A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  The simple, orderly beauty of the rice fields helped me to shake off the thought of the bandits, but when the train finally entered Phnom Penh I drew a sigh of relief, even though the station presented a disheartening scene, occupied as it was by an army of beggars, homeless people, desperate characters of every kind—those produced in the past by war and those produced now, with equal cruelty, by the free-market economy.

  In Phnom Penh I remembered the monk that Hoc had told me about, the one who appeared sometimes as a young man and sometimes as an old one. With the journey I had before me, I thought it would not be a bad idea to “recharge” the Buddha I wore on my neck. Hoc was not sure if the monk was still alive. His wife had heard that he had been killed by bandits who had robbed his monastery. We decided to try anyway the next morning, very early so that I could go on to Saigon.

  It was the sort of dawn that leaves you with an eternal sense of nostalgia: the dark tops of sugar palms against the immaculate pastel sky, the water motionless in the rice fields reflecting the gold of the pagodas. We went on Hoc’s motorbike. For the last three miles the road was full of holes, and we laughed at the idea that before “recharging” the Buddha we were unprotected, and might get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere.

  The monk had not been murdered, or at least not his youthful incarnation. More than a magician or guru, he looked to me like a paratroop commander. A strong, muscular man, he ruled his 120 monks with an iron fist.

  Hoc explained my case to him: the danger of flying and my Buddha which had not been recharged since 1972. The monk said that for a proper job I should go to seven pagodas and have it recharged by seven monks, but since I did not have time, I should at least offer seven white lotus flowers to the great image of the Enlightened One enthroned in his temple. I did so, reflecting that the number seven has been magic in all cultures and all times: the seven days of the week, the seven dwarfs, the seven fat years and seven lean years, the seven-league boots, and the seven lotus flowers. Even in Cambodia!

  The monk told me to lay out not only the Buddha on its chain but all the other objects that I usually carried with me, especially when traveling. These too had to be “charged” so they would protect me. Meanwhile he went to look after some other patients.

  A group of young men, mentally disturbed or epileptic, were waiting for him. Brought from various parts of the country, they stood in a corner of the garden under a big tree, naked except for a krama around the waist. Beside them was a goatskin full of water. Some of them were too agitated to stand still, others were trembling. They all kneeled down. With both hands the monk picked up a bucket, plunged it into the water, and with all his strength, reciting aloud some prayers or magic formulae, poured it over those wretches: one bucketful after another until the goatskin was empty and the madmen, whether by magic or just from the cold shower, had all quieted down.

  Hoc told me the monk was expert in curing the traumas of war, and that all these men were ex-soldiers. Luckily my case was different: a “half bath” would do, said the monk, but if I preferred I could strip naked like the others. I preferred not. He took the Buddha and the objects I had selected: my old Rolex, my old Leica, and a clip I use to hold money in my pocket. He put them in a silver bowl, scattered some jasmine flowers over them, laid his hands on top, said some prayers and sprinkled them—just as well!—with a few drops of water. But as for me, while I sat on a chair with a crown of flowers in my joined hands, he slowly poured a whole basin of water on my head. It ran into my collar and down my back. And then another basinful, and another. Chanting the whole time. Instead of concentrating on the blessing, I was thinking the madmen had been much wiser to take their clothes off. By the end of it I was soaking wet.

  When the ceremony was over the monk gave me a small image of Buddha on laminated paper. Whenever I felt in danger, he said, I must immediately press it against the center of my forehead and strike it with the palm of my hand as if to drive it into my head. He demonstrated with a couple of whacks that set my whole brain spinning.

  We made our offering and left. As we went out, Hoc translated an inscription I had noticed on one wall of the temple: “Life is not yours, and it can be taken from you at any moment. Reflect on this.”

  The Cambodian railway, even in colonial times, had never been linked directly with that of Vietnam. The fastest way of getting from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now called, is by car. Dozens of broken-down vehicles, their doors held together by wire, run back and forth between the two cities carrying thousands of carpenters, builders, painters and Vietnamese prostitutes in search of fortune.

  For the people of Vietnam, Cambodia has become a sort of Eldorado: the country is underpopulated, the rice fields are fertile, the rivers full of fish, and the cities full of people who have got rich quickly with the traffics of war and then of peace and the United Nations.

  At Neak Leung all the cars, lorries and carts had to board a ferry to cross the Mekong. That powerful river, dense with mud and history, cuts Cambodia in two from north to south, and no bridge links the two shores. For centuries the great danger of this country has been that of being torn apart along this natural border: the west bank in the orbit of Thailand, the east in that of Vietnam. Today the demographic pressure of its two neighbors (Thailand with sixty million inhabitants and Vietnam with seventy-one) still threatens Cambodia with its present population of eight million.

  The Cambodian border is marked by a great triumphal arch in pink stone, surmounted by a reproduction of the towers of Angkor. From there I had to walk about a hundred yards to reach an unadorned gray cement portal that demarcates the entrance to Vietnam. Foreigners are very rarely seen there, and my arrival aroused great curiosity, a detailed search of my bags, and an interrogation in which the recurring question was: “Why didn’t you take a plane?”

  The difference from Cambodia is immediately striking. After the semideserted Khmer plains, Vietnam seems absolutely crammed with people. Everywhere you look you see nothing but people, people, people. People sawing, hammering, welding, sewing, cooking, in what looks like an obsessive preoccupation with survival.

  The distance from the border to Saigon is forty-six miles—the last, until Europe, that I was to travel by car: another rickety, shuddering old banger.

  On entering Saigon I realized that I was not prepared for the shock. I had thought about all the practicalities, but not about what the return would mean for me. The Saigon that came to meet me was a bedlam of humanity. I felt lost and almost frightened. In that city I had spent some of the most intense moments of my life; but now I felt that the past was something from which I must keep my distance. I began by avoiding the hotels where I had stayed before: the Continental, whose lovely terrace overlooking the square had been modernized with an ugly glass enclosure, and the Majestic, whose view of the river now took in several huge advertising billboards. I took a room in a cheap hostel for backpackers. Some of my former friends were dead; Cao Giao, my old interpreter and teacher, had died of cancer after years in the prisons of the Communist regime he had supported. I was unsure whether to look up the others.

  I walked for hours and hours at random through the city I had known, without recognizing anything or anyone. It was like walking in hell. At every turn someone tried to attract my attention, holding out a cap, or offering a ride in a rickshaw, a bowl of soup, a girl. Though it had changed its name, Saigon was again the old Saigon: a thoroughly Oriental city full of decadence, corruption and vitality—extremely materialistic, but even dirtier, more chaotic, more indecent and more lascivious than it had been during the war.

  Memory can be a wonderful refuge, and if I ever live to be old, as the fortune-tellers predict, I shall enjoy rummaging around in it as in an old family chest forgotten in the attic; but it can also be a terrible burden, especially for others. As I walked, constantly haunted by one recollection or another, I realized how obnoxious I was with this memory of mine: obnoxious to people of my own age, because my memor
ies of the past made it hard for them to lie about promises that were made and not kept; obnoxious to the young, who live in the present and do not want to hear about the world of yesterday. I was obnoxious, but at least harmless. In that war I had lost only some illusions—a loss that was not even visible. But what about those who in that revolution—a failed revolution, like all the others—had lost legs, arms, eyes, or even just their youth, and who now dragged themselves around the streets, begging? They were really obnoxious, with their memories so physical, so visible, such a burden for everyone.

  On the morning of April 30, 1975 I had wept with joy to see the tanks of the Liberation Army rolling into Saigon: the war was over, and the Vietnamese would now be masters of their own country. When I returned ten years later I had wept with despair when I saw how the Communists had wasted their chance to make Vietnam a truly free country. Now I was even more heartsick. The failure was everywhere, in the life of every one of those who had won the war.

  During the war years I had been greatly impressed by the revolutionaries I met: they were poor, tough, dedicated to a cause they believed in. Some of them reminded me of modern saints. In twenty years they too had lost their haloes and had become banal, commonplace figures. One had gone into business with some French Communists in the import-export trade. Another, in his own words (at least he still had some irony), was in the “yellow slave trade,” recruiting Vietnamese workers for Korean building companies. A man who had been a mythical figure in the Vietcong told me the tragedy was that they had won the war: losers are forced to adapt, to change, and thus to improve; but winners think they have nothing to learn.

  The S-10 train for Hanoi is called “The Reunification Express,” but by the looks of it, armored as it was, it still seemed to belong to the time when the pro-American south and the Communist north were at war. All the windows were fitted with steel grilles to be lowered “in case of need.”

  “What need?” I asked.

  “Bandits,” explained one of my fellow travelers, an ex-soldier. With a small tip to the conductress he had managed to smuggle in his young wife to share his bench-bed, so instead of six passengers in the compartment there were seven of us stretched out on those wooden boards, barely padded with soiled straw mats. Above me were another soldier and an old woman who talked all the time; on the opposite side were two strange young men with several days’ growth of beard and no baggage.

  The train was poor, dirty and primitive, as if it had been hastily cobbled together by a blacksmith. When we left Saigon there was already no water in the toilets. I tried to sleep, but it was not easy. Whenever the train stopped it was besieged by a howling mob of women, children and beggars trying to get on, to sell something or to cadge a handout. Many passengers got off to crowd around the women who carried pots of soup on shoulder-poles to serve on the platform. In the darkness of the stations the flames of their oil lamps flickered like fireflies: a medieval scene. Poor Vietnam! The only modernity this country seems to have known is that of war: weapons, planes and missiles are products of this century; all the rest still belongs to the past.

  The night sky was moonless and crowded with stars. Below the black silhouettes of the hills the presence of villages could be guessed from the light of the small fires on which people were cooking their meals. At every station the assault of peddlers and the uproar of bargaining was repeated. In the middle of the night the conductress entered our compartment, made us all get up, and began probing under our straw beds. A passenger had reported the disappearance of his baggage, and they were trying to identify the thief. They did not find him.

  Dawn came, fresh and pure as if this were the world’s first day, with not a cloud in the sky, the palms and hills mirrored in the still water of the rice paddies. For two days and two nights the train panted northward up the coast: a long, rattling train of poverty. But for the villages we passed through, the train was a symbol of wealth and abundance. At every station a forest of skinny arms reached up toward the windows. Some of them offered things for sale: ragged youngsters sold hot water from battered aluminum teapots covered with straw, little girls offered pieces of sugarcane. Most offered empty hands. Amputees boarded the train to display their stumps, the blind to chant their singsong tales of woe. The police drove them all out again. They were undoubtedly victims of the war, but nowadays in Vietnam only the dead are honored as heroes. For them there is a monument in every town and every village. For the lame there is nothing but contempt: they are a burden.

  The conductresses and inspectors were also ex-soldiers. They were paid starvation wages (15,000 dong, about $15 a month), but they got by thanks to various dealings which the train made possible. In Saigon they would buy a television set imported from Thailand, and resell it in Hanoi for a $10 profit. The great problem was to have the $700 to buy the first television.

  The talkative old woman and the ex-soldier’s wife were also doing big business. Both had bankrolls hidden in their blouses, and our compartment slowly filled up with baskets of grapes, skewers of dried fish, and medicinal plants bought at stations along the way. The old woman would haggle over the price until the train started moving, and then, with the goods already in her hand and the vendor running frantically alongside, at the very last moment she would throw out whatever she chose to pay. Take it or leave it! In Hanoi she would resell everything at a handsome profit. The two unshaven young men without baggage had not a penny to invest, and thus no way of making any money.

  The landscape outside the windows was movingly beautiful. Equally moving was the human landscape. At mealtimes, when the conductress came with a big pot to ladle soup into greasy aluminum bowls, a few skinny and grubby children would creep along the corridor waiting for scraps, which they furtively stowed in plastic bags. They would climb in through the windows, and as soon as the train began slowing down they would jump out again, gambling constantly with death.

  All through the second night the train ran alongside the sea. From my window, whenever the track curved it looked like a long, luminous snake. At dawn we arrived at Kim Lu. The population was already waiting with bowls of water on which cut-off beer cans floated to serve as cups. This water was for our washing. Dozens of women, children and old people with basins on their heads had been waiting for hours for the train to pass. So had the dogs who dived under the carriages, hoping to snatch a few crumbs of our wealth.

  My ex-soldier companion and his wife saw how horrified I was, and explained that we were in the province most heavily bombed by the Americans. Gesturing with their hands, they mimed the B-52s which had dropped their loads of death on the people. The story was twenty years old, but it still seemed to justify the poverty of the present.

  When we passed the city of Vinh the loudspeakers announced something I could not understand. My fellow travelers rushed to lower the grilles over the windows. Why? We were crossing the region where Ho Chi Minh was born, and I wanted to photograph the people in the rice fields. Annoyed, I pushed up the shutter again … and was hit in the face by a handful of mud and manure thrown by the peasants. A hail of stones clattered against the train’s iron sides and barred windows.

  For the heirs of “Uncle Ho” the train was the symbol of all the promises which the revolution had not kept. Loaded with party bureaucrats, city dwellers and sharp traders, that train of luxury and comfort—as they saw it—passed by, as it had always passed, without a thought for them. The peasants felt betrayed and brushed aside, and now they took out their rage on the train, pelting it with anything they could lay hands on every time it passed.

  I realized that for the past two days the Vietnam we saw from the windows had consisted of nothing but huts; that its cafés, its dentists’, its bicycle-repair workshops, its tailors’ and hairdressers’ were all miserable straw roofs supported by four bamboo poles, that the people were all dressed in patched rags and the children were all barefoot.

  The train rolled through that misery, whistling all the time. It ran parallel with the main ro
ad, crossing it now and then. Often there was not even a level crossing and the whistle was the only warning. A man on a bicycle failed to get off in time and was knocked down. It happened on every trip, they told me. At last the loudspeakers broadcast some patriotic music, and the mellifluous voice of a woman announced that we were arriving at Hanoi. The train slowed as if it had to break a path through the vegetable gardens and houses, bicycles and children, almost grazing shops and street stalls, and entered the city.

  The station, built by the French when Vietnam was a colony, looked like a miniature Versailles—a pathetic contrast with the mass of scrawny, dusty people who slept along the tracks and on the stairways.

  “Do you know where to find an opium den?” I asked a rickshaw driver in front of the modest hotel for Vietnamese travelers where I was staying. The man shook himself out of his weary lethargy, smiled toothlessly, motioned to me to climb in, and pedaled away through the Hanoi night.

  Along the broken pavements, lined with old houses whose yellow paint was now peeling, under beautiful French trees strangled by electric wires and signboards, swarmed the usual poor, pale, sickly humanity in shorts and singlets. Sweaty, tired, angry. Every entry hall was a little shop, every stall sold cigarettes or newspapers or petrol. Two stools at a little table made a café, a pump and a bucket of water was a tire repair shop. Every conversation looked like a quarrel, and often it was. Everything seemed to be rotting: the roofs, the doors, the walls, the people themselves. The city smelled of mold. I have always liked walking around cemeteries, but the vast graveyard that was Hanoi offered no inspiration. The austere, silent, heroic Hanoi of the war was now just a city of poverty in which everything was for sale. A symbolic journey into the political illusions of my generation would begin from here, where the night again concealed a thousand secrets.

  The rickshaw man had his own. He set me down in the city center, at the end of a dark passage between two large buildings. A young man beckoned to me and led me into the ancient belly of Asia, which the fire of the revolution had wanted to destroy forever, but which had come back to life. We crossed a court and went up the elegant wooden stairs of an old colonial house, past a row of huts built on what had been its balconies, around the edge of a terrace, along a gallery and up another small wooden stairway. Finally a little door brought us into the shadows of a beautiful room, its walls lined with bamboo, where the air was heavy with the sweet, familiar odor. On a little stove opium was being refined, boiling in an iron bowl. On the floor, covered with straw mats, lay some young people, each with his head against a wooden support. A beautiful, slim woman with very white skin moved from one to the other with the small oil lamp on which the pipe rested. By the light of that little flame I saw the shadows of other bodies stretched out along the wall, the outline of an inlaid frog on the pipe that passed from hand to hand, the tattoo of a butterfly on the naked shoulder of a girl lying beside me.