A WARRIOR’S LIFE
A Biography of
PAULO COELHO
Fernando Morais
For Marina, my companion on yet another crossing of the Rubicon
When the world fails to end in the year 2000, perhaps what will end is this fascination with the work of Paulo Coelho.
Wilson Martins, literary critic, April 1998, O Globo
Brazil is Rui Barbosa, it’s Euclides da Cunha, but it’s also Paulo Coelho. I’m not a reader of his books, nor am I an admirer, but he has to be accepted as a fact of contemporary Brazilian life.
Martins again, July 2005, O Globo
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 Paulo today: Budapest – Prague – Hamburg – Cairo
CHAPTER 4 First play, first love
CHAPTER 5 First encounter with Dr Benjamim
CHAPTER 7 Ballad of the Clinic Gaol
CHAPTER 11 The marijuana years
CHAPTER 12 Discovering America
CHAPTER 14 The Devil and Paulo
CHAPTER 16 A devil of a different sort
CHAPTER 17 Paulo renounces the Devil
CHAPTER 21 First meeting with Jean
CHAPTER 22 Paulo and Christina – publishers
CHAPTER 23 The road to Santiago
CHAPTER 25 The critics’ response
CHAPTER 28 Becoming an ‘immortal’
CHAPTER 30 One hundred million copies sold
CHAPTER 1 Paulo today: Budapest – Prague – Hamburg – Cairo
IT’S A DREARY, GREY EVENING in May 2005 as the enormous white Air France Airbus A600 touches down gently on the wet runway of Budapest’s Ferihegy airport. It is the end of a two-hour flight from Lyons in the south of France. In the cabin, the stewardess informs the passengers that it’s 6.00 p.m. in Hungary’s capital city and that the local temperature is 8°C. Seated beside the window in the front row of business class, his seat belt still fastened, a man in a black T-shirt looks up and stares at some invisible point beyond the plastic wall in front of him. Unaware of the other passengers’ curious looks, and keeping his eyes fixed on the same spot, he raises the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand as though in blessing and remains still for a moment.
After the plane stops, he gets up to take his bag from the overhead locker. He is dressed entirely in black – canvas boots, jeans and T-shirt. (Someone once remarked that, were it not for the wicked gleam in his eye, he could be mistaken for a priest.) A small detail on his woollen jacket, which is also black, tells the other passengers – at least those who are French – that their fellow traveller is no ordinary mortal, since on his lapel is a tiny gold pin embossed in red, a little larger than a computer