A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  Bikku, despite his declared need for Western rationality, had become an absolute believer in the way of Oriental mysticism. It seemed to me that he needed to believe it. He, like Chang Choub, had felt the need for a teacher, and had gone a long way to find him. I had the impression that along the way he had somehow lost himself, but that the road home had by now become impossible for him.

  Bikku was returning to the small monastery near Hua Hin where he lived. He had been in Malaysia for kidney treatment. Since entering the monastic life he had been constantly ill. I venture to say this was due to the food and the rhythm of life, but he disagreed. His ailments, he said, were a form of purification from the bad karma that he had accumulated in his previous lives. Meditation also helped him to draw those evils out and rid himself of them.

  Like Chang Choub, despite years of effort, self-denial and hard spiritual exercises, Bikku too seemed to me an unhappy person deep down. I was struck by his story of an experience in the mountains of Nepal, when he had the sensation that his body was dissolving and he was becoming part of everything around him—plants, mountains, grass, air. Then he heard a voice saying to him, “No. Not yet. Your time has not come.” The memory of that sensation had never left him, he said, and the thought that one day his body would dissolve in that way gave him a great sense of well-being, “Because the body is like a shoe that’s too tight. You can’t walk properly and you want to throw it away.”

  While Bikku, thin and ailing, was speaking to me in that poetically veiled way of his desire for death, in the corridor two strapping Americans who ran a bar in Pattaya were discussing the problems they had with the girls, and the methods they used to get them to come to work every evening and hand over the right percentage of the money they made from the customers. I joined them, and after two hours I knew enough about the subject to open a bar of my own if need be. I learned that one must hire at least eight girls (they do not all turn up every night, and there is always some client who rents a couple of them for a week); I learned to avoid making mistakes, above all not to pay the girls more than the other bars. I could earn at least two thousand dollars a month. Net! Even after paying off the local police! Where, if not on such a train, would I have had such a lesson in survival?

  At dinnertime Bikku only drank some fruit juice, and then went to sleep. I spent the evening in the restaurant car, where the police, the train attendants and my bar owners went on swapping stories about Thai girls. We all drank that lethal mixture of local whiskey and soda with ice and lemon which they say eventually makes you go blind, especially the fake one made with methyl alcohol. But how can one tell? One must trust to luck. When I returned to my couchette I left the curtain open to enjoy the breeze. A large moon looked as if it were hung on a nail in the square of the window, as the train rumbled on through the warm night.

  I woke early to say goodbye to Bikku, who got off at Hua Hin, 130 miles before Bangkok. Through the pale dawn light I could see the pinnacles of temples, like golden cutouts against the dark foliage of the palms. High up on a hill I made out the silhouette of the small monastery where Bikku lived.

  Another couple of hours, then the train slowed down and began that pleasant clattering over the switches, the weaving and straightening-out that announces the arrival at a main station. Bangkok at long last! Two months had gone by. Two months traveling without planes because of a fortune-teller. Sheer madness, many people already thought. But being taken for a madman amused me more and more.

  17/THE NAGAROSE

  I have never been able to feel for Somerset Maugham the affection that he inspires in most of his readers. He has always struck me as an excessively English writer, not the slightest bit interested in Asia for its own sake but only as an exotic backdrop to his stories of whites.

  It happened by chance—by chance?—that when the car was waiting for me at the gate of Turtle House, my eyes, as I searched in a last-minute dash for a book to read at sea, fell on The Gentleman in the Parlor, which was lying on the round Chinese table in the library. It was a first edition which I had bought in Singapore twenty years previously. The book had been attacked by the Bangkok termites, and had just come back after being rebound. I shoved it into the last empty corner of my rucksack and left.

  So it was with great emotion, compounded not only of pleasure but also of that uneasiness one always experiences when confronted by a mystery to which one has no key, that when I came to open this book, sitting on a pile of ropes on the afterdeck of a small cargo ship en route from Bangkok to Cambodia, I realized that Maugham was describing the identical voyage, made on a similar ship in 1929.

  The book began: “I have never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of his readers.” Maugham tells how, on the point of departure, he looks for a book to take along; his eye happens to fall on one with a green cover, and subsequently he begins reading it on board ship …

  What a bizarre year this was turning out to be for me! And life so splendid once again, so unusual, so full of surprises. Of coincidences?

  Maugham had begun his journey in Rangoon, and was bound for Hanoi. And I, where had I begun mine? What was my destination? And who was there pulling the strings of what happened to me? Because I had a feeling there was someone.

  The chain of cause and effect that links human affairs is endless, and that means they remain without a real explanation. I was on that ship as the result of an infinite series of “becauses,” of which it was impossible to establish the first. That is the maddening thing about destiny—and the wonderful thing.

  There is always an inexplicable bridge of San Luis Rey, where different people with different stories, coming from different places, meet by chance at the moment when the bridge collapses, to die together in the abyss. But the first step of each of the journeys which end in that assignation cannot be retraced.

  In my case, any starting point that I might fix—the fortune-teller in Hong Kong, the escape from death in Cambodia, the decision in Laos, even my own birth—was not it. Perhaps because, when you come down to it, there really is no beginning.

  I called out to Leopold, an old friend who had offered to join me in this adventure, and the three of us—Somerset Maugham was by now a powerful presence—celebrated the fact that we were there, enjoying the calm progress of a ship called the Nagarose.

  I had to be in Cambodia for the elections organized by the United Nations, and luck was on my side. The overland route was difficult and dangerous. The frontier with Thailand was officially closed, and the Khmer Rouge, having decided to boycott the elections, were threatening the road between Poipet and Battambang. The foreigner’s only point of entry was the Phnom Penh airport.

  One day, however, I had seen a small notice in a Thai newspaper announcing that a ship bound for the Cambodian port of Kompong Som was taking on cargo in Bangkok. I had telephoned: the ship belonged to a young American, a fledgling shipowner. I invited him to dinner at Turtle House and persuaded him to take me on board. Leopold had joined me enthusiastically.

  A fine character, Leopold. Born into an old patrician family, many of whom had given their lives for France, he had been a law student in Paris in 1968, and had “made revolution.” Frustrated at the way it turned out, he had gone on the road: India, Nepal, Thailand, and then Indochina. I met him in Saigon in 1975, in the garden of the Hotel Continental, after the city had been taken by the Communists. Of good bearing, elegant, always in a beautifully ironed silk shirt, Leopold was not in Vietnam for the same reasons as the rest of us journalists, businessmen or adventurers. He was an observer of life, and Saigon in 1975 was an ideal place to indulge that passion. Later, after years of wandering, he wanted to prove to himself that he too was capable of doing something. He went to Bangkok, where through a series of coincidences he started a jewelry factory. He gave it a high-sounding French name taken at random from the Paris telephone directory, and it made him a fortune.

  “But one can’t spend one’s life making useless thi
ngs like jewelry,” he said fifteen years later when we met again. He had decided to make the factory over to the workers as a cooperative, and to devote himself to something else. “Giving is better than selling,” he said. “In future if I need anything they’ll help me. In Asia gratitude is more binding than any contract.”

  Our departure was postponed from day to day. It was raining and the ship could not load its cargo of sugar. Then at last we were told to come to Quay 5 at Tomburi, across the Chao Paya, the great river of Bangkok.

  An appointment with a ship is like one with a woman you have spoken to only on the telephone. You go to meet her, all curiosity and with an image in your mind, the product of fantasy, and regularly it fails to match the reality. Small, rusty, haphazardly repainted in light blue and white, her decks filthy and littered with cigarette butts, her Maltese flag blackened by smoke from the funnel and her mainmast bent from some encounter with a crane, the Nagarose was not as I had imagined her.

  Accompanied by a tall and distinguished young sailor who seemed utterly out of place on that old tin can, I stowed my sack in the cabin that had been allocated to us. It was minute, baking hot and with no ventilation. On the door I was surprised to see a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the Burmese resistance to the military dictatorship. “I was one of her bodyguards,” said the young man in excellent English. “I was in my third year of physics, but when she was arrested I had to flee.” All the crew were Burmese. Many, like him, were former students who had fled to Thailand to escape the repression.

  We slipped our moorings at six in the evening. The Nagarose had made barely a hundred yards when a glorious girl, wrapped in a beautiful close-fitting sarong, appeared on deck. Making her way to the stern she arranged a garland of jasmine flowers, some strips of colored silk, sticks of incense and a bunch of orchids. “It brings luck. It’s our protection,” said the captain, also a Burmese. He was a man of forty to fifty years intensely lived, to judge by his face.

  The ship glided away, hugging the left bank of the Chao Paya, passing the Naval Academy, several pagodas and a Chinese temple surmounted by a large yellow sculpture in the shape of a coin. Here and there rows of old wooden houses on piles could be seen, each with a ladder from which children were diving into the water. In the old days, when the river was the main avenue of access to Siam, these were the first sights that greeted travelers before they saw the sparkling roofs of the Royal Palace in the distance.

  At nine o’clock we reached the mouth of the river. We dropped our Thai pilot and made for the open sea. Ahead of us lay hundreds of fishing boats with lamps hung on long poles over the dark water. We seemed to be moving toward a city full of lights and life.

  Our dining room consisted of a rough table bolted to the floor and two benches, but the dinner would not have disgraced any restaurant. It was magnificent, like she who had prepared it, the girl we had seen before. She was twenty years old, dark-skinned, with high strong hips, and unusually full-breasted by Thai standards. On her wrist she wore several bracelets, one of which had a little gold bell that supplied a musical accompaniment to all her movements.

  The captain had seen her selling T-shirts in a Bangkok market. She had just arrived from the provinces and this was her first job. He asked how much she earned, and offered her a thousand baht ($25) more per month to perform the office of his wife. Done! Then he managed to hire her as the Nagarose’s cook. Both seemed happy enough with the arrangement. The “hired wife” is an old tradition in Thailand, and Leopold and I readily agreed that it was a most civilized one.

  We sailed all night among the fishermen’s lights. Sleeping below decks was impossible. The ship had been made in Norway, for northern seas, not the tropics. Big pipes belched heat from the engine room into the cabins, turning them into ovens. You couldn’t walk barefoot on the steel-plated floor of the corridor, it was so hot. Only the big cock-roaches scurried happily back and forth. The crew had their bunks below, but the captain slept in a comfortable hammock, hugging our cook and enjoying the cool breeze from the only fan on board.

  Leopold and I abandoned our cabin and lay down on the upper deck at the foot of the funnel, but neither of us could sleep straight away. The night, the atmosphere of the ship, and once again the sense of being completely outside the everyday world, had dealt me that exhilarating feeling of freedom which is my drug. To Leopold it dealt a great desire to talk and laugh.

  “Just think of that American who says: ‘I am the owner of the Nagarose.’ He’s maybe never set foot on it, and spends all his time in an air-conditioned office sorting out problems of insurance and sugar-loading. And you and me? Here we are enjoying his ship!” said Leopold. The idea that the American had only a piece of paper declaring him to be the ship’s owner, while we, without even a ticket, had the run of it, made me laugh too.

  “In life one should always be as on this ship: passengers. There is no need to own anything!” he went on, as if to justify his decision to get rid of the factory.

  I think it was then that Leopold first spoke to me of John Coleman. “He’s an exceptional man. You must meet him. He’s really a great master, and he can teach you to meditate.”

  We fell asleep where we were. Now and then, with a change of wind, I felt puffs of smoke blowing over me, but I was too tired to move. I was awakened by the sun.

  I spent most of the day on deck. At the stern the ropes were coiled in big rings, forming nests in which a prehistoric bird might have laid its eggs. I stayed there sunbathing and reading Somerset Maugham, sometimes aloud so that Leopold could join in the “conversation.” I did not spare him the story of how Maugham, when he arrived in Bangkok, went to stay at the Oriental Hotel and had an attack of malaria. The German manageress, rather than have him die there, tried to persuade a doctor to take him away. Poor Maugham! He would be turning in his grave if he could see how today the Oriental boasts of him as one of its illustrious guests, with a suite named after him, all his books, specially bound, in a showcase on the Bamboo Veranda, and his photograph on the menu with suggestions as to what he might have eaten for breakfast and drunk at sunset.

  In the afternoon the heat became unbearable, but it was the rainy season, and at three o’clock the daily storm punctually brought its cool relief. Afterward the sky was like a vast fresco of blues and blacks and grays, with a few very white clouds, motionless like grandiose monuments.

  The ship made slow progress—in fact sometimes it seemed to be motionless. Once the fire alarm suddenly went off, but nobody seemed to get excited. It was caused by an overheated accumulator, and the captain gave orders to reduce the speed even more: three knots at the maximum. We would reach Kompong Som a day late.

  The sea was a desert. The only ship we saw for hours on end was another old freighter with a Burmese crew. Our sailors knew them, and tried to make contact by radio, but no one replied.

  “Travel makes sense only if you come back with an answer in your baggage,” said Leopold. “You’ve traveled a lot; have you found it?”

  For him too the ship was a break, a release from routine. He spent the long empty hours reflecting on matters close to his heart, and I was like the sandbag at which a boxer practices punching. This time the fist hit me hard, because I knew I had not found the answer. Quite the reverse: along the way I had lost even those two or three certainties that I used to think I possessed. Perhaps that was the answer, but I refrained from telling Leopold so. Trying to lighten the tone of the conversation, I said that I traveled because my nature is that of a fugitive: sooner or later I always have to escape from where I am. Leopold was not satisfied.

  “We’ve both spent half our lives in Asia, and we’ve had some pretty strange experiences,” he said. “We must have got at least a clue from it all. We can’t go home with nothing in our bags but a few yarns to spin, like old sailors.”

  I have never thought about that baggage; still less about what to put into it on the way home. If I ever want to return.

  The ship was
wheezing painfully, and every breath sounded like her last. Suddenly we heard a loud clashing sound, like stones in a grinder. The long-haired youth in charge of the engine scratched his head and disappeared into the hot belly of the ship. This time it was a pump that had broken down. Fault put right. On we went.

  For dinner the beautiful cook had prepared a stew of pigs’ trotters, fried fish and vegetables with ginger, and rice. We all ate together except for the two lads who stayed on guard above, scanning the pitch-black sea where not a single light was to be seen. As if the food were not already spicy enough, the Burmese constantly helped themselves to red peppers from an old glass jar. After dinner the youngest sailor prepared little packets of betel for everyone.

  The captain realized that betel was not our favorite dessert, so he sent for a bottle of gin and another of lemonade, and we spent the small hours together. For him we were the break, the respite from routine, and he wanted to unburden himself. He was forty-four years old, and had been sailing for twenty. He had been everywhere and had done a bit of everything, from smuggling cigarettes to smuggling electronics. His family were in Rangoon, but he could not go back there: he had taken a stand against the dictatorship and would be arrested. He had chosen the members of the crew one by one, and they were utterly loyal to him. The man looking after the ship’s machinery was an engineer, two of the ship-boys were architectural students. Because of the military dictatorship Burma had remained backward and was now treated with contempt, especially by the Thais, he added.

  The Thais, he said, think of nothing but money. Even their Buddhism is mercenary. In Burma, on the other hand … he put his hand in his shirt to show me his Buddha. Then he noticed that I too had one at my neck and, as is done in these cases, each of us took off his chain and in cupped hands offered it to the other for admiration.