Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (27 page)

Gisa’s premonitions were not entirely unfounded. She had mistaken the year, but not the date. While it marked Paulo’s first step in the direction of one of his dreams–fame–25 May was, by coincidence, going to be a crucial date, a watershed in his life: the day chosen by destiny, some years later, for his first appointment with the Devil, a ceremony he was preparing for when he met Raul Seixas. Under Marcelo Ramos Motta’s guidance he felt he was a disciple of the Beast’s battalions. He was
determined to immerse himself in the malignant forces that had seduced Lennon and Charles Manson, and began the process by being accepted into the OTO as a ‘probationer’, the lowest rank in the sect’s hierarchy. He was fortunate that his guide was not Motta but another militant in the organization, a graduate employee of Petrobras, Euclydes Lacerda de Almeida, whose magical name was Frater Zaratustra, or Frater Z, and who lived in Paraíba do Sul, 150 kilometres from Rio. ‘I received a letter, rude as ever, from Marcelo,’ Paulo wrote to Frater Z when he heard the news. ‘I’m forbidden from contacting him except through you.’ It was a relief to have a well-educated man like Euclydes as his instructor rather than the uncouth Marcelo Motta, who treated all his subordinates appallingly. Extracts from letters sent to militants of the OTO by Parzival XI (as Motta self-importantly called himself) show that Paulo was being quite restrained when describing the leader of the followers of the Devil as ‘rude’:

On at least two occasions Paulo’s name appears in correspondence from Parzival XI to Euclydes. In the first, one gets the impression that Paulo will be working on the publication by Editora Três, in São Paulo, of the book
The Equinox of the Gods
, by Crowley and translated into Portuguese by Motta: ‘I got in touch with Editora Três through their representative in Rio, and we shall soon see whether or not they’re going to publish
Equinox of the Gods
. Paulo Coelho is young, enthusiastic and imaginative, but it’s too early for us to assume that they really will publish the book.’ In the second, Euclydes is castigated for having told Paulo too much and too soon about Parzival XI’s power: ‘Paulo Coelho said that you told him I destroyed the Masons in Brazil. You talk too much. Even if it were true, Paulo Coelho doesn’t have the magical maturity to understand how these things are done, which is why he’s confused.’

At the time, Paulo had had his own experiences of being in contact with the Devil. Some months before getting to know Motta and the OTO, during one of his regular anxiety crises, he was full of complaints. The reasons were many, but behind them lay the usual fact: he was nearly twenty-five and still just a nobody, without the remotest chance of becoming a famous writer. The situation seemed hopeless and the pain this time was such that, instead of asking for help from the Virgin Mary or St Joseph as he usually did, he decided to make a pact with the Prince of Darkness. If the Devil gave him the power to realize all his dreams, Paulo would give him his soul in exchange. ‘As an educated man who knows the philosophical principles that govern the world, humanity and the Cosmos,’ Paulo wrote in his diary, ‘I know perfectly well that the Devil does not signify Evil, but just one of the poles in the equilibrium of humanity.’ Using a fountain pen with red ink (‘the colour of this supernatural being’), he began to write out his pact in the form of a letter to the Devil. In the first line he made it clear that he was setting out the conditions and was not willing to deal with intermediaries:

In order to confirm this agreement he took a flower out of a vase and crushed it, at the same time proposing to Satan a kind of spectral test: ‘I’m going to crush this flower and eat it. From now on, for the next seven days, I’m going to do everything I want and I’m going to get what I want, because You will be helping me. If I’m satisfied with the results, I will give You my soul. If a ritual is necessary, I take it upon myself to carry it out.’

As a proof of good faith, Paulo promised the Devil that, during this experimental period, he would reciprocate by not praying to or saying the names of those considered sacred by the Catholic Church. But he did make it clear that this was a test, not a lifelong contract. ‘I retain the right to go back,’ he went on, still in red, ‘and I want to add that I’m only doing this because I find myself in such a state of complete despair.’

The agreement lasted less than an hour. He closed his notebook, and went out to have a cigarette and walk along the beach. When he returned home, he was deathly pale, terrified at the mad thing he had done. He opened his notebook again and wrote in capital letters that took up the whole page:

Paulo felt sure that he had tricked the Devil, but this ruse did not work for long. Although he and the Devil did not meet this time, he continued to invoke the spirit of evil in his articles for
A Pomba
and in a new enterprise in which he had become involved, the storyboards for comic strips. Beings from the Beyond created by him were brought to life in Gisa’s drawings and began to illustrate the pages of the magazine. The positive reaction to the series
Os Vampiristas
, which told of the troubles and adventures of a small, peaceful solitary vampire, convinced Gisa to send her work to King Features, an American agency that distributed comic strips, but she
received no reply. The couple did, though, manage to get some of their work into two of the main daily Rio newspapers,
O Jornal
and
Jornal do Brasil
, creating a special cartoon about the little vampire for the latter’s children’s supplement, which came out on Sundays. They also created a highly popular character, Curingão, whose image was used on lottery tickets. From time to time, one of their comic strips even appeared in
Pasquim
, the magazine favoured by the Rio intelligentsia.

A Pomba
was managing to survive with almost no advertising revenue and even achieved sales of 20,000, a real achievement in the tiny counterculture market; however, by the middle of 1972, it was heavily in debt, and looked set to take
2001
down with it. When the publisher, Eduardo Prado, announced that he was thinking of closing both publications, Paulo and Gisa moved to the newspaper
Tribuna da Imprensa
, where they produced a whole page that was published on Saturdays and given the name of the magazine that had died after only two issues–
2001
.

This change of medium was another step towards their work emerging from the subworld of flying saucers, elves and sorcerers to reach a wider public. Although in comparison with the other Rio dailies,
Tribuna
didn’t publish many copies, it had earned respect as a fighter. It had been founded in 1949 by the journalist Carlos Lacerda in order to combat the ideas, the supporters and the future government of President Getúlio Vargas (1951–54) and now, under the editorship of Hélio Fernandes, it was the favourite target for the military dictatorship’s censors. The arrival of Paulo and Gisa in the old building on Rua do Lavradio, near Lapa, coincided with the most repressive period in the entire history of the dictatorship, and this was reflected in the daily life of the paper. For three years, the offices of
Tribuna
had been visited every night by army officers, who would read everything and then decide what could and could not be published. According to Hélio Fernandes, a fifth of their daily output was thrown in the rubbish bin by the censors. He himself was an example of what happened to those targeted by the regime’s violence, for he had been arrested no fewer than twenty-seven times since 1964 and imprisoned twice. However, since the military were not too concerned about alchemy and the supernatural, the page produced by Paulo and Gisa remained untouched.

The visibility they achieved in the paper encouraged Paulo to go to the advertising department of Petrobras and show them a comic strip he and Gisa had created to be handed out at their petrol stations.

The man they met had approved the idea, but then Paulo, eager to make the project a success, said: ‘Just so that there’s no risk to Petrobras, we can work for free for the first month.’

The man turned round and said: ‘For free? Sorry, but you’re clearly a real amateur. Here no one does anything for free. Go and do a bit more work and try again when you’re a professional.’

In August, while he was still smarting from this rejection, Paulo received an invitation to go with his mother and maternal grandmother, Lilisa, for a three-week trip to Europe. He was heavily into his journalistic work, and hesitated before agreeing, but then it wasn’t every day that one was invited on a trip to Europe with all expenses paid. Added to this, he could leave several cartoons ready, as well as the
Tribuna
page, for Gisa to illustrate and design while he was away, since his mother’s invitation did not include his girlfriend. During the twenty-one day trip, which started in Nice and ended in Paris, with stops in Rome, Milan, Amsterdam and London, Paulo visited museums, ruins and cathedrals. Apart from two or three occasions in Amsterdam, when he escaped his mother’s vigilance in order to smoke a joint, the trip meant that he went almost a month without his daily intake of drugs.

Having been brought up by a methodical, obsessive mother, Paulo was furious with what he found when he arrived home. He wrote: ‘The house is a complete tip, which really annoyed me. It hasn’t even been swept. The electricity bill hasn’t been paid, nor has the rent. The page for
Tribuna
hasn’t been handed in, which is utterly irresponsible. I’m so upset by all this that I have nothing else to say.’

However, not everything was bad. While he was away, a tempting invitation had arrived in the post. Professor Glória Albues, who worked for the education department in Mato Grosso, had finally organized a project that the two had thought up when they had met up in Rio. The idea was that Paulo would spend three weeks every two months in three cities in Mato Grosso–Campo Grande, Três Lagoas (now in Mato Grosso do Sul, a state that did not exist at the time) and Cuiabá–teaching a course in
theatre and education for teachers and pupils in state schools. The salary was tempting–1,500 cruzeiros a month, which was double what he earned on
A Pomba
and
2001
. There was another reason that led Paulo to exchange the delights of Rio for the inhospitable lands of Mato Grosso. When the idea for the course had first come up, he hadn’t been involved with the OTO, but now, eager to spread Crowley’s ideas, the thought came to him: Why not change the course into a black magic workshop?

E
ITHER ALONE OR WITH GISA,
who was following him on his journey to satanism, Paulo began to try out some so-called magical exercises. One he frequently performed consisted in going to a park to pick a leaf of
Sansevieria trifasciata
, a plant with hard, pointed leaves, popularly known in English as mother-in-law’s tongue and in Brazil as St George’s sword. Performed in public, this exercise was likely to expose the novice to a certain amount of ridicule, since it was then necessary to walk ten steps holding the plant as though it were a real sword, turn towards the setting sun and then bow to the four points of the compass, pointing the ‘sword’ at each and shouting at the top of one’s voice: ‘Strength lies in the West!’ Each step to the left was accompanied by a roar, with eyes raised heavenwards: ‘Knowledge lies in the South! Protection lies in the East! Victory lies in the North!’

He would then take the leaf home, where he would cut it into eleven pieces (eleven being the Thelemites’ magic number) with a penknife or an ordinary knife that he had previously thrust into the ground, and then heated over a fire and washed in sea water. After this he would arrange the eleven pieces on the kitchen table to form the symbol of Mars–a circle topped by a small arrow, which also represents the male sex–while boiling up some water in a saucepan. He would then mix the pieces up
with the torn petals of two yellow roses and add them to the boiling water. The entire ceremony had to be performed so that the thick, viscous liquid thus produced would be ready at precisely eleven at night, which, according to the
Liber Oz
, is the hour of the Sun. He would then add it to his bath water, in which he would immerse himself until midnight, the hour of Venus. After performing one such ceremony, Paulo dried himself and wrote in his diary, with the house in almost total darkness and his notebook lit just by a single candle:

Another ceremony he frequently performed was the so-called Ritual of the Lesser Pentagram, which involved spreading out on the floor a white sheet on which one had to paint a green five-pointed star. The star was surrounded by a length of twine dipped in sulphur, with which Paulo would draw the symbol of Mars. He would turn off all the lights, and then hang a lamp from the ceiling, immediately above the centre of the pentagram, so that it created a column of light. With sword in hand and completely naked, he would turn to the south, step into the middle of the sheet and adopt the ‘Dragon pose’–a yoga position in which the person crouches on the floor with one leg forward and the other back–and then jump up and down like a toad while repeating invocations to the Devil. On one of these occasions, the ceremony ended very strangely, as he recorded in his diary:

It was during this time that Paulo was preparing for his first stay in Mato Grosso. He left various texts and storyboards ready for
Tribuna
and the other publications he was working for and typed out a programme for the course. Anyone not in the know would have had difficulty identifying any magical or satanic content. ‘I used this trick on purpose, so that no one would realize,’ he confessed years later, ‘because I knew it was an act of supreme irresponsibility to use magical techniques and rituals in order to give classes to teachers and adolescents…There I was performing black magic: I was using them without their knowledge, innocently, for my own magical experiments.’ Before leaving, Paulo asked permission from Frater Zaratustra to use Hermes Trismegistus’
Emerald Tablet
on the course. This was a text containing such statements as: ‘By this means wilt thou partake of the honours of the whole world. And Darkness will fly from thee’, and ‘With this thou wilt be able to overcome all things and transmute all that is fine and all that is coarse.’

Unaware that they were to be used as guinea pigs in the experiments of a satanic sect, the people of Mato Grosso received him with open arms. The local press heralded his arrival at each of the towns participating in the project with praise, hyperbole and even a pinch of fantasy. After comparing him with Plínio Marcos and Nelson Rodrigues, two of the greatest names in Brazilian drama, the Campo Grande
Diário da Serra
congratulated the government for having invited Paulo to bring to Mato Grosso a course ‘that was crowned with success in Rio de Janeiro, Belém do Pará and Brasília’. The treatment conferred on him by the
Jornal do Povo
, in Três Lagoas, was even more lavish:

He had not received such reverential attention since Aracaju, when he had plagiarized an article by Carlos Heitor Cony. Cast in the role of full-time missionary, Paulo took advantage of his few free hours to become still more steeped in mysticism, and it didn’t much matter to him how he gained access to this mysterious world. In Três Lagoas, ‘with the help of a Tibetan who is there fulfilling a mission’, he went to the headquarters of the Brazilian Society of Eubiosis, a group that argued for living in harmony with nature, and also the Masonic lodge of the Grand Order of Brazil. When he learned that there was a village of acculturated Indians on the edge of the city, he decided to visit them in order to find out about native witchcraft. After his three weeks were up, he recorded the first results of his time there:

On his return to Rio, Paulo learned from a colleague at
Tribuna
that the editorial team at
O Globo
was looking for staff. The idea of writing for what claimed to be ‘the greatest newspaper in the country’ was very tempting, and he managed to arrange an interview with Iran Frejat, the much-feared editor. If he got a job there, he would have at his disposal a fantastic means of spreading the ideals of the OTO. Several times in his correspondence with Frater Zaratustra he had suggested allowing the weekly page in
Tribuna
to be used by the sect, but they had never asked him to do so. When he told Raul Seixas of his interest in a position at
O Globo
, his friend tried to dissuade him from the idea, again suggesting a musical partnership: ‘Forget it. Don’t go and work for some newspaper, let’s write music. TV Globo are going to re-record
Beto Rockefeller
[an innovative and very successful soap opera that was shown on the now defunct TV Tupi from 1968 to 1969] and they’ve asked me to write the soundtrack. Why don’t we do it together? I’ll write the music and you can write the lyrics.’

While Paulo was still torn between the supernatural and the need to earn a living, Raul was building his career as a singer, devoting himself entirely to music. He had an LP on sale–
Sociedade da Grã Ordem Kavernista
, which was recorded almost secretly at CBS a few weeks before he resigned–and he was getting ready for the seventh International Song Festival being put on by Rede Globo. For Paulo, accepting a partnership would mean going back to poetry, which he had sworn never to do. For the moment at least the position at
O Globo
seemed more achievable and this was what he was going to try for.

He turned up at the appointed time for his interview with Frejat, introduced himself to the chief reporter, who appeared to be in a very bad mood, and sat down in a corner of the office waiting to be called. Before leaving home, he had put a book of poems by St John of the Cross in his bag to help take his mind off things while waiting. At two in
the afternoon, an hour after he had arrived, Frejat had still not even so much as glanced at him, although he had walked past him several times, giving orders and handing out papers to various desks. Paulo stood up, got himself a coffee, lit a cigarette and sat down again. When the clock showed three he lost patience. He ripped the pages out of the book he was reading, tore them into tiny pieces, gathered them up and deposited them on Frejat’s desk.

This unexpected gesture caught the journalist by surprise, and he burst out laughing and said: ‘What’s up, boy? Have you gone mad?’

Paulo said quietly, but forcefully: ‘I’ve been waiting for two hours–didn’t you notice? Are you behaving like this just because I want a job? That’s so disrespectful!’

Frejat’s response was a surprising one: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were here for the job. Well, let’s give you a test. If you pass it, the job’s yours. You can start now. Go to the Santa Casa and count the dead.’

The dead? Yes, one of his daily tasks would be to go to the Santa Casa de Misericórdia and to two other large hospitals in Rio to get lists of the names of the dead, which would then appear on the newspaper’s obituary pages the following day. In spite of his previous experience on
Diário de Notícias
and
Tribuna
, he was going to start at
O Globo
as a cub reporter. As a trainee, on the lowest rung of the ladder, he would work seven hours a day, with one day off a week, for a salary of 1,200 cruzeiros a month–some US$408. His first weeks at the paper were spent on ‘reports on still lives’, or ‘coverage of a pacifist demonstration’ as he called his daily visits to the city’s mortuaries. The famous, such as politicians and artists, were the domain of the more experienced reporters, who would write obituaries or ‘memorials’. When this macabre daily round finished early he would go to the red light district of Mangue to chat to the prostitutes.

Although he didn’t have a formal contract, which was the case with the majority of cub reporters on most Brazilian newspapers (meaning that they had no form of social security), he could have his meals at
O Globo
’s very cheap canteen. For a mere 6 cruzeiros–US$1.75–he could have lunch or dinner in the canteen, along with the owner of
O Globo
, Roberto Marinho. A few days after meeting Marinho in the canteen queue, Paulo learned from Frejat that ‘Dr Roberto’, as he was known, had issued
an ultimatum: either Paulo cut his hair, which at the time was down to his shoulders, or he need not return to the office. Working on
O Globo
was more important than having long hair, and so he gave in to the demand without protest and trimmed his black mane.

Paulo was, in fact, used to reporting on two or three emergency situations, which meant that his superiors could see that this cub reporter with dark circles under his eyes knew how to write and had the confidence to carry out an interview. While he was never singled out to report on matters of major importance, he went out on to the streets every day with the other more experienced reporters, and, unlike some of them, he almost never returned empty-handed. What his superiors didn’t know was that when he failed to find the interviewees he needed, he simply made them up. On one such occasion, he was told to file a report on people whose work centred on Carnival. He spent the day out in the streets, returned to the office and, in the early evening, handed to his editor, the experienced Henrique Caban, five pages of interviews with, among others, ‘Joaquim de Souza, nightwatchman’, ‘Alice Pereira, waitress’ and ‘Adilson Lopes de Barros, bar owner’. The article ended with an ‘analysis of the behaviour of the inhabitants of Rio during Carnival’, a statement made by a ‘psychologist’ going by the highly suspicious name of ‘Adolfo Rabbit’. That night Paulo noted at the top of his carbon copy of the article, which he had taken home, something that neither Caban nor anyone else would ever know: ‘This material was COMPLETELY invented.’

While he may occasionally have resorted to such low stratagems, he was, in fact, doing well at the newspaper. Less than two months after starting work, he saw one of his interviews–a real one this time–with Luis Seixas, the president of the National Institute of Social Security (INPS), on the front page of the next day’s edition of
O Globo
: ‘Free medicine from the INPS’. Following this he was given the news that if he moved to being
pauteiro de madrugada
(sub-editor on the early-morning shift), he would receive a 50-per-cent salary increase. Most applicants for the position were put off by having to work every day from two until nine in the morning; however, for an insomniac like him, this was no problem.