Half an hour after leaving the airport, the Mercedes stops in front of the Gellert, an imposing four-star establishment on the banks of the Danube, one of the oldest spa hotels in Central Europe. Before signing in, Paulo embraces a beautiful dark-haired woman who has just arrived from Barcelona and has been waiting for him in the hotel lobby. Holding her hand is a chubby, blue-eyed little boy. She is Mônica Antunes and the boy is her son. Although she acts as Paulo Coelho’s literary agent, it would be a mistake to consider her, as people often do, as merely that, because it accounts for only a small part of the work she has been doing since the end of the 1980s.
Some people in the literary jet set say that behind her beautiful face, soft voice and shy smile lies a ferocious guard dog, for she is known and feared for the ruthlessness with which she treats anyone who threatens her author’s interests. Many publishers refer to her – behind her back of course – as ‘the witch of Barcelona’, a reference to the city where she lives and from where she controls everything to do with the professional life of her one client. Mônica has become the link between the author and the publishing world. Anything and everything to do with his literary work has to pass through the modern, seventh-storey office that is home to Sant Jordi Asociados, named in Catalan after the patron saint of books, St George.
While her Peruvian nanny keeps an eye on her son in the hotel lobby, Mônica sits down with the author at a corner table and opens her briefcase, full of computer printouts produced by Sant Jordi. Today, it’s all good news: in three weeks The Zahir has sold 106,000 copies in Hungary. In Italy, over the same period, the figure was 420,000. In the Italian best-seller lists the book has even overtaken the memoirs of the recently deceased John Paul II. The author, however, doesn’t appear to be pleased.
‘That’s all very well, Mônica, but I want to know how The Zahir has done in comparison with the previous book in the same period.’
She produces another document. ‘In the same period, Eleven Minutes sold 328,000 copies in Italy. So The Zahir is selling almost 30 per cent more. Now are you happy?’
‘Yes, of course. And what about Germany?’
‘There The Zahir is in second place on Der Spiegel’s best-seller list, after The Da Vinci Code.’
As well as Hungary, Italy and Germany, the author asks for information about sales in Russia and wants to know whether Arash Hejazi, his Iranian publisher, has resolved the problems of censorship, and what is happening regarding pirate copies being sold in Egypt. According to Mônica’s figures, the author is beating his own records in every country where the book has come out. A week after its launch in France, The Zahir topped all lists, including the most prized, that of the weekly news magazine L’Express. In Russia, sales have passed the 530,000 mark, while in Portugal, they stand at 130,000 (whereas Eleven Minutes had sold only 80,000 copies six months after its launch). In Brazil, The Zahir has sold 160,000 copies in less than a month (60 per cent more than Eleven Minutes in the same period). And while Coelho is appearing in Hungary, 500,000 copies of the Spanish translation of The Zahir are being distributed throughout the southern states of America – to reach the Spanish-speaking communities there – and throughout eighteen Latin-American countries.
The only surprise is the last piece of news: the previous day, an armed gang stopped a lorry in a Buenos Aires suburb and stole the entire precious cargo – 2,000 copies of The Zahir that had just left the printer’s and were on their way to bookshops in the city. Some days later, a literary critic in the Diario de Navarra in Spain suggested that the robbery had been a publicity stunt dreamed up by the author as a way of selling more copies.
All this stress and anxiety is repeated every two years, each time Paulo Coelho publishes a new book. On these occasions, he shows himself to be as insecure as a novice. This has always been the case. When he wrote his first book, O Diário de um Mago [The Pilgrimage], he shared the task of distributing publicity leaflets outside Rio’s theatres and cinemas with his partner, the artist Christina Oiticica, and then went round the bookshops to find out how many copies they had sold. After twenty years, his methods and strategies may have changed, but he has not: wherever he is, be it in Tierra del Fuego or Greenland, in Alaska or Australia, he uses his mobile phone or his laptop to keep abreast of everything to do with publication, distribution, media attention and where his books are on the best-seller lists.
He has still not yet filled out the inevitable hotel form or gone up to his room, when Lea arrives. A pleasant woman in her fifties, married to the Swiss Minister of the Interior, she is a devoted reader of Coelho’s books, having first met him at the World Economic Forum in Davos. When she learned that he was visiting Budapest, Lea took the train from Geneva, travelling over 4,000 kilometres through Switzerland, Austria and half of Hungary in order to spend a few hours in Budapest with her idol. It is almost eight o’clock when Coelho finally goes up to the suite reserved for him at the Gellert.
The room seems palatial in comparison with his modest luggage, the contents of which never vary: four black T-shirts, four pairs of coloured silk boxer shorts, five pairs of socks, a pair of black Levi’s, a pair of denim Bermudas and a pack of Galaxy cigarettes (his stock of the latter is regularly topped up by his office in Rio or by kind visitors from Brazil). For formal occasions he adds to his luggage the coat he was wearing when he flew in from France, a shirt with a collar, a tie and his ‘society shoes’ – a pair of cowboy boots – again all in black.
Contrary to what one might think on first seeing him, his choice of colour has nothing to do with luck, mysticism or spirituality. As someone who often spends two-thirds of the year away from home, he has learned that black clothes are more resistant to the effects of hotel laundries, although on most occasions he washes his own socks, shirts and underpants. In one corner of his case is a small wash bag containing toothbrush and toothpaste, a razor, dental floss, eau de cologne, shaving foam and a tube of Psorex, a cream he uses for the psoriasis he sometimes gets between his fingers and on his elbows. In another corner, wrapped in socks and underpants, are a small image of Nhá Chica, a holy woman from Minas Gerais in Brazil, and a small bottle of holy water from Lourdes.
Half an hour later, he returns to the hotel lobby freshly shaved and smelling of lavender, and looking as refreshed as if he has just woken from a good night’s sleep; his overcoat, slung over his shoulders, allows a glimpse of a small blue butterfly with open wings tattooed on his left forearm. His last engagement for the day is dinner at the home of an artist in the Buda hills above the city on the right bank of the Danube, with a wonderful view of the old capital, on which, this evening, a fine drizzle is falling.
In a candlelit room some fifty people are waiting for him, among them artists, writers and diplomats, mostly young people in their thirties. And, as usual, there are a lot of women. Everyone is sitting around on sofas or on the floor, talking or, rather, trying to talk above the noise of heavy rock blasting out from loudspeakers. A circle of people gathers round the author, who is talking non-stop. They soon become aware of two curious habits: every now and then, he makes a gesture with his right hand as if brushing away an invisible fly from in front of his eyes. Minutes later, he makes the same gesture, but this time the invisible fly appears to be buzzing next to his right ear. At dinner, he thanks everyone in fluent English for their kindness and goes on to praise Hungarian cooks, who can transform a modest beef stew into an unforgettable delicacy – goulash. At two in the morning, after coffee and a few rounds of Tokaji wine, everyone leaves.
At a quarter to ten the following morning, the first journalists invited to the press conference have already taken their places on the thirty upholstered chairs in the Hotel Gellert’s small meeting room. Anyone arriving punctually at ten will have to stand. The person the reporters are interested in woke at 8.30. Had it not been raining he would have taken his usual hour-long morning walk. Since he dislikes room service (‘Only sick people eat in their bedrooms’), he has breakfasted in the