In a shoe factory, a female worker had suddenly started screaming, tearing off her clothes and running about like a maniac. Another woman followed her example, then another, and in no time at all the whole place was in an uproar. It took three days and the sacrifice of a she-goat to appease the spirits and normalize production.
Ghosts did not provide the only explanation for incidents of this kind: the young people who had grown up in their kampongs found difficulty in adjusting to city life, the discipline of the production line, and reacted by “running amok.”
In fact the two explanations were not at all contradictory. I, like the Malays, preferred the one which gave the name of “ghosts” to the frustrations of so many young people. They had eagerly abandoned their work in the fields to go into the factories, but soon realized that in doing so they had not bettered their lives or made themselves any happier. Quite the contrary.
Malacca is a city unlike any other. I could not see anyone, or go anywhere, without being told strange stories. One woman, with a university education, told me that the people of Malacca took care not to let their children go on the beach after sunset, because they would be kidnapped by the gnomes.
“The gnomes?”
“Yes. No one has seen them, but everyone knows they’re there, because they leave a trail of perfume behind them.” Not long before, a stolen child had been found by a bomoh inside a coconut tree. He had his mouth full of chicken droppings which the gnomes, having little idea of what humans ate, had offered him. “It was even in the newspaper,” she assured me.
I had asked about a restaurant with traditional cuisine, and someone had recommended a place in the old Portuguese quarter. I was eating an excellent boiled cod with potatoes, onions, black olives and raw garlic when the chef-proprietor sat down beside me and asked: “Sir, are you in need of protection?”
Michael Texeira, aged seventy-six, a Malay-Portuguese and a Catholic, had served in the British army and been captured by the Japanese. After the war he was sent to fight against the Communists. He had married when he was very young. He and his wife, Nancy, had had seventeen children, of whom fourteen were still alive. Twenty years previously Nancy told him her belly could stand no more: another baby and it would burst. Punctilious in their obedience to the Church’s laws, they had decided to have no more sexual relations, and this, Michael told me, had given him the power to cure people and free them from the devil. He did this with a small wooden crucifix that his parish priest had brought him from Rome, where he had been on a pilgrimage.
“Of course,” I replied. “One always needs protection.”
Michael put the crucifix in a glass of water, whispered some prayers, passed the glass around my head, over my chest and my hands, and concluded that I had no problems, as the devil had never been in my body.
What most interested me was the story of his marriage. “Was it a love match?” I asked. Not in the least. It was his mother who had chosen Nancy for him. At the time of their wedding he had only ever seen her once. He said that they had had a happy life together and were still very close.
Even in the tradition of arranged marriages—still so widespread in Asia—is there a wisdom that we Westerners, with our cult of free choice, have given up along the way?
Ali, the taxi driver who took me back to town, was a Malay. He and his wife already had four children, but were set on having more. “The rich make more and more money, the poor more and more children,” he said, “but the poor are happier because they have time to be with their families. The rich, never: they are always busy.”
“Was it a love match?” I asked. No, Ali’s marriage had been arranged, too. His father, a bus driver, had come to an agreement with the girl’s father, who had a market stall.
“We took one look and we hated each other. But there was nothing to do. Even at the wedding we couldn’t stand each other. Love began only with the first child, but since then it has grown and grown.”
Are the Asians perhaps right in their principle: “Love the one you marry, don’t marry the one you love”?
I asked Ali to take me to an Indian fortune-teller who Michael had said could be found on the street where the haberdashers were.
“Him? He’s a fool. He can’t foretell a thing,” said Ali with a loud laugh. “How can he read someone else’s fortune if he can’t make his own? He’s been in that chair for thirty years, and every time the monsoon comes he runs for shelter. If he were any good he’d at least have an umbrella. No, no, I believe in fortune-tellers who have made their fortune, who have grown rich.”
I gave up on the Indian and went instead to find Mr. Lee. Here was someone to be reckoned with! Three years ago he had predicted to Ali that one day he would stop driving other people’s taxis and would have one of his own. And just look! He now had a cream-colored Mercedes with red upholstery!
Mr. Lee, very Chinese, had been conceived on the island of Hainan, born in Malacca, and orphaned at the age of three. As a child he had worked in a city restaurant, and had soon become a salesman for alcoholic drinks. Wanting to learn how to tell if people were trustworthy, if he should grant them credit or if they would run off without paying, he had bought for fifty cents a little book on how to deduce people’s personalities from their physical traits. He had struck it rich and made his name as a magician.
“It’s become a habit by now,” said Mr. Lee. “Every time I meet a person I look at their hands without them realizing it. Sometimes a sign is all you need to understand them and have power over them.” He explained that while the hand and the face are giveaways, the real signs of destiny lie in the soles of the feet. There, he said, are to be found the permanent signs of destiny. The lines in the hand change with time.
As soon as I had taken off my shoes, Mr. Lee said that my father was dead and my mother was still alive.
“That’s true. But how can you tell?”
“Easy. From the shape of your big toe.”
“But it was the same shape when my father was alive.”
“Yes, but the shape tells me that your mother has a very strong life line and will outlive your father by many years, and that has been true from the moment when you were born.”
Then, in great detail and with the aid of a magnifying glass, he examined the soles of both my feet. He told me I was a simple, straightforward character, that I did not provoke people’s aggression, that I refused to listen to other people’s opinions, but trusted only my own. He said that I had married at twenty-four and that this had been my great good fortune.
All this was quite true, and the likable thing was that Mr. Lee did not make it sound like some giant discovery. According to him, it was all perfectly written in the soles of my feet. There he read—like all the others—that I would never get rich. What he could not say was how many children I had. Birth control, he said, had introduced an element that upset every prophecy.
I told him what the old Chinese fortune-teller in Hong Kong had said, and asked what he thought. He studied my feet carefully.
“Yes,” he said, “there’s danger in your life. At times it’s great, especially this year. But you needn’t worry, because you have hemorrhoids, and the blood you lose will save you.”
The facts were undeniable. But the interpretation? If nothing else, it was consoling.
Malacca also had a living ghost: Father Manuel Joaquim Pintado, a Portuguese, formerly a parish priest in the city. An amateur historian, he had spent all his life in Malacca, collecting documents on his fellow countrymen there. A few years ago, when for reasons of its own Rome decided to take Malacca away from the Portuguese missionaries and give it to the French, Pintado refused to leave. He was living in a cottage on the outskirts. In the sitting room, with a statue of the Virgin which he had brought from his church, he had made an altar where he said mass. The rest of the house was full of old newspapers, books and maps.
When he heard that I was from Florence, Father Pintado searched among his papers and pulled out a photocopy
of a letter. Dated December 20, 1510, it was written on the eve of Albuquerque’s expedition against Malacca by a young Florentine, Piero Strozzi. The young man describes the dangers of the undertaking, the enemy’s poisoned arrows, the way he lived “with death constantly at his elbow,” and asks his family to pray for him. He concludes: “If I return safely I hope to get two thousand ducats from this voyage.” Money, always money, even then!
I asked Father Pintado if he could introduce me to someone who would show me around the city. He gave me the telephone number of a lady, a member of an old Malaccan family, who had assisted him in his historical research.
We met by appointment in front of the Church of St. Peter, and spent a whole day together. She was descended from poor Portuguese settlers who, after the Dutch conquest, were unable to go elsewhere or to return to Portugal. For centuries they remained a race unto themselves, with their own language—a mixture of Portuguese, Malay and Dutch—and their own traditions. They were called “the Christaon people.” In Malacca there are about two thousand of them.
With her, too, every step taken in Malacca was a story of death and ghosts. The houses and monuments in the center of the city are all painted red. When the British captured Malacca they destroyed the fort and other large Portuguese monuments, but spared the Dutch buildings on condition that they be painted red, to distinguish them from those that they themselves intended to construct. This tradition has survived, and the center of Malacca is called the Red Square.
“Yes, bloodred,” said the Christaon lady. During the Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945, a thousand Malaccan citizens were decapitated, bayoneted or burned alive to terrorize the rest of the population. My guide pointed out that in the old clocktower there was now a new Seiko, a gift from Tokyo. But the dead, she said, were far from happy about that Japanese presence. At night you could often hear their moans of protest.
We passed Banda Hill, a tract reclaimed from the sea not far from the fortress. It was occupied by an expanse of wooden shacks, each with a small cage hanging from it. “Indonesian immigrants,” said my companion. “They come here to work, but they know there’s the evil eye in these parts, so they bring cuckoos to protect themselves.”
While we were eating at the Malacca Club, the woman showed me a ring she was wearing. “I put it on to meet you,” she said. “I wear it for protection whenever I go with someone I don’t know.” On the ring was a little frog. “It must be worn with the frog’s face looking out, and then at six in the evening you turn it toward the inside,” she explained. “A frog is ugly and repulsive, but if you care for it, if you are kind to it, it is so grateful that it repays you by protecting you and bringing you money. That is why frogs are a symbol of good luck.”
Clearly this was the moment to ask if she knew a good fortune-teller. Not she, she was a practicing Catholic, but her sister, yes: she was a follower of a famous woman magician of Malacca.
The next day I found myself with three women in a small van driving toward the outskirts of the town. The two sisters were accompanied by a Malay friend who was also full of strange tales.
The sorceress lived in a small, single-storeyed house set in an open field without so much as a single tree for shade. It was identical to those that stretched on either side of it. They all had wire netting around their little gardens, blue-tiled roofs and white walls. We entered a sort of waiting room with a gray cement floor, plastic armchairs and plastic flowers. On one wall hung a plush carpet with a view of Mecca. The sorceress was Malay, a devout Muslim. She sat at the head of a table on a slightly raised platform; on her left was an elderly man with a kindly expression. On the table, covered by a floral plastic cloth, was a mobile telephone—a status symbol all over Asia.
She was called Ka (Sister) Non: a very thin woman with sparse, fine hair, deep-set eyes, a drawn face and almost transparent skin. She wore a floor-length green skirt and a green smock down to her knees. She was forty-two years old, had grown up in a kampong and had never been to school. When very young she had married a man who hit her constantly. During one of these beatings she struck her head and lost consciousness. When she came to she realized she had powers, that she “saw.” She had left her husband and married the kindly man, also a magician, who now acted as her assistant.
Other clients, all of them women, sat waiting in the armchairs. Everything was conducted openly, aloud, like a group confession in which everyone took part with questions, comments and exclamations of wonder.
Ka Non looked at me with very intense, ironic eyes. I felt that she was testing me, and I stared her down without batting an eyelash. She was not interested in knowing where or when I was born; only my name, which she went on practicing till finally she managed to pronounce “Ticciano.” She shut her eyes and repeated it about ten times, rapid-fire. Then she looked very intently at the palms of her own hands, as Muslims do when they pray. (“For her it’s like watching television,” explained her husband.)
When, finally, words came, she uttered them in a sort of trance: “Ticciano, this year you have started something special, very special.” (I marveled at her seeming accuracy. Then it struck me that if I had come to Malaysia to run one of those new factories, her words would have seemed equally apt.) “Yours is a very special mission. When it’s over you’ll be riding high.”
My three companions laughed, and the friend of the two sisters could not restrain herself: “Are you a spy? Who are you?”
Ka Non continued: “For years you had been seeking something. Now you have found it. You know what I am talking about. You know your mission, you understand me.” She told me that soon I would meet someone who would show me the way, who would enlighten me, and that I would then have a great success and become famous.
I asked her if she saw any dangers in my “mission.”
Still in a trance, she looked amused and then tense. She took my hands and examined them (my television, I thought). Then she flew into a passion and began screaming something I could not understand. Eventually the translation followed: “Nineteen ninety-three is the year in which you began to believe in God.” (One might explain my presence there in front of her in such terms.) “Since you set foot in my house you have been safe; that step was the first of a new life, a step that will bring you luck.”
Ka Non gesticulated wildly, one hand shot up toward the sky like a sword, and the other moved crosswise as if cutting someone’s throat: “From now on everything you desire will be yours, because you are protected, because you have found what you were looking for.” Of course, I thought, I had found a pleasing rhythm of life, more time to look around me. It seemed to me that the woman had hit the mark. I thought of Anatole France’s observation that “all translations make sense for those who have made them.” It was the same with the vague pronouncements of these magicians: they made sense to those who wanted to believe them.
She told me it was all right to fly, but that my life had been in great danger once in the past. (Well, everyone of my age has at some time experienced danger.) She said I would live to be more than eighty years old. Then she asked the names of my two children.
“The boy is called Folco,” I said. The procedure was the same: Ka Non repeated the name a dozen times, looked into her hands, and said that Folco was very intelligent, he was a pintar. (My companions were surprised at that word, but could not think of the translation.) “Pintar, pintar …” repeated Ka Non, and added that Folco would be successful in the arts, but that he must be careful about some friends who were not morally sound. As for Saskia, Ka Non said that she was extremely determined, and would marry a rich man whom I also liked. (What filial love!) She would have an easy life and one child.
Hearing the woman pronounce my children’s names, I felt as if I had done something wrong in revealing them to her. I told myself that this was an absurd taboo, and asked what she saw in the life of Angela (who hates fortune-tellers, and never wants to hear of them). I was lucky. Ka Non said that Angela was extremely sensitive,
that one had to take care not to hurt her, and that she might explode if she were not respected. “Treat her as if she were gold,” she said. “Handle her with caution, like a bowl of boiling oil, and take care not to splash it on your hands.” Good advice for anyone.
At this point my companions wanted to satisfy their own curiosity. “Does Ticciano have another life? Does he have lovers?” one of them asked.
Ka Non looked at her hands and pronounced: “Ticciano is an extrovert, he likes to mix with people, especially women, and women admire him. Some even fall in love with him. But he doesn’t take advantage of this. He finds it difficult to be unfaithful.”
They all laughed, and I laughed too, stripped bare as I was.
My session had put everyone in a good mood, and the woman who had recommended Ka Non insisted that her sister, my Christaon lady, must now consult her. She was a Catholic, a believer, and she considered that she was committing a sin, but she yielded nonetheless. The procedure remained the same: name, television in the hands, trance; but the answers were quite different from mine.
“You have great problems,” said Ka Non without hesitation. “Your husband is continually unfaithful, and now he has a lover he is especially fond of. A friend has robbed you of a large sum of money. A while ago someone put the evil eye on you. Much of it you have overcome, but a few traces remain. I feel it. That is the cause of your problems.”
The woman was aghast, and began to weep. It was all true. Her husband had always had other women, and two million Malay dollars had disappeared with a friend to whom she had entrusted them for a joint investment. The cure? A mixture of flowers and perfumes in her bath every day. Ka Non’s husband wrote out the recipe.
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 18
