A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho. Fernando Morais
passed, Paulo’s doubts became certainties. He began to hate the priests (‘a band of retrogrades’) and all the duties, whether religious or scholastic, that they imposed on the boys. He felt the Jesuits had deceived him. Seen from a distance, sermons he had once believed to contain solid truths were now remembered as ‘slowly administered doses of poison to make us hate living’, as he wrote in his diary. And he deeply regretted ever having taken those empty words seriously. ‘Idiot that I was, I even began to believe that life was worthless,’ he wrote, ‘and that with death always watching, I was obliged to go to confession on a regular basis so as to avoid going to hell.’ After much torment and many sleepless nights, at almost seventeen years of age, Paulo knew that he no longer wanted to hear about church, sermons or sin. And he hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming a good student during his second year on the science course. He was equally convinced that he would invest all his beliefs and energy in what he saw not as a vocation but as a profession – that of being a writer.
One term was more than enough for everyone to realize that the college had lost all meaning for him. ‘I have gone from being a bad pupil to being a dreadful pupil.’ His school report shows that this was no exaggeration. He was always near the bottom of the class, and he managed to do worse in each exam he sat. In the first monthly tests he got an average of just over 5, thanks to a highly suspect 9 in chemistry. In May, his average fell to 4.4, but alarm bells only started to ring in June, when his average fell to 3.7.
That month, Pedro and Lygia were called to a meeting at the school and asked to bring his report book. The news they received could not have been worse. A priest read out the fifth article of the school rules, which all parents had to sign when their son was admitted to the school and in which it was stated that those who did not achieve the minimum mark required would be expelled. If Paulo continued along the same path, he would undoubtedly fail and his subsequent expulsion from one of the most traditional schools in the country would thereafter blot his scholastic record. There was only one way to avoid expulsion and to save both student and parents from such ignominy. The priest suggested that they take the initiative and move their son at once to another school. He went on to say that St Ignatius had never done this before. This exception was being made in deference to the fact that the pupil in question was the grandson of one of the first pupils at the college, Arthur Araripe Júnior, ‘Mestre Tuca’, who had gone there in 1903.
Pedro and Lygia returned home, devastated. They knew that their son smoked in secret and had often smelled alcohol on his breath, and some relatives had complained that he was becoming a bad example for the other children. ‘That boy’s trouble,’ his aunts would whisper, ‘he’s going to end up leading all his younger cousins astray.’ What, up until then, had been termed Paulo’s ‘strange behaviour’ was restricted to the family circle. However, if he were to leave St Ignatius, even without being expelled, this would bring shame upon his parents and reveal them as having failed to bring him up properly. And if, as his father was always saying, a son was a reflection of his family, then the Coelhos had more than enough reason to feel that their image had been tarnished. At a time when corporal punishment was commonplace among Brazilian parents, Pedro and Lygia had never lifted a hand against Paulo, but they were rigorous in the punishments they meted out. So when Pedro announced that he had enrolled Paulo at Andrews College, where he would continue in the science stream, he also told his son that any future holidays were cancelled and that his allowance was temporarily suspended – if he wanted money for cigarettes and beer he would have to work.
If this was meant as a form of punishment, then it backfired, because Paulo loved the change. Andrews was not only a lay college and infinitely more liberal than St Ignatius but co-educational, which added a delightful novelty to the school day: girls. Besides this, there were political discussions, film study groups and even an amateur drama group, which he joined before he even met any of his teachers. He had ventured into the world of the theatre a year earlier, when, during the long end-of-year holiday, he had locked himself in his room, determined to write a play. He would only come out for lunch and dinner, telling his parents that he was studying. After four days, he finished The Ugly Boy, which he pretentiously referred to as ‘a petit guignol à la Aluísio Azevedo’, a synopsis of which he recorded in his diary:
In this play, I present the ugly person in society. It’s the story of a young man rejected by society who ends up committing suicide. The scenes are played out by silhouettes, while four narrators describe the feelings and actions of the characters. During the interval between the first and second acts, someone at the back of the stalls sings a really slow bossa nova [a style of Brazilian music that has its roots in samba and cool jazz] whose words relate to the first act. I think it will work really well. This year it’s going to be put on at home in the conservatory.
Fortunately, his critical sense won out over his vanity, and a week later, he tore up this first incursion into play-writing and gave it a six-word epitaph: ‘Rubbish. I’ll write another one soon.’ And it was as a playwright (as yet unpublished) that he approached the amateur theatre group at Andrews College, known as Taca.
As for schoolwork, teachers and exams, none of these seemed to concern him. On the rare occasions when these topics merited a mention in his diary, he would dismiss them with a short, usually negative sentence: ‘I’m doing badly at school, I’m going to fail in geometry, physics and chemistry’; ‘I can’t even get myself to pick up my schoolbooks: anything serves as a distraction, however stupid’; ‘Classes seem to get longer and longer’; ‘I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with me, it’s beyond description.’ Admitting that he was doing badly at school was a way of hiding the truth: he was on the slippery slope.
Up until October, two months before the end of the year, all his marks in every subject had been below 5. His father thought that it was time to rein him in once and for all and carry out his earlier threat: his cousin, Hildebrando Góes Filho, found Paulo work in a dredging company that operated at the entrance to the port of Rio de Janeiro. The pay wasn’t even enough to cover Paulo’s travel and cigarettes. Every day after morning classes, he would rush home, have lunch and take a bus to Santo Cristo, an area by the docks. A tugboat would take him over to the dredger, where he would spend the rest of the day with a slate in his hand, making a cross each time the machine picked up the rubbish from the seabed and deposited it in a barge. It seemed to him utterly pointless and reminded him of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is forced to push a stone up to the top of a mountain only to have the stone roll back down to the bottom, so that he has to begin his task all over again. ‘It’s never-ending,’ Paulo wrote in his diary. ‘Just when I think it’s finished, it starts again.’
The punishment had no positive result. He continued to do badly at school and when he knew he ran the risk of failing the whole year, he recorded the fact quite shamelessly: ‘A friend has told me I’m going to be kept down in maths,’ he wrote. ‘And meanwhile the morning is so beautiful, so musical, that I’m even rather happy. Oh, God, what a life. What a life, what a life.’ At the end of the year, his report confirmed the expected results: his final average of 4.2 meant that he had failed in every subject.
Paulo seemed to be growing ever more indifferent to the world in which he found himself. He accepted uncomplainingly the work on the dredger and didn’t even care when all he received from his parents at Christmas was a penknife. The only thing that interested him was writing, whether in the form of novels, plays or poetry. He had recently returned to poetry and was writing furiously. After some thought, he had concluded that it was no disgrace to write verses if he was not yet ready to start writing his novel. ‘I have so many things to write about! The problem is that I can’t get started and I haven’t got the patience to carry on with it,’ he moaned, and went on: ‘All the same, that is my chosen profession.’
As he settled into the house in Gávea, he discovered that there were others among the young who were interested in books and literature. Since there were fifteen boys and girls, they created a literary club, which they called Rota 15, the name Rota being derived from Rua Rodrigo Otávio, which crossed Rua Padre Leonel Franca, where Paulo’s house was, and at the corner of which they would all meet. Paulo’s poetic output was such that when Rota 15 decided to produce a mimeographed booklet of poetry he contributed an anthology of thirteen poems (among them the award-winning ‘Thirteen-year-old