HIS MARRIAGE MIGHT BE FALLING APART, but the same could not be said of Paulo’s professional life. In December 1976, Philips released the fifth LP produced by Paulo and Raul, Há Dez Mil Anos Atrás, on which ten of the eleven tracks had lyrics written by him. It immediately became a phenomenal success. The album took its title from ‘I Was Born Ten Thousand Years Ago’, a traditional American song of which there were several versions, the most famous of which had been recorded by Elvis Presley four years earlier. It was also only the second time that Paulo had dedicated a song to anyone; in this case, the dedication was to his father, Pedro Queima Coelho. It was an unusual way of paying him homage, since the lyrics speak of the differences between himself and his father and are slightly condescending. Although he only admitted it years later, anyone who knew a little about his family history would realize that the ‘Pedro’ of ‘Meu Amigo Pedro’ [‘My Friend Pedro’] was his father:
Every time that I touch paradise
Or else burn in hell,
I think of you, my poor friend,
Who always wears the same suit.
Pedro, I remember the old days
When we two used to think about the world.
Today, I call you square, Pedro
And you call me a bum.
Pedro, where you go I go too,
But everything ends where it started
And I’ve got nothing to say to you,
But don’t criticize me for being the way I am,
Each one of us is a universe, Pedro,
Where you go I go too.
Success was synonymous with money and, as far as Paulo was concerned, money had to be transformed into bricks and mortar. By the end of 1976, he was the owner of a third property, a two-bedroom apartment in Rua Paulino Fernandes, in Flamengo, a few steps from the estate where he had been born and brought up. Despite the pleasure he took in being a property owner, there was a problem in being rich: the possible envy of other people, particularly communists. In this aspect, Paulo had become very conventional indeed. The long-haired hippie who, only a short time before, had challenged the consumer society and written ironical songs about materialism was now terrified of losing the money he had so eagerly accumulated. ‘Today at the cinema I was gripped by this terrible fear of communism coming and taking away all my apartments,’ Paulo confessed to his diary and added bluntly, ‘I would never fight for the people. These words may come back to haunt me, but I would never do that. I fight for free thought and perhaps for an elite of privileged people who choose a society apart.’
The material stability that the world of music gave him, however, never seems to have diverted him from his old dream of becoming a great writer. In anxious moments he got to the point of feeling ‘almost certain’ that he would not achieve this. He was appalled each time he thought how close his thirtieth birthday was, the deadline he had given himself, and beyond which, he believed, he wouldn’t have the slightest chance of being a literary success. But all it took to restore his enthusiasm was to read that Agatha Christie had accumulated a fortune of US$18 million simply from her book sales. On these occasions Paulo would plunge back into his daydreams: ‘There’s no way I want to publish my novels in Brazil. There’s no market for them here. In Brazil, a book that sells 3,000 copies is deemed a success, while in the United States that would be considered a complete flop. There’s no future here. If I want to be a writer I’m going to have to get out of here.’
Meanwhile, Paulo was obliged to submit to the routine of meetings and trips to São Paulo demanded by his position as a Philips executive. The company had decided to concentrate all its departments in one office, in the then remote Barra da Tijuca, a modern district that was just beginning to develop in Rio. He was against the move, not just because his work would then be 40 kilometres from his home–which meant he had to get over the trauma of that accident in Araruama, buy a car and take his driving test–but also because he was given a really tiny office. He complained to no one except his diary: ‘I’m sitting in my new office, if that’s what you can call the place I’m in now. Me and my team, comprising two secretaries, an assistant and an office boy, occupy an area of 30 square metres, i.e., 5 metres per person. This would be bad enough if it weren’t for the fact that we also have to take into consideration the pile of obsolete furniture that has also been crammed into this small space.’
As well as the distance and discomfort, he realized that his job was all to do with vanity, prestige and squabbles over space in the media. This world of embattled egos and back-stabbings was hardly the ideal place for someone so tormented by fear and paranoia. If some big shot was less than effusive when he met him in the lift, Paulo would immediately see in this a threat to his job. Not being invited to a show or to some major launch in the music world was a guarantee of sleepless nights and page after despairing page in his diary. Being excluded from a company meeting could trigger an asthma attack. His insecurity reached extreme levels. A music producer who ignored him could provoke an internal crisis that almost prevented him from working. When a number of these symptoms coincided, Paulo would lose direction entirely.
I’m in a really bad way today, completely in the grip of paranoia. I think no one likes me, that they’re going to play some dirty trick on me at any moment and that they don’t pay me as much attention as they used to.
It all started when I was practically thrown out of a meeting this morning. It left me with a runny nose. Maybe the colds I get are psychosomatic. André Midani, the president of the company, came into the room and didn’t even speak to me; my partner was in a foul mood, and I’m sure he’s plotting against me. My name isn’t mentioned in a newspaper column, when it should be.
To add to my persecution mania, I wasn’t even invited to the launch of Nelson Motta’s book. He’s pretty much avoided me, and I’ve never been able to conceal my dislike of him.
I think people only tolerate me because I’m a friend of Menescal’s. It really winds me up.
His dual role–as lyricist and Philips executive–also became a source of irrepressible fears. Paulo often had to produce lengthy reports for the Philips board containing critical appraisals of the most important artists contracted to the company, namely, his colleagues. Although only Midani, Menescal, Armando Pittigliani and one or two other directors read this information, it made him go cold just to think of that material falling into the hands or reaching the ears of the artists he had assessed. His fear was justifiable, as he was usually niggardly in his praise and harsh in his criticism. Paulo was nevertheless a more than dedicated worker whose enthusiasm for what he was doing often meant working late into the night. His work with Philips was one of the supports on which his fragile emotional stability was balanced. The second was his somewhat shaky marriage and the third, a new interest into which he threw himself body and soul, yoga. As well as this, and when things got too much, he asked for help from Dr Benjamim Gomes, who would get him back on track with an assortment of antidepressants.
In January 1977, Paulo had been convinced that Cissa was different from his previous partners. ‘She is what she is, she’s unlikely to change,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve stopped trying to change her because I can see how useless that is.’ Gradually, however, he managed to interest his wife in at least one facet of his world–drugs. Cissa would never become a regular consumer, but it was because of him that she smoked cannabis for the first time and then experimented with LSD. Following a ritual similar to that adopted by Vera Richter when she smoked hashish for the first time, they had their first experiment with LSD on 19 March, St Joseph’s feast day, after first kissing the saint’s image. They turned on a tape recorder when Cissa placed the small tablet on her tongue and from then on she described her initial feelings of insecurity, how she felt, at first, sleepy and then experienced itching all over her body, finally reaching a state of ecstasy. At that moment, she began to hear ‘indescribable’ sounds. Sobbing, she tried unsuccessfully to describe what she felt: ‘No one can stop what’s going in my ears. I’ll never forget what I’m hearing now. I need to try and describe it…I know that you heard what I heard. I was looking at the ceiling of our little home. I don’t know…I think it’s impossible to describe it, but I must…Paulo, it’s such an amazing thing.’ Her husband monitored this ‘research’ and also provided the sound track. The opening was a headline from Jornal Nacional, on TV Globo, announcing high numbers of traffic accidents in Rio. Then came Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, and Wagner’s Wedding March. To calm his guinea pig he promised that should she have a bad trip, a simple glass of freshly squeezed orange juice would quickly reverse the effects of the lysergic acid.
While drugs may have masked his anxieties, they were not enough to drive them away. It was during one of his deep depressions that a superhero appeared to him in his room, on a mission to save him. This was the heavyweight Rocky Balboa, the character played by Sylvester Stallone in the film Rocky. In the early hours, in March 1977, as he and Cissa sat in bed watching the Oscar awards on TV, Paulo was moved to see Rocky win no fewer than three statuettes, for best film, best director and best editing. Like Balboa, who had come back from nothing to become a champion, he, too, wanted to be a winner and was determined to win his prize. And still the only thing he was interested in becoming was a writer with a worldwide readership. It was already clear in his mind that the first step on the long road to literary glory was to leave Brazil and write his books abroad. The following day he went to Menescal and told him he was leaving. If it had been up to Paulo, the couple’s destination would have been Madrid, but Cissa’s preference won the day and in early May 1977, the two disembarked at Heathrow airport in London, the city chosen as the birthplace of his first book.
A few days later, they were settled in a studio flat in 7 Palace Street, halfway between Victoria station and Buckingham Palace, for which they paid £186 a month. It was a tiny apartment, but it was in a good location and there was a further attraction: a bath. When they arrived in London, they opened an account at the Bank of Brazil with US$5,000. Money was not exactly a problem for Paulo, but as well as being known for his parsimony, he had a legal problem, which was the limit of US$300 a month that could be transferred to Brazilians living abroad. In order to get round this, at the end of each month Paulo and Cissa mobilized grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins to each send US$300 to Brazilian friends who were resident in London and they would then deposit the money in the couple’s account in the Bank of Brazil. Thus they received about US$1,500 a month without paying any tax.
Paulo’s incomings included payment for a music column he wrote in the weekly magazine Amiga. Cissa did some journalistic work for the Brazilian section of the BBC and published the occasional short, signed article in the Jornal do Brasil, as well, of course, as doing all housework, since her husband’s contribution in this area was nil. Worse, he refused to allow any frozen food in the house and politely asked his wife to buy a cookery book. The problem was translating the recipes. The two spent hours trying to understand a recipe so that she could transform it into a meal. A weekly menu listing each day’s meals was solemnly posted in a prominent place on one of the walls of the apartment. From these menus it can be seen that they only allowed themselves meat once a week, although they made up for this with frequent visits to Indian and Thai restaurants.
They never lacked for money and what they received was enough to cover their expenses, including the classes in yoga, photography and vampirism that Paulo attended, as well as outings, short trips and taking in London’s many cultural highlights. Paulo and Cissa were always first in the queue when something was shown that would have been banned by the censors in Brazil, such as the film State of Siege, directed by Costa-Gavras, which was a denunciation of the dictatorship in Uruguay. Three months went by without any real work being done. Paulo wrote: ‘I have worked a maximum two days a week. That means that, on average, in these three months in Europe I’ve worked less than a month. For someone who wanted to conquer the world, for someone who arrived full of dreams and desires, two days’ work a week is very little.’
As there seemed no way to write the wretched, longed-for book, Paulo tried to fill his time with productive activity. The classes in vampirism inspired him to write a film script, The Vampire of London. He sent it by post to well-known producers, all of whom replied politely, making it clear that, as far as they were concerned, vampires did not make good box office. One of them very kindly offered ‘to look at the film when it’s finished and give you my opinion as to whether or not we are prepared to distribute it’.
By July, Paulo and Cissa realized that it would not be easy to find friends in London. To compensate for this lack in their lives they had a short visit from his parents. The exchange of correspondence with Brazil was growing, in the form of letters or, as Paulo preferred, tapes, whenever there was someone who could take them back to Brazil. Piles and piles of cassette tapes collected in the houses of his parents and friends, particularly in that of his dearest friend, Roberto Menescal, from whom he learned that Rita Lee had found a new writing partner–which, added to the rejections from producers and publishers, led to pages of lamentation:
My partner has found another writing partner. I’ve been forgotten far more quickly than I imagined: in just three months. In just three months I’ve lost any importance I had to cultural life over there. No one’s written to me for several days.
What’s been going on? What lies behind the mysteries that led me here? The dream I’ve dreamed all my life? Right now I’m close to realizing that dream and yet I feel as though I’m not ready for it.
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:
Playboy–And what about your marriage to Cecília Mac Dowell?
Paulo–It took place in church.
Playboy–With the full regalia?
Paulo–Yes, and Raul Seixas was my best man. Cecília and I then went to live in London, where we enjoyed a ménage à trois.
Playboy–How did that happen?
Paulo–I did a course on vampires and fell in love with one of the students, a Japanese girl called Keiko. Since I loved Cecília too, I decided to live with them both.
Playboy–Did they meet?
Paulo–Oh, yes, we lived together for a year.
Playboy–And how was it in bed?
Paulo–I had sex with them both at the same time, but they didn’t have sex with each other.
Playboy–Wasn’t one jealous of the other?
Paulo–No, never.
Playboy–Wasn’t there a time when you felt you wanted to make love just to one of them alone?
Paulo–As far as I can remember, no. It was a very intense love affair à trois.
Playboy–Cecília and Keiko didn’t have sex, but what exactly did they feel for each other?
Paulo–They were very fond of each other. They knew how much I loved them and I knew how much they loved me.
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:
It’s been a time of rejections. Everything I’ve submitted to the various competitions I was eligible to enter has been rejected. The last remaining results arrived today. All the women I’ve wanted to go out with have rejected me. This isn’t just my imagination. When I say ‘all’ I mean that there is not one exception.
[…] Ever since I was a child I’ve dreamed of being a writer, of going abroad to write and becoming world-famous. Obviously London was the step I dreamed of taking when I was a child. The fact is that the results haven’t been what I was hoping for. My first and greatest disappointment has been with myself. I’ve had six months here to feel inspired and I haven’t had enough discipline to write a single line.
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:
My relationship with Cissa could prove lasting if she showed the same emotional flexibility that existed in London. We have already advanced far enough for a small step back to be acceptable. On the other hand, there will be no opportunities. It is just going to be a question of time. Let’s hope that everything turns out all right. Although I think that our return to Brazil means that we’re more likely to split up than to stay together, because here we’re less forgiving of each other’s weaknesses.
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:
My dearest son,
We have much in common, including the ease with which we express ourselves in letters. That’s why, on this Easter Sunday, I’m sending you these lines in the hope that they will be of some help to you or at least let you know how much I love you, which is why I suffer when you suffer and am happy when you’re happy.
As you can well imagine, you and Cissa are much on my mind. There’s no need to tell me again that it’s your problem and that I should simply keep out of it. That’s why I don’t really know whether I’ll actually send you this letter.
When I say that I know you well I’m basing this simply on my mother’s intuition, because much of you, unfortunately, was created far from us, and so there are lots of things I don’t know. You were repressed during childhood and then suffocated by your own problems and ended up having to break off close relationships, break with convention and start from scratch. And although you were anxious, fearful, insecure, you succeeded. And how! But you also let go of a very repressed side to you, something you didn’t know how to live with.
I only know Cecília a little, but she seems to me a practical woman. Strong. Fearless. Intuitive. Uncomplicated. It must have been a real shock to you when she paid you back in kind…with her dependency, her hang-ups, her needs. She refused to carry your burden any more and that’s what tipped the balance in your relationship. I don’t know how it all ended, but you took it as a rejection, as lack of love, and couldn’t accept it. There is only one way of resolving the problem: recognizing it. Identifying it. You told me that you don’t know how to lose. We can only live life fully if we accept winning and we accept losing.
Lygia
Note: As you can see, I’m still a dreadful typist. But I’ve decided to beard the lion in his den, and I’m sending the letter.
My dear son: I prayed a lot for you today in my way. I prayed that God would encourage in you the certainty that it’s in your hands to build your life, and that your life will always be the same as it has been up to now: full of conscious and honest decisions and full of moments of happiness and joy.
Much love,
L.
As he himself often wrote in his diary, there is nothing new under the sun. And as had been the case so often before in his life, the only way of compensating for an emotional defeat was to find new victories at work. So it seemed like a gift from God when he received an invitation in April 1979–not even a month after his separation–to swap his job at Philips for that of product manager with their largest competitor, CBS. Included in the proposal was the prospect of prompt promotion to the post of artistic director. Following a succession of amorous and professional failures–the poor performance of the Mata Virgem album, the short-lived engagement to Eneida, the literary sterility in London, the end of his marriage–the invitation was a great relief, in large part because it would put him back in the media world of Rio and São Paulo, a world he hadn’t frequented for some time. But it also awoke an unfamiliar and unpleasant side to his character: arrogance. Since one of his duties was to reorganize the artistic department, he started by rocking the boat. ‘It’s true, I did behave very arrogantly when I started work there,’ he was to recall years later. ‘I went round giving orders and giving the yes-men a really hard time; pure authoritarianism!’ He suspected that money was being channelled out of the company and began to refuse to sign notes and invoices about which there might be any doubt.
Unaware that he was digging his own grave, he hired and fired, cut costs and closed departments, adding fuel to what was already a bonfire of egos and vanities. Meanwhile, those who had suffered most in his clean-up operation were plotting against him. One Monday, 13 August 1979, after two months and ten days in the job, he arrived at the company late in the morning and, having sent yet more heads rolling, was summoned to the office of Juan Truden, the president of CBS in Brazil. He was standing waiting for Paulo, smiling, his hand outstretched and with these words on his lips: ‘My friend, you’re fired.’ Nothing more. No ‘Good afternoon’, no ‘Hope it goes well’.
The impact was enormous, not simply because of the coldness of the dismissal but because he knew that this meant the end of his career as a recording executive. ‘I was dismissed from the highest post, from the highest position in the profession, and I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t go back to being what I was at the beginning,’ Paulo recalled years later in a statement at the Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro. ‘There were only six recording companies in Brazil and all the six positions I might really want were occupied.’ Before packing his bags, he wrote a long, angry letter to Truden in which he said that, in view of the lack of structure in the company, ‘CBS artists at the moment enjoy the dubious pleasure of being the most poorly served in the Brazilian market.’ He finished dramatically, using an expression that had remained in the popular imagination since it had been used by the ex-president Jânio Quadros in his letter of resignation: ‘And the same hidden forces that are responsible for my dismissal will one day have to face the truth. For you cannot hide the sun with a sieve, Sr Juan Truden.’
His dismissal (‘for incompetence’, as he learned later) was celebrated by the group of disaffected individuals he had created as manager, and would cause him still more humiliation. Some days later, at a social function, Paulo met Antônio Coelho Ribeiro, who had just been made president of Philips, the company Coelho had left in order to try his luck with CBS. When he saw him, Ribeiro said, in front of everyone: ‘You always were a bluffer.’
Ten months later, Antônio Ribeiro, too, got the sack. When he heard the news, Paulo took from a drawer a present he had bought shortly after Ribeiro had publicly insulted him. He went to the Ribeiros’ apartment and, when Ribeiro opened the door, Paulo hurriedly explained the reason for his presence there: ‘Do you remember what you said to me when I was sacked? Right, now you can repeat those words every day as you look into your own eyes.’ He unwrapped the object and handed it to Ribeiro. It was a wall mirror on which he had had the wretched words painted in capitals: ‘YOU ALWAYS WERE A BLUFFER.’ Once he had returned the insult, he turned, took the lift and left.
It was time for Paulo to heal his wounds. Now that he had been ejected from the world of show business, his name did not appear again in the press until the end of the year, when the magazine Fatos&Fotos published an article entitled ‘Vampirology: a Science that Now Has its Own Brazilian Master’. He was the master, presenting himself as a specialist in the subject, and he announced that he was writing the script for a feature film on vampires, which was, in fact, never made. His unexpected dismissal from CBS had caught him unawares, and with the scars from the recent breakdown of his marriage still open he was unable to bear the setback alone. In his solitude, his mind oscillated between delusions of grandeur and feelings of persecution, which, at times, he managed to bring together in his diary in one sentence: ‘Every day it seems harder to achieve my great ideal: to be famous and respected, to be the man who wrote the Book of the Century, the Thought of the Millennium, the History of Humanity.’
This seemed to be simply a repeat of what various doctors had diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia or manic depression. The problem was that it was nearly time for his traditional end-of-year taking stock and, at thirty-two, he had still not succeeded in realizing his dream. There were moments when he seemed to accept being a writer like any other. ‘Sometimes I think about writing an erotic story, and I know it would get published,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Besides which, I could devote myself to that one genre, which is gaining ground here now that pornographic magazines are being published again. I could think up some really good pseudonym.’ These plans were followed by questions he could not answer. Why write erotic books? To earn money? He was already earning money and he still wasn’t happy. In order not to have to accept that his problems were caused by no one but himself, he returned to the old story: he hadn’t written before because he was married and Cissa didn’t help. Now it was because he was alone and loneliness was preventing him from writing.
I carry on with the same plans, which haven’t yet died in me. I can resuscitate them whenever I want to; all I have to do is find the woman of my life. And I really do want to find her soon…
[…] I’ve been very, very lonely. I can’t be happy without a woman at my side.
[…] I’m tired of searching. I need someone. If I had a woman I could love, I’d be all right.
In his misery Paulo seemed to be confirming the popular belief that there’s none so blind as those who will not see, because ‘the woman of his life’ had been right there before him for more than ten years without ever receiving from him a smile or even a handshake. It’s surprising that such a pretty girl–petite, with dark hair, gentle eyes and porcelain skin–had gone unnoticed for such a long time by Paulo, the confirmed womanizer.
Paulo had met Christina Oiticica in 1968, when her uncle, Marcos, asked Sônia, Paulo’s sister, to marry him. At Lygia’s insistence, all the women invited to the formal engagement dinner were to wear long dresses. For the men, including Paulo, who was sporting a great dark mane of hair at the time and appeared to be completely out of it on drugs during the supper, she demanded dark suits. Christina and Paulo met several times in the years that followed at family gatherings and dinners without either really noticing the other. Naturally, one of these celebrations was for the marriage of Cissa and Paulo. When Paulo’s sister took him to Christmas lunch in 1979 at Christina’s parents’ house, she was going out with Vicente, a young millionaire whose inheritance included, among other luxuries, a vast yacht. Destiny, however, had decided that she was to be the woman Paulo had so longed for. A week later, just as in a fairy tale, the two were together for ever.