PAULO COELHO DE SOUZA was born on a rainy night on 24 August 1947, the feast of St Bartholomew, in the hospital of São José in Humaitá, a middle-class area of Rio de Janeiro. The doctors had foreseen that there might be problems with the birth, the first for twenty-three-year-old Lygia Araripe Coelho de Souza, married to a thirty-three-year-old engineer, Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza. The baby would be not only their first child but a first grandchild for the four grandparents and a first nephew for uncles and aunts on both sides. Initial examination had shown that the child had swallowed a fatal mixture of meconium – that is, his own faeces – and amniotic fluid. He was not moving in the womb and showed no inclination to be born, and finally had to be delivered by forceps. As he was pulled into the world, at exactly 12.05 a.m., the doctor must have heard a slight crack, like a pencil snapping. This was the baby’s collarbone, which had failed to resist the pressure of the forceps. Since the baby, a boy, was dead, this was hardly a problem.
Lygia was a devout Catholic and, in a moment of despair, the first name that came to her lips was that of the patron saint of the maternity hospital: ‘Please bring back my son! Save him, St Joseph! My baby’s life is in your hands!’
The sobbing parents asked for someone to come and give the last rites to their dead child. Only a nun could be found, but just as she was about to administer the sacrament, there was a fainting mewing sound. The child was, in fact, alive, but in a deep coma. He had faced his first challenge and survived it.
He spent his first three days in an incubator. During those decisive seventy-two hours his father, Pedro, remained with him all the time. On the fourth day, when Paulo was taken out of the incubator, Pedro finally managed to get some sleep, and was replaced in his vigil by his mother-in- law Maria Elisa, or Lilisa as she was known. Six decades later, Paulo would state without hesitation that his earliest memory was of seeing a woman come into the room and knowing that she was his grandmother. In spite of weighing only 3.33 kilos at birth and measuring 49 centimetres, the child seemed healthy. According to Lygia’s notes in her baby album, he had dark hair, brown eyes and fair skin, and looked like his father. He was named after an uncle who had died young from a heart attack.
Apart from a bout of whooping cough, Paulo had a normal, healthy childhood. At eight months, he said his first word, at ten months, his first teeth appeared and at eleven months, he began to walk without ever having crawled. According to Lygia, he was ‘gentle, obedient, extremely lively and intelligent’. When he was two, his only sister, Sônia Maria, was born; he was always fond of her and, apparently, never jealous. At three, he learned to make the sign of the cross, a gesture that was later accompanied by requests to God for the good health of his parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.
Until he was thirteen, he and his family lived on an eleven-house estate built by his father in Botafogo, a pleasant middle-class area of Rio. The best of the houses – the only one with a garden – was reserved for Pedro’s in-laws, Lilisa and Tuca, who owned the land. Another of the houses, a modest, two-storey affair, was given to Pedro in payment for his work and the remaining nine were let, sold or occupied by relatives. The Coelhos were so concerned about security that, although the estate was protected by high gates, all the windows and doors in the house were kept shut. Paulo and the other children could play freely as long as they did so within the confines of the estate; although it was only a few blocks from Botafogo beach, they knew nothing of life beyond its walls. Friendship with children from ‘outside’ was unthinkable.
From a very young age, Paulo showed that he had an original way of thinking. When, at the age of three, Lygia caught him behaving badly, he said: ‘Do you know why I’m being naughty today, Mama? It’s because my guardian angel isn’t working. He’s been working very hard and his battery has run out.’
One of his greatest pleasures was helping his grandfather Tuca repair his enormous Packard car. His father felt that this was clear proof that his son would turn out to be an engineer like him. Pedro also had a car – a Vanguard – but it rarely left the garage. As far as Pedro Coelho was concerned, if the family could take the bus into the city, there was no reason to spend money on petrol.
One of Coelho’s earliest memories is of his father’s tight grip on domestic finances. Engineer Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza’s dream was to build not just a modest house for his family, like those on the estate, but a really large house with drawing rooms, a conservatory, verandahs and several bathrooms. The first step towards building this cathedral was a present from his father-in-law, Tuca: a 400-square-metre plot in Rua Padre Leonel Franca in the smart district of Gávea. From then on all non-essential expenditure for the family was cut in favour of the house in Gávea. ‘If we’re going to build a house for everyone,’ declared Dr Pedro, as he was known, ‘then everyone is going to have to cut back on spending.’ No new clothes, no birthday parties, no presents, no unnecessary trips in the car. ‘At the time,’ the author recalls, ‘we had nothing, but we didn’t lack for anything either.’ Christmas was saved for the children by the German electric trains and French dolls that their maternal grandparents gave them.
The dream house in Gávea caused the family a further problem. Instead of placing his savings in a bank, Pedro preferred to invest them in building materials and, since he had no shed in which to store these treasures, he kept everything in the house until he had enough capital to begin the construction work. As a result, both Coelho and his sister recall spending their childhood among lavatory bowls, taps, bags of cement and tiles.
The cutbacks did not, however, impoverish Coelho’s intellectual life. Although his father no longer bought any new records, he nevertheless listened to classical music every night. And anyone pressing his ear to the front door of No. 11 would have heard Bach and Tchaikovsky being played by Lygia on the piano that had been with her since before she was married. The house was also full of books, mainly collected by Lygia.
At the beginning of 1952, when he was four and a half, Coelho’s parents enrolled him in kindergarten, where he spent two years. Then, in 1954, intending eventually to send their son to a Jesuit secondary school, St Ignatius College, he was moved to Our Lady Victorious School, which was seen as the best route to St Ignatius – the most traditional school of its kind in Rio, and one of the most respected educational establishments for boys in the city. St Ignatius was expensive, but it guaranteed the one thing that the Coelhos regarded as essential: strict discipline.
It was certainly true that, at least in Paulo’s case, the cordon sanitaire placed around the estate to protect the children from the evil world outside had no effect. At five, he was already viewed by his adult neighbours as a bad influence on their children. As there were two other children on the estate called Paulo (his cousins, Paulo Arraes and Paulo Araripe), he was simply called ‘Coelho’. To Lygia and Pedro’s horror, suspicions that it was ‘Coelho’ who was responsible for many of the odd things that were happening in the small community began to be confirmed. First, there was the discovery of a small girl bound hand and foot to a tree so that she appeared to be hugging it and who was too afraid to tell on the culprit. Then came the information that, at dead of night, the boys were organizing chicken races, which ended with all the competitors, apart from the winner, having their necks wrung. One day, someone replaced the contents of all the cans of hair lacquer belonging to the young girls on the estate with water. It was one of the victims of this last jape – Cecília Arraes, an older cousin – who worked out who the culprit was. She found a satchel in one of the boys’ hiding places containing papers that revealed the existence of a ‘secret organization’ complete with