The companion on whom he had his eye was a trainee, Cecília Mac Dowell, who was working on the press team at Philips. But before declaring himself to Cissa, as she was known, Paulo had a lightning romance with Elisabeth Romero, who was also a journalist and had interviewed him for a music magazine. They started going out together, and the affair took off. Beth rode a large Kawasaki 900 motorbike, and Paulo took to riding pillion. Although the affair was short-lived, it allowed Beth to witness an episode which Paulo was to describe dozens, if not hundreds of times in interviews published in the international press: the meeting he never had with his idol Jorge Luis Borges.
With the Christmas holidays approaching, Paulo invited Beth to go with him to Buenos Aires, where he intended to visit the great Argentinean writer. He had been putting off the trip for some time, reluctant to go to the police in order to ask for an exit visa to travel to the neighbouring country, fearing that he might be arrested again. They made no attempt to get in touch with Borges beforehand or to obtain some kind of letter of introduction, but the couple were nevertheless prepared to put up with the forty-eight-hour bus journey between Rio and Buenos Aires, armed only with Borges’s address: Calle Maipu 900. As soon as they arrived, Paulo went straight there. The porter of the apartment block, in the centre of the city, told him that Don Jorge Luis was on the other side of the road having a coffee in the bar of an old hotel. Paulo crossed the road, went into the lobby and saw through the window the unmistakable silhouette of the great author of El Aleph, then seventy-six years old, seated alone at a table, drinking an espresso. Such was his excitement that Paulo didn’t have the courage to go up to him. Creeping out as silently as he had entered, he left without saying a word to Borges–something he would always regret.
At the age of twenty-eight, he was to spend his first Christmas away from his family. On the path to Christian reconversion, on 24 December he invited Beth to go with him to midnight mass. Surprised by her refusal–she preferred to spend the night walking through the streets of Buenos Aires–he simply ended the relationship. He telephoned Cissa in Rio on the pretext of wishing her a happy Christmas and declared: ‘I’m in love with you and I’ll be home in three days’ time. If you promise to meet me at the airport, I’ll take a plane so we can be together as soon as possible.’
Small, like him, with brown eyes and a slightly aquiline nose, Cecília Mac Dowell was nineteen and doing media studies at university in Rio de Janeiro when she met Paulo. She was the daughter of Patrícia Fait, an American, and the wealthy and respected TB specialist Afonso Emílio de la Rocque Mac Dowell, the owner of a large clinic in Jacarepaguá. She had been educated at the traditional Colégio Brasileiro de Almeida in Copacabana, which had been set up and run by Nilza Jobim, the mother of the composer Tom Jobim. Although she came from a conservative background–her father came from the northeast and her mother had received a strict Protestant education–the Mac Dowells welcomed with open arms the hippie who had fallen in love with their youngest child. As the months went by, Patrícia and Afonso Emílio shut their eyes to the fact that Cissa spent every weekend with her boyfriend (who had rented out his apartment in Voluntários da Pâtria and moved to the two-roomed apartment in noisy Barata Ribeiro). Thirty years later, Cissa would look back and see some ulterior motives behind her parents’ broad-mindedness: ‘I think that because my two older sisters hadn’t married, my parents lowered their expectations regarding future sons-in-law. They thought it best not to frighten off any potential candidates.’
Whatever her parents’ reasoning, the fact is that at the end of the week, when the Mac Dowells went to their country house in Petrópolis, Cissa would put a few clothes and possessions into a cloth bag and set off to the apartment in Barata Ribeiro. The memory of his disastrous engagement to Eneida, however, continued to trouble Paulo whenever such a situation threatened to reappear: He wrote in his diary: ‘This evening, we’re having supper at Cissa’s house and I hate that because it looks like we’re engaged, and the last thing I want at the moment is to be someone’s fiancé.’ During one of his sessions with the psychiatrist, which he continued to attend frequently, Dr Benjamim Gomes suggested that his nervous tension arose from his problems with sexual relationships: ‘He said that my lack of interest in sex is causing the tension I’m experiencing. In fact, Cissa is a bit like me: she doesn’t insist that much on having sex. This suited me fine because I wasn’t under any obligation, but now I’m going to use sex as a therapy to relieve tension. Dr Benjamim told me that the curve on the graph produced by electroshock treatment is the same as for an orgasm or for an epileptic fit. That’s how I discovered sex as therapy.’
Although he still avoided any mention of an engagement, in March 1976, when his girlfriend returned from a three-week trip to Europe, Paulo proposed marriage. Cissa accepted with genuine happiness, but she laid down certain conditions: she wanted a real marriage, both in a register office and in church, with a priest, and with the bride in white and the groom in jacket and tie. He burst out laughing, telling her that he would accept all her demands in the name of love; ‘besides I really needed to do something conventional and there was nothing better than marriage for that’.
Before the ceremony Paulo consulted the I Ching several times to discover whether he was doing the right thing, and he recorded in his diary his feelings of insecurity: ‘Yesterday I was filled with a real dread of marriage and I was terrified. I reacted violently. We were both feeling a bit suspicious of each other and things turned ugly.’ Two days later, his state of mind was quite different: ‘I’ve been sleeping away from the apartment because I’m suffering from paranoia. I’m desperate for Cissa to come and live with me now. We really do love each other and understand each other and she’s a very easy person to be with. But before she can do that, we have to go through the farce of the wedding.’
On 2 July, however, Paulo was even more dressed up than his fiancée had demanded. Punctually, at seven in the evening, as Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 was playing, he took his place to the right of the priest in St Joseph’s Church. Compared with the Paulo Coelho who had allowed himself to be photographed drunk and dishevelled in New York two years earlier, the man at the altar looked like a prince. With short hair, and his moustache and goatee neatly trimmed, he was wearing a modern morning suit, with a double-breasted jacket, striped trousers, black shoes, a white shirt with cufflinks and a silver tie–identical clothes to those worn by his father and father-in-law, although not by his two best men, Roberto Menescal and Raul Seixas.
To the sound of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, five bridesmaids led the way for the bride, who arrived on her father’s arm and wearing a long white dress. Among the dozens of guests filling the church, Raul Seixas was a most striking figure, in dark glasses, red bowtie and a jacket with matching red stitching. At the blessing of the rings, music filled the nave and the ceremony ended to the chords of Albinoni’s Adagio. Afterwards, everyone went back to the bride’s parents’ apartment, where the civil ceremony was performed, followed by a magnificent dinner.
The honeymoon was nothing special. Since both had to get back to work, they spent a week in a summer house that belonged to Paulo’s parents on the island of Jaguanum, off the Rio de Janeiro coast. Neither has particularly fond memories of that time. There is no reference to the trip in Paulo’s diaries, and Cissa commented: ‘Paulo wasn’t very happy. I don’t think he wanted all that formality…He agreed to it, but only, I think, because I insisted. But it wasn’t the sort of honeymoon, where you’d say, oh, it was marvellous, we were so in love. No. No, I don’t recall that. I know we spent a few days there, I can’t say how many, and then went back to our little life in Rio.’
Their ‘little life’ was to start with a slight disagreement between husband and wife. Paulo insisted on living in his two-room apartment in Barata Ribeiro, not because it was cheap, but because it was near his parents, who had sold their house in Gávea and moved to a new apartment in Rua Raimundo Correia, in Copacabana, ju
st a block away. The memories Cissa has of the first months of her marriage are not very encouraging:
Living there was dreadful. The only bedroom looked directly out on to Rua Barata Ribeiro, which was incredibly noisy. But he was in his maternal phase and wanted it so that he could be close to his mother, who lived in the same district. Our apartment would hardly have fitted into a decent-sized living room. He had another apartment, but wanted to stay close to his mother. I had been brought up to be a good Protestant, and so I did everything I could for the sake of the marriage and learned to fall asleep to the noise from the street. We got married in July, and I think we stayed there for about six months.
This may not have been one of the most promising starts to a marriage, but the marriage survived. Sometimes, however, their fights were very noisy, as in the early hours of 24 August, Paulo’s twenty-ninth birthday. Cissa was woken at two in the morning by a loud bang, as if a bomb had gone off in the building. She got up, terrified, and found her husband in the sitting room with a burnt-out firework in his hand. With the inevitable spliff in the other hand, he had decided to let off some rockets, to the despair of the neighbours. Everything was, of course, recorded on tape:
Paulo–It’s 1:59 on 24th August 1976. I’m twenty-nine. I’m going to let off a rocket commemorating who I am and I’m going to record the noise [sound of the rocket exploding]. Great! Everyone is coming to their windows.
Cecília–Paulo!!
Paulo–What? Everyone’s awake, the dogs are barking…
Cecília–This is absurd!
Paulo–What?
Cecília–Are you mad?
Paulo–It made a fantastic noise! It echoed all over the city! I’m the champion! [laughing a lot] It’s great that I bought these rockets the other day! It’s great! God, it was fun! [laughing a lot] Fantastic! I think that I’ve really freed myself of a lot of things letting off that rocket!
Cecília–Come and sit here with me for a while. I’m frightened.
Paulo–Why are you frightened? Have you had a premonition or something?
Cecília–No Paulo, it’s because I’ve had a difficult day.
Paulo–Ah, thank God for that! Jesus, this has been a real liberation, Cecília. Go on, you let off a rocket and you’ll feel calm too, straight away. Stand here at the window and let off a rocket.
Cecília–No! Anyone hearing the noise will know where it came from. Forget about the rockets. Stay a bit with me, will you?
Paulo–[laughing a lot] Oh, this is so cool! Two o’clock in the morning, a rocket celebrating my birthday, the stars filling the sky. Oh, thank you, God! I’m going to let off my fireworks across the city! [sound of rockets exploding]
Cecília–Paulo! The porters in all the other buildings will see it’s coming from here.
Cissa was in fact an easy person to live with, but she had a strong character and wouldn’t be forced to do anything against her will. She accepted her husband’s ‘Castaneda-inspired ideas’, as Eneida had, and would sometimes even join him in smoking a cannabis joint, but she wouldn’t hear of any marital extravagances, which he called ‘sexual propositions’. One day, Paulo woke late in the morning when, as usual, Cissa was at work. She had left a piece of paper on the bedside table with a handwritten note that seemed to burn his fingers as he read it. It said that if her husband had decided to ‘settle down’, then this certainly hadn’t happened at home.
To whom it may concern:
I am quite relaxed about the 500 women Paulo has had in the past because none of them is a threat. But today I felt really worried about my marriage. When Paulo joked with a secretary that he was going to grab her arse, I thought that was really low-class, but it was much worse when I heard him suggest paying ‘some guys’ in Cinelândia to join in our sexual relationship. I knew he had done this before, but I never thought he would suggest something so disgusting to me, knowing me as Paulo knows me, and knowing what I think about it. So this morning I feel more alone than ever because I know I can’t talk about it to anyone. The only thing I can see, and what I actually want at this moment, is to separate from Paulo as soon as possible, as soon as this stupid society allows it, but I know that it’s going to be a real trauma for me and for my family.
They hadn’t even been married for a year and already the marriage was floundering.
CHAPTER 19
London
HIS MARRIAGE MIGHT BE FALLING APART, but the same could not be said of Paulo’s professional life. In December 1976, Philips released the fifth LP produced by Paulo and Raul, Há Dez Mil Anos Atrás, on which ten of the eleven tracks had lyrics written by him. It immediately became a phenomenal success. The album took its title from ‘I Was Born Ten Thousand Years Ago’, a traditional American song of which there were several versions, the most famous of which had been recorded by Elvis Presley four years earlier. It was also only the second time that Paulo had dedicated a song to anyone; in this case, the dedication was to his father, Pedro Queima Coelho. It was an unusual way of paying him homage, since the lyrics speak of the differences between himself and his father and are slightly condescending. Although he only admitted it years later, anyone who knew a little about his family history would realize that the ‘Pedro’ of ‘Meu Amigo Pedro’ [‘My Friend Pedro’] was his father:
Every time that I touch paradise
Or else burn in hell,
I think of you, my poor friend,
Who always wears the same suit.
Pedro, I remember the old days
When we two used to think about the world.
Today, I call you square, Pedro
And you call me a bum.
Pedro, where you go I go too,
But everything ends where it started
And I’ve got nothing to say to you,
But don’t criticize me for being the way I am,
Each one of us is a universe, Pedro,
Where you go I go too.
Success was synonymous with money and, as far as Paulo was concerned, money had to be transformed into bricks and mortar. By the end of 1976, he was the owner of a third property, a two-bedroom apartment in Rua Paulino Fernandes, in Flamengo, a few steps from the estate where he had been born and brought up. Despite the pleasure he took in being a property owner, there was a problem in being rich: the possible envy of other people, particularly communists. In this aspect, Paulo had become very conventional indeed. The long-haired hippie who, only a short time before, had challenged the consumer society and written ironical songs about materialism was now terrified of losing the money he had so eagerly accumulated. ‘Today at the cinema I was gripped by this terrible fear of communism coming and taking away all my apartments,’ Paulo confessed to his diary and added bluntly, ‘I would never fight for the people. These words may come back to haunt me, but I would never do that. I fight for free thought and perhaps for an elite of privileged people who choose a society apart.’
The material stability that the world of music gave him, however, never seems to have diverted him from his old dream of becoming a great writer. In anxious moments he got to the point of feeling ‘almost certain’ that he would not achieve this. He was appalled each time he thought how close his thirtieth birthday was, the deadline he had given himself, and beyond which, he believed, he wouldn’t have the slightest chance of being a literary success. But all it took to restore his enthusiasm was to read that Agatha Christie had accumulated a fortune of US$18 million simply from her book sales. On these occasions Paulo would plunge back into his daydreams: ‘There’s no way I want to publish my novels in Brazil. There’s no market for them here. In Brazil, a book that sells 3,000 copies is deemed a success, while in the United States that would be considered a complete flop. There’s no future here. If I want to be a writer I’m going to have to get out of here.’
Meanwhile, Paulo was obliged to submit to the routine of meetings and trips to São Paulo demanded by his position as a Philips executive. The company had decided to concentrate all
its departments in one office, in the then remote Barra da Tijuca, a modern district that was just beginning to develop in Rio. He was against the move, not just because his work would then be 40 kilometres from his home–which meant he had to get over the trauma of that accident in Araruama, buy a car and take his driving test–but also because he was given a really tiny office. He complained to no one except his diary: ‘I’m sitting in my new office, if that’s what you can call the place I’m in now. Me and my team, comprising two secretaries, an assistant and an office boy, occupy an area of 30 square metres, i.e., 5 metres per person. This would be bad enough if it weren’t for the fact that we also have to take into consideration the pile of obsolete furniture that has also been crammed into this small space.’
As well as the distance and discomfort, he realized that his job was all to do with vanity, prestige and squabbles over space in the media. This world of embattled egos and back-stabbings was hardly the ideal place for someone so tormented by fear and paranoia. If some big shot was less than effusive when he met him in the lift, Paulo would immediately see in this a threat to his job. Not being invited to a show or to some major launch in the music world was a guarantee of sleepless nights and page after despairing page in his diary. Being excluded from a company meeting could trigger an asthma attack. His insecurity reached extreme levels. A music producer who ignored him could provoke an internal crisis that almost prevented him from working. When a number of these symptoms coincided, Paulo would lose direction entirely.
I’m in a really bad way today, completely in the grip of paranoia. I think no one likes me, that they’re going to play some dirty trick on me at any moment and that they don’t pay me as much attention as they used to.
It all started when I was practically thrown out of a meeting this morning. It left me with a runny nose. Maybe the colds I get are psychosomatic. André Midani, the president of the company, came into the room and didn’t even speak to me; my partner was in a foul mood, and I’m sure he’s plotting against me. My name isn’t mentioned in a newspaper column, when it should be.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 33