Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (14 page)

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

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

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

T
HE FEW FRIENDS WHO HAD WITNESSED
Paulo’s twenty-eight days of suffering in the clinic were surprised when he was let out. Although physically exhausted and looking more fragile, he made no attempt to hide the fact that he had been admitted to an asylum. On the contrary, when he reappeared in Rua Rodrigo Otávio, he boasted to a circle of friends that he had lived through an experience unknown to any of them: being treated as a madman. His descriptions of the people and events at the clinic, many of them invented, were so extraordinary that some of his friends even expressed envy at not having been in such an interesting place.

Lygia and Pedro were concerned about their son’s behaviour. Fearing that his confinement might stigmatize him at school and at work, they treated the matter with total discretion. His father had decided to tell Andrews College and the
Diário de Notícias
that Paulo’s absence was due to his having to go away unexpectedly. When they learned that their son was telling everyone the truth, Pedro warned him: ‘Don’t do that. If people get to know that you’ve had mental problems, you’ll never be able to stand as a candidate for President of the Republic.’

Not having the least desire to be president of anything at all, Paulo appeared to have returned from the clinic with a renewed appetite for
what he called ‘the intellectual life’. Now he had a new place where he could hang out, besides the amateur theatre at the college and the Cine Paissandu. The director of the Serviço Nacional de Teatro (SNT), Bárbara Heliodora, had got permission from the government to transform the old headquarters of the Students’ Union (which had been ransacked and burned by extreme right-wing groups on the day of the military coup) into the new National Drama Conservatory. Without restoring the building or painting over the marks left by the damage caused by the vandals, the Centro Popular de Cultura, as it had been known, was turned into the Teatro Palcão, a 150-seat theatre which, although it didn’t enjoy the freedom it had previously enjoyed, would once again become a centre of cultural debate permanently filled by workshops, rehearsals and drama group productions. What would later become the Teatro Universitário Nacional (National University Theatre), an occasional drama group comprising only students, was also born there. Paulo’s sole experience in this area was his play
The Ugly Boy
, which he had torn up soon after writing it, plus two or three other plays that had also gone no further than his own house. However, he was sure that he had some ability in the field and plunged into the newly formed Conservatory.

When he returned to the
Diário de Notícias
, it became clear to Paulo that his absence of almost a month had put paid to or at least delayed his chances of being taken on as a reporter, but he stayed on, unpaid and uncomplaining. Working in a place that allowed him to write every day, even if only on the trivial topics that usually fell to him, was a good thing. At the end of July 1965, he was sent off to report on the history of the Marian Congregation in Brazil. He was beginning to gain experience as a reporter and had no difficulty in carrying out the task; at the organization’s headquarters, he interviewed members of the community, noted down numbers and wrote a short article describing the history of the Marians from the time they had arrived in Brazil with the first Portuguese Jesuit missionaries. The following morning on his way to school, he bought a copy of the
Diário de Notícias
at the newspaper stand and smiled proudly when he saw his article. The sub-editors had made some small changes, but they were still essentially his words being read by thousands of readers at that very moment.

When he arrived at the newspaper office after lunch, he learned that his head was on the block. The Marians were furious about the article and had gone straight to the owner of the newspaper to complain. They accused him of having invented facts and attributing them to the organization’s leaders. The cub reporter was indignant when he heard this, and although his colleagues told him to lie low until the whole thing had blown over, he decided that it would be best to clear up the matter straight away. He sat outside the owner’s glass-walled office, the so-called fishbowl, and waited two hours for her to arrive.

On entering the fishbowl, he remained standing in front of her desk. ‘Dona Ondina, I’m the person who wrote the article on the Marians and I’ve come to explain—’

She didn’t even let him finish the sentence: ‘You’re sacked,’ she said.

Surprised, he countered with: ‘But Dona Ondina, I’m about to be taken on by the newspaper.’

Without even looking up, she said again: ‘You’re sacked. Please leave.’

Paulo left, regretting his naivety. If he had waited a few days, as he had been advised, she would probably have forgotten about the matter. Now there was no way of saving the situation. He returned home with his tail between his legs. Although shaken by the incident, his ability to fantasize seemed limitless. Recording in his diary his regret at having taken the initiative, he described his dismissal as if it were a case of political persecution:

The
Diário de Notícias
was not a right-wing newspaper; nor had he been dismissed for political reasons.

Paulo appeared prepared to take advantage of his time in the clinic. He had been labelled ‘a madman’, and he intended to enjoy the impunity that protects the mentally ill and do whatever he wanted. To hell with school and his parents: he wanted to follow his dream. In his own words, he had become a ‘delinquent’ who went around with gangs, but since he lacked the physical strength of other boys, he thought that he could become an ‘intellectual delinquent’–someone who read things that none of his friends had read and knew things that no one else knew. He belonged to three different groups–Paissandu, the Conservatory and what remained of Rota 15–but whenever there was any sign of violence, he felt ashamed that he didn’t have the courage even to break up a fistfight.

He knew, however, that displays of physical strength were not the way forward. Whereas before he had felt himself to be ‘an existentialist on the road to communism’, now he saw himself as ‘a street communist’. He had read Henry Miller’s famous trilogy
Sexus, Plexus
and
Nexus
, and glanced over the works of Marx and Engels, and he felt confident enough to talk on such topics as ‘true socialism’, ‘the Cold War’ and ‘the exploitation of the worker’. In a text entitled ‘Art in Brazil’, he quotes Lenin as having spoken of the need to take two steps back when it was clear that this was the only way of taking one step forward. ‘Art cannot flee from this premise. It must first adapt to man and then, having gained his confidence, respect and love, it can lead him along the road to reality.’ His basis for taking a route he had earlier rejected was simple: ‘I am an intellectual, and since all intellectuals are communists, I am a communist.’ The mother of a girl he was friendly with accused him of ‘putting ideas’ in the heads of the poor people in the street. ‘From Henry Miller to communism is only a step,’ he wrote; ‘therefore, I’m a communist.’ What he would only confess to his diary was that he loathed Bergman and considered Godard ‘a bore’ and Antonioni ‘annoying’. In fact what he really liked was to listen to The Beatles, but it wasn’t quite right for a communist to say this in public.

As he had predicted, his studies were relegated firmly to the background. In August, fearing that he would fail the year, the school summoned Lygia and Pedro to deal with three issues: low grades, too
many absences and ‘the student’s personal problems’. Since the start of classes after the July holidays he had not achieved marks above 2.5 in any subject and during that time he had not been to a single maths lesson, which explained why he had never got more than 3 in the subject since moving to the college. He would leave home every morning and go to school, but once there, involved as he was with the drama group, he would spend whole days without entering the classroom. The verdict presented to his parents was worrying: either their son paid more attention to his studies or he would be expelled. Although the college did not adopt the same strategy as that used at St Ignatius, the director of studies subtly suggested to his parents that ‘to avoid the worst’, it might be best to move him before the end of the year to a ‘less demanding’ educational establishment. Put bluntly: if they didn’t want to have the shame of seeing their son fail again, the best thing would be to enrol him in a college where the pupil only had to pay his monthly fees promptly in order to guarantee success. Lygia and Pedro were indignant at this suggestion. Neither of them had lost hope of Paulo returning to the straight and narrow, and to accept such an idea meant a humiliating surrender. There was no way they would let him end up in a fifth-rate school.

Paulo, meanwhile, seemed to be living on another planet. His life within the world of theatre, which was a hotbed of opposition to the military regime, brought him close to young people who were becoming politically militant. Now all the films and plays he watched were political, and he had incorporated into his vocabulary left-wing slogans such as ‘More bread, fewer guns’ and ‘United, the people will never be defeated’.

One night, when he went with a group of his friends to see
Liberdade, Liberdade
[
Freedom, Freedom
], which was being put on by Oduvaldo Viana Filho and Paulo Autran at the Teatro Opinião, the play was interrupted halfway through. A dishevelled young man got up on the stage and spoke out against the military dictatorship. He was Vladimir Palmeira, the student leader who went on to become a Member of Parliament and who was urging the audience to join yet another student march against the regime. On the few occasions when Paulo decided to take part in such marches, his real objective was to be seen by his father, whose office was in the centre of the city, where all the protest marches ended up. In fact,
the world of politics that he was being drawn into had never much mattered to him. Apart from one or two notes, such as the results of the presidential elections in 1960 won by Jânio Quadros, his diary reflects his indifference to both politics and politicians. When the army had taken power in the April of the previous year, Paulo was speculating loftily in his diary on the existence of heaven and hell. Two weeks before the coup, when the whole country was in uproar, he filled several pages in his diary describing the misfortunes of a ‘sixteen-year-old girl’ he had met in the street: ‘To think that this girl ran away from home and that in order to survive, she has been subjected to the most humiliating of things, although she has still managed to keep her virginity. But now she’ll have to lose that just so she can eat.’ And he ended: ‘It’s at times like this that I doubt the existence of God.’

However, that was the past. Now he felt himself to be a member of the resistance, although his criticisms of the dictatorship never went beyond the limits of his diary and even then were very timid. It was in his diary that he recorded his dissatisfaction with the existing situation, for example, in a satirical article entitled ‘J’accuse’, in which he placed The Beatles, Franco, Salazar and Lyndon Johnson on one side and on the other de Gaulle, Glauber Rocha and Luís Carlos Prestes:

The first job opportunity to arise, meanwhile, was light-years away from the battle against the military dictatorship and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by American imperialism. An actors’ cooperative called Grupo Destaque was rehearsing a dramatized version of the children’s classic
Pinocchio
, which was to be performed at the end of 1965, and the directors had a problem. The show required seven scene-changes, and the directors were worried that each time the curtain fell, the audience, mostly children, would start wandering around the theatre and delay the start of the next scene. The producer, the Frenchman Jean Arlin, came up with a simple solution: they would get another actor to appear on the stage during each interval and distract the children until the curtain rose again. He recalled an ugly, awkward, but witty young man, Paulo Coelho, who had been introduced to him by Joel Macedo. He would be perfect for the role. This was hardly resistance theatre, and the role didn’t even have a script, which meant he would simply have to improvise, and it was unlikely he would get paid very much. As a cooperative venture, after each show, the takings would be shared out, most of them going to pay first for the hire of the theatre, and then the technicians, lighting assistants and scene-shifters. If anything was left over, then it would be divided equally among the actors, each of whom would get only enough to pay for a snack. All the same, Paulo accepted the invitation on the spot.