Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (41 page)

He looked at the stranger–a man in his forties of European appearance, in jacket and tie–and summoned up his courage to address him in English in a deliberately hostile way: ‘I saw you two months ago in
Dachau and I’m going to make one thing clear: I have not, nor do I wish to have, anything to do with occultism, sects or orders. If that’s why you’re here, then you’ve had a wasted journey.’

The man looked up and reacted quite calmly and, to Paulo’s surprise, he replied in fluent Portuguese, albeit with a strong accent: ‘Don’t worry. Come and join me so that we can talk.’

‘May I bring my partner?’

‘No, I want to talk to you alone.’

Paulo made a sign to Chris to reassure her that everything was all right. Then he went and sat at the other man’s table and asked: ‘Talk about what?’

‘What’s all this about a concentration camp?’

‘I thought I saw you there two months ago.’

The man said that there must be some confusion. Paulo insisted: ‘I’m sorry, but I think that we met in February in the concentration camp at Dachau. You don’t remember?’

The man then admitted that Paulo might have seen him, but that it could also have been a phenomenon known as ‘astral projection’, something Paulo knew about and to which he had referred many times in his diary. The man said: ‘I wasn’t at the concentration camp, but I understand what you’re saying. Let me look at the palm of your hand.’ Paulo cannot remember whether he showed him his left or his right hand, but the mysterious man studied it hard and then began to speak very slowly. He did not seem to be reading the lines on his hand; it was more as if he were seeing a vision: ‘There is some unfinished business here. Something fell apart around 1974 or 1975. In magical terms, you grew up in the Tradition of the Serpent, and you may not even know what the Tradition of the Dove is.’

As a voracious reader of everything to do with magic, Paulo knew that these traditions were two different routes leading to the same place: magical knowledge, understood as the ability to use gifts that not all humans succeed in developing. The Tradition of the Dove (also known as the Tradition of the Sun) is a system of gradual, continuous learning, during which any disciple or novice will always depend on a Master, with a capital ‘M’. On the other hand, the Tradition of the Serpent (or Tradition
of the Moon) is usually chosen by intuitive individuals and, according to its initiates, by those who, in a previous existence, had some connection with or commitment to magic. The two routes are not mutually exclusive, and candidates to the so-called magical education are recommended to follow the Tradition of the Dove once they have followed that of the Serpent.

Paulo began to relax when the man finally introduced himself. He was French, of Jewish origin, worked in Paris as an executive for the Dutch multinational Philips and was an active member of an old, mysterious Catholic religious order called RAM which stood for Regnus Agnus Mundi–Lamb of the Kingdom of the World–or ‘Rigour, Adoration and Mercy’. He had gained his knowledge of Portuguese from long periods spent in Brazil and Portugal working for Philips. His real name–which could be ‘Chaim’, ‘Jayme’ or ‘Jacques’–has never been revealed by Paulo, who began to refer to him publicly as ‘the Master’, ‘Jean’ or simply ‘J’.

In measured tones, Jean said that he knew Paulo had started out along the road towards black magic, but had interrupted that journey. He said: ‘If you want to take up the road to magic again and if you would like to do so within our order, then I can guide you. But, once you have made the decision, you will have to do whatever I tell you without argument.’

Astonished by what he was hearing, Paulo asked for time to reflect. Jean was uncompromising: ‘You have a day to make your decision. I shall wait for you here tomorrow at the same time.’

Paulo could think of nothing else. While he had felt great relief at leaving the OTO and rejecting the ideas of Crowley, the world of magic, as opposed to black magic, continued to hold an enormous fascination for him. He recalled later: ‘Emotionally I was still connected to it. It’s like falling in love with a woman, and sending her away because she really doesn’t fit in with your life. But you go on loving her. One day she turns up in a bar, as J did, and you say: “Please, go away. I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want to suffer again.”’

Unable to sleep, he spent all night talking to Chris, and it was dawn when he finally made up his mind. Something was telling him that this was an important moment and he decided to accept the challenge, for good or ill. Some hours later, he met for the second (or was it the third?)
time the mysterious man who from that moment was to be his Master–always with a capital M. Jean explained to Paulo what the first steps towards his initiation would be: on the Tuesday of the following week he was to go to the Vikingskipshuset, the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.

‘Go to the room where you will find three ships called the
Gokstad
,
Oseberg
and
Borre
on display. There someone will hand you something.’

Not quite understanding what he was being asked to do, Paulo wanted to know more. ‘But what time should I be at the museum? How will I recognize the person? Is it a man or a woman? What will they give me?’

As Jean stood up, leaving a few coins on the table in payment for the cup of tea he had drunk, he satisfied only a part of Paulo’s curiosity: ‘Be in the room when the museum opens its doors. The other questions need no answer. You will be told when we are to see each other again.’ And then he vanished, as if he had never existed–if indeed he ever did exist. Whether real or supernatural, one thing was certain: he had left his new disciple a task that would begin with a journey of almost 1,000 kilometres to the capital of Norway, a city Paulo had never been to before. They drove there through the snow via Holland, Germany and Denmark. On the appointed day, Paulo woke early, worried that he might arrive late and fearing that any queues and groups of tourists at the museum might delay him. The publicity leaflet from the museum, which he had picked up in the lobby of the hotel, informed him that the doors opened at nine in the morning, but he set off a whole hour earlier. Situated on the Bygdøy Peninsula, ten minutes’ drive from the centre of the city, the Vikingskipshuset is a large yellow building in the shape of a cross, with no windows and a pointed roof. It was only when he arrived that Paulo realized he had misunderstood the opening hours. The museum was open from nine in the morning until six in the evening during the high season, but from October to April, the doors only opened at eleven. He spent the time reflecting on the decision he had just taken. ‘I had tried everything in order to realize my dream to be a writer, but I was still a nobody,’ Paulo was to recall later. ‘I had abandoned black magic and the occult sciences when I discovered that they were of no help to me at all, so why not try the route Jean was suggesting?’

At eleven on the dot, he joined the half-dozen Japanese tourists who were also waiting and followed the arrows to the room with high, curved walls like a church nave, where the
Gokstad
,
Oseberg
and
Borre
were displayed. There was only one other person there–a pretty blonde woman of about forty, who seemed to be absorbed in reading a plaque on one of the walls. When she heard his footsteps, she turned, revealing that she was holding something long, like a walking stick or a sword. She said nothing, but walked towards him, took a silver ring bearing the image of an ouroboros–the snake that devours its own tail–from the ring finger of her left hand and placed it on the middle finger of his left hand. She then traced an imaginary circle on the floor with the stick or sword, indicating that Paulo should stand inside it. Then, she made a gesture as if pouring the contents of a cup into the circle. She moved her right hand across Paulo’s face without touching it, indicating that he should shut his eyes. ‘At that moment I felt that someone had liberated stagnant energies,’ he said years later, ‘as though the spiritual floodgate of a lake had been opened, allowing fresh water to enter.’ When he opened his eyes again, the only sign left by the mysterious woman was the strange ring, which he would wear for the rest of his life.

Paulo would only be in contact with Jean again much later, when he returned to Brazil. At the end of April 1982, he was supposed to return to his job with TV Globo, but after discussing it at length with Chris, he decided not to return to work but to remain in Europe. They had more than enough money to allow them to stay for another three months in Amsterdam.

And so it wasn’t until the middle of July that they drove the 1,900 kilometres from Amsterdam to Lisbon–a journey of three days–from where they would take a plane to Brazil. However, the first visible change in Paulo Coelho’s behaviour following his meeting with his Master took place on European soil. Only some supernatural force could have persuaded someone as careful with money as he was to donate the Mercedes to a charitable institution, the Sisterhood of the Infant Jesus for the Blind, rather than selling it and pocketing the thousand dollars.

W
HEN THEY ARRIVED IN RIO,
reinvigorated by their eight long months in Europe, Paulo and Chris settled back into the ground-floor apartment in Rua Raimundo Correia, in which her parents had been living since their departure. He began his initiation tasks. These so-called ordeals, which would lead to his being admitted to RAM, would arrive in either a letter or a phone call from Jean. The first of these, ‘the ritual of the glass’, involved a short ceremony that he was to perform alone each day for six months, always at the same hour. He had to fill a glass that had never been used with water, and place it on the table. He then had to open the New Testament at any page, read out loud a paragraph at random and drink the water. The passage he had read was to be marked with the date of the reading. If, on the following days, he alighted on the same text, then he should read the following paragraph. If he had read that one too, then he was to find another that had not been previously read. Paulo chose the early morning as the best time to perform this penance, so that it would not clash with anything else. And since no specific instruction had been given as to the size or shape of the glass, he bought a small shot glass, which could, if necessary, be discreetly carried around with a copy of the New Testament.

Fortunately, none of the trials demanded by Jean prevented him from leading a normal life. Money continued to be no problem, but his partnership with Raul had clearly fallen out of fashion. Their records continued to sell, but royalties from the recording company were not pouring in as they had before. Although a regular income from the five apartments he rented out guaranteed a comfortable lifestyle, his lack of activity was likely to propel him once more into depression. Therefore the best thing to do would be to find some more work as soon as possible.

A year before his trip to Europe, Paulo had persuaded Chris that she should start a company, Shogun Editora e Arte Ltda, which was primarily created for tax purposes to cover the architectural work she was doing, but which also meant that they both had business cards, letterheads and envelopes stating that they were a legal entity. In addition, as he said, when the time came for him to write his books, why not publish them himself? On returning to Brazil, he decided to put this idea into action and rented two rooms in a building on Rua Cinco de Julho in Copacabana, two blocks from the apartment where they lived. Although it managed to grow and even to bring in some income, Shogun was never more than a small family firm whose day-to-day business was handled by its two owners, with the accounts done by Paulo’s father, who had just retired. They had only one paid employee–an office boy.

Less than three months after their return to Brazil, in October 1982, the publishing house launched its first book:
Arquivos do Inferno
[
Archives of Hell
], a collection of sixteen texts written by the proprietor, Paulo Coelho. On the cover was a picture of the author sitting cross-legged in front of a typewriter, holding a cigarette and apparently deep in thought, while beside him are two young women with bare breasts: one was Chris, and the other was Stella Paula, his old colleague from his Crowley witchcraft days. In the photo she had such long hair that it not only covered most of her breasts but fell below her waist. Although it was little more than a booklet (it was only 106 pages long),
Arquivos do Inferno
was certainly a record-breaker in terms of prefaces, forewords and notes on the inside flaps. The preface, entitled ‘Preface to the Dutch Edition’, was signed by the pop genius Andy Warhol (who, as Paulo confessed years later, never read the book):

The second was written by Jimmy Brouwer, the owner of the hotel where the couple had stayed in Amsterdam; the third by the journalist Artur da Távola, Paulo’s colleague at Philips; the fourth by the psychiatrist Eduardo Mascarenhas, who at the time was the presenter of a television programme and a Member of Parliament; and the fifth by Roberto Menescal, who was one of the book’s two dedicatees, the other being Chris. Nothing about the book quite fits. According to the cover, it was supposedly a co-edition by Shogun with a Dutch publisher, the Brouwer Free Press, a firm that apparently never existed. A press release distributed by Shogun confused things still more by stating that the book had been published abroad, which was not true: ‘After its successful launch in Holland, where it was acclaimed by critics and public alike after only two months in the shops,
Arquivos do Inferno
, by Paulo Coelho, will be in all the bookshops in Brazil this month.’ The information given about the author’s previous works muddied the waters still further, including as it did something entitled
Lon: Diário de um Mago
, which had apparently been published by Shogun in 1979, even though the firm did not exist at that time and
Diário de um Mago
(translated as
The Pilgrimage
in English) wasn’t published until 1987. On one of the few occasions, years later, when he spoke about the matter, Paulo gave a strange explanation: ‘It can only have been a prophecy.’ On the imprint page, in tiny print, is another peculiarity: ‘300 copies of the first editions in Portuguese and Dutch will be numbered and signed by the author and sold at US$350 each, the money to be donated to the Order of the Golden Star.’

The book did not contain a single chapter or essay that dealt with the theme mentioned in the title–hell. The sixteen texts are a jumble of subjects arranged in no particular order, covering such disparate matters as the proverbs of the English poet William Blake, the rudiments of homoeopathy and astrology, and passages from manuscripts by a certain Pero Vaz and from Paulo’s own works, such as ‘The Pieces’:

The most striking feature of the book is the second chapter, entitled ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’. Paulo makes it clear that this was not written by him, but was dictated by the spirit of Torquemada, the Dominican friar who was in charge of the trials held by the Holy Office in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. As though wanting to clear himself of any responsibility for its content, the author explains that not only the spelling and the underlinings but also ‘some syntactical errors’ were retained exactly as dictated by the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor. The eight pages of the chapter are filled with celebrations of torture and martyrdom as instruments in the defence of the faith:

Apparently wanting to attribute a scientific character to this psychic writing, Paulo ends the text with a curious parenthetical observation: ‘[After these words, no other communication was made by what called itself the “spirit of Torquemada”. As it is always important to note the conditions in which a transmission was made–with a view to future scientific investigations–I recorded the ambient temperature (29°C), the atmospheric pressure (760 mmHg), weather conditions (cloudy) and the time the message was received (21h15m to 22h07m)].’

This was not the first occasion on which Paulo had shown an interest in the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In September 1971, he had thought of writing a play on the subject and during his research he came across a book by Henrique Hello, published by Editora Vozes in 1936 and reprinted in 1951, the title of which was
The Truth about the Inquisition
. The ninety-page text is a long peroration in defence of the objectives and methods used by the Inquisition. Part had been quoted in the preface to
O Santo Inquérito
[
The Holy Inquisition
], written in 1966 by the playwright Dias Gomes. When he finished reading it, Paulo had concluded ironically: ‘I set to work on the play about the Inquisition. It’s an easy play. It simply plagiarizes what someone called Henrique Hello said about it. No, it doesn’t plagiarize, it criticizes. The guy wrote a book called
The Truth about the Inquisition
in favour of the Inquisition!’

Probably because of his imprisonment and abduction in 1974, Paulo held back from criticizing the author and simply transcribed his words. A comparison between the content of
Arquivos do Inferno
and the 1936 publication shows that if it was in fact an example of psychic writing, the
spirit that dictated ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’ was that of Henrique Hello and not Torquemada, since 95 per cent of the text is simply copied from Hello’s work.

None of this, however, surpasses the extraordinary piece of information the author gives at the beginning of ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’. He states there that the automatic writing had occurred ‘on the night of 28 May 1974’. The fact is that, between 21.15 and 22.07 on the night of 28 May 1974, Paulo was lying handcuffed on the floor of a car with his head covered by a hood and was being driven to the buildings of the DOI-Codi. It is hard to believe that the prison guards of one of the most violent prisons of the Brazilian dictatorship would have allowed a prisoner to write such an essay, even though it was a treatise in praise of torture. The author seems to have realized that
Arquivos do Inferno
would not stand up to scrutiny, and once the first, modest print run had sold out, he did not publish it again. When he had become an international name, the work was mentioned discreetly on his website: ‘In 1982 he published his first book,
Arquivos do Inferno
, which made no impact whatsoever.’

A quarter of a century after this major failure,
Arquivos
became a rarity sought by collectors in auctions on the Internet with starting prices of about US$220, as though Paulo’s initial fantasy were finally coming to fruition.

The lack of success of Shogun’s debut book acted as an important lesson, since it made it clear that this was an undertaking requiring a professional approach. Determined to do things properly, Paulo took over the management of the business, and his first step was to take a seven-week correspondence course on financial planning. The course seems to have borne fruit, since in 1984, two years after it was set up, Shogun was ranked thirty-fourth among Brazilian publishers listed in the specialist magazine
Leia Livros
, rivalling traditional publishing houses such as Civilização Brasileira and Agir, and even Rocco (which some years later would become Paulo’s publisher in Brazil). Shogun rented stands at book fairs and biennials and had a backlist of more than seventy titles.

Among the authors published, besides the proprietors themselves, there were only two well-known names, neither of whom was exactly a
writer: the rock singer Neusinha Brizola, the daughter of the then governor of Rio, Leonel Brizola (
O Livro Negro de Neusinha Brizola
[
The Black Book of Neusinha Brizola
]), and the ever-present ‘close enemy’, Raul Seixas (
As Aventuras de Raul Seixas na Cidade de Thor
[
Raul Seixas’ Adventures in the City of Thor
]). Shogun’s success was, in fact, due to hundreds and thousands of anonymous poets from all over Brazil who, like the owner of Shogun, had dreamed for years of one day having a book of their poetry published. In a country where hundreds of young authors were desperate to publish, Shogun came up with the perfect solution: the ‘Raimundo Correia Poetry Competition’.

Paulo placed small advertisements in newspapers and left flyers at the doors of theatres and cinemas, inviting unpublished poets from across Brazil to take part in the competition, which had been named after the street in which Paulo and Chris lived, in turn named after an influential Brazilian poet who had died in 1911. The rules were simple. The competition was open to poems written in Portuguese by ‘authors, whether amateur or professional, published or not, and of any age’. Each person could submit up to three poems of a maximum length of two pages double-spaced, and a ‘committee of critics and experts of high standing’ (whose names were never revealed) would select those to be included in an anthology to be published by Shogun. Those selected would receive a contract under which they committed themselves to paying US$175, for which they would receive ten copies. To the couple’s surprise, one of the competitions received no fewer than 1,150 poems, of which 116 were selected for a book entitled
Poetas Brasileiros
. The publishers ran no financial risk at all, because the work was published only after the authors had paid up. Each contributor would receive, along with the books, a certificate produced by Shogun and signed by Chris, and a handwritten note from Paulo: