Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (11 page)

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 they 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 schoolday: 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:

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 have concerned 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…’: