Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life

by Fernando Morais

  The success of the disc meant that Paulo and Gisa, Raul and Edith could really push the boat out. They flew to the United States and, after spending a childish week at Disney World in Florida, visited Memphis, the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and then spent a glorious, hectic month in New York. On one of their many outings in the Big Apple, the two couples knocked at the door of the Dakota building, the grey, neo-Gothic, somewhat sinister apartment block opposite Central Park where John Lennon lived and which had also provided the setting for that classic of satanism, Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Roman Polanski. With typical Brazilian immodesty, Paulo and Raul seemed to assume that the success of Krig-Ha was recommendation enough for these two puny rockers to fraternize with the unassailable writer of ‘Imagine’. On their return to Brazil, Paulo and Raul gave several interviews, some for international publications, in which they gave details of their conversation with Lennon, who despite a heavy cold had, according to them, received them with his wife, Yoko Ono, to chat, swap compositions and even consider the possibility of working together. A press release described their meeting:

  We only got to meet John Lennon the day before our return. We went there with a journalist from a Brazilian TV channel. As soon as we sat down, the journalist asked about his separation from Yoko. John immediately told the journalist to leave, saying that he wasn’t going to waste his time on gossip. Because of this, the meeting began rather tensely, with John warning us that he would take a very dim view of any attempt on our part to capitalize on our meeting for the purposes of promoting ourselves in Brazil. After a few minutes, the tension lifted and we talked non-stop for half an hour about the present and the future. The results of this meeting will be revealed bit by bit as the situation develops.

  It was a complete lie. As time went by the truth behind the story emerged. Paulo and Raul never visited John Lennon’s apartment; nor were they received by Yoko Ono. The nearest they got to John Lennon was the porter at the Dakota building, who merely informed them over the intercom that ‘Mr Lennon is not at home’. The same press release included another invention: that Lennon had been most impressed by the project Paulo and Raul were preparing to launch in Brazil, the Sociedade Alternativa, the Alternative Society.

  The plan was to create a community based on an experiment developed by Aleister Crowley at the beginning of the twentieth century in Cefalu, in Sicily. The place chosen as the site of the ‘City of the Stars’, as Raul called it, was Paraíba do Sul, where Euclydes Lacerda, or Frater Zaratustra, lived. Raul had absorbed the world of drugs and magic so quickly that a year after his first meeting with Paulo, there was no sign of the smart businessman who had come to the office of Pomba to discuss flying saucers. He now sported a thick beard and a magnificent mane of black hair, and had started dressing extravagantly as well, favouring flares that were very tight in the leg and very wide at the bottom, and lamé jackets which he wore without a shirt underneath, thus revealing his pale, sunken, bony chest.

  When they returned from their American trip, Raul and Paulo began to create what was to be by far their greatest success–the LP Gita. Of the eleven songs chosen for the disc, seven had lyrics by Paulo and of these at least three became the duo’s theme tunes–‘Medo da Chuva’, ‘Gita’ and ‘Sociedade Alternativa’. ‘Medo da Chuva’ revealed the lyricist’s somewhat unorthodox views on marriage (‘It’s a pity that you think I’m your slave/Saying that I’m your husband and I can’t leave/Like the stones on the beach I stay at your side/Knowing nothing of the loves life brought me, but that I never knew…’). The title song, ‘Gita’, was no more than a translation of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna found in Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu sacred text which they had just read. The most intriguing song on the album, though, was the sixth, ‘Sociedade Alternativa’–or, rather, what was intriguing was what the words concealed. At first sight, the words appear to be an innocent surrealist game based on a single chorus, which is repeated throughout the song:

  If I want and you want

  To take a bath in a hat

  Or to wait for Father Christmas

  Or to talk about Carlos Gardel

  Then let’s do it!

  It was the refrain that opens and closes the piece that concealed the mystery.

  Do what you want is the whole of the law.

  Viva! Viva! Viva the Sociedade Alternativa!

  As if wanting to leave no doubt as to their intentions, the authors transcribed word for word entire texts from the Liber Oz, finally showing their hand and making their allegiances crystal clear. While Raul sang the refrain, a backing track of his own voice sang:

  Number 666 is called Aleister Crowley!

  Viva! Viva!

  Viva the Sociedade Alternativa!

  The law of Thelema

  Viva! Viva!

  Viva the Sociedade Alternativa!

  The law of the strong

  That is our law and the joy of the world

  Viva! Viva!

  Viva the New Age!

  Although only the few initiates to the world of Crowley would understand this, Paulo Coelho and Raul Seixas had decided to become the spokesmen of OTO and, therefore, of the Devil. For many of their audience this was a coded message written to confuse the censors and arguing for a new society as an alternative to the military dictatorship. This also seemed to be the government’s view, because when ‘Sociedade Alternativa’ was released, the censors forbade Raul to sing it when he toured Brazil.

  With or without censorship, the fact is that everything was going so well that Paulo concluded that his days of material and emotional penury were over. That evening, as he sometimes did, instead of writing, he recorded his diary on tape, talking as if he were on stage:

  On 15 April 1974, at the age of twenty-six, I, Paulo Coelho, finally finished paying for my crimes. Only at twenty-six did I become fully aware of this. Now give me my reward.

  I want what’s due to me.

  And what’s due to me will be whatever I want!

  And I want money!

  I want power!

  I want fame, immortality and love!

  While he was waiting for his other wishes to come true, he enjoyed the money, fame and love that had already come his way. At the beginning of May, Raul invited him and Gisa to go to Brasília, where he was going to do three shows during the Festival of the Nations being held in the federal capital on 10, 11 and 12 May. At the same time, they were going to start promoting the LP Gita, which was to be launched a few weeks later. A slave to the I Ching, Paulo threw the three coins several times until it was confirmed that the trip would present no danger.

  They were staying at the smart Hotel Nacional when, on the Friday afternoon, the day of the first show, the two were summoned by the Federal Police to be given the usual talk by the censors as to what could and could not be sung in public. The colonel and bureaucrat who received them explained that in their case the only banned song was ‘Sociedade Alternativa’. The sports stadium where the show was to be held was packed, and the first two shows passed off without incident. On the Sunday, the night of the final show, Raul, after spending the afternoon and evening smoking cannabis, had what he called ‘a turn’. He was unable to remember a single word of the songs on the programme. While the band kept the audience entertained, he squatted at the edge of the stage and whispered to his partner, who was sitting in the first row: ‘Help me, will you? I’m in deep shit. Get up here and keep the public quiet for a while, while I go and splash my face with water.’ With the microphone in his hand, Raul introduced Paulo to the crowd as ‘my dear partner’ and left him to deal with the problem. Since the audience were already clapping in time to the band, shouting out the banned refrain, Paulo simply did the same and began to sing along with them:

  Viva! Viva! Viva the Sociedade Alternativa!

  Viva! Viva! Viva the Sociedade Alternativa!

  When he returned to Rio, he described the weekend in Brasília in just a few lines: ‘It was a very quiet trip. On Friday we
talked to the censor and a colonel from the Federal Police. On Sunday, I talked to the crowd for the first time, although I was completely unprepared. Any mention of the Alternative Society is restricted to interviews.’

  During that week Paulo made an important decision: he formalized his acceptance into the OTO as a probationer or novice, when he swore ‘eternal devotion to the Great Work’. From 19 May ‘of the year 1974 of the Common Era’ onwards, for followers of the Devil, Paulo Coelho de Souza’s ‘profane name’ would disappear and be replaced by the ‘magical name’ that he himself had chosen: Eternal Light, or Staars, or, simply, 313. After sending his oath off in the post, he noted in his diary: ‘Having been invoked so often, He must be breathing fire from his nostrils somewhere near by.’ He was. On the morning of 25 May, six days after his entrance into the world of darkness, Paulo was finally to have his much-desired meeting with the Devil.

  CHAPTER 16

  A devil of a different sort

  THE LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY that Philips had deposited in Paulo’s bank account the previous year was just a hint of what was to come. Following the enormous success of Krig-Ha, Bandolo! the recording company launched a single featuring ‘Gita’ and ‘Não Pare na Pista’, the latter written on the Rio–Bahia highway when the two were returning from a few days’ rest in Dias d’Ávila, in the interior of Bahia, where Raul’s parents lived. The aim of the single was merely to give the public a taster of the LP that would be released in June, but in less than a month it had sold more than a hundred thousand copies, which won the creators an unexpectedly early Gold Disc, the first of six prizes that the two songs went on to win. Each time a radio station unwittingly made an invocation to the Devil as they played the refrain ‘Viva! Viva a Sociedade Alternativa!’ meant more money for Raul and Paulo. In April 1974, Paulo bought a large apartment in Rua Voluntários da Pátria, in Botafogo, a few blocks from the estate where he had been born and spent his childhood, and he moved in there with Gisa.

  On Friday, 24 May, two weeks after their short stay in Brasília, Raul telephoned to say that he had been ordered to go to the political police–known as the Dops–on the following Monday in order to ‘provide some information’. Being accustomed to frequent invitations to discuss which songs could appear in shows or on records, he didn’t appear to be worried, but just in case, he asked his partner to go with him. As soon as he rang off, Paulo consulted the I Ching as to whether there was any risk in going to the Dops. Since the answer seemed to be ‘No’–or at least so it seemed, for according to its followers, the interpretation of the oracle is not always very precise–he thought no more about the matter.

  When he woke on the Saturday morning, Paulo found a note on the bedside table from Gisa, saying that she had gone out early and would be back soon. As he scanned the front page of the Jornal do Brasil, the date on the masthead caught his eye: it was exactly two years since he had met Raul, a meeting that had totally changed his life. He drank a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, glanced through the window from where he could see the sun beating down on the pavement below and then went into his bedroom to put on some shorts before going for his usual hour-long walk. He could detect a slight smell of burning and checked the sockets and domestic appliances, but found nothing wrong. And yet the smell was getting stronger. No, it wasn’t the smell of a fuse blowing, it was something else, something very familiar. He felt a chill in his stomach as his memory took him back to the place where he had smelled the same smell now filling the apartment: the morgue in the Santa Casa de Misericórdia that he had visited daily for some months when collecting data for the obituary page of O Globo. It was the macabre smell of the candles that appeared to be permanently burning in the hospital morgue. The difference was that the odour permeating everything around him now was so strong that it seemed to be coming from 100, even 1,000, candles all burning at the same time.

  As he bent down to do up his trainers, he had the impression that the parquet floor was rising up and coming dangerously close to his face. In fact, his legs had unexpectedly given way beneath him, as if he were about to faint, throwing his chest forwards. He almost crashed to the ground. When the dizziness intensified, he tried to remember whether he had eaten anything strange, but no, it was nothing like that: he wasn’t feeling nauseous, he was simply caught up in a kind of maelstrom that seemed to be affecting everything around him. As well as the attacks of giddiness, which came and went, he realized that the apartment was full of a dark mist, as though the sun had suddenly disappeared and the place was being invaded by grey clouds. For a moment, he prayed that he was merely experiencing the moment most feared by drug addicts–a bad trip, provoked by the use of LSD. This, however, was impossible. He hadn’t taken LSD in ages, and he’d never heard of cannabis causing such hellish feelings.

  He tried to open the door and go outside, but fear paralysed him. It might be worse outside than in. By now, along with the dizziness and the smoke, he could hear terrifying noises, as though someone or some being were breaking everything around him, and yet everything remained in its place. Terrified and lacking the strength to do anything, he felt his hopes revive when the telephone rang. He prayed to God to let it be Euclydes Lacerda–Frater Zaratustra–who could put an end to his suffering. He picked up the phone, but almost immediately put it down again when he realized that he was invoking God’s name in order to speak to a disciple of the Devil. It was not Euclydes: the person calling was his friend Stella Paula, whom he had also recruited into the OTO. She was sobbing, as terrified as he was, and was calling to ask for help because her apartment was filled with black smoke, a strong smell of decomposition and other vile smells. Paulo broke down into uncontrollable sobs. He rang off and, remembering what he usually did when he’d had too much cannabis, he went to the refrigerator and drank several glasses of milk, one after the other, and then put his head under the cold-water tap in the bathroom. Nothing happened. The smell of the dead, the smoke and the dizziness continued, as did the noise of things breaking, which was so loud that he had to cover his ears with his hands to deaden it.

  It was only then that he began to understand what was happening. Having broken all ties with Christianity, he had spent the last few years working with negative energies in search of something that not even Aleister Crowley had achieved: a meeting with the Devil. What was happening that Saturday morning was what Frater Zaratustra called a ‘reflux of magical energies’. All his prayers had been answered. Paulo was face-to-face with the Devil. He felt like throwing himself out the window, but jumping from the fourth floor might not necessarily kill him, and might do terrible damage and perhaps leave him crippled. Crying like an abandoned baby, his hands shielding his ears and his head buried between his knees, he recalled fragments of the threats that Father Ruffier had pronounced from the pulpit of the chapel at St Ignatius College.

  We are in hell! Here you can see only tears and hear only the grinding of teeth caused by the hatred of some against others.

  […] While we cry in pain and remorse the Devil smiles a smile that makes us suffer still more. But the worst punishment, the worst pain, the worst suffering is that we have no hope. We are here for ever.

  […] And the Devil will say: my dear, your suffering hasn’t even begun!

  That was it: he was in hell–a hell far worse than Father Ruffier had promised and which he seemed to be condemned to suffer alone. Yes, how long had this been going on–two hours? three? He had lost all notion of time, and there was still no sign of Gisa. Had something happened to her? In order to stop thinking, he began to count the books in the apartment, and then the records, the pictures, the knives, spoons, forks, plates, pairs of socks, underpants…When he reached the end, he started again. He was standing bent over the kitchen sink with his hands full of cutlery when Gisa returned. She was as confused as he was, shivering with cold, and with her teeth chattering. She asked him what was happening, but Paulo didn’t know. She became angry, saying: ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You know ever
ything!’

  They clung to each other, knelt down on the kitchen floor and began to cry. When he heard himself confessing to Gisa that he was afraid to die, the ghosts of St Ignatius College again rose up before him. ‘You’re afraid of dying?’ Father Ruffier had bawled at him once in front of his classmates. ‘Well, I’m shamed by your cowardice.’ Gisa found his cowardice equally shameful, especially in a man who, until recently, had been the great macho know-it-all, and who had encouraged her to become involved with the crazy warlocks of the OTO. However, in the midst of that mayhem, Paulo really didn’t care what that priest or his girlfriend or his parents might think of him. The only thing he knew was that he didn’t want to die, far less deliver his soul to the Devil.

  He finally plucked up the courage to whisper in Gisa’s ear: ‘Let’s go and find a church! Let’s get out of here and go straight to a church!’

  Gisa, the left-wing militant, couldn’t believe her ears. ‘A church? Why do you need a church, Paulo?’

  He needed God. He wanted a church so that he could ask God to forgive him for having doubted His existence and to put an end to his suffering. He dragged Gisa into the bathroom, turned on the cold-water tap of the shower and crouched beneath it with her. The evil smell, the grey clouds and the noise continued. Paulo began to recite out loud every prayer he knew–Hail Mary, Our Father, Salve Regina, the Creed–and eventually she joined in. They couldn’t remember how long they stayed there, but the tips of their fingers were blue and wrinkled by the time Paulo got up, ran into the sitting room and grabbed a copy of the Bible. Back in the shower, he opened it at random and came upon verse 24, chapter 9, of St Mark’s gospel, which he and Gisa began to repeat, like a mantra, under the showerhead: