Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (35 page)

It was Hilde who, after much insistence, convinced Paulo to get back into circulation. She invited him to attend the debate ‘Women and Communication’ at which she was to participate with the feminist Rose Marie Muraro at the Museu Nacional de Belas-Artes. Paulo’s justified paranoia would have reached unbearable levels had he known that among the audience was a spy, Deuteronômio Rocha dos Santos, who wrote a report on the meeting for the Section of Special Searches (part of the Dops) in which he said: ‘among those present was the journalist and writer Paulo Coelho, a personal friend of Hildegard Angel’.

As soon as he felt strong enough to go around without fear of being kidnapped again, Paulo’s first important step after what he referred to as the ‘black week’ was to search out the OTO. He had two reasons for going to see Frater Zaratustra: first, he wanted to understand what had happened in his apartment on that dreadful Saturday and, second, whatever the explanation, he was going to distance himself permanently from the sect. His fear of the Devil was such that he asked Euclydes-Zaratustra to meet him during the day at his parents’ house, where he had gone back to live, and, for good measure, he invited Roberto Menescal to be there as a witness. This turned out to be a good idea: to his surprise, on the appointed day, who should appear at the house in Gávea but Parzival XI, the self-crowned world head of the sect–the sinister and uncouth Marcelo Ramos Motta. Paulo decided to come straight to the point. After summarizing what had happened at his home and in prison, he asked: ‘I want to know what happened to me that Saturday and on the following days.’

Parzival XI eyed him scornfully. ‘You always knew that with us what counts is the law of the strongest. I taught you that, remember? According to the law of the strongest, whoever holds out succeeds. Those who don’t, fail. That’s it. You were weak and failed.’

Menescal, who was listening to the conversation from a distance, threatened to attack the visitor–something that would have endangered the Coelhos’ china and crystal, since Menescal practised aikido and the Crowleyite Ramos Motta was a black belt in ju-jitsu.

But Paulo restrained him and, for the first time, addressed the high priest by his real name: ‘So is that what the OTO is, Marcelo? On Saturday, the Devil appears in my house, on Monday, I’m arrested and on Wednesday, I’m abducted? That’s the OTO, is it? Well, in that case, my friend, I’m out of it.’

As soon as he found himself free from the sect, it was with great relief, as though he had sloughed off a great burden, that Paulo sat down at his typewriter and wrote an official document formalizing his rejection of the mysterious Ordo Templi Orientis. His brief and dramatic incursion into the kingdom of darkness had lasted less than two months:

What Paulo believed to be a break with the Devil and his followers did not mean the end of his paranoia. In fact he felt safe only when at home with his parents and with the doors locked. It was during this period of despair that the idea of leaving Brazil for a while, at least until the fear subsided, first surfaced. With Gisa out of his life there was nothing to keep him in Brazil. The sales of
Gita
had outstripped even the most optimistic expectations and the money kept pouring into his bank account.

This coincided with another important moment in Paulo’s progress: the launch of his first book. Although it was not the Great Work he dreamed of producing, it was nevertheless a book. It had been published at the end of 1973 by the highly regarded Editora Forense, which specialized in educational books, and was entitled
O Teatro na Educação
[
Theatre in Education
]. In it he explained the programme of courses he had given in state schools in Mato Grosso. Not even an admiring review by Gisa published on their weekly page in
Tribuna
had been able to get sales moving: a year after its launch, the book had sold only 500 copies out of an initial print run of 3,000. Although it was predictable that the work would pass almost unnoticed in the world of letters, this was still his first book and therefore deserved to be celebrated. When Gisa had arrived home on the day it came out, on the dining table stood two glasses and a miniature of Benedictine liqueur that Paulo had won at the age of fifteen and kept all that time, promising not to open it until he published his first book.

Not even this initial lack of success as an author or the wealth that came with fame, however, could shake the dream that he himself admitted had become an obsession: to be a writer known throughout the world. Even after he had become well known as a lyricist, that dream would return as strongly as ever when he was alone. A rapid flick through his diaries reveals, in sentences dotted here and there, that public recognition as a lyricist had not changed his plan one jot: he wanted to be not just another writer but ‘world-famous’. He regretted that by the time they were his age, The Beatles ‘had already conquered the world’, but Paulo didn’t lose hope that, one day, his dreams would be realized. ‘I’m like a warrior waiting to make his entrance on the scene,’ he wrote, ‘and my destiny is success. My great talent is to fight for it.’

Raul had been very shaken by his friend’s imprisonment, and Paulo had no difficulty in convincing him, too, to go abroad for a while. Less than ten days after their decision to leave Brazil, they were ready for departure. The fact that they had to go to the Dops to receive a visa to leave the country–a requirement imposed by the dictatorship on anyone wanting to travel abroad–so frightened Paulo that he had a serious asthma attack. But on 14 July 1974, a month and a half after his kidnapping, the two partners landed in New York with no fixed return date.

They each had on their arm a new girlfriend. Raul had separated from Edith, the mother of his daughter, Simone, and was living with another American, Gloria Vaquer, the sister of the drummer Jay Vaquer. Abandoned by Gisa, Paulo had started a relationship with the beautiful Maria do Rosário do Nascimento e Silva, a slim brunette of twenty-three. She was an actress, scriptwriter and film producer. She was also the daughter of a judge from Minas Gerais, Luiz Gonzaga do Nascimento e Silva, who, a week before the trip, had been named Minister for Social Services by General Ernesto Geisel, the President of the Republic. Despite her father’s political activities, Rosário was a left-wing activist who hid those being persecuted by the regime and who had been arrested when filming statements by workers at the Central do Brasil railway station in Rio. When she met Paulo, through Hilde Angel, she was just emerging from a tempestuous three-year marriage to Walter Clark, the then director-general of the Globo television network.

The bank balance of any of those four travellers was more than enough for them to stay in comfort at the Hotel Plaza opposite Central Park or in the Algonquin, both natural staging posts for stars passing through New York. In the crazy 1970s, however, the in thing was to stay in ‘exciting’ places. So it was that Paulo, Rosário, Raul and Gloria knocked at the door of the Marlton Hotel, or, to be more precise, on the iron bars that protected the entrance of the hotel from the street gangs of Greenwich Village.

Built in 1900, the Marlton was famous for welcoming anyone, be they pimps, prostitutes, drug-dealers, film stars, jazz musicians or beatniks. Such people as the actors John Barrymore, Geraldine Page and Claire Bloom, the singers Harry Belafonte, Carmen McRae and Miriam Makeba and beat writer Jack Kerouac had stayed in some of its 114 rooms, most of which shared a bathroom on the landing. The fanatical feminist Valerie Solanas left one of those rooms in June 1968, armed with a revolver, to carry out an attack on the pop artist Andy Warhol that nearly killed him. Raul and Gloria’s apartment, which had a sitting room, bedroom and bathroom, cost US$300 a month. Paulo and Rosário had only a bedroom and bathroom, which cost US$200, but there was no refrigerator, which meant they had to spend their days drinking warm Coke and neat whisky–this, of course, when they weren’t smoking cannabis or sniffing cocaine, their main pastimes.

On 8 August 1974, the eyes of the whole world were turned on the United States. After two years and two months of involvement in the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon’s Republican government was suffering a very public death. The big decisions were taken in Washington, but the heart of America beat in New York. There seemed to be a more-than-usual electric atmosphere in the Big Apple. It was expected that at any moment either the President would be impeached or he would resign. After a night spent in a fashionable nightclub, Paulo and Rosário woke at three in the afternoon, went out for a big breakfast at Child, a rough bar a block away from the Marlton, and then returned to their room. They had a few lines of cocaine and when they came to, it was getting dark. On the radio on the bedside table, the reporter was announcing that in ten minutes there was to be a national radio and television transmission of an announcement by President Nixon.

Paulo jumped off the bed, saying: ‘Come on, Maria! Let’s go down and record the reactions of the people when he announces his resignation.’ He put on a denim jacket but no shirt and his knee-high riding boots, grabbed his portable recorder–a heavy thing the size of a telephone directory–filled his pockets with cassette tapes and hung his cine camera round Rosário’s neck, telling her to hurry: ‘Come on, Maria! We can’t miss this. It’s going to be better than the final of the World Cup!’

He turned on the recorder when they got outside and began describing what he could see, as though making a live radio report:

In the crowded restaurant, the two managed to find a place in front of the television that was suspended from the ceiling, its volume on maximum. Wearing a navy-blue suit and red tie, Nixon appeared on the screen, looking very sombre. A church-like silence fell in the bar as he began to read the speech in which he resigned from the most important position in the world. For almost fifteen minutes, the people standing around made not a sound as Nixon explained the reasons that had led him to this dramatic decision. His speech ended on a sad note: ‘To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer: may God’s grace be with you in all the days ahead.’

As soon as the speech had ended Paulo was out in the street, closely followed by Maria do Rosário, with the microphone to his mouth like a radio announcer.

The two returned to the Marlton, feeling very excited. Rosário got out at the third floor, where their apartment was, and Paulo took the lift up to the seventh, because he wanted Raul to listen to the tapes recording the madness that had taken hold of New York that evening. When he opened the door, without knocking, as was their habit, he found his partner lying flat out on the sofa, sleeping with his mouth open. On the small table next to him was a line of cocaine ready to be sniffed, a half-drunk bottle of whisky and a pile of money amounting to about US$5,000 in one hundred dollar bills. For someone coming from a public celebration as Paulo had, after having been witness to a spontaneous street festival, the shock of seeing his friend lying there, completely out of it, a victim of drugs and alcohol, was a real wake-up call. He was sad not only to see a friend in that state–a friend whom he had introduced to the world of drugs–but also because he realized that cocaine was leading him down the same path.
Paulo had never confessed this to anyone, not even to his diary, but he knew he was becoming drug-dependent. He returned to his room in a state of shock. He saw Rosário’s slim body lying naked on the bed, lit only by the bluish light from the street.

He sat shamefaced beside his girlfriend and gently stroked her back as he announced in a whisper: ‘Today is an historic day for me too. On 8 August 1974, I stopped sniffing cocaine.’

T
HEIR PLAN TO REMAIN IN NEW YORK
for a few months was cut short by an unforeseen incident. One evening, Paulo was trying out an electric can-opener and accidently let the sharp blade slip, catching his right hand. Rosário tried to staunch the flow of blood with a bath towel, and it immediately became a ball of blood. He was taken by ambulance to a first-aid station in Greenwich Village, where he learned that the gadget had sliced the tendon in the third finger of his right hand. He had emergency surgery and ended up with nine stitches in his finger and had to wear a metal splint for several weeks, which immobilized his hand. A few days later, he and Rosário left for Brazil, while Raul and Gloria travelled on to Memphis.

On his return to Rio, Paulo found that he was strong enough to confront his ghosts and decided to live alone in the apartment where he had lived with Gisa. However, his courage was short-lived. On 10 September, after two weeks, he was once again berthed in the secure port of his parents’ house in Gávea. Anxious to free himself of everything that might remind him of demons, prisons and abductions, before moving to their house, he sold all his books, records and pictures. When he saw his bare apartment, with nothing on the walls or shelves, he wrote in his diary: ‘I have just freed myself from the past.’ But it wasn’t going to be that
easy. His paranoia, fears and complexes continued to trouble him. He frequently confessed that he continued to feel guilty even about things that had happened during his childhood, such as having ‘placed my hand on a girl’s private parts’, or even ‘dreaming of doing sinful things with Mama’. But at least at home it was unlikely that anyone could simply abduct him, with no questions asked.

At a time when sexual promiscuity appeared to carry few risks, he recorded in his diary the women who came and went in his life without saying anything much about them, apart from some statement as to how well this woman or that had performed in bed. Sometimes he set up meetings with ex-girlfriends, but the truth is that he had still not got over the end of his affair with Gisa, to whom he continued to write and from whom he never received a reply. When he learned that Vera Richter was back with her ex-husband he noted: ‘Today I went into town to resolve my psychological problem with a few shares in the Bank of Brazil. I was thinking of selling them and giving the money to Mário in exchange for having possessed Vera for more than a year. In fact it was Vera who possessed me, but in my muddled head I always thought it was the other way round.’

His partnership with Raul continued to produce impressive results, but the ship of the Sociedade Alternativa was beginning to let in water. Even before the ‘dark night’ and Paulo’s imprisonment, disagreements between them and Philips as to the meaning of the Sociedade Alternativa had begun to arise. Everything indicates that Raul had been serious about creating a new community–a sect, religion or movement–that would practise and spread the commandments of Aleister Crowley, Parzival XI and Frater Zaratustra. For the executives of the recording company, however, the Sociedade Alternativa was nothing more than a brand name they could use to boost the sales of records. The president of Philips in Brazil, André Midani, a Syrian who had become a Brazilian national, had created an informal working group to help the company market its artists better. This dream team, which was coordinated by Midani and the composer Roberto Menescal, consisted of the market researcher Homero Icaza Sánchez, the writer Rubem Fonseca and the journalists Artur da Távola, Dorrit Harazim, Nelson Motta, Luis Carlos Maciel, João Luís de Albuquerque and Zuenir Ventura. The group would meet once a week in
a suite in some luxury hotel in Rio and spend a whole day there discussing the profile and work of a particular Philips artist. At the first meeting, they would simply talk among themselves, and then the following week, they would repeat the exercise with the artist present. Those taking part were paid well–Zuenir Ventura describes how for each meeting he would receive ‘four thousand or four million, I can’t remember which, but I know that it was the equivalent of my monthly salary as a director of the Rio branch of the magazine
Visão
’.

When it was time for Paulo and Raul to face the group, it was Raul who was in the grip of paranoia. He was sure he was being followed by plainclothes policemen and had taken on a bodyguard, the investigator Millen Yunes, from the Leblon police department, who, in his spare time, was to accompany the musician wherever he went. When Paulo told him that Menescal had invited them to be questioned by the select group of intellectuals, Raul declared: ‘It’s a trick on the part of the police! I bet you the police have infiltrated the group in order to record what we say. Tell Menescal we’re not going.’

Paulo assured his partner that there was no danger, that he knew most of the participants and that some were even people who were opposed to the dictatorship; finally he promised that neither Midani nor Menescal would play such a trick. Since Raul refused to budge, Paulo went alone to the meeting, but because of Raul’s concerns, he placed a tape recorder on the table so that he could give the tapes to his partner afterwards. Before the discussion began, someone asked Paulo to explain, in his own words, what exactly the Sociedade Alternativa was. From what he can remember more than three decades later, he hadn’t taken any drugs or been smoking cannabis; however, to judge by what he said, which was all captured on tape, you would think he must have taken something:

Clarity was obviously not his strong point, but the working group seemed to be used to people like him. Paulo paused a second for breath, and then went on:

‘More or less,’ the journalist Artur da Távola replied. Since most of those present had understood none of this nonsense, the problem the group put to Paulo was a simple one: if this was the explanation he and Raul were going to give to the press, then they should prepare themselves to see the idea made mincemeat of by the media. Dorrit Harazim, who, at the time, was editor of the international section of the magazine
Veja
, thought that if they wanted to convince the public that the Sociedade Alternativa was not merely a marketing strategy but some kind of mystical or political movement, then they would need far more objective arguments: ‘First of all, you need to decide whether the Sociedade Alternativa is political or metaphysical. With the arguments you put to us, it will be very hard for you to explain to anyone what the Sociedade Alternativa actually is.’

This was the first time the working group had reached a unanimous decision about anything, and it fell to Artur da Távola to remind them that they risked losing a gold mine: ‘We need to be very careful because we’re pointing out defects in a duo who sell hundreds of thousands of records. We mustn’t forget that Raul and Paulo are already a runaway success.’

However, there was another matter bothering the group: Raul and Paulo’s insistence on telling the press that they had seen flying saucers. They all believed that this was something that could affect the commercial standing of the duo, and they suggested that Paulo tell Raul to stop it. They had good reason to be concerned. Some months earlier, Raul had given a long interview to
Pasquim
and, inevitably, he was pressed by the journalists to explain the Sociedade Alternativa and his sightings of flying saucers, giving him the chance to ramble on at will. He explained that it
was a society that wasn’t governed by any truth or any leader, but had arisen ‘like a realization of a new tactic, of a new method’. As his reply was somewhat unclear, he made another attempt to explain what he meant: ‘The Sociedade Alternativa is the fruit of the actual mechanism of the thing,’ he went on, adding that it had already crossed frontiers. ‘We’re in constant correspondence with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who are also part of the Society.’ With no one there to keep a check on him, Raul even made up facts about things that were public knowledge, such as his first meeting with Paulo. ‘I met Paulo in Barra da Tijuca,’ he told
Pasquim
. ‘At five in the afternoon, I was there meditating and he was too, but I didn’t know him then–it was then that we saw the flying saucer.’ One of the interviewers asked whether he could describe the supposed UFO and he said: ‘It was sort of…silver, but with an orange aura round it. It just stood there, enormous it was. Paulo came running over to me, I didn’t know him, but he said, “Can you see what I see?” We just sat there and the saucer zigzagged off and vanished.’ It was statements like these that made the Philips work group fear that the duo risked exposing themselves to public ridicule.

When the session ended, Paulo took the recorded tapes to his partner. Since the working group’s comments had not been exactly flattering, instead of telling Raul to his face what had happened, Paulo preferred to record another tape on arriving home, in which he gave Raul his version of the meeting:

Although the idea of the Sociedade Alternativa proved alluring enough to attract hundreds of thousands of record buyers and an unknown number of Devil-worshippers from all over Brazil, time would prove the working group right. As time went on, the expression ‘Sociedade Alternativa’ would be remembered only as the chorus of a song from the 1970s.

Now, not long after his return from New York with his hand strapped up, and at the height of the success of
Gita
(which had been released in their absence), Paulo was invited by Menescal to join the working group as a consultant, with the same pay as the other members, which meant an additional US$11,600 per month. Money was flooding in from all sides. When he received the first set of accounts from the recording company for initial sales of
Gita
, he wondered whether to invest the money in shares or to buy a summer house in Araruama, but finally decided upon an apartment in the busy Rua Barata Ribeiro, in Copacabana. At this time, Paulo also wrote three sets of lyrics–‘Cartão Postal’, ‘Esse Tal de Roque Enrow’ and ‘O Toque’–for the LP
Fruto Proibido
, that the singer Rita Lee released at the beginning of 1975, and he also produced film scripts for Maria do Rosário. In between, he acted in the porn movie
Tangarela
,
a Tanga de Cristal
. In December 1974, the recording company abandoned the working group, but then, at Menescal’s suggestion, André Midani contracted Paulo Coelho to work as a company executive, managing the creative department.