PAULO’S FIRST MOVE when he returned to Brazil was to persuade his father to leave Shogun so that Chris could work in peace, which he managed to do without causing any resentment. During his absence, she had dealt very competently with the firm’s business, and knowing that Chris was looking after the firm as well as or even better than he could was a further inducement for Paulo to dedicate himself entirely to the book. He was still full of doubts, though. Was he really just writing a book about his pilgrimage? Weren’t there enough books on that topic? Why not abandon the idea and try writing something else, such as a Manual of Practical Magic? And whatever the subject, should the book be published by Shogun or given to Eco, as had been the case with Manual Pratico do Vampirismo?
These uncertainties lasted until 3 March 1987, a Tuesday during Carnival. That day Paulo sat down in front of his typewriter, determined to leave the apartment only when he had put the final full stop on the last page of The Pilgrimage. He worked frenetically for twenty-one days, during which time he did not set foot outside the house, getting up from his chair only to eat, sleep and go to the toilet. When Chris arrived home on the twenty-fourth, Paulo had a package in front of him containing 200 pages ready to be sent to the printer. The decision to have Shogun publish it was growing in his mind and he even put some small classified ads in the Saturday edition of Jornal do Brasil announcing: ‘It’s on its way! The Pilgrimage–Editora Shogun.’
The person who once again dissuaded him from the idea of being at once author and publisher was the journalist Nelson Liano, Jr, who advised him to knock on Ernest Mandarino’s door. Paulo thought about it for a few days, and it wasn’t until mid-April that he signed the contract for the first edition of O Diário de um Mago, or The Pilgrimage, standing at the counter of a small bar next to the publisher’s office in Rua Marquês de Pombal.
The contract contains some odd things. First, Paulo demanded that, instead of the usual five-or seven-year contract, he should have a contract that would be renewed with every edition (the first had a print run of 3,000 copies). He did not, as he had with Manual Prático do Vampirismo, ask for monthly rather than quarterly accounts, but accepted what he was offered, even though inflation in Brazil had reached almost 1 per cent a day. The other strange thing is that at the foot of the contract the author put in an apparently meaningless addendum–which would, however, prove to be prophetic: ‘Once the book has sold 1,000 (one thousand) copies, the publisher will be responsible for the costs of producing the book in Spanish and English.’ If, among his gifts, Paulo had had the ability to predict the future, he could have taken the opportunity to make it Mandarino’s responsibility to produce versions not only in English and Spanish but also in the other forty-four languages into which The Pilgrimage would subsequently be translated, among them Albanian, Estonian, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay and Marathi.
Although sales got off to a very slow start, they soon overtook all of Eco’s other titles. Years later, when he was retired and living in Petrópolis, 70 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, Ernesto Mandarino was to recall how much of this success was due to a virtue that few authors possess–a desire to publicize the book: ‘Authors would leave the finished manuscript with the publisher and do nothing to publicize their work. Paulo not only appeared in all the media, newspapers, radio and television, but gave talks on the book wherever he was asked.’
On the advice of his friend the journalist Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos, Paulo took an initiative rare even among established authors: at his own expense he employed the twenty-year-old journalist Andréa Cals to work exclusively on publicizing the book in the media. The salary was modest–8,000 cruzados a month, the equivalent in 1987 of about US$400–but he offered a tempting bonus. Should the book sell 20,000 copies by the end of 1987, Andréa would get a return flight from Rio to Miami. The contract also included the publicity for an exhibition of art by Chris entitled ‘Tarô’, and if all twenty-two works on show were sold before the exhibition closed, Andréa would earn a further 5,000 cruzados. Meanwhile, Paulo and Chris printed flyers about The Pilgrimage, which they themselves handed out nightly in cinema, theatre and stadium queues.
All this was an attempt to make up for the resistance of large media companies to give space to something as specific as The Pilgrimage–which seemed to be of interest only to the shrinking underground press. Andréa recalls trying in vain to get a copy of The Pilgrimage included in Mandala, a TV soap being shown by Globo and whose theme was in some ways similar to that of the book, but it was down to her hard work that the book got its first mention in one of the major newspapers. Beside the very brief mention in the Jornal do Brasil was a photo of the author who, at Joaquim’s suggestion, was wearing a black cape and holding a sword. The picture caught the attention of the producers of Sem Censura, a chat show that went out every afternoon on the national television network Educativa, to which Paulo was invited.
In response to a question from the presenter, Lúcia Leme, and in front of millions of television viewers, Paulo revealed for the first time in public the secret that had been known only to a few friends and his diary: yes, he was a magus and among his many powers was that of making it rain. The strategy worked. The reporter Regina Guerra, from the newspaper O Globo, saw the programme and suggested to her boss an interview with this new individual on the Rio cultural scene: the writer who could make it rain. Her boss thought it all complete nonsense, but when his young reporter persisted, he gave in. The result was that, on 3 August, the cultural section of the newspaper devoted its entire front page to Paulo Coelho, who was given the title of ‘the Castaneda of Copacabana’. In a sequence of photos, he appears among the leaves of his garden wearing the same black cloak and dark glasses and holding a sword. The text preceding the interview seems made to order for someone claiming to have supernatural powers:
The thick walls of the old building mean that the apartment is very quiet, in spite of the fact that it’s in one of the noisiest parts of the city–Copacabana, Posto Quatro. One of the bedrooms acts as a study and opens on to a miniature forest, a tangle of bushes, climbing shrubs and ferns. To the question–‘Are you a magus?’ Paulo Coelho, who has just launched The Pilgrimage, his fifth book, replies with another: ‘Is it windy outside?’
A glance at the dense leaves is enough to make one shake one’s head and murmur a casual ‘No’, implying that it really doesn’t matter if there’s a breeze outside or not: ‘Right, take a look’–he remains as he was, seated on a cushion and leaning against another, doing nothing.
First, the tip of the highest leaf of a palm tree starts to sway gently. In the next instant, the whole plant moves, as does all the vegetation around. The bamboo curtain in the corridor sways and clicks, the reporter’s notes fly off her clipboard. After one or two minutes, the wind stops as suddenly as it began. There are a few leaves on the carpet and a question: was it coincidence or is he really a magus who knows how to summon up the wind? Read on and find out more.
Apart from O Globo, the only other coverage the rain-making author received was in Pasquim and the magazine Manchete. He was always friendly and receptive towards journalists, posing in a yoga position and allowing himself to be photographed behind smoking test tubes and putting on or removing his cloak and sword according to the demands of his clients. The barriers began to fall. His telephone number was soon in the diaries of social columnists, among them his friend Hildegard Angel, and he was often reported as having been seen dining in such-and-such a restaurant or leaving such-and-such a theatre. For the first time Paulo could feel the wind of fame in his face–something he had never experienced even at the height of his musical success, since, at the time, the star of the partnership was Raul Seixas. This media exposure did increase the sales of the book, but The Pilgrimage still seemed far from becoming a best-seller.
In order to try and capitalize on his new-found ‘almost-fame’, as he himself called it, Paulo and the astrologer Cláudia Castelo Branco, who had written the preface to The Pilgrimage, joined forces with the specialist travel firm Itatiaia Turismo to organize a spiritual package holiday named ‘The Three Sacred Roads’, which were to be Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Those interested would be guided by Paulo and Cláudia on a journey that would start in Madrid and end in Santiago de Compostela, via a zigzag route through Egypt (Cairo and Luxor), Israel (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), France (Lourdes) and then back to Spain (Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos, León, Ponferrada and Lugo). Whether it was the fault of the dreadful advertisement published in the newspapers (which did not even say how long the excursion would last) or the high price of the package (US$2,800), they received not a single enquiry. However, although it produced no results, the project had cost them both time and money, and in order to pay them for their work, the agency gave them a half-price trip to the Middle East, one of the places suggested for the failed magical mystery tour.
Paulo and Cláudia set off on 26 September with Paula, Chris’s mother, but as soon as they arrived in Cairo, he decided to continue alone with Paula. On their second day in the Egyptian capital, he hired a guide named Hassan and asked him to take them to the Moqattam district, in the southwest of the city, so that he could visit the Coptic monastery of St Simon the Shoemaker. From there they crossed the city by taxi, and night was falling when, after driving through an enormous slum, they reached the sandy fringe of the largest desert on the planet, the Sahara, a few hundred metres from the Sphinx and the famous pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos. They left the taxi and continued their journey to the pyramids on horseback (Paulo was frightened of falling off a camel, the only other available means of transport from there on). When they drew near, Paulo decided to proceed on foot, while Hassan looked after the horses and read the Koran. Paulo says that, near one of the illuminated monuments, he saw a woman in the middle of the desert wearing a chador and carrying a clay pot on her shoulder. This, according to him, was very different from what had occurred in Dachau. ‘A vision is something that you see and an apparition is something almost physical,’ he explained later. ‘What happened in Cairo was an apparition.’ Although used to such phenomena, he found what he had seen strange. He looked at the endless stretch of sand surrounding him on that moonlit night and saw no one else apart from Hassan, who was still reciting sacred verses. As the shape approached Paulo, it disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. However, it left such a strong impression that, months later, he could reconstruct the apparition in detail when describing it in his second book.
When he flew back to Brazil some weeks later, he received the first major news regarding his career while still on the plane. The stewardess handed him a copy of O Globo from the Saturday before, and he placed the folded newspaper on his lap, closed his eyes, meditated for a moment and only then opened the paper at the arts section–and there was The Pilgrimage on that week’s best-sellers’ list. Before the end of the year, he would sign contracts for five new editions of the book, the sales of which went on to exceed 12,000 copies. This success encouraged him to enter The Pilgrimage for the Prêmio Instituto Nacional do Livro, an award supported by the Ministry of Education for published novels. The jury that year was to meet in Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo, and its members were the poet Ivan Junqueira, the writer Roberto Almada, and the journalist Carlos Herculano Lopes. The Pilgrimage didn’t even appear on the list of finalists and only got Junqueira’s vote. ‘The book was unusual for us, because it mixed reality with fantasy,’ the poet recalled later. ‘For me personally it was interesting in that I like travel literature very much and also this kind of half-ghost-story.’
Immediately after the results were announced, Paulo suffered yet another disappointment. The magazine Veja had published a long report on the boom in esoteric books in Brazil and made no mention of The Pilgrimage. This was such a hard blow that Paulo once again thought of giving up his career as a writer. ‘Today I seriously thought of abandoning everything and retiring,’ he wrote in his diary. Weeks later, however, he seemed to have recovered from those two setbacks and returned to the I Ching, already with an idea for a new book. He wrote a question in his diary: ‘What should I do to make my next book sell 100,000 copies?’ He threw the three coins on the table and stared in delight at the result. Usually vague and metaphorical in its responses, the Chinese oracle was, according to Paulo, astonishingly clear: ‘The great man brings good luck.’
That piece of good luck–the new book–was already in his head. The next work by Paulo Coelho was to be based on a Persian fable that had also inspired the Borges story ‘Tale of the Two Dreamers’, published in 1935 in A Universal History of Infamy. It is the tale of Santiago, a shepherd who, after dreaming repeatedly of a treasure hidden near the Egyptian pyramids, resolves to leave the village where he was born in search of what the author calls a ‘personal legend’. On the journey to Egypt Santiago meets various characters, among them an alchemist, and at each meeting he learns a new lesson. At the end of his pilgrimage he discovers that the object of his search was in the very village he had left. Paulo had also chosen the title: O Alquimista, or The Alchemist. It’s odd to think that a book that would become one of the greatest best-sellers of all time–at the beginning of 2000 it had sold more than 35 million copies–started out as a play that would combine Shakespeare and the Brazilian humourist Chico Anysio, as the author recorded in his diary in January 1987:
Menescal and [the actor] Perry [Salles] called me asking me to write a play for one actor alone on the stage. By coincidence, I was watching Duel on video, which is a film about a man alone.
I had an idea: a large laboratory in which an old man, an alchemist, is searching for the philosopher’s stone, for wisdom. He wants to discover what man can achieve through inspiration. The alchemist (perhaps that would be a good title) recites texts by Shakespeare and by Chico Anysio. He will perform songs and hold dialogues with himself, playing more than one character. He could be an alchemist or a vampire. I know through personal experience that vampires really excite the human imagination, and it’s some time since I’ve seen anything that combines horror and humour on the stage.
But, like Faust, the alchemist realizes that knowledge lies not in books but in people–and the people are in the audience. In order to get them in the mood, he gets them to chant or sing something all together. Perry would be the alchemist, in the role of the discoverer. Again, I stress that this must all be done with great good humour.
This sketch never became a play, but went on to become a novel. Paulo knew the story so intimately that when it came to writing the book, it took him only two weeks to produce 200 pages. At the beginning was a dedication to Jean, to whom Paulo gave the privilege of being the first to read the original manuscript:
For J.,
An alchemist who knows and uses the secrets of the Great Work.
When The Alchemist was ready for publication in June 1988, sales of The Pilgrimage had exceeded 40,000 copies and it had spent nineteen uninterrupted weeks in the main best-seller lists of the Brazilian press. The sublime indifference with which the media had treated it gave a special savour to Paulo’s success, a success that was entirely down to the book itself and to the guerrilla warfare that Paulo, Chris and Andréa Cals had engaged in to publicize it. The I Ching, as interpreted by Paulo, recommended that he renew his contract with Andréa, but since she had taken on other work and he required her to devote herself entirely to him, her responsibilities were transferred to Chris.
She and Paulo adopted the same tactics for The Alchemist as had been used for the first book: the couple once again distributed flyers at the doors of theatres, bars and cinemas, visited bookshops and presented booksellers with signed copies. With his experience of the record industry, Paulo brought to the literary world a somewhat reprehensible practice–the jabaculê, a payment made to radio stations to encourage them to make favourable comments about a record, or in this case, a book. Evidence of this can be found in spreadsheets–certificados de irradiação–sent to him by O Povo AM-FM, the most popular radio station in Fortaleza, Ceará. These show that during the entire second half of July, The Alchemist was mentioned three times a day in programmes presented by Carlos Augusto, Renan França and Ronaldo César, who were, at the time, the station’s most popular presenters.
Paulo and Chris knew that they were in a world where anything goes–from sending signed copies to the grandees of the Brazilian media to becoming a full-time speaker, albeit unpaid. He had eight themes for organizers of talks to choose from: ‘The Sacred Paths of Antiquity’ ‘The Dawn of Magic’ ‘The Practices of RAM’ ‘The Philosophy and Practice of the Occult Tradition’ ‘The Esoteric Tradition and the Practices of RAM’ ‘The Growth of the Esoteric’ ‘Magic and Power’ and ‘Ways of Teaching and Learning’. At the end of each session, the audience could buy signed copies of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist, and it was, apparently, very easy to get people to come and listen to him. Paulo’s diary at the time shows that he spoke frequently at theatres and universities, as well as in country hotels and even people’s homes.
However, this campaign produced slow results and the effects on sales of The Alchemist took time to appear. Six weeks after its launch, a few thousand copies had been sold–a vast number in a country like Brazil, it’s true, but nothing when compared with the success of The Pilgrimage and far fewer than he had planned: ‘Up to now’, he wrote, ‘the book hasn’t reached 10 per cent of the goal I set myself. I think what this book needs is a miracle. I spend all day by the telephone, which refuses to ring. Why the hell doesn’t some journalist call me saying that he liked my book? My work is greater than my obsessions, my words, my feelings. For its sake I humiliate myself, I sin, I hope, I despair.’
With The Pilgrimage still high in the best-seller lists and The Alchemist heading in the same direction, it had become impossible to ignore the author. A great silence had greeted the publication of the first book, but the launch of The Alchemist was preceded by full-page articles in all the main Brazilian newspapers. And because most of the press had totally ignored The Pilgrimage on its publication, they felt obliged to rediscover it following the success of The Alchemist. However, most restricted themselves to printing an article on the author and a summary of the story. The journalist and critic Antônio Gonçalves Filho, in Folha de São Paulo, was the first to publish a proper review. He commented only that The Alchemist was not as seductive a narrative as The Pilgrimage and that the story adopted by the author had already been the subject of a considerable number of books, plays, films and operas, something that Paulo himself had commented on in his preface to the book.
‘This is why The Alchemist, too, is a symbolic text. In the course of the book I pass on everything I have learned. I’ve also tried to pay homage to great authors who managed to achieve a Universal Language: Hemingway, Blake, Borges (who also used the Persian story for one of his tales) and Malba Tahan, among others.’
In the second half of 1988, Paulo was just wondering whether to move to a larger, more professional publisher than Eco, when he was set yet another trial by Jean. He and Chris were to spend forty days in the Mojave Desert in southern California. A few days before they were due to leave, he had an unsettling phone conversation with Mandarino, the owner of Eco, who, although he was still enthusiastic about The Pilgrimage, did not believe that The Alchemist would enjoy the same success. The best thing to do would be to postpone the trip and try to resolve the problem immediately, but Master J would not be moved. And so in the middle of September, Paulo and Chris found themselves practising the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius Loyola in the extreme heat of the Mojave Desert, which could reach 50°C. Four years later, he wrote As Valkirias [The Valkyries], which was based on this experience.
At the end of October, they returned to Rio. Paulo wanted to resolve his difficulties with Eco immediately, but leaving the small publishing house without having anywhere else to go was not a good idea. One night, wanting to forget these problems for a while, he went with a friend to a poetry recital that was being held in a small fashionable bar. During the entire evening, he had the strange feeling that someone in the audience behind him was staring at him. It was only when the evening came to an end and the lights went up that he turned and caught the fixed gaze of a pretty dark-haired young girl in her early twenties. There was no apparent reason for anyone to look at him like that. At forty-one, Paulo’s close-cropped hair was almost entirely white, as were his moustache and goatee. The girl was too pretty for him not to approach her.
He went up to her and asked straight out: ‘Were you by any chance looking at me during the reading?’
The girl smiled and said: ‘Yes, I was.’
‘I’m Paulo Coelho.’
‘I know. Look what I’ve got here in my bag.’
She took out a battered copy of The Pilgrimage.
Paulo was about to sign it, but when he heard that it belonged to a friend of hers, he gave it back, saying: ‘Buy your own copy and I’ll sign it.’
They agreed to meet two days later in the elegant old Confeitaria Colombo, in the centre of the city, so that he could sign her book. Although his choice of such a romantic venue might seem to indicate that he had other intentions, this was not the case. He arrived more than half an hour late, saying that he couldn’t stay long because he had a meeting with his publisher, who had just confirmed that he was not interested in continuing to publish The Alchemist. So that they could talk a little more, Paulo and the girl walked together to the publisher’s office, which was ten blocks from the Colombo.
Her name was Mônica Rezende Antunes, and she was the twenty-year-old only daughter of liberal parents whose sole demand had been that she take a course in classical ballet, which she abandoned almost at once. When she met Paulo, she was studying chemical engineering at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro. What Mônica remembers most vividly about that meeting was that she was ‘dressed ridiculously’: ‘Imagine going to discuss contracts with your publisher in the company of a girl in tiny shorts, a flowery blouse and hair like a nymphet!’
Mônica ended up being a witness to the moment when Mandarino at Eco decided not to continue to publish The Alchemist. He didn’t believe that a work of fiction such as this could have the same degree of success as a personal narrative like The Pilgrimage. Although she had read only The Pilgrimage, Mônica couldn’t understand how anyone could reject a book by an author who had made such an impact on her. Perhaps in an attempt to console himself, Paulo gave her a not very convincing explanation for what might be Ernesto Mandarino’s real reason: with annual inflation in the country running at 1,200 per cent it was more profitable to put his money in financial deals than to publish books that ran the risk of not selling. The two of them walked on together a little farther, exchanged telephone numbers and went their different ways.
A few days later, before Paulo had decided what to do with the rights to The Alchemist, he read in a newspaper column that Lya Luft would be signing her book of poetry, O Lado Fatal [The Fatal Side], at a cocktail party given by her publisher, Paulo Roberto Rocco. Paulo had been keeping an eye on Editora Rocco for some time. It had only been in existence for just over ten years, but its catalogue already included heavyweights like Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe and Stephen Hawking. When Paulo arrived, the bookshop was crammed with people. Squeezing his way past waiters and guests, he went up to Rocco, whom he knew only from photographs in newspapers, and said:
‘Good evening, my name’s Paulo Coelho, we don’t know each other but…’
‘I already know you by name.’
‘I wanted to talk to you about my books. I’ve a friend, Bona, who lives in the same building as you and had thought of asking her to give a dinner so she could introduce us.’
‘You don’t need to ask anything of anyone. Come to my office and we’ll have a coffee and talk about your books.’
Rocco arranged the meeting for two days later. Before making a decision, though, Paulo turned to the I Ching to find out whether or not he should hand The Alchemist to a new publisher, since Rocco had clearly shown an interest. From what he could understand from the oracle’s response, it seemed that the book should be given to the new publisher only if he agreed to have it in the bookshops before Christmas. This was a highly convenient interpretation since, as any author knows, Christmas is the best time of the year for selling books. As he was about to leave to meet Rocco, the phone rang. It was Mônica, whom he invited to go along with him.
After a brief, friendly conversation with Rocco, Paulo left copies of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist with him. The publisher thought it somewhat strange that Paulo should want him to publish the book so quickly, but Paulo explained that all he had to do was buy the camera-ready copy from Eco, change the name of the publisher and put the book on the market. Rocco said that he would think about it and would reply that week. In fact, two days later, he called to say that the new contract was ready for signature. Rocco was going to publish The Alchemist.