Cecília collared the future author and said: ‘So what’s this Arco business? What does the organization do? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to your parents.’
He was terrified. ‘It’s a secret organization, so I’m forbidden to tell you anything.’ When his cousin continued to threaten him, he said: ‘No, really, I can’t tell you. The only thing I can say is that Arco is an organization specializing in sabotage.’ He went on to explain that both the water in the girls’ hair lacquer and the girl being tied to the tree were punishments for their having crossed the chalk frontier scratched on the ground to mark the borders of Arco territory, beyond which lay an area ‘forbidden to girls’.
When evidence of Paulo’s involvement in the matter reached his parents, they were in no doubt that, when he was old enough, the boy should definitely be placed in the stern, wise hands of the Jesuits. While at Our Lady Victorious, he became accustomed to the regime that he would find at St Ignatius, for, unlike at other schools, the pupils had classes on Saturdays and were free on Wednesdays. This meant that Paulo only had Sunday to play with his friends on the estate. On Saturdays, when they were all off, he had to spend the day at school. On Wednesdays, when he was free but had no companions, he had no alternative but to stay at home reading and studying.
The children at Our Lady Victorious ranged in age from seven to eleven, and the school made a point of inculcating the pupils with a belief in the values of hard work and of respect for one’s fellows. The children had to learn by heart the school rules, one of which was: ‘It shows a lack of politeness, Christian charity and fellowship to wound less talented or less intelligent colleagues by words or laughter.’ Coelho loathed all the subjects he was taught, without exception. The only reason he put up with the torment of spending his days bent over his books was that he had to get good marks in order to move up to the next year. In the first two years he spent at Our Lady Victorious, he managed to achieve well-above-average marks. However, from the third year on, things began to slip, as can be seen in a letter he sent to Pedro on Father’s Day in 1956:
Papa,
I only got one in my maths test, so I’m going to have to study with you every night. My averages in the other subjects improved though. In religion I went from zero to six, in Portuguese from zero to six and a half, but in maths I went from four and a half to two and a half. My overall place in the class was still pretty bad, but I improved a bit, moving from twenty-fifth to sixteenth.
Love,
Paulo
Twenty-fifth was, in fact, bottom of the class, given that the classes at Our Lady Victorious had a maximum of twenty-five boys in them. However, the fact that he was bottom of the class didn’t mean that the Coelhos were bringing up a fool. On the contrary. Their son may have hated studying, but he loved reading. He would read anything and everything, from fairy tales to Tarzan, and whatever his parents bought him or his friends lent him. Little by little, Coelho became the estate’s resident storyteller. Years later, his aunt, Cecília Dantas Arraes, would recall the ‘boy with skinny legs and baggy, wide-legged trousers’: ‘When he wasn’t thinking up some mischief, he would be sitting on the pavement with his friends around him while he told stories.’
One night, he was with his parents and grandparents watching a quiz programme, The Sky’s the Limit. A professor was answering questions about the Roman Empire and when the quiz master asked the professor who had succeeded Julius Caesar, Paulo jumped up and, to everyone’s astonishment, said: ‘Octavius Augustus’, adding: ‘I’ve always liked Octavius Augustus. He was the one August was named after, and that’s the month I was born in.’
Knowing more than his friends was one way of compensating for his physical weakness. He was very thin, frail and short, and both on the estate and at school he was known as ‘Pele’ – ‘skin’ – a Rio term used at the time for boys who were always getting beaten up by their classmates. He may have been his peers’ favourite victim, but he soon learned that knowing things no one else knew and reading stories none of his peers had read was one way of gaining their respect.
He realized that he would never come top in anything at school, but when he learned that there was to be a writing competition for all the boys in the third year, he decided to enter. The subject was ‘The Father of Aviation’, Alberto Santos Dumont. This is what Coelho wrote:
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alberto Santos Dumont. Every day, early in the morning, Alberto would watch the birds flying and sometimes he would think: ‘If eagles can fly, why can’t I, after all, I’m more intelligent than the eagles.’ Santos Dumont then decided to study hard, and his father and his mother, Francisca Dumont, sent him to an aeromodelling school.
Other people, such as Father Bartholomew and Augusto Severo, had tried to fly before. Augusto Severo flew in a balloon that he had built, but it fell to earth and he died. But Santos Dumont did not give up. He built a balloon that was a tube filled with gas and he flew, went round the Jefel [sic] Tower in Paris and landed in the same place he had taken off from.
Then he decided to invent an aeroplane that was heavier than air. Its shell was made of bamboo and silk. In 1906, in Champs de Bagatelle, he tried out the aeroplane. Lots of people laughed, convinced he would never fly. But Santos Dumont with his 14-bis travelled along for more than 220 metres and suddenly the wheels left the ground. When the crowd saw it there was a cry of ‘Ah!’ And that was it, aviation had been invented.
The best composition was to be chosen by a vote among the pupils. Paulo was so lacking in confidence that when it came to voting, he ended up choosing the work of another pupil. When the votes were counted, though, he was astonished to find that he was the winner. The pupil for whom he had voted came second, but was later disqualified when it was discovered that he had copied the text from a newspaper article.
However, Paulo’s performance in the competition was not reflected in other subjects. When the time came for him to take the entrance exam for St Ignatius, the strict discipline and sacrifices imposed by the harsh regime at Our Lady Victorious proved useless and he failed. As punishment, in order to prepare for the retake, he was forced to stay in Rio having private lessons. This meant he had to forgo the annual family holiday in Araruama, where one of his uncles lived. To make sure that he had no spare time, his mother, who was also concerned by his lack of physical strength, decided that in the mornings he would attend PE classes at a holiday camp in Fortaleza de São João, an army unit in the peaceful, romantic area of Urca in the central region of Rio. Forced to do the two things he most hated – physical exercise in the morning and studying in the afternoon – Paulo felt as if he were spending two months in hell.
Every morning, Lygia took a bus with her son that went directly from Botafogo to Urca, where she handed him over to his tormentors. The climax of the nightmare was the dreaded jump into the river, which the boys – about fifty of them – were forced to do every day at the end of a seemingly endless session of bending, running and bar work. The boys, who were always accompanied by adult instructors, were placed in line and forced to jump from a bridge into the icy water of the river that cuts through the woods around the fortress. Even though he knew there was no chance of drowning or being hurt, the mere thought of doing this made Paulo panic. Initially, he was always last in line. His heart would pound, the palms of his hands would sweat and he felt like crying, calling for his mother, even peeing his pants: he would have done anything to avoid making that leap were it not for the fact that he was even more afraid of looking like a coward. Then he discovered the solution: ‘If I was first in line, I would suffer for less time.’ Problem solved. ‘Not that I got over my fear of jumping,’ he recalled years later, ‘but the suffering ended and I learned my first lesson in life: if it’s going to hurt, confront the problem straight away because at least then the pain will stop.’
These were, in fact, wasted days, in terms of both money and suffering, since he again failed the entrance exam. After spending the whole of 1958 preparing, however, he finally passed and did so with the excellent average mark of 8.3. High marks not only guaranteed admission to the school but also meant being given the title of ‘Count’. If his performance improved still more he