A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  I too have seen that old wisdom disappear in my own world. When I was a child, there was someone in every family who knew the medicinal herbs and where to find them in the woods. My maternal grandmother used to prepare bitter cough mixtures, and applied hot plasters to my chest for bronchitis. For my mother that knowledge was already lost: she preferred going to the chemist. Today, who looks at the moon to see if it is the right time to transplant a tree so that it will root well, or to cut it down without having worms eat the wood?

  Science having been put on a pedestal, everything nonscientific seems ridiculous and contemptible. Thus we have discarded innumerable practices that could have been of service to us. In Orsigna, when someone cut himself with an axe or a scythe he went to Alighiero, who made the sign of the cross and muttered a secret formula which his father had taught him. He then ran his hand over the wound, and the bleeding stopped. For shingles there was Ubaldo who, having caught it twice, could now “mark it” and thus cure others of it. He would prick his finger with a pin and trace a circle around the affected area with his blood, while murmuring some kind of prayer. And the “fire” passed. I have seen it done. Now even in Orsigna everyone goes to the hospital, and those who know how to perform the “markings” grow rarer and rarer.

  St. Francis, they say, used to talk to the birds. In his day this was exceptional, but a few hundred thousand years ago it may not have been. Then, perhaps, everyone could understand animals. And perhaps they could also feel the approach of certain events. The Australian Aborigines must have retained some of these primitive skills: how otherwise could they arrive punctually at the funeral of a chief by setting out days before his death?

  My thoughts reverted to the helicopter, and I asked Cheong Keat, “Do you believe in fate?”

  I expected him to burst out laughing, but instead he said, “Let’s have a look.” He examined the hand I held out to him.

  “You are destined to have a life out of the ordinary. In this we are similar. Look.” He showed me his own hand. “Both of us, in the middle of the palm, have a big ‘A.’ Yes, two men with a destiny.” Then he stopped, as if embarrassed.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I’m trying to find the strength to tell you something I see without ruining our friendship.”

  “Go on.”

  “Your hand plainly shows that you’re not an intellectual. You’re a man of great feeling, but not of great intellect.”

  “Of course. I’m quite well aware of that.”

  “Anyone looking at your house, your library, would take you for someone devoted to thought alone. On the contrary, you’re a man of action, a doer. Never by logic, though, always by instinct. You have great highs and lows in your emotional life.”

  “Where did you learn to read palms?”

  “Not from books, that’s for sure. They’re all secondhand knowledge. In chiromancy, as in feng shui, there’s something of the magical, the divine—you have to feel it, you can’t learn it from books.”

  I had known Cheong Keat for many years, but I knew nothing about this interest of his. With his collections, his plants, his birds, the palm trees he studied, I had always thought of him as a man of scientific bent. But here he was talking to me of magic! As with so many people, there was an unsuspected side to him.

  Every day I had at least three appointments with people from the university or the business world, and at the end of each interview I would ask if there were any really good fortune-tellers in Penang.

  “Fortune-tellers? I detest them!” was the reaction of a history professor who had just given me an excellent lesson on Malaysia prior to the arrival of the British. He told me a story. When he was small, an Indian passed his house and persuaded his mother to let him read her palm. “You have an illness for which there is no cure,” he pronounced. “You’ll be dead within the year.” The mother was shattered. She said nothing to the family, but from that day on she was no longer herself. She had been a strong, loyal Chinese woman, completely devoted to her husband and children. Now she began to go out, play cards and live it up. Nobody understood why. When she confessed to her husband and told him about the prophecy, he was extremely understanding and let her do as she pleased. Time passed: a year, two years, three. She did not fall ill, let alone die. In the meantime, however, she had grown so used to her new lifestyle that she carried on with it. Twenty-five years later she died of a heart attack. “Lucky woman!” I said, but the professor did not agree. His childhood was blighted by that story, his mother never at home and his father always struggling to pay her debts.

  I had better luck with the wife of an economist. “Yes, indeed, there’s an outstanding one in Bishop Street. He’s in the room behind Vogue, the tailor’s,” she said. “He’s an Indian. His name’s Kaka.”

  Bishop Street is in the heart of old Penang. In the shade of low white porticoes is a row of shops—haberdashers, perfumers, tailors and barbers. Their names are all smartly painted in red or black characters on the columns that give on to the street, and I had no difficulty in finding the Vogue tailor shop. But Kaka was no longer there. He had moved, though not far away, and the tailor—also an Indian—offered to take me there. It was a way of doing me a courtesy, but also of ingratiating fate. He told me as we went that he too consulted Kaka from time to time.

  I climbed a narrow stairway to the first floor. Behind a glass door was a clean, tidy waiting room. Two stout Indian ladies and a tall, elegant gentleman, broad-chested and perfumed, were sitting in blue imitation-leather armchairs eating dried beans. I realized that it was lunchtime, and the shady room offered a pleasant refuge from the boiling asphalt in the streets.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” said the man, getting up. I had not uttered a word, but what a perfect way for a fortune-teller to introduce himself! He showed me into his office and sat down in a big managerial armchair, with me on the other side of the desk.

  Date of birth, country of birth, calculations on a piece of paper, and the diagnosis: “Your lucky number is eight. This is a very important number in your life. Make sure that your house number, your telephone number and the number plate of your car always contain an eight, or that the numbers add up to eight. That way you will be 100 percent lucky. The other number is five. Your lucky stone is the emerald.”

  Then he took my left hand and studied it. “In your family everyone reaches old age, and you too will die old, because you don’t have one life line, but two. It’s this second line that protects you. If you’re involved in a car accident, for example, the car will be wrecked but you’ll come out unscathed. When you were forty years old you had problems caused by some friends who betrayed you; but after fifty-five you’ll have seven splendid years. You’ll soon do something you’ve never done before, and you’ll be successful. If you play the lottery, you’ll win.” (I shall end up believing this!) “When you were young you had an illness you nearly died from.” (The year I spent in a sanatorium when I was eighteen?) “You should now begin to meditate.” (That is what Chang Choub said.) “If you do, then you will become able to see the future, and will have the power to cure people.” (I wouldn’t mind.) “You already have these abilities within yourself, you need only learn to exercise them. If you happen to go to a place where you’ve never been, and have the sensation of recognizing it, that’s because you were there in your past lives. You’ve already had many lives, some extremely interesting.”

  “What lives? Where?”

  Kaka said there were experts who could see these lives in detail, but he could only speak in general terms. “You’ve already had many lives, and you’re on the point of reaching the higher state, that of…”

  “Of a guru?” I said irreverently.

  “Yes, it’s possible. The problem is that you have a lot of heat in you; you must be always very active sexually, and this saps your energy. You’re irascible, at times downright unbearable. You’ll be like that into old age,” he said, as if to punish me for my levity.

  “At
sixteen you had two love affairs: both ended badly. If you were married before the age of twenty-four your marriage failed; if at twenty-eight, you have an excellent marriage.” (Wrong, but I said nothing.) “Money comes your way in abundance, but it goes just as fast.” (The same old story.) “If you want to keep it you must put a gold ring on the middle finger of your right hand. Just a small gold ring. The signs on your palm say that you should have three children. If you don’t, it’s because one of the mothers aborted, perhaps without your knowledge; otherwise you still have time to have three.” (That’s all I need!)

  Taking both my hands, Kaka examined the fingers and nails. “You are particularly healthy,” he said, “and you’ve no problems with constipation. But if you should ever have it, don’t take medicine—eat only fruit and vegetables.” (Excellent advice.) “In any case, the vitally important thing for you is to begin meditating.”

  Kaka was clever. By introducing most of his remarks with “if,” he left himself a way out. That was his trick, and once I understood it I lost interest in what he had to say.

  “Your hand shows you’ve been left a fortune by someone. If not, then you’ll win the lottery …”

  “Kaka,” I interrupted, “do you believe in fate?”

  “Yes, but only as a tendency. The lines in the hand are just a warning, they indicate what may happen. Look at my hand. Any palmist can see that I suffer from heart trouble, and one colleague, a famous one in Kuala Lumpur, told me years ago that I’d die at fifty-two. I’m sixty-five now, and even when I do die it won’t be of heart failure.”

  Kaka had studied all the medical books he could get hold of. He had learned what causes heart disease, and for years had dieted, exercised, eaten huge amounts of raw garlic, and lived a very regular life: up at half past six, in the office from eight in the morning until seven in the evening, 365 days a year. “I won’t die of heart failure!” he said, and thumped his chest resoundingly with his fist. “I won’t die of heart failure because the signs in my palm have put me on guard.”

  I told him I had been warned by a fortune-teller not to fly, and that the very helicopter I should have been on had crashed. What did my hand say? Was I really meant to die in that helicopter?

  “Of course not!” replied confident Kaka. “You’ve two life lines in your hand, and if you’d been on that helicopter you’d have got off without a scratch. In fact, if there had been three or four people with hands like yours on that helicopter it would never have crashed. Always remember, in moments of danger it’s that second line that saves you.”

  I wish I had known that years ago in Vietnam. There were days when I was obsessed by the idea that in somebody’s rifle, somewhere in a paddy field, was the bullet that would kill me. I could see that bullet. I could smell it. I never told anyone, but the thought tortured me. At times, to go where my job, my curiosity or just my spirit of competition with colleagues took me, I really had to pluck up courage. Yes, courage: what is it? I have always thought of it as being the strength to overcome one’s own inexpressible fear.

  In those years one of my colleagues was an extraordinary Australian cameraman, Neal Davis. Every time I got to where I was told the front was, I would always see Neal, with his white towel around his neck and his old Bolex, ahead of me. He was a man who had no fear of war. Once, in the last days of Saigon, a plane tried to bomb the presidential palace and the antiaircraft guns started firing wildly. Thousands of bullets rained on the roofs and the square around the cathedral, and we all dashed for cover. But Neal just stood there in that inferno and carried on filming. Ten years later, in Bangkok, during a failed coup, a tank crew mistook his Bolex for a gun and fired at him. Neal put the camera on automatic and threw it down in front of him, thus producing his last dramatic film: that of his own death.

  I asked Kaka if he believed the hand was the best guide to a person’s fate. He said yes, then added, “But you must pay attention, and try to understand what the palmist says.”

  He told me the story of a Chinese client of his, a well-to-do businessman. Kaka read his palm and told him: “Your hand shows that you’ve two wives. If you don’t, you may one day.” The man wasted no time. He went home, gathered the family together and announced that he was marrying his secretary because the palmist had told him to. The family were terribly upset, and went to Kaka. He had to call the man back and explain to him that “you may have” does not mean “you must have.” He said, “If I told you that in your hand it’s written that you’ll die by fire, what would you do? Get a petrol tank and throw yourself in, or prepare a water tank to put out any possible fire?” He convinced the man to remain monogamous.

  Kaka said that the signs in the hand do not remain the same all one’s life; they change as time goes by, and your fate changes with them. If I began to meditate I would see for myself how my hand would change. I failed to see how this would be possible, but I said nothing.

  I walked back to the hotel in the broiling sun. It was the hour when in the tropics everyone takes a siesta. The rickshaw drivers sleep on the passenger’s seat with their feet up, shaded by the hood, the Indian tailors sleep on their counters, the Chinese in the dim interiors of their shops.

  My visits to fortune-tellers were growing more and more disappointing. What they told me about my fate was a string of banalities. Were there really any among them with special powers? Was the old man in Hong Kong one of them? I brushed away the thought.

  Of all the things Kaka said, the only one that stuck in my mind was his advice to meditate. I was most definitely not going to wear a ring on my middle finger. And getting rich did not interest me in the slightest. If you are rich you end up having to be with other rich people, and the rich, as I discovered some time ago, are boring. Also, rich people have to worry about not losing their wealth, and that is a worry I can do without.

  And yet there was something enjoyable in my encounters with these characters. As they reviewed the topics of family, health, love and money I was led to think about myself in a way I had not done for some time. Who at my age really thinks about himself anymore? Who stops to ask himself seriously if he wants a second wife, a third child, or even a ring on the middle finger of his right hand? Preoccupied with the problems of daily life, we scarcely ever stand back and take a good look at ourselves. How many happily married people take a conscious pleasure in their state? We have fewer and fewer moments in which to reflect on what we have. And who thinks about death anymore? For us Westerners it has become a taboo. We live in societies that have been molded by the optimism of the advertising industry, in which death has no place. It has been banished, exiled from our midst. By contrast, every fortune-teller I saw held it up to my gaze once more.

  What changes there have been in death during the course of my life! When I was a boy and someone died, it was a choral event. All the neighbors came to lend a hand. Death was displayed. The house was opened, the deceased was visible, and so everyone became acquainted with death. Today death is an embarrassment, it is hidden. No one knows how to manage it, what to do with the deceased. The experience of death is becoming more and more rare, and one may well arrive at one’s own without ever having witnessed another’s.

  If the Bangkok woman who looked at my mole was right, I shall end my days in a foreign land. What a pity, for there is something reassuring in the idea of dying where one was born, in a room where one knows the smell, the creak of the door, the view from the window. Dying where one’s parents and grandparents died, where one’s grandchildren will be born, one somehow dies less.

  The Chinese have always understood this, and ancestor worship has been their only real religion. In ancient times they would reserve a place at the far end of the cave in which the dead were buried and the women gave birth. Thus a cycle was created, as if the new took life from the old. Reincarnation, in fact. There can be no doubt that remaining for generations in the same place, repeating the same gestures and the same rites, tends to favor the concept of a great continuity of life in wh
ich an individual’s body is something purely accidental, a convenient shell that just happens to belong to the person inside it.

  While meditating, one of the Eight Chinese Immortals once departed so far from his body that when he “returned” he found someone else had taken it over. Not in the least distressed, he helped himself to the first free body he found: that of a one-legged beggar who had just died. Which is why that particular god of the Taoist Olympus is called Iron Leg Li.

  From Penang I had to go to Kuala Lumpur. I could have taken the express train from Butterworth, but that seemed too precipitate, so I decided to work my way slowly down the peninsula. A shared taxi took me as far as Ipoh, a city from which—so they say—come the most beautiful women and the richest Chinese in Malaysia.

  Little more than a hundred years ago Ipoh was just a big village. Its name comes from a tree whose wood the Malays used for making poisoned arrows. Then came the British, who discovered that the soil was full of tin. What happened next explains the history of Malaysia and its problems today.

  Extracting tin required manpower. The Malays did not greatly care for working in the mines, so the British decided to welcome any immigrants who could manage to get there. In 1879 there were 4,623 Malays in Ipoh, 982 Chinese and one Englishman. By 1889 there were 10,291 Malays, sixty-nine Englishmen, and 44,790 Chinese. That was how Ipoh became an almost exclusively Chinese city. A few of these immigrant families, enriched by tin, are today an economic power with which the political power (controlled by the Malays) has to reckon.

  “Only 10 percent of the Chinese here are really rich, but the other 90 percent work like mad in the hope that they may become so,” I was told by one of the Chinese people I spoke to in Ipoh. None of them dream of going back to their homeland. “In Malaysia I’m a second-class citizen, but I still have a better life than I would as a first-class citizen in China,” a teacher told me. “So I stay put.” Nothing if not practical, the Chinese!