Читать книгу A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho - Fernando Morais - Страница 10

THE BOY WAS LUÍS CLÁUDIO, or Claudinho, the son of a tailor, Lauro Vieira de Azevedo. He was seven years old and lived in Rua Oscar Clark, near the house where Paulo was staying. The violence of the collision was such that the boy was thrown some distance, with his stomach ripped open and his intestines exposed. He was taken unconscious to the Casa de Caridade, the only hospital in Araruama, where it was found that the blow had ruptured his spleen. To control the haemorrhaging the doctor in A&E gave him a blood transfusion, but Claudinho experienced a sudden drop in blood pressure and nearly died.

After the collision, Paulo and his friends had not only failed to go to Claudinho’s aid but also fled the scene of the accident. They took the car back to Carlinhos’s house and, with the city still in darkness, went to the home of another of the boys who had been in the car, Maurício. On their way there, they realized that news of the accident was spreading. Terrified by rumours that the boy had died, they made a pact of silence: no one would ever utter a word about the incident. They all went their separate ways. In order not to arouse suspicion, when Paulo arrived at his uncle’s home, he ‘cynically’ (his own word) acted as though nothing had happened. However, half an hour later came the moment of truth: Maurício and Aurélio, the fourth member of the group, had been named by a witness and arrested, and while in police custody they revealed the identity of the driver.

Paulo’s uncle took him to a room and told him of the gravity of the situation: ‘The boy’s life is hanging by a thread. We must just hope that he survives, because if he dies, things will get very ugly for you. Your parents have been told everything and they’re on their way from Rio to talk to the police and the magistrate. Meanwhile, you’re not leaving the house. You’re safe here.’

His uncle knew what the tailor was like and was concerned that he might do something crazy. His fears were confirmed that night. After visiting his dying son in hospital, Lauro appeared at the gates of the house where Paulo was hiding, along with two unpleasant-looking men. A revolver stuck in his belt, Lauro wagged a finger at José and said: ‘Dr Araripe, we don’t know yet whether Claudinho will live or die. As long as that’s the case, your nephew is not to leave Araruama. And if my son dies, Paulo will die too, because I’ll come here personally and kill him.’

Late that night, Lygia and Pedro arrived in Araruama and, even before going to see their son, they went to the magistrate’s house, who told them that the ‘perpetrator’ could only leave the city with his permission. His parents’ arrival did nothing to alleviate Paulo’s despair and he spent a sleepless night. Lying in bed, he wrote in a tremulous hand:

This is the longest day of my life. I feel terrible, not knowing how the child is. But the worst thing was when we arrived at Maurício’s house, after the accident, and everyone was saying that the boy was dead. I wanted to run away, to disappear. I can’t think of anything but you, Márcia. I’m going to be charged with driving without a licence. And if the child’s condition worsens, I’ll be tried and might be sent to prison.

This was hell on earth. On Shrove Tuesday news of the two incidents – the accident and the tailor’s threat – had spread rapidly, drawing inquisitive crowds to Rua Oscar Clark, eager to witness the climax to the drama. Early on, Lygia and Pedro decided to visit Claudinho’s parents to offer their apologies and to get news of the boy’s condition, for Claudinho was still unconscious. Lygia put together a large basket of fruit for the boy’s mother to take to him. As she and her husband were approaching the house, which was on the same side of the road as José’s, Lauro ordered them to turn back, because he was not prepared to talk. He repeated his threat – ‘Your son will only leave this town if my son survives’ – and he said that Lygia could take the fruit back: ‘No one here is dying of hunger. I don’t want charity, I want my son back.’

Paulo left his room only to ask for news of the boy. He recorded each piece of information in his notebook:

They went to the hospital this morning. The boy’s temperature is going down, let’s hope that his father withdraws his complaint to the police.

[…] The whole town knows everything and I can’t leave the house because they’re out looking for me. I heard that yesterday, at the dance, there was a detective waiting for me at the door.

[…] The boy’s temperature has gone up again.

[…] It looks as though I might be arrested at any moment, because someone told the police I’m over eighteen. Everything depends on the boy.

Claudinho’s temperature rose and fell several times. He regained consciousness on the Wednesday morning, two days after the accident, but it wasn’t until late that night that the agony ended, when the doctors reported that he was out of danger and would be discharged in a few days.

Early on the Thursday, Pedro Coelho took his son to make a statement to the magistrate, who had him sign an agreement to pay all the medical and hospital expenses. The boy survived and suffered no long-term consequences, apart from an enormous scar on his abdomen that would remain with him for life. Destiny, however, appears to have decided that his meeting with death was to be on Carnival Monday, for thirty-four years later, on 15 February 1999 – another Carnival Monday – Luís Cláudio, by this time a businessman, and married with two daughters, was dragged from his house in Araruama by two masked men with guns, who were apparently in the pay of a group of hijackers of transport lorries. He was viciously tortured, then tied up, soaked in petrol, set alight and burned to death.

Claudinho’s survival in 1965 did nothing to improve Pedro Coelho’s mood. When Paulo returned to Rio, he learned that, as a punishment for having caused the accident and for having lied, he would not be allowed out at night for a month. Added to this, his allowance, which he had regained after leaving his job on the dredger in December, was once again to be stopped until he had repaid his father the 100,000 cruzeiros (some US$1,750 in today’s terms) for the hospital fees.

Two months after the beginning of term, the first report from Andrews College revived the hopes of the Coelho family: although he had done badly in some subjects, their son had received such good marks in Portuguese, philosophy and chemistry that his average had risen to 6.1, which may have been only so-so, but was certainly an improvement for someone who hadn’t even been able to manage a 5. Everyone was hopeful: but in his second report, his average dropped to 4.6 and in the third he managed only 2.5. The days when the reports arrived became days of retribution for Paulo. Pedro Coelho would rant and rave, take away more of Paulo’s privileges and threaten even worse punishments. Paulo, however, appeared indifferent to all of this. ‘I’m fed up with school,’ he would tell his friends. ‘I’ll leave as soon as I can.’

He channelled all the energy and enthusiasm he failed to put into his schoolwork into the idea of becoming a writer. Unwilling to accept the fact that he was not yet a famous author, and convinced of his own talent, he had decided that his problem could be summed up in four words: a lack of publicity. At the beginning of 1965, he would take long walks with his friend Eduardo Jardim along Copacabana beach, during which he would ponder what he called ‘the problem of establishing myself as a recognized writer’.

His argument was a simple one: with the world becoming more and more materialistic (whether through communism or capitalism, it made no difference), the natural tendency was for the arts to disappear and, with them, literature. Only publicity could save them from a cultural Armageddon. His main preoccupation was with the written word, as he frequently explained to Jardim. Since it wasn’t as widely disseminated as music, literature was failing to find fertile ground among the young. ‘If someone doesn’t enthuse this generation with a love of literature,’ he would tell his friend, ‘it won’t be around much longer.’ To conclude, he revealed the secret of success: ‘That’s why publicity is going to be the main element in my literary programme. And I’m going to control it. I’m going to use publicity to force the public to read and judge what I write. That way my books will sell more, but, more importantly, I’ll arouse people’s curiosity about my ideas and theories.’ In spite of Jardim’s look of astonishment when he heard this, Paulo continued with his plans for the final phase of his conquest of the reading public: ‘Then, like Balzac, I shall write articles under a pseudonym both attacking and defending my work, but that’s a different matter.’

Jardim did not appear to agree with anything he was hearing: ‘You’re thinking like a businessman, Paulo. Remember, publicity is an artificial thing that forces people to do what they don’t want.’

Paulo was so convinced of the effectiveness of his ideas, though, that he had stuck to his desk at home a summary of the tasks he would have to carry out during that year in order to achieve fame:

Literary programme for the Year 1965

Buy all the Rio newspapers each day of the week.

Check the book reviews, who writes them and the names of the editors of the papers.

Send articles to the relevant people and a covering note to the editors. Telephone them, asking when the article will appear. Tell the editors what my ambitions are.

Find contacts for publication.

Repeat this process for magazines.

Find out whether anyone who has received my texts would like to receive them on a regular basis.

Repeat the same process with radio stations. Send my own proposal for a programme or send contributions to current programmes. Contact the relevant people by phone, asking when my contribution will be transmitted, if it is.

Find out the addresses of famous writers and write to them sending my poetry and asking for their comments and for help in placing them in the papers they write for. Write again if there’s no reply.

Go to all book signings, lectures, first nights of plays, and try to get talking with the big names and get myself noticed.

Organize productions of plays I’ve written and invite people belonging to the literary circle of the older generation, and get their ‘patronage’.

Try to get in touch with the new generation of writers, hold drinks parties, go to places where they go. Continue with my internal publicity campaign, keeping my colleagues informed of my triumphs.

The plan seemed infallible, but the truth is that Paulo continued to be humiliatingly, painfully unknown. He didn’t manage to get anything published; he didn’t get to know any critics, journalists or anyone who could open a door for him or reach out a hand to help him up the ladder of success. To make matters worse, he continued to do badly in his studies and was clearly miserable at having to go to college every day – what was the point when his marks went from bad to worse? He spent the days in a state of abstraction, as if his mind were in another world.

It was during this state of lethargy that he got to know another boy at school, Joel Macedo, who was studying classics. They were the same age, but Joel was the opposite of Paulo: he was extrovert and politically articulate, and one of the youngest members of the so-called ‘Paissandu generation’ – film-lovers and intellectuals who would meet at the old-fashioned Paissandu cinema in the Flamengo district. He was a cultural activist, led the Taca drama group and was responsible for Agora, a small newspaper published by the pupils of the college, whose editorial team he invited Paulo to join. The newspaper was at loggerheads with the conservative directors of the college because it criticized the arrests and other arbitrary measures taken by the military government.

A new world opened up to Paulo. Joining the Paissandu set meant rubbing shoulders with Rio’s intellectual elite and seeing close to the leading lights of the left-wing opposition. The cinema and the two nearby bars – the Oklahoma and the Cinerama – attracted film directors, musicians, playwrights and influential journalists. The latest European films were shown at midnight sessions on a Friday, when the 700 available tickets sold out in minutes. Paulo wasn’t much interested in political or social problems, but his deep existential anxieties fitted the profile of the typical denizen of Paissandu and he quickly made himself at home.

One day, he was forced to confess to Joel why he never went to the midnight film sessions, which were, after all, the most popular ones. ‘Firstly because I’m not yet eighteen and the films shown there are usually banned for minors,’ he explained, adding: ‘And if I get home after eleven o’clock my father won’t open the door to me.’ Joel couldn’t accept that someone of seventeen had a set time for getting home. ‘The time has come for you to demand your freedom. The problem of your age is easy enough to solve: all you have to do is change your date of birth on your student card, as I did.’ He also offered to solve the problem of the curfew: ‘After the midnight sessions you can sleep in my parents’ house in Ipanema.’ From then on, with his card duly falsified and a guaranteed roof over his head, Paulo was free to enter the enchanted world of Jean- Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.

However, one problem remained: tickets, beer, cigarettes and travel all cost money. Not a fortune, obviously, but with his allowance suspended he didn’t have a penny to his name, nor any idea as to how to get some money. To his surprise, a partial solution came from his father. Pedro was a friend of Luís Eduardo Guimarães, the editor of the Diário de Notícias, which, at the time, was an influential newspaper in Rio. Guimarães was also the son-in-law of its owner, Ondina Dantas. Pedro fixed up a meeting between his son and the journalist, and a few days later Paulo began to work as a cub reporter. The work, alas, would be unpaid until he was given a proper contract. The problem of money remained, therefore, but there was one compensation: the job was a step towards liberating himself from parental control. He was almost never at home. He would go out in the morning to college, return home briefly for lunch, then spend the afternoon at the newspaper office and the evening at the Paissandu. He spent so many nights at Joel’s parents’ apartment that it became his second home.

As is the case with all publications, the least exciting tasks fell to the juniors, such as reporting on any potholes that were holding up the flow of traffic or any domestic arguments that ended up at the police station, or compiling lists of the dead in the public hospitals for the deaths section in the next day’s edition. It was not unusual for the new boy to arrive at the office and be told by Silvio Ferraz, the chief reporter at the Diário de Notícias: ‘Go and talk to shopkeepers to see whether business is suffering from the downturn.’ He may have been earning nothing and dealing only with unimportant matters, but Paulo felt he was an intellectual, someone who wrote every day, no matter about what. There was also another great advantage. When his colleagues at college or someone from the Paissandu set asked what he was doing, he would say: ‘I’m a journalist. I write for the Diário de Notícias.’

He was so busy with the newspaper, the cinema and amateur dramatics that he had less and less time left for Andrews College. His father was in despair when he discovered that, at the end of April, his son had an average of 2.5 (contributed to by a zero in Portuguese, English and chemistry), but Paulo seemed to be living in another world. He did exactly what he wanted to and came home at night when he wanted. If he found the door unlocked, he would go in. If his father had, as he usually did, carefully locked everything up at eleven, he would simply take the Leblon – Lapa bus and, minutes later, be sleeping in Joel’s house. His parents didn’t know what else they could do.

In May, a friend asked him for a favour: he wanted a job in the Crédito Real de Minas Gerais bank and needed two references. As this was the bank where Paulo’s father had an account, perhaps he could be persuaded to write one of the necessary letters? Paulo promised to see to it, but when he brought up the subject with his father he received a blunt refusal: ‘Absolutely not! Only you could possibly think that I would support your vagrant friends.’

Upset and too ashamed to tell his friend the truth, Paulo made a decision: he locked himself in his room and typed up a letter full of praise for the applicant, adding at the bottom ‘Engenheiro Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’. He signed it and put the letter in an envelope – problem solved. Everything went so well that the subject of the letter felt obliged to thank its writer for his kindness with a telephone call. Dr Pedro couldn’t understand what the boy was talking about: ‘Letter? What letter?’ On hearing the words ‘bank manager’, he said: ‘I wrote no letter! Bring that letter here. Bring it here immediately! This is Paulo’s doing! Paulo must have forged my signature!’ He rang off and rushed to the bank, looking for evidence of the crime – the letter, the proof that his son had become a forger, a fraudster. Paulo arrived home that evening, unaware of what had happened. He found his father in a fury, but that was nothing new. Before going to sleep, he wrote a short note in his diary: ‘In a month and a half I’ve written nine articles for Diário de Notícias. I’ve got a trip to Furnas set up for 12th June, when I’m going to meet the most important people in the political world, such as the president, the most important governors and ministers of state.’

The following morning, he woke in a particularly good mood, since a rumour had been going round at the newspaper that he was going to be taken on officially, which would mean he would be a real journalist, with a press card and a guaranteed salary. When he went downstairs, he was surprised to find his parents already up and waiting for him. Pedro was beside himself with rage, but he said nothing.

It was Lygia who spoke: ‘Paulo, we’re worried about your asthma and so we’ve made an appointment with the doctor for a check-up. Eat your breakfast because we’ve got to leave soon.’

A few minutes later, his father took the Vanguard out of the garage – a rare occurrence – and the three drove along the coast road towards the city centre. Seated in the back, absorbed in thought, Paulo gazed out at the fog over the sea, which made Guanabara bay look simultaneously melancholy and poetic. When they were halfway along Botafogo beach the car took a left turn into Rua Marquês de Olinda, drove another three blocks and drew up alongside a wall more than 3 metres high. The three got out and went over to a wrought-iron gate. Paulo heard his father say something to the gatekeeper and, moments later, saw a nun arrive to take them to a consulting room. They were in the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, a large hospital occupying various buildings and large mansions in the woods at the bottom of a hill.

The nun went ahead, showing his parents the way, with Paulo behind, not understanding what was going on. The four of them took a lift to the ninth floor and, as they walked down a long corridor towards the consulting room, the nun opened a door and showed Pedro and Lygia a bedroom with two beds and a window with an iron grille. She smiled, saying: ‘This is where the boy will sleep. As you can see, it’s a nice bright, spacious room.’

Paulo couldn’t understand what he was hearing and had no time to ask, since, by then, they were all in the doctor’s consulting room. Seated behind a desk was the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gaspar Gomes, a fifty-two-year-old man, bald, with small eyes and a pleasant face.

Astonished, Paulo turned to his parents: ‘If I’ve just come here for asthma tests, why have you booked a room for me?’

Pedro said nothing and Lygia gently tried to explain to her son that he was being admitted to an asylum. ‘You’re not going to school any more, and you’re not going to sleep at home. You left St Ignatius so that you wouldn’t be expelled and you’ve ended up failing at Andrews. On top of that you ran over the boy in Araruama …’

Then his father spoke for the first time: ‘This time, you’ve really overstepped the mark. Forging a signature, as you did mine, isn’t just a prank – it’s a crime.’

Things moved rapidly from then on. His mother said that she and his father had had a long talk with Dr Benjamim – a colleague of Pedro’s and a person whom the family trusted implicitly – and that they were all agreed that he was too excitable and needed medication, so it would be a good idea for him to spend a few days in this ‘rest home’. Before he could recover from the shock, his parents stood up, said goodbye and disappeared down the tiled corridor.

Suddenly he found himself alone, locked up in an asylum with his school file under his arm and a jacket over his shoulders, not knowing what to do. As though he thought it might still be possible to escape from this nightmare, he said to the doctor: ‘You mean you’re going to lock me up like a madman without examining me – no interview, nothing?’

Dr Benjamim smiled: ‘You’re not being admitted as a madman. This is a rest home. You’re just going to take some medicine and rest. Besides, I don’t need to interview you, I have all the information I need.’

No one with any common sense would think that the information given by Paulo’s father could justify this treatment: his parents’ complaints – that he was irritable, hostile, a bad student and ‘even politically opposed to his father’ – were not very different from the complaints that nine out of ten parents make about their adolescent children. His mother had more precise concerns and thought that her son ‘had problems of a sexual nature’. The three reasons for this suspicion are surprising, coming as they do from an intelligent and sophisticated woman like Lygia: her son had no girlfriends, he had refused circumcision to correct an overtight foreskin – phimosis – and, finally, it seemed, lately, that his breasts were developing like those of a girl. There was, in fact, an explanation for all of these ‘symptoms’, including the change in his breasts, which was nothing more than the side effect of a growth hormone prescribed by a doctor to whom she herself had taken him.

The only problem of a psychiatric nature that might have concerned his parents was one of which they were in fact unaware. Some months earlier, during one of his many sleepless, anxiety-filled nights, he had decided to kill himself. He went into the kitchen and began to block all the air vents with sticky tape and dusters. However, when it came to turning on the gas inlet from the street to the oven, his courage failed him. He saw with sudden clarity that he didn’t want to die: he only wanted his parents to notice his despair. He describes how, as he removed the last strip of tape from behind the door and started to go back to his room, he realized, terrified, that he had company: it was the Angel of Death. There was good reason for his panic, since he had read somewhere that, once summoned to Earth, the Angel never left empty-handed. He recorded the conclusion to this macabre encounter in his diary:

I could sense the smell of the Angel all around me, the Angel’s breath, the Angel’s desire to take someone away. I remained silent and silently asked what he wanted. He told me that he had been summoned and that he needed to take someone, to give an account of his work. Then I picked up a kitchen knife, jumped over the wall and landed in an empty plot of land where the people in the shanty towns kept their goats running free. I grabbed hold of one of them and slit its throat. The blood spurted up and went right over the wall, splattering the walls of my house. But the Angel left satisfied. From then on, I knew that I would never try to kill myself again.

Unless his parents had been so indiscreet as to read his diary – as he suspected some time later – the sacrifice of the goat, which at the time was attributed to some perverse evil-doer, could not have been one of their reasons for having him admitted to the asylum.

Still absorbing the shock of this new situation, Paulo was led to his room by a male nurse. As he leaned against the iron bars at the window, he was surprised by the beauty to be found in such a wretched place. From the ninth floor he had an unbroken view of the white sands of Botafogo beach, the Flamengo gardens and, in the background, the spectacular outline of Morro da Urca and Pão de Açucar. The bed beside his was empty, which meant that he would have to suffer his torment alone. In the afternoon, someone arrived from his house and handed over at the gate a suitcase with clothes, books and personal possessions. The day passed without incident.

Lying on his bed, Paulo thought of the options open to him: the first, of course, was to continue with his plan to be a writer. If this didn’t work out, the best thing would be to go mad as a convenient means to an end. He would be supported by the state, he wouldn’t have to work any more nor take on any responsibilities. This would mean spending a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, but, after a day wandering the corridors, he realized that the patients at the clinic didn’t behave ‘like the mad people you see in Hollywood films’: ‘Except for some pathological cases of a catatonic or schizophrenic nature, all the other patients are perfectly capable of talking about life and having their own ideas on the subject. Sometimes they have panic attacks, crises of depression or aggression, but they don’t last for long.’

Paulo spent the following days trying to get to know the place to which he had been confined. Talking to the nurses and employees, he discovered that 800 mentally ill people were interned at the clinic, and divided up according to the degree of their insanity and social class. The floor he was on was for the so-called ‘docile mad’ and those referred by private doctors, while the remainder, the ‘dangerously mad’ and those dependent on public health services, were in another building. The former slept in rooms with a maximum of two beds and a private bathroom and during the day they could move freely around the entire floor. However, you could only take the lift, the doors of which were locked, when accompanied by a nurse and a guide nominated by a doctor. All the windows, balconies and verandahs were protected by iron grilles or walls made of decorative air bricks through which one could still see. Those being paid for by social services slept in dormitories of ten, twenty and even thirty beds, while those considered to be violent were kept in solitary confinement.

The Dr Eiras clinic was not only an asylum, as Paulo had originally thought, but a group of neurological, cardiological and detox clinics for alcoholics and drug addicts. Two of its directors, the doctors Abraão Ackerman and Paulo Niemeyer, were among the most respected neurosurgeons in Brazil. While hundreds of workers dependent on social security lined up at their doors waiting for a consultation, famous people with health problems also went there. During his time in the clinic as a patient, Paulo received weekly visits from his mother. On one of these visits, Lygia arrived accompanied by Sônia Maria, who was fifteen at the time and had insisted on going to see her brother in hospital. She left in a state of shock. ‘The atmosphere was horrendous, people talking to themselves in the corridors,’ she was to recall angrily some years later. ‘And lost in that hell was Paulo, a mere boy, someone who should never have been there.’ She left determined to speak to her parents, to beg them to open their hearts and remove her brother from the asylum, but she lacked the courage to do so. If she was unable to argue in defence of her own rights, what could she do for him? Unlike Paulo, Sônia spent her life in submission to her parents – to such a point that, even when married and a mother, she would never smoke in front of her father and concealed from him the fact that she wore a bikini.

As for Paulo’s suffering, this, according to Dr Benjamim, who visited him each morning, was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to ‘a special way he had of getting himself out of difficult situations, even when he was protesting against being interned!’ According to the psychiatrist, ‘the fact that Paulo did not suffer more is because he had a way with words’. And it was thanks to that ‘way with words’ that he avoided being subjected to a brutal treatment frequently inflicted on the mentally ill at the clinic: electroshock treatment. Although he was well informed about mental illnesses and had translated books on psychiatry, Dr Benjamim was a staunch defender of electroconvulsive therapy, which had already been condemned in a large part of the world. ‘In certain cases, such as incurable depression, there is no alternative,’ he would say confidently. ‘Any other therapy is a cheat, an illusion, a palliative and a dangerous procrastination.’ However, while he was a patient, Paulo was subjected to such heavy doses of psychotropic substances that he would spend the whole day in a daze, slouching along the corridor in his slippers. Although he had never experimented with drugs, not even cannabis, he spent four weeks consuming packs and packs of medication that was supposedly detoxifying, but only left him more confused.

Since almost no one knew he was in the asylum, he had little news of his friends. One day, he had an unexpected visit from the friend who was indirectly responsible for his presence there by asking for a reference, and who left the clinic with a mad idea – never carried out: that of rallying the members of the defunct Rota 15 group to kidnap him. However, Paulo’s tortured soul only found true peace when his latest love appeared: Renata Sochaczewski, a pretty girl whom he had met at an amateur theatrical group, who was to become a great actress under the name Renata Sorrah, and whom Paulo affectionately called ‘Rennie’ or ‘Pato’. When she failed to get in to visit him, Renata would furtively send him little love notes. These contained such messages as ‘Stand at the window because I’m waiting to wave goodbye to you’, or ‘Write a list of what you want and give it to me on Friday. Yesterday I phoned but they didn’t tell you.’

When he was allowed out, four weeks after being admitted, Paulo was in a very fragile state, but he nevertheless tried to take a positive lesson from his journey into hell. It was only when he got home that he found the mental energy to make notes in his diary:

In the meantime, I’ve been in Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, where I was admitted for being maladjusted. I spent twenty-eight days there, missed classes, lost my job and was released as if I had been cured, even though there was no reason for my ever having been admitted in the first place. My parents have really done it this time! They ruin my chances at the newspaper, ruin my academic year and spend loads of money only to find that there was nothing wrong with me. What I have to do now is start all over again, accepting what’s happened as a joke and a well-intentioned mistake. (The worst of it is that the day I was admitted, I was going to be given a job on the permanent staff at the newspaper.)

All the same, it was OK. As a patient on my floor said, ‘All experiences are good experiences, even the bad ones.’ Yes, I’ve learned a lot. It gave me a chance to mature and gain in self-confidence, to make a more careful study of my friends and notice things I’d never really thought about before. Now I’m a man.

While Paulo may have left the clinic convinced that there was nothing wrong with him, this was not the opinion of the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gomes. The hospital file in the archives of the clinic held a dark prognosis that read more like a condemnation: ‘A patient with schizoid tendencies, averse to social and loving contact. He prefers solitary activities. He is incapable of expressing his feelings or of experiencing pleasure.’ Judging from this piece of paper, Paulo’s suffering was only just beginning.