Читать книгу A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho - Fernando Morais - Страница 7

PAULO COELHO DE SOUZA was born on a rainy night on 24 August 1947, the feast of St Bartholomew, in the hospital of São José in Humaitá, a middle-class area of Rio de Janeiro. The doctors had foreseen that there might be problems with the birth, the first for twenty-three-year-old Lygia Araripe Coelho de Souza, married to a thirty-three-year-old engineer, Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza. The baby would be not only their first child but a first grandchild for the four grandparents and a first nephew for uncles and aunts on both sides. Initial examination had shown that the child had swallowed a fatal mixture of meconium – that is, his own faeces – and amniotic fluid. He was not moving in the womb and showed no inclination to be born, and finally had to be delivered by forceps. As he was pulled into the world, at exactly 12.05 a.m., the doctor must have heard a slight crack, like a pencil snapping. This was the baby’s collarbone, which had failed to resist the pressure of the forceps. Since the baby, a boy, was dead, this was hardly a problem.

Lygia was a devout Catholic and, in a moment of despair, the first name that came to her lips was that of the patron saint of the maternity hospital: ‘Please bring back my son! Save him, St Joseph! My baby’s life is in your hands!’

The sobbing parents asked for someone to come and give the last rites to their dead child. Only a nun could be found, but just as she was about to administer the sacrament, there was a fainting mewing sound. The child was, in fact, alive, but in a deep coma. He had faced his first challenge and survived it.

He spent his first three days in an incubator. During those decisive seventy-two hours his father, Pedro, remained with him all the time. On the fourth day, when Paulo was taken out of the incubator, Pedro finally managed to get some sleep, and was replaced in his vigil by his mother-in- law Maria Elisa, or Lilisa as she was known. Six decades later, Paulo would state without hesitation that his earliest memory was of seeing a woman come into the room and knowing that she was his grandmother. In spite of weighing only 3.33 kilos at birth and measuring 49 centimetres, the child seemed healthy. According to Lygia’s notes in her baby album, he had dark hair, brown eyes and fair skin, and looked like his father. He was named after an uncle who had died young from a heart attack.

Apart from a bout of whooping cough, Paulo had a normal, healthy childhood. At eight months, he said his first word, at ten months, his first teeth appeared and at eleven months, he began to walk without ever having crawled. According to Lygia, he was ‘gentle, obedient, extremely lively and intelligent’. When he was two, his only sister, Sônia Maria, was born; he was always fond of her and, apparently, never jealous. At three, he learned to make the sign of the cross, a gesture that was later accompanied by requests to God for the good health of his parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.

Until he was thirteen, he and his family lived on an eleven-house estate built by his father in Botafogo, a pleasant middle-class area of Rio. The best of the houses – the only one with a garden – was reserved for Pedro’s in-laws, Lilisa and Tuca, who owned the land. Another of the houses, a modest, two-storey affair, was given to Pedro in payment for his work and the remaining nine were let, sold or occupied by relatives. The Coelhos were so concerned about security that, although the estate was protected by high gates, all the windows and doors in the house were kept shut. Paulo and the other children could play freely as long as they did so within the confines of the estate; although it was only a few blocks from Botafogo beach, they knew nothing of life beyond its walls. Friendship with children from ‘outside’ was unthinkable.

From a very young age, Paulo showed that he had an original way of thinking. When, at the age of three, Lygia caught him behaving badly, he said: ‘Do you know why I’m being naughty today, Mama? It’s because my guardian angel isn’t working. He’s been working very hard and his battery has run out.’

One of his greatest pleasures was helping his grandfather Tuca repair his enormous Packard car. His father felt that this was clear proof that his son would turn out to be an engineer like him. Pedro also had a car – a Vanguard – but it rarely left the garage. As far as Pedro Coelho was concerned, if the family could take the bus into the city, there was no reason to spend money on petrol.

One of Coelho’s earliest memories is of his father’s tight grip on domestic finances. Engineer Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’s dream was to build not just a modest house for his family, like those on the estate, but a really large house with drawing rooms, a conservatory, verandahs and several bathrooms. The first step towards building this cathedral was a present from his father-in-law, Tuca: a 400-square-metre plot in Rua Padre Leonel Franca in the smart district of Gávea. From then on all non-essential expenditure for the family was cut in favour of the house in Gávea. ‘If we’re going to build a house for everyone,’ declared Dr Pedro, as he was known, ‘then everyone is going to have to cut back on spending.’ No new clothes, no birthday parties, no presents, no unnecessary trips in the car. ‘At the time,’ the author recalls, ‘we had nothing, but we didn’t lack for anything either.’ Christmas was saved for the children by the German electric trains and French dolls that their maternal grandparents gave them.

The dream house in Gávea caused the family a further problem. Instead of placing his savings in a bank, Pedro preferred to invest them in building materials and, since he had no shed in which to store these treasures, he kept everything in the house until he had enough capital to begin the construction work. As a result, both Coelho and his sister recall spending their childhood among lavatory bowls, taps, bags of cement and tiles.

The cutbacks did not, however, impoverish Coelho’s intellectual life. Although his father no longer bought any new records, he nevertheless listened to classical music every night. And anyone pressing his ear to the front door of No. 11 would have heard Bach and Tchaikovsky being played by Lygia on the piano that had been with her since before she was married. The house was also full of books, mainly collected by Lygia.

At the beginning of 1952, when he was four and a half, Coelho’s parents enrolled him in kindergarten, where he spent two years. Then, in 1954, intending eventually to send their son to a Jesuit secondary school, St Ignatius College, he was moved to Our Lady Victorious School, which was seen as the best route to St Ignatius – the most traditional school of its kind in Rio, and one of the most respected educational establishments for boys in the city. St Ignatius was expensive, but it guaranteed the one thing that the Coelhos regarded as essential: strict discipline.

It was certainly true that, at least in Paulo’s case, the cordon sanitaire placed around the estate to protect the children from the evil world outside had no effect. At five, he was already viewed by his adult neighbours as a bad influence on their children. As there were two other children on the estate called Paulo (his cousins, Paulo Arraes and Paulo Araripe), he was simply called ‘Coelho’. To Lygia and Pedro’s horror, suspicions that it was ‘Coelho’ who was responsible for many of the odd things that were happening in the small community began to be confirmed. First, there was the discovery of a small girl bound hand and foot to a tree so that she appeared to be hugging it and who was too afraid to tell on the culprit. Then came the information that, at dead of night, the boys were organizing chicken races, which ended with all the competitors, apart from the winner, having their necks wrung. One day, someone replaced the contents of all the cans of hair lacquer belonging to the young girls on the estate with water. It was one of the victims of this last jape – Cecília Arraes, an older cousin – who worked out who the culprit was. She found a satchel in one of the boys’ hiding places containing papers that revealed the existence of a ‘secret organization’ complete with statutes, the names of the leaders and the minutes of meetings. This was the Arco Organization, its name being taken from the first two letters of the surnames of the chief perpetrators, Paulo Araripe and Paulo Coelho.

Cecília collared the future author and said: ‘So what’s this Arco business? What does the organization do? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to your parents.’

He was terrified. ‘It’s a secret organization, so I’m forbidden to tell you anything.’ When his cousin continued to threaten him, he said: ‘No, really, I can’t tell you. The only thing I can say is that Arco is an organization specializing in sabotage.’ He went on to explain that both the water in the girls’ hair lacquer and the girl being tied to the tree were punishments for their having crossed the chalk frontier scratched on the ground to mark the borders of Arco territory, beyond which lay an area ‘forbidden to girls’.

When evidence of Paulo’s involvement in the matter reached his parents, they were in no doubt that, when he was old enough, the boy should definitely be placed in the stern, wise hands of the Jesuits. While at Our Lady Victorious, he became accustomed to the regime that he would find at St Ignatius, for, unlike at other schools, the pupils had classes on Saturdays and were free on Wednesdays. This meant that Paulo only had Sunday to play with his friends on the estate. On Saturdays, when they were all off, he had to spend the day at school. On Wednesdays, when he was free but had no companions, he had no alternative but to stay at home reading and studying.

The children at Our Lady Victorious ranged in age from seven to eleven, and the school made a point of inculcating the pupils with a belief in the values of hard work and of respect for one’s fellows. The children had to learn by heart the school rules, one of which was: ‘It shows a lack of politeness, Christian charity and fellowship to wound less talented or less intelligent colleagues by words or laughter.’ Coelho loathed all the subjects he was taught, without exception. The only reason he put up with the torment of spending his days bent over his books was that he had to get good marks in order to move up to the next year. In the first two years he spent at Our Lady Victorious, he managed to achieve well-above-average marks. However, from the third year on, things began to slip, as can be seen in a letter he sent to Pedro on Father’s Day in 1956:

Papa,

I only got one in my maths test, so I’m going to have to study with you every night. My averages in the other subjects improved though. In religion I went from zero to six, in Portuguese from zero to six and a half, but in maths I went from four and a half to two and a half. My overall place in the class was still pretty bad, but I improved a bit, moving from twenty-fifth to sixteenth.

Love,

Paulo

Twenty-fifth was, in fact, bottom of the class, given that the classes at Our Lady Victorious had a maximum of twenty-five boys in them. However, the fact that he was bottom of the class didn’t mean that the Coelhos were bringing up a fool. On the contrary. Their son may have hated studying, but he loved reading. He would read anything and everything, from fairy tales to Tarzan, and whatever his parents bought him or his friends lent him. Little by little, Coelho became the estate’s resident storyteller. Years later, his aunt, Cecília Dantas Arraes, would recall the ‘boy with skinny legs and baggy, wide-legged trousers’: ‘When he wasn’t thinking up some mischief, he would be sitting on the pavement with his friends around him while he told stories.’

One night, he was with his parents and grandparents watching a quiz programme, The Sky’s the Limit. A professor was answering questions about the Roman Empire and when the quiz master asked the professor who had succeeded Julius Caesar, Paulo jumped up and, to everyone’s astonishment, said: ‘Octavius Augustus’, adding: ‘I’ve always liked Octavius Augustus. He was the one August was named after, and that’s the month I was born in.’

Knowing more than his friends was one way of compensating for his physical weakness. He was very thin, frail and short, and both on the estate and at school he was known as ‘Pele’ – ‘skin’ – a Rio term used at the time for boys who were always getting beaten up by their classmates. He may have been his peers’ favourite victim, but he soon learned that knowing things no one else knew and reading stories none of his peers had read was one way of gaining their respect.

He realized that he would never come top in anything at school, but when he learned that there was to be a writing competition for all the boys in the third year, he decided to enter. The subject was ‘The Father of Aviation’, Alberto Santos Dumont. This is what Coelho wrote:

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alberto Santos Dumont. Every day, early in the morning, Alberto would watch the birds flying and sometimes he would think: ‘If eagles can fly, why can’t I, after all, I’m more intelligent than the eagles.’ Santos Dumont then decided to study hard, and his father and his mother, Francisca Dumont, sent him to an aeromodelling school.

Other people, such as Father Bartholomew and Augusto Severo, had tried to fly before. Augusto Severo flew in a balloon that he had built, but it fell to earth and he died. But Santos Dumont did not give up. He built a balloon that was a tube filled with gas and he flew, went round the Jefel [sic] Tower in Paris and landed in the same place he had taken off from.

Then he decided to invent an aeroplane that was heavier than air. Its shell was made of bamboo and silk. In 1906, in Champs de Bagatelle, he tried out the aeroplane. Lots of people laughed, convinced he would never fly. But Santos Dumont with his 14-bis travelled along for more than 220 metres and suddenly the wheels left the ground. When the crowd saw it there was a cry of ‘Ah!’ And that was it, aviation had been invented.

The best composition was to be chosen by a vote among the pupils. Paulo was so lacking in confidence that when it came to voting, he ended up choosing the work of another pupil. When the votes were counted, though, he was astonished to find that he was the winner. The pupil for whom he had voted came second, but was later disqualified when it was discovered that he had copied the text from a newspaper article.

However, Paulo’s performance in the competition was not reflected in other subjects. When the time came for him to take the entrance exam for St Ignatius, the strict discipline and sacrifices imposed by the harsh regime at Our Lady Victorious proved useless and he failed. As punishment, in order to prepare for the retake, he was forced to stay in Rio having private lessons. This meant he had to forgo the annual family holiday in Araruama, where one of his uncles lived. To make sure that he had no spare time, his mother, who was also concerned by his lack of physical strength, decided that in the mornings he would attend PE classes at a holiday camp in Fortaleza de São João, an army unit in the peaceful, romantic area of Urca in the central region of Rio. Forced to do the two things he most hated – physical exercise in the morning and studying in the afternoon – Paulo felt as if he were spending two months in hell.

Every morning, Lygia took a bus with her son that went directly from Botafogo to Urca, where she handed him over to his tormentors. The climax of the nightmare was the dreaded jump into the river, which the boys – about fifty of them – were forced to do every day at the end of a seemingly endless session of bending, running and bar work. The boys, who were always accompanied by adult instructors, were placed in line and forced to jump from a bridge into the icy water of the river that cuts through the woods around the fortress. Even though he knew there was no chance of drowning or being hurt, the mere thought of doing this made Paulo panic. Initially, he was always last in line. His heart would pound, the palms of his hands would sweat and he felt like crying, calling for his mother, even peeing his pants: he would have done anything to avoid making that leap were it not for the fact that he was even more afraid of looking like a coward. Then he discovered the solution: ‘If I was first in line, I would suffer for less time.’ Problem solved. ‘Not that I got over my fear of jumping,’ he recalled years later, ‘but the suffering ended and I learned my first lesson in life: if it’s going to hurt, confront the problem straight away because at least then the pain will stop.’

These were, in fact, wasted days, in terms of both money and suffering, since he again failed the entrance exam. After spending the whole of 1958 preparing, however, he finally passed and did so with the excellent average mark of 8.3. High marks not only guaranteed admission to the school but also meant being given the title of ‘Count’. If his performance improved still more he could become a ‘Marquis’ or even, as all parents dreamed of their children becoming, a ‘Duke’, a title reserved for those who ended the year with an average of 10 in all subjects.

But he never fulfilled his parents’ dream. The entrance exam was the one moment of glory in his educational career. A graph based on his school reports for 1959 onwards shows a descending curve that would only end when he completed his science course in 1965 at one of the worst colleges in Rio de Janeiro. It was as though he were saying to his parents: ‘Your dream of having a son at St Ignatius has come true, now leave me in peace.’ As he himself remarked many years later, that mark of 8.3 was his final act in the world of the normal.