PAULO AND CHRIS spent the first few months of 2004 working on making the old mill they had bought in Saint-Martin habitable. The plan to spend four months there, four in Brazil and four travelling had been scuppered by the suggested programme Mônica had sent at the beginning of the year. Sant Jordi had been overwhelmed by no fewer than 187 invitations for Paulo to present prizes and participate in events, signings, conferences and launches all over the world. If he were to agree to even half of those requests there would be no time for anything else–not even his next book, which was just beginning to preoccupy him.
He had been working on the story in his head during the second half of the year, at the end of which time just two weeks were enough for him to set down on paper the 318 pages of O Zahir, or The Zahir, the title of which had been inspired by a story by Jorge Luís Borges about something which, once touched or seen, would never be forgotten. The nameless main character, who is easily recognizable, is an ex-rock star turned world-famous writer, loathed by the critics and adored by his readers. He lives in Paris with a war correspondent, Esther. The narrative begins with the character’s horror when he finds out that she has left him. Written at the end of 2004, in March of the following year, the book was ready to be launched in Brazil and several other countries.
However, before it was discovered by readers around the world, Brazilians included, The Zahir was to be the subject of a somewhat surprising operation: it was to be published first in, of all places, Tehran, capital of Iran, where Coelho was the most widely read foreign author. This was a tactic by the young publisher Arash Hejazi to defeat local piracy which, while not on the same alarming scale as in Egypt, was carried out with such impunity that twenty-seven different editions of The Alchemist alone had been identified, all of them pirate copies as far as the author was concerned, but none of them illegal, because Iran is not a signatory to the international agreements on the protection of authors’ rights. The total absence of any legislation to suppress the clandestine book industry was due to a peculiarity in the law, which only protects works whose first edition is printed, published and launched in the country. In order to guarantee his publishing house, Caravan, the right to be the sole publisher of The Zahir in the country, Hejazi suggested that Mônica change the programme of international launches so that the first edition could appear in bookshops in Iran.
Some days after the book was published, it faced problems from the government. The bad news was conveyed in a telephone call from Hejazi to the author, who was with Mônica in the Hotel Gellert in Budapest. Speaking from a public call box in order to foil the censors who might be bugging his phone, the terrified thirty-five-year-old publisher told Coelho that the Caravan stand at the International Book Fair in Iran had just been invaded by a group from the Basejih, the regime’s ‘morality police’. The officers had confiscated 1,000 copies of The Zahir, announced that the book was banned and ordered him to appear two days later at the censor’s office.
Both publisher and author were in agreement as to how best to confront such violence and ensure Hejazi’s physical safety: they should tell the international public. Coelho made calls to two or three journalist friends, the first he could get hold of, and the BBC in London and France Presse immediately broadcast the news, which then travelled around the world. This reaction appears to have frightened off the authorities, because, a few days later, the books were returned without any explanation and the ban lifted. It was understandable that a repressive and moralistic state such as Iran should have a problem with a book that deals with adulterous relationships. What was surprising was that the hand of repression should touch someone as popular in the country as Paulo Coelho, who was publicly hailed as ‘the first non-Muslim writer to visit Iran since the ayatollahs came to power’–that is, since 1979.
In fact, Coelho had visited the country in May 2000 as the guest of President Mohamed Khatami, who was masterminding a very tentative process of political liberalization. When they landed in Tehran, and even though it was three in the morning, Paulo and Chris (who was wearing a wedding ring on her left hand and had been duly informed of the strictures imposed on women in Islamic countries) were greeted by a crowd of more than a thousand readers who had learned of the arrival of the author of The Alchemist from the newspapers. It was just before the new government was about to take office and the political situation was tense. The streets of the capital were filled every day with student demonstrations in support of Khatami’s reforms, which were facing strong opposition from the conservative clerics who hold the real power in the country. Although accompanied everywhere by a dozen or so Brazilian and foreign journalists, Coelho was never far from the watchful eyes of the six security guards armed with machine guns who had been assigned to him. After giving five lectures and various book signings for Brida, with an audience of never fewer than a thousand, he was honoured by the Minister of Culture, Ataolah Mohajerani, with a gala dinner where the place of honour was occupied by no less a person than President Khatami. When the seventy-year-old Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dolatabadi turned down an invitation to be present at the banquet given in honour of his Brazilian colleague, of whom he was a self-confessed admirer, he referred to the limitations and the fragility of Khatami’s liberalization process. Hounded by the government, he refused to fraternize with its censors. ‘I cannot be interrogated in the morning,’ he told the reporters, ‘and in the evening have coffee with the president.’
Some weeks after The Zahir’s publication in Iran, 8 million copies of the book, translated into forty-two languages, arrived in bookshops in eighty-three countries. When it was launched in Europe, the novel came to the attention of the newspapers–not in the political pages, as had been the case with the Iranian censorship, but in the gossip columns. In the spring of 2005, a question had been going round the press offices of the European media: who was the inspiration behind the book’s main female character, Esther? The first suspect, put forward by the Moscow tabloid Komsomólskaia Pravda, was the beautiful Russian designer Anna Rossa, who was reported to have had a brief affair with the author. When he read the news, which was reproduced on an Italian literary website, Coelho was quick to send the newspaper a letter, which his friend the journalist Dmitry Voskoboynikov translated:
Dear readers of Komsomólskaia Pravda
I was most intrigued to learn from your newspaper that I had an affair with the designer Anna Rossa three years ago and that this woman is supposedly the main character in my new book, The Zahir. Happily or unhappily, we shall never know which, the information is simply not true.
When I was shown a photo of this young woman at my side, I remembered her at once. In fact, we were introduced at a reception at the Brazilian embassy. Now I am no saint, but there was not and probably never will be anything between the two of us.
The Zahir is perhaps one of my deepest books, and I have dedicated it to my partner Christina Oiticica, with whom I have lived for twenty-five years. I wish you and Anna Rossa love and success.
Yours
Paulo Coelho
In the face of this quick denial, the journalists’ eyes turned to another beautiful woman, the Chilean Cecília Bolocco, Miss Universe 1987, who, at the time, was presenting La Noche de Cecília, a highly successful chat show in Chile. On her way to Madrid, where she was recording interviews for her programme, she burst out laughing when she learned that she was being named as the inspiration for Esther in The Zahir: ‘Don’t say that! Carlito gets very jealous…’ The jealous ‘Carlito’ was the former Argentine president, Carlos Menem, whom she had married in May 2000, when he was seventy and she was thirty-five. Cecília’s reaction was understandable. Some years earlier, the press had informed readers that she had had an affair with Coelho between the beginning of 1999 and October 2000, when she was married to Menem. Both had vehemently denied the allegations. Suspicions also fell on the Italian actress Valeria Golino.
However, on 17 April 2005, a Sunday, the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã announced on its front page that the woman on whom Paulo had based the character was the English journalist Christina Lamb, war correspondent for the Sunday Times. When she was phoned up in Harare, where she was doing an interview, she couldn’t believe that the secret had been made public. She was the ‘real-life Esther’, the newspaper confirmed. ‘All last week I fielded phone calls from newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, South Africa, even Britain, asking how I felt being “Paulo Coelho’s muse”,’ she said in a full-page article in the Sunday Times Review, entitled ‘He stole my soul’ and with a curious subtitle: ‘Christina Lamb has covered many foreign wars for the Sunday Times, but she had no defences when one of the world’s bestselling novelists decided to hijack her life.’
In the article, the journalist says that she met Coelho two years earlier when she was chosen to interview him about the success of Eleven Minutes. At the time, the writer was still living in the Henri IV hotel. This was their only meeting. During the following months, they exchanged e-mails, he in the south of France and she in Kandahar and Kabul, in Afghanistan. Coelho so enjoyed Christina’s The Sewing Circles of Herat that he included it in his ‘Top Ten Reads’ on the Barnes & Noble website. When she checked her e-mails in June 2004 she found, ‘among the usual monotonous updates from the coalition forces in Kabul and junk offering penis enlargement’, a message from Coelho with a huge attachment. It was the Portuguese typescript of his just completed book The Zahir, with a message saying: ‘The female character was inspired by you.’ He then explained that he had thought of trying to meet, but she was always away, so he had used her book and Internet research to create the character. In the article published in the Sunday Times, she describes what she felt as she read the e-mail:
I was part astonished, part flattered, part alarmed. He didn’t know me. How could he have based a character on me? I felt almost naked. Like most people, I guess, there were things in my life I would not wish to see in print. […]
So with some trepidation I downloaded the 304-page file and opened it. As I read the manuscript I recognized things I had told him in Tarbes, insights into my private world, as well as concerns I had discussed in my book.
The first paragraph began: ‘Her name is Esther, she is a war correspondent who has just returned from Iraq because of the imminent invasion of that country; she is thirty years old, married, without children.’
At least he had made me younger.
What had at first seemed amusing (‘I was starting to enjoy the idea that the heroine was based on me, and now here she was disappearing on page one,’ Christina wrote) was becoming uncomfortable as she read on:
I was slightly concerned about his description of how Esther and her husband had met. ‘One day, a journalist comes to interview me. She wants to know what it’s like to have my work known all over the country but to be entirely unknown myself…She’s pretty, intelligent, quiet. We meet again at a party, where there’s no pressure of work, and I manage to get her into bed that same night.’
Astonished by what she had read, Christina told her mother and her husband–a Portuguese lawyer named Paulo:
Far from sharing my feeling of flattery, he was highly suspicious about why another man should be writing a book on his wife. I told a few friends and they looked at me as though I was mad. I decided it was better not to mention it to anyone else.
If the Correio da Manhã had not revealed the secret, the matter would have ended there. The revelation would not, after all, have caused any further discomfort for the journalist, as she herself confessed in her article:
Once I got used to it, I decided I quite liked being a muse. But I was not quite sure what muses do. […] I asked Coelho how a muse should behave. ‘Muses must be treated like fairies,’ he replied, adding that he had never had a muse before. I thought being a muse probably involved lying on a couch with a large box of fancy chocolates, looking pensive. […] But being a muse is not easy if you work full time and have a five-year-old. […] In the meantime, I have learnt that going to interview celebrity authors can be more hazardous than covering wars. They might not shoot you but they can steal your soul.
The book seemed destined to cause controversy. Accustomed to the media’s hostility towards Coelho’s previous books, Brazilian readers had a surprise during the final week of March 2005. On all the news-stands in the country three of the four major weekly magazines had photos of Coelho on the cover and inside each were eight pages about the author and his life. This unusual situation led the journalist Marcelo Beraba, the ombudsman of the Folha de São Paulo, to dedicate the whole of his Sunday column to the subject.
The ‘case of the three covers’, as it became known, was deemed important only because it revealed a radical change in behaviour in a media which, with a few rare exceptions, had treated the author very badly. It was as though Brazil had just discovered a phenomenon that so many countries had been celebrating since the worldwide success of The Alchemist.
Whatever the critics might say, what distinguished Paulo from other best-sellers, such as John Grisham and Dan Brown, was the content of his books. Some of those authors might even sell more books, but they don’t fill auditoriums around the world, as Paulo does. The impact his work has on his readers can be measured by the hundreds of e-mails that he receives daily from all corners of the earth, many of them from people telling him how reading his books has changed their lives. Ordinary letters posted from the most remote places, sometimes simply addressed to ‘Paulo Coelho–Brazil’, arrive by the sackload.
In February 2006–as if in acknowledgement of his popularity–Coelho received an invitation from Buckingham Palace–from Sir James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn and Lord Steward of the Household. This was for a state banquet to be given some weeks later for the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during the President’s official visit to Britain. The invitation made clear that the occasion called for ‘white tie with decorations’. As the date of the banquet approached, however, newspapers reported that, at the request of the Brazilian government, both President Lula and his seventy-strong delegation had been relieved of the obligation to wear tails. When he read this, Coelho (who had dusted off his tails, waistcoat and white tie) was confused as to what to do. Concerned that he might make a blunder, he decided to send a short e-mail to the Royal Household asking for instructions: ‘I just read that President Lula vetoed the white tie for the Brazilian Delegation. Please let me know how to proceed–I don’t want to be the only one with a white tie.’
The reply, signed by a member of the Royal Household, arrived two days later, also by e-mail:
Mr. Coelho:
Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II has agreed that President Lula and members of his official suite need not wear white tie to the State Banquet. However, that will be just a small number of people (less than 20). The remainder of the 170 guests will be in white tie, so I can reassure you that you will not be the only person wearing white tie. The Queen does expect her guests to wear white tie and you are officially a guest of Her Majesty The Queen, not President Lula.