I read Lamarca’s diary. I admired him only because he fought for his ideas, nothing more. Today, though, when I see the demeaning comments in the press, I felt like shouting, like screaming. I was really angry. And I discovered in his diary a great love for someone, a poetic love that was full of life, and the newspaper called it ‘the terrorist’s dependence on his lover’. I discovered a man who was full of self-doubt and hyper-honest with himself, even though he fought for an idea that I consider wrong.
The government is torturing people and I’m frightened of torture, I’m frightened of pain. My heart is beating far too fast now, simply because these words could compromise me. But I have to write. The whole thing is fucked. Everyone I know has either been imprisoned or beaten up. And none of them had anything to do with anything.
I still think that one day they’re going to knock on the door of this room and take this diary. But St Joseph will protect me. Now that I’ve written these lines, I know that I’m going to live in fear, but I couldn’t continue to keep quiet, I needed to let it out. I’m going to type because it’s faster. It needs to be fast. The sooner this notebook is out of my room the better. I’m really frightened of physical pain. I’m frightened of being arrested like I was before. And I don’t want that to happen ever again: that’s why I try not to think about politics at all. I wouldn’t be able to resist. But I will resist. Up until now, 21st September 1971, I was scared. But today is an historic day–or perhaps just a few historic hours. I’m liberating myself from the prison that I built, thanks to all Their practices.
It was very difficult for me to write these words. I’m repeating this so that I won’t ever delude myself when I re-read this diary in a safe place, thirty years from now, about the times I’m living through now. But now I’ve done it. The die is cast.
Sometimes he would spend all day locked in his room at the back of his grandmother’s house, smoking cannabis and trying to make a start on that dreamed-of book, or at least a play, or an essay. He had notebooks full of ideas for books, plays and essays, but something was missing–inclination? inspiration?–and when evening came, he still hadn’t written a line. Otherwise, he taught for three hours a day and then went to the university. He would go in, talk to various people and, when he got fed up with doing that, end up alone in a bar near by, drinking coffee, chain-smoking and filling pages of notebooks with ideas.
It was on one such evening that a girl appeared, wearing a miniskirt and high boots. She had very long, thick dark hair. She sat down beside Paulo at the bar, ordered a coffee and struck up a conversation with him. She had just qualified as an architect and her name was Adalgisa Eliana Rios de Magalhães, or Gisa, from Alfenas in Minas Gerais; she was two years older than Paulo. She had left Minas for Rio in order to study at the Federal University and was now working for the Banco Nacional da Habitação, although what she liked best was drawing comic strips. She was as slender as a catwalk model, and had an unusual face in which her dark melancholy eyes contrasted with a sensual mouth. They talked for some time, exchanged telephone numbers and parted. Once again, Paulo dismissed any possibility of a relationship developing, writing: ‘She’s ugly and has no sex appeal.’
Unlike Paulo–and this was something he never knew–Gisa had been an active militant in opposition to the military regime. She had never taken part in armed action or anything that might involve risking her life–and this, in the jargon of repression, meant that she was a ‘subversive’, rather than a ‘terrorist’–but following her first year in architecture, she had been a member of several clandestine left-wing cells that had infiltrated the student movement. It was through the students’ union at the university that she joined the Brazilian Communist Party, or PCB, where she handed out pamphlets at student assemblies with copies of Voz Operária [The Worker’s Voice]. She left the party and joined the Dissidência da Guanabara, which changed its name in 1969 to Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro, or MR-8, and was one of the groups responsible for the kidnapping of the United States ambassador Charles Elbrick. Although she herself was never anything more than a low-ranking militant, Gisa was nevertheless an activist, and, when she met Paulo, she was having an affair with a young architect from Pernambuco, Marcos Paraguassu de Arruda Câmara. He was the son of Diógenes de Arruda Câmara, a member of the elite in the Partido Comunista do Brasil, who had been in prison in Rio since 1968, and was himself a militant.
In spite of Paulo’s scornful remark after their first meeting, over the next few days, the two met up again every night in the small bar next to the theatre school. A week later, he walked her back to the apartment where she lived with her brother, José Reinaldo, at Flamengo beach. She invited him up, and they listened to music and smoked cannabis until late. When her brother arrived home at two in the morning, he found them lying naked on the sitting-room carpet. Less than a month later, Gisa broke up with Marcos Paraguassu: she and Paulo had decided to live together. Paulo moved in three weeks later, once she had managed to get rid of her brother, and immediately proposed that they get married in a month and a half, on Christmas Eve. Gisa accepted, despite feeling slightly uncomfortable about the speed with which he had moved into her home and his habit of walking around the apartment naked.
Hoping perhaps that marriage would help her son to settle down, Paulo’s mother reacted as warmly as she had with his previous girlfriends. Then, on 22 November, three months after they had met, Paulo recorded in his diary: ‘Gisa is pregnant. It looks as though we’re going to have a son.’ The fact that the baby would be a boy born under the sign of Leo appears to have made him still more excited at the thought of fatherhood. ‘My powers will be re-born with this son,’ he wrote delightedly. ‘In the next eight months I’ll redouble my energy and climb higher and higher.’
The dream lasted less than a week. After his initial excitement, Paulo began to feel a sense of horror whenever he thought of it, which was all the time. When reality dawned, and he saw that it would be absolute madness to have a child when he had no permanent employment and no means of supporting a family, the first person to be told of his decision was not Gisa but his mother. To Paulo’s surprise, Lygia turned out to be not quite the committed Catholic when he told her that he was going to suggest to his girlfriend that she have an abortion. She agreed that having the child was not a good idea. Gisa resisted at first, before agreeing that she, too, was convinced that it would be irresponsible to have the baby. With the help of friends they found a clinic that specialized in clandestine abortions–abortion being a crime–and arranged the operation for 9 December 1971.
Neither managed to sleep the night before. In the morning, they got up in silence, had a bath and went in search of a taxi. They arrived at the clinic at seven on the dot, the time of the appointment. It was a surprise for them both when they saw that there were about thirty women there, the majority very young, and many with their husbands or boyfriends–all looking miserable. On arrival, each woman gave her name to the nurse, left a small pile of notes on the table–cheques were not accepted–and waited to be called. Although there were plenty of chairs, the majority preferred to stand. Five minutes later, Gisa was taken by another nurse to a staircase going up to the second floor. She left with her head bowed, without saying goodbye. In a matter of minutes, all the women had been called, with only a few men remaining in the waiting room.
Paulo sat on one of the chairs, took a notebook out of his bag and began to write–in a very small hand so that his partners in misfortune would not be able to read what he was writing. Whether knowingly or not, each tried to conceal his concern with some gesture or other. Paulo was constantly blinking; the man on his right would empty half the tobacco from his cigarette into the ashtray before lighting up; another kept flipping through a magazine, meanwhile staring into space. Despite his tic, Paulo did not appear to be nervous. He was, it was true, feeling an unpleasant sense of physical smallness, as though he had suddenly become a shrunken dwarf. Background music was coming from two loudsp
eakers, and although no one was really listening to it, they all kept time by tapping their feet or rattling their key rings. As he watched these movements, Paulo noted in his diary: ‘They are all trying to keep their bodies as busy as possible and in the most varied ways, because their subconscious is clearly telling them: “Don’t think about what’s going on in there”.’ They all kept looking at the clock, and each time footsteps were heard, heads would turn toward the staircase. Occasionally, one would complain about how slowly time seemed to be passing. A small group tried to put aside their thoughts by talking quietly about football. Paulo merely observed and wrote:
A young man next to me is complaining about the delay and says that he’s going to be late collecting his car from the garage. But I know he’s not really like that. He’s not thinking about his car, but he wants me to believe that so that he can play the part of the strong man. I smile and gaze into his neurones: there’s his wife with her legs open, the doctor is inserting forceps, cutting, scraping and filling everything up with cotton wool once it’s over. He knows that I know, turns the other way and is still, without looking at anything, breathing only deeply enough to stay alive.
At 8.30 in the morning, half the women had left and there was no sign of Gisa. Paulo went to the bar around the corner, had a coffee, smoked a cigarette and went back to the waiting room and his notebook, impatient and concerned that perhaps things were not going well for his girlfriend. An hour later, there was still no news. At 9.30 he put his hand in his pocket, hurriedly took out his fountain pen and wrote: ‘I felt that it was now. My son returned to the eternity he had never left.’
Suddenly, no one knew from where, or why, they heard a sound that no one had really expected to hear in such a place: a loud, healthy baby’s cry, followed immediately by a shout of surprise from a young lad in the waiting room: ‘It’s alive!’
For a moment, the men appeared to have been freed from the pain, misery and fear that united them in that gloomy room and they broke into a wild, collective burst of laughter. Just as the laughter stopped, Paulo heard footsteps: it was Gisa, returning from the operation, almost three hours after their arrival. Paler than he had ever seen her and with dark rings around her eyes, she looked very groggy and was still suffering from the effects of the anaesthetic. In the taxi on the way home, Paulo asked the driver to go slowly, ‘because my girlfriend has cut her foot and it’s hurting a lot’.
Gisa slept the whole afternoon and when she woke she couldn’t stop crying. Sobbing, she told him that just as she was about to be anaesthetized, she had wanted to run out: ‘The doctor put a thin tube inside me and took out a baby that was going to be born perfect. But now our son is rotting somewhere, Paulo…’
Neither could sleep. It was late at night when she went slowly over to the desk where he was sitting writing and said: ‘I hate to ask you this, but I’ve got to change the dressing and I think I’ll manage to do it alone. But if it’s very painful, can you come into the bathroom with me to help?’
He smiled and replied with a supportive ‘Of course’, but once the bathroom door was shut, Paulo begged St Joseph a thousand times to save him from that unpleasant task. ‘Forgive me my cowardice, St Joseph,’ he murmured, looking up, ‘but changing that dressing would be too much for me. Too much! Too much!’ To his relief, minutes later, she released him from that obligation and lay down on the bed again. Since leaving the abortion clinic, Gisa had only stopped crying when she fell asleep.
On the Saturday, Paulo took advantage of the fact that she seemed a little better and went off to do his teaching. When he got back in the evening, he found her standing at the bus stop in front of their building. The two returned home and only after much questioning from him did she confess what she had been doing in the street: ‘I left the house to die.’
Paulo’s reaction was astonishing. He immediately said: ‘I’m really sorry I interrupted such an important process. If you’ve decided to die, then go ahead and kill yourself.’
Her courage had failed her, though.
On the third night without sleep, Gisa only opened her mouth to cry, while he could not stop talking. He explained carefully that she had no way out: after being called to Earth, the Angel of Death would only go back if he could take a soul with him. He said that there was no point in turning back, because the Angel would follow her for ever, and even if she didn’t want to die now, he could kill her later, for example by letting her be run over. He recalled how he had faced the Angel when he was an adolescent and had cut the throat of a goat so that he would not have to hand over his own life. The way out was to stand up to the Angel: ‘You need to challenge him. Do what you decided to do: try to kill yourself but hope that you’ll escape with your life.’
When Gisa closed her eyes, exhausted, he went back to his diary, where he pondered the mad course of action he was proposing to his girlfriend:
I know that Gisa isn’t going to die, but she doesn’t know it and she can’t live with that doubt. We have to give a reply to the Angel in some way or other. Some days ago, a friend of ours, Lola, slashed her whole body with a razor blade, but she was saved at the last moment. Lots of people have been attempting suicide recently. But few succeeded and that’s good, because they escaped with their lives and managed to kill the person inside them whom they didn’t like.
This macabre theory was not just the fruit of Paulo’s sick imagination but had been scientifically proven by a psychiatrist whom he frequently visited, and whom he identified in his diary merely as ‘Dr Sombra’, or ‘Dr Shadow’. The theory was that one should reinforce the patient’s traumas. The doctor had told him quite categorically that no one is cured by conventional methods: ‘If you’re lost and think that the world is much stronger than you are,’ he would say to his patients, ‘then all that’s left for you is suicide.’ According to Paulo, this was precisely where the brilliance of his thesis lay: ‘The subject leaves the consulting room completely devastated. It’s only then that he realizes that he has nothing more to lose and he begins to do things that he would never have had the courage to do in other circumstances. All in all, Dr Sombra’s method is really the only thing in terms of the subconscious that I have any real confidence in. It’s cure by despair.’
When they woke the following day–a brilliant, sunny summer Sunday–Paulo did not need to try to convince Gisa any further. He realized this when she put on a swimsuit, took a bottle of barbiturates from the bathroom cupboard–he thought it was Orap, or pimozide, which he had been taking since his first admission to the clinic–and emptied the contents into her mouth, swallowing it all down with a glass of water. They went out together into the street, she stumbling as she walked, and proceeded down to the beach. Paulo stayed on the pavement while Gisa waded into the water, where she began swimming out to sea. Although he knew that with that amount of medication in her she would never have the strength to swim back, he waited, watching until she was just a black dot among the glittering waves, a black dot that was moving farther and farther away. ‘I was scared, I wanted to give in, to call her, to tell her not to do it,’ he wrote later, ‘but I knew that Gisa wasn’t going to die.’
Two men doing yoga on the beach went up to him, concerned that the girl was nearly out of sight, and said: ‘We should call the lifeguard. The water’s very cold and if she gets cramp she’ll never get back.’
Paulo calmed them with a smile and a lie: ‘No need, she’s a professional swimmer.’
Half an hour later, when a group of people had begun to collect on the pavement, foreseeing a tragedy, Gisa began to swim back. When she reached the beach, pale and ghostly looking, she threw up, which probably saved her life, because she vomited up all the tablets. The muscles in her face and arms were stiff from the cold water and from the overdose. Paulo held her as they went to the house and then wrote the results of that ‘cure by despair’ in his diary:
I’m thinking: Who’s the Angel going to content himself with this time, now that Gisa is in my arms? She c
ried and was very tired, and of course she did still have eight tablets inside her. We came home, and she fell asleep on the carpet, but woke up looking quite different, with a new light in her eyes. For a while, we didn’t go out for fear of contagion. The suicide epidemic was spreading like anything.
If anyone had looked through his diaries during the months prior to Gisa’s attempted suicide, they would not have been surprised by Paulo’s bizarre behaviour. Since reading Molinero’s book, The Secret Alchemy of Mankind, he had become deeply immersed in the occult and in witchcraft. It was no longer just a matter of consulting gypsies, witch doctors and tarot readers. At one point, he had concluded that ‘The occult is my only hope, the only visible escape’. As if he had put aside his dream of becoming a writer, he now concentrated all his energies on trying to ‘penetrate deep into Magic, the last recourse and last exit for my despair’. He avidly devoured everything relating to sorcerers, witches and occult powers. On the bookshelves in the apartment he shared with Gisa, works by Borges and Henry Miller had given way to things such as The Lord of Prophecy, The Book of the Last Judgement, Levitation and The Secret Power of the Mind. He would frequently visit Ibiapas, 100 kilometres from Rio, where he would take purifying baths of black mud administered by a man known as ‘Pajé Katunda’.
It was on one such trip that Paulo first attributed to himself the ability to interfere with the elements. ‘I asked for a storm,’ he wrote, ‘and the most incredible storm immediately blew up.’ However, his supernatural powers did not always work. ‘I tried to make the wind blow, without success,’ he wrote a little later, ‘and I ended up going home frustrated.’ Another trick that failed was his attempt to destroy something merely by the power of thought: ‘Yesterday Gisa and I tried to break an ashtray by the power of thought, but it didn’t work. And then, would you believe it, straight afterwards, while we were having lunch here, the maid came to say that she had broken the ashtray. It was bizarre.’
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 24