Although Paulo was clearly upset, he saw the concentration camps as a tragedy of the past, part of the Nazism that was defeated in a war that had ended even before he was born. However, in the room set aside for the relatives of the dead to pay their respects, he felt that the emotions aroused in Prague were returning. The cards pinned on bunches of fresh flowers that had been put there only a few days earlier were living proof that Dachau was still an open wound. The 30,000 dead were not meaningless names taken from books, but human beings whose cruel deaths were recent enough still to awaken the grief of widows, children, brothers and sisters.
Paulo and Chris returned to the open area of the camp feeling overwhelmed. They walked along an avenue of bare trees whose branches looked like bony claws reaching for the sky. In the north part of the camp there were three small religious buildings–Catholic, Protestant and Jewish–beside which a fourth–Russian Orthodox–was to be built in the 1990s. The couple walked straight past these buildings, following a sign indicating the most chilling place in Dachau: the crematorium. At that point, they noticed a radical change in the landscape. Unlike the barren camp itself, which is a lunar landscape of grey stones with not a hint of greenery, the path leading to the crematorium passes through a small wood. Even in the hardest of winters this is covered by vegetation of tropical exuberance, with gardens, flowers and pathways between rows of shrubs. Planted in a clearing in the middle of the wood is a modest, rustic, red-brick building, which can only be distinguished from a traditional family house by the chimney, which seems disproportionately large. This was the crematorium oven, where the bodies of more than thirty thousand prisoners would have been burnt after their execution or death from starvation, suicide or illness, such as the typhoid epidemic that devastated the camp a few months before its liberation.
His experience in the medieval prison in Prague was still very clear in Paulo’s mind. He saw all eight red-brick ovens and the metal stretchers on which the bodies would have been piled for incineration, and he stopped in front of a peeling door on which one word was written: ‘Badzimmer’. This was not an old bathroom, as the name indicated, but the Dachau gas chamber. Although it was never used, Paulo wanted to feel for himself the terror experienced by millions in the Nazi extermination camps. He left Chris alone for a moment, went into the chamber and shut the door. Leaning against the wall, he looked up and saw, hanging from the ceiling, the fake showerheads from which the gas would be released. His blood froze and he left that place with the stench of death in his nose.
When he stepped out of the crematorium he heard the small bell of the Catholic chapel chiming midday. He went towards that sound and as he re-entered the harsh grey of the camp, he saw an enormous modern sculpture, which recalled Picasso’s Guernica. On it was written in several languages ‘Never again!’ As he read the two words on entering the small church, a moment of peace came to him, as he was to remember many years later: ‘I’m entering the church, my eye alights on that “Never Again!” and I say: Thank God for that! Never again! Never again is that going to happen! How good! Never again! Never again will there be that knock on the door at midnight, never again will people just disappear. What joy! Never again will the world experience that!’
He went into the chapel feeling full of hope and yet in the short space of time between lighting a candle and saying a quick prayer, he suddenly felt overwhelmed again by his old ghosts. In a moment, he went from faith to despair. As he crossed the frozen camp, a short way behind Chris, he realized that the ‘Never again!’ he had just read was nothing more than a joke in several languages:
I said to myself: what do they mean ‘Never again!’? ‘Never again’, my eye! What happened in Dachau is still happening in the world, on my continent, in my country. In Brazil, opponents of the regime were thrown from helicopters into the sea. I myself, on an infinitely smaller scale, lived for several years in a state of paranoia after being the victim of that same violence! I suddenly remembered the cover of Time with the killings in El Salvador, the dirty war waged by the Argentine dictatorship against the opposition. At that moment, I lost all hope in the human race. I felt that I had reached rock bottom. I decided that the world is shit, life is shit, and I’m nothing but shit for having done nothing about it.
While he was thinking these contradictory thoughts, a sentence began going round and round in his head: ‘No man is an island.’ Where had he read that? Slowly, he managed to rebuild and recite to himself almost the entire passage: ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…’ For a moment he could not remember the rest, but when he did, it seemed to have opened all the doors of his memory: ‘and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’. It was from one of John Donne’s Meditations, from which Ernest Hemingway took the title for his novel. What happened in the following minutes is something that will remain for ever cloaked in mystery; indeed Paulo himself, on one of the few occasions when he has been urged to describe what occurred, became so emotional that he wept copiously: ‘We were in the middle of a concentration camp, Chris and I, alone, absolutely alone, without another living soul around! At that moment I heard the sign: I felt that the bells of the chapel were ringing for me. That’s when I had my epiphany.’
According to him, the revelation in Dachau took the form of a beam of light, under which a being of human appearance apparently told him something about possibly meeting again in two months’ time. This message was given not in a human voice but, as Paulo himself put it, ‘in a communication of souls’. Even the most sceptical would perhaps agree that something took place in Dachau, so radical was the change in Paulo’s life from that day on. When he reached the car park, he wept as he told Chris what he had just experienced, and the first, horrifying suspicion fell on the OTO. What if what he had seen minutes earlier were the reincarnation of the Beast? Had the ghosts of Crowley and Marcelo Motta returned to frighten him eight years on? When they reached Bonn, six hours later, Paulo settled on the most rational explanation: he would consider the vision as a delirium, a brief hallucination provoked by the fear and tension he was feeling.
The couple planned to stay in Bonn just long enough to sort out the paperwork for the car and to meet Paula, a niece who had been born a few months earlier. Since they were staying at the home of Chris’s sister, Tânia, and so were free of hotel expenses, they decided to extend their stay to a week. In early March, the couple set off once again, this time to cover the 250 kilometres between them and the liberal city of Amsterdam, which had so enchanted Paulo ten years earlier.
They stayed in the Hotel Brouwer, on the edge of the Singel Canal, where they paid US$17 a day for bed and breakfast. In a letter to his parents Paulo talked of the pot shops, ‘cafés where you can freely buy and smoke drugs that are considered soft, like hashish and cannabis, although cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamines, including LSD, are prohibited’, and he took the opportunity to add a subtle apology for the liberalization of the drugs: ‘This doesn’t mean that the Dutch youth are drugged all the time. On the contrary, government statistics show that there are far fewer drug addicts here, proportionally speaking, than in the USA, Germany, England and France. Holland has the lowest rate of unemployment in the whole of Western Europe, and Amsterdam is the fourth largest commercial centre of the world.’
It was in this liberal atmosphere, where the two smoked cannabis until they got tired of it, that Chris tried LSD for the first and only time. Paulo was so shocked by the devastating effects of heroin on its users–zombies of various nationalities wandered the streets of the city–that he wrote two articles for the Brazilian magazine Fatos&Fotos entitled ‘Heroin, the Road of No Return’ and ‘Amsterdam, the Kiss of the Needle’. His relationship with this underworld, however, wa
s strictly professional, that of an investigative reporter. Judging by the letters he sent to his father, their European tour was a hippie journey in appearance only: ‘We haven’t deprived ourselves of anything, lunching and dining every day. And although we have a very thirsty child to support (the 110-horse-power Mercedes), we go to cinemas, saunas, barbers, nightclubs and even casinos.’
There seemed to be no end to the good life. After several weeks in the city, Paulo became bored by so much cannabis. He had tried varieties from places as far away as the Yemen and Bolivia. He had smoked blends of every strength and experimented with plants that had won prizes in the Cannabis Cup, the marijuana world cup which was held once a year in Amsterdam. He had even tried a new product called skunk–cannabis grown in a hot house and fed with fertilizers and proteins. And it was there, in that hippie paradise, that Paulo discovered that the plant had nothing more to offer him. He was, he said, ‘fed up’ with its repetitious effects. He repeated the oath he had made eight years earlier in New York regarding cocaine: he would never again smoke cannabis.
He was explaining all this to Chris in the hotel café when he felt a cold shiver run through him, just as he had in Dachau. He glanced to one side and saw that the shape he had seen in the concentration camp had taken physical form and was there having tea at a table nearby. His first feeling was one of terror. He had heard of societies which, in order to preserve their secrets, would pursue and even kill those who had left. Was he being followed by people belonging to a satanist group from the other side of the world? He suddenly remembered the lesson he had learned during those PE classes in Fortaleza de São João: to avoid unnecessary pain, confront the fear straight away.
He looked at the stranger–a man in his forties of European appearance, in jacket and tie–and summoned up his courage to address him in English in a deliberately hostile way: ‘I saw you two months ago in Dachau and I’m going to make one thing clear: I have not, nor do I wish to have, anything to do with occultism, sects or orders. If that’s why you’re here, then you’ve had a wasted journey.’
The man looked up and reacted quite calmly and, to Paulo’s surprise, he replied in fluent Portuguese, albeit with a strong accent: ‘Don’t worry. Come and join me so that we can talk.’
‘May I bring my partner?’
‘No, I want to talk to you alone.’
Paulo made a sign to Chris to reassure her that everything was all right. Then he went and sat at the other man’s table and asked: ‘Talk about what?’
‘What’s all this about a concentration camp?’
‘I thought I saw you there two months ago.’
The man said that there must be some confusion. Paulo insisted: ‘I’m sorry, but I think that we met in February in the concentration camp at Dachau. You don’t remember?’
The man then admitted that Paulo might have seen him, but that it could also have been a phenomenon known as ‘astral projection’, something Paulo knew about and to which he had referred many times in his diary. The man said: ‘I wasn’t at the concentration camp, but I understand what you’re saying. Let me look at the palm of your hand.’ Paulo cannot remember whether he showed him his left or his right hand, but the mysterious man studied it hard and then began to speak very slowly. He did not seem to be reading the lines on his hand; it was more as if he were seeing a vision: ‘There is some unfinished business here. Something fell apart around 1974 or 1975. In magical terms, you grew up in the Tradition of the Serpent, and you may not even know what the Tradition of the Dove is.’
As a voracious reader of everything to do with magic, Paulo knew that these traditions were two different routes leading to the same place: magical knowledge, understood as the ability to use gifts that not all humans succeed in developing. The Tradition of the Dove (also known as the Tradition of the Sun) is a system of gradual, continuous learning, during which any disciple or novice will always depend on a Master, with a capital ‘M’. On the other hand, the Tradition of the Serpent (or Tradition of the Moon) is usually chosen by intuitive individuals and, according to its initiates, by those who, in a previous existence, had some connection with or commitment to magic. The two routes are not mutually exclusive, and candidates to the so-called magical education are recommended to follow the Tradition of the Dove once they have followed that of the Serpent.
Paulo began to relax when the man finally introduced himself. He was French, of Jewish origin, worked in Paris as an executive for the Dutch multinational Philips and was an active member of an old, mysterious Catholic religious order called RAM which stood for Regnus Agnus Mundi–Lamb of the Kingdom of the World–or ‘Rigour, Adoration and Mercy’. He had gained his knowledge of Portuguese from long periods spent in Brazil and Portugal working for Philips. His real name–which could be ‘Chaim’, ‘Jayme’ or ‘Jacques’–has never been revealed by Paulo, who began to refer to him publicly as ‘the Master’, ‘Jean’ or simply ‘J’.
In measured tones, Jean said that he knew Paulo had started out along the road towards black magic, but had interrupted that journey. He said: ‘If you want to take up the road to magic again and if you would like to do so within our order, then I can guide you. But, once you have made the decision, you will have to do whatever I tell you without argument.’
Astonished by what he was hearing, Paulo asked for time to reflect. Jean was uncompromising: ‘You have a day to make your decision. I shall wait for you here tomorrow at the same time.’
Paulo could think of nothing else. While he had felt great relief at leaving the OTO and rejecting the ideas of Crowley, the world of magic, as opposed to black magic, continued to hold an enormous fascination for him. He recalled later: ‘Emotionally I was still connected to it. It’s like falling in love with a woman, and sending her away because she really doesn’t fit in with your life. But you go on loving her. One day she turns up in a bar, as J did, and you say: “Please, go away. I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want to suffer again.”’
Unable to sleep, he spent all night talking to Chris, and it was dawn when he finally made up his mind. Something was telling him that this was an important moment and he decided to accept the challenge, for good or ill. Some hours later, he met for the second (or was it the third?) time the mysterious man who from that moment was to be his Master–always with a capital M. Jean explained to Paulo what the first steps towards his initiation would be: on the Tuesday of the following week he was to go to the Vikingskipshuset, the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.
‘Go to the room where you will find three ships called the Gokstad, Oseberg and Borre on display. There someone will hand you something.’
Not quite understanding what he was being asked to do, Paulo wanted to know more. ‘But what time should I be at the museum? How will I recognize the person? Is it a man or a woman? What will they give me?’
As Jean stood up, leaving a few coins on the table in payment for the cup of tea he had drunk, he satisfied only a part of Paulo’s curiosity: ‘Be in the room when the museum opens its doors. The other questions need no answer. You will be told when we are to see each other again.’ And then he vanished, as if he had never existed–if indeed he ever did exist. Whether real or supernatural, one thing was certain: he had left his new disciple a task that would begin with a journey of almost 1,000 kilometres to the capital of Norway, a city Paulo had never been to before. They drove there through the snow via Holland, Germany and Denmark. On the appointed day, Paulo woke early, worried that he might arrive late and fearing that any queues and groups of tourists at the museum might delay him. The publicity leaflet from the museum, which he had picked up in the lobby of the hotel, informed him that the doors opened at nine in the morning, but he set off a whole hour earlier. Situated on the Bygdøy Peninsula, ten minutes’ drive from the centre of the city, the Vikingskipshuset is a large yellow building in the shape of a cross, with no windows and a pointed roof. It was only when he arrived that Paulo realized he had misunderstood the opening hours. The museum
was open from nine in the morning until six in the evening during the high season, but from October to April, the doors only opened at eleven. He spent the time reflecting on the decision he had just taken. ‘I had tried everything in order to realize my dream to be a writer, but I was still a nobody,’ Paulo was to recall later. ‘I had abandoned black magic and the occult sciences when I discovered that they were of no help to me at all, so why not try the route Jean was suggesting?’
Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life Page 37