Paulo Coelho: A Warrior's Life (38 page)

At the end of 1977, when it was time to renew the six-month contract with their landlord, the couple decided to leave the apartment in Palace
Street for a cheaper one. They put a five-line advertisement in the classified column of a London newspaper saying: ‘Young professional couple need flat from November 15th, London area with telephone.’ Days later, they had settled in Bassett Road, in Notting Hill, near Portobello, where Paulo would later set his novel
The Witch of Portobello
. It was not such a smart address as Palace Street, but they were now living in a far larger apartment that was also better and cheaper than the other one.

While the course in vampirism didn’t help Paulo become a screenplay writer, it nevertheless left a mark on his life. There he met and fell in love with a charming twenty-four-year-old Japanese masseuse, Keiko Saito, who was as interested as he was in that lugubrious subject. As well as being his colleague on the course, Keiko became his companion in handing out pamphlets in the street, one day protesting against the mass killings perpetrated by ‘Marshal’ Pol Pot in Cambodia, and another collecting signatures in favour of the legalization of cannabis in Great Britain. Paulo broached the subject with Cissa: ‘I’m in love with Keiko and I want to know how you feel about me inviting her to come and live with us.’ On the only occasion when he spoke publicly about this episode–an interview in 1992 with the journalist W.F. Padovani, who was working for
Playboy
at the time–Paulo revealed that his wife happily accepted his proposal:

Just as the Chinese and Soviet communist leaders used to do with political dissenters in official photos, Paulo airbrushed from the scene described in
Playboy
an important character in this story, a young, long-haired Brazilian music producer known as Peninha, who was also living in London at the time. Paulo had always believed that Cissa was an easy person to live with, but after living with her for a year he had learned that he had married a woman who would not put up with any excesses. When she realized that he was suggesting living with two women, like an Arabian sheikh, in an apartment that had just one room and one bed, he was astonished at her reaction:

‘Keiko can come and live here, as long as you agree that Peninha can move in too, because I’m in love with him as well.’

Paulo had no alternative but to agree to the involvement of this fourth member of what he came to call ‘the extended family’, or the ‘UN General Assembly’. Whenever a relative of Cissa’s or Paulo’s arrived, Keiko and Peninha had to vanish, as, for example, when Gail, Cissa’s elder sister, spent a week at the apartment.

To celebrate the New Year–the first and only one they spent in England–the Coelhos travelled by train with the ‘extended family’ to spend a few days in Edinburgh. The end of the year was always a time for Paulo to weigh up triumphs and failures. He clearly wasn’t going to lay his hands on the imaginary Oscar that had been one of his reasons
for leaving Brazil in March. Months and months had passed without his producing a single line of the much dreamed-of book. Defeat followed defeat, as he confessed to his diary:

The image Paulo gave to other people was of a successful lyricist whose hobby was writing about London for Brazilian magazines. His old friend Menescal, however, with whom he corresponded frequently, began to suspect that his protégé was not very happy and thought that it was time for him to end his stay in London. Paulo agreed to return to Brazil, but he didn’t want to return with his tail between his legs, as though defeated. If Philips invited him to go back to work there, he would return to Rio de Janeiro the next day. Menescal not only flew to London to make the offer but took with him Heleno Oliveira, a top executive of the multinational company. The job would not begin until March 1978, but it was the invitation Paulo needed, not the job. The day before leaving, he collected together the few pieces of writing he had managed to produce during those sterile months in London and put them in an envelope on which, after sealing it, he wrote his own name and address. Then, as he was drinking a whisky with Menescal in a modest pub in the Portobello Road, he ‘accidentally’ left the envelope on the bar. On his last night in the city, he explained to his diary the reason for this act: ‘I’ve left everything I’ve written this year in that bar. It’s the last chance for someone to discover
me and say: this guy’s brilliant. So there’s my name and address. If they want to, they can find me.’

Either the package was lost or whoever found it did not consider its contents particularly brilliant. The couple returned to Brazil in February 1978. During the flight, Cissa broke down in tears and Paulo summarized the situation thus: ‘In London all my hopes of becoming a world-famous writer were dashed.’

As various of the characters he created later on would say: this was just another defeat, not a failure. He and Cissa returned to the apartment in Rua Barata Ribeiro, which had seemed unsuitable even before their trip to England. As soon as they were back, Paulo began to predict dark times for his marriage, if the ‘emotional flexibility’ that had prevailed in London did not extend to Brazil:

Some months later, they moved to the fourth property that Paulo had added to his small urban portfolio. Bought with the royalties that had accumulated during his absence, this was a comfortable three-bedroom apartment in Rua Senador Eusébio in Flamengo, two blocks from the Paissandu cinema, three from the home of his ex-fiancée Eneida and a few metres from where Raul Seixas lived. They decorated half the sitting-room wall with photos and souvenirs of their trip to London, which began to take on another meaning: while on the one hand, they reminded the couple of the happy times they had spent there, on the other, they were, for Paulo, a permanent reminder that he had not succeeded in writing ‘the book’.

In March he took up his job as artistic producer with Philips and during the months that followed, he resumed his routine as executive at
a recording company. Since he disliked getting up early, he was frequently woken at ten in the morning with a telephone call from his secretary, telling him that someone had been asking for him. He would drive from home to Barra da Tijuca in his own car and spend the rest of the day in endless meetings, many out of the office, with artists, directors of the company and journalists from the music world. In his office he ended up dealing with everything. In between fielding numerous telephone calls, he would sort out administrative matters, approve record sleeves and write letters to fans on behalf of famous artists.

The fact that Raul Seixas was near by didn’t mean that the partners became close again. Indeed, at the end of the year, the two ‘close enemies’ were invited by WEA, Raul’s new recording company, to try to recreate the partnership that had taken Brazil by storm, but the attempt failed. The LP
Mata Virgem
, for which Paulo wrote five lyrics (‘Judas’, ‘As Profecias’, ‘Tá na Hora’, ‘Conserve seu Medo’ and ‘Magia de Amor’), was released at the beginning of 1979, but did not achieve even a tenth of the sales of such albums as
Gita
and
Há Dez Mil Anos Atrás
.

The fame that the two had experienced between 1973 and 1975 became a thing of the past, but Paulo had absorbed the lesson that Raul had taught him–‘Writing music is like writing a story in twenty lines that someone can listen to ten times without getting bored’–and was no longer dependent on his partner. Besides the five songs he wrote for
Mata Virgem
, in 1978 he wrote almost twenty songs in partnership with all the performers who were making a mark on the popular Brazilian music of the time. He had become a sort of jack-of-all-trades in show business, writing songs, directing and scripting shows, and when Pedro Rovai, a director of porn films, decided to make
Amante Latino
, he invited Paulo to write the script for that.

As was usually the case with his fragile emotional state, when his work was going well, his emotional life wasn’t–and vice versa. This time was no different. The clear skies he was enjoying professionally clouded over when he returned home. The bitterness between him and Cissa gave way to ever more frequent arguments, and then came the endless silences that could last for days. In February 1979, he decided to go alone on a boat trip to Patagonia. When the liner anchored in Buenos Aires on the way
back to Brazil, he phoned Cissa and suggested that they separate. Given how concerned he was with signs, it’s surprising that he failed to realize that, three years earlier, he had proposed marriage to her by telephone and from Buenos Aires.

The separation took place on 24 March 1979, when Cissa left the apartment in Rua Senador Eusébio, and it was legally ratified on 11 June in a family court 50 metres from St Joseph’s Church, where they had married. The hearing nearly didn’t take place. Firstly, because Cissa had to go out at the last minute to buy a skirt, because the judge would not allow jeans in the court. Then, the lawyer had forgotten a document, which meant that they had to bribe an employee in the register office in order to get their certificate of legal separation.

Setting aside their disagreements, the two went out afterwards to have a civilized lunch in a restaurant. They each had a very different memory of the end of their marriage. Paulo wrote: ‘I don’t know how unhappy she is, but she certainly cried a lot. I didn’t find the procedure in the least traumatic. I left and went back to work in other offices, other rooms, other worlds. I had a good dinner and enjoyed it more than I have for a long time, but that had nothing to do with the separation. It was all down to the cook, who made a really delicious meal.’ Cissa, on the other hand, set down her feelings in a brief note written in English, which she posted to him. She found fault with him in the one area where he considered himself to be good–in bed: ‘One of our main problems, in my view, was sex. I never understood why you didn’t think about me in bed. I could have been much better if I had felt that you were thinking about my pleasure in bed. But you didn’t. You never thought about it. So I began not to think about your pleasure either.’

For someone whose emotional stability was so dependent on a stable relationship with a woman who would help him through his psychological storms, the end of the marriage was sure to presage more depression and more melancholy. Not that he lacked for women–on the contrary. The problem now was that Paulo had got it into his head that they were sucking out the energy that he should be putting into his career as a writer. ‘I’ve gone out a lot, had sex a lot, but with female vampires,’ he wrote, ‘and I don’t want that any more.’

The person who appears to have been most seriously shaken by the separation was his mother. During Easter she wrote a long letter to her son, typewritten in single spacing. It does not appear to have been written by ‘a fool’, as Paulo called his mother more than once. The document reveals someone who had a knowledge of psychoanalytical jargon, which was unusual in a non-professional. She also insisted that it was he who was responsible for the separation, with his insecurities and his inability to recognize what he had lost: