Читать книгу A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho - Fernando Morais - Страница 8

IF THE DEVIL WAS HIDING in the hallowed walls of St Ignatius, paradise was 100 kilometres from Rio in Araruama, where Paulo Coelho usually spent the school holidays, almost always with his sister, Sônia Maria, who was two years younger. When family finances allowed, which was rare, they would go to Belém do Pará, where their paternal grandparents lived. Araruama, famous for its long beaches, was chosen by the Coelhos not for its natural beauty but because they had a guaranteed welcome at the home of Paulo’s great-uncle, the eccentric José Braz Araripe. He had graduated in mechanical engineering and, in the 1920s, had been employed by the state-owned navigation company Lóide Brasileiro to run the ship repair yard owned by the company in the United States. With the help of another Brazilian engineer, Fernando Iehly de Lemos, Araripe spent all his free time in the Lóide laboratories working on the development of an invention that would change his life, as well as that of millions of consumers worldwide: the automatic gear box. Araripe based his invention on a prototype created in 1904 by the Sturtevant brothers in Boston, which was never taken up because it had only two speeds and would only work when the engine was on full power. It was not until 1932, after countless hours of tests, that Araripe’s and Lemos’s revolutionary invention was finally patented. That year, General Motors bought the rights from them for mass production, which began in 1938 when GM announced that the Oldsmobile had as an option the greatest thing since the invention of the automobile itself: the Hydra-Matic system, a luxury for which the consumer would pay an additional US$70, about a tenth of the total price of the car. Some say that the two Brazilians each pocketed a small fortune in cash at the time, and nothing else; others say that both opted to receive a percentage of each gearbox sold during their lifetime. Whatever the truth of the matter, from then on, money was never a problem for Araripe, or ‘Uncle José’, as he was known to his great-nephew and -niece.

With no worries about the future, Uncle José left Lóide and returned to Brazil. It might have been expected that he would live in Rio, close to his family; however, during his time in the United States, he had suffered a slight accident at work, which caused him to lose some movement in his left arm, and someone told him that the black sands of Araruama would be an infallible remedy. He moved there, bought a large piece of land on one of the main streets in the city, and built a six-bedroom house in which all the walls and furniture were retractable. At the command of their owner, walls, beds and tables would disappear, turning the residence into a large workshop where Uncle José worked and built his inventions.

In summer, walls and furniture would be restored in readiness to receive the children. One night a week during the holidays, the walls would disappear again in order to create an area for watching 35mm films on a professional film projector and the workshop would become a cinema. Some summers, Uncle José would have more than twenty guests, among them his great-nephews and -nieces, friends, and the few adults who had the impossible job of keeping an eye on the children. The children’s parents were appalled by the man’s unconventional behaviour, but the comfort he offered them outweighed their concerns. Anxious mothers whispered that, as well as being an atheist, José held closed sessions of pornographic films when there were only boys in the house – which was, indeed, true – and he took off his oil-stained dungarees (under which he never wore underpants) only on special occasions; but he was open and generous and shared the eccentricities of his house with his neighbours. When he learned that the television he had bought was the only one in town, he immediately turned the screen to face the street and thus improvised a small auditorium where, from seven to ten at night, everyone could enjoy the new phenomenon.

Michele Conte and Jorge Luiz Ramos, two of Coelho’s friends in Araruama, recall that, every year, Coelho would arrive from Rio bearing some new ‘toy’. Once, it was a Diana airgun with which he shot his first bird, a grassquit whose black wings he carefully plucked and stuck to a piece of paper with the date and a note of the bird’s characteristics (a trophy that was to remain among his childhood mementoes in his house in Rio). The following year, he appeared with a diving mask and flippers, which prompted Uncle José to make him a submarine harpoon, its shafts propelled by a wire spring like a medieval man-of-war.

Like the other children, visitors and locals, Paulo woke every day when it was still dark. The town’s residents recall a boy with skinny legs, knee-length socks and baggy shorts. The group would disappear off into the woods, explore the lakes, steal boats and go fishing, invade orchards or explore grottoes and caves. On returning home at the end of the day, they would hand over the spoils of their expedition – doves brought down with shot or fish spiked with Uncle José’s harpoon – to Rosa, the cook, who would clean and prepare them for dinner. They would often return bruised or scratched or, as was the case once with Paulo, having been arrested by the forest rangers for hunting wild animals.

When Lygia arrived at the weekend to see her children, she would find herself in a party atmosphere. She would take up her guitar and spend the nights playing songs by Trini Lopez and by the rising star Roberto Carlos, accompanied by the children. The only thing Paulo did not enjoy was dancing. He found the parades in Rio fun, but hated dancing, and felt ridiculous when forced by his friends to jump around at Carnival dances in Araruama. To avoid humiliation, he would go straight to the toilets when he arrived at the club, hold his shirt under the tap and put it on again, soaking wet. If anyone invited him to dance he had his excuse ready: ‘I’ve just been dancing. Look how sweaty I am. I’m going to take a break – I’ll be back soon.’

Araruama was the place where he made various adolescent discoveries, like getting drunk for the first time. He and two friends went to one of the town’s deserted beaches and swiftly downed two bottles of rum he had bought secretly in Rio and concealed among his clothes at the bottom of his suitcase. As a result, he fell asleep on the beach and woke with his body all swollen with sunburn. He was ill for several days. So bad was the hangover that, unlike most boys of his generation, he never became a serious drinker.

He also experienced his first kiss on one of these holidays. Although he liked to boast theatrically to his friends that destiny had reserved something rather different for his first kiss, namely a prostitute, that kiss in fact took place in the innocent atmosphere of Araruama and was shared with the eldest sister of his friend Michele, Élide – or Dedê – who was a little younger than he. It was in Araruama, too, that he experienced his first sexual impulses. When he discovered that his uncle had made the walls of the rooms of very light, thin wood so that they could easily be raised, Paulo managed secretly to bore a hole in one wall large enough for him to enjoy the solitary privilege, before falling asleep, of spying on his female cousins, who were sleeping naked in the next room. He was shocked to see that girls had curly hair covering their private parts. In his amazement, he grew breathless, his heart pounded and his legs shook, so much so that he feared that he might have an asthma attack and be caught in flagrante.

The respiratory problems he had suffered from since birth had developed, with puberty, into a debilitating asthma. The attacks, which were caused by a variety of things – changes in the weather, dust, mould, smoke – were unpredictable. They began with breathlessness, a cough and a whistling in his chest, and culminated in terrible feelings of asphyxia, when his lungs felt as if they were about to burst. He had to make sure that he always had his bag full of cough syrups, medication to dilate the bronchial tubes (usually in the form of cortisone tablets) and a ‘puffer’ to alleviate the symptoms.

Quite often his parents would take it in turns to sit by his bed at night in order to be there during an emergency and once, in despair, Lygia took him to a faith healer who had been recommended by friends. When they arrived at the consulting room, the man gazed fixedly into Paulo’s eyes and said just five words: ‘I can see Dr Fritz.’^* This was enough for Lygia to take her son by the hand and leave, muttering: ‘This is no place for a Christian.’ When the asthma manifested itself in Araruama, far from his mother’s care, the exchange of letters between Paulo and his mother became more frequent and, at times, worrying: ‘Could you come with Aunt Elisa to look after me?’ he asked, tearfully. Such requests would provoke anxious telegrams from Lygia to the aunt who looked after the children on holiday, one saying: ‘I’m really worried about Paulo’s asthma. The doctor said he should be given one ampoule of Reductil for three days and two Meticorten tablets a day. Let me know how things are.’

Although he said that he loved receiving letters, but hated writing them, as soon as he could read and write, and when he was away from home, Paulo would fill page after page, mostly addressed to his parents. Their content reveals a mature, delicate child concerned with his reputation as a bad, ill-behaved student. His letters to Lygia were mawkish and full of sentimentality, like this one, sent on Mother’s Day 1957, when he was nine:

Dear Mama: No, no, we don’t need May 8th to remember all the good things we’ve received from you. Your constant love and dedication, even though we’re, very often, bad, disobedient children.

[…] The truth is, it’s your love that forgives us. That resilient love that never snaps like chewing gum. May God keep you, darling Mama, and forgive my errors because I’m still only small and I promise to improve very very soon.

Lots of love,

Paulinho

The letters he sent to his father were more formal, even down to the signature, and written in a rather complaining tone.

Papa,

Have you sent my leaflets to be printed? And how is the new house going? When are we going to move in?

I’m counting on your presence here the next time you come.

Love,

Paulo Coelho

As time went by, letter-writing became a regular thing for him. He would write to his parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and friends. If he had no one to write to, he would simply jot down his ideas on small pieces of paper and then hide his scribbled thoughts in a secret place away from prying eyes. When he was about twelve he bought a pocket diary in which he began to make daily entries. He would always write in ink, in a slightly wobbly hand, but with few grammatical errors. He began by recording typical adolescent tasks – ‘tidy my desk’, ‘Fred’s birthday’ and ‘send a telegram to Grandpa Cazuza’ – and gradually he also began to record things he had done, seen or merely thought. Sometimes these were short notes to himself, such as ‘swap s. with Zeca’, ‘papa: equations’ and ‘do part E of the plan’. This was also the first time he sketched a self-portrait:

I was born on 24 August 1947 in the São José Hospital. I have lived on this estate since I was small. I have attended three schools and in all three I was regarded as a prince because of the way I dressed. I’ve always had good marks in all the schools I’ve been to.

I really like studying, but I also like playing. I’ve never been interested in opera or romantic music. I hate rock-and-roll, but I really like popular Brazilian music. I only like carnival when I’m taken to fancy-dress balls.

I really like adventures, but I’m scared of dangerous things […] I’ve had several girlfriends already. I love sport. I want to be a chemist when I grow up because I like working with flasks and medicines. I love the cinema, fishing and making model aeroplanes.

I like reading comics and doing crosswords. I hate picnics and outings or anything that’s boring.

This regular exercise of writing about himself or things that happened during the day attracted him so much that he began to record everything – either in a diary kept in a spiral notebook or by dictating into a cassette recorder and keeping the tapes. Later, with the arrival of computers he put together the entire set of records covering the four decades of confessions that he had accumulated up until then and stored them in a trunk, which he padlocked. In those 170 handwritten notebooks and 94 cassettes lay hidden the minutiae of his life and soul from 1959, when he was twelve years old, up to 1995, when he was forty-eight and began to write directly on to a computer. He was famous by then, and had stated in his will that immediately following his death, the trunk and its entire contents should be burned. However, for reasons that will be explained later, he changed his mind and allowed the writer of this biography free access to this material. Diaries are records produced almost simultaneously with the emotion or action described, and are often cathartic exercises for the person writing them. This is clear from Coelho’s diaries, where he often speaks of the more perverse sides of his personality, often to the detriment of his more generous and sensitive side.

The diary gave the author the freedom to fantasize at will. Contrary to what he wrote in the self-portrait quoted above, Coelho rarely dressed smartly, he loathed studying just as he loathed sport and his love life was not always happy. According to his diary, his cousin Cecília, his neighbour Mónica, who lived on the estate, Dedê, with whom he shared his first kiss in Araruama, and Ana Maria, or Tatá, a pretty dark-haired girl with braces, were all girlfriends. Young love is often a troubling business, and the appearance of the last of these girls in his life was the subject of dramatically embroidered reports. ‘For the first time, I cried because of a woman,’ he wrote. At night, unable to sleep, he saw himself as a character in a tragedy: as he cycled past his lover’s house, he was run over by a car and fell to the ground covered in blood. Somehow, Tatá was there at his side and knelt sobbing beside his body in time to hear him utter his last words: ‘This is my blood. It was shed for you. Remember me …’

Although the relationship was purely platonic, Tatá’s parents took an immediate dislike to Coelho. Forbidden to continue her relationship with that ‘strange boy’, she nevertheless stood up to her family. She told Paulo that her mother had even hit her, but still she wouldn’t give him up. However, when he was holidaying in Araruama, he received a two-line note from Chico, a friend who lived on the estate: ‘Tatá has told me to tell you it’s all over. She’s in love with someone else.’ It was as though the walls in Uncle José’s house had fallen in on him. It wasn’t just the loss of his girlfriend but the loss of face before his friends for having been so betrayed, cuckolded by a woman. He could take anything but that. He therefore invented an extraordinary story, which he described in a letter to his friend the following day. Chico was told to tell everyone that he had lied about his relationship with Tatá; he had never actually felt anything for her, but as a secret agent of the CIC – the Central Intelligence Center, a US spy agency – he had received instructions to draw up a dossier on her. This was the only reason he had got close to her. A week later, after receiving a second letter from Chico, he noted in his diary: ‘He believed my story, but from now on, I have a whole string of lies to live up to. Appearances have been saved, but my heart is aching.’

Lygia and Pedro also had aching hearts, although not because of love. The first months their son had spent at St Ignatius had been disastrous. The days when he brought back his monthly grades were a nightmare. While his sister, Sônia Maria, was getting top marks at her school, Paulo’s marks got steadily worse. With only rare exceptions – usually in unimportant subjects such as choral singing or craftwork – he hardly ever achieved the necessary average of 5 if he was to stay on at the school. It was only when he was forced to study for hours on end at home and given extra tuition in various subjects that he managed to complete the first year, but even then his average was only a poor 6.3. In the second year, things deteriorated still further. He continued to get high marks in choral singing, but couldn’t achieve even the minimum average grade in the subjects that mattered – maths, Portuguese, history, geography, Latin and English. However, his parents were sure that the iron hand of the Jesuits would bring their essentially good-natured son back to the straight and narrow.

As time went by, he became more and more timid, retiring and insecure. He began to lose interest even in the favourite sport of his schoolmates, which was to stand at the gates of the Colégio Jacobina, where his sister was a pupil, to watch the girls coming out. This was a delight they would all remember for the rest of their lives, as the author and scriptwriter Ricardo Hofstetter, who was also a pupil at the Jesuit college, was to recall:

It was pure magic to walk those two or three blocks to see them coming out. I still have the image in my mind: the girls’ slim, exquisite legs, half on view, half hidden by their pleated skirts. They came out in groups, groups of legs and pleated skirts that the wind would make even more exciting. Anyone who experienced this knows that there was nothing more sublime in the world, although I never went out with a girl at the Jacobina.

Nor did Paulo, not at the Jacobina or anywhere else. Apart from innocent flirtations and notes exchanged with the girls on the estate or in Araruama, he reached young adulthood without ever having had a real girlfriend. When his friends got together to brag about their conquests – never anything more than holding hands or a quick kiss or a squeeze – he was the only one who had no adventure to talk of. Fate had not made him handsome. His head was too big for his skinny body and his shoulders narrow. He had fleshy lips, like his father’s, and his nose, too, seemed overlarge for the face of a boy of his age.

He became more solitary with each day that passed and buried himself in books – not those the Jesuits had them read at school, which he loathed, but adventure stories and novels. However, while he may have become a voracious reader, this still did not improve his performance at school. At the end of every year, in the public prize-giving ceremonies, he had become used to seeing his colleagues – some of whom went on to become leading figures in Brazilian public life – receiving diplomas and medals, while he was never once called to go up to the dais. He only narrowly avoided being kept down a year and thus forced to find another school, since at St Ignatius, staying down was synonymous with being thrown out.

While their son proved himself to be a resounding failure, his parents at least lived in hope that he would become a good Christian and, indeed, he appeared to be well on the way to this. While averse to study, he felt comfortable in the heavily religious atmosphere of the college. He would don his best clothes and happily attend the obligatory Sunday mass, which was celebrated entirely in Latin, and he became familiar with the mysterious rituals such as covering the images of the saints during Lent with purple cloths. Even the dark underground catacombs where the mortal remains of the Jesuits lay aroused his curiosity, although he never had the courage to visit them.

His parents’ hopes were re-awakened during his fourth year, when he decided to go on a retreat held by the school. These retreats lasted three or four days, and took place during the week so that they would not seem like a holiday camp or mere recreation. They were always held at the Padre Anchieta Retreat House, or the Casa da Gávea, as it was known – a country house high up in the then remote district of São Conrado, 15 kilometres from the centre of Rio. Built in 1935 and surrounded by woods, it was a large three-storey building with thirty blue-framed windows in the front. These were the windows of the bedrooms where the guests stayed, each with a magnificent view of the deserted beach of São Conrado. The Jesuits never tired of repeating that the silence in the house was so complete that at any hour of the day or night and in any corner of the building you could hear the waves breaking on the beach below.

It was on a hot October morning in 1962 that Paulo left for his encounter with God. In a small suitcase packed by his mother, he took, as well as his clothes and personal belongings, his new, inseparable companions: a notebook and a fountain pen with which to make the notes that were more and more taking on the form of a diary. At eight in the morning, all the boys were standing in the college courtyard and as they waited for the bus to take them to the retreat house, Coelho was suddenly filled with courage. With two friends he went into the chapel in the dark, and walked round the altar and down the stairs towards the catacombs. Lit only by candles, the crypt, which was full of coffins, looked even gloomier. To his surprise, though, instead of being filled with terror, as he had always imagined he would be, he had an indescribable feeling of well-being. He seemed inspired to search for an explanation for his unexpected bravery. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t seeing death in all its terror,’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘but the eternal rest of those who had lived and suffered for Jesus.’

Half an hour later, they were all at the Casa da Gávea. During the days that followed, Paulo shared with another young boy a bare cubicle provided with two beds, a wardrobe, a table, two chairs and a little altar attached to the wall. In a corner was a china wash basin and above it a mirror. Once they had unpacked, both boys went down to the refectory, where they were given tea and biscuits. The spiritual guide for the group was Father João Batista Ruffier, who announced the rules of the retreat, the first of which would come into force in the next ten minutes: a vow of silence. From then on, until they left at the end of the retreat, no one was allowed to say a single word. Father Ruffier, who was a stickler for the rules, was about to give one of his famous sermons, one that would remain in the memory of generations of those who attended St Ignatius.

‘You are here like machines going into the workshop for a service. You can expect to be taken apart piece by piece. Don’t be afraid of the amount of dirt that will come out. The most important thing is that you put back each piece in its right place with total honesty.’

The sermon lasted almost an hour, but it was those opening words that went round and round in Paulo’s head all afternoon, as he walked alone in the woods surrounding the house. That night he wrote in his diary, ‘I have reviewed all my thoughts of the last few days and I’m ready to put things right.’ He said a Hail Mary and an Our Father, and fell asleep.

Although Father Ruffier had made it clear what the retreat was for – ‘Here you will drive away the temptations of life and consecrate yourselves to meditation and prayer’ – not everyone was there for Christian reflection. Everyone knew that once dinner was over and after the final prayer of the day had been said, shadows would creep along the dark corridors of the house to meet secretly in small groups for whispered games of poker and pontoon. If one of the boys had managed to smuggle in a transistor radio – something that was expressly forbidden – someone would immediately suggest placing a bet on the races at the Jockey Club. From midnight to dawn the religious atmosphere was profaned by betting, smoking and even drinking contraband whisky concealed in shampoo bottles. Whenever a light in a cubicle warned of suspicious activities, one of the more attentive priests would immediately turn off the electricity. This, however, didn’t always resolve the problem, since the heretical game would continue in the light from candles purloined from the chapel during the day.

On the second day, Paulo woke at five in the morning, his mind confused, although his spirits improved a little when he opened the bedroom window and saw the sun coming up over the sea. At six on the dot, still not having eaten, he met his colleagues in the chapel for the daily mass, prepared to put things right with God and do something he had been putting off for almost a year: taking communion. The problem was not communion itself but the horror of confession, with which all the boys were familiar. They would arrive at the confessional prepared to reveal only the most banal of sins, but they knew that, in the end, the priest would always ask the inevitable question: ‘Have you sinned against chastity, my son?’ Should the reply be in the affirmative, the questions that followed were more probing: ‘Alone or with someone else?’ If it was with someone else, the priest would continue, to the mortification of the more timid boys: ‘With a person or an animal?’ If the response was ‘with a person’, the sinner was not required to reveal the name of the partner, only the sex: ‘With a boy or with a girl?’

Paulo found this an extremely difficult topic to deal with and he didn’t understand how it could be a sin. He was so convinced that masturbation was not a shameful activity that he wrote in his notebook: ‘No one on this earth can throw the first stone at me, because no one has avoided this temptation.’ In spite of this, he had never had the courage to confess to a priest that he masturbated, and living in a permanent state of sin troubled him deeply. With his soul divided, he preferred merely to say the act of contrition and to receive communion without going to confession.

Following mass, Father Ruffier returned to the charge with a particularly harsh sermon. Before a terrified audience, he painted a terrifying picture of the place intended for all sinners: ‘We are in hell! The fire is burning mercilessly! Here one sees only tears and hears only the grinding of teeth in mutual loathing. I come across a colleague and curse him for being the cause of my condemnation. And while we weep in pain and remorse, the Devil smiles a smile that makes our suffering still greater. But the worst punishment, the worst pain, the worst suffering is that we have no hope. We are here for ever.’

Paulo was in no doubt: Father Ruffier was talking about him. After twelve months without going to confession – so as not to have to touch on the taboo subject of masturbation – he realized that if he were to die suddenly, his final destiny would be hell. He imagined the Devil looking into his eyes and snickering sarcastically: ‘My dear boy, your suffering hasn’t even begun yet.’ He felt helpless, powerless and confused. He had no one to turn to, but he knew that a Jesuit retreat was a place of certainties, not of doubts. Faced with a choice between suffering in the flames for all eternity as described by the priest and giving up his solitary pleasure, he chose faith. Deeply moved and kneeling alone on the stone floor of the mirador, he turned to God and made a solemn promise never to masturbate again.

His decision gave him courage and calmed him, but that feeling of calm was short-lived. The following day, the Devil counter-attacked with such force that he could not resist the temptation and, defeated, he masturbated. He left the bathroom as though his hands were covered in blood, knelt in front of the altar and implored: ‘Lord! I want to change, but I can’t stop myself! I’ve said endless acts of contrition, but I can’t stop sinning. I sin in thought, word and deed. Give me strength! Please! Please! Please!’ Full of despair, he only felt relief when, in a whispered conversation in the woods, he found that he had a companion in eternal suffering: a fellow pupil who had also been masturbating during the retreat.

Ashamed of his own weakness, Paulo was subjected to two more sermons from Father Ruffier, which seemed to have been chosen especially to instil fear into the minds of the boys. Once again, the priest deployed dramatic and terrifying images, this time to alert the boys to the perils of clinging on to material values. From the pulpit Father Ruffier gesticulated like an actor, shaking his short, muscular arms and saying: ‘Truly, truly I say unto you, my children: the time will come when we shall all be laid low. Imagine yourselves dying. In the hospital room, your relatives white with fear. The bedside table is crammed with different medicines, all useless now. It is then that you see how powerless you are. You humbly recognize that you are powerless. What good will fame, money, cars, luxuries be at the fatal hour? What use are those things if your death lies in the hands of the Creator?’ With his fists clenched, and as though possessed by divine fury, he declared vehemently: ‘We must give up everything, my sons! We must give up everything!’

These words should not be confused with an exhortation to embrace socialism or anything of the sort. Not only were the sons of some of the wealthiest families in Rio de Janeiro in the congregation, but the college was politically conservative and was always showing films of executions by firing squads in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in order to show the boys ‘the bloodthirsty nature of communism’. And Father Ruffier himself was proud of the fact that he had had to leave Colombia in a hurry ‘to flee communism’ (he was referring to the popular uprising in Bogotá in 1948, known as the Bogotazo).

While the boys stared at each other in astonishment, the priest spoke again. The subject was, once again, hell. Just in case he had not made himself clear in the first part of his sermon, he once more described the eternal state of suffering to which sinners would be condemned: ‘Hell is like the sea that is there before us. Imagine a swallow coming along every hundred years and taking a drop of water each time. That swallow is you and that is your penance. You will suffer for millions and millions of years, but one day the sea will be empty. And you will say: at last, it’s over and I can rest in peace.’ He paused, then concluded: ‘But then the Creator will smile from the heights and will say: “That was just the beginning. Now you will see other seas and that is how it will be for all eternity. The swallow empties the sea and I fill it up again.”’

Paulo spent the rest of the day with these words echoing in his head. He went into the woods that surrounded the retreat house and tried to distract himself with the beauty of the view, but Father Ruffier’s words only resonated inside him more loudly. That night, he set down his thoughts before finally falling asleep, and the notes he made appear to demonstrate the efficacy of the spiritual retreat.

Here, I’ve completely forgotten the world. I’ve forgotten that I’m going to fail maths, I’ve forgotten that Botafogo is top of the league and I’ve forgotten that I’m going to spend next week on the island of Itaipu. But I feel that with every moment spent forgetting, I’m learning to understand the world better. I’m going back to a world that I didn’t understand before and which I hated, but which the retreat has taught me to love and understand. I’ve learnt here to see the beauty that lies in a piece of grass and in a stone. In short, I’ve learnt how to live.

Most important was the fact that he returned home certain that he had acquired the virtue which – through all the highs and lows of his life – would prove to be the connecting thread: faith. Even his parents, who appeared to have lost all hope of getting him back on the straight and narrow, were thrilled with the new Paulo. ‘We’re very happy to see that you finally appear to have got back on the right track,’ Lygia declared when he returned. Her son’s conversion had been all that was missing to complete domestic bliss, for a few months earlier, the family had finally moved into the large pink house built by Pedro Coelho with his own hands.

In fact, the move to Gávea happened before the building was completed, which meant that they still had to live for some time among tins of paint, sinks and baths piled up in corners. However, the house astonished everyone, with its dining room, sitting room and drawing room, its ensuite bathrooms in every bedroom, its marble staircase and its verandah. There was also an inner courtyard so large that Paulo later thought of using it as a rehearsal space for his plays. The move was a shock to Paulo. Moving from the estate in Botafogo, where he was born and where he was the unchallenged leader, to Gávea, which, at the time, was a vast wasteland with few houses and buildings, was a painful business. The change of district did nothing to lessen his parents’ earlier fears, or, rather, his father’s, and, obsessively preoccupied with the harm that the ‘outside world’ might do to his son’s character and education, Pedro thought it best to ban him from going out at night. Suddenly, Paulo no longer had any friends and his life was reduced to three activities: sleeping, going to classes at St Ignatius and reading at home.

Reading was nothing new. He had even managed to introduce a clause concerning books in the Arco statutes, stating that, ‘besides other activities, every day must include some recreational reading’. He had begun reading the children’s classics that Brazilian parents liked to give their children; then he moved on to Conan Doyle and had soon read all of Sherlock Holmes. When he was told to read the annotated edition of The Slum by Aluísio Azevedo at school, he began by ridiculing it: ‘I’m not enjoying the book. I don’t know why Aluísio Azevedo brings sex into it so much.’ Some chapters later, however, he radically changed his mind and praised the work highly: ‘At last I’m beginning to understand the book: life without ideals, full of betrayal and remorse. The lesson I took from it is that life is long and disappointing. The Slum is a sublime book. It makes us think of the sufferings of others.’ What had initially been a scholastic exercise had become a pleasure. From then on, he wrote reviews of all the books he read. His reports might be short and sharp, such as ‘weak plot’ when writing about Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan, or, in the case of Vuzz by P.A. Hourey, endless paragraphs saying how magnificent it was.

He read anything and everything, from Michel Quoist’s lyrical poems to Jean-Paul Sartre. He would read best-sellers by Leon Uris, Ellery Queen’s detective stories and pseudo-scientific works such as O Homem no Cosmos by Helio Jaguaribe, which he classed in his notes as ‘pure, poorly disguised red propaganda’. Such condensed reviews give the impression that he read with one eye on the aesthetic and the other on good behaviour. Remarks such as ‘His poetry contains the more degrading and entirely unnecessary aspects of human morality’ (on Para Viver um Grande Amor by Vinicius de Moraes) or ‘Brazilians aren’t yet ready for this kind of book’ (referring to the play Bonitinha, mas Ordinária by Nelson Rodrigues) were frequent in his listings. He had even more to say on Nelson Rodrigues: ‘It’s said that he’s a slave to the public, but I don’t agree. He was born for this type of literature, and it’s not the people who are making him write it.’

Politically his reactions were no less full of preconceptions. When he saw the film Seara Vermelha, which was based on the book of the same name by Jorge Amado, he regretted that it was a work that was ‘clearly communist in outlook, showing man’s exploitation of man’. He was pleasantly surprised, however, when he read Amado’s best-seller Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; indeed, he was positively intoxicated: ‘It’s so natural … There’s not a trace of communism in its pages. I really liked it.’ He felt that Manuel Bandeira was the greatest Brazilian poet (‘because he leaves aside unhealthy aspects of life, and because of his simple, economical style’); he loathed João Cabral de Melo Neto (‘I read some of his verses and I shut the book immediately’); and he confessed that he didn’t understand Carlos Drummond de Andrade (‘He has a confused, abstract style, which makes it hard to interpret his poetry’).

It was apparently at this time, when he was thirteen or fourteen, that Paulo showed the first signs of an undying idée fixe, a real obsession that he would never lose – to be a writer. Almost half a century later, as one of the most widely read authors of all time, he wrote in The Zahir:

I write because when I was an adolescent, I was useless at football, I didn’t have a car or much of an allowance, and I was pretty much of a weed … I didn’t wear trendy clothes either. That’s all the girls in my class were interested in, and so they just ignored me. At night, when my friends were out with their girlfriends, I spent my free time creating a world in which I could be happy: my companions were writers and their books.

In fact, he saw himself as a writer well before he said as much. Besides being the winner of the writing competition at Our Lady Victorious, from the time he could read he had become a full-time poet. He would write short verses and poems for his parents, grandparents, friends, cousins, girlfriends and even the saints revered by his family. Compositions such as ‘Our Lady, on this febrile adolescent night/I offer you my pure childhood/That the fire is now devouring/And transforming into smoke so that it may rise up to you/And may the fire also free me from the past’, which was inspired by the Virgin Mary; or four-line verses written for his parents: ‘If the greatest good in the world/Is given to those who are parents/Then it is also a certain truth/That it is they who suffer most.’ If there was no one to whom he could dedicate his verses, he would write to himself: ‘The past is over/And the future has not yet arrived/I wander through the impossible present/Full of love, ideals and unbelief/As if I were simply/Passing through life.’

When, at a later age, he grew to know more about books and libraries, he came across a quote attributed to Émile Zola, in which the author of J’Accuse said something along the lines of ‘My poetic muse has turned out to be a very dull creature; from now on, I shall write prose’. Whether or not these words were true of Zola, Paulo believed that the words were written precisely for him. He wrote in his diary: ‘Today I ended my poetic phase in order to devote myself solely to the theatre and the novel.’ He made a bonfire in the garden of everything he had written up to then – vast quantities of poems, sonnets and verses.

Such a promise, if meant seriously, would have been a proof of great ingratitude to the art of verse, for it was a poem he wrote – ‘Mulher de Treze Anos’ [‘Thirteen-year-old Woman’] – that rescued him from anonymity among the 1,200 students at St Ignatius. One of the Jesuit traditions was the Academy of Letters of St Ignatius (ALSI), which had been created in 1941 and was responsible for cultural development of the students. Great names in Brazilian culture attended the events held by the ALSI. At the age of fourteen, Paulo appeared for the first time in the pages of the magazine Vitória Colegial, the official publication of the ALSI, with a small text entitled ‘Why I Like Books’. It was an unequivocal defence of writers, whom he portrayed dramatically as people who spent sleepless nights, ‘without eating, exploited by publishers’, only to die forgotten:

What does a book represent? A book represents an unequalled wealth of culture. It is the book that opens windows on to the world for us. Through a book we experience the great adventures of Don Quixote and Tarzan as though we ourselves were the characters; we laugh at the hilarious tales of Don Camilo, we suffer as the characters in other great works of world literature suffer. For this reason, I like to read books in my free time. Through books we prepare ourselves for the future. We learn, just by reading them, theories that meant sacrifice and even death for those who discovered them. Every didactic book is a step in the direction of the country’s glorious horizon. This is why I like books when I’m studying. But what did it take for that book to arrive in our hands? Great sacrifice on the part of the author, whole nights spent starving and forgotten, their room sometimes lit only by the spluttering flame of a candle. And then, exploited by their publishers, they died forgotten, unjustly forgotten. What willpower on the part of others was needed for them to achieve a little fame! This is why I like books.

Months later, the ALSI announced the date for entries for its traditional annual poetry prize. Paulo had just seen the Franco-Italian film Two Women, directed by Vittorio de Sica, and left the cinema inspired. Based on the novel La Ciociara, by Alberto Moravia, the film tells the story of Cesira (Sophia Loren) and her thirteen-year-old daughter Rosetta (Eleanora Brown), both of whom have been raped by Allied soldiers during the Second World War. Paulo based his poem ‘Thirteen-year-old Woman’ on the character of Rosetta, and it was that poem which he then entered for the competition.

The day the poems were to be judged was one of endless agony. Paulo could think of nothing else. That evening, before the meeting when the three prize-winners were to be announced, he overcame his shyness and asked a member of the jury, a Portuguese teacher, whom he had voted for. He blushed at the response: ‘I voted for you, Átila and Chame.’

Twenty poems were selected for the final. Paulo knew at least one of the chosen poems, ‘Introduce’, by José Átila Ramos, which, in his opinion, was the favourite. If his friend won, that would be fine, and if he himself managed at least third place, that would be wonderful. At nine in the evening, the auditorium was full of nervous boys soliciting votes and calculating their chances of winning. There was total silence as the jury, comprising two teachers and a pupil, began to announce in ascending order the three winners. When he heard that in third place was ‘Serpentina and Columbina’ and in second ‘Introduce’, he felt sure he hadn’t been placed at all. So he almost fell off his chair when it was announced: ‘The winner, by unanimous vote, is the poem … “Thirteen-year-old Woman”, by Paulo Coelho de Souza!’

First place! He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Heart pounding and legs shaking, the slight young boy crossed the room and stepped up on to the stage to receive the certificate and the prize, a cheque for 1,000 cruzeiros – about US$47. Once the ceremony was over, he was one of the first to leave the college, desperate to go straight home and for once give his parents some good news. On the tram on the way back to Gávea, he began to choose his words and work out the best way to tell his father that he had discovered his one and only vocation – to be a writer.

He was therefore somewhat surprised on reaching the house to find his father standing outside on the pavement, angrily tapping his watch and saying: ‘It’s almost eleven o’clock and you know perfectly well that in this house the doors are closed at ten, no argument.’

This time, though, Paulo had up his sleeve a trump card that would surely move his father’s cold heart. Smiling, he brandished the trophy he had just won – the cheque for 1,000 cruzeiros – and told his father everything: the prize, the unanimous vote, the dozens of contestants, the discovery of his vocation.

But even this failed to win over his grim father. Apparently ignoring everything his son had said, Pedro poured cold water on the boy’s excitement, saying: ‘I’d prefer it if you got good marks at school and didn’t come home so late.’

The thought that at least his mother would be thrilled by his win was dispelled in an instant. When he saw her waiting at the front door, he told her, eyes shining, what he had just told his father. To her son’s dismay, Lygia quietly gave him the same lecture: ‘My boy, there’s no point dreaming about becoming a writer. It’s wonderful that you write all these things, but life is different. Just think: Brazil is a country of seventy million inhabitants, it has thousands of writers, but Jorge Amado is the only one who can making a living by writing. And there’s only one Jorge Amado.’

Desperately unhappy, depressed and close to tears, Paulo did not get to sleep until dawn. He wrote just one line in his diary: ‘Mama is stupid. Papa is a fool.’ When he woke, he had no doubt that his family was determined to bury for ever what he dramatically called ‘my only reason for living’ – being a writer. For the first time, he seemed to recognize that he was prepared to pay dearly to realize his dream, even if this meant clashing with his parents. Lygia and Pedro Queima Coelho were not going to have long to wait.

*Adolf Fritz, generally called Dr Fritz, was a hypothetical German surgeon whose spirit was said to have been channelled by various psychic surgeons in Brazil, starting with Zé Arigo in the 1950s and continuing up to the present. There is no proof that he actually existed.