him more, while in Washington, than the visits he made to the military museum and the FBI museum. The first, with its many exhibits relating to the participation of the United States in the two world wars, appeared to him to be a place ‘where children are sent to learn to hate the enemies of the United States’. Not only children, to judge by his reaction. After visiting every bit of the museum and seeing planes, rockets and films about American military power, he left ‘hating the Russians, wanting to kill, kill, kill, spitting hatred’. On his tour of the FBI museum, with a federal agent as his guide, he saw the Gangster Museum, with the original clothes and weapons used by famous gangsters, such as Dillinger, ‘Baby Face’, ‘Machine Gun Kelly’ and others, as well as the actual notes written by kidnapped hostages. In the corner of one room he was surprised to find a blinking light, under which was a plaque bearing the following words: ‘Each time this light blinks, a type A crime (murder, kidnap or rape) is committed in the United States.’ The problem was that the light blinked every three seconds. On the gun stand, the agent was proud of the fact that in the FBI, they shoot to kill. That night, on a card peppered with exclamation marks, he recorded his feelings:
These guys don’t miss! They shot with revolvers and machine-guns, and always at the target’s head! They never missed! And there were children, my love, watching all this! There were whole school parties at the FBI gun stand to find out how they defend the country!…The agent told me that to join the FBI you have to be taller than 1.80m, have a good aim and be prepared for them to examine the whole of your past life. Nothing else. There’s no intelligence test, only a shooting test. I’m in the most advanced country in the world, in a country enjoying every comfort and the highest social perfection. So why do such things happen here?
Concerned with his public image, Paulo usually appended a footnote, asking Christina not to show the letters to anyone. ‘They’re very private and written with no thought for style,’ he explained. ‘You can say what I’ve written, but don’t let anyone else read them.’ At the end of a marathon week of visits, he bought a train ticket to New York, where he was going to decide on his next move. In a comfortable red-and-blue second-class carriage on an Amtrak train, minutes after leaving the American capital, he felt a shiver run through him when he realized the purpose of the concrete constructions beside the railway line: they were fall-out shelters built in case of nuclear war. These dark thoughts were interrupted by a tap on his shoulder when the train was about to make its first stop in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
It was the conductor, wearing a blue uniform and with a leather bag round his waist, who said to him: ‘Morning, sir, may I see your ticket?’
Surprised, and not understanding what he meant, Paulo responded in Portuguese: ‘Desculpe.’
The man seemed to be in a hurry and in a bad mood: ‘Don’t you understand? I asked for your ticket! Without a ticket nobody travels on my train.’
It was only at this point that Paulo understood, with deep dismay, that all Vera’s efforts to make him into a model English speaker had been in vain. Without her to turn to, he realized that it was one thing to read books in English, and even then with the help of his lover or of dictionaries. It was quite another to speak it and, most of all, to understand what people were saying in the language. The disappointing truth was that there he was alone in the United States and he couldn’t say a single, solitary word in English.
CHAPTER 12
Discovering America
PAULO’S FIRST IMPRESSION OF NEW YORK could not have been worse. In marked contrast to the cleanliness and colour he was accustomed to seeing on cinema screens and in books, the city that opened up to him through the train windows as soon as he passed through the Brooklyn tunnel and entered Manhattan Island appeared to be infested with beggars and ugly, poorly dressed, threatening-looking people. But this sight did not dishearten him. He wanted to stay only a few days in the city and then set off to find the original objective of his journey: the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the magical deserts of Mexico. He had US$300 and wanted to spend two months ‘wandering from one side of the United States to the other’. The first thing he should do was to stop travelling by train and switch to Greyhound buses. He remembered having seen these buses in films, an elegant greyhound painted on the side. A pass costing US$99 gave you the right to travel for forty-five days to anywhere on the Greyhound network, more than two thousand towns across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Since his plan was to spend two months travelling, this meant that, with the money that remained, he could only afford to stay in YMCA hostels, which charged 6 dollars a night, including breakfast and dinner.
Two days was enough for New York to dispel the disappointment he had felt on arrival. Firstly, because, although the YMCA rooms were small–half the size of his room at his grandmother’s house–and they had no bathroom, television or air conditioning, they were single and very clean, with bed linen changed daily. The staff were polite and while the food was not exactly haute cuisine, it was well cooked and tasty. Were it not for the discomfort of having to share a bathroom with all the other guests on the corridor, Paulo could happily have stayed there longer. The continuing problem was the language.
Every day, in the dining room, he would annoy everyone else in the hungry, impatient queue with his inability to communicate to the cook what it was he wanted to eat. It was a relief to learn that the delicious beans served at the YMCA were called ‘poroto’. Since this was a word he had no difficulty in pronouncing, the problem was solved: he would eat nothing but ‘poroto’ until his English improved.
New York’s tolerant, liberal atmosphere also helped to reconcile him to the city. Paulo discovered that sex, cannabis and hashish were all available in the streets, especially in the areas around Washington Square, where groups of hippies spent their days playing guitars and enjoying the first rays of spring sunshine. One night, he arrived at the hostel restaurant only five minutes before the doors were to be closed. Even though almost all the tables were empty, he picked up his tray and sat down opposite a slim girl of about twenty, wearing what seemed to be the official uniform of hippie women the world over–an ankle-length Indian dress in multi-coloured cotton. A smile appeared on her freckled face and Paulo, sure that he had enough English to be polite, said: ‘Excuse me?’
The girl didn’t understand: ‘What?’
Realizing that he was incapable of pronouncing even a banal ‘excuse me’, he relaxed and started to laugh at himself. Feeling more relaxed made communication easier, and, later that night, he and the girl, Janet, walked together through the city streets. However hard he tried to find out what it was she was studying, Paulo could not understand what the word ‘belei’ meant. Belei? But what did studying ‘belei’ mean? Janet drew back and jumped up, her arms wide, performed a pirouette, and then curtseyed deeply. So that was what it was! She was studying ballet!
At the end of the evening, on the way back to the hostel, where men and women slept on different floors, the young couple stopped on the steps of a building in Madison Square Garden to say goodbye. Between kisses and hugs, Janet slipped her hand below Paulo’s waist, over his jeans, and then started back and said, almost spelling out the words so that he could understand: ‘I’ve been with other boys before, but you…Wow! You’re the first one I’ve known who’s had a square one.’ Laughing, he had to explain that no, he did not have a square dick. Rather than leaving his documents in the wardrobe in the YMCA, he had put all his money and his return ticket to Brazil in his passport and put the whole lot in a supposedly safe place–his underpants.
It was under the guidance of Janet, with whom he would often have sex in quiet corners of parks and gardens, that he came to know a new world: the New York of the 1970s. He joined demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, went to concerts of baroque music in Central Park and was thrilled to go down some steps and find Pennsylvania station magically lit up. ‘It’s bigger than Central station in Rio,’ he wrote to his girlfriend, ‘only it’s constructed entirely underground.’ He was excited when he went to Madison Square Garden, ‘where three months ago Cassius Clay was beaten by Joe Frazier’. His passion for the boxer who would later take the name Muhammad Ali was such that he not only watched all his fights but also compared his tiny physical measurements with those of the American giant. Although he had no specific date to return home, time seemed too short to enjoy everything that New York had to offer a young man from a poor country under a military dictatorship.
When he could, he tried to record in his letters the excitement he was experiencing:
There are areas where everything–books, newspapers, posters–is written in Chinese, or Spanish or Italian. My hotel is full of men in turbans, Black Panther militants, Indians in long clothes, everything. Last night, when I left my room, I broke up a fight between two old guys of sixty! They were bashing the hell out of each other! I haven’t even told you anything about Harlem yet, the black district, it’s amazing, fantastic. What is NY? I think NY is the prostitutes walking the streets at midday in Central Park, it’s the building where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed, it’s the place where West Side Story was filmed.
Before sealing the envelopes he would cover the margins of his letters with sentimental declarations of love (‘adored, loved, wonderful woman’, or ‘I’ll telephone you even if I’ve got to go without food for a day just to hear your voice for a minute’) and a few lies, such as ‘Don’t worry, I won’t cheat on you’.
At the end of a torrid, two-week affair with New York, Paulo realized that he was limited by two things: neither his hesitant English nor his savings would be enough for him to travel alone across the United States for two months. The question of money could be resolved with a clever piece of belt-tightening suggested by Janet: if he used his Greyhound ticket for night journeys lasting more than six hours, the bus would become his hotel bedroom. The language problem, though, seemed insoluble. His schoolboy vocabulary might be enough to cope with basic needs, such as sleeping and eating, but Paulo knew that the journey would lose its charm if he couldn’t properly understand what other people were saying. Faced with a choice between returning to Brazil and asking for help, he opted for the latter: he made a reverse-charge call to his aunt’s house in Washington and invited his cousin Sérgio, who spoke English fluently, to go with him. A few days later, the two young men, rucksacks on their backs and using the Greyhound buses as a hotel, headed off to Chicago, the first stop on the long haul to the Grand Canyon, in the heart of Arizona, more than 4,000 kilometres from Manhattan and so far away that the time there was three hours earlier than in New York.
The only records of this period are the letters he sent to Christina, and one notes the absence of any reference to his companion who was, after all, his saviour on the journey. This is not just a lapse, because, besides overlooking Sérgio’s presence, Paulo told his girlfriend that he was travelling alone. ‘Perhaps I’ll leave my camera with Granny during the journey,’ he wrote, ‘because I’m alone and can’t take photos of myself, and it’s better to buy postcards than to waste film on landscapes.’ He wanted to make this marathon trip sound like a bold adventure.
With no money to spare, he recorded all his expenses on a piece of paper with the amounts in dollars and Brazilian cruzeiros: a packet of cigarettes 60 cents, a hamburger 80 cents, a subway ticket 30 cents, a cinema ticket 2 dollars. Each time they missed the night Greyhound bus, his savings would shrink by 7 dollars, the price of a room in one of the more modest roadside hotels. New York, with its mixture of civilization and barbarism, had left him ‘shaken up’, and it was hard for him to adjust to the more rural states in the Midwest. ‘After NYC I’ve got little to say,’ he complained to Christina in a near unintelligible scrawl written as the bus was moving. ‘I’m only writing because I’m really missing my woman.’ The majority of the cities he visited merited only superficial mention in his correspondence. His impression of Chicago was that it was the ‘coldest’ city he had so far encountered. ‘The people are absolutely neurotic, and totally and uncontrollably aggressive. It’s a city where they take work very seriously.’
After spending five days on the road, Paulo’s eyes lit up at the sight through the dusty bus window of a road sign saying ‘Cheyenne–100 miles’. In the state of Wyoming, on the border with Colorado, in the heart of the American West, this was a city he felt he had known since childhood. He had read so many books and magazines and seen so many Westerns set in Cheyenne that he thought himself capable of reconstructing from memory the names of the streets, hotels and saloons where the cowboy and Indian adventures had taken place. His astonishment at seeing the road sign stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t realized the city actually existed. In his mind, Cheyenne was a fantasy appropriated by the authors of books, films and cartoons in stories of the Wild West that he had read and seen during his childhood and adolescence.
He was disappointed to discover that while there were still cowboys in the city, in boots, Stetsons and belts with bull’s buckles, and revolvers in holsters, they now travelled in convertible Cadillacs. The only traces of the Cheyenne he had seen in John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn were the carriages used by the local Amish community, which forbids th
e use of such modern inventions as lifts, telephones and cars. But his greatest disappointment was when he discovered that Pioneer Street, the favourite place for cowboys to hold duels in the evening in the mythical Cheyenne, had been transformed into a busy four-lane highway lined with shops selling electronic gadgets.
The obvious route to the Grand Canyon was to travel some 1,000 kilometres southwest, then cross Colorado and part of New Mexico into Arizona. However, because they both wanted to go to Yellowstone Park and make the most of their Greyhound ticket, they travelled in the opposite direction, northwards. When they realized that the closest stopping-off place to the park was Idaho Falls, 300 kilometres from Yellowstone, Paulo decided to take two risks. First, he spent US$30 on hiring a car. Second, since he had not taken his driving test he lied to the car-hire firm and presented his membership card of the Actors’ Union in Rio as a Brazilian driving licence.
Although he was aware that he risked being arrested if stopped by a traffic policeman, he drove for the whole day past the glaciers in the park and the geysers spewing out hot water and sulphur on to the snow, and saw bears and deer crossing the road. In the evening, they went to return the car and decided to catch a Greyhound bus where they could shelter from the cold. Although it was the middle of summer and the two had experienced temperatures of up to 38°C, two hours from the Canadian border, the cold was so unbearable that the heating in the car wasn’t enough to keep them warm. As neither had suitable clothes for such low temperatures, when they arrived at the bus station in Boise, the capital of Idaho, they rushed to the Greyhound ticket office to ask what time the next night bus left. Going where? Anywhere that wasn’t so cold. If the only destination with available seats at that time of night was San Francisco, then that was where they would go.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 22