In the restaurant, they told the waiter about these strange occurrences and were given an explanation that made their hair stand on end: ‘Are you staying at the Cabana Clube? There used to be an Indian cemetery there. When they were building the foundations, they found the bones of hundreds of Indians, but built the houses on top of them anyway. Everyone in Cabo Frio knows that it’s haunted.’
So that was what the warning in Paulo’s dream had meant. Paulo and Chris stayed in a hotel that night and didn’t go back to the house until the next morning, and even then, they only went to collect their clothes. A few weeks later, the chalet was sold for the same US$4,000 it had cost a few months earlier.
No ghosts darkened their relationship, however. After breaking up with her boyfriend during the first days of the New Year, Chris moved into Paulo’s apartment, with all her clothes, furniture and personal possessions, including the easel she needed for her work as an architect. There they began a partnership which, though it has never been formalized, has remained solid ever since.
The start of their life together was not easy, though. As preoccupied as Paulo was with interpreting signs, Chris was most upset to find in the apartment a biography of Count Dracula open on a Bible lectern. It was not that she had anything against vampires or vampirologists–she even liked films on the subject–but she was appalled that a sacred object should be used as a joke, something which she believed would attract negative energies into the house. She was so shocked that she went out into the street and from the first available public telephone called the Baptist pastor who used to counsel her and told him what she had seen. They prayed together over the phone and, before returning to the apartment, Chris thought it prudent to go into a church. She only calmed down when Paulo explained that his interest in vampirology had absolutely nothing to do with satanism, OTO or Aleister Crowley, saying: ‘The myth of the vampire existed a hundred years before Christ. I haven’t had any contact with anyone involved in the dark arts for years.’
In fact, he hadn’t had anything to do with Marcelo Motta’s satanists since 1974, but he continued to appear publicly here and there as a specialist on the work of Aleister Crowley. Indeed, some months later he wrote a long article on the English occultist in Planeta, which was illustrated with drawings by Chris. Their relationship went through further rocky times before it finally settled down. Paulo was still racked with doubt: was Chris really the ‘marvellous companion’ he had been waiting for? He feared that deep down the two were only together for the same, unspoken reason, what he called ‘the paranoiac desire to escape solitude’. However, even while he was saying that he was afraid of falling in love with her, he broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of losing her. ‘We had our first serious argument a few days ago, when she refused to go to Araruama with me. Suddenly I was terrified to think how easily I could lose Chris. I did everything to get her and have her close. I like her, she brings me peace, calm, and I feel that we can try and build something together.’
These ups and downs at the start of their life together did not stop them celebrating their partnership unofficially. On 22 June 1980, a dreary Sunday, they blessed their union with a lunch for their parents, relatives and a few friends in the apartment where they were living. Christina took charge of the hippie-style decorations and on each invitation she wrote a psalm or proverb illustrated with a drawing. Chris’s eclectic interest in religion seems to have helped the couple’s relationship. When they met, she was already a specialist in tarot, on which she had read numerous books, and, even though she didn’t consult the I Ching as often as Paulo, she knew how to interpret its predictions. When Paulo read The Book of Mediums by Allan Kardec, the couple decided to see if they could be mediums. Just as Cissa had been a guinea pig in the experiment with LSD, now Paulo was trying to get Chris to write down messages from the Beyond. He wrote: ‘I have performed a few experiments. We began last week, when I bought the book. Chris has acted as a medium, and we have achieved some elementary communications. I’ve found this all very troubling. My concept of things has changed radically since I arrived scientifically at the conclusion that spirits do exist. They exist and are all around us.’ Much later, Chris confirmed that the experiment had worked. ‘I’m sure that a table really did move,’ she recalls, ‘and I also wrote down some texts that were dictated to me.’
The suspicion that she might have powers as a medium continued to grow from the moment when she was gripped by strange, inexplicable feelings of dread whenever she went into the bathroom of their apartment. They were odd sensations which she herself had difficulty understanding and of which she never spoke to anyone. More than once it entered her mind to turn on the gas for the shower, seal up the exits and kill herself. On the afternoon of Monday, 13 October, she left her easel and went into the bathroom. This time the desire to kill herself seemed uncontrollable, but fearing that death by asphyxiation might be very slow and painful she decided to turn to medication. She calmly took a taxi to her parents’ house in Jardim Botânico, where she knew she would find the tranquillizers that her mother took regularly–Somalium, she recalls, or Valium in Paulo’s version of events. Whatever the name of the medication, the fact is that she emptied a whole pack into her mouth, wrote a short note to Paulo and collapsed on the bed.
When he arrived home and Chris wasn’t there, Paulo went to her parents’ apartment, where they both often used to have dinner, and found Chris unconscious on the bed and, beside her, as well as the note, an empty pack of Valium. With the help of Chris’s mother, who had just arrived, he managed to get her to the lift, having first made Chris put her finger down her throat and vomit up what she could. Outside, they stopped the first taxi that passed and went to the St Bernard clinic in Gávea, where the doctors pumped out her stomach. Once recovered, hours later, she was well enough to go home.
While she was sleeping and having spoken to her about what happened, Paulo kept asking himself where those strange emanations in the bathroom came from. With the question still going round and round in his head, he went downstairs to talk to the porter, tell him what had happened to Chris and see if he had an answer to the mystery. The man said: ‘The last person who lived in that apartment, before you, was an airline captain who gassed himself in the bathroom.’ When he went back upstairs and told Chris the story, she didn’t think twice: despite having been in hospital only a few hours earlier, she got up, collected together a change of clothes for them both, as well as other personal items, threw everything into a suitcase and announced: ‘We’re going to my mother’s house. I never want to set foot in this apartment again.’
Neither of them did, not even to move house. They spent a little more than a month with Chris’s parents, long enough for work on the seventh property Paulo had bought to be completed so that they could move in there. This was a ground-floor apartment with a lovely garden and one particularly priceless feature: it was in the same building as Lygia and Pedro’s apartment. He could only have felt more emotionally secure if he were actually living with his parents.
Chris’s rules regarding Paulo’s sexual excesses always prevailed, but they were still far from being an average couple. One day, for example, Paulo suggested that they should both try an experiment that had its origins in the Middle Ages, and to which he gave the grand name of ‘a reciprocal test of resistance to pain’. Chris agreed, although she knew what was involved: stark naked, they began to whip each other with a thin bamboo cane. They took it in turns to beat the other on the back, the blows growing harder and harder, until they reached the limit of physical endurance. This occurred only when they were both bleeding from their wounds.
Their relationship gradually began to settle down. The first two years passed without anything untoward disrupting their life together. Encouraged by her partner, Chris began to paint again, something she had given up four years earlier, while Paulo began to direct so-called TV specials. Not that they needed money to live on. Besides the forty-one songs he had written with Raul Se
ixas, in the past few years, Paulo had written more than a hundred lyrics–originals or versions of foreign hits–for dozens of different artists. This meant that the royalties continued to flow into his bank account. He tried to keep busy, however, fearing that idleness would lead him into depression again. Besides the TV specials, he gave talks and took part in round-table discussions on music and, occasionally, on vampirism. But the cure only worked for a while, because even when he was fully occupied, he would still suffer occasional anxiety attacks.
When this occurred, as it did at the end of 1981, he continued to give vent to his feelings in his diary:
These last two days, I missed two appointments, on the pretext that I was having a tooth extracted. I’m completely confused as to what to do. I can’t even be bothered to write a short press release that would bring in a tiny amount of money. The situation inside me is this. I can’t even write these pages and this year, which I was hoping would be better than last, has turned out precisely as I described above. Oh, yes: I haven’t had a bath for the last few days.
The crisis appears to have hit him so badly that he even changed his behaviour regarding something that had always been very dear to him–money: ‘I haven’t paid attention to anything, including one of the things that I really like: money. Just imagine, I don’t know how much is in my bank account, something I’ve always known down to the minutest detail. I’ve lost interest in sex, in writing, in going to the cinema, in reading, even in the plants I’ve been tending so lovingly for so long and that are now dying because I only water them sporadically.’
If he had lost interest in both money and sex, things were very bad indeed, and so he did what he always did in such situations–he went back to Dr Benjamim, visiting him once a week. Whenever he felt like this, he would always ask Chris the same question: ‘Am I on the right path?’ And so, at the end of 1981, she made a suggestion that struck a chord in his nomadic soul: why not just leave everything and go off travelling with no fixed destination and no date set for their return? Her instincts told her that this was the right path. Years later, Chris would recall: ‘Something was telling me that it would work. Paulo trusted my instinct and decided to drop everything.’ Determined to ‘search for the meaning of life’, wherever it might be, he asked permission to leave his unpaid post with TV Globo, bought two air tickets to Madrid–the cheapest he could find–and promised that he and Chris would return to Brazil only when the last cent of the US$17,000 he took with him had run out.
Unlike all Paulo’s other trips, this one, which was to last eight months, was made without any forward planning. Although he took more than enough for a comfortable trip, with no need to cut corners, he was never one to squander money. He chose Iberia, the airline that not only offered the cheapest flights but added in a free night in a hotel in Madrid. From Spain he and Chris went on to London at the beginning of December 1981, where they rented the cheapest car available, a tiny Citroën 2CV. In London, they also established the first rule of the trip: neither should carry more than 6 kilos of luggage. This meant sacrificing the heavy Olivetti typewriter that Paulo had taken with him; this was shipped back to Brazil.
While pondering what direction to take, Paulo and Chris remained in London until the middle of January 1982, when they took to the road, determined to visit two places: Prague, where he wanted to make a promise to the Infant Jesus, and Bucharest, the capital of Romania and birthplace, 550 years earlier, of the nobleman Vlad Tepeş, who was the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s creation: the most famous of all the vampires, Count Dracula. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 January, they arrived in Vienna frozen to the bone, after almost a day travelling the 1,200 or so kilometres separating London from the capital of Austria. Their modest 2CV had no heater, which meant that they had to travel wrapped in woollen blankets in order to withstand the low winter temperatures. The stop in Vienna was so that they could obtain visas for Hungary, which they would have to cross in order to reach Romania.
Once this was done, they went to the Brazilian embassy, where Chris needed to sort out a small bureaucratic matter. Paulo waited for her out in the street, smoking and walking up and down. Suddenly, with a sound like a bomb, a vast sheet of ice several metres long slid off the roof of the building five storeys above and crashed on to the street, ripping open the bodywork of a car that was parked only a few centimetres from where Paulo was standing. He had been that close to death.
After spending the night in Budapest, they left for the capital of Yugoslavia, where they decided to stay for three days. Not that Belgrade held any special attraction, but they couldn’t face getting back into the freezing Citroën. The car had become such a problem that they decided to hand it back to the rental company. With the help of the hotel manager they found a real bargain: the Indian embassy was selling a light-blue Mercedes–nine years old, but in good condition–for a mere US$1,000. Although well used, it had a 110-horse-power engine and was equipped with an efficient heating system. This would be the only large expense of the trip. For advice on hotels, restaurants and places to visit, they relied on Europe on 20 Dollars a Day.
Now that they had a proper car, the 500 kilometres between Belgrade and Bucharest, the couple’s next destination, could be done in one day. However, precisely because they now had a fast, comfortable car, they chose to take a more roundabout route. Having crossed Hungary and part of Austria, driving a little more than 1,000 kilometres, they arrived in Prague, where Paulo was to make the promise to the Infant Jesus that he would honour almost twenty-five years later. It was only then that they turned towards Romania, which meant another 1,500 kilometres. For anyone not in a hurry or concerned about money, this was wonderful.
During this criss-cross journey across Central Europe, chance placed another destination in their path. It was not until a few weeks after buying the Mercedes that Paulo discovered that the car had originally come from the old Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany) and that the change of ownership had to be registered at the licensing authority in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. Travelling from Bucharest to Bonn meant a journey of almost 2,000 kilometres, a distance that now held no worries for them. Two days after leaving the capital of Romania, the blue Mercedes was crossing the frontier into West Germany. From Bucharest to Munich, the first German city they went through, the odometer showed that they had driven 1,193 kilometres. Munich was completely covered in snow, it was almost midday and since neither of the travellers was hungry, instead of lunching there, they decided to stop in Stuttgart, about 200 kilometres farther on. Minutes after passing through Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Paulo turned the car off the road into an avenue of bare trees with a sign written in German: ‘Dachau Konzentrationslager’. It had long been in his mind to visit the sadly famous Nazi concentration camp in Dachau–since he was a boy he had been a passionate reader of books and stories about the Second World War–but little did he imagine that this visit, which lasted only a few hours, would radically change his life.
CHAPTER 21
First meeting with Jean
ALTHOUGH HE WOULD NOT PUBLISH his first real book until 1987, Paulo Coelho the author was born on 23 February 1982 at the age of thirty-five in Dachau concentration camp in Germany. Five days earlier, he had had a strange experience in Prague. Immediately after making his promise to the Infant Jesus of Prague, he had gone out with Chris for a walk round the city which, like almost all of Central Europe, was covered in snow and with below-zero temperatures. They crossed the river Vltava by the imposing Charles Bridge. One end of the bridge is in the Old City; the other comes out into the Street of Alchemists where, according to legend, lies the entrance to hell through which, naturally, Paulo was determined to go. The object of his interest was a medieval dungeon, which had been opened to the public some years before. In order to get in, he and Chris had to wait until the place had emptied of an enormous group of Soviet recruits–who appeared to be there as tourists.
Minutes after going through the doo
rs of the dark dungeon and entering the cells, Paulo felt as though the ghosts from which he had believed himself to be free were reviving–the electroshock therapy, his supposed meeting with the Devil, his imprisonment by the Dops, his abduction, his cowardly betrayal of Gisa. From one moment to the next, all those events seemed to rise up, as though they had only just happened. He began to sob convulsively and Chris led him away. The gloomy surroundings had reawakened memories that threatened to propel him into a fit of deep depression, and he was thousands of kilometres from the security provided by his parents, Dr Benjamim’s consulting rooms or Roberto Menescal.
This time, the origins of his torment were not metaphysical but all too real and visible on the pages of the newspapers and on the TV news: dictatorships, the state oppression of people, wars, abductions and clandestine imprisonments, which appeared to be sweeping the planet. Civil war was to claim almost 80,000 lives in the tiny state of El Salvador. In Chile, the savage dictatorship of General Pinochet was about to celebrate ten years of its existence and appeared to be as firmly entrenched as ever. In Brazil, the military dictatorship seemed exhausted, but there was still no guarantee that democracy was within reach. This was the worst possible state of mind in which to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp, but this was precisely how Paulo was feeling when he parked the Mercedes in the visitors’ car park in Dachau.
Dachau was the first camp built by the Third Reich and was the model for the remaining fifty-six scattered across ten European countries. It operated from 1933 until April 1945, when its gates were opened by the Allied troops. Although it was planned to house 6,000 prisoners, on the day of its liberation there were more than 30,000. During that tragic period, about 200,000 people of sixteen nationalities were taken there. Although the majority were Jews, there were also communists, socialists and others opposed to Nazism, as well as Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses. For reasons as yet unknown, the gas chamber in Dachau was never put to use, which meant that any prisoners who were condemned to death had to be taken by bus to Hartheim Castle, halfway between the camp and Linz, in Austria, which had been transformed into a centre of mass execution. The first surprise for Paulo and Chris as they went through the entrance gates of Dachau was that there was absolutely no one there. It was understandable that the freezing wind might have kept away the tourists, but they didn’t see any porters, guards or officials who could give them any information. They were–or they appeared to be–alone in that enormous 180,000-square-metre rectangle surrounded on all sides by walls and empty watch towers. Paulo had not yet gotten over the dark thoughts that had assailed him in Prague some days before, but he didn’t want to miss the opportunity of visiting one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. They followed the arrows and took the suggested route for visitors–the same as that taken by the prisoners. They went into the reception area, where the newly arrived prisoners would receive their uniforms, have their heads shaved and be ‘disinfected’ in a collective bath of insecticide. Then they walked down the corridors lined by cells, in which they saw the hooks attached to the ceiling beams from which the prisoners were hung by their arms during torture sessions; then they went into the sheds where, until the end of the war, bunk beds were stacked three or four high and where the prisoners slept like animals, packed into wooden cages. In total silence, their horror only grew with each new revelation.
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 36