Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (25 page)

Neither managed to sleep the night before. In the morning, they got up in silence, had a bath and went in search of a taxi. They arrived at the clinic at seven on the dot, the time of the appointment. It was a surprise for them both when they saw that there were about thirty women there, the majority very young, and many with their husbands or boyfriends–all looking miserable. On arrival, each woman gave her name to the nurse, left a small pile of notes on the table–cheques were not accepted–and waited to be called. Although there were plenty of chairs, the majority preferred to stand. Five minutes later, Gisa was taken by another nurse to a staircase going up to the second floor. She left with her head bowed, without saying goodbye. In a matter of minutes, all the women had been called, with only a few men remaining in the waiting room.

Paulo sat on one of the chairs, took a notebook out of his bag and began to write–in a very small hand so that his partners in misfortune would not be able to read what he was writing. Whether knowingly or not, each tried to conceal his concern with some gesture or other. Paulo was constantly blinking; the man on his right would empty half the tobacco from his cigarette into the ashtray before lighting up; another kept flipping through a magazine, meanwhile staring into space. Despite his tic, Paulo did not appear to be nervous. He was, it was true, feeling an unpleasant sense of physical smallness, as though he had suddenly become a shrunken dwarf. Background music was coming from two loudspeakers, and although no one was really listening to it, they all kept time by tapping their feet or rattling their key rings. As he watched these movements, Paulo noted in his diary: ‘They are all trying to keep their bodies as busy as possible and in the most varied ways, because their subconscious is clearly telling them: “Don’t think about what’s going on in there”.’ They all kept looking at the clock, and each time footsteps were heard, heads would turn toward the staircase. Occasionally, one would complain about how slowly time seemed to be passing. A small group tried to put aside their thoughts by talking quietly about football. Paulo merely observed and wrote:

At 8.30 in the morning, half the women had left and there was no sign of Gisa. Paulo went to the bar around the corner, had a coffee, smoked a cigarette and went back to the waiting room and his notebook, impatient and concerned that perhaps things were not going well for his girlfriend. An hour later, there was still no news. At 9.30 he put his hand in his pocket, hurriedly took out his fountain pen and wrote: ‘I felt that it was now. My son returned to the eternity he had never left.’

Suddenly, no one knew from where, or why, they heard a sound that no one had really expected to hear in such a place: a loud, healthy baby’s cry, followed immediately by a shout of surprise from a young lad in the waiting room: ‘It’s alive!’

For a moment, the men appeared to have been freed from the pain, misery and fear that united them in that gloomy room and they broke into a wild, collective burst of laughter. Just as the laughter stopped, Paulo heard footsteps: it was Gisa, returning from the operation, almost three hours after their arrival. Paler than he had ever seen her and with dark rings around her eyes, she looked very groggy and was still suffering from the effects of the anaesthetic. In the taxi on the way home, Paulo asked the driver to go slowly, ‘because my girlfriend has cut her foot and it’s hurting a lot’.

Gisa slept the whole afternoon and when she woke she couldn’t stop crying. Sobbing, she told him that just as she was about to be anaesthetized, she had wanted to run out: ‘The doctor put a thin tube inside me and took out a baby that was going to be born perfect. But now our son is rotting somewhere, Paulo…’

Neither could sleep. It was late at night when she went slowly over to the desk where he was sitting writing and said: ‘I hate to ask you this,
but I’ve got to change the dressing and I think I’ll manage to do it alone. But if it’s very painful, can you come into the bathroom with me to help?’

He smiled and replied with a supportive ‘Of course’, but once the bathroom door was shut, Paulo begged St Joseph a thousand times to save him from that unpleasant task. ‘Forgive me my cowardice, St Joseph,’ he murmured, looking up, ‘but changing that dressing would be too much for me. Too much! Too much!’ To his relief, minutes later, she released him from that obligation and lay down on the bed again. Since leaving the abortion clinic, Gisa had only stopped crying when she fell asleep.

On the Saturday, Paulo took advantage of the fact that she seemed a little better and went off to do his teaching. When he got back in the evening, he found her standing at the bus stop in front of their building. The two returned home and only after much questioning from him did she confess what she had been doing in the street: ‘I left the house to die.’

Paulo’s reaction was astonishing. He immediately said: ‘I’m really sorry I interrupted such an important process. If you’ve decided to die, then go ahead and kill yourself.’

Her courage had failed her, though.

On the third night without sleep, Gisa only opened her mouth to cry, while he could not stop talking. He explained carefully that she had no way out: after being called to Earth, the Angel of Death would only go back if he could take a soul with him. He said that there was no point in turning back, because the Angel would follow her for ever, and even if she didn’t want to die now, he could kill her later, for example by letting her be run over. He recalled how he had faced the Angel when he was an adolescent and had cut the throat of a goat so that he would not have to hand over his own life. The way out was to stand up to the Angel: ‘You need to challenge him. Do what you decided to do: try to kill yourself but hope that you’ll escape with your life.’

When Gisa closed her eyes, exhausted, he went back to his diary, where he pondered the mad course of action he was proposing to his girlfriend:

This macabre theory was not just the fruit of Paulo’s sick imagination but had been scientifically proven by a psychiatrist whom he frequently visited, and whom he identified in his diary merely as ‘Dr Sombra’, or ‘Dr Shadow’. The theory was that one should reinforce the patient’s traumas. The doctor had told him quite categorically that no one is cured by conventional methods: ‘If you’re lost and think that the world is much stronger than you are,’ he would say to his patients, ‘then all that’s left for you is suicide.’ According to Paulo, this was precisely where the brilliance of his thesis lay: ‘The subject leaves the consulting room completely devastated. It’s only then that he realizes that he has nothing more to lose and he begins to do things that he would never have had the courage to do in other circumstances. All in all, Dr Sombra’s method is really the only thing in terms of the subconscious that I have any real confidence in. It’s cure by despair.’

When they woke the following day–a brilliant, sunny summer Sunday–Paulo did not need to try to convince Gisa any further. He realized this when she put on a swimsuit, took a bottle of barbiturates from the bathroom cupboard–he thought it was Orap, or pimozide, which he had been taking since his first admission to the clinic–and emptied the contents into her mouth, swallowing it all down with a glass of water. They went out together into the street, she stumbling as she walked, and proceeded down to the beach. Paulo stayed on the pavement while Gisa waded into the water, where she began swimming out to sea. Although he knew that with that amount of medication in her she would never have the strength to swim back, he waited, watching until she was just a black dot among the glittering waves, a black dot that was moving farther and farther away. ‘I was scared, I wanted to give in,
to call her, to tell her not to do it,’ he wrote later, ‘but I knew that Gisa wasn’t going to die.’

Two men doing yoga on the beach went up to him, concerned that the girl was nearly out of sight, and said: ‘We should call the lifeguard. The water’s very cold and if she gets cramp she’ll never get back.’

Paulo calmed them with a smile and a lie: ‘No need, she’s a professional swimmer.’

Half an hour later, when a group of people had begun to collect on the pavement, foreseeing a tragedy, Gisa began to swim back. When she reached the beach, pale and ghostly looking, she threw up, which probably saved her life, because she vomited up all the tablets. The muscles in her face and arms were stiff from the cold water and from the overdose. Paulo held her as they went to the house and then wrote the results of that ‘cure by despair’ in his diary:

If anyone had looked through his diaries during the months prior to Gisa’s attempted suicide, they would not have been surprised by Paulo’s bizarre behaviour. Since reading Molinero’s book,
The Secret Alchemy of Mankind
, he had become deeply immersed in the occult and in witchcraft. It was no longer just a matter of consulting gypsies, witch doctors and tarot readers. At one point, he had concluded that ‘The occult is my only hope, the only visible escape’. As if he had put aside his dream of becoming a writer, he now concentrated all his energies on trying to ‘penetrate deep into Magic, the last recourse and last exit for my despair’. He avidly devoured everything relating to sorcerers, witches and occult powers. On the bookshelves in the apartment he shared with Gisa, works by Borges and Henry Miller had given way to things such as
The Lord of Prophecy
,
The Book of the Last Judgement
,
Levitation
and
The Secret Power of the Mind
.
He would frequently visit Ibiapas, 100 kilometres from Rio, where he would take purifying baths of black mud administered by a man known as ‘Pajé Katunda’.

It was on one such trip that Paulo first attributed to himself the ability to interfere with the elements. ‘I asked for a storm,’ he wrote, ‘and the most incredible storm immediately blew up.’ However, his supernatural powers did not always work. ‘I tried to make the wind blow, without success,’ he wrote a little later, ‘and I ended up going home frustrated.’ Another trick that failed was his attempt to destroy something merely by the power of thought: ‘Yesterday Gisa and I tried to break an ashtray by the power of thought, but it didn’t work. And then, would you believe it, straight afterwards, while we were having lunch here, the maid came to say that she had broken the ashtray. It was bizarre.’

Sects had also become an obsession with Paulo. It might be Children of God or Hare Krishnas, followers of the Devil’s Bible or even the faithful of the Church of Satan, whom he had met on his trip to the United States. All it took was a whiff of the supernatural–or of sulphur, depending on the case. Not to mention the myriad groups of worshippers of creatures from outer space or UFO freaks. He became so absorbed in the esoteric world that he eventually received an invitation to write in a publication devoted to the subject, the magazine
A Pomba
. Published by PosterGraph, a small publishing house dedicated to underground culture and printing political posters, this contained a miscellany of articles and interviews on subjects of interest to hippie groups: drugs, rock, hallucinations and paranormal experiences. Printed in black and white, every issue carried a photographic essay involving some naked woman or other, just like men’s magazines, the difference being that the models for
A Pomba
appeared to be women recruited from among the employees in the building where the magazine was produced. Like dozens of other, similar publications,
A Pomba
had no influence, although it must have had a reasonable readership, since it managed to survive for seven months. For half the salary he received at the school, Paulo accepted the position of jack-of-all-trades on the magazine: he would choose the subjects, carry out the interviews, write articles. The visual aspect–design, illustrations and photographs–was Gisa’s job. It appears to have been a good idea,
because after only two issues under Paulo’s editorship, the owner of PosterGraph, Eduardo Prado, agreed to his proposal to launch a second publication, entitled
2001
. With two publications to take care of, his salary doubled, and he had to give up teaching.

While he was doing research for an article on the Apocalypse, it was suggested to Paulo that he should go and see someone who called himself ‘the heir of the Beast in Brazil’, Marcelo Ramos Motta. He was surprised to find that the person he was to interview lived in a simple, austere apartment with good furniture and bookcases crammed with books. There was just one eccentric detail: all the books were covered with the same grey paper, without any indication as to the content apart from a small handwritten number at the foot of the spine. The other surprise was Motta’s appearance. He wasn’t wearing a black cloak and brandishing a trident, as Paulo had expected, but instead had on a smart navy-blue suit, white shirt, silk tie and black patent-leather shoes. He was sixteen years older than Paulo, tall and thin, with a thick black beard, and a very strange look in his eye. His voice sounded as if he were trying to imitate someone. He did not smile, but merely made a sign with his hand for the interviewer to sit down, and then sat down opposite him.