AFTER HER PRIMARY EDUCATION, Christina had been to Bennett College, a traditional Protestant establishment, where the Bible stories told during the Religious Knowledge lessons were the only thing that awoke in her a flicker of interest. She consistently failed in all other subjects, which meant that she had to leave the college and go from school to school until, like Paulo, she gave up completely. When she was seventeen, however, she was able to take a different educational route that would allow her to complete her secondary school studies in less than a year. It was only then that she returned to Bennett College, which had become a college of higher education, where she studied art and architecture. And at the end of 1979, when Paulo arrived at her parents’ house for Christmas dinner, she was working as an architect.
Although they were practising Christians, Christina’s parents were exceptionally liberal. If she wanted to go to lessons, she went. If she preferred to go to the cinema, no problem. And as soon as she was old enough, she was allowed to have her boyfriends sleep over at her parents’ house without any objections on their part. Not, however, that she had that many boyfriends. Although she was very pretty, Chris was no flirt. She was a thoughtful girl, who enjoyed reading and, although she was not particularly religious, joined a choir at one of the Protestant churches. On the other hand, she also went to see films at the Paissandu, bought clothes at Bibba, the fashion boutique in Ipanema, and consumed large quantities of whisky at Lama’s. She went out every night and would often not get home until dawn, her legs unsteady. ‘My drug was alcohol,’ she confessed years later. ‘I simply loved alcohol.’
It was growing dark by the time coffee was being served at the end of Christmas lunch in the Oiticica household. Paulo had had his eye on Chris since he arrived and, even though she was going out with someone else, he decided to use his cousin Sérgio Weguelin, who was also present, to find out whether or not she was doing anything that evening. When it was time to leave, he asked his cousin to invite her to go with them to see Woody Allen’s latest hit, Manhattan. She was taken by surprise and didn’t know what to say. The next thing she knew, she was alone in the cinema with Paulo, not watching Manhattan, which was sold out, but a re-run of Airport, which had been released almost ten years earlier.
Paulo behaved like a true gentleman throughout the film, and didn’t even try to hold Chris’s hand. When they left, they found the square outside the cinema full of jugglers, fortune-tellers, tarot readers, chiromancers, fire-eaters and, of course, several religious choirs each singing a different hymn. They walked along until they came to a fake Indian sitting in front of a wicker basket in which was coiled a terrifying reptile 6 metres in length. It was an enormous anaconda, a non-poisonous snake that was, however, capable of asphyxiating an ox or a human, swallowing it whole and spending weeks digesting the remains of its prey.
With a mixture of fear and disgust for the creature the couple went up to the Indian. As naturally as if he were merely asking the time, Paulo said to Chris: ‘If I kiss the snake on the mouth will you kiss me on the mouth?’
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Kiss that monster? Are you mad?’
When she realized that he was serious, she accepted the dare. ‘Fine: if you kiss the snake, I’ll kiss you on the mouth.’
To her astonishment and to that of the Indian and all the bystanders, Paulo stepped forward, grabbed the head of the snake in both hands and kissed it. Then, in front of dozens of wide-eyed spectators, he turned, took Chris in his arms and gave her a long, movie-style kiss on the lips, a kiss that was greeted with a round of applause by those present. Paulo got more than a kiss. A few hours later, the two were sleeping together in his apartment.
On the last day of the year–having first consulted the I Ching–he invited her to spend New Year with him in the sixth of the properties he owned, a small, pleasant summer house he had just bought in the seaside resort of Cabo Frio. The little white chalet, with red windows and a thatched roof, was exactly the same as the other seventy-four in a condominium called Cabana Clube designed by Renato Menescal, the architect brother of Paulo’s friend Roberto. On their way there, Paulo told Christina that the previous night he had dreamed of a voice that kept saying over and over: ‘Don’t spend New Year’s Eve in the cemetery.’ Since neither could work out what this meant, and since they had no plans to see in the New Year in a cemetery, the matter was forgotten.
Immediately after they arrived in Cabo Frio, they both sensed a strange atmosphere in the house, although they were unable to pinpoint what it was. It wasn’t something they could smell or see; it was what Paulo would call negative energy. As night fell, they began to hear noises, but couldn’t work out where they were coming from–it sounded as though some creature, human or animal, was dragging itself through the rooms, but apart from the two of them there was no one else there. Feeling both intrigued and frightened, they went out for dinner.
In the restaurant, they told the waiter about these strange occurrences and were given an explanation that made their hair stand on end: ‘Are you staying at the Cabana Clube? There used to be an Indian cemetery there. When they were building the foundations, they found the bones of hundreds of Indians, but built the houses on top of them anyway. Everyone in Cabo Frio knows that it’s haunted.’
So that was what the warning in Paulo’s dream had meant. Paulo and Chris stayed in a hotel that night and didn’t go back to the house until the next morning, and even then, they only went to collect their clothes. A few weeks later, the chalet was sold for the same US$4,000 it had cost a few months earlier.
No ghosts darkened their relationship, however. After breaking up with her boyfriend during the first days of the New Year, Chris moved into Paulo’s apartment, with all her clothes, furniture and personal possessions, including the easel she needed for her work as an architect. There they began a partnership which, though it has never been formalized, has remained solid ever since.
The start of their life together was not easy, though. As preoccupied as Paulo was with interpreting signs, Chris was most upset to find in the apartment a biography of Count Dracula open on a Bible lectern. It was not that she had anything against vampires or vampirologists–she even liked films on the subject–but she was appalled that a sacred object should be used as a joke, something which she believed would attract negative energies into the house. She was so shocked that she went out into the street and from the first available public telephone called the Baptist pastor who used to counsel her and told him what she had seen. They prayed together over the phone and, before returning to the apartment, Chris thought it prudent to go into a church. She only calmed down when Paulo explained that his interest in vampirology had absolutely nothing to do with satanism, OTO or Aleister Crowley, saying: ‘The myth of the vampire existed a hundred years before Christ. I haven’t had any contact with anyone involved in the dark arts for years.’
In fact, he hadn’t had anything to do with Marcelo Motta’s satanists since 1974, but he continued to appear publicly here and there as a specialist on the work of Aleister Crowley. Indeed, some months later he wrote a long article on the English occultist in Planeta, which was illustrated with drawings by Chris. Their relationship went through further rocky times before it finally settled down. Paulo was still racked with doubt: was Chris really the ‘marvellous companion’ he had been waiting for? He feared that deep down the two were only together for the same, unspoken reason, what he called ‘the paranoiac desire to escape solitude’. However, even while he was saying that he was afraid of falling in love with her, he broke out in a cold sweat at the thought of losing her. ‘We had our first serious argument a few days ago, when she refused to go to Araruama with me. Suddenly I was terrified to think how easily I could lose Chris. I did everything to get her and have her close. I like her, she brings me peace, calm, and I feel that we can try and build something together.’
These ups and downs at the start of their life together did not stop them celebrating their partnership unofficially. On 22 June 1980, a dreary Sunday, they blessed their union with a lunch for their parents, relatives and a few friends in the apartment where they were living. Christina took charge of the hippie-style decorations and on each invitation she wrote a psalm or proverb illustrated with a drawing. Chris’s eclectic interest in religion seems to have helped the couple’s relationship. When they met, she was already a specialist in tarot, on which she had read numerous books, and, even though she didn’t consult the I Ching as often as Paulo, she knew how to interpret its predictions. When Paulo read The Book of Mediums by Allan Kardec, the couple decided to see if they could be mediums. Just as Cissa had been a guinea pig in the experiment with LSD, now Paulo was trying to get Chris to write down messages from the Beyond. He wrote: ‘I have performed a few experiments. We began last week, when I bought the book. Chris has acted as a medium, and we have achieved some elementary communications. I’ve found this all very troubling. My concept of things has changed radically since I arrived scientifically at the conclusion that spirits do exist. They exist and are all around us.’ Much later, Chris confirmed that the experiment had worked. ‘I’m sure that a table really did move,’ she recalls, ‘and I also wrote down some texts that were dictated to me.’
The suspicion that she might have powers as a medium continued to grow from the moment when she was gripped by strange, inexplicable feelings of dread whenever she went into the bathroom of their apartment. They were odd sensations which she herself had difficulty understanding and of which she never spoke to anyone. More than once it entered her mind to turn on the gas for the shower, seal up the exits and kill herself. On the afternoon of Monday, 13 October, she left her easel and went into the bathroom. This time the desire to kill herself seemed uncontrollable, but fearing that death by asphyxiation might be very slow and painful she decided to turn to medication. She calmly took a taxi to her parents’ house in Jardim Botânico, where she knew she would find the tranquillizers that her mother took regularly–Somalium, she recalls, or Valium in Paulo’s version of events. Whatever the name of the medication, the fact is that she emptied a whole pack into her mouth, wrote a short note to Paulo and collapsed on the bed.
When he arrived home and Chris wasn’t there, Paulo went to her parents’ apartment, where they both often used to have dinner, and found Chris unconscious on the bed and, beside her, as well as the note, an empty pack of Valium. With the help of Chris’s mother, who had just arrived, he managed to get her to the lift, having first made Chris put her finger down her throat and vomit up what she could. Outside, they stopped the first taxi that passed and went to the St Bernard clinic in Gávea, where the doctors pumped out her stomach. Once recovered, hours later, she was well enough to go home.
While she was sleeping and having spoken to her about what happened, Paulo kept asking himself where those strange emanations in the bathroom came from. With the question still going round and round in his head, he went downstairs to talk to the porter, tell him what had happened to Chris and see if he had an answer to the mystery. The man said: ‘The last person who lived in that apartment, before you, was an airline captain who gassed himself in the bathroom.’ When he went back upstairs and told Chris the story, she didn’t think twice: despite having been in hospital only a few hours earlier, she got up, collected together a change of clothes for them both, as well as other personal items, threw everything into a suitcase and announced: ‘We’re going to my mother’s house. I never want to set foot in this apartment again.’
Neither of them did, not even to move house. They spent a little more than a month with Chris’s parents, long enough for work on the seventh property Paulo had bought to be completed so that they could move in there. This was a ground-floor apartment with a lovely garden and one particularly priceless feature: it was in the same building as Lygia and Pedro’s apartment. He could only have felt more emotionally secure if he were actually living with his parents.
Chris’s rules regarding Paulo’s sexual excesses always prevailed, but they were still far from being an average couple. One day, for example, Paulo suggested that they should both try an experiment that had its origins in the Middle Ages, and to which he gave the grand name of ‘a reciprocal test of resistance to pain’. Chris agreed, although she knew what was involved: stark naked, they began to whip each other with a thin bamboo cane. They took it in turns to beat the other on the back, the blows growing harder and harder, until they reached the limit of physical endurance. This occurred only when they were both bleeding from their wounds.
Their relationship gradually began to settle down. The first two years passed without anything untoward disrupting their life together. Encouraged by her partner, Chris began to paint again, something she had given up four years earlier, while Paulo began to direct so-called TV specials. Not that they needed money to live on. Besides the forty-one songs he had written with Raul Seixas, in the past few years, Paulo had written more than a hundred lyrics–originals or versions of foreign hits–for dozens of different artists. This meant that the royalties continued to flow into his bank account. He tried to keep busy, however, fearing that idleness would lead him into depression again. Besides the TV specials, he gave talks and took part in round-table discussions on music and, occasionally, on vampirism. But the cure only worked for a while, because even when he was fully occupied, he would still suffer occasional anxiety attacks.
When this occurred, as it did at the end of 1981, he continued to give vent to his feelings in his diary:
These last two days, I missed two appointments, on the pretext that I was having a tooth extracted. I’m completely confused as to what to do. I can’t even be bothered to write a short press release that would bring in a tiny amount of money. The situation inside me is this. I can’t even write these pages and this year, which I was hoping would be better than last, has turned out precisely as I described above. Oh, yes: I haven’t had a bath for the last few days.
The crisis appears to have hit him so badly that he even changed his behaviour regarding something that had always been very dear to him–money: ‘I haven’t paid attention to anything, including one of the things that I really like: money. Just imagine, I don’t know how much is in my bank account, something I’ve always known down to the minutest detail. I’ve lost interest in sex, in writing, in going to the cinema, in reading, even in the plants I’ve been tending so lovingly for so long and that are now dying because I only water them sporadically.’
If he had lost interest in both money and sex, things were very bad indeed, and so he did what he always did in such situations–he went back to Dr Benjamim, visiting him once a week. Whenever he felt like this, he would always ask Chris the same question: ‘Am I on the right path?’ And so, at the end of 1981, she made a suggestion that struck a chord in his nomadic soul: why not just leave everything and go off travelling with no fixed destination and no date set for their return? Her instincts told her that this was the right path. Years later, Chris would recall: ‘Something was telling me that it would work. Paulo trusted my instinct and decided to drop everything.’ Determined to ‘search for the meaning of life’, wherever it might be, he asked permission to leave his unpaid post with TV Globo, bought two air tickets to Madrid–the cheapest he could find–and promised that he and Chris would return to Brazil only when the last cent of the US$17,000 he took with him had run out.
Unlike all Paulo’s other trips, this one, which was to last eight months, was made without any forward planning. Although he took more than enough for a comfortable trip, with no need to cut corners, he was never one to squander money. He chose Iberia, the airline that not only offered the cheapest flights but added in a free night in a hotel in Madrid. From Spain he and Chris went on to London at the beginning of December 1981, where they rented the cheapest car available, a tiny Citroën 2CV. In London, they also established the first rule of the trip: neither should carry more than 6 kilos of luggage. This meant sacrificing the heavy Olivetti typewriter that Paulo had taken with him; this was shipped back to Brazil.
While pondering what direction to take, Paulo and Chris remained in London until the middle of January 1982, when they took to the road, determined to visit two places: Prague, where he wanted to make a promise to the Infant Jesus, and Bucharest, the capital of Romania and birthplace, 550 years earlier, of the nobleman Vlad Tepeş, who was the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s creation: the most famous of all the vampires, Count Dracula. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 January, they arrived in Vienna frozen to the bone, after almost a day travelling the 1,200 or so kilometres separating London from the capital of Austria. Their modest 2CV had no heater, which meant that they had to travel wrapped in woollen blankets in order to withstand the low winter temperatures. The stop in Vienna was so that they could obtain visas for Hungary, which they would have to cross in order to reach Romania.
Once this was done, they went to the Brazilian embassy, where Chris needed to sort out a small bureaucratic matter. Paulo waited for her out in the street, smoking and walking up and down. Suddenly, with a sound like a bomb, a vast sheet of ice several metres long slid off the roof of the building five storeys above and crashed on to the street, ripping open the bodywork of a car that was parked only a few centimetres from where Paulo was standing. He had been that close to death.
After spending the night in Budapest, they left for the capital of Yugoslavia, where they decided to stay for three days. Not that Belgrade held any special attraction, but they couldn’t face getting back into the freezing Citroën. The car had become such a problem that they decided to hand it back to the rental company. With the help of the hotel manager they found a real bargain: the Indian embassy was selling a light-blue Mercedes–nine years old, but in good condition–for a mere US$1,000. Although well used, it had a 110-horse-power engine and was equipped with an efficient heating system. This would be the only large expense of the trip. For advice on hotels, restaurants and places to visit, they relied on Europe on 20 Dollars a Day.
Now that they had a proper car, the 500 kilometres between Belgrade and Bucharest, the couple’s next destination, could be done in one day. However, precisely because they now had a fast, comfortable car, they chose to take a more roundabout route. Having crossed Hungary and part of Austria, driving a little more than 1,000 kilometres, they arrived in Prague, where Paulo was to make the promise to the Infant Jesus that he would honour almost twenty-five years later. It was only then that they turned towards Romania, which meant another 1,500 kilometres. For anyone not in a hurry or concerned about money, this was wonderful.
During this criss-cross journey across Central Europe, chance placed another destination in their path. It was not until a few weeks after buying the Mercedes that Paulo discovered that the car had originally come from the old Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany) and that the change of ownership had to be registered at the licensing authority in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. Travelling from Bucharest to Bonn meant a journey of almost 2,000 kilometres, a distance that now held no worries for them. Two days after leaving the capital of Romania, the blue Mercedes was crossing the frontier into West Germany. From Bucharest to Munich, the first German city they went through, the odometer showed that they had driven 1,193 kilometres. Munich was completely covered in snow, it was almost midday and since neither of the travellers was hungry, instead of lunching there, they decided to stop in Stuttgart, about 200 kilometres farther on. Minutes after passing through Munich, the capital of Bavaria, Paulo turned the car off the road into an avenue of bare trees with a sign written in German: ‘Dachau Konzentrationslager’. It had long been in his mind to visit the sadly famous Nazi concentration camp in Dachau–since he was a boy he had been a passionate reader of books and stories about the Second World War–but little did he imagine that this visit, which lasted only a few hours, would radically change his life.