Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (39 page)

As he himself often wrote in his diary, there is nothing new under the sun. And as had been the case so often before in his life, the only way of compensating for an emotional defeat was to find new victories at work. So it seemed like a gift from God when he received an invitation in April 1979–not even a month after his separation–to swap his job at Philips for that of product manager with their largest competitor, CBS. Included in the proposal was the prospect of prompt promotion to the post of artistic director. Following a succession of amorous and professional failures–the poor performance of the
Mata Virgem
album, the short-lived engagement to Eneida, the literary sterility in London, the end of his marriage–the invitation was a great relief, in large part because it would put him back in the media world of Rio and São Paulo, a world he hadn’t frequented for some time. But it also awoke an unfamiliar and unpleasant side to his character: arrogance. Since one of his duties was to reorganize the artistic department, he started by rocking the boat. ‘It’s true, I did behave very arrogantly when I started work there,’ he was to recall years later. ‘I went round giving orders and giving the yes-men a really hard time; pure authoritarianism!’ He suspected that money was being channelled out of the company and began to refuse to sign notes and invoices about which there might be any doubt.

Unaware that he was digging his own grave, he hired and fired, cut costs and closed departments, adding fuel to what was already a bonfire
of egos and vanities. Meanwhile, those who had suffered most in his clean-up operation were plotting against him. One Monday, 13 August 1979, after two months and ten days in the job, he arrived at the company late in the morning and, having sent yet more heads rolling, was summoned to the office of Juan Truden, the president of CBS in Brazil. He was standing waiting for Paulo, smiling, his hand outstretched and with these words on his lips: ‘My friend, you’re fired.’ Nothing more. No ‘Good afternoon’, no ‘Hope it goes well’.

The impact was enormous, not simply because of the coldness of the dismissal but because he knew that this meant the end of his career as a recording executive. ‘I was dismissed from the highest post, from the highest position in the profession, and I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t go back to being what I was at the beginning,’ Paulo recalled years later in a statement at the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro. ‘There were only six recording companies in Brazil and all the six positions I might really want were occupied.’ Before packing his bags, he wrote a long, angry letter to Truden in which he said that, in view of the lack of structure in the company, ‘CBS artists at the moment enjoy the dubious pleasure of being the most poorly served in the Brazilian market.’ He finished dramatically, using an expression that had remained in the popular imagination since it had been used by the ex-president Jânio Quadros in his letter of resignation: ‘And the same hidden forces that are responsible for my dismissal will one day have to face the truth. For you cannot hide the sun with a sieve, Sr Juan Truden.’

His dismissal (‘for incompetence’, as he learned later) was celebrated by the group of disaffected individuals he had created as manager, and would cause him still more humiliation. Some days later, at a social function, Paulo met Antônio Coelho Ribeiro, who had just been made president of Philips, the company Coelho had left in order to try his luck with CBS. When he saw him, Ribeiro said, in front of everyone: ‘You always were a bluffer.’

Ten months later, Antônio Ribeiro, too, got the sack. When he heard the news, Paulo took from a drawer a present he had bought shortly after Ribeiro had publicly insulted him. He went to the Ribeiros’ apartment and, when Ribeiro opened the door, Paulo hurriedly explained the reason
for his presence there: ‘Do you remember what you said to me when I was sacked? Right, now you can repeat those words every day as you look into your own eyes.’ He unwrapped the object and handed it to Ribeiro. It was a wall mirror on which he had had the wretched words painted in capitals: ‘YOU ALWAYS WERE A BLUFFER.’ Once he had returned the insult, he turned, took the lift and left.

It was time for Paulo to heal his wounds. Now that he had been ejected from the world of show business, his name did not appear again in the press until the end of the year, when the magazine
Fatos&Fotos
published an article entitled ‘Vampirology: a Science that Now Has its Own Brazilian Master’. He was the master, presenting himself as a specialist in the subject, and he announced that he was writing the script for a feature film on vampires, which was, in fact, never made. His unexpected dismissal from CBS had caught him unawares, and with the scars from the recent breakdown of his marriage still open he was unable to bear the setback alone. In his solitude, his mind oscillated between delusions of grandeur and feelings of persecution, which, at times, he managed to bring together in his diary in one sentence: ‘Every day it seems harder to achieve my great ideal: to be famous and respected, to be the man who wrote the Book of the Century, the Thought of the Millennium, the History of Humanity.’

This seemed to be simply a repeat of what various doctors had diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia or manic depression. The problem was that it was nearly time for his traditional end-of-year taking stock and, at thirty-two, he had still not succeeded in realizing his dream. There were moments when he seemed to accept being a writer like any other. ‘Sometimes I think about writing an erotic story, and I know it would get published,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Besides which, I could devote myself to that one genre, which is gaining ground here now that pornographic magazines are being published again. I could think up some really good pseudonym.’ These plans were followed by questions he could not answer. Why write erotic books? To earn money? He was already earning money and he still wasn’t happy. In order not to have to accept that his problems were caused by no one but himself, he returned to the old story: he hadn’t written before because he was married and Cissa didn’t
help. Now it was because he was alone and loneliness was preventing him from writing.

In his misery Paulo seemed to be confirming the popular belief that there’s none so blind as those who will not see, because ‘the woman of his life’ had been right there before him for more than ten years without ever receiving from him a smile or even a handshake. It’s surprising that such a pretty girl–petite, with dark hair, gentle eyes and porcelain skin–had gone unnoticed for such a long time by Paulo, the confirmed womanizer.

Paulo had met Christina Oiticica in 1968, when her uncle, Marcos, asked Sônia, Paulo’s sister, to marry him. At Lygia’s insistence, all the women invited to the formal engagement dinner were to wear long dresses. For the men, including Paulo, who was sporting a great dark mane of hair at the time and appeared to be completely out of it on drugs during the supper, she demanded dark suits. Christina and Paulo met several times in the years that followed at family gatherings and dinners without either really noticing the other. Naturally, one of these celebrations was for the marriage of Cissa and Paulo. When Paulo’s sister took him to Christmas lunch in 1979 at Christina’s parents’ house, she was going out with Vicente, a young millionaire whose inheritance included, among other luxuries, a vast yacht. Destiny, however, had decided that she was to be the woman Paulo had so longed for. A week later, just as in a fairy tale, the two were together for ever.

A
FTER HER PRIMARY EDUCATION,
Christina had been to Bennett College, a traditional Protestant establishment, where the Bible stories told during the Religious Knowledge lessons were the only thing that awoke in her a flicker of interest. She consistently failed in all other subjects, which meant that she had to leave the college and go from school to school until, like Paulo, she gave up completely. When she was seventeen, however, she was able to take a different educational route that would allow her to complete her secondary school studies in less than a year. It was only then that she returned to Bennett College, which had become a college of higher education, where she studied art and architecture. And at the end of 1979, when Paulo arrived at her parents’ house for Christmas dinner, she was working as an architect.

Although they were practising Christians, Christina’s parents were exceptionally liberal. If she wanted to go to lessons, she went. If she preferred to go to the cinema, no problem. And as soon as she was old enough, she was allowed to have her boyfriends sleep over at her parents’ house without any objections on their part. Not, however, that she had that many boyfriends. Although she was very pretty, Chris was no flirt. She was a thoughtful girl, who enjoyed reading and, although she was not particularly religious, joined a choir at one of the Protestant churches.
On the other hand, she also went to see films at the Paissandu, bought clothes at Bibba, the fashion boutique in Ipanema, and consumed large quantities of whisky at Lama’s. She went out every night and would often not get home until dawn, her legs unsteady. ‘My drug was alcohol,’ she confessed years later. ‘I simply loved alcohol.’

It was growing dark by the time coffee was being served at the end of Christmas lunch in the Oiticica household. Paulo had had his eye on Chris since he arrived and, even though she was going out with someone else, he decided to use his cousin Sérgio Weguelin, who was also present, to find out whether or not she was doing anything that evening. When it was time to leave, he asked his cousin to invite her to go with them to see Woody Allen’s latest hit,
Manhattan
. She was taken by surprise and didn’t know what to say. The next thing she knew, she was alone in the cinema with Paulo, not watching
Manhattan
, which was sold out, but a re-run of
Airport
, which had been released almost ten years earlier.

Paulo behaved like a true gentleman throughout the film, and didn’t even try to hold Chris’s hand. When they left, they found the square outside the cinema full of jugglers, fortune-tellers, tarot readers, chiromancers, fire-eaters and, of course, several religious choirs each singing a different hymn. They walked along until they came to a fake Indian sitting in front of a wicker basket in which was coiled a terrifying reptile 6 metres in length. It was an enormous anaconda, a non-poisonous snake that was, however, capable of asphyxiating an ox or a human, swallowing it whole and spending weeks digesting the remains of its prey.

With a mixture of fear and disgust for the creature the couple went up to the Indian. As naturally as if he were merely asking the time, Paulo said to Chris: ‘If I kiss the snake on the mouth will you kiss me on the mouth?’

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Kiss that monster? Are you mad?’

When she realized that he was serious, she accepted the dare. ‘Fine: if you kiss the snake, I’ll kiss you on the mouth.’

To her astonishment and to that of the Indian and all the bystanders, Paulo stepped forward, grabbed the head of the snake in both hands and kissed it. Then, in front of dozens of wide-eyed spectators, he turned, took Chris in his arms and gave her a long, movie-style kiss on the lips, a
kiss that was greeted with a round of applause by those present. Paulo got more than a kiss. A few hours later, the two were sleeping together in his apartment.

On the last day of the year–having first consulted the I Ching–he invited her to spend New Year with him in the sixth of the properties he owned, a small, pleasant summer house he had just bought in the seaside resort of Cabo Frio. The little white chalet, with red windows and a thatched roof, was exactly the same as the other seventy-four in a condominium called Cabana Clube designed by Renato Menescal, the architect brother of Paulo’s friend Roberto. On their way there, Paulo told Christina that the previous night he had dreamed of a voice that kept saying over and over: ‘Don’t spend New Year’s Eve in the cemetery.’ Since neither could work out what this meant, and since they had no plans to see in the New Year in a cemetery, the matter was forgotten.

Immediately after they arrived in Cabo Frio, they both sensed a strange atmosphere in the house, although they were unable to pinpoint what it was. It wasn’t something they could smell or see; it was what Paulo would call negative energy. As night fell, they began to hear noises, but couldn’t work out where they were coming from–it sounded as though some creature, human or animal, was dragging itself through the rooms, but apart from the two of them there was no one else there. Feeling both intrigued and frightened, they went out for dinner.

In the restaurant, they told the waiter about these strange occurrences and were given an explanation that made their hair stand on end: ‘Are you staying at the Cabana Clube? There used to be an Indian cemetery there. When they were building the foundations, they found the bones of hundreds of Indians, but built the houses on top of them anyway. Everyone in Cabo Frio knows that it’s haunted.’

So that was what the warning in Paulo’s dream had meant. Paulo and Chris stayed in a hotel that night and didn’t go back to the house until the next morning, and even then, they only went to collect their clothes. A few weeks later, the chalet was sold for the same US$4,000 it had cost a few months earlier.

No ghosts darkened their relationship, however. After breaking up with her boyfriend during the first days of the New Year, Chris moved
into Paulo’s apartment, with all her clothes, furniture and personal possessions, including the easel she needed for her work as an architect. There they began a partnership which, though it has never been formalized, has remained solid ever since.

The start of their life together was not easy, though. As preoccupied as Paulo was with interpreting signs, Chris was most upset to find in the apartment a biography of Count Dracula open on a Bible lectern. It was not that she had anything against vampires or vampirologists–she even liked films on the subject–but she was appalled that a sacred object should be used as a joke, something which she believed would attract negative energies into the house. She was so shocked that she went out into the street and from the first available public telephone called the Baptist pastor who used to counsel her and told him what she had seen. They prayed together over the phone and, before returning to the apartment, Chris thought it prudent to go into a church. She only calmed down when Paulo explained that his interest in vampirology had absolutely nothing to do with satanism, OTO or Aleister Crowley, saying: ‘The myth of the vampire existed a hundred years before Christ. I haven’t had any contact with anyone involved in the dark arts for years.’

In fact, he hadn’t had anything to do with Marcelo Motta’s satanists since 1974, but he continued to appear publicly here and there as a specialist on the work of Aleister Crowley. Indeed, some months later he wrote a long article on the English occultist in
Planeta
, which was illustrated with drawings by Chris. Their relationship went through further rocky times before it finally settled down. Paulo was still racked with doubt: was Chris really the ‘marvellous companion’ he had been waiting for? He feared that deep down the two were only together for the same, unspoken reason, what he called ‘the paranoiac desire to escape solitude’. However, even while he was saying that he was afraid of falling in love with her, he broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of losing her. ‘We had our first serious argument a few days ago, when she refused to go to Araruama with me. Suddenly I was terrified to think how easily I could lose Chris. I did everything to get her and have her close. I like her, she brings me peace, calm, and I feel that we can try and build something together.’

These ups and downs at the start of their life together did not stop them celebrating their partnership unofficially. On 22 June 1980, a dreary Sunday, they blessed their union with a lunch for their parents, relatives and a few friends in the apartment where they were living. Christina took charge of the hippie-style decorations and on each invitation she wrote a psalm or proverb illustrated with a drawing. Chris’s eclectic interest in religion seems to have helped the couple’s relationship. When they met, she was already a specialist in tarot, on which she had read numerous books, and, even though she didn’t consult the I Ching as often as Paulo, she knew how to interpret its predictions. When Paulo read
The Book of Mediums
by Allan Kardec, the couple decided to see if they could be mediums. Just as Cissa had been a guinea pig in the experiment with LSD, now Paulo was trying to get Chris to write down messages from the Beyond. He wrote: ‘I have performed a few experiments. We began last week, when I bought the book. Chris has acted as a medium, and we have achieved some elementary communications. I’ve found this all very troubling. My concept of things has changed radically since I arrived scientifically at the conclusion that spirits do exist. They exist and are all around us.’ Much later, Chris confirmed that the experiment had worked. ‘I’m sure that a table really did move,’ she recalls, ‘and I also wrote down some texts that were dictated to me.’

The suspicion that she might have powers as a medium continued to grow from the moment when she was gripped by strange, inexplicable feelings of dread whenever she went into the bathroom of their apartment. They were odd sensations which she herself had difficulty understanding and of which she never spoke to anyone. More than once it entered her mind to turn on the gas for the shower, seal up the exits and kill herself. On the afternoon of Monday, 13 October, she left her easel and went into the bathroom. This time the desire to kill herself seemed uncontrollable, but fearing that death by asphyxiation might be very slow and painful she decided to turn to medication. She calmly took a taxi to her parents’ house in Jardim Botânico, where she knew she would find the tranquillizers that her mother took regularly–Somalium, she recalls, or Valium in Paulo’s version of events. Whatever the name of the
medication, the fact is that she emptied a whole pack into her mouth, wrote a short note to Paulo and collapsed on the bed.

When he arrived home and Chris wasn’t there, Paulo went to her parents’ apartment, where they both often used to have dinner, and found Chris unconscious on the bed and, beside her, as well as the note, an empty pack of Valium. With the help of Chris’s mother, who had just arrived, he managed to get her to the lift, having first made Chris put her finger down her throat and vomit up what she could. Outside, they stopped the first taxi that passed and went to the St Bernard clinic in Gávea, where the doctors pumped out her stomach. Once recovered, hours later, she was well enough to go home.

While she was sleeping and having spoken to her about what happened, Paulo kept asking himself where those strange emanations in the bathroom came from. With the question still going round and round in his head, he went downstairs to talk to the porter, tell him what had happened to Chris and see if he had an answer to the mystery. The man said: ‘The last person who lived in that apartment, before you, was an airline captain who gassed himself in the bathroom.’ When he went back upstairs and told Chris the story, she didn’t think twice: despite having been in hospital only a few hours earlier, she got up, collected together a change of clothes for them both, as well as other personal items, threw everything into a suitcase and announced: ‘We’re going to my mother’s house. I never want to set foot in this apartment again.’

Neither of them did, not even to move house. They spent a little more than a month with Chris’s parents, long enough for work on the seventh property Paulo had bought to be completed so that they could move in there. This was a ground-floor apartment with a lovely garden and one particularly priceless feature: it was in the same building as Lygia and Pedro’s apartment. He could only have felt more emotionally secure if he were actually living with his parents.

Chris’s rules regarding Paulo’s sexual excesses always prevailed, but they were still far from being an average couple. One day, for example, Paulo suggested that they should both try an experiment that had its origins in the Middle Ages, and to which he gave the grand name of ‘a reciprocal test of resistance to pain’. Chris agreed, although she knew
what was involved: stark naked, they began to whip each other with a thin bamboo cane. They took it in turns to beat the other on the back, the blows growing harder and harder, until they reached the limit of physical endurance. This occurred only when they were both bleeding from their wounds.

Their relationship gradually began to settle down. The first two years passed without anything untoward disrupting their life together. Encouraged by her partner, Chris began to paint again, something she had given up four years earlier, while Paulo began to direct so-called TV specials. Not that they needed money to live on. Besides the forty-one songs he had written with Raul Seixas, in the past few years, Paulo had written more than a hundred lyrics–originals or versions of foreign hits–for dozens of different artists. This meant that the royalties continued to flow into his bank account. He tried to keep busy, however, fearing that idleness would lead him into depression again. Besides the TV specials, he gave talks and took part in round-table discussions on music and, occasionally, on vampirism. But the cure only worked for a while, because even when he was fully occupied, he would still suffer occasional anxiety attacks.

When this occurred, as it did at the end of 1981, he continued to give vent to his feelings in his diary: