*Adolf Fritz, generally called Dr Fritz, was a hypothetical German surgeon whose spirit was said to have been channelled by various psychic surgeons in Brazil, starting with Zé Arigo in the 1950s and continuing up to the present. There is no proof that he actually existed.
CHAPTER 4 First play, first love
AT THE END OF 1962, at his father’s insistence, Paulo was forced to enrol in the science stream rather than the arts as he had hoped. His scholastic performance in the fourth year had been disastrous, and he had finished the year having to re-sit maths, the subject at which his father so excelled. In the end, he passed with a 5 – not a decimal point more than the mark required to move on to the next year and remain at St Ignatius. In spite of this and Paulo’s declared intention to study the arts, his parents insisted that he study engineering and, following his appalling scholastic performance, he was in no position to insist.
However, from his point of view, the practical Pedro Coelho had reasons for hoping that his son might yet be saved and become an engineer. These hopes lay not only in the interest Paulo had shown in his grandfather’s success as a mechanic – professional and amateur. As a boy, Paulo had frequently asked his parents to buy him copies of the magazine Mecânica Popular, a publication dating from the 1950s that taught readers how to do everything from fixing floor polishers to building boats and houses. When he was ten or eleven he was so passionate about aeroplane modelling that any father would have seen in this a promising future as an aeronautical engineer. The difference was that, while lots of children play with model aeroplanes, Paulo set up the Clube Sunday, of which he and his cousin Fred, who lived in Belém, were sole members. Since a distance of 3,000 kilometres separated them and their aeroplanes, the club’s activities ended up being a chronological list of the models each had acquired. At the end of each month, Paulo would record all this information in a notebook – the names and characteristics of the small planes they had acquired, the serial number, wing span, date and place of purchase, general construction expenses, the date, place and reason for the loss of the plane whenever this occurred. Not one of these pieces of information served any purpose, but ‘It was best to keep things organized,’ Paulo said. When the glider Chiquita smashed into a wall in Gávea, it was thought worthy of special mention: ‘It only flew once, but since it was destroyed heroically, I award this plane the Combat Cross. Paulo Coelho de Souza, Director.’
This fascination for model aeroplanes rapidly disappeared, but it gave way to another mania, even more auspicious for anyone wanting his son to be an engineer: making rockets. For some months Paulo and Renato Dias, a classmate at St Ignatius, spent all their spare time on this new activity. No one can say how or when it began – not even Paulo can remember – but the two spent any free time during the week in the National Library reading books about such matters as ‘explosive propulsion’, ‘solid fuels’ and ‘metallic combustibles’. On Sundays and holidays, the small square in front of the Coelho house became a launch pad. As was almost always the case with Paulo, everything had to be set down on paper first. In his usual meticulous way, he started a small notebook entitled ‘Astronautics – Activities to be Completed by the Programme for the Construction of Space Rockets’. Timetables stated the time taken on research in books, the specifications of materials used in the construction and the type of fuel. On the day of the launch, he produced a typewritten document with blank spaces to be filled in by hand at the time of the test, noting date, place, time, temperature, humidity and visibility.
The rockets were made of aluminium tubing about 20 centimetres in length and weighing 200 grams and had wooden nose cones. They were propelled by a fuel the boys had concocted out of ‘sugar, gunpowder, magnesium and nitric acid’. This concentrated mixture was placed in a container at the base of the rocket, and the explosive cocktail was detonated using a wick soaked in kerosene. The rockets were given illustrious names: Goddard I, II and III, and Von Braun I, II and III, in homage, respectively, to the American aeronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard and the creator of the German flying bombs that devastated London during the Second World War, Wernher von Braun. However, although the rockets were intended to rise up to 17 metres, they never did. On launch days, Paulo would take over a part of the pavement outside their house ‘for the public’ and convert a hole that the telephone company had forgotten to close up into a trench where he and his friend could shelter. He then invited his father, the servants and passers-by to sign the flight reports as ‘representatives of the government’. The rockets failed to live up to the preparations. Not one ever rose more than a few centimetres into the air and the majority exploded before they had even got off the ground. Paulo’s astronautical phase disappeared as fast as it had arrived and in less than six months the space programme was abandoned before a seventh rocket could be constructed.
Apart from these fleeting fancies – stamp-collecting was another – Paulo continued to nurture his one constant dream – to become a writer. When he was sixteen, his father, in a conciliatory gesture, offered him a flight to Belém, which, to Paulo, was a paradise on a par with Araruama. Nevertheless, he turned it down, saying that he would rather have a typewriter. His father agreed and gave him a Smith Corona, which would stay with him until it was replaced, first, by an electric Olivetti and, then, decades later, by a laptop computer.
His total lack of interest in education meant that he was among the least successful students in his class in the first year of his science studies and at the end of the year he once again scraped through with a modest 5.2 average. His report arrived on Christmas Eve. Paulo never quite knew whether it was because of his dreadful marks or an argument over the length of his hair, but on Christmas Day 1963, when the first group of relatives was about to arrive for Christmas dinner, his mother told him bluntly: ‘I’ve made an appointment for the 28th. I’m taking you to a nerve specialist.’
Terrified by what that might mean – what in God’s name was a nerve specialist? – he locked himself in his room and scribbled a harsh, almost cruel account of his relationship with his family:
I’m going to see a nerve specialist. My hands have gone cold with fear. But the anxiety this has brought on has allowed me to examine my home and those in it more closely.
Mama doesn’t punish me in order to teach me, but just to show how strong she is. She doesn’t understand that I’m a nervous sort and that occasionally I get upset, and so she always punishes me for it. The things that are intended to be for my own good she always turns into a threat, a final warning, an example of my selfishness. She herself is deeply selfish. This year, she has never, or hardly ever, held my hand.
Papa is incredibly narrow-minded. He is really nothing more than the house financier. Like Mama, he never talks to me, because his mind is always on the house and his work. It’s dreadful.
Sônia lacks character. She always does what Mama does. But she’s not selfish or bad. The coldness I feel towards her is gradually disappearing.
Mama is a fool. Her main aim in life is to give me as many complexes as possible. She’s a fool, a real fool. Papa’s the same.
The diary also reveals that the fear induced by the proposed visit to the specialist was unjustified. A day after the appointment he simply mentions the visit along with other unimportant issues:
Yesterday I went to the psychiatrist. It was just to meet him. No important comment to make.
I went to see the play Pobre Menina Rica, by Carlos Lyra and Vinicius de Moraes and then I had a pizza.
I decided to put off my whole literary programme until 1965. I’m going to wait until I’m a bit more mature.
He managed to achieve