A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho. Fernando Morais
effectiveness of his ideas, though, that he had stuck to his desk at home a summary of the tasks he would have to carry out during that year in order to achieve fame:
Literary programme for the Year 1965
Buy all the Rio newspapers each day of the week.
Check the book reviews, who writes them and the names of the editors of the papers.
Send articles to the relevant people and a covering note to the editors. Telephone them, asking when the article will appear. Tell the editors what my ambitions are.
Find contacts for publication.
Repeat this process for magazines.
Find out whether anyone who has received my texts would like to receive them on a regular basis.
Repeat the same process with radio stations. Send my own proposal for a programme or send contributions to current programmes. Contact the relevant people by phone, asking when my contribution will be transmitted, if it is.
Find out the addresses of famous writers and write to them sending my poetry and asking for their comments and for help in placing them in the papers they write for. Write again if there’s no reply.
Go to all book signings, lectures, first nights of plays, and try to get talking with the big names and get myself noticed.
Organize productions of plays I’ve written and invite people belonging to the literary circle of the older generation, and get their ‘patronage’.
Try to get in touch with the new generation of writers, hold drinks parties, go to places where they go. Continue with my internal publicity campaign, keeping my colleagues informed of my triumphs.
The plan seemed infallible, but the truth is that Paulo continued to be humiliatingly, painfully unknown. He didn’t manage to get anything published; he didn’t get to know any critics, journalists or anyone who could open a door for him or reach out a hand to help him up the ladder of success. To make matters worse, he continued to do badly in his studies and was clearly miserable at having to go to college every day – what was the point when his marks went from bad to worse? He spent the days in a state of abstraction, as if his mind were in another world.
It was during this state of lethargy that he got to know another boy at school, Joel Macedo, who was studying classics. They were the same age, but Joel was the opposite of Paulo: he was extrovert and politically articulate, and one of the youngest members of the so-called ‘Paissandu generation’ – film-lovers and intellectuals who would meet at the old-fashioned Paissandu cinema in the Flamengo district. He was a cultural activist, led the Taca drama group and was responsible for Agora, a small newspaper published by the pupils of the college, whose editorial team he invited Paulo to join. The newspaper was at loggerheads with the conservative directors of the college because it criticized the arrests and other arbitrary measures taken by the military government.
A new world opened up to Paulo. Joining the Paissandu set meant rubbing shoulders with Rio’s intellectual elite and seeing close to the leading lights of the left-wing opposition. The cinema and the two nearby bars – the Oklahoma and the Cinerama – attracted film directors, musicians, playwrights and influential journalists. The latest European films were shown at midnight sessions on a Friday, when the 700 available tickets sold out in minutes. Paulo wasn’t much interested in political or social problems, but his deep existential anxieties fitted the profile of the typical denizen of Paissandu and he quickly made himself at home.
One day, he was forced to confess to Joel why he never went to the midnight film sessions, which were, after all, the most popular ones. ‘Firstly because I’m not yet eighteen and the films shown there are usually banned for minors,’ he explained, adding: ‘And if I get home after eleven o’clock my father won’t open the door to me.’ Joel couldn’t accept that someone of seventeen had a set time for getting home. ‘The time has come for you to demand your freedom. The problem of your age is easy enough to solve: all you have to do is change your date of birth on your student card, as I did.’ He also offered to solve the problem of the curfew: ‘After the midnight sessions you can sleep in my parents’ house in Ipanema.’ From then on, with his card duly falsified and a guaranteed roof over his head, Paulo was free to enter the enchanted world of Jean- Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Roberto Rossellini.
However, one problem remained: tickets, beer, cigarettes and travel all cost money. Not a fortune, obviously, but with his allowance suspended he didn’t have a penny to his name, nor any idea as to how to get some money. To his surprise, a partial solution came from his father. Pedro was a friend of Luís Eduardo Guimarães, the editor of the Diário de Notícias, which, at the time, was an influential newspaper in Rio. Guimarães was also the son-in-law of its owner, Ondina Dantas. Pedro fixed up a meeting between his son and the journalist, and a few days later Paulo began to work as a cub reporter. The work, alas, would be unpaid until he was given a proper contract. The problem of money remained, therefore, but there was one compensation: the job was a step towards liberating himself from parental control. He was almost never at home. He would go out in the morning to college, return home briefly for lunch, then spend the afternoon at the newspaper office and the evening at the Paissandu. He spent so many nights at Joel’s parents’ apartment that it became his second home.
As is the case with all publications, the least exciting tasks fell to the juniors, such as reporting on any potholes that were holding up the flow of traffic or any domestic arguments that ended up at the police station, or compiling lists of the dead in the public hospitals for the deaths section in the next day’s edition. It was not unusual for the new boy to arrive at the office and be told by Silvio Ferraz, the chief reporter at the Diário de Notícias: ‘Go and talk to shopkeepers to see whether business is suffering from the downturn.’ He may have been earning nothing and dealing only with unimportant matters, but Paulo felt he was an intellectual, someone who wrote every day, no matter about what. There was also another great advantage. When his colleagues at college or someone from the Paissandu set asked what he was doing, he would say: ‘I’m a journalist. I write for the Diário de Notícias.’
He was so busy with the newspaper, the cinema and amateur dramatics that he had less and less time left for Andrews College. His father was in despair when he discovered that, at the end of April, his son had an average of 2.5 (contributed to by a zero in Portuguese, English and chemistry), but Paulo seemed to be living in another world. He did exactly what he wanted to and came home at night when he wanted. If he found the door unlocked, he would go in. If his father had, as he usually did, carefully locked everything up at eleven, he would simply take the Leblon – Lapa bus and, minutes later, be sleeping in Joel’s house. His parents didn’t know what else they could do.
In May, a friend asked him for a favour: he wanted a job in the Crédito Real de Minas Gerais bank and needed two references. As this was the bank where Paulo’s father had an account, perhaps he could be persuaded to write one of the necessary letters? Paulo promised to see to it, but when he brought up the subject with his father he received a blunt refusal: ‘Absolutely not! Only you could possibly think that I would support your vagrant friends.’
Upset and too ashamed to tell his friend the truth, Paulo made a decision: he locked himself in his room and typed up a letter full of praise for the applicant, adding at the bottom ‘Engenheiro Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’. He signed it and put the letter in an envelope – problem solved. Everything went so well that the subject of the letter felt obliged to thank its writer for his kindness with a telephone call. Dr Pedro couldn’t understand what the boy was talking about: ‘Letter? What letter?’ On hearing the words ‘bank manager’, he said: ‘I wrote no letter! Bring that letter here. Bring it here immediately! This is Paulo’s doing! Paulo must have forged my signature!’ He rang off and rushed to the bank, looking for evidence of the crime – the letter, the proof that his son had become a forger, a fraudster. Paulo arrived home that evening, unaware of what had happened. He found his father in a fury, but that was nothing new. Before going to sleep, he wrote a short note in his diary: ‘In a month and a half I’ve written nine articles for Diário de Notícias. I’ve