It was pure magic to walk those two or three blocks to see them coming out. I still have the image in my mind: the girls’ slim, exquisite legs, half on view, half hidden by their pleated skirts. They came out in groups, groups of legs and pleated skirts that the wind would make even more exciting. Anyone who experienced this knows that there was nothing more sublime in the world, although I never went out with a girl at the Jacobina.
Nor did Paulo, not at the Jacobina or anywhere else. Apart from innocent flirtations and notes exchanged with the girls on the estate or in Araruama, he reached young adulthood without ever having had a real girlfriend. When his friends got together to brag about their conquests – never anything more than holding hands or a quick kiss or a squeeze – he was the only one who had no adventure to talk of. Fate had not made him handsome. His head was too big for his skinny body and his shoulders narrow. He had fleshy lips, like his father’s, and his nose, too, seemed overlarge for the face of a boy of his age.
He became more solitary with each day that passed and buried himself in books – not those the Jesuits had them read at school, which he loathed, but adventure stories and novels. However, while he may have become a voracious reader, this still did not improve his performance at school. At the end of every year, in the public prize-giving ceremonies, he had become used to seeing his colleagues – some of whom went on to become leading figures in Brazilian public life – receiving diplomas and medals, while he was never once called to go up to the dais. He only narrowly avoided being kept down a year and thus forced to find another school, since at St Ignatius, staying down was synonymous with being thrown out.
While their son proved himself to be a resounding failure, his parents at least lived in hope that he would become a good Christian and, indeed, he appeared to be well on the way to this. While averse to study, he felt comfortable in the heavily religious atmosphere of the college. He would don his best clothes and happily attend the obligatory Sunday mass, which was celebrated entirely in Latin, and he became familiar with the mysterious rituals such as covering the images of the saints during Lent with purple cloths. Even the dark underground catacombs where the mortal remains of the Jesuits lay aroused his curiosity, although he never had the courage to visit them.
His parents’ hopes were re-awakened during his fourth year, when he decided to go on a retreat held by the school. These retreats lasted three or four days, and took place during the week so that they would not seem like a holiday camp or mere recreation. They were always held at the Padre Anchieta Retreat House, or the Casa da Gávea, as it was known – a country house high up in the then remote district of São Conrado, 15 kilometres from the centre of Rio. Built in 1935 and surrounded by woods, it was a large three-storey building with thirty blue-framed windows in the front. These were the windows of the bedrooms where the guests stayed, each with a magnificent view of the deserted beach of São Conrado. The Jesuits never tired of repeating that the silence in the house was so complete that at any hour of the day or night and in any corner of the building you could hear the waves breaking on the beach below.
It was on a hot October morning in 1962 that Paulo left for his encounter with God. In a small suitcase packed by his mother, he took, as well as his clothes and personal belongings, his new, inseparable companions: a notebook and a fountain pen with which to make the notes that were more and more taking on the form of a diary. At eight in the morning, all the boys were standing in the college courtyard and as they waited for the bus to take them to the retreat house, Coelho was suddenly filled with courage. With two friends he went into the chapel in the dark, and walked round the altar and down the stairs towards the catacombs. Lit only by candles, the crypt, which was full of coffins, looked even gloomier. To his surprise, though, instead of being filled with terror, as he had always imagined he would be, he had an indescribable feeling of well-being. He seemed inspired to search for an explanation for his unexpected bravery. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t seeing death in all its terror,’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘but the eternal rest of those who had lived and suffered for Jesus.’
Half an hour later, they were all at the Casa da Gávea. During the days that followed, Paulo shared with another young boy a bare cubicle provided with two beds, a wardrobe, a table, two chairs and a little altar attached to the wall. In a corner was a china wash basin and above it a mirror. Once they had unpacked, both boys went down to the refectory, where they were given tea and biscuits. The spiritual guide for the group was Father João Batista Ruffier, who announced the rules of the retreat, the first of which would come into force in the next ten minutes: a vow of silence. From then on, until they left at the end of the retreat, no one was allowed to say a single word. Father Ruffier, who was a stickler for the rules, was about to give one of his famous sermons, one that would remain in the memory of generations of those who attended St Ignatius.
‘You are here like machines going into the workshop for a service. You can expect to be taken apart piece by piece. Don’t be afraid of the amount of dirt that will come out. The most important thing is that you put back each piece in its right place with total honesty.’
The sermon lasted almost an hour, but it was those opening words that went round and round in Paulo’s head all afternoon, as he walked alone in the woods surrounding the house. That night he wrote in his diary, ‘I have reviewed all my thoughts of the last few days and I’m ready to put things right.’ He said a Hail Mary and an Our Father, and fell asleep.
Although Father Ruffier had made it clear what the retreat was for – ‘Here you will drive away the temptations of life and consecrate yourselves to meditation and prayer’ – not everyone was there for Christian reflection. Everyone knew that once dinner was over and after the final prayer of the day had been said, shadows would creep along the dark corridors of the house to meet secretly in small groups for whispered games of poker and pontoon. If one of the boys had managed to smuggle in a transistor radio – something that was expressly forbidden – someone would immediately suggest placing a bet on the races at the Jockey Club. From midnight to dawn the religious atmosphere was profaned by betting, smoking and even drinking contraband whisky concealed in shampoo bottles. Whenever a light in a cubicle warned of suspicious activities, one of the more attentive priests would immediately turn off the electricity. This, however, didn’t always resolve the problem, since the heretical game would continue in the light from candles purloined from the chapel during the day.
On the second day, Paulo woke at five in the morning, his mind confused, although his spirits improved a little when he opened the bedroom window and saw the sun coming up over the sea. At six on the dot, still not having eaten, he met his colleagues in the chapel for the daily mass, prepared to put things right with God and do something he had been putting off for almost a year: taking communion. The problem was not communion itself but the horror of confession, with which all the boys were familiar. They would arrive at the confessional prepared to reveal only the most banal of sins, but they knew that, in the end, the priest would always ask the inevitable question: ‘Have you sinned against chastity, my son?’ Should the reply be in the affirmative, the questions that followed were more probing: ‘Alone or with someone else?’ If it was with someone else, the priest would continue, to the mortification of the more timid boys: ‘With a person or an animal?’ If the response was ‘with a person’, the sinner was not required to reveal the name of the partner, only the sex: ‘With a boy or with a girl?’
Paulo found this an extremely difficult topic to deal with and he didn’t understand how it could be a sin. He was so convinced that masturbation was not a shameful activity that he wrote in his notebook: ‘No one on this earth can throw the first stone at me, because no one has avoided this temptation.’ In spite of this, he had never had the courage to confess to a priest that he masturbated, and living in a permanent state of sin troubled him deeply. With his soul divided, he preferred merely to say the act of contrition and to receive communion without going to confession.
Following mass, Father Ruffier returned to the charge with a particularly harsh sermon. Before a terrified audience, he painted a terrifying picture of the place intended for all sinners: ‘We are in hell! The fire is burning mercilessly! Here one sees only tears and hears only the grinding of teeth in mutual loathing. I come across