Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (46 page)

Six days after the news of the death of his ‘close enemy’, still shaken and still on the Road to Rome, Paulo had what he describes as another extrasensory experience. He was heading for one of the small towns in the region where he was to take part in the so-called ritual of fire, during which invocations are made in the light of a bonfire. On the way, he says, he felt the presence beside him of no less a person–or thing–than his guardian angel. It wasn’t a tangible or audible being, nor even an ectoplasm, but a being whose presence he could clearly feel and with whom he could only communicate mentally. According to his recollection, it was the being that took the initiative, and a non-verbal dialogue took place.

‘What do you want?’

Paulo kept his eyes on the road and said: ‘I want my books to be read.’

‘But in order for that to happen you’re going to have to take a lot of flack.’

‘But why? Just because I want my books to be read?’

‘Your books will bring you fame, and then you’re really going to get it in the neck. You’ve got to decide whether that really is what you want.’

Before disappearing into the atmosphere, the being said to him: ‘I’m giving you a day to think about it. Tonight you will dream of a particular place. That’s where we shall meet at the same time tomorrow.’

In the hotel where he was staying in Pau, he dreamed of a small ‘tram’ taking passengers to the top of a very high mountain. When he woke the following morning, he learned at reception that one of the city’s attractions was precisely that: a cable car, the Funiculaire de Pau, which set off only a few metres from the hotel, next to the railway station. The hill where the dark-green cable car let off its thirty or so passengers every ten minutes was not as high as the one in his dream, but there was no doubt that he was on the right route. When it was getting dark, more or less twenty-four hours after the apparition of the previous day, Paulo joined a short queue and minutes later, reached a terrace surrounded by fountains–the Fontaine de Vigny, where he had an amazing view of the lights in the city coming on. The writer recalls clearly not only the date–‘It was 27 September 1989, the feast-day of Cosmos and Damian’–but also what he said to the apparition: ‘I want my books to be read. But I want to be able to renew my wish in three years’ time. Give me three years and I’ll come back here on 27 September 1992 and tell you whether I’m man enough to continue or not.’

The seemingly interminable seventy days of the pilgrimage were drawing to a close, when one night, following the ‘ritual of fire’, a fair-skinned, fair-haired young woman went up to him and began a conversation. Her name was Brida O’Fern, and she was a thirty-year-old Irish woman who had reached the rank of Master in RAM and, like him, was following the Road to Rome. Brida’s company proved to be not only a pleasant gift that would alleviate his weariness as he completed the pilgrimage, for Paulo was so delighted by the stories she told him that he decided to base his third book on her, which, like her, would be called
Brida
. Writing about the Road to Rome could come later.

Once he had completed the trial set by Jean, he set about writing
Brida
, using a method he would continue to use from then on: he would ponder the subject for some time and then, when the story was ready,
write the book in two weeks. The novel tells the story and adventures of the young Brida O’Fern, who, at twenty-one, decides to enter the world of magic. Her discoveries start when she meets a wizard in a forest 150 kilometres from Dublin. Guided by the witch Wicca, she starts her journey and, after completing all the rituals, finally becomes a Master in RAM. In the very first pages the author warns his readers:

Encouraged by the success of
The Pilgrimage
and
The Alchemist
, Rocco, when he learned that Paulo had a new book on the boil, took the initiative and offered him US$60,000 for
Brida
. Although the amount offered was high by Brazilian standards, it certainly didn’t break any records (a few months earlier Rocco had paid US$180,000 for the right to publish Tom Wolfe’s novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
). What was so different was the way in which Paulo proposed that the money should be divided up, a method he would continue to use in almost all negotiations over his future publications in Brazil: US$20,000 would be spent by the publisher on promotion and advertising; a further US$20,000 would be used to cover the journeys he would have to make within Brazil to promote the book; and only US$20,000 would go to him as an advance against royalties. The biggest surprise, which was kept secret by the publisher until a few days before its launch during the first week of August 1990, was that the first edition of
Brida
would have a print run of 100,000 copies–a run surpassed among Brazilian authors only by Jorge Amado, whose novel
Tieta do Agreste
[translated as
Tieta, the Goat Girl
] was launched in 1977 with an initial print run of 120,000 copies.

The angel Paulo met near Pau was absolutely right when he predicted that the author would be massacred by the critics.
The Pilgrimage
and
The Alchemist
had been treated fairly gently by the press, but when
Brida
was launched, the critics appeared to want blood. Merciless and on many occasions almost rude, the main newspapers in Rio and São Paulo seemed determined to demolish him:

The insults came from all sides, not only from newspapers and magazines. A few days after the launch of
Brida
, the author was interviewed on a popular Brazilian television chat show,
Jô Soares Onze e Meia
, which was broadcast nationally by SBT. Although they were friends and had worked together on the soft-porn movie
Tangarela, a Tanga de Cristal
, the
presenter joined the attack on Paulo Coelho and opened the programme with a list of dozens of errors he had discovered in
The Alchemist
. The interview provoked a parallel squabble. Two days later, the Rio newspaper
O Dia
carried a note in the column written by Artur da Távola, Paulo’s ex-colleague in the working group at Philips and someone who had contributed a preface to
Arquivos do Inferno
, entitled ‘Credit where credit’s due, Jô’:

There remained, however, a faint hope that someone in the media might read his books with the same unprejudiced eyes as the thousands of people who were flocking to bookshops across the country looking for one of his three books. Perhaps it would be Brazil’s most widely read and influential weekly,
Veja
, which had decided to put him on its next cover? After giving a long interview and posing for photographs, the writer waited anxiously for Sunday morning, when the magazine would arrive on the news-stands in Rio. The first surprise was seeing the cover, where, instead of his photo, he found the image of a crystal ball under the title ‘The Tide of Mysticism’. He quickly leafed through the magazine until he came to the article, entitled ‘The All-High Wizard’ and illustrated with a photograph of him in a black cloak and trainers and holding a crook in his hand. He began to skim-read, but needed to go no farther than the tenth line to realize that the journalist (the article was unsigned) was using heavy artillery fire:
Brida
,
The Pilgrimage
and
The Alchemist
were all classed as ‘books with
badly told metaphysical stories steeped in a vague air of mysticism’. In the following six pages, the bombardment continued with the same intensity, and hardly a paragraph went by that did not contain some criticism, gibe or ironic remark: ‘crazy superstitions’ ‘it’s impossible to know where genuine belief ends and farce begins’ ‘yet another surfer on the lucrative wave of mysticism’ ‘he pocketed US$20,000 as an advance for perpetrating
Brida
and is already thinking of charging for his talks’ ‘surely the worst of his books’ ‘pedestrian fiction’. Not even his faith was spared. Referring to the religious order to which he belonged,
Veja
stated that Regnum Agnus Mundi was nothing more than ‘an assemblage of Latin words that could be translated approximately as Kingdom of the Lamb of the World’. Despite the hours of interviewing time he had given them, only one sentence was used in its entirety. When he was asked what was the reason for his success, he had replied: ‘It’s a divine gift.’

The author reacted by writing a short letter to
Veja
, saying: ‘I should like to make just one correction to the article “The All-High Wizard”. I do not intend to charge for my talks to the public. The remainder came as no surprise: we are all idiots and you are very intelligent.’ He sent a long article to the journalist Luiz Garcia of
O Globo
, which was published under the headline ‘I am the Flying Saucer of Literature’, and in which for the first time Paulo complained about the treatment he had received from the media:

The author of the review replied on the same page, at the end of which he adopted as abrasive a tone as he had before: ‘Resigned to the fact that he will continue, as he says in his all too mistakable style, to “fight the
good fight”, I would simply advise him not to persist with his thesis that writing simply and writing badly are the same thing. It does him no favours.’

Fortunately for Paulo, the bacteria of the critics’ remarks did not infect sales. While the journalists, magnifying glass in hand, searched for misused verbs, doubtful agreements and misplaced commas, the readers kept buying the book. A week after it went on the market,
Brida
topped the best-seller lists throughout the country, bringing the author a new record, that of having three books simultaneously in the national best-seller lists. The popular phenomenon that Paulo Coelho had become meant that public figures, intellectuals and artists had to have an opinion about him. Curiously enough, to judge by the statements in various newspapers and magazines of the time, while the critics may have been unanimous, the world of celebrities seemed divided:

In spite of the critics’ bile, a year after its launch,
Brida
had been through fifty-eight editions and continued to top all the best-seller lists with sales which, combined with those of the previous books, were edging towards the one million mark, something very few Brazilian authors had achieved up to then. Encouraged by his success, Paulo was preparing to write a non-fiction book, a real bombshell that he intended to be in the shops in 1991. It was an autobiographical book that would describe his adventures with Raul Seixas in the world of black magic and satanism–including, of course, the ‘black night’, when he believed that he had come face-to-face with the Devil. He usually gave Chris the text to read only when he had finished the book, but this time he handed it to her a chapter at a time. While Paulo spent his days bent over his computer, she was electrified by what she was reading. When he was already on page 600, though, she gave him a piece of harsh advice.