In September 1990, barely a week after we had arrived in Bangkok, a tanker full of liquid gas overturned right in the middle of the city, not far from where we lived. A cloud of death enveloped dozens of cars and houses, a spark set off an explosion, and more than a hundred people were burnt to a cinder.
A few months later, in the early afternoon, we heard a deafening roar and saw a dense, black cloud rise sky-high in the port district. A chemical depot had exploded, killing dozens of people. It is still not known what chemical products were involved, but since then more than two thousand people who found themselves in that pestilent cloud have suffered from inexplicable skin diseases and difficulty in breathing. Many children have been born deformed.
Disasters came one after another. One of the most dramatic was a fire in a doll factory where 190 girl workers were burned alive. To prevent the possibility of theft the management had padlocked every exit, and the girls were trapped.
Bangkok now lives under a malign spell, a city bewitched by the evil eye. People say it is too built up, that from the weight of all the skyscrapers it is sinking several inches every year, and will soon be swallowed up by the sea. Already it is hotter, because the cool coastal breeze of past years is blocked by new buildings. And there is a water shortage. But what is it that most worries the politicians and the leader writers of the local papers? That the poor have nothing to drink? No. Rather that the “massage parlors”—as brothels in Thailand are coyly termed—lack sufficient water to wash the private parts of their numerous customers.
For every disaster there is an immediate, obvious, rational explanation: gas explodes because the safety regulations are not observed; factories are firetraps because instead of paying for proper fireproofing the bosses prefer to pay bribes to the officials who are supposed to check that the laws are obeyed. And yet it is the phii explanation that rings truest, because it sums up the essence of what is happening not only in Bangkok but in many other parts of the world: nature is taking revenge on those who fail to respect her, and who, out of pure greed, destroy every kind of harmony.
In Bangkok, we moved into the most beautiful and enchanted house we have ever lived in, an oasis of old Siam amid the horror of so much cement. Yet it had no altar in which to house the spirit of the place.
“Here the spirit is very much alive, and you really must feed it every day,” we were told by the American writer Bill Warren, the previous tenant. The “spirit” was an enormous meat-eating turtle, almost three feet across, that lived in the pond on which the house is built.
I was happy: the house was on water, as the Hong Kong fortune-teller had recommended, and the turtle, for one like me who has lived so long among the Chinese, is the symbolic quintessence of a positive force. Legend has it that a turtle can live for centuries, which is why the Chinese have always erected steles bearing imperial edicts on the backs of great stone or marble turtles. And in the Chinese tradition the turtle has another great merit: it is the symbol of the cosmos. The lower part of the shell is a square, the earth; the upper part is a sphere, the heavens. The turtle has always been used in divination because, enclosing this totality, it holds the key to time and space, and thus can understand the past and read the future.
Our turtle was another victim of progress. It had lived for heaven knows how many years in the city’s canal system; then, when the canals were cemented over, and the water that formerly ran past and under the house became a stagnant pond, it remained there, trapped.
On our arrival the turtle decided to hide, and even though we rebaptized the place “Turtle House” in its honor, it continued to make itself scarce. We knew it was around somewhere, because now and then one of our ducklings would disappear, but it did not seem to feel at ease with us. Similarly the people who worked at Turtle House; they began complaining of one ailment after another: the gardener coughed nonstop, the cook could not stand on her feet, and my secretary had a constant headache. Some of their relatives had road accidents; two died. Clearly our arrival had thrown the order of things out of kilter, and we had to find a way to restore harmony.
Some Thai friends suggested that Angela and I should present ourselves to the Emerald Buddha, the phii of all the phii of Bangkok, and announce to him that we had arrived in Thailand and would like to stay there for a few years; others advised us to have Turtle House exorcised to rid it of all possible negative influences.
We did not think twice: one morning we went to Wat Prakeo, the big temple on the river in front of the Royal Palace, to prostrate ourselves before the famous statue of Buddha; and on April 9, Angela’s birthday, we had nine monks come to the house. In their hands they held a very long white thread with which one of them encircled the house and the pond, then they sang some beautiful litanies, sprinkled holy water over everyone and everything, and ate before noon, as is required of them, the vegetarian food we had prepared.
After that, and after a swarm of wild bees had come and built an enormous honeycomb on a tree in the garden—a symbol of great good luck for the house—all troubles ceased.
But now I was facing a difficult year. I had assumed that even if I could move only very slowly, I would be able to get around by boat. I could not have been more wrong.
Bangkok is a port: hundreds of ships dock there every day, and several times a week the local newspapers publish a thick supplement listing the names and destinations of all the vessels and the times at which they load cargo. We began telephoning around for information about sailings to the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Singapore. We may as well have been asking for the moon. I talked with chief clerks, chairmen and managing directors. No use. The politest would say, “No, not us. But try another line.” Or, “Yes, we used to carry passengers, but now …” Impossible. Ships no longer transport anything but goods, preferably sealed in containers which are loaded and unloaded automatically by computer-operated cranes.
To stave off the temptation to give up the whole project I began telling everyone about the Hong Kong fortune-teller and my decision not to fly for a year. This reinforced my commitment, but above all I attracted the sympathy of various Thai friends who suddenly felt “understood.” The fact that I had taken a Chinese fortune-teller’s prophecy seriously meant that I had entered into their logic, that I had accepted the culture of Asia. This flattered them, and they declared their willingness to help me, even if only with suggestions and advice. One of the most commonly repeated was: “Don’t worry. Try to acquire some merits!”
The underlying idea of acquiring merits is that fate is not ineluctable: a fortune-teller’s predictions must be taken as a warning, or as indicating a tendency, but never as a sentence without appeal. Suppose a fortune-teller sees that you are about to fall gravely ill? Or that someone in your family will soon die? No need to despair. Make offerings in a temple, help an unfortunate, free some caged animals, adopt an orphan, pay for the construction of a stupa or donate a coffin to a poor man, and you will deflect what is otherwise coming for you. Obviously one must be guided by a professional in the choice of the quality, quantity and object of the merits to be acquired, but having done this, one’s destiny has to be examined anew, or rather, it is returned to the hands of the person concerned. Fate is negotiable; you can always come to an agreement with heaven.
Despite all the advice I was given, it was difficult to get an answer to the simple question: “Who is the best fortune-teller in Bangkok?” I had the impression that everyone wanted to keep his favorite to himself. And then too, they are all convinced that the best fortune-tellers are to be found not among themselves but somewhere else. The Thais say the best are in Cambodia, the Cambodians say India, the Chinese that nobody can equal the Mongols, the Mongols believe only in the Tibetans, and so on. It is as if each one, conscious of the relativity that surrounds him, wants to preserve the hope that the absolute exists elsewhere. “Ah, if only I could go to that fortune-teller in Ulan Bator!” a Javanese will say, thus keeping alive the hope that in some other place the ke
y to his happiness can surely be found.
My case was simpler: I was in Bangkok and I wanted to see a fortune-teller there. I wanted to begin my flightless year by reconfirming my fate, by having my future read again. After all, since my encounter with the Hong Kong fortune-teller I had consulted none other.
Since none of my Thai acquaintances was able to recommend a fortune-teller, my friend Sulak Sivaraksa came to mind. He is Thailand’s leading philosopher, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. A convinced Buddhist, he has been a persistent critic of the way his country is abandoning its traditions, and he never misses a chance of attacking those he believes have strayed from the traditional Buddhist path. The Thai establishment does not care for him, and because of his outspokenness he has been accused of lèse-majesté, a crime that no longer exists elsewhere, and has spent some time in prison. The last time they arrested him I went to see his wife, thinking she would be distraught. Not at all! She had consulted a fortune-teller who had assured her that in a few days Sulak would be released. That is just what happened: the fellow had named the day and the hour. I decided to consult him.
I knew where he lived, and that he was blind. I needed an interpreter, but I did not want to take my secretary or anyone who knew anything about me: he or she might, even if unconsciously, give the fortune-teller a clue as to my trade or my family. So I telephoned an agency that provides secretaries for visiting businessmen. Pretending to be a guest at the Oriental Hotel, I made an appointment to meet my escort in the hotel lobby. The woman who arrived was about fifty, plump, with big glasses. She was delighted at the idea of not having to translate clauses of contracts and conversations about buying and selling.
The fortune-teller lived in the heart of Chinatown, and the Oriental Hotel’s cream-colored limousine, with a driver in white gold-braided livery, crept at a snail’s pace into the marvelous, chaotic Vorachak quarter which is still one of the noisiest and liveliest parts of Bangkok—still unchanged, thank God, with its thousands of shops selling hardware, pumps, curtains, nails, coffins, sweets; with its myriad smells of incense wafting from little altars at the back of every hole in the wall, or balsam from the pharmacies; with the usual teeming crowds of overseas Chinese in their black shorts, immutable with white undershirts pulled up over their bellies, as if to air the navel and to stimulate the qi—the vital force—which, according to them, has its true center there.
The fortune-teller lived at the far end of a tangle of little streets reachable only by foot. Finally we found his house. But it was not a house, exactly: through a big iron grille that opened on to the street we entered a large room that doubled as shop and home, where goods and gods cohabited. On one side, among the sacks of rice, was an old iron desk. Behind it, on a cane chair, was a blind man. More perching than sitting, he was massaging his feet, as the Chinese do, convinced that the bodily organs, from the heart to the lungs, the intestines to the liver, are controlled from there; it is enough to know the right points to touch. His eyes were blank. Where the pupils should have been were white spots that seemed always turned skywards. On the desk was a small teapot, a dish of tangerines—a symbol of prosperity—and an empty turtle shell. The room was filled with a strong smell of incense from a large altar in one corner, full of statuettes made of gilded wood and representing gods and ancestors, the dead not as they were in life, but as they would have liked to be. This is a curious tradition among the southern Chinese. An uncle failed the Imperial examination? Never mind: after death he is represented as a mandarin. Another had dreamed of being a policeman? After death he appears on the ancestral altar in uniform, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Many of the fortune-teller’s statuettes held raised swords, as if to protect him in his blindness. An old woman in green silk pajamas, perhaps his wife, had just finished eating at a round table. She put wicker covers on the pots with the remains of her meal and sat down on a stool at the sink and began washing up.
Slowly, as if he did not want to hurry our relationship, the blind man began whispering something. My assistant translated. It was the usual question, to which I gave the usual reply: “I was born in Florence, Italy, on September 14, 1938, at about eight in the evening.”
He seemed satisfied, and began performing some strange calculations with his fingers in the air. His sightless eyes, still raised to heaven, brightened as if he had a great secret with which to capture my attention. His lips whispered a sort of nonsense rhyme, but he said nothing intelligible. A Chinese girl in white pajamas ran in, handed something to his wife and dashed off, first joining her hands over her bosom in salutation to all the impassive ones on the altar. An old clock on the wall ticked for long minutes. I had the impression that the blind man was searching for something in his memory, and had found it.
At long last his mouth opened. “The day you were born was a Wednesday!” he announced, as if he expected to surprise me. (Right. Bravo! A few years ago he might have impressed many people with that calculation, done entirely by memory. Now it seemed much less impressive. My computer does the same thing in a few seconds.) His satisfaction was touching, but I was disappointed and my interest flagged. I listened to him absentmindedly. “You have a good life, a healthy body and a lively mind, but a very bad character,” he said. “You are capable of great anger, but you are also able to calm down quickly.” Generalities, likely to be true for anyone sitting before him, I thought. “Your mind is never still, you are always thinking about something, which is not good. You are very generous to others.” Again, true for almost anyone, I told myself.
I had placed a small tape recorder on the table, and took notes as well, but I suspected I was wasting my time. Then I heard the woman translate: “When you were a child you were very ill, and if your parents had not given you away to another family you would not have survived.” My curiosity revived: true, as a small child I was not very healthy. We were poor, it was wartime and we had little to eat; I had lung trouble, anemia, swollen glands. “From the age of seven to twelve you did well at school, but you were often ill and you moved house. From seventeen to twenty-seven you had to study and work at the same time. You have a very good brain, capable of solving various problems, and now you have no worries because you studied engineering. From the age of twenty-four to twenty-nine you went through the most unhappy period of your life. Then everything went better.”
It is true that as a child I was often ill, but not that I began working at seventeen. It is not true that we moved house, but the years between twenty-four and twenty-nine were the most unhappy of my life: I had a job with Olivetti, and thought of nothing but getting away, but did not know how. As for engineering, I studied law.
I was not impressed: it looked like a typical case, where the fortune-teller’s pronouncements have a fifty-fifty chance of being true. My mind wandered. I looked at his hands, which were caressing the turtle shell on the desk. I heard his continuous whispered calculations, like a computer sifting its memory. Obviously he was mentally shuffling cards. But perhaps his real strength was instinct. Being blind, not distracted by the sight of all the things that distracted me, perhaps he was able to concentrate, to sense the person he had before him. Perhaps his instinct told him that my attention was wandering, because he suddenly broke off the singsong recital.
“I’ve bad news for you,” he said. For an instant I was worried. Was he going to warn me about flying? “You’ll never be rich. You’ll always have enough money to live, but never will you become rich. That is certain,” he declared.
I almost laughed. Here we were, in the middle of the Chinese city where everyone’s dream is to become rich, where the greatest curse is just what the fortune-teller had told me. For the people here it really would be bad news, but not for me: becoming rich has never been my aim.
Well then, what would interest me? I asked myself, continuing my silent mental dialogue with the blind man. If I do not want to be rich, what would I like to be? The answer had just taken shape in my head when it came to me from him, s
till reading his invisible computer. “Famous. Yes. You’ll never become rich, but between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two you will become famous.”
“But how?” I asked instinctively, this time aloud.
The translation had hardly reached him when he lifted his hands and, with a widening smile on his lips, began tapping an imaginary typewriter in midair. “By writing!”
Extraordinary! The blind man could of course guess that anyone sitting before him would like to be famous, but what gave him the idea that I might do so by writing? Why not by starring in a film, say? Had I perhaps told him? Told him mentally, in no actual language—there was none we had in common—but in that language of gestures comprehensible to anyone who could … see?
Unconsciously, internally, at the very moment when I asked, “But how?” I answered the question and mentally made the gesture of a hand that wrote. Could it be that the blind man “read” this gesture and immediately repeated it with his hands? Is there any other explanation of this brief sequence?
He felt that he had regained my attention, and continued. “Until the age of seventy-two you’ll have a good life. After seventy-three you’ll have to rest, and you’ll reach the age of seventy-eight. From now on never try your hand at any business dealings or you’ll lose every penny. If you want to start something new, if you want to live in another country, you must absolutely do it next year.”
Business is something I have never thought about. As for changing countries, I knew I wanted to go and live in India, but definitely not before May 1995, when my contract with Der Spiegel and the lease on the Turtle House were due to expire. And then? It would depend on various circumstances if I could then move. To go next year was impossible, in any case.
“Be careful; this year isn’t good for your health,” said the blind man. Then he stopped and did some more calculations with his fingers in the air. “No, no, the worst is over. You were through with all that was bad at the beginning of September of last year.”
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 5
