Читать книгу A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho - Fernando Morais - Страница 9

AT THE END OF 1962, at his father’s insistence, Paulo was forced to enrol in the science stream rather than the arts as he had hoped. His scholastic performance in the fourth year had been disastrous, and he had finished the year having to re-sit maths, the subject at which his father so excelled. In the end, he passed with a 5 – not a decimal point more than the mark required to move on to the next year and remain at St Ignatius. In spite of this and Paulo’s declared intention to study the arts, his parents insisted that he study engineering and, following his appalling scholastic performance, he was in no position to insist.

However, from his point of view, the practical Pedro Coelho had reasons for hoping that his son might yet be saved and become an engineer. These hopes lay not only in the interest Paulo had shown in his grandfather’s success as a mechanic – professional and amateur. As a boy, Paulo had frequently asked his parents to buy him copies of the magazine Mecânica Popular, a publication dating from the 1950s that taught readers how to do everything from fixing floor polishers to building boats and houses. When he was ten or eleven he was so passionate about aeroplane modelling that any father would have seen in this a promising future as an aeronautical engineer. The difference was that, while lots of children play with model aeroplanes, Paulo set up the Clube Sunday, of which he and his cousin Fred, who lived in Belém, were sole members. Since a distance of 3,000 kilometres separated them and their aeroplanes, the club’s activities ended up being a chronological list of the models each had acquired. At the end of each month, Paulo would record all this information in a notebook – the names and characteristics of the small planes they had acquired, the serial number, wing span, date and place of purchase, general construction expenses, the date, place and reason for the loss of the plane whenever this occurred. Not one of these pieces of information served any purpose, but ‘It was best to keep things organized,’ Paulo said. When the glider Chiquita smashed into a wall in Gávea, it was thought worthy of special mention: ‘It only flew once, but since it was destroyed heroically, I award this plane the Combat Cross. Paulo Coelho de Souza, Director.’

This fascination for model aeroplanes rapidly disappeared, but it gave way to another mania, even more auspicious for anyone wanting his son to be an engineer: making rockets. For some months Paulo and Renato Dias, a classmate at St Ignatius, spent all their spare time on this new activity. No one can say how or when it began – not even Paulo can remember – but the two spent any free time during the week in the National Library reading books about such matters as ‘explosive propulsion’, ‘solid fuels’ and ‘metallic combustibles’. On Sundays and holidays, the small square in front of the Coelho house became a launch pad. As was almost always the case with Paulo, everything had to be set down on paper first. In his usual meticulous way, he started a small notebook entitled ‘Astronautics – Activities to be Completed by the Programme for the Construction of Space Rockets’. Timetables stated the time taken on research in books, the specifications of materials used in the construction and the type of fuel. On the day of the launch, he produced a typewritten document with blank spaces to be filled in by hand at the time of the test, noting date, place, time, temperature, humidity and visibility.

The rockets were made of aluminium tubing about 20 centimetres in length and weighing 200 grams and had wooden nose cones. They were propelled by a fuel the boys had concocted out of ‘sugar, gunpowder, magnesium and nitric acid’. This concentrated mixture was placed in a container at the base of the rocket, and the explosive cocktail was detonated using a wick soaked in kerosene. The rockets were given illustrious names: Goddard I, II and III, and Von Braun I, II and III, in homage, respectively, to the American aeronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard and the creator of the German flying bombs that devastated London during the Second World War, Wernher von Braun. However, although the rockets were intended to rise up to 17 metres, they never did. On launch days, Paulo would take over a part of the pavement outside their house ‘for the public’ and convert a hole that the telephone company had forgotten to close up into a trench where he and his friend could shelter. He then invited his father, the servants and passers-by to sign the flight reports as ‘representatives of the government’. The rockets failed to live up to the preparations. Not one ever rose more than a few centimetres into the air and the majority exploded before they had even got off the ground. Paulo’s astronautical phase disappeared as fast as it had arrived and in less than six months the space programme was abandoned before a seventh rocket could be constructed.

Apart from these fleeting fancies – stamp-collecting was another – Paulo continued to nurture his one constant dream – to become a writer. When he was sixteen, his father, in a conciliatory gesture, offered him a flight to Belém, which, to Paulo, was a paradise on a par with Araruama. Nevertheless, he turned it down, saying that he would rather have a typewriter. His father agreed and gave him a Smith Corona, which would stay with him until it was replaced, first, by an electric Olivetti and, then, decades later, by a laptop computer.

His total lack of interest in education meant that he was among the least successful students in his class in the first year of his science studies and at the end of the year he once again scraped through with a modest 5.2 average. His report arrived on Christmas Eve. Paulo never quite knew whether it was because of his dreadful marks or an argument over the length of his hair, but on Christmas Day 1963, when the first group of relatives was about to arrive for Christmas dinner, his mother told him bluntly: ‘I’ve made an appointment for the 28th. I’m taking you to a nerve specialist.’

Terrified by what that might mean – what in God’s name was a nerve specialist? – he locked himself in his room and scribbled a harsh, almost cruel account of his relationship with his family:

I’m going to see a nerve specialist. My hands have gone cold with fear. But the anxiety this has brought on has allowed me to examine my home and those in it more closely.

Mama doesn’t punish me in order to teach me, but just to show how strong she is. She doesn’t understand that I’m a nervous sort and that occasionally I get upset, and so she always punishes me for it. The things that are intended to be for my own good she always turns into a threat, a final warning, an example of my selfishness. She herself is deeply selfish. This year, she has never, or hardly ever, held my hand.

Papa is incredibly narrow-minded. He is really nothing more than the house financier. Like Mama, he never talks to me, because his mind is always on the house and his work. It’s dreadful.

Sônia lacks character. She always does what Mama does. But she’s not selfish or bad. The coldness I feel towards her is gradually disappearing.

Mama is a fool. Her main aim in life is to give me as many complexes as possible. She’s a fool, a real fool. Papa’s the same.

The diary also reveals that the fear induced by the proposed visit to the specialist was unjustified. A day after the appointment he simply mentions the visit along with other unimportant issues:

Yesterday I went to the psychiatrist. It was just to meet him. No important comment to make.

I went to see the play Pobre Menina Rica, by Carlos Lyra and Vinicius de Moraes and then I had a pizza.

I decided to put off my whole literary programme until 1965. I’m going to wait until I’m a bit more mature.

He managed to achieve the required grades to pass the year and, according to the rules of the house, he therefore had the right to a holiday, which, this time, was to be in Belém. His holidays with his paternal grandparents, Cencita and Cazuza, had one enormous advantage over those spent in Araruama. At a time when a letter could take weeks to arrive and a long-distance phone call sometimes took hours if not days to put through, the distance – more than 3,000 kilometres – between Rio and Belém meant that the young man was beyond the control of his parents or from any surprise visits. Adventures that were unthinkable in Rio were routine in Belém: drinking beer, playing snooker and sleeping out of doors with his three cousins, whose mother had died and who were being brought up by their grandparents. Such was the excitement and bustle of life there that within the first few days of his holiday, he had lost his penknife, his watch, his torch and the beloved Sheaffer fountain pen he had bought with his prize money. One habit remained: no matter what time he went to bed, he devoted the last thirty minutes before going to sleep to writing letters to his friends and reading the eclectic selection of books he had taken with him – books ranging from Erle Stanley Gardner’s detective story The Case of the Calendar Girl, to the encyclical Pacem in Terris, published in March 1963 by Pope John XXIII (‘Reading this book is increasing my understanding of society,’ he wrote).

He filled his letters to friends with news of his adventures in Belém, but in his letters to his father there was only one subject: money.

You’ve never put your money to such good use as when you paid for this trip for me. I’ve never had such fun. But if all the money you’ve spent on the trip is to produce real benefits, I need more cash. There’s no point in you spending 140,000 on a trip if I’m not going to have fun. If you haven’t got any spare money, then no problem. But it isn’t right to spend all your money on the house while my short life passes me by.

Belém appears to have been a city destined to provoke strong feelings in him. Three years before, on another trip there, he had at last had the chance to clarify a question that was troubling him: how were babies made? Earlier, he had plucked up the courage to ask Rui, a slightly older friend, but the reply, which was disconcertingly stark, appalled him: ‘Simple: the man puts his dick in the woman’s hole and when he comes, he leaves a seed in her stomach. That seed grows and becomes a person.’ He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine his father being capable of doing something so perverted with his mother. As this was not something that could be written about in a letter, he waited for the holidays in Belém so that he could find out from an appropriate person – his cousin, Fred, who as well as being older, was a member of the family, someone whose version he could trust. The first chance he had to speak to his cousin alone, he found a way of bringing the subject up and repeated the disgusting story his friend in Rio had told him. He almost had an asthma attack when he heard what Fred had to say: ‘Your friend in Rio is right. That’s how it is. The man enters the woman and deposits a drop of sperm in her vagina. That’s how everyone is made.’

Paulo reacted angrily. ‘You’re only telling me that because you haven’t got a mother and so you don’t have a problem with it. Can you really imagine your father penetrating your mother, Fred? You’re out of your mind!’

That loss of innocence was not the only shock Belém had in store for him. The city also brought him his first contact with death. Early on the evening of Carnival Saturday, when he arrived at his grandparents’ house after a dance at the Clube Tuna Luso, he was concerned to hear one of his aunts asking someone, ‘Does Paulo know?’ His grandfather Cazuza had just died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Paulo was extremely upset and shocked by the news, but he felt very important when he learned that Lygia and Pedro – since they were unable to get there in time – had named him the family’s representative at his grandfather’s funeral. As usual, he preferred to keep his feelings to himself, in the notes he made before going to sleep:

Carnival Saturday, 8th February

This night won’t turn into day for old Cazuza. I’m confused and overwhelmed by the tragedy. Yesterday, he was laughing out loud at jokes and today he’s silent. His smile will never again spread happiness. His welcoming arms, his stories about how Rio used to be, his advice, his encouraging words – all over. There are samba groups and carnival floats going down the street, but it’s all over.

That same night he wrote ‘Memories’, a poem in three long stanzas dedicated to his grandfather. The pain the adolescent spoke of in prose and verse appeared sincere, but it was interwoven with other feelings. The following day, with his grandfather’s corpse still lying in the drawing room, Paulo caught himself sinning in thought against chastity several times, when he looked at the legs of his female cousins, who were there at the wake. On the Sunday evening, Cazuza’s funeral took place – ‘a very fine occasion’, his grandson wrote in his diary – but on Shrove Tuesday, during the week of mourning, the cousins were already out having fun in the city’s clubs.

That holiday in Belém was not only the last he would spend there: it also proved to be a watershed in his life. He knew he was going to have a very difficult year at school. He felt even more negative about his studies than he had in previous years; and it was clear that his days at St Ignatius were numbered and equally clear that this would have consequences at home. There were not only dark clouds hanging over his school life either. At the end of the month, the day before returning to Rio, he flipped back in his diary to the day when he had written of his grandfather’s death and wrote in tiny but still legible writing: ‘I’ve been thinking today and I’ve begun to see the terrible truth: I’m losing my faith.’

This was not a new feeling. He had experienced his first religious doubts – gnawing away at him implacably and silently – during the retreat at St Ignatius when, troubled by sexual desire and tortured by guilt, he had been gripped by panic at the thought of suffering for all eternity in the apocalyptic flames described by Father Ruffier. He had turned to his diary to talk to God in a defiant tone ill suited to a true Christian: ‘It was You who created sin! It’s Your fault for not making me strong enough to resist! The fact that I couldn’t keep my word is Your fault!’ The following morning, he read this blasphemy and felt afraid. In desperation, he took his fellow pupil Eduardo Jardim to a place where they would not be seen or heard and broke his vow of silence to open up his heart to him.

His choice of confidant was a deliberate one. He looked up to Jardim, who was intelligent, read a lot and was a good poet without being a show-off. A small group of boys from St Ignatius to which Paulo belonged would meet in the garage at Jardim’s house to discuss what each had been reading. But it was mostly the strength of Jardim’s religious convictions that made him not only a good example but also the perfect confidant for a friend with a troubled soul. Paulo told him that everything had started with one doubt: if God existed and if this God had created him in his own image and likeness, then why did He delight in his suffering? As he asked these questions Paulo had arrived at the really big one – the unconfessable doubt: did God really exist? Fearing that others might hear him, Jardim whispered, as though in the confessional, words that were like salt being rubbed into his friend’s wounds: ‘When I was younger and was scared that my faith in God would disappear, I did everything I could to keep it. I prayed desperately, took cold baths in winter, but my faith was very slowly disappearing, until, finally, it disappeared completely. My faith had gone.’

This meant that even Jardim had succumbed. The more Paulo tried to drive away this thought, the less he was able to rid his mind of that image of a small boy taking cold baths in the middle of winter just so that God would not disappear – and God simply ignoring him. That day Paulo Coelho hated God. And so that there would be no doubt regarding his feelings he wrote: ‘I know how dangerous it is to hate God.’

A perfectly banal incident when he was returning from the retreat had soured his relations with God and His shepherds still more. On the way from the retreat house to the school Paulo judged that the driver of the bus was driving too fast and putting everyone’s life at risk. What started out merely as a concern became a horror movie: if the bus had an accident and he were to die, his soul would be burning in hell before midday. That fear won out over any embarrassment.

He went to the front of the bus, where his spiritual guide was sitting, and said: ‘Father Ruffier, the driver is driving too fast. And I’m terrified of dying.’

Furious, the priest snarled at the boy: ‘You’re terrified of dying and I’m outraged that you’re such a coward.’

As time passed, Paulo’s doubts became certainties. He began to hate the priests (‘a band of retrogrades’) and all the duties, whether religious or scholastic, that they imposed on the boys. He felt the Jesuits had deceived him. Seen from a distance, sermons he had once believed to contain solid truths were now remembered as ‘slowly administered doses of poison to make us hate living’, as he wrote in his diary. And he deeply regretted ever having taken those empty words seriously. ‘Idiot that I was, I even began to believe that life was worthless,’ he wrote, ‘and that with death always watching, I was obliged to go to confession on a regular basis so as to avoid going to hell.’ After much torment and many sleepless nights, at almost seventeen years of age, Paulo knew that he no longer wanted to hear about church, sermons or sin. And he hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming a good student during his second year on the science course. He was equally convinced that he would invest all his beliefs and energy in what he saw not as a vocation but as a profession – that of being a writer.

One term was more than enough for everyone to realize that the college had lost all meaning for him. ‘I have gone from being a bad pupil to being a dreadful pupil.’ His school report shows that this was no exaggeration. He was always near the bottom of the class, and he managed to do worse in each exam he sat. In the first monthly tests he got an average of just over 5, thanks to a highly suspect 9 in chemistry. In May, his average fell to 4.4, but alarm bells only started to ring in June, when his average fell to 3.7.

That month, Pedro and Lygia were called to a meeting at the school and asked to bring his report book. The news they received could not have been worse. A priest read out the fifth article of the school rules, which all parents had to sign when their son was admitted to the school and in which it was stated that those who did not achieve the minimum mark required would be expelled. If Paulo continued along the same path, he would undoubtedly fail and his subsequent expulsion from one of the most traditional schools in the country would thereafter blot his scholastic record. There was only one way to avoid expulsion and to save both student and parents from such ignominy. The priest suggested that they take the initiative and move their son at once to another school. He went on to say that St Ignatius had never done this before. This exception was being made in deference to the fact that the pupil in question was the grandson of one of the first pupils at the college, Arthur Araripe Júnior, ‘Mestre Tuca’, who had gone there in 1903.

Pedro and Lygia returned home, devastated. They knew that their son smoked in secret and had often smelled alcohol on his breath, and some relatives had complained that he was becoming a bad example for the other children. ‘That boy’s trouble,’ his aunts would whisper, ‘he’s going to end up leading all his younger cousins astray.’ What, up until then, had been termed Paulo’s ‘strange behaviour’ was restricted to the family circle. However, if he were to leave St Ignatius, even without being expelled, this would bring shame upon his parents and reveal them as having failed to bring him up properly. And if, as his father was always saying, a son was a reflection of his family, then the Coelhos had more than enough reason to feel that their image had been tarnished. At a time when corporal punishment was commonplace among Brazilian parents, Pedro and Lygia had never lifted a hand against Paulo, but they were rigorous in the punishments they meted out. So when Pedro announced that he had enrolled Paulo at Andrews College, where he would continue in the science stream, he also told his son that any future holidays were cancelled and that his allowance was temporarily suspended – if he wanted money for cigarettes and beer he would have to work.

If this was meant as a form of punishment, then it backfired, because Paulo loved the change. Andrews was not only a lay college and infinitely more liberal than St Ignatius but co-educational, which added a delightful novelty to the school day: girls. Besides this, there were political discussions, film study groups and even an amateur drama group, which he joined before he even met any of his teachers. He had ventured into the world of the theatre a year earlier, when, during the long end-of-year holiday, he had locked himself in his room, determined to write a play. He would only come out for lunch and dinner, telling his parents that he was studying. After four days, he finished The Ugly Boy, which he pretentiously referred to as ‘a petit guignol à la Aluísio Azevedo’, a synopsis of which he recorded in his diary:

In this play, I present the ugly person in society. It’s the story of a young man rejected by society who ends up committing suicide. The scenes are played out by silhouettes, while four narrators describe the feelings and actions of the characters. During the interval between the first and second acts, someone at the back of the stalls sings a really slow bossa nova [a style of Brazilian music that has its roots in samba and cool jazz] whose words relate to the first act. I think it will work really well. This year it’s going to be put on at home in the conservatory.

Fortunately, his critical sense won out over his vanity, and a week later, he tore up this first incursion into play-writing and gave it a six-word epitaph: ‘Rubbish. I’ll write another one soon.’ And it was as a playwright (as yet unpublished) that he approached the amateur theatre group at Andrews College, known as Taca.

As for schoolwork, teachers and exams, none of these seemed to concern him. On the rare occasions when these topics merited a mention in his diary, he would dismiss them with a short, usually negative sentence: ‘I’m doing badly at school, I’m going to fail in geometry, physics and chemistry’; ‘I can’t even get myself to pick up my schoolbooks: anything serves as a distraction, however stupid’; ‘Classes seem to get longer and longer’; ‘I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s beyond description.’ Admitting that he was doing badly at school was a way of hiding the truth: he was on the slippery slope.

Up until October, two months before the end of the year, all his marks in every subject had been below 5. His father thought that it was time to rein him in once and for all and carry out his earlier threat: his cousin, Hildebrando Góes Filho, found Paulo work in a dredging company that operated at the entrance to the port of Rio de Janeiro. The pay wasn’t even enough to cover Paulo’s travel and cigarettes. Every day after morning classes, he would rush home, have lunch and take a bus to Santo Cristo, an area by the docks. A tugboat would take him over to the dredger, where he would spend the rest of the day with a slate in his hand, making a cross each time the machine picked up the rubbish from the seabed and deposited it in a barge. It seemed to him utterly pointless and reminded him of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is forced to push a stone up to the top of a mountain only to have the stone roll back down to the bottom, so that he has to begin his task all over again. ‘It’s never-ending,’ Paulo wrote in his diary. ‘Just when I think it’s finished, it starts again.’

The punishment had no positive result. He continued to do badly at school and when he knew he ran the risk of failing the whole year, he recorded the fact quite shamelessly: ‘A friend has told me I’m going to be kept down in maths,’ he wrote. ‘And meanwhile the morning is so beautiful, so musical, that I’m even rather happy. Oh, God, what a life. What a life, what a life.’ At the end of the year, his report confirmed the expected results: his final average of 4.2 meant that he had failed in every subject.

Paulo seemed to be growing ever more indifferent to the world in which he found himself. He accepted uncomplainingly the work on the dredger and didn’t even care when all he received from his parents at Christmas was a penknife. The only thing that interested him was writing, whether in the form of novels, plays or poetry. He had recently returned to poetry and was writing furiously. After some thought, he had concluded that it was no disgrace to write verses if he was not yet ready to start writing his novel. ‘I have so many things to write about! The problem is that I can’t get started and I haven’t got the patience to carry on with it,’ he moaned, and went on: ‘All the same, that is my chosen profession.’

As he settled into the house in Gávea, he discovered that there were others among the young who were interested in books and literature. Since there were fifteen boys and girls, they created a literary club, which they called Rota 15, the name Rota being derived from Rua Rodrigo Otávio, which crossed Rua Padre Leonel Franca, where Paulo’s house was, and at the corner of which they would all meet. Paulo’s poetic output was such that when Rota 15 decided to produce a mimeographed booklet of poetry he contributed an anthology of thirteen poems (among them the award-winning ‘Thirteen-year-old Woman’), and he added at the end his biography: ‘Paulo Coelho began his literary career in 1962, writing short articles, then moved on to poetry. He entered a poem in the Academia Literária Santo Inácio in 1963 and in the same year won the top prize.’ Rota 15 collapsed amid scandal when Paulo accused the treasurer of stealing the petty cash in order to go and see the French singer Françoise Hardy in concert in Rio.

He already believed himself to be a poet of sufficient standing not to have to depend any more on insignificant little magazines produced locally or by small groups. With the self-confidence of an old hand he felt that the time had come for him to fly higher. His dream was to be praised for his work – a laudatory quote would work wonders – in the respected weekly literary column ‘Escritores e Livros’, produced by José Condé, from Pernambuco, in the newspaper Correio da Manhã. The waspish Condé, who was able to make or break reputations in one paragraph, was the joint author of Os Sete Pecados Capitais [The Seven Cardinal Sins], a collection published by Civilização Brasileira, the other authors being Guimarães Rosa, Otto Lara Resende, Carlos Heitor Cony and Lygia Fagundes Telles, among other equally important writers. Paulo admired Condé’s dry style and hoped that the critic’s sharp eye would perceive the talent hidden in his work.

He added new poems to the anthology published by Rota 15, typed it up and sent off the carefully bound volume to the editors of Correio da Manhã. The following Wednesday, when ‘Escritores e Livros’ appeared, he rushed to the newspaper stand, desperate to read Condé’s opinion of his work. His surprise was such that he cut out the column and stuck it in his diary, writing above it: ‘A week ago, I wrote to J. Condé sending him my poetry and asking for his opinion. This is what appeared in the newspaper today.’ The reason for his fury was a ten-line postscript at the foot of the writer’s column: ‘To all young show-offs who are desperate to get themselves a name and publish books, it would be worthwhile recalling the example of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who only published three volumes totalling 144 poems in 15 years … And only the other day, a critic said that Ernest Hemingway rewrote that small masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea no fewer than twenty times.’

Paulo took this personally and felt crushed by such an aggressive response. While only a short while before he had been thanking God for the joy of having discovered his vocation, his self-confidence gave way to a sea of doubt. ‘Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer,’ he wrote. But he soon recovered his self-belief. Like the friend who used to take cold baths in order not to lose faith in God, he had to fight to realize his dream. Condé had dealt him a blow, but he was not prepared to lie down. He spent the whole day thinking of nothing but that literary column. In order to take his mind off it he tried watching an episode of Dr Kildare, about a young doctor, played by Richard Chamberlain, working in a large hospital. He switched off before the end and wrote in his notebook: ‘In today’s episode of Dr Kildare, the director of the hospital says to the doctor: “I shouldn’t have tried to change your life, Jim. We were all born with an ideal.” I’ve applied these words to being a writer and have decided that’s what I’ll be.’ Thrilled by his own determination, he wrote a parody of Kipling’s ‘If …’:

If you can ask your friends and enemies for a chance.

If you can hear a ‘no’ and take it as a ‘maybe’.

If you can start from the bottom and yet still value the little that you have.

If you can improve yourself each moment and reach the heights without succumbing to vanity.

Then you’ll be a writer.

Immersed in these lofty ideas, he viewed with horror the prospect of going back to Andrews College. Tormented by the mere thought of it, he dreamed up a plan which, if it succeeded, would free him from school for a good two years: to get a study grant and leave the country, as several of his schoolfriends had done. His parents found renewed hope when he applied to join the American Field Service, a cultural exchange programme that was much in vogue at the time. Judging by his marks, he wasn’t entirely useless at English (a subject in which, by his standards, he always did fairly well), and that would certainly help in obtaining the grant. For two weeks, he dedicated his free time to getting together all the necessary documents: school certificates, passport-size photos, references. When the exams came around, the seven other applicants in his group for the one place were whittled down until there remained only Paulo and two others who were to take the decisive test – the interview in English with someone from the United States.

On the day, he was so nervous that as he sat down in front of the examiner – a girl his own age – he felt a jolt, as though he had been punched in the chest. He set aside his atheism and silently begged God to let this be a false alarm. It was not: he was having an asthma attack. A dry whistle rose from his lungs while, eyes bulging, he patted his pockets, searching for his inhaler. He tried to talk, but all that came out was a whisper. The American girl didn’t know what to do. After a few minutes, the attack subsided. Pulling himself together, he managed to complete the interview, but he left with misgivings: ‘I think that asthma attack has ruined my chances.’ Indeed, a month before he would have been due to leave for the United States, a telegram arrived informing him that he had not been selected. Instead of feeling downhearted at this failure, Paulo attributed it not to his poor performance but to the fact that his mother had visited the States earlier. ‘I think they’d prefer people whose relatives have never been to the United States,’ he wrote, finishing with a statement worthy of the fox in the fable when faced with the bunch of grapes he cannot reach: ‘They believe, at least this is how I interpret it, that I’m too much of an intellectual for America.’

It was at this time that a new, overwhelming passion entered his life: a flesh-and-blood passion with brown eyes and long legs and answering to the name of Márcia. At seventeen, Paulo was still skinny and rather short, even by Brazilian standards. He weighed 50 kilos, which was at least 10 kilos below the ideal for his height of 1.69 metres (he remains this height to this day). Added to this, he was not an attractive adolescent. ‘I was ugly, skinny, lacking in charm and incapable of getting a girlfriend,’ he has said in various interviews throughout his life. ‘I had an inferiority complex about the way I looked.’ While the majority of boys wore short-sleeved, close-fitting shirts, to show off their muscles, he would always wear a long-sleeved shirt that concealed his narrow shoulders and thin arms. A disproportionately wide leather belt held up his faded jeans which, as fashion decreed, were tight on the legs. He wore the same metal-framed spectacles with tinted lenses that, years later, would become the trademark of the Beatle John Lennon. His hair was almost shoulder-length, and he had started to cultivate a thin moustache and a tuft of hair under his lower lip.

Márcia was a year younger than Paulo and lived almost next door. She was also a pupil at Andrews College and a member of Rota 15. In spite of vigilance on the part of her parents and older brother, she was seen by her colleagues as a fun-loving girl and was, therefore, in great demand. With his self-confidence at rock bottom, Paulo didn’t even notice her looking at him when he was arguing with the other ‘intellectuals’ in the group about films, books and plays. Although the majority of the group didn’t even know the meaning of the word, they almost all felt that they were ‘existentialists’. Paulo never wore smart clothes, he didn’t have a car and he wasn’t strong, but Márcia melted whenever she heard him talking about books or reciting famous poems. He, however, was oblivious to this until she took the initiative.

On New Year’s Eve 1964, Paulo closed yet another notebook with the melancholy words: ‘Today is the last day of 1964, a year that’s coming to an end with a sob hidden in the dark night. A year crowned with bitterness.’ And it was in this same downbeat mood that he met up with his friends two days later, on a Saturday, to go to the show Opinião, featuring the singer Nara Leão, at the Arena Theatre in Copacabana. The group took their seats and Márcia happened to sit next to him. When the lights dimmed and Nara began to sing, Márcia felt something brush her hand. She glanced sideways and saw Paulo’s hand lying close to hers. She immediately entwined her fingers in his and squeezed lightly. He was so astonished that his first reaction was one of panic: what if he had an asthma attack right there? However, he calmed down. ‘I was certain that God had guided Márcia’s hand towards mine,’ he recalled later. ‘In that case, why would He give me an asthma attack?’ So he began to breathe like any mortal and the two fell desperately in love.

When the show came to an end, Nara Leão gave several encores, but, still holding hands, the young couple took advantage of the dark, and escaped from the crowded theatre. They took off their shoes and walked barefoot, hand-in-hand, along Copacabana beach. Paulo put his arms around her and tried to kiss her, but Márcia pulled back gently, saying: ‘I’ve never been kissed on the mouth before.’

He reacted like a veritable Don Juan: ‘Don’t worry. I’ve kissed lots of girls. You’ll like it.’

In the suffocating heat and under the starry Rio night, the two liars shared a long kiss, which both would remember warmly more than forty years later. The year 1965 could not have got off to a more encouraging start.

Paulo’s relationship with Márcia brought him a peace of mind he had never known before, not even during the best times in Araruama and Belém. He wasn’t even upset when he learned that he hadn’t been placed in a poetry competition held by the Instituto Nacional do Mate. ‘Who cares about prizes,’ he wrote magnanimously, ‘when they’re loved by a woman like Márcia?’ He now filled whole pages of his diary with drawings of hearts pierced by love’s arrow and with their two names written on them.

This happiness was short-lived. Before the summer was over, Márcia’s parents found out the name of her boyfriend, and they were adamant that he was not the one for her. And when she wanted to know the reason for this ban, her mother was disconcertingly frank: ‘In the first place he’s really ugly. I can’t understand what a pretty girl like you could see in such an ugly, awkward boy. You’re someone who likes parties, and he doesn’t even know how to dance and would be embarrassed to ask a girl to dance. The only thing he’s interested in is books. Added to that, he looks rather sickly …’

Márcia retorted that he was perfectly healthy. He had asthma, like millions of others, but it could be cured and certainly wasn’t a blot on his character. Her mother feared that he might have other, contagious illnesses: ‘I’ve even been told that he’s an existentialist and a communist. So we’re not going to discuss it any further.’

For her daughter, the matter was far from being closed. She recounted the entire episode to her boyfriend and the two decided to deal with the situation as best they could. They began to meet secretly in the homes of mutual friends, but because there were very few safe places, their intimate moments together were exceedingly rare and usually occurred in a pedalo on Lake Rodrigo de Freitas. Not that they ever went beyond the preliminaries. Paulo pretended to be experienced, but in fact up until then he had had only one sexual relationship, some months earlier, when, taking advantage of his parents’ absence, he had managed to convince Madalena, a pretty maid whom his mother had recently employed, to go up to his room with him. Although she was only eighteen, Madá – as she was known – was experienced enough for the boy to retain a happy memory of that first night.

When they learned that their daughter was still meeting ‘that creature’ behind their backs, Márcia’s parents increased their vigilance and refused to allow her to speak to Paulo on the phone. However, it was soon discovered that they had each put an alarm clock under their pillow to wake them at four in the morning when, in the silence of the night, they could whisper words of love, their mouths pressed to the receiver. The punishment for this disobedience was still harsher: she was to remain in the house for a month. Márcia refused to give up. With the help of the maid she would send notes to her boyfriend in which she would say when he should go and stand beneath the window of her room, where she was shut away. One morning, she woke to find a declaration of love scrawled in the tarmac in enormous letters: ‘M: I love you. P.’

Márcia’s mother returned to the charge: Paulo wasn’t right for her, it wouldn’t work out, he had no future and no prospects. The girl responded, undaunted, that she would certainly not break up with her boyfriend. She planned to marry Paulo one day. On hearing this, one of her aunts suggested that a sickly boy like him might not have the physical strength to fulfil his conjugal obligations. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, my dear,’ she went on. ‘Marriage, sex, children … Do you think that, weak as he is, he’ll be able to lead a normal life?’ Márcia appeared unconcerned by such threats. As soon as she had served her term of punishment, she went back to meeting Paulo. They had discovered an ideal spot: the church of Our Lady of the Conception, which was close to both their houses. They never sat next to each other, but one would sit in front of the other so that they wouldn’t arouse suspicion, and there they would talk in whispers. Despite all their precautions, they were caught by Márcia’s father, who dragged her home screaming and punished her by beating her with a belt.

She, however, seemed firmly determined to love, become engaged to and marry her Prince Charming. His parents weren’t over-enthusiastic about their son’s choice either. Since it was usual for his friends to hold small parties in their homes, Paulo managed to persuade his parents to allow him to hold one in theirs. It was a disaster. When they saw their son dancing cheek-to-cheek with his girlfriend, his father stood, arms crossed, beside them, staring angrily until Márcia, embarrassed, moved away and joined a group of girlfriends. And he did the same with Paulo’s other guests. If he saw a boy and girl dancing too close or with the boy’s hand below the girl’s waist, he would stand right next to them until they ‘showed some manners’. In addition, the master of the house had forbidden all alcohol, even an innocent beer.

This was the first and last party held in the Coelhos’ large pink house. But nothing could shake Paulo’s happiness. Márcia’s birthday was approaching, and their love was not yet two months old, when her mother suggested they have a talk. Not being a believer in corporal punishment, she tried another tack: ‘If you break up with him, you can go to the best boutique in Rio and buy all the clothes you want.’ Her mother knew her daughter’s weak spot: vanity. Márcia’s initial reaction was that the suggestion was unacceptable – ‘downright blackmail’. However, after some reflection, she decided that she had more than proved her love and that they both knew that they couldn’t pursue their love against their parents’ wishes. They were both under age and dependent – there was no future in it. If she had to give in, then at least it was at a good price. She accepted. When he read Márcia’s letter telling him that their romance was over, Paulo burst into tears and wrote of his frustration: ‘For someone like me, who dreamed of transforming Gávea into a Brazilian Verona, there could be no sadder end than being thrown over for a couple of dresses.’

Abandoned by his Great Love – as he described Márcia in his diary – he once again fell into depression. His parents were concerned about his state of mind and, taking pity on him, they decided to make an exception. Although holidays in Araruama had been forbidden because of his failure at Andrews College, he would be allowed to spend Carnival there with his cousins. Paulo arrived by bus on the Friday night and spent the weekend feeling miserable, not even wanting to go and see the girls at the dances in the city. On the following Monday evening, he accepted an invitation from three friends to have a beer in a bar near his Uncle José’s house.

When the table was covered in beer mats, showing how many drinks had been consumed, one of the boys, Carlinhos, had an idea: ‘My parents are away and the car is in the garage just waiting to be taken out. If any of you knows how to drive we can go for a spin round the town.’

Although he had never driven a car, Paulo announced: ‘I can drive.’

They paid the bill, went to Carlinhos’s house and took the car. While the four of them were driving up the main street, where there were crowds of people and carnival parades, there was a general power failure. Although it was pitch dark, Paulo drove on through the mêlée of pedestrians and carnival-goers. Suddenly he saw a group of revellers in carnival costumes making their way towards the car.

Not knowing how to react, he swerved and accelerated. Then one of his friends yelled: ‘Watch out for the boy!’

It was too late. They all felt something hit the car’s front bumper, but Paulo went on accelerating while his friends looked back, terrified, shouting: ‘Put your foot down, Paulo! Put your foot down! Get out of here! You’ve killed the boy!’