A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho. Fernando Morais
still see. Those being paid for by social services slept in dormitories of ten, twenty and even thirty beds, while those considered to be violent were kept in solitary confinement.
The Dr Eiras clinic was not only an asylum, as Paulo had originally thought, but a group of neurological, cardiological and detox clinics for alcoholics and drug addicts. Two of its directors, the doctors Abraão Ackerman and Paulo Niemeyer, were among the most respected neurosurgeons in Brazil. While hundreds of workers dependent on social security lined up at their doors waiting for a consultation, famous people with health problems also went there. During his time in the clinic as a patient, Paulo received weekly visits from his mother. On one of these visits, Lygia arrived accompanied by Sônia Maria, who was fifteen at the time and had insisted on going to see her brother in hospital. She left in a state of shock. ‘The atmosphere was horrendous, people talking to themselves in the corridors,’ she was to recall angrily some years later. ‘And lost in that hell was Paulo, a mere boy, someone who should never have been there.’ She left determined to speak to her parents, to beg them to open their hearts and remove her brother from the asylum, but she lacked the courage to do so. If she was unable to argue in defence of her own rights, what could she do for him? Unlike Paulo, Sônia spent her life in submission to her parents – to such a point that, even when married and a mother, she would never smoke in front of her father and concealed from him the fact that she wore a bikini.
As for Paulo’s suffering, this, according to Dr Benjamim, who visited him each morning, was not as bad as it might have been, thanks to ‘a special way he had of getting himself out of difficult situations, even when he was protesting against being interned!’ According to the psychiatrist, ‘the fact that Paulo did not suffer more is because he had a way with words’. And it was thanks to that ‘way with words’ that he avoided being subjected to a brutal treatment frequently inflicted on the mentally ill at the clinic: electroshock treatment. Although he was well informed about mental illnesses and had translated books on psychiatry, Dr Benjamim was a staunch defender of electroconvulsive therapy, which had already been condemned in a large part of the world. ‘In certain cases, such as incurable depression, there is no alternative,’ he would say confidently. ‘Any other therapy is a cheat, an illusion, a palliative and a dangerous procrastination.’ However, while he was a patient, Paulo was subjected to such heavy doses of psychotropic substances that he would spend the whole day in a daze, slouching along the corridor in his slippers. Although he had never experimented with drugs, not even cannabis, he spent four weeks consuming packs and packs of medication that was supposedly detoxifying, but only left him more confused.
Since almost no one knew he was in the asylum, he had little news of his friends. One day, he had an unexpected visit from the friend who was indirectly responsible for his presence there by asking for a reference, and who left the clinic with a mad idea – never carried out: that of rallying the members of the defunct Rota 15 group to kidnap him. However, Paulo’s tortured soul only found true peace when his latest love appeared: Renata Sochaczewski, a pretty girl whom he had met at an amateur theatrical group, who was to become a great actress under the name Renata Sorrah, and whom Paulo affectionately called ‘Rennie’ or ‘Pato’. When she failed to get in to visit him, Renata would furtively send him little love notes. These contained such messages as ‘Stand at the window because I’m waiting to wave goodbye to you’, or ‘Write a list of what you want and give it to me on Friday. Yesterday I phoned but they didn’t tell you.’
When he was allowed out, four weeks after being admitted, Paulo was in a very fragile state, but he nevertheless tried to take a positive lesson from his journey into hell. It was only when he got home that he found the mental energy to make notes in his diary:
In the meantime, I’ve been in Casa de Saúde Dr Eiras, where I was admitted for being maladjusted. I spent twenty-eight days there, missed classes, lost my job and was released as if I had been cured, even though there was no reason for my ever having been admitted in the first place. My parents have really done it this time! They ruin my chances at the newspaper, ruin my academic year and spend loads of money only to find that there was nothing wrong with me. What I have to do now is start all over again, accepting what’s happened as a joke and a well-intentioned mistake. (The worst of it is that the day I was admitted, I was going to be given a job on the permanent staff at the newspaper.)
All the same, it was OK. As a patient on my floor said, ‘All experiences are good experiences, even the bad ones.’ Yes, I’ve learned a lot. It gave me a chance to mature and gain in self-confidence, to make a more careful study of my friends and notice things I’d never really thought about before. Now I’m a man.
While Paulo may have left the clinic convinced that there was nothing wrong with him, this was not the opinion of the psychiatrist Dr Benjamim Gomes. The hospital file in the archives of the clinic held a dark prognosis that read more like a condemnation: ‘A patient with schizoid tendencies, averse to social and loving contact. He prefers solitary activities. He is incapable of expressing his feelings or of experiencing pleasure.’ Judging from this piece of paper, Paulo’s suffering was only just beginning.
THE FEW FRIENDS WHO HAD WITNESSED Paulo’s twenty-eight days of suffering in the clinic were surprised when he was let out. Although physically exhausted and looking more fragile, he made no attempt to hide the fact that he had been admitted to an asylum. On the contrary, when he reappeared in Rua Rodrigo Otávio, he boasted to a circle of friends that he had lived through an experience unknown to any of them: being treated as a madman. His descriptions of the people and events at the clinic, many of them invented, were so extraordinary that some of his friends even expressed envy at not having been in such an interesting place.
Lygia and Pedro were concerned about their son’s behaviour. Fearing that his confinement might stigmatize him at school and at work, they treated the matter with total discretion. His father had decided to tell Andrews College and the Diário de Notícias that Paulo’s absence was due to his having to go away unexpectedly. When they learned that their son was telling everyone the truth, Pedro warned him: ‘Don’t do that. If people get to know that you’ve had mental problems, you’ll never be able to stand as a candidate for President of the Republic.’
Not having the least desire to be president of anything at all, Paulo appeared to have returned from the clinic with a renewed appetite for what he called ‘the intellectual life’. Now he had a new place where he could hang out, besides the amateur theatre at the college and the Cine Paissandu. The director of the Serviço Nacional de Teatro (SNT), Bárbara Heliodora, had got permission from the government to transform the old headquarters of the Students’ Union (which had been ransacked and burned by extreme right-wing groups on the day of the military coup) into the new National Drama Conservatory. Without restoring the building or painting over the marks left by the damage caused by the vandals, the Centro Popular de Cultura, as it had been known, was turned into the Teatro Palcão, a 150-seat theatre which, although it didn’t enjoy the freedom it had previously enjoyed, would once again become a centre of cultural debate permanently filled by workshops, rehearsals and drama group productions. What would later become the Teatro Universitário Nacional (National University Theatre), an occasional drama group comprising only students, was also born there. Paulo’s sole experience in this area was his play The Ugly Boy, which he had torn up soon after writing it, plus two or three other plays that had also gone no further than his own house. However, he was sure that he had some ability in the field and plunged into the newly formed Conservatory.
When he returned to the Diário de Notícias, it became clear to Paulo that his absence of almost a month had put paid to or at least delayed his chances of being taken on as a reporter, but he stayed on, unpaid and uncomplaining. Working in a place that allowed him to write every day, even if only on the trivial topics that usually fell to him, was a good thing. At the end of July 1965, he was sent off to report on the history of the Marian Congregation in Brazil. He was beginning to gain experience as a reporter and had no difficulty in carrying out the task; at the organization’s headquarters, he interviewed members of the