Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (17 page)

O
NE SUNDAY IN SEPTEMBER
1966, Paulo was wandering along the corridors of the clinic after lunch. He had just been re-reading ‘The Ballad of the Clinic Gaol’, which he had finished writing the day before, and he felt proud of the thirty-five typewritten pages that he had managed to produce in a month and a half at the mental asylum. In fact, it was not so very different from the work that had inspired him, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, written in 1898, after his release from prison, where he had served two years for homosexual offences. Paulo’s final sentence on the last page–‘Now let’s start all over again’–might seem like mere empty words, a rather glib ending. Starting all over again meant only one thing: to get out of the hell that was the clinic as quickly as possible and restart his life. However, a terrifying idea was daily becoming more of a reality: if it was up to the doctors or his parents, he would continue to rot on the ninth floor for a long time.

Absorbed in these thoughts, he hardly noticed the two male nurses who came over to him and asked him to go with them to another part of the building. They led him to a cubicle with tiled floor and walls, where Dr Benjamim was waiting. In the centre of the room was a bed covered with a thick rubber sheet and, to one side, a small machine that looked like an ordinary electric transformer with wires and a handle, much like the
equipment used clandestinely by the police to torture prisoners and extract confessions.

Paulo was terrified: ‘Do you mean I’m going to have shock treatment?’

Kindly and smiling as ever, the psychiatrist tried to calm him: ‘Don’t worry, Paulo. It doesn’t hurt at all. It’s more upsetting seeing someone else being treated than receiving the treatment yourself. Really, it doesn’t hurt at all.’

Lying on the bed, he watched a nurse putting a plastic tube in his mouth so that his tongue wouldn’t roll back and choke him. The other nurse stood behind him and stuck an electrode that looked like a small cardiac defibrillator to each of his temples. While he stared up at the peeling paint on the ceiling, the machine was connected. A session of electroconvulsive therapy was about to begin. As the handle was turned, a curtain seemed to fall over his eyes. His vision was narrowing until it was fixed on one point; then everything went dark.

At each subsequent turn of the handle his body shook uncontrollably and saliva spurted from his mouth like white foam. Paulo never knew how long each session lasted–Minutes? An hour? A day? Nor did he feel any sickness afterwards. When he recovered consciousness he felt as though he were coming round after a general anaesthetic: his memory seemed to disappear and he would sometimes lie for hours on his bed, eyes open, before he could recognize and identify where he was and what he was doing there. Apart from the pillowcase and his pyjama collar, which were wet with dribble, there was no sign in the room of the brutality to which he had been subjected. The ‘therapy’ was powerful enough to destroy his neurones, but the doctor was right: it didn’t hurt at all.

Electroconvulsive therapy was based on the idea that mental disturbance resulted from ‘electrical disturbances in the brain’. After ten to twenty sessions of electric shocks applied every other day, the convulsions caused by the succession of electric charges would, it was believed, ‘reorganize’ the patient’s brain, allowing him to return to normal. This treatment was seen as a great improvement on other treatments used at the time such as Metazol and insulin shock: it caused retrograde amnesia, blocking any memory of events immediately prior to the charges,
including their application. The patient would therefore have no negative feelings towards the doctors or his own family.

After that first session, Paulo woke late in the afternoon with a sour taste in his mouth. During the torpor that dulled both mind and body after the treatment, he got up very slowly, as if he were an old man, and went over to the grille at the window. He saw that it was drizzling, but he still did not recognize his room, where he had been taken following the treatment. He tried to remember what lay beyond the door, but couldn’t. When he went towards it, he realized that his legs were trembling and his body had been weakened by the shocks. With some difficulty, he managed to leave his room. There he saw an enormous, empty corridor and felt like walking a little through that cemetery of the living. The silence was such that he could hear the sound of his slippers dragging along the white, disinfected corridor. As he took his first steps, he had the clear impression that the walls were closing in around him as he walked, until he began to feel them pressing on his ribs. The walls were enclosing him so tightly that he could walk no farther. Terrified, he tried to reason with himself: ‘If I stay still, nothing will happen to me. But if I walk, I’ll either destroy the walls or I’ll be crushed.’

What should he do? Nothing. He stayed still, not moving a muscle. And he stayed there, for how long, he doesn’t know, until a female nurse led him gently by the arm, back to his room, and helped him to lie down. When he woke, he saw someone standing beside him, someone who had apparently been talking to him while he slept. It was Luís Carlos, the patient from the room next door, a thin mulatto who was so ashamed of his stammer that he would pretend to be dumb when meeting strangers. Like everyone else there, he also swore that he wasn’t mad. ‘I’m here because I decided to retire,’ he would whisper, as though revealing a state secret. ‘I asked a doctor to register me as insane, and if I manage to stay here as a madman for two years, I’ll be allowed to retire.’

Paulo could not stand hearing such stories. When his parents visited, he would kneel down, weep and beg them to take him away, but the answer was always the same: ‘Wait a few more days. You’re almost better. Dr Benjamim is going to let you out in a few days.’

His only contacts with the outside world were the ever-more infrequent visits from the friends who managed to get through the security.
By taking advantage of the comings and goings at the gate, anyone with a little patience could get through, taking in whatever he or she wanted. So it was that Paulo managed to get a friend to smuggle in a loaded 7.65 automatic revolver, hidden in his underpants. However, once rumours began to spread among the other patients that Paulo was walking around armed, he quickly stuffed the Beretta into Renata’s bag, and she left with the gun. She was his most frequent visitor. When she couldn’t get through security, she would leave notes at the gate to be given to him.

On his birthday, it was Renata who turned up with a bundle of notes and letters she had collected from his friends with optimistic, cheerful messages, all of them hoping that Batatinha would soon return to the stage. Among this pile of letters full of kisses and promises to visit there was one message that particularly excited him. It was a three-line note
from Jean Arlin: ‘Batatinha my friend, our play
Timeless Youth
is having its first night on 12 September here in Rio. We’re counting on the presence of the author.’

The idea of running away surfaced more strongly when Paulo realized that with his newly cropped hair he was unrecognizable, even to his room-mate. He spent two days sitting on a chair in the corridor pretending to read a book but in fact watching out of the corner of his eye the movements of the lift–the only possible escape route, since the stairs were closed off with iron grilles. One thing was sure: the busiest time was Sunday, between midday and one in the afternoon, when the doctors, nurses and employees changed shift and mingled with the hundreds of visitors who were getting in and out of the packed lift.

In pyjamas and slippers the risk of being caught was enormous. But if he were dressed in ‘outdoor clothes’ and wearing shoes, it would be possible to merge unnoticed with the other people crowding together so that they wouldn’t miss the lift; then he could leave the building complex. Concealed behind his open book, Paulo mentally rehearsed his escape route dozens, hundreds of times. He considered all the possible obstacles and unexpected incidents that might occur and concluded that the chances of escaping were fairly high. It would have to be soon, though, before everyone got used to his new appearance without his usual shoulder-length curly mane.

He spoke of his plan to only two people: Renata and Luís Carlos, his ‘dumb’ neighbour in the clinic. His girlfriend not only urged him on but contributed 30 cruzeiros–about US$495 today–from her savings in case he should have to bribe someone. Luís Carlos was so excited by the idea that he decided to go too, as he was fed up with being stuck in the clinic. Paulo asked whether this meant he was giving up his idea of using mental illness as a way of retiring, but his fellow inmate replied: ‘Running away is part of the illness. Every mad person runs away at least once. I’ve run away before, and then I came back of my own accord.’

Finally the long-awaited day arrived: Sunday, 4 September 1966. Duly dressed in ‘normal people’s clothes’, the two friends thought the lift ride down, stopping at every floor, would never end. They kept their heads lowered, fearing that a doctor or nurse they knew might get in at any
moment. It was a relief when they reached the ground floor and went up to the gate, not so fast as to arouse suspicion, but not so slowly as to be easily identified. Everything went exactly to plan. Since there had been no need to bribe anyone, the money Renata had given Paulo was enough to keep them going for a few days.

Still with Luís Carlos, Paulo went to the bus station and bought two tickets to Mangaratiba, a small town on the coast, a little more than 100 kilometres south of Rio. The sun was starting to set when the two of them hired a boat to take them to an island half an hour from the mainland. The tiny island of Guaíba was a paradise as yet unspoiled by people. Heloísa Araripe, ‘Aunt Helói’, Paulo’s mother’s sister, had a house on Tapera beach, and it was only when he arrived there, still with the ‘dumb’ man in tow, that he felt himself safe from the wretched clinic, the doctors and nurses.

The place seemed ideal as a refuge, but hours after getting there, the two realized that they wouldn’t be able to stay there for long, at least not the way things were. The house was rarely used by Aunt Helói, and had only a clay filter half full with water–and this of a highly suspicious green colour. The caretaker, a man from Cananéia who lived in a cabin a few metres from the house, showed no interest in sharing his dinner. They were by now extremely hungry, but the only relief for their rumbling stomachs was a banana tree. When they woke the following day, their arms and legs covered in mosquito bites, they had to go to the same banana tree for breakfast, lunch and, finally, dinner. On the second day, Luís Carlos suggested that they should try fishing, but this idea failed when they discovered that the stove in the house had no gas and that there was no cutlery, oil or salt in the kitchen–nothing. On the Tuesday, three days after their arrival, they spent hours in the depot waiting for the first boat to take them back to the mainland. When the bus from Mangaratiba left them at the bus station in Rio, Paulo told his fellow fugitive that he was going to spend a few days in hiding until he had decided what to do with his life. Luís Carlos had also concluded that their adventure was coming to an end and had decided to go back to the clinic.

The two said goodbye, roaring with laughter and promising that they would meet again some day. Paulo took a bus and knocked on the door of Joel Macedo’s house, where he hoped to remain until he had worked
out what to do next. His friend was delighted to receive him, but he was worried that his house might not be a good hiding-place, as Lygia and Pedro knew that Paulo used to sleep there when he stayed out late. If he were to leave Rio, the ideal hiding-place would be the house that Joel’s father had just finished building in a condominium at Cabo Frio, a town 40 kilometres from Araruama. Before setting out, Joel asked Paulo to have a bath and change his clothes, as he didn’t fancy travelling with a friend who hadn’t washed or had clean clothes for four days. A few hours later, they set off in Joel’s estate car, driven by Joel (after the trauma of the accident, Paulo hadn’t even touched a steering wheel).

The friends spent the days drinking beer, walking along the beach and reading Joel’s latest passion, the plays of Maxim Gorki and Nikolai Gogol. When the last of Renata’s money had gone, Paulo thought it was time to return. It was a week since he had run away and he was tired of just wandering about with nowhere to go. He went to a telephone box and made a reverse-charge call home. On hearing his voice, his father didn’t sound angry, but was genuinely concerned for his physical and mental state. When he learned that his son was in Cabo Frio, Pedro offered to come and fetch him in the car, but Paulo preferred to return with Joel.

Lygia and Pedro had spent a week searching desperately for their son in mortuaries and police stations, and this experience had changed them profoundly. They agreed that he should not return to the clinic and even said that they were interested in his work in the theatre; and they appeared to have permanently lifted the curfew of eleven o’clock at night. Paulo distrusted this offer. ‘After a week of panic, with no news of me,’ he was to say later, ‘they would have accepted any conditions, and so I took advantage of that.’ He grew his hair again, as well as a ridiculous beard, and no one told him off. In his very limited free time, he devoted himself to girls. Besides Renata and Fabíola (Márcia was not around much), he had also taken up with Genivalda, a rather plain, but very intelligent girl from the northeast of Brazil. Geni, as she preferred to be called, didn’t dress well, she didn’t live in a smart part of town and she didn’t study at the Catholic university in Rio or at one of the smart colleges. However, she seemed to know everything and that ensured her a place in the Paissandu circle.