ONCE HE WAS BACK IN RIO, Paulo entered the 1970s propelled by a new fuel: cannabis. This would be followed by other drugs, but initially he only used cannabis. Once they had tried the drug together for the first time, he and Vera became regular consumers. Being new to the experience, they had little knowledge of its effects, and before starting to smoke they would lock away any knives or other sharp household objects in a drawer ‘to prevent any accidents’, as she said. They smoked every day and on any pretext: in the afternoon so that they could better enjoy the sunsets, at night to get over the fact that they felt as if they were sleeping on the runway of Santos Dumont airport, with the deafening noise of aeroplanes taking off and landing only a few metres away. And, if there was no other reason, they smoked to allay boredom. Paulo recalled later having spent days in a row under the effect of cannabis, without so much as half an hour’s interval.
Completely free of parental control, he had become a true hippie: someone who not only dressed and behaved like a hippie but thought like one too. He had stopped being a communist–before he had ever become one–when he was lectured in public by a militant member of the Brazilian Communist Party for saying that he had really loved the film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg–a French musical starring Catherine Deneuve. With the same ease with which he had crossed from the Christianity of the Jesuits to Marxism, he was now a devout follower of the hippie insurrection that was spreading throughout the world. ‘This will be humanity’s final revolution,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Communism is over, a new brotherhood is born, mysticism is invading art, drugs are an essential food. When Christ consecrated the wine, he was consecrating drugs. Drugs are a wine of the most superior vintage.’
After spending a few months at the Solar Santa Terezinha, he and Vera rented, together with a friend, a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Teresa, a bohemian district at the top of a hill near the Lapa, in the centre of the city, which had a romantic little tramway running through it that clanked as it went up the hill. In between moves, they had to live for some weeks in the Leblon apartment, along with Vera’s husband, who had not yet moved out.
Cannabis usually causes prolonged periods of lethargy and exhaustion in heavy users, but the drug seemed to have the opposite effect on Paulo. He became positively hyperactive and in the first months of 1970, he adapted for the stage and produced The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, took part in theatre workshops with the playwright Amir Haddad and entered both the Paraná Short Story Competition and the Esso Prize for Literature. He even found time to write three plays: Os Caminhos do Misticismo [The Paths of Mysticism], about Father Cícero Romão Batista, a miracle worker from the northeast of Brazil; A Revolta da Chibata: História à Beira de um Caís [The Chibata Revolt: History on the Dockside], about the sailors’ revolt in Rio de Janeiro in 1910; and Os Limites da Resistência [The Limits of Resistance], which was a dramatized compilation of various texts. He sent the latter off to the National Book Institute, an organ of the federal government, but it failed to get beyond the first obstacle, the Reading Commission. His book fell into the hands of the critic and novelist Octavio de Faria who, while emphasizing its good points, sent the originals straight to the archives with the words:
I won’t deny that this strange book, The Limits of Resistance, left me completely perplexed. Even after reading it, I cannot decide which literary genre it belongs to. It claims to comprise ‘Eleven Fundamental Differences’, bears an epigraph by Henry Miller, and sets out to ‘explain’ life. It contains digressions, surrealist constructions, descriptions of psychedelic experiences, and all kinds of games and jokes. It is a hotchpotch of ‘fundamental differences’, which, while undeniably well written and intelligent, does not seem to me the kind of book that fits our criteria. Whatever Sr. Paulo Coelho de Souza’s literary future may be, it’s the kind of work that ‘avant-garde’ publishers like, in the hope of stumbling across a ‘genius’, but not the publishers of the National Book Institute.
At least he had the consolation of being in good company. The same Reading Commission also rejected at least two books that would become classics of Brazilian literature: Sargento Getúlio, which was to launch the writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro in Brazil and the United States, and Objeto Gritante, by Clarice Lispector, which was later to be published as Água Viva.
As if some force were trying to deflect him from his idée fixe of becoming a writer, drama continued to offer Paulo more recognition than prose. Although he had high hopes for his play about Father Cícero, foreseeing a brilliant future for it, only A Revolta da Chibata went on to achieve any success. He entered it in the prestigious Concurso Teatro Opinião, more because he felt that he should than with any hope of winning. The prize offered was better than any amount of money: the winning play would be performed by the members of the Teatro Opinião, which was the most famous of the avant-garde theatre groups in Brazil. When Vera called to tell him that A Revolta had come second, Paulo reacted angrily: ‘Second? Shit! I always come second.’ First prize had gone to Os Dentes do Tigre [Tiger’s Teeth] by Maria Helena Kühner, who was also starting out on her career.
However, if his objective was fame, he had nothing to complain about. Besides being quoted in all the newspapers and praised by such critics as João das Neves and José Arrabal, that despised second prize brought A Revolta a place in the Teatro Opinião’s much-prized series of readings, which were open to the public and took place every week. Paulo may have been upset about not winning first prize, but he was very anxious during the days that preceded the reading. He could think of nothing else all week and was immensely proud when he watched the actress Maria Pompeu reading his play before a packed house.
Months later, his acquaintance with Teatro Opinião meant that he met–very briefly–one of the international giants of counterculture, the revolutionary American drama group the Living Theatre, which was touring Brazil at the time. When Paulo learned that he had managed to get tickets to see a production by the group, he was so excited that he felt ‘quite intimidated, as though I had just taken a big decision’. Fearing that he might be asked to give his opinion on something during the interval or after the play, he read a little Nietzsche before going to the theatre ‘so as to have something to say’. In the end, he and Vera were so affected by what they saw that they wangled an invitation to the house where the group–headed by Julian Beck and Judith Malina–were staying, and from there went on to visit the shantytown in Vidigal. Judging by the notes in his diary, however, the meeting did not go well: ‘Close contact with the Living Theatre. We went to the house where Julian Beck and Judith Malina are staying and no one talked to us. A bitter feeling of humiliation. We went with them to the favela. It was the first time in my life that I’d been to a favela. It’s a world apart.’
The following day, although they had had lunch with the group and been present at rehearsals, the Americans’ attitude towards them remained unchanged. ‘Julian Beck and Judith Malina continue to treat us with icy indifference,’ he wrote. ‘But I don’t blame them. I know it must have been very difficult to get where they are.’ The next Paulo heard of the group and its leaders was some months later, when he heard that they had been arrested in Ouro Preto, in Minas Gerais, accused of possession and use of cannabis. The couple had rented a large house in the city and turned it into a permanent drama workshop for actors from all over Brazil. A few weeks later, the police surrounded the house and arrested all eighteen members of the group and took them straight to the Dops prison in Belo Horizonte.
In spite of protests from the famous across the world–Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard and Umberto Eco among others–the military government kept the whole group in prison for sixty days, after which they expelled all the foreign members, accusing them of ‘drug trafficking and subversion’.
As for Paulo, some months after he and Vera had first been introduced to cannabis, the artist Jorge Mourão gave them a tiny block the size of a packet of chewing gum that looked as though it were made of very dark, almost black, wax. It was hashish. Although it comes from the same plant as cannabis, hashish is stronger and was always a drug that was consumed more in Europe and North Africa than in South America, which meant that it was seen as a novelty among Brazilian users. Obsessive as ever about planning and organizing everything he did, Paulo decided to convert a mere ‘puff’ into a solemn scientific experiment. From the moment he inhaled the drug for the first time he began to record all his sensations on tape, keeping a note of the time as well. He typed up the final result and stuck it in his diary:
Brief notes on our Experiment with Hashish
To Edgar Allan Poe
We began to smoke in my bedroom at ten forty at night. Those present: myself, Vera and Mourão. The hashish is mixed with ordinary tobacco in a ratio of approximately one to seven and put into a special silver pipe. This pipe makes the smoke pass through iced water, which allows for perfect filtration. Three drags each are enough. Vera isn’t going to take part in the experiment, as she’s going to do the recording and take photos. Mourão, who’s an old hand at drugs, will tell us what we must do.
3 minutes–A feeling of lightness and euphoria. Boundless happiness. Strong inner feelings of agitation. I walk backwards and forwards feeling totally drunk.
6 minutes–My eyelids are heavy. A feeling of dizziness and sleepiness. My head is starting to take on terrifying proportions, with images slightly distorted into a circular shape. At this phase of the experiment, certain mental blocks (of a moral order) surfaced in my mind. Note: the effects may have been affected by over-excitement.
10 minutes–An enormous desire to sleep. My nerves are completely relaxed and I lie down on the floor. I start to sweat, more out of anxiety than heat. No initiative whatsoever: if the house caught fire, I’d rather die than get up from here.
20 minutes–I’m conscious, but have lost all sense of where sounds come from. It’s a pleasant phase that leads to total lack of anxiety.
28 minutes–The sense of the relativity of time is really amazing. This must be how Einstein discovered it.
30 minutes–Suddenly, I lose consciousness entirely. I try to write, but I fail to realize that this is just an attempt, a test. I begin to dance, to dance like a madman; the music is coming from another planet and I exist in an unknown dimension.
33 minutes–Time is passing terribly slowly. I wouldn’t have the courage to try LSD…
45 minutes–The fear of flying out of the window is so great that I get off my bed and lie on the floor, at the back of the room, well away from the street outside. My body doesn’t require comfort. I can stay lying on the floor without moving.
1 hour–I look at my watch, unable to understand why I’m trying to record everything. For me this is nothing more than an eternity from which I will never manage to escape.
1 hour 15 minutes–A sudden immense desire to come out of the trance. In the depths of winter, I’m suddenly filled by courage and I decide to take a cold bath. I don’t feel the water on my body. I’m naked. But I can’t come out of the trance. I’m terrified that I might stay like this for ever. Books I’ve read about schizophrenia start parading through the bathroom. I want to get out. I want to get out!
1 hour and a half–I’m rigid, lying down, sweating with fear.
2 hours–The passage from the trance to a normal state takes place imperceptibly. There’s no feeling of sickness, sleepiness or tiredness, but an unusual hunger. I look for a restaurant on the corner. I move, I walk. One foot in front of the other.
Not satisfied with smoking hashish and recording its effects, Paulo was brave enough to try something which, in the days when he was under his father’s authority, would have ended in a session of electroshock therapy in the asylum: he made a copy of these notes and his parents almost died of shock when he gave it to them to read. From his point of view, this was perhaps not simply an act of provocation towards Lygia and Pedro. Although he confessed to his diary that he had ‘discovered another world’ and that ‘drugs are the best thing in the world’, Paulo considered himself to be no ordinary cannabis user but, rather, ‘an activist ideologue of the hippie movement’ who never tired of repeating to his friends the same extravagant claim: ‘Drugs are to me what the machine gun is to communists and guerrillas.’ As well as cannabis and hashish, the couple had become frequent users of synthetic drugs. Since the time when he had first been admitted to the clinic, he had been prescribed regular doses of Valium. Unconcerned about the damage these drug cocktails might cause to their nervous systems, the lovers became enthusiastic users of Mandrix, Artane, Dexamil and Pervitin. Amphetamines were present in some of these drugs and acted on the central nervous system, increasing the heartbeat and raising blood pressure, producing a pleasant sensation of muscular relaxation, which was followed by feelings of euphoria that would last up to fourteen hours. When they became tired, they would take some kind of sleeping drug such as Mandrix, and crash out. Drugs used in the control of epileptic fits or the treatment of Parkinson’s disease guaranteed never-ending ‘trips’ that lasted days and nights without interruption.
One weekend at Kakiko’s place in Friburgo, 100 kilometres from Rio, Paulo carried out an experiment to find out how long he could remain drugged without stopping even to sleep, and was overjoyed when he managed to complete more than twenty-four hours, not sleeping and completely ‘out of it’. Only drugs seemed to have any importance on this dangerous path that he was following. ‘Our meals have become somewhat subjective,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘We don’t know when we last ate and anyway we don’t seem to miss food at all.’
Just one thing seemed to be keeping him connected to the world of the normal, of those who did not take drugs: the stubborn desire to be a writer. He was determined to lock himself up in Uncle José’s house in Araruama and just write. ‘To write, to write a lot, to write everything’ was his immediate plan. Vera agreed and urged him on, but she suggested that before he did this, they should relax and take a holiday. In April 1970, the couple decided to go to one of the Meccas of the hippie movement, Machu Picchu, the sacred city of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes, at an altitude of 2,400 metres. Still traumatized by his journey to Paraguay, Paulo feared that something evil would happen to him if he left Brazil. It was only after much careful planning that the couple finally departed. Inspired by the 1969 film Easy Rider, they had no clear destination or fixed date of return.
On 1 May they took a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano aeroplane to La Paz for a trip that involved many novelties, the first of which Paulo experienced as soon as he got out at El Alto airport, in the Bolivian capital: snow. He was so excited when he saw everything covered by such a pure white blanket that he could not resist throwing himself on the ground and eating the snow. It was the start of a month of absolute idleness. Vera spent the day in bed in the hotel, unable to cope with the rarefied air of La Paz at 4,000 metres. Paulo went out to get to know the city and, accustomed to the political apathy of a Brazil under a dictatorship, he was shocked to see workers’ demonstrations on Labour Day. Four months later, Alfredo Ovando Candia, who had just named himself President of the Republic for the third time, was ousted.
Taking advantage of the low cost of living in Bolivia, they rented a car, stayed in good hotels and went to the best restaurants. Every other day, the elegant Vera made time to go to the hairdresser’s, while Paulo climbed the steep hills of La Paz. It was there that they encountered a new type of drug, which was almost non-existent in Brazil: mescalito, also known as peyote, peyotl or mescal–a hallucinogenic tea distilled from cut, dried cactus. Amazed by the calmness and tranquillity induced by the drink, they wallowed in endless visual hallucinations and experienced intense moments of synaesthesia, a confusion of the senses that gives the user the sense of being able to smell a colour or hear a taste.
They spent five days in La Paz drinking the tea, visiting clubs to listen to local music and attending diabladas, places where plays in which the Inca equivalent of the Devil predominated. They then caught a train to Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world, where they took a boat across and then the train to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, after which they went by plane to Lima.
In Lima, they rented a car and headed for Santiago de Chile, passing through Arequipa, Antofagasta and Arica. The plan was to spend more time on this stretch, but the hotels were so unprepossessing that they decided to carry on. Neither Paulo nor Vera enjoyed the Chilean capital–‘a city like any other’, he wrote–but they did have the chance to see Costa-Gavras’s film Z, which denounced the military dictatorship in Greece and was banned in Brazil. At the end of their three-week trip, still almost constantly under the influence of mescalito, they found themselves in Mendoza, in Argentina, on the way to Buenos Aires. Paulo was eaten up with jealousy when he saw the attractive Vera being followed by men, particularly when she began to speak in English, which he still could not understand that well. In La Paz it had been the sight of snow that had taken him by surprise; in Buenos Aires it was going on the metro for the first time. Accustomed to low prices in the other places they had visited, they decided to dine at the Michelangelo, a restaurant known as ‘the cathedral of the tango’, where they were lucky enough to hear a classic of the genre, the singer Roberto ‘Polaco’ Goyeneche. When they were handed a bill for $20–the equivalent of about US$120 today–Paulo almost fell off his chair to discover that they were in one of the most expensive restaurants in the city.
Although his asthma had coped well with the Andean heights, in Buenos Aires, at sea level, it reappeared in force. With a temperature of 39°C and suffering from intense breathing difficulties, he had to remain in bed for three days and began to recover only in Montevideo, on 1 June, the day before they were to leave for Brazil. At his insistence, they would not be making the return journey on a Lloyd Aéro Boliviano flight. This change had nothing to do with superstition or with the fact that they would have to travel via La Paz. Paulo had seen the bronze statue of a civilian pilot at La Paz airport in homage ‘to the heroic pilots of LAB who have died in action’: ‘I’d be mad to travel with a company that treats the pilots of crashed planes as heroes! What if our pilot has ambitions to become a statue?’ In the end, they flew Air France to Rio de Janeiro, where they arrived on 3 June in time to watch the first round of the 1970 World Cup, when the Brazilian team beat Czechoslovakia 4–1.
The dream of becoming a writer would not go away. Paulo placed nowhere in the short story competions he entered. He wrote in his diary: ‘It was with a broken heart that I heard the news…that I had failed to win yet another literary competition. I didn’t even get an honourable mention.’ However, he did not allow himself to be crushed by these defeats and continued to note down possible subjects for future literary works, such as ‘flying saucers’, ‘Jesus’, ‘the abominable snowman’, ‘spirits becoming embodied in corpses’ and ‘telepathy’. All the same, the prizes continued to elude him, as he recorded in his notes: ‘Dear São José, my protector. You are witness to the fact that I’ve tried really hard this year. I’ve lost in every competition. Yesterday, when I heard I’d lost in the competition for children’s plays, Vera said that when my luck finally does arrive, it will do so all in one go. Do you agree?’
On his twenty-third birthday, Vera gave him a sophisticated microscope and was pleased to see what a success it was: hours after opening the gift, Paulo was still hunched over it, carefully examining the glass plates and making notes. Curious to know what he was doing, she began to read what he was writing: ‘It’s twenty-three years today since I was born. I was already this thing that I can see under the microscope. Excited, moving in the direction of life, infinitesimally small but with all my hereditary characteristics in place. My two arms, my legs and my brain were already programmed. I would reproduce myself from that sperm cell, the cells would multiply. And here I am, aged twenty-three.’ It was only then that she realized that Paulo had put his own semen under the microscope. The notes continue: ‘There goes a possible engineer. Another one that ought to have become a doctor is dying. A scientist capable of saving the Earth has also died, and I’m impassively watching all this through my microscope. My own sperm are furiously flailing around, desperate to find an egg, desperate to perpetuate themselves.’
Vera was good company, but she could be tough too. When she realized that, if he had anything to do with it, Paulo would never achieve anything beyond the school diploma he had got at Guanabara, she almost forced him to prepare for his university entrance exams. Her vigilance produced surprising results. By the end of the year, he had managed to be accepted by no fewer than three faculties: law at Cândido Mendes, theatre direction at the Escola Nacional de Teatro and media studies at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC) in Rio.
This success, needless to say, could not be attributed entirely to Vera: it had as much to do with Paulo’s literary appetite. Since he had begun making systematic notes of his reading four years earlier, he had read more than three hundred books, or seventy-five a year–a vast number when one realizes that most Brazilians read, on average, one book a year. He read a great deal and he read everything. From Cervantes to Kafka, from Jorge Amado to Scott Fitzgerald, from Aeschylus to Aldous Huxley. He read Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Brazilians who were on police files such as the humourist Stanislaw Ponte Preta. He would read, make a short commentary on each work and rate them accordingly. The highest accolade, four stars, was the privilege of only a few writers, such as Henry Miller, Borges and Hemingway. And he blithely awarded ‘zero stars’ to books as varied as Norman Mailer’s American Dream, Régis Debray’s Revolution in Revolution and two Brazilian classics, Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands] by Euclides da Cunha and História Econômica do Brasil [An Economic History of Brazil] by Caio Prado, Jr.
In this mélange of subjects, periods and authors, there was one genre that appeared to arouse Paulo’s interest more than others: books dealing with the occult, witchcraft and satanism. Ever since he had read a short book written by the Spanish sorcerer José Ramón Molinero, The Secret Alchemy of Mankind, he had devoured everything relating to the invisible world beyond the human senses. When he finished reading The Dawn of Magic by the Belgian Louis Pauwels and the French-Ukrainian Jacques Bergier, he began to feel he was a member of this new tribe. ‘I’m a magician preparing for his dawn,’ he wrote in his diary. At the end of 1970, he had collected fifty works on the subject. During this time he had read, commented on and given star ratings to all six of the Hermann Hesse books published in Brazil, as well as to Erich von Däniken’s best-sellers The Chariots of the Gods and Return to the Stars, Goethe’s Faust, to which he gave only three stars, and to absurd books such as Black Magic and White Magic by a certain V.S. Foldej, which didn’t even merit a rating.
One of the most celebrated authors of this new wave was Carlos Castaneda. Not only did he write on the occult: his own story was shrouded in mystery. He was said to have been born in 1925 in Peru (or in 1935 in Brazil, according to other sources) and had graduated in anthropology at the University of California, in Los Angeles. When he was preparing his doctoral thesis he decided to write autobiographical accounts of his experiences in Mexico on the use of drugs such as peyote, mushrooms and stramonium (known as devil’s weed) in native rituals. The worldwide success of Castaneda, who even featured on the cover of Time magazine, attracted hordes of hippies, in search of the new promised land, from the four corners of the earth to the Sonora desert on the border where California and Arizona meet Mexico, where the books were set.
For those who, like Paulo, did not believe in coincidences, the fact that it was at precisely this moment that his mother made him the gift of a trip to the United States seemed like a sign. His grandmother Lilisa was going to Washington to visit her daughter Lúcia, who was married to the diplomat Sérgio Weguelin, and he would go with her and, if he wanted, extend the trip and go travelling alone or with his cousin Serginho, who was a few years younger. Besides giving him the opportunity to get to know first-hand the area about which Castaneda had written, the trip was useful in another way. His relationship with Vera appeared to be coming to an end. ‘Life with her is getting complicated,’ he complained at the beginning of 1971 in his diary. ‘We don’t have sex any more, she’s driving me mad, and I’m driving her mad. I don’t love her any more. It’s just habit.’ Things had reached such a low ebb that the two had stopped living together. Vera had returned to her apartment in Leblon and he had moved from Santa Teresa back to his grandparents’ house before moving to Copacabana. Besides this, he announced in his diary that he was ‘half-married’ to a new woman, the young actress Christina Scardini, whom he had met at drama school and with whom he swore he was passionately in love. This was a lie, but during the month and a half he was away in America, she was the recipient of no fewer than forty-four letters.
At the beginning of May, after a celebratory farewell dinner given by his parents, he took a Varig flight with his grandparents to New York, where they were to catch an internal flight to Washington. When they arrived at Kennedy airport, Paulo and his grandmother couldn’t understand why Tuca was in such a hurry to get the eleven o’clock plane to Washington, for which the check-in was just closing. Lilisa and her grandson argued that there was no reason to rush, because if they missed that plane they could take the following flight, half an hour later. Out of breath from running, the three boarded the plane just as the doors were about to be closed. Tuca only calmed down once they were all sitting with their seatbelts buckled. That night, when they were watching the news at his uncle’s house, Paulo realized that the hand of destiny had clearly been behind Tuca’s insistence that they catch the 11.00 flight. The 11.30 flight, a twin-engined Convair belonging to Allegheny (later US Airways), had experienced mechanical problems and when the pilot tried to make an emergency landing near New Haven, 70 kilometres from New York, the plane had crashed, killing the crew and all thirty passengers on board.
While staying at his diplomat uncle’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, half an hour from Washington, instead of writing a travel diary Paulo decided to use his copious correspondence with Christina to record his impressions. He seemed to be astounded by everything he saw. He could stand for ages, gazing at the automatic vending machines for stamps, newspapers and soft drinks, or spend hours on end in department stores without buying anything, amazed by the sheer variety of products. In his very first letter he regretted not having taken with him ‘a sack of change’ from Brazil, since he had discovered that all the machines accepted the Brazilian 20 centavo coin as if it were a 25 cent piece, even though it was worth only one fifth of the value. ‘I’d have made great savings if I’d brought more coins,’ he confessed, ‘because it costs me 25 cents to buy a stamp for Brazil from the vending machines and to get in to see the blue movies they show in the porn shops here.’
Everything was new and everything excited him, from the supermarket shelves stacked with unnecessary items to the works of art at the National Gallery, where he wept as he actually touched with his own hands the canvas of Death and the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch. He knew perfectly well that touching a painting is a cardinal sin in any serious museum, but he placed his fingers not only on Bosch’s 1485 work but on several other masterpieces too. He would stand in front of each work for some minutes, look around and, when he was certain he wasn’t being watched by the security guards, commit the heresy of spreading all ten fingers out on the canvas. ‘I touched a Van Gogh, a Gauguin, and a Degas, and I felt something growing in me, you know,’ he told his girlfriend. ‘I’m really growing here. I’m learning a lot.’
Nothing, however, seems to have struck him more, while in Washington, than the visits he made to the military museum and the FBI museum. The first, with its many exhibits relating to the participation of the United States in the two world wars, appeared to him to be a place ‘where children are sent to learn to hate the enemies of the United States’. Not only children, to judge by his reaction. After visiting every bit of the museum and seeing planes, rockets and films about American military power, he left ‘hating the Russians, wanting to kill, kill, kill, spitting hatred’. On his tour of the FBI museum, with a federal agent as his guide, he saw the Gangster Museum, with the original clothes and weapons used by famous gangsters, such as Dillinger, ‘Baby Face’, ‘Machine Gun Kelly’ and others, as well as the actual notes written by kidnapped hostages. In the corner of one room he was surprised to find a blinking light, under which was a plaque bearing the following words: ‘Each time this light blinks, a type A crime (murder, kidnap or rape) is committed in the United States.’ The problem was that the light blinked every three seconds. On the gun stand, the agent was proud of the fact that in the FBI, they shoot to kill. That night, on a card peppered with exclamation marks, he recorded his feelings:
These guys don’t miss! They shot with revolvers and machine-guns, and always at the target’s head! They never missed! And there were children, my love, watching all this! There were whole school parties at the FBI gun stand to find out how they defend the country!…The agent told me that to join the FBI you have to be taller than 1.80m, have a good aim and be prepared for them to examine the whole of your past life. Nothing else. There’s no intelligence test, only a shooting test. I’m in the most advanced country in the world, in a country enjoying every comfort and the highest social perfection. So why do such things happen here?
Concerned with his public image, Paulo usually appended a footnote, asking Christina not to show the letters to anyone. ‘They’re very private and written with no thought for style,’ he explained. ‘You can say what I’ve written, but don’t let anyone else read them.’ At the end of a marathon week of visits, he bought a train ticket to New York, where he was going to decide on his next move. In a comfortable red-and-blue second-class carriage on an Amtrak train, minutes after leaving the American capital, he felt a shiver run through him when he realized the purpose of the concrete constructions beside the railway line: they were fall-out shelters built in case of nuclear war. These dark thoughts were interrupted by a tap on his shoulder when the train was about to make its first stop in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
It was the conductor, wearing a blue uniform and with a leather bag round his waist, who said to him: ‘Morning, sir, may I see your ticket?’
Surprised, and not understanding what he meant, Paulo responded in Portuguese: ‘Desculpe.’
The man seemed to be in a hurry and in a bad mood: ‘Don’t you understand? I asked for your ticket! Without a ticket nobody travels on my train.’
It was only at this point that Paulo understood, with deep dismay, that all Vera’s efforts to make him into a model English speaker had been in vain. Without her to turn to, he realized that it was one thing to read books in English, and even then with the help of his lover or of dictionaries. It was quite another to speak it and, most of all, to understand what people were saying in the language. The disappointing truth was that there he was alone in the United States and he couldn’t say a single, solitary word in English.