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A Warrior’s Life: A Biography of Paulo Coelho
Fernando Morais
Paulo Coelho is a worldwide phenomenon. At a time when he is coming up to the fantastic achievement of 100 million copies sold worldwide across all his books, his fans will be delighted with the first ever official biography of Paulo, an in-depth look at his life and work, and what makes him the much-loved author he is today.Paulo's first official biographer, Fernando Morais, provides an exhaustive look at Paulo's fascinating and varied life, taking several years to research his subject, and interviewing everyone who knows Paulo. He weaves together the strands of Paulo's life, revealing the man behind the world-famous writer.Paulo Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August 1947. Before he became internationally known and a worldwide bestseller, he had to overcome many obstacles. As a teenager, he was subjected to the brutality of electric shock treatment in the psychiatric hospital where his parents, who took his rebelliousness as a sign of madness, interned him three times. As a member of the esoteric underworld, he was put in prison for alleged subversive activities against the Brazilian dictatorship and subjected to physical torture.Later, Paulo joined forces with rock star Raul Seixas and together they composed songs that revolutionized Brazilian rock music. Hippie, journalist, rock star, actor, playwright, theatre director and producer of television programs, this whirlwind life came to an end in 1982, during a trip to Europe. In Dachau and later in Amsterdam, Paulo had a mystical meeting with "J", his new mentor, who persuaded him to walk the Road to Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrim's route between France and Spain.In 1986 Paulo walked the Road to Santiago, and it was there that he reconverted to Christianity and found again the faith bequeathed to him by the Jesuit fathers of his school years. He would later describe this experience in his first book, The Pilgrimage. The following year, The Alchemist, established his worldwide reputation. The novel has already achieved the status of a universally admired modern classic. Now, for the first time, discover the true story of the man behind some of the world's most loved books.
A WARRIOR’S LIFE
A Biography of
PAULO COELHO
Fernando Morais
DEDICATION (#ulink_9016450d-0fcd-5d68-a008-fb37616ec333)
For Marina, my companion on yet another crossing of the Rubicon
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_9c65d921-71f0-51c3-b282-7b1cdccb3c4e)
When the world fails to end in the year 2000, perhaps what will end is this fascination with the work of Paulo Coelho.
Wilson Martins, literary critic, April 1998, O Globo
Brazil is Rui Barbosa, it’s Euclides da Cunha, but it’s also Paulo Coelho. I’m not a reader of his books, nor am I an admirer, but he has to be accepted as a fact of contemporary Brazilian life.
Martins again, July 2005, O Globo
CONTENTS
Cover (#u61b0da32-f5d7-5450-9eb6-cf1991bf0819)
Title Page (#uae98c89d-aa5e-5e37-aa3f-35c67da4faac)
Dedication (#ue98cf409-16a8-551f-9ac7-24b08185916f)
Epigraph (#ud1b44f3f-e8dd-5869-906b-904cd2d07f15)
CHAPTER 1 Paulo today: Budapest – Prague – Hamburg – Cairo (#uead1e28d-cf24-51c5-954e-d9a28ee06346)
CHAPTER 2 Childhood (#u12c90aa8-5dff-50d8-a389-4f0a38b2c8fc)
CHAPTER 3 Schooldays (#uf0413ff4-5ef6-595c-99f4-bb4c4325aaf6)
CHAPTER 4 First play, first love (#u93438a47-e4be-5bff-b14a-fbb5b01d23bf)
CHAPTER 5 First encounter with Dr Benjamim (#uec10e682-0b30-5b37-b591-0e65bfa8056e)
CHAPTER 6 Batatinha’s début (#u5c5e603e-68cb-57b7-af30-475602d72fee)
CHAPTER 7 Ballad of the Clinic Gaol (#u7091a789-da50-5d6b-a4e2-13290a6f17a1)
CHAPTER 8 Shock treatment (#uf3482f52-e2b1-5e51-b374-625335e5592b)
CHAPTER 9 The great escape (#u66ccf2a3-4a4d-5a8b-84fb-5aaa17824981)
CHAPTER 10 Vera (#u9d64a73f-5616-5a8c-be23-5632d5196041)
CHAPTER 11 The marijuana years (#u74621797-fba2-531c-939d-44f4d7856da1)
CHAPTER 12 Discovering America (#u743354d3-2820-5052-accd-e153ac4488a1)
CHAPTER 13 Gisa (#u7769517f-cac2-54ff-a0b5-c76f88b3495c)
CHAPTER 14 The Devil and Paulo (#u2078cf48-35cf-52eb-bdf5-5f8ae5f320cc)
CHAPTER 15 Paulo and Raul (#u0be57974-3956-55f3-b43d-b4458dd68cfc)
CHAPTER 16 A devil of a different sort (#u5f1eac0f-edfd-5254-b6df-6ec6694785fa)
CHAPTER 17 Paulo renounces the Devil (#ucb31bf4d-ca69-5af2-9589-f6bcd8c40a66)
CHAPTER 18 Cissa (#ue0f1062e-43ca-5b7e-99fc-e3547db62b19)
CHAPTER 19 London (#ub526e7a7-c83b-59ec-a0fe-2f66e94f1c81)
CHAPTER 20 Christina (#u5446f541-d5bb-56fd-8828-10c402d1b94e)
CHAPTER 21 First meeting with Jean (#udcf46dcc-8738-599f-91fd-bbc0eef2887a)
CHAPTER 22 Paulo and Christina – publishers (#u6881c521-8354-539a-8816-16d45cfa67b6)
CHAPTER 23 The road to Santiago (#u23be559b-3493-5f41-9dcd-5a8038086014)
CHAPTER 24 The Alchemist (#uf4174c26-d895-5c2e-91bd-3123f4e6a695)
CHAPTER 25 The critics’ response (#ub6c3be4c-c879-5a2e-a3da-7ba0afa16448)
CHAPTER 26 Success abroad (#ud42b1615-fb14-5789-9514-b935e975e630)
CHAPTER 27 World fame (#u029a02a0-901e-5d77-b2f7-6f8f3f4e88f9)
CHAPTER 28 Becoming an ‘immortal’ (#u7325b9ab-ae74-566d-af08-19ab8d87fd84)
CHAPTER 29 The Zahir (#uca36fafb-f5af-5be8-bd89-7c3dca902b95)
CHAPTER 30 One hundred million copies sold (#u34cc03a2-2835-554b-a8fc-6d48fff971fc)
Plates (#u3ff9a4f7-2d52-5847-b328-ccd22086dd1b)
Facts About Paulo Coelho (#uaaa4ac9c-a244-539c-a8f0-2ffe3e51d7c9)
Acknowledgements (#uef31a296-2798-5f63-9434-1d6ef8d42f66)
Index (#u22f16db5-029f-5c74-920c-b61c7be97d74)
Copyright (#u443419e4-ca6e-5c36-a24c-4a8c83bd4e1b)
About the Publisher (#uebec6ba5-9edb-50b9-b3c2-da96f21952a3)
CHAPTER 1 Paulo today: Budapest – Prague – Hamburg – Cairo (#ulink_cefe82fd-8943-51ed-af74-be8aa2cccc9a)
IT’S A DREARY, GREY EVENING in May 2005 as the enormous white Air France Airbus A600 touches down gently on the wet runway of Budapest’s Ferihegy airport. It is the end of a two-hour flight from Lyons in the south of France. In the cabin, the stewardess informs the passengers that it’s 6.00 p.m. in Hungary’s capital city and that the local temperature is 8°C. Seated beside the window in the front row of business class, his seat belt still fastened, a man in a black T-shirt looks up and stares at some invisible point beyond the plastic wall in front of him. Unaware of the other passengers’ curious looks, and keeping his eyes fixed on the same spot, he raises the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand as though in blessing and remains still for a moment.
After the plane stops, he gets up to take his bag from the overhead locker. He is dressed entirely in black – canvas boots, jeans and T-shirt. (Someone once remarked that, were it not for the wicked gleam in his eye, he could be mistaken for a priest.) A small detail on his woollen jacket, which is also black, tells the other passengers – at least those who are French – that their fellow traveller is no ordinary mortal, since on his lapel is a tiny gold pin embossed in red, a little larger than a computer chip, indicating to those around him that he is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. This is the most coveted of French decorations, created in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte and granted only at the personal wish of the President of the Republic. The award, which was given to the traveller at the behest of Jacques Chirac, is not, however, the only thing that marks him out. His thinning, close-cropped white hair ends in a tuft above the nape of his neck, a small white ponytail some 10 centimetres long. This is a sikha, the lock of hair worn by Brahmans, orthodox Hindus and Hare Krishna monks. His neat white moustache and goatee beard are the final touch on a lean, strong, tanned face. At 1.69 metres he’s fairly short, but muscular and with not an ounce of fat on his body.
With his rucksack on his back and dying for a cigarette, he joins the queue of passengers in the airport corridor, with an unlit, Brazilian-made Galaxy Light between his lips. In his hand is a lighter ready to be flicked on as soon as it’s allowed, which will not, it seems, be soon. Even for someone with no Hungarian, the meaning of the words ‘Tilos adohanyzas’ is clear, since it appears on signs everywhere, alongside the image of a lighted cigarette with a red line running through it. Standing beside the baggage carousel, the man in black looks anxiously over at the glass wall separating international passengers from the main concourse. His black case with a white heart chalked on it is, in fact, small enough for him to have taken it on board as hand luggage, but its owner hates carrying anything.
After going through customs and passing beyond the glass wall, the man in black is visibly upset to find that his name does not appear on any of the boards held up by the drivers and tour reps waiting for passengers on his flight. Worse still, there are no photographers, reporters or television cameras waiting for him. There is no one. He walks out on to the pavement, looking around, and even before lifting the collar of his jacket against the cold wind sweeping across Budapest, he lights his cigarette and consumes almost half of it in one puff. The other Air France passengers go their separate ways in buses, taxis and private cars, leaving the pavement deserted. The man’s disappointment gives way to anger. He lights another cigarette, makes an international call on his mobile phone and complains in Portuguese and in a slightly nasal voice: ‘There’s no one waiting for me in Budapest! Yes! That’s what I said!’ He repeats this, hammering each word into the head of the person at the other end: ‘That’s right – there’s no one waiting for me here in Budapest. No one. I said no one!’
He rings off without saying goodbye, stubs out his cigarette and starts to smoke a third, pacing disconsolately up and down. Fifteen interminable minutes after disembarking he hears a familiar sound. He turns towards it, and his eyes light up. An enormous smile appears on his face. The reason for his joy is only a few metres away: a crowd of reporters, photographers, cameramen and paparazzi are running towards him calling his name, nearly all of them holding a microphone and a recorder. Behind them is a still larger group – his fans.
‘Mister Cole-ro! Mister Paulo Cole-ro!’
This is how Hungarians pronounce the surname of the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, the man in black who has just arrived in Budapest as guest of honour at the International Book Festival. The invitation was a Russian initiative, rather than a Brazilian one (Brazil doesn’t even have a stand), Russia being the guest country at the 2005 festival. Coelho is the most widely read author in Russia, which, with 143 million inhabitants, is one of the most populous countries in the world. Along with the reporters come people bearing copies of his most recent success, The Zahir, all open at the title page, as they step over the tangle of cables on the ground and face the hostility of the journalists, simply to get his autograph. The flashbulbs and the bluish glow from the reflectors cast a strange light on the shaven head of the author, who looks as if he were on the strobe-lit dance floor of a 1970s disco. Despite the crowd and the discomfort, he wears a permanent, angelic smile and, even though he’s drowning in a welter of questions in English, French and Hungarian, he appears to be savouring an incomparable pleasure: world fame. He is in his element. Mister Cole-ro with his sparkling eyes and the sincerest possible smile is once again Paulo Coelho, superstar and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, whose books have been translated into 66 languages and dialects across 160 countries. He is a man accustomed to receiving a pop star’s welcome from his readers. He tells the journalists that he has been to Hungary only once, more than twenty years before. ‘I’m just afraid that fifteen years of capitalist tourism may have done Budapest more harm than the Russians did in half a century,’ he says provocatively, referring to the period when the country was part of the former Soviet Union.
That same day, the author had another opportunity to savour public recognition. While waiting for the plane at Lyons airport he was approached by a fellow Brazilian, who told him that he had read and admired his work. On being called to take the bus to the plane, they walked together to the gate, but the other Brazilian, when asked to produce his boarding pass, couldn’t find it. Anxious that the other passengers would grow impatient as the man searched clumsily through his things, the Air France employee moved him to one side, and the queue moved on.
Out of kindness, Paulo Coelho stood beside his fellow countryman, but was told: ‘Really, you don’t need to wait. I’ll find it in a minute.’
All the other passengers were now seated in the bus, and the Air France employee was threatening to close the door. ‘I’m sorry, but if you haven’t got a boarding pass, you can’t board the plane.’
The Brazilian began to see his holiday plans falling apart, but he wasn’t going to give up that easily. ‘But I know I’ve got it. Only a few minutes ago I showed it to the author Paulo Coelho, who was with me, because I wanted to know if we were going to be sitting next to each other.’
The Frenchman stared at him. ‘Paulo Coelho? Do you mean that man is Paulo Coelho?’ On being assured that this was so, he ran over to the bus, where the passengers were waiting for the problem to be resolved, and shouted, ‘Monsieur Paulo Coelho!’ Once the author had stood up and confirmed that he had indeed seen his fellow Brazilian’s boarding pass, the Frenchman, suddenly all politeness and cordiality, beckoned to the cause of the hold-up and allowed him to board the bus.
Night has fallen in Budapest when a tall, thin young man announces that there are to be no more photos or questions. To the protests of both journalists and fans, Paulo Coelho is now seated in the back of a Mercedes, its age and impressive size suggesting that it may once have carried Hungary’s Communist leaders. Also in the car are the men who are to be his companions for the next three days: the driver and bodyguard, Pal Szabados, a very tall young man with a crew cut; and Gergely Huszti, who freed him from the reporters’ clutches and who is to be his guide. Both men were appointed by the author’s publisher in Hungary, Athenäum.
When the car sets off, and even before Gergely has introduced himself, Paulo asks for a moment’s silence and, as he did in the plane, he gazes into the distance, raises his forefinger and middle finger, and for a few seconds prays. He performs this solitary ceremony at least three times a day – when he wakes, at six in the evening and at midnight – and repeats it in planes when taking off and landing and in cars when driving off, regardless of whether he is on a long-haul flight or a short trip in a cab.
On the way to the hotel, Gergely reads out the planned programme: a debate followed by a signing session at the book festival; a visit to the Budapest underground with the prefect, Gabor Demszky; five individual interviews for various television programmes and major publications; a press conference; a photo shoot with Miss Peru, one of his readers (who is in Hungary for the Miss Universe contest); two dinners; a show at an open-air disco …
Coelho interrupts Gergely in English. ‘Stop there, please. You can cut out the visit to the underground, the show and Miss Peru. None of that was on the programme.’
The guide insists: ‘I think we should at least keep the visit to the underground, as it’s the third oldest in the world … And the prefect’s wife is a fan of yours and has read all your books.’
‘Forget it. I’ll sign a book especially for her, but I’m not going to the underground.’
With the underground, the disco and Miss Peru scrapped, the author approves the schedule, showing no signs of fatigue in spite of the fact that he has had an exhausting week. With the launch of The Zahir he has given interviews to reporters from the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, the French magazine Paris Match, the Dutch daily De Telegraaf, the magazine produced by Maison Cartier, the Polish newspaper Fakt and the Norwegian women’s magazine Kvinner og Klœr. At the request of a friend, an aide to the Saudi royal family, he also gave a long statement to Nigel Dudley and Sarah MacInnes from the magazine Think, a British business publication.
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 hotel’s coffee bar, gone back to his room to take a shower, and is now reading newspapers and surfing the Internet. He usually reads a Rio newspaper and one from São Paulo, as well as the Paris edition of the International Herald Tribune. The remainder of his daily reading will arrive later in the form of cuttings and synopses focusing on the author and his books.
At exactly ten o’clock he enters the room, which is lit by reflectors and full of journalists, and sits down behind the small table provided, on which stand a bottle of mineral water, a glass, an ashtray and a vase of red roses. His guide, Gergely, takes the microphone, explains the reason for the author’s visit to the country and announces the presence in the front row of his agent, Mônica Antunes. She stands shyly and acknowledges the applause.
Coelho speaks in English for forty minutes, which includes the time it takes for Gergely to translate each sentence into Hungarian. He recalls his visit to Budapest in 1982, and talks a little about his personal life and his career as a writer. He reveals, for example, that, following the success of The Pilgrimage, the number of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela rose from 400 a year to 400 a day. In recognition of this, the Galician government has named one of the streets of Santiago ‘Rua Paulo Coelho’. When the meeting is opened up for questions, it becomes clear that the journalists present are fans of his work. Some mention a particular book as ‘my favourite’. The meeting passes without any indiscreet or hostile questions being asked; the friendly atmosphere is more like a gathering of the Budapest branch of his fan club. When Gergely brings the meeting to an end, the reporters reward the author with a round of applause. A small queue forms in front of the table and an improvised signing session exclusive to Hungarian journalists begins. Only then does it become apparent that nearly all of them have copies of his books in their bags.
The writer, who rarely lunches, has a quick snack in the hotel restaurant – toast with liver pâté, a glass of orange juice and an espresso. He makes use of a free half-hour before his next appointment to glance at the international news in Le Monde and El País. He’s always interested in what’s going on in the world and he’s always well informed about any wars and crises that hit the headlines. It’s quite usual to hear him speaking confidently (but without ever appearing to be dictatorial or superior) on matters as various as the growing crisis in Lebanon or the nationalization of oil and gas in Bolivia. He publicly defended the exchange of hostages held by Marxist guerrillas in Colombia for political prisoners being held by the Colombian government, and his protest letter in 2003 entitled ‘Thank you, President Bush’, in which he castigated the American leader for the imminent invasion of Iraq, was read by 400 million people and caused much debate.
Once he has read the newspapers, he gets back to work. Now it is time for Marsi Aniko, the presenter of RTL Club’s Fokusz2, which regularly tops the Sunday evening ratings. The unusual thing about Fokusz2 is that, at the end of each programme, the interviewee is given a Hungarian dish prepared by Marsi Aniko herself. In a small, improvised studio in the hotel, the face-to-face interview again holds no surprises, apart from the way she blushes when a cheerful Coelho decides to start talking about penetrative sex. At the end, he receives a kiss on each cheek, a tray of almásrétes – a traditional Hungarian tart filled with poppy petals that Aniko swears she has made with her own fair hand – and a bottle of Pálinka, a very strong local brandy. Within minutes, the set has been removed to make way for another jollier, more colourful one, for an interview with András Simon from Hungarian MTV. An hour later, once the recording is over, the journalist hands the author a stack of seven books to sign.
With a few minutes’ break between each interview – time enough for the author to drink an espresso and smoke a cigarette – these interviews continue into the late afternoon. When the last reporter leaves the hotel, it is dark.
Coelho declares that he is not in the least tired. ‘On the contrary. Talking about so many different things in such a short space of time only increases the adrenalin. I’m just getting warmed up …’
Whether it is professionalism, vanity or some other source of energy, the fact is that the author, who is about to turn sixty, is on enviably good form. A shower and another espresso are all it takes for him to reappear at 8.30 in the hotel lobby, gleefully rubbing his hands. Mônica, Lea (who has managed to attach herself to the group), the silent bodyguard Szabados and Gergely are waiting for him. There is one more engagement before the end of the day: a dinner with writers, publishers and journalists at the home of Tamás Kolosi, who owns the publishing house Athenäum and is one of the people behind Coelho’s visit to Hungary. When Gergely asks Coelho if he’s tired after all the day’s activities, the author roars with laughter.
‘Certainly not! Today was just the aperitif. The real work begins tomorrow.’
After dinner with the publisher, Mônica uses the ten minutes in the car journey back to the hotel to tell him what she has organized with Gergely for the following day.
‘The opening of the book festival is at two in the afternoon. You’ve got interviews at the hotel in the morning, so there’ll be no time for lunch, but I’ve booked a restaurant on the way to the book festival so that we can grab a sandwich and some salad.’
