Paulo was in no doubt: Father Ruffier was talking about him. After twelve months without going to confession – so as not to have to touch on the taboo subject of masturbation – he realized that if he were to die suddenly, his final destiny would be hell. He imagined the Devil looking into his eyes and snickering sarcastically: ‘My dear boy, your suffering hasn’t even begun yet.’ He felt helpless, powerless and confused. He had no one to turn to, but he knew that a Jesuit retreat was a place of certainties, not of doubts. Faced with a choice between suffering in the flames for all eternity as described by the priest and giving up his solitary pleasure, he chose faith. Deeply moved and kneeling alone on the stone floor of the mirador, he turned to God and made a solemn promise never to masturbate again.
His decision gave him courage and calmed him, but that feeling of calm was short-lived. The following day, the Devil counter-attacked with such force that he could not resist the temptation and, defeated, he masturbated. He left the bathroom as though his hands were covered in blood, knelt in front of the altar and implored: ‘Lord! I want to change, but I can’t stop myself! I’ve said endless acts of contrition, but I can’t stop sinning. I sin in thought, word and deed. Give me strength! Please! Please! Please!’ Full of despair, he only felt relief when, in a whispered conversation in the woods, he found that he had a companion in eternal suffering: a fellow pupil who had also been masturbating during the retreat.
Ashamed of his own weakness, Paulo was subjected to two more sermons from Father Ruffier, which seemed to have been chosen especially to instil fear into the minds of the boys. Once again, the priest deployed dramatic and terrifying images, this time to alert the boys to the perils of clinging on to material values. From the pulpit Father Ruffier gesticulated like an actor, shaking his short, muscular arms and saying: ‘Truly, truly I say unto you, my children: the time will come when we shall all be laid low. Imagine yourselves dying. In the hospital room, your relatives white with fear. The bedside table is crammed with different medicines, all useless now. It is then that you see how powerless you are. You humbly recognize that you are powerless. What good will fame, money, cars, luxuries be at the fatal hour? What use are those things if your death lies in the hands of the Creator?’ With his fists clenched, and as though possessed by divine fury, he declared vehemently: ‘We must give up everything, my sons! We must give up everything!’
These words should not be confused with an exhortation to embrace socialism or anything of the sort. Not only were the sons of some of the wealthiest families in Rio de Janeiro in the congregation, but the college was politically conservative and was always showing films of executions by firing squads in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in order to show the boys ‘the bloodthirsty nature of communism’. And Father Ruffier himself was proud of the fact that he had had to leave Colombia in a hurry ‘to flee communism’ (he was referring to the popular uprising in Bogotá in 1948, known as the Bogotazo).
While the boys stared at each other in astonishment, the priest spoke again. The subject was, once again, hell. Just in case he had not made himself clear in the first part of his sermon, he once more described the eternal state of suffering to which sinners would be condemned: ‘Hell is like the sea that is there before us. Imagine a swallow coming along every hundred years and taking a drop of water each time. That swallow is you and that is your penance. You will suffer for millions and millions of years, but one day the sea will be empty. And you will say: at last, it’s over and I can rest in peace.’ He paused, then concluded: ‘But then the Creator will smile from the heights and will say: “That was just the beginning. Now you will see other seas and that is how it will be for all eternity. The swallow empties the sea and I fill it up again.”’
Paulo spent the rest of the day with these words echoing in his head. He went into the woods that surrounded the retreat house and tried to distract himself with the beauty of the view, but Father Ruffier’s words only resonated inside him more loudly. That night, he set down his thoughts before finally falling asleep, and the notes he made appear to demonstrate the efficacy of the spiritual retreat.
Here, I’ve completely forgotten the world. I’ve forgotten that I’m going to fail maths, I’ve forgotten that Botafogo is top of the league and I’ve forgotten that I’m going to spend next week on the island of Itaipu. But I feel that with every moment spent forgetting, I’m learning to understand the world better. I’m going back to a world that I didn’t understand before and which I hated, but which the retreat has taught me to love and understand. I’ve learnt here to see the beauty that lies in a piece of grass and in a stone. In short, I’ve learnt how to live.
Most important was the fact that he returned home certain that he had acquired the virtue which – through all the highs and lows of his life – would prove to be the connecting thread: faith. Even his parents, who appeared to have lost all hope of getting him back on the straight and narrow, were thrilled with the new Paulo. ‘We’re very happy to see that you finally appear to have got back on the right track,’ Lygia declared when he returned. Her son’s conversion had been all that was missing to complete domestic bliss, for a few months earlier, the family had finally moved into the large pink house built by Pedro Coelho with his own hands.
In fact, the move to Gávea happened before the building was completed, which meant that they still had to live for some time among tins of paint, sinks and baths piled up in corners. However, the house astonished everyone, with its dining room, sitting room and drawing room, its ensuite bathrooms in every bedroom, its marble staircase and its verandah. There was also an inner courtyard so large that Paulo later thought of using it as a rehearsal space for his plays. The move was a shock to Paulo. Moving from the estate in Botafogo, where he was born and where he was the unchallenged leader, to Gávea, which, at the time, was a vast wasteland with few houses and buildings, was a painful business. The change of district did nothing to lessen his parents’ earlier fears, or, rather, his father’s, and, obsessively preoccupied with the harm that the ‘outside world’ might do to his son’s character and education, Pedro thought it best to ban him from going out at night. Suddenly, Paulo no longer had any friends and his life was reduced to three activities: sleeping, going to classes at St Ignatius and reading at home.
Reading was nothing new. He had even managed to introduce a clause concerning books in the Arco statutes, stating that, ‘besides other activities, every day must include some recreational reading’. He had begun reading the children’s classics that Brazilian parents liked to give their children; then he moved on to Conan Doyle and had soon read all of Sherlock Holmes. When he was told to read the annotated edition of The Slum by Aluísio Azevedo at school, he began by ridiculing it: ‘I’m not enjoying the book. I don’t know why Aluísio Azevedo brings sex into it so much.’ Some chapters later, however, he radically changed his mind and praised the work highly: ‘At last I’m beginning to understand the book: life without ideals, full of betrayal and remorse. The lesson I took from it is that life is long and disappointing. The Slum is a sublime book. It makes us think of the sufferings of others.’ What had initially been a scholastic exercise had become a pleasure. From then on, he wrote reviews of all the books he read. His reports might be short and sharp, such as ‘weak plot’ when writing about Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan, or, in the case of Vuzz by P.A. Hourey, endless paragraphs saying how magnificent it was.
He read anything and everything, from Michel Quoist’s lyrical poems to Jean-Paul Sartre. He would read best-sellers by Leon Uris, Ellery Queen’s detective stories and pseudo-scientific works such as O Homem no Cosmos by Helio Jaguaribe, which he classed in his notes as ‘pure, poorly disguised red propaganda’. Such condensed reviews give the impression that he read with one eye on the aesthetic and the other on good behaviour. Remarks such as ‘His poetry contains the more degrading and entirely unnecessary aspects of human morality’ (on Para Viver um Grande Amor by Vinicius de Moraes) or ‘Brazilians aren’t yet ready for this kind of book’ (referring to the play Bonitinha, mas Ordinária by Nelson Rodrigues) were frequent in his listings. He had even more to say on Nelson Rodrigues: ‘It’s said that he’s a slave to the public, but I don’t agree. He was born for this type of literature, and it’s not the people who are making him write it.’
Politically