A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  The project of the man on my other side was soon on his lips. Together with some of his relatives in Taiwan, a brother in Singapore and a few Japanese investors, he was building the first big hotel on the island to which we were traveling. The long-term plan included eight more. “We want to turn Pulau Bintan into the Hawaii of Southeast Asia,” he said. He gestured toward the horizon, where I saw only a beautiful row of distant palms, but where he could already see the glint of skyscrapers.

  I had not tried to imagine Pulau Bintan, and at first sight I found it magnificent, still natural, not yet ruined by modernity. The boat tied up at an old wharf and we disembarked down a long wooden plank. The streets were narrow, the houses all one or two stories high. Nobody appeared to have air conditioning. I took a room in an old inn across from a mosque, and hired an interpreter and a driver who came to offer their services. We would be spending a couple of days together, and I thought the best way of getting acquainted was for us to go and have lunch. In hiring the driver I had not worried about what sort of car he had, and I was pleasantly surprised: an old-fashioned Chevrolet, held together with wire.

  “We’re lucky,” said Nordin, the interpreter. “In the Riau archipelago we have cars that don’t exist even in America anymore.”

  Pulau Bintan (pulau means “island,” bintan means “betel nut”), three times the size of Singapore and with a population of only 250,000 people, is the main island of the Riau archipelago, lying between Sumatra and Java. The Riau islands are rich in oil—they supply most of Indonesia’s crude petroleum—and other natural resources. Bintan itself has large deposits of bauxite, exploited in the past by the Dutch and now by the Japanese. The capital of the island is Tanjung Pinang (tanjung means “port”), with a population of about ninety thousand. The overwhelming majority are Chinese, who here, as elsewhere, control all the shops and all commercial activity.

  The restaurant we went to, the best in town according to my two companions, was Chinese. We sat on a beautiful wooden deck, overlooking the sea. Everything you might want to eat was in a tank below: different sorts of fish, crabs, lobsters and prawns, all alive. You looked down from above and made your selection, then a boy scooped out the victims and sent them to the cook in a basket. In due course the bones and shells were thrown over the railing back into the sea to be carried away by the tide.

  In travelers’ tales, even modern ones, one rarely reads about what people eat; yet in Asia food is still one of the great pleasures. The variety is enormous, the methods of preparation are still simple, and the smells and colors are as much a part of the pleasure as the tastes. Every dish has a magic property all its own: one is good for the liver, another for the circulation; one fruit warms, another cools; and many things are good for sex, a common obsession of all peoples in this part of the world.

  Sex also dominated our conversation. Nordin began by telling me to be careful in Indonesia when speaking the little Malay that I knew. Indonesian and Malay are virtually identical languages, but several words have quite different meanings. Aqua, for example, means “water” in Malay but something else in Indonesian. A week before, the Bintan football team were in Kuala Lumpur. They had asked for some aqua, and a little later they saw arriving … a group of transvestites!

  Nordin told me that his name meant “light of religion.” That religion was obviously Islam. “But Islam of the Indonesian variety,” he added—that is to say, extremely relaxed and permissive. Nordin came from Sumatra; he was a Batak, very proud of his origins. The Batak people are divided into four tribes. Nordin belonged to the Karo tribe. He told me that when a girl dies unmarried the custom is to put a fresh banana in her coffin “to keep her company on her journey to the underworld.” In the coffin of a celibate boy they put a thick segment of bamboo with a hole in the middle.

  Every people seems to have its own myth of the creation and of how men came into the world. Nordin told me the Batak version: one day the monkeys realized that there was no more room for them in the trees of the forest. They had had so many children that nobody could swing, run or jump from branch to branch anymore. So they decided that half of the monkeys should go and live on the ground. A pretty version of Genesis, it seems to me. But where shall we send half the human population when we finally realize that the living conditions on the ground have become like those of the monkeys in the trees?

  Still on the subject of sex, the driver of the Chevrolet—a big, tall fellow, who looked like a pirate with long hair down to his shoulders—told me that sex was the reason he had had to leave home. He came from a village in western Sumatra where there is still a very strict matriarchal regime: women rule everything, control everything. If a girl wants a certain boy, she need only go to his house and talk to his mother, and the poor devil cannot refuse. For my driver the only solution was to run away—the girl who wanted him was ghastly, he said. Another rule in his village was that a woman can always get rid of the man she has chosen: all she has to do is put his black Muslim cap outside the front door. She is then a divorced woman, and can marry someone else.

  For the driver, escaping to Pulau Bintan had been a liberation. He told me that many young men of his area were doing the same, and the women were growing discontented.

  I, for my part, felt perfectly happy. The stories told by Nordin and the driver took me back to a world of people who were different, not homogenized—people who still lived in their own way, with aspirations and concerns other than getting rich. I enjoyed the way my two companions described the women of the various islands, their characteristics, their good and bad sides: faithless were the women of Aceh, who, according to them, were a mixture of Arab, Portuguese and Indian; splendid were the Javanese, who have an extra muscle in their most private parts, and are of a courtesy beyond compare. If a Javanese girl accidentally steps on your toe, she apologizes a thousand times for having to continue using the offending foot.

  I asked my companions if anything strange ever happened on the island, if there were any bomohs. Of course! Masses of them! But in the Riau archipelago the bomohs, experts in magic, were called dukuns. In a village on the north coast of the island there was a very powerful one whom the driver had known since he was a child. His voice was enough to make anyone quake. But if I was interested in the occult, they said, I absolutely had to go to Lingga, an island five hours away by boat. It was a mysterious place, once the capital of the sultans, where now the whole population has special powers, and even the fish can speak. On that island are the ruins of an ancient civilization, which no one knows anything about. It seemed the place for me.

  Nordin made a few telephone calls and we went and looked for a Chinese who had a boat suitable for the trip, but by the time we found him it was too late to put to sea, especially as a storm was brewing. We would try the next day. All I had to do now was to go and see the dukun.

  We drove for over an hour along a good asphalt road that ran around the island (“The army built it,” said Nordin. “They don’t have to fight the Communists anymore, so they devote themselves to public works”). Then we turned off on a red earth track that took us into a plain dotted with coconut trees. The old Chevrolet shook and creaked, but I was the only one to be worried. “The dukun lives far from any populated area, because he needs peace to concentrate,” said the driver, and I thought how I too would choose a tranquil and solitary spot if I was to set about becoming a guru or founding a new religion. One of the specialties of the dukun was to cure madness, and in difficult cases he had to fast for a few days to gather enough strength to drive the disease from a patient’s body.

  The trees became more dense, and in the middle of a beautiful thicket we saw an old wooden house which had been painted blue many years before. A sign over the door said “Salamat Datang,” welcome. An elderly man in a sarong, wearing a dark vest and a greasy old black cap, sat on the veranda. Around his feet some scrawny little cocks were learning to fight; a few children stood watching with puppies in their arms. Dogs are taboo for Muslims, but
the man explained to Nordin that they were useful for keeping away the wild boar, which would otherwise destroy their fields. Another example of the relative flexibility of Islam in Indonesia.

  The man was blind in his left eye, which was completely white and expressionless, but the incredible vivacity of the right one compensated for this. He signaled to us to step inside, into a large room. We sat on benches around a big wooden table. A pleasant breeze blew in through the open windows. On the walls were images of Javanese women dancers, along with portraits of Sukarno, Suharto and other Indonesians who were unknown to me. On a little altar was an old print of Muslim saints with white beards. An acetylene lamp hung from the ceiling for the night. The dukun had no electricity, hence no television.

  He had not yet spoken a word to me, and I realized it was up to me to introduce myself. I came from far away, I said, and had heard of his powers. I wanted to know if someone had put the evil eye on me, if I had anything to fear in the time ahead, and if this year he saw any danger for me in planes.

  “Baik!” Good, he said. “I’ll give you all the protection you need.” His voice did not make me tremble exactly, but it was deep, firm, cavernous. An assistant came and poured out some very sweet tea, and the driver showed me the rooms where patients stayed during prolonged treatment. The dukun explained that I must submit to a special examination to see if I had the evil eye. He had a habit of raising his hands in the air while speaking, as the woman magician in Malacca had done. His nails were dirty and long, especially those of the two little fingers.

  He led me through a beautiful curtain made of shells, which made a pleasant sound when they moved, into a dark, windowless room. On the floor of trodden earth was a straw mat, on which we sat cross-legged in a circle. The dukun lit three small candles, and in the center of the mat I saw five round mirrors facing in different directions, and a few eggs. There were more eggs in a basket to the right of the dukun.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tiziano.” He practiced saying it a couple of times, and then in a stentorian voice began reciting a long litany in which I recognized only the name of Allah and, now and then, perfectly mastered, my own. From a paper envelope he took out a magnifying glass, with which he slowly looked into the mirrors one by one while continuing his prayers. Then, with an air of supreme confidence, he said I had no evil eye on me, that I must not worry, and that anyway he would give me a special oil with which to protect myself. From under a cloth he took a tiny bottle which shone like gold in the candlelight. As he opened it a strong, sweetish scent filled the room. He put the bottle to his mouth as if to spit into it, but instead blew as hard as he could, perhaps to instill his soul or that of the spirit he represented. Then he closed it, lifted it toward heaven with new supplications, and handed it to me as he would an object of the utmost preciousness. Whenever I felt in danger I was to anoint my forehead with this oil. With that little bottle on me, no one could do me harm. If someone tried to shoot me—because, yes this was a risk I ran—at the last moment the weapon would jam, the arm of the person holding it would bend and the gun would point at the ground. Everywhere I went, thanks to that oil I would be protected and respected. All who came my way would grasp that they were up against a superior being. Generals and ministers would get the message. There was only one thing I had to be careful about … The dukun spoke without pausing, but slowly, so Nordin had time to translate word for word: “Never piss against the sun. Remember: never! You must never do it facing the sun, or the oil will lose its strength. Understand?”

  The dukun joined his hands. I observed his long, dirty fingernails and the vacant white eye which suddenly, in the dim light of the candles, appeared to see. He began reciting an extraordinary litany in which my name was intoned with the words Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, Pakistan, Jakarta, India, Europe, America, Australia, New York, Asia, Germany, Rome. Names of cities, countries, continents, repeated at random, backward and forward for minutes on end in an obsessive crescendo: all the places where I could go with the assurance of being protected and respected as a superior being.

  The ceremony was over. We made our way back to the big table and I asked the dukun to tell me his story. How had he discovered his powers? No. He could not answer such questions. If I had come in the morning he would have told me all, but the propitious time of day had passed. Even he had his taboos, and were he to break them he would lose all his power. He said only that his name was Ismail, that he was seventy-seven, that he had come to Pulau Bintan from Java after the war, and that he was descended from those white-bearded sages portrayed in the prints above the altar. Those were extraordinary people, he said: if they wished, they could make themselves invisible. That he could not do, but he was able to stop bullets, and for that reason many young men of the island came to him before going to do their military service. He made them invulnerable.

  The dukun was good with words—which is perhaps the real power of most of these magicians. At a certain point he said that he and Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence and who was president until 1967, had the same great-grandfather. Sukarno had great powers, said the dukun, and it was directly from Sukarno that he had received his own. If Sukarno’s car or plane ran out of petrol, he had only to urinate into the fuel tank and the engine would start running. His last wife had wanted to remarry, but on the eve of the wedding he had appeared before her and the marriage had not taken place. Did I know that Sukarno was not dead? It was his statue that had been buried. The real Sukarno was still alive, wandering around Indonesia. The dukun was absolutely convinced of this, and in a way he was not mistaken. Sukarno died in 1970, but his presence is felt in Indonesia perhaps even more today than when he was at its head. As time goes by the myth grows, and even his successor Suharto, after almost thirty years in power, has to reckon with this ghost that still circulates in the archipelago and in whose name all sorts of miracles are performed. By now Sukarno has become the tutelary divinity of whatever is connected with magic in Indonesia. Which is almost everything.

  A computer programmer who loses a disk goes to the dukun to find out where to look for it; the police enlist the services of magicians to help trace a thief or identify a murderer; high government officials consult masters of magic before approving important contracts already vetted by economic and financial experts. Recently a group of car mechanics claimed they could iron out dents by using magic. They do it in a few hours and for a fraction of the normal price. Even the representative of the World Bank in Jakarta turned to them to have his Toyota repaired. All of these people come from Biltar, Sukarno’s birthplace, and like the dukun they claim to have received their power from him.

  I asked the dukun what he thought about the fact that man had been on the moon. Again he flung up his grimy hands. “It’s not true. Man can’t go to the moon because the moon is God’s creation. Man’s imagination can go to the moon, but not man. Human beings have limits, and these limits must be respected, otherwise terrible things happen.” I could not but agree with him.

  On the table in front of us was one of those little plastic envelopes containing colored medicines one comes across in every market throughout Asia. “Do you believe in modern medicines?” I asked the dukun. Of course he did. He took them himself, and recommended them to his patients for ailments with a physical basis. The problem, he said, was that these medicines were not up to curing any sickness that had been brought on by magic. These would only respond to a magic that was stronger. For example, madness, he said, was caused by magic, and there were no medicines capable of curing it. People would come to him after having tried the city doctors to no avail. The boy who had served us tea intervened to tell us that many women who had been brought in by their relatives with frightful tremors and convulsions would go away calm and tranquil after two or three days’ treatment.

  “It’s not I who do it,” said the dukun. “It’s God who does it through me.”

  It was time to pay. The driver had said there was no fee; only
if the client was satisfied did he leave anything. But when I asked Nordin he suggested the equivalent of twenty dollars. A fortune here, I said to myself, but if the oil worked … And then, I could not come and probe into these people’s minds with the excuse about planes, and not leave behind some token of gratitude, some goodwill that might bring me at least as much benefit as the oil.

  Discreetly, making sure no one noticed, I fished out a pocketful of rupees and concealed them in my hand. Making a slight farewell bow, I held out my right hand to the dukun, supporting the wrist with my left in that courteous gesture which is obligatory in Asia. He did the same; our hands met, and as he felt the money his face brightened into a beautiful, broad smile of satisfaction. He was very happy, and I felt protected and important.

  On the way back Nordin told of his own experience with a dukun. In 1979, two years after he had come to Bintan and begun taking tourists to the nearby Island of the Bees, he started feeling ill. He was constantly weak, had headaches, and often vomited during the night. The doctors gave him medicines, but he grew even worse and could no longer move. His wife called in a dukun, a woman. She gave him some ingredients to drink, some leaves to apply to his body, and after three days Nordin, “light of religion,” was in shape again. The explanation? The people of the Island of the Bees had put the evil eye on him. They were jealous because he spoke English, and by bringing tourists to the island he profited from their existence without sharing anything with them. The woman dukun performed some countermagic and the evil eye disappeared. But she warned Nordin that for the rest of his life he must show more respect for others, must not bother them needlessly and must share what he earned with those who helped him.