When he arrived at the newspaper office after lunch, he learned that his head was on the block. The Marians were furious about the article and had gone straight to the owner of the newspaper to complain. They accused him of having invented facts and attributing them to the organization’s leaders. The cub reporter was indignant when he heard this, and although his colleagues told him to lie low until the whole thing had blown over, he decided that it would be best to clear up the matter straight away. He sat outside the owner’s glass-walled office, the so-called ‘fishbowl’, and waited two hours for her to arrive.
On entering the fishbowl, he remained standing in front of her desk. ‘Dona Ondina, I’m the person who wrote the article on the Marians and I’ve come to explain—’
She didn’t even let him finish the sentence: ‘You’re sacked,’ she said.
Surprised, he countered with: ‘But Dona Ondina, I’m about to be taken on by the newspaper.’
Without even looking up, she said again: ‘You’re sacked. Please leave.’
Paulo left, regretting his naivety. If he had waited a few days, as he had been advised, she would probably have forgotten about the matter. Now there was no way of saving the situation. He returned home with his tail between his legs. Although shaken by the incident, his ability to fantasize seemed limitless. Recording in his diary his regret at having taken the initiative, he described his dismissal as if it were a case of political persecution:
I could have done all kinds of things to avoid being fired! I could have given in and gone over to the right simply in order to keep my job on the newspaper. But no. I wanted to be a martyr, crucified for his ideas, and they put me on the cross before I could give any kind of message to humanity. I couldn’t even say that I was innocent, that I was fighting for the good of all. But no! Die now, you filthy dog. I’m a worm. A C-O-W-A-R-D! I was sacked from the ‘DN’ for being a subversive. Now I’ve got nothing but night school and lots of time doing nothing.
The Diário de Notícias was not a right-wing newspaper; nor had he been dismissed for political reasons.
Paulo appeared prepared to take advantage of his time in the clinic. He had been labelled ‘a madman’, and he intended to enjoy the impunity that protects the mentally ill and do whatever he wanted. To hell with school and his parents: he wanted to follow his dream. In his own words, he had become a ‘delinquent’ who went around with gangs, but since he lacked the physical strength of other boys, he thought that he could become an ‘intellectual delinquent’ – someone who read things that none of his friends had read and knew things that no one else knew. He belonged to three different groups – Paissandu, the Conservatory and what remained of Rota 15 – but whenever there was any sign of violence, he felt ashamed that he didn’t have the courage even to break up a fistfight.
He knew, however, that displays of physical strength were not the way forward. Whereas before he had felt himself to be ‘an existentialist on the road to communism’, now he saw himself as ‘a street communist’. He had read Henry Miller’s famous trilogy Sexus, Plexus and Nexus, and glanced over the works of Marx and Engels, and he felt confident enough to talk on such topics as ‘true socialism’, ‘the Cold War’ and ‘the exploitation of the worker’. In a text entitled ‘Art in Brazil’, he quotes Lenin as having spoken of the need to take two steps back when it was clear that this was the only way of taking one step forward. ‘Art cannot flee from this premise. It must first adapt to man and then, having gained his confidence, respect and love, it can lead him along the road to reality.’ His basis for taking a route he had earlier rejected was simple: ‘I am an intellectual, and since all intellectuals are communists, I am a communist.’ The mother of a girl he was friendly with accused him of ‘putting ideas’ in the heads of the poor people in the street. ‘From Henry Miller to communism is only a step,’ he wrote; ‘therefore, I’m a communist.’ What he would only confess to his diary was that he loathed Bergman and considered Godard ‘a bore’ and Antonioni ‘annoying’. In fact what he really liked was to listen to The Beatles, but it wasn’t quite right for a communist to say this in public.
As he had predicted, his studies were relegated firmly to the background. In August, fearing that he would fail the year, the school summoned Lygia and Pedro to deal with three issues: low grades, too many absences and ‘the student’s personal problems’. Since the start of classes after the July holidays he had not achieved marks above 2.5 in any subject and during that time he had not been to a single maths lesson, which explained why he had never got more than 3 in the subject since moving to the college. He would leave home every morning and go to school, but once there, involved as he was with the drama group, he would spend whole days without entering the classroom. The verdict presented to his parents was worrying: either their son paid more attention to his studies or he would be expelled. Although the college did not adopt the same strategy as that used at St Ignatius, the director of studies subtly suggested to his parents that ‘to avoid the worst’, it might be best to move him before the end of the year to a ‘less demanding’ educational establishment. Put bluntly: if they didn’t want to have the shame of seeing their son fail again, the best thing would be to enrol him in a college where the pupil only had to pay his monthly fees promptly in order to guarantee success. Lygia and Pedro were indignant at this suggestion. Neither of them had lost hope of Paulo returning to the straight and narrow, and to accept such an idea meant a humiliating surrender. There was no way they would let him end up in a fifth-rate school.
Paulo, meanwhile, seemed to be living on another planet. His life within the world of theatre, which was a hotbed of opposition to the military regime, brought him close to young people who were becoming politically militant. Now all the films and plays he watched were political, and he had incorporated into his vocabulary left-wing slogans such as ‘More bread, fewer guns’ and ‘United, the people will never be defeated’.
One night, when he went with a group of his friends to see Liberdade, Liberdade [Freedom, Freedom], which was being put on by Oduvaldo Viana Filho and Paulo Autran at the Teatro Opinião, the play was interrupted halfway through. A dishevelled young man got up on the stage and spoke out against the military dictatorship. He was Vladimir Palmeira, the student leader who went on to become a Member of Parliament and who was urging the audience to join yet another student march against the regime. On the few occasions when Paulo decided to take part in such marches, his real objective was to be seen by his father, whose office was in the centre of the city, where all the protest marches ended up. In fact, the world of politics that he was being drawn into had never much mattered to him. Apart from one or two notes, such as the results of the presidential elections in 1960 won by Jânio Quadros, his diary reflects his indifference to both politics and politicians. When the army had taken power in the April of the previous year, Paulo was speculating loftily in his diary on the existence of heaven and hell. Two weeks before the coup, when the whole country was in uproar, he filled several pages in his diary describing the misfortunes of a ‘sixteen-year-old girl’ he had met in the street: ‘To think that this girl ran away from home and that in order to survive, she has been subjected to the most humiliating of things, although she has still managed to keep her virginity. But now she’ll have to lose that just so she can eat.’ And he ended: ‘It’s at times like this that I doubt the existence of God.’
However, that was the past. Now he felt himself to be a member of the resistance, although his criticisms of the dictatorship never went beyond the limits of his diary and even then were very timid. It was in his diary that he recorded his dissatisfaction with the existing situation, for example, in a satirical article entitled ‘J’accuse’, in which he placed The Beatles, Franco, Salazar and Lyndon B. Johnson on one side and on the other de Gaulle, Glauber Rocha and Luís Carlos Prestes:
I accuse the rich, who have bought the consciences of the politicians. I accuse the military, who use guns to control the feelings of the people. I accuse the Beatles, Carnival and football of