He filled his letters to friends with news of his adventures in Belém, but in his letters to his father there was only one subject: money.
You’ve never put your money to such good use as when you paid for this trip for me. I’ve never had such fun. But if all the money you’ve spent on the trip is to produce real benefits, I need more cash. There’s no point in you spending 140,000 on a trip if I’m not going to have fun. If you haven’t got any spare money, then no problem. But it isn’t right to spend all your money on the house while my short life passes me by.
Belém appears to have been a city destined to provoke strong feelings in him. Three years before, on another trip there, he had at last had the chance to clarify a question that was troubling him: how were babies made? Earlier, he had plucked up the courage to ask Rui, a slightly older friend, but the reply, which was disconcertingly stark, appalled him: ‘Simple: the man puts his dick in the woman’s hole and when he comes, he leaves a seed in her stomach. That seed grows and becomes a person.’ He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine his father being capable of doing something so perverted with his mother. As this was not something that could be written about in a letter, he waited for the holidays in Belém so that he could find out from an appropriate person – his cousin, Fred, who as well as being older, was a member of the family, someone whose version he could trust. The first chance he had to speak to his cousin alone, he found a way of bringing the subject up and repeated the disgusting story his friend in Rio had told him. He almost had an asthma attack when he heard what Fred had to say: ‘Your friend in Rio is right. That’s how it is. The man enters the woman and deposits a drop of sperm in her vagina. That’s how everyone is made.’
Paulo reacted angrily. ‘You’re only telling me that because you haven’t got a mother and so you don’t have a problem with it. Can you really imagine your father penetrating your mother, Fred? You’re out of your mind!’
That loss of innocence was not the only shock Belém had in store for him. The city also brought him his first contact with death. Early on the evening of Carnival Saturday, when he arrived at his grandparents’ house after a dance at the Clube Tuna Luso, he was concerned to hear one of his aunts asking someone, ‘Does Paulo know?’ His grandfather Cazuza had just died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Paulo was extremely upset and shocked by the news, but he felt very important when he learned that Lygia and Pedro – since they were unable to get there in time – had named him the family’s representative at his grandfather’s funeral. As usual, he preferred to keep his feelings to himself, in the notes he made before going to sleep:
Carnival Saturday, 8th February
This night won’t turn into day for old Cazuza. I’m confused and overwhelmed by the tragedy. Yesterday, he was laughing out loud at jokes and today he’s silent. His smile will never again spread happiness. His welcoming arms, his stories about how Rio used to be, his advice, his encouraging words – all over. There are samba groups and carnival floats going down the street, but it’s all over.
That same night he wrote ‘Memories’, a poem in three long stanzas dedicated to his grandfather. The pain the adolescent spoke of in prose and verse appeared sincere, but it was interwoven with other feelings. The following day, with his grandfather’s corpse still lying in the drawing room, Paulo caught himself sinning in thought against chastity several times, when he looked at the legs of his female cousins, who were there at the wake. On the Sunday evening, Cazuza’s funeral took place – ‘a very fine occasion’, his grandson wrote in his diary – but on Shrove Tuesday, during the week of mourning, the cousins were already out having fun in the city’s clubs.
That holiday in Belém was not only the last he would spend there: it also proved to be a watershed in his life. He knew he was going to have a very difficult year at school. He felt even more negative about his studies than he had in previous years; and it was clear that his days at St Ignatius were numbered and equally clear that this would have consequences at home. There were not only dark clouds hanging over his school life either. At the end of the month, the day before returning to Rio, he flipped back in his diary to the day when he had written of his grandfather’s death and wrote in tiny but still legible writing: ‘I’ve been thinking today and I’ve begun to see the terrible truth: I’m losing my faith.’
This was not a new feeling. He had experienced his first religious doubts – gnawing away at him implacably and silently – during the retreat at St Ignatius when, troubled by sexual desire and tortured by guilt, he had been gripped by panic at the thought of suffering for all eternity in the apocalyptic flames described by Father Ruffier. He had turned to his diary to talk to God in a defiant tone ill suited to a true Christian: ‘It was You who created sin! It’s Your fault for not making me strong enough to resist! The fact that I couldn’t keep my word is Your fault!’ The following morning, he read this blasphemy and felt afraid. In desperation, he took his fellow pupil Eduardo Jardim to a place where they would not be seen or heard and broke his vow of silence to open up his heart to him.
His choice of confidant was a deliberate one. He looked up to Jardim, who was intelligent, read a lot and was a good poet without being a show-off. A small group of boys from St Ignatius to which Paulo belonged would meet in the garage at Jardim’s house to discuss what each had been reading. But it was mostly the strength of Jardim’s religious convictions that made him not only a good example but also the perfect confidant for a friend with a troubled soul. Paulo told him that everything had started with one doubt: if God existed and if this God had created him in his own image and likeness, then why did He delight in his suffering? As he asked these questions Paulo had arrived at the really big one – the unconfessable doubt: did God really exist? Fearing that others might hear him, Jardim whispered, as though in the confessional, words that were like salt being rubbed into his friend’s wounds: ‘When I was younger and was scared that my faith in God would disappear, I did everything I could to keep it. I prayed desperately, took cold baths in winter, but my faith was very slowly disappearing, until, finally, it disappeared completely. My faith had gone.’
This meant that even Jardim had succumbed. The more Paulo tried to drive away this thought, the less he was able to rid his mind of that image of a small boy taking cold baths in the middle of winter just so that God would not disappear – and God simply ignoring him. That day Paulo Coelho hated God. And so that there would be no doubt regarding his feelings he wrote: ‘I know how dangerous it is to hate God.’
A perfectly banal incident when he was returning from the retreat had soured his relations with God and His shepherds still more. On the way from the retreat house to the school Paulo judged that the driver of the bus was driving too fast and putting everyone’s life at risk. What started out merely as a concern became a horror movie: if the bus had an accident and he were to die, his soul would be burning in hell before midday. That fear won out over any embarrassment.
He went to the front of the bus, where his spiritual guide was sitting, and said: ‘Father Ruffier, the driver is driving too fast. And I’m terrified of dying.’
Furious, the priest