Although he said that he loved receiving letters, but hated writing them, as soon as he could read and write, and when he was away from home, Paulo would fill page after page, mostly addressed to his parents. Their content reveals a mature, delicate child concerned with his reputation as a bad, ill-behaved student. His letters to Lygia were mawkish and full of sentimentality, like this one, sent on Mother’s Day 1957, when he was nine:
Dear Mama: No, no, we don’t need May 8th to remember all the good things we’ve received from you. Your constant love and dedication, even though we’re, very often, bad, disobedient children.
[…] The truth is, it’s your love that forgives us. That resilient love that never snaps like chewing gum. May God keep you, darling Mama, and forgive my errors because I’m still only small and I promise to improve very very soon.
Lots of love,
Paulinho
The letters he sent to his father were more formal, even down to the signature, and written in a rather complaining tone.
Papa,
Have you sent my leaflets to be printed? And how is the new house going? When are we going to move in?
I’m counting on your presence here the next time you come.
Love,
Paulo Coelho
As time went by, letter-writing became a regular thing for him. He would write to his parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and friends. If he had no one to write to, he would simply jot down his ideas on small pieces of paper and then hide his scribbled thoughts in a secret place away from prying eyes. When he was about twelve he bought a pocket diary in which he began to make daily entries. He would always write in ink, in a slightly wobbly hand, but with few grammatical errors. He began by recording typical adolescent tasks – ‘tidy my desk’, ‘Fred’s birthday’ and ‘send a telegram to Grandpa Cazuza’ – and gradually he also began to record things he had done, seen or merely thought. Sometimes these were short notes to himself, such as ‘swap s. with Zeca’, ‘papa: equations’ and ‘do part E of the plan’. This was also the first time he sketched a self-portrait:
I was born on 24 August 1947 in the São José Hospital. I have lived on this estate since I was small. I have attended three schools and in all three I was regarded as a prince because of the way I dressed. I’ve always had good marks in all the schools I’ve been to.
I really like studying, but I also like playing. I’ve never been interested in opera or romantic music. I hate rock-and-roll, but I really like popular Brazilian music. I only like carnival when I’m taken to fancy-dress balls.
I really like adventures, but I’m scared of dangerous things […] I’ve had several girlfriends already. I love sport. I want to be a chemist when I grow up because I like working with flasks and medicines. I love the cinema, fishing and making model aeroplanes.
I like reading comics and doing crosswords. I hate picnics and outings or anything that’s boring.
This regular exercise of writing about himself or things that happened during the day attracted him so much that he began to record everything – either in a diary kept in a spiral notebook or by dictating into a cassette recorder and keeping the tapes. Later, with the arrival of computers he put together the entire set of records covering the four decades of confessions that he had accumulated up until then and stored them in a trunk, which he padlocked. In those 170 handwritten notebooks and 94 cassettes lay hidden the minutiae of his life and soul from 1959, when he was twelve years old, up to 1995, when he was forty-eight and began to write directly on to a computer. He was famous by then, and had stated in his will that immediately following his death, the trunk and its entire contents should be burned. However, for reasons that will be explained later, he changed his mind and allowed the writer of this biography free access to this material. Diaries are records produced almost simultaneously with the emotion or action described, and are often cathartic exercises for the person writing them. This is clear from Coelho’s diaries, where he often speaks of the more perverse sides of his personality, often to the detriment of his more generous and sensitive side.
The diary gave the author the freedom to fantasize at will. Contrary to what he wrote in the self-portrait quoted above, Coelho rarely dressed smartly, he loathed studying just as he loathed sport and his love life was not always happy. According to his diary, his cousin Cecília, his neighbour Mónica, who lived on the estate, Dedê, with whom he shared his first kiss in Araruama, and Ana Maria, or Tatá, a pretty dark-haired girl with braces, were all girlfriends. Young love is often a troubling business, and the appearance of the last of these girls in his life was the subject of dramatically embroidered reports. ‘For the first time, I cried because of a woman,’ he wrote. At night, unable to sleep, he saw himself as a character in a tragedy: as he cycled past his lover’s house, he was run over by a car and fell to the ground covered in blood. Somehow, Tatá was there at his side and knelt sobbing beside his body in time to hear him utter his last words: ‘This is my blood. It was shed for you. Remember me …’
Although the relationship was purely platonic, Tatá’s parents took an immediate dislike to Coelho. Forbidden to continue her relationship with that ‘strange boy’, she nevertheless stood up to her family. She told Paulo that her mother had even hit her, but still she wouldn’t give him up. However, when he was holidaying in Araruama, he received a two-line note from Chico, a friend who lived on the estate: ‘Tatá has told me to tell you it’s all over. She’s in love with someone else.’ It was as though the walls in Uncle José’s house had fallen in on him. It wasn’t just the loss of his girlfriend but the loss of face before his friends for having been so betrayed, cuckolded by a woman. He could take anything but that. He therefore invented an extraordinary story, which he described in a letter to his friend the following day. Chico was told to tell everyone that he had lied about his relationship with Tatá; he had never actually felt anything for her, but as a secret agent of the CIC – the Central Intelligence Center, a US spy agency – he had received instructions to draw up a dossier on her. This was the only reason he had got close to her. A week later, after receiving a second letter from Chico, he noted in his diary: ‘He believed my story, but from now on, I have a whole string of lies to live up to. Appearances have been saved, but my heart is aching.’
Lygia and Pedro also had aching hearts, although not because of love. The first months their son had spent at St Ignatius had been disastrous. The days when he brought back his monthly grades were a nightmare. While his sister, Sônia Maria, was getting top marks at her school, Paulo’s marks got steadily worse. With only rare exceptions – usually in unimportant subjects such as choral singing or craftwork – he hardly ever achieved the necessary average of 5 if he was to stay on at the school. It was only when he was forced to study for hours on end at home and given extra tuition in various subjects that he managed to complete the first year, but even then his average was only a poor 6.3. In the second year, things deteriorated still further. He continued to get high marks in choral singing, but couldn’t achieve even the minimum average grade in the subjects that mattered – maths, Portuguese, history, geography, Latin and English. However, his parents were sure that the iron hand of the Jesuits would bring their essentially good-natured son back to the straight and narrow.
As time went by, he became more and more timid, retiring and insecure. He began to lose interest even in the favourite sport of his schoolmates, which was to stand at the gates of the Colégio Jacobina, where