Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (51 page)

Indifferent to what academics might think of his work, Paulo was preparing once again to face the whirlwind of activity that now accompanied the launch of each new book. Set in Slovenia, the story of
Veronika Decide Morrer
, or
Veronika Decides to Die
, has as its backdrop the romance between Eduard, the son of a diplomat, and the eponymous heroine who, after attempting suicide, is placed in a mental asylum by her parents and subjected to brutal electroshock treatment. The explosive nature of the book lay in Paulo’s revelation that he had been admitted to the Dr Eiras clinic in Rio during the 1960s on three separate occasions, something he had never spoken about in public before. By doing so, he was breaking an oath he had made that he would deal with the subject in public only after the death of his parents. His mother had died five years earlier, in 1993, of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease, and he had been unable to be at her funeral because he received the news while he was in Canada, working on the launch of
The Alchemist
, and was unable to get back to Brazil in time. Although his energetic father, Pedro, was not only alive but, as he appears in the book, ‘in full enjoyment of his mental faculties and his health’,
Veronika Decides to Die
exposes in no uncertain terms the violence to which the author was subjected by his father and his late mother. ‘Veronika is Paulo Coelho’, the author declared to whoever wanted to listen.

Concerned as always that his books should reach poorer readers, this time he decided to change his launch tactics. He told Objetiva to cut by half the US$450,000 spent on advertising
The Fifth Mountain
, thus allowing a reduction of almost 25 per cent on the cover price. Another move intended to make his work more accessible was a contract with the supermarket chain Carrefour, which included
Veronika
in its promotional package of presents for Father’s Day. The book’s publication coincided with an intense debate in Brazil about the treatment of people being held in public and private mental asylums. The Senate was discussing a bill drawn up to bring about the gradual eradication of institutions where patients with mental problems were held as virtual prisoners, and during that debate, passages of
Veronika
were read out. On the day on which the vote was to be held and the law ratified, Senator Eduardo Suplicy quoted from a letter he had received from Paulo Coelho in praise of the bill: ‘Having been a victim in the past of the violence of these baseless admissions to mental hospitals–I was committed to the Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras in 1965, ’66 and ’67–I see this new law not only as opportune, but as absolutely necessary.’ Together with the letter the author sent a copy of the records of his admissions to the clinic. Two years later, Paulo was invited to join the team of the International Russell Tribunal on Psychiatry, an institution created by the European Parliament, and in 2003, he was one of the speakers at a seminar on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Persons with Mental Health Problems organized by the European Committee on Human Rights.

Veronika
broke all Paulo’s previous records. What was new was the respectful treatment accorded to the book by the media. Perhaps moved by the shocking revelations contained in the book, the newspapers and magazines devoted pages and pages to accounts of the horror of his three internments.

One of the few dissenting voices was that of a friend of his, the writer and journalist Marcelo Rubem Paiva. Asked by the
Folha de São Paulo
to review
Veronika
, he did so tongue in cheek and even suggested stylistic changes to the text, only to pull himself up short: ‘What am I saying? Here I am giving tips to a writer who has sold millions and won commendations and prizes abroad!’

Exactly. To judge by all those sales, prizes and commendations, it would seem that his readers preferred his texts as they were. Immediately following the publication of
Veronika
in Brazil, the journalist and professor Denis de Moraes published an essay entitled
The Big Four
. These were Stephen King, Michael Crichton, John Grisham and Tom Clancy. Moraes used a list of Paulo’s achievements and engagements in 1998 to show that the Brazilian already had a foot in that select group of world best-sellers:

All this feverish travelling was interrupted only in 2000, when he finished his new book,
O Demónio e a Srta. Prym
, or
The Devil and Miss Prym
. The launch this time was rather different. Firstly, the author decided to stay at home (the book was launched simultaneously in Brazil and other countries), preferring to receive foreign journalists in his new apartment in Copacabana. This was an apartment occupying an entire floor, which he had transformed into a vast bedroom-cum-sitting room, for which he had paid about US$350,000 and from where he enjoyed a wonderful view of Brazil’s most famous beach. The idea of asking journalists to come to him had arisen some weeks earlier, when the North American television network CNN International recorded a long interview with him that was shown in 230 countries.

During the weeks that followed, at the invitation of his agent, teams from all the major newspapers and television stations began to arrive in Rio from Germany, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, France, Greece, England, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and the Czech Republic. Many used the trip to Brazil to file reports on Rio de Janeiro as well, and Mônica commented: ‘That amount of publicity would have cost the Prefecture of Rio a fortune.’ The other unusual thing about the launch in Brazil was the choice of venue. Coelho preferred to hold it in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. You didn’t have to be very sharp to guess what this choice meant: Paulo Coelho, who had been so mistreated by Brazilian critics, clearly had his eye on a seat in the Olympus of Brazilian literature.

T
HE DEVIL AND MISS PRYM
was not the book Coelho had wanted to publish at the turn of the millennium. He had written a novel about sex, which had been carefully checked by Mônica and a friend of the author, the theologian and ex-impresario Chico Castro Silva, but it did not survive Chris’s reading of it, and, as with his book on satanism, she refused to give it her approval.

This was not the first time he had been down this route. At the end of the 1980s, a little after publishing
The Alchemist
in Brazil, he had tried to write a book in which he treated sex with a starkness rarely found in literature. Between January and March 1989, he produced a 100-page novel telling the story of a man who is identified simply as ‘D.’, with the book being given the provisional title
A Magia do Sexo, A Glória de Deus
[
The Magic of Sex, The Glory of God
] or, simply,
Conversas com D
.[
Conversations with D
].

Tormented by doubts about his sexuality, the main character is only able to find sexual satisfaction with his wife, but has terrible dreams in which he sees his mother naked and being abused by several men who, having raped her, urinate over her. What troubles the forty-year-old D. is not just the nightmare in itself but also the fact that witnessing this violence gives him pleasure. Lost in the midst of these terrible fantasies,
D. starts to tell his problems to a friend, who becomes the narrator of the plot. The two meet every evening for a beer. As he describes his innermost secrets and insecurities, D. ends up confessing that, although he is not homosexual, he experiences enormous pleasure when dreaming that he is being raped by men (‘I like the humiliation of being on all fours, submissive, giving pleasure to the other man’). Coelho never finished
Conversas com D.
, and it ends without one knowing what fate the author will choose for the central character–whose story bears a certain resemblance to his own. The book ended up in the trunk full of diaries that Coelho had said should be burned after his death.

The Devil and Miss Prym
arose from a visit Coelho made to the French town of Viscos, on the Spanish frontier. In the main square, he saw a strange sculpture in which the water flowed out of a sun and into the mouth of a toad, and, however much he quizzed the inhabitants, no one could explain to him the significance of this odd creation. The image remained in his head for months, until he decided to use it as a representation of Good and Evil. With
The Devil and Miss Prym
, Coelho was completing a trilogy that he called ‘And on the Seventh Day’, which began with
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
(1994) and was followed by
Veronika
(1998). According to him, ‘they are three books that describe a week in the life of normal people who suddenly find themselves confronted by love, death and power’.

The story takes place in a small imaginary village of 281 inhabitants, all of whom are believed to be extremely honest. The village routine is interrupted by the arrival of Carlos, a foreigner who is at once identified by the widow Berta, the eldest of the inhabitants, as someone bringing evil to their peaceful town, i.e., the Devil. The stranger stays in a hotel where the only single woman in town, Chantal Prym, works in the snack bar. Miss Prym is an orphan and rather frowned on by the other inhabitants, and she is chosen by the visitor as an instrument to test their honesty. Presenting himself as a businessman who has lost his wife and two daughters to a dreadful crime, the mysterious Carlos offers the young woman the chance to become rich and leave the tedious life of the town. In exchange, she must help him to convince the local inhabitants to take part in a macabre competition: if, within a week, someone can commit the
motiveless murder of at least one local inhabitant, the town will receive ten bars of gold which he has hidden in a secret place. The book deals with the conflicts generated by this extraordinary offer and concludes by identifying the possible simultaneous existence within every human soul of a personal angel and a personal devil.

In March 2000, after delivering
The Devil and Miss Prym
to Editora Objetiva, Paulo took a plane to Paris in time to see the start of the huge publicity campaign organized by Anne Carrière for the launch of
Veronika Decides to Die
. On a cold, grey Monday morning, along with the millions of Parisians and tourists who daily cross the city, he was shown a number 87 bus bearing a gigantic close-up of his face printed against a blue backdrop, announcing that
Veronika
was in all the bookshops. The number 87 buses departed from Porte de Reuilly, to the east of the capital, and travelled some 30 kilometres through the streets until reaching their final stop in Champs de Mars, having passed through some of the busiest areas of Paris, such as Gare de Lyon, the Bastille and St Germain-des-Près. The same scene was being repeated in fourteen other French cities. This time, however, the publicity campaign did not produce the hoped-for results. The reaction of French readers was lukewarm, perhaps because they found it odd to see a book being advertised like soap or toothpaste. Although it sold more than the previous books, the sales of
Veronika
in France were below expectations. Even so, the book was warmly received by the French press, including
L’Express
and the serious and conservative
Figaro
, one of the most influential newspapers in the country. At the same time, although without the same fanfare,
Veronika
was beginning to arrive in bookshops in Taiwan, Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand and the United States.

The globalization of his literary success was finally introducing the author to another circle–the international jet set. As he had been doing since 1998, Coelho had taken part in the World Economic Forum some weeks earlier. The forum is an organization created in 1971 by the professor and economist Klaus Schwab and every year it brings together in Davos the elite of world politics and economics (at Schwab’s invitation, the author has been a member of the Schwab Foundation since 2000). The most important guest at the 2000 meeting, the American President
Bill Clinton, had been photographed some months earlier clutching a copy of
The Alchemist
as he stepped out of a helicopter in the gardens of the White House. On hearing that Paulo was in Davos as well, Clinton took the opportunity to meet him. ‘It was my daughter Chelsea who gave me the book–in fact she ordered me to read it,’ the President joked. ‘I liked it so much that I gave it to Hillary to read as well,’ he went on, ending the meeting with an invitation that would not in fact be followed up: ‘Let me know if you’re visiting the United States. If I’m home, my family and I would love to have you over for dinner.’ Seven years later, in 2007, at the request of Hillary Clinton’s team, Paulo produced a text in support of her candidature for nomination for the presidency of the United States.

The meeting in Davos in 2000 and in subsequent years meant that he could personally meet some of his most famous readers–such as the former Israeli prime minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Shimon Peres, the American actress Sharon Stone and the Italian author Umberto Eco–and could mingle with such world-famous names as Bill Gates and political leaders such as the Palestinian Yasser Arafat and the German Gerhard Schroeder. Interviewed during one of the ‘literary teas’ held during the forum, Umberto Eco revealed that he had read Paulo’s works, saying: ‘My favourite book by Paulo Coelho is
Veronika
. It touched me deeply. I confess that I don’t like
The Alchemist
very much, because we have different philosophical points of view. Paulo writes for believers, I write for those who don’t believe.’

In the second half of 2000, the ‘fever’ predicted by Mônica Antunes ten years earlier had spread through all the social, economic and cultural classes regardless of race, sex or age, far less ideology. Some months before, the author had been appalled to read in the English newspaper the
Guardian
that
The Alchemist
and
The Fifth Mountain
were the favourite bedside reading of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was at the time being held in England at the request of the Spanish courts, accused of ‘torture, terrorism and genocide’. He declared to the press: ‘I wonder if General Pinochet would continue to read my books if he knew that their author was imprisoned three times during the Brazilian military regime and had many friends who were detained in or expelled from Chile during the Chilean military regime.’ Some time later, when interviewed by
the Caracas newspaper
El Universal
, the Venezuelan Miguel Sanabria, the ideological leader of an organization that supported President Hugo Chávez, revealed the bibliography used in his political degree course: Karl Marx, Simón Bolivar, José Carlos Mariátegui and Paulo Coelho. Books by Coelho appeared in the strangest hands and on the oddest bookshelves, such as those of the Tajik ex-major Victor Bout, who was captured at the beginning of 2008 in Thailand by American agents. In a rare interview, the retired KGB official, who was considered the biggest arms dealer in the world (and who inspired the film
Lord of War
, starring Nicolas Cage), candidly stated to
New York Times
reporter Peter Landesman that, when not selling anti-aircraft missiles, he would relax by reading Paulo Coelho. In the war launched by the United States against the Al Qaeda network, Coelho’s books were read on both sides. According to the British
Sunday Times
,
The Alchemist
was the most borrowed book in the barracks library of the American soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, who were hunting for Osama Bin Laden in the Afghan caves. And on visiting Number 4 concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, where those suspected of having links with Bin Laden were imprisoned, the reporter Patrícia Campos Mello, of
O Estado de São Paulo
, discovered versions in Farsi of
The Pilgrimage
among the books offered to the prisoners by their American gaolers.

Coelho himself was surprised when he saw the film
Guantanamera
, directed by the Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, to see that, on the protagonist’s long trip across the island in order to bury a relative, he was carrying a copy of
The Alchemist
. Since his books are not published in Cuba, he did some research and discovered that it was a Spanish copy, sold on the black market for an incredible US$40. ‘I had no qualms about contacting the Cubans and giving up my rights as author, without getting a cent,’ he later told newspapers, ‘just so that the books could be published there at lower prices and more people could have access to them.’ In an incident that shows that rudeness has no ideological colour, in 2007, Paulo was the victim of a gratuitous insult from the Cuban Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, who was responsible for the organization of the Havana Book Fair. ‘We have a problem with Paulo Coelho,’ Prieto declared to a group of foreign journalists. ‘Although he is a friend of Cuba and speaks out against
the blockade, I could not invite him because that would lower the tone of the fair.’ Not a man to take insults lying down, the author paid him back on his Internet blog with a six-paragraph article that was immediately reproduced in the daily
El Nuevo Herald
, the most important Spanish-language newspaper published in Miami, the heart of anti-Castroism. ‘I am not at all surprised by this statement,’ he wrote. ‘Once bitten by the bug of power, those who have fought for liberty and justice become oppressors.’

His international prominence did not distance him from his country of origin. The choice of the Brazilian Academy of Letters for the launch of
The Devil and Miss Prym
in October 2000 was seen as a step towards his entry into the Brazilian Academy. This was not the first such step. When Anne Carrière had organized that dinner at the Carrousel du Louvre in 1998, all the members of the Brazilian delegation in Paris had been invited, but only three writers received personal telephone calls from Paulo reiterating the invitation–Nélida Piñon, Eduardo Portela and the senator and ex-president of the Republic José Sarney. Needless to say, all three were members of the Academy.

For the launch of
The Devil and Miss Prym
4,000 invitations were sent out. The size of the crowd meant that the organizers of the event had to increase the security and support services. At the insistence of the author, one thousand plastic glasses of iced mineral water were distributed among those present, and he regretted that he could not do as he had in France, and serve French champagne.

To everyone’s surprise, the Brazilian critics reacted well to
The Devil and Miss Prym
. ‘At the age of fifty-three, Paulo Coelho has produced his most accomplished work yet, with a story that arouses the reader’s curiosity and creates genuine tension,’ wrote the reviewer in the magazine
Época
. One of the exceptions was the astrologist Bia Abramo, in the
Folha de São Paulo
, who was asked by the newspaper to write a review. ‘Like his other books,
The Devil and Miss Prym
seems to be a well-worn parable,’ she wrote, ‘that could have been told in three paragraphs, like the various little anecdotes that tend to fill his narratives.’

Any careful observer of the author at this time would have realized that his energies were focused not on the critics but on being given a chair
in the Brazilian Academy. Paulo had no illusions and he knew, from someone else who had been rejected as a candidate, that ‘it’s easier to be elected as a state governor than to enter the Academy’. It was well known that some of the thirty-nine academicians despised him and his work. ‘I tried to read one of his books and couldn’t get beyond page eight,’ the author Rachel de Queiroz, a distant cousin, told newspapers, to which the author replied that none of his books even started on page eight. The respected Christian thinker Cândido Mendes, rector and owner of the Universidade Cândido Mendes (where Paulo had almost obtained a degree in law), gave an even harsher evaluation: