A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

The man lived in one of the many old tumbledown beehive-tenements of Wanchai. The doors of the flats were left wide open even at night to let in air, but they had big padlocked grilles to keep thieves out. We climbed several flights of stairs before arriving at a grille like all the others. I saw the red glow of a little altar on the floor, with a bowl of rice and some tangerines offered to the tutelary deities and ancestors. I recall a pleasant smell of incense. Behind an old iron desk sat a Chinese man of about seventy. He wore a sleeveless vest and his head was shaven like a monk’s. His bony hands were resting on some old books and an abacus.

I stood to one side as the old man gave my friend the advice she sought. Then, pointing in my direction, he said in Cantonese, a dialect I did not understand, ‘He’s the one I’m interested in.’ And I gave in.

First he measured the length of my forearm with a string, then he felt the bones of my forehead, asked me when I was born and at what time of day, made a few calculations on his abacus, looked into my eyes and began to speak. I was expecting the typical vague formulae used by fortune-tellers, which one can interpret at will, pull this way and that like a rubber band, and if one so desires always succeed (more or less) in squaring with reality. Had he said, ‘You are married but there’s another woman in your life,’ I might have thought, ‘Ah, perhaps that’s the one he means.’ Had he said, ‘You have three children,’ I could have enjoyed playing with the idea that besides Folco and Saskia I might have sown another somewhere in the world. But when my Chinese friend began translating I could not believe my ears: ‘About a year ago you were about to die a violent death, and you saved yourself by smiling…’ Yes, that was true enough, but how could this old man I had never seen describe so exactly an episode which only I knew about, which even my Chinese friend had never heard mentioned before?

It had happened in Cambodia, exactly a year before. I had left the country a few days before the fall of Phnom Penh on 17 April, and in Bangkok, in that haven of peace and luxury that is the Oriental Hotel on the Chao Paya River, I was grinding my teeth at the thought of those friends and colleagues who had stayed put to see what was happening in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge moved in. My not being there with them struck me as a terrible personal defeat, which I was not prepared to accept. I rented a car, drove to the Thai city of Aranyaprathet on the Cambodian border, and on the morning of 18 April I walked across the iron bridge that spans the frontier. What I had in mind was the crazy, stupid, reckless notion – proof of how little I then knew about the Khmer Rouge – that from there I would find a way of getting as far as Phnom Penh. And off I set along the road on foot.

I passed crowds of panic-stricken Cambodians racing in the opposite direction, cars crammed to overflowing with people and baggage, horns blaring. They were all terrified, all trying to escape to Thailand. One of them waved to me to turn back, but I took no notice. I had just reached the centre of Poipet when the Khmer Rouge, in single file, began entering the town. The government soldiers threw away their arms, took off their uniforms and fled. There was no resistance, no shooting. The first Khmer Rouge troops passed by as if they had not seen me, but a second group grabbed hold of me, turned their machine guns on me and shoved me up against a wall in the market square. Yelling something that sounded like ‘CIA, CIA! American, American!’ they prepared to shoot me.

Until then I had seen the Cambodian guerrillas only as corpses abandoned after a battle beside a road or a rice field. These were the first that I saw alive: young, fresh from the jungle, with dry, grey, dusty-looking skin and fierce eyes, red from malaria. ‘CIA! American!’ they kept shouting. I was sure they were going to shoot me. I thought it would be a quick and painless death, and worried only about how the news would reach my home, what suffering it would cause my family. Instinctively I reached into my shirt pocket and took out my passport. Smiling pleasantly, and speaking for some reason in Chinese, I said: ‘I am Italian. Italian. Not American. Italian.’

From the cluster of spectators behind the guerrillas a man with pale, almost white skin – no doubt a local Chinese trader – stepped forward and translated into Khmer: ‘I am a journalist, don’t kill me…wait till a political cadre comes, let him decide…I’m Italian.’ And I went on smiling, smiling, waving my passport. The Khmer Rouge lowered their guns and entrusted me to a very young guerrilla who scrutinized me curiously for hours. Now and then he would run the barrel of his big Chinese pistol around my face and over my nose, my eyes.

Towards sunset an older guerrilla arrived on the scene, evidently the leader. Without even looking at me he talked with his men for a few very long minutes, then turned to me and said in perfect French that I was welcome to liberated Cambodia, that these were historic days, the war was over and I was free to go.

Later that evening I was again between the beautiful cool linen sheets of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. ‘If somebody aims a gun at you, smile,’ I have told my children since. It seemed to me one of the few lessons in life I could give them.

But the encounter left me with something more than a ‘lesson in life’. The real fear, as always, came later. For months I had nightmares; I often relived the scene in slow-motion, and not always with a happy ending. Obviously the experience had left its mark.

But how had the old Chinese fortune-teller, in his musty little Hong Kong flat, managed to see that mark? If I had been slashed with a knife or wounded by a bullet, my skin would have shown a scar that anybody’s eye could have seen. But with what eye had he seen the scar that the Khmer Rouge had left inside me, not even I knew where? Was it mere coincidence? This time it really was hard to believe.

After looking into my past, the old man spoke of my relations with the five natural elements, fire, water, wood, metal and earth. ‘You love wood,’ he said. That is true: whenever I can I surround myself with wooden objects, and of all perfumes I like sandalwood best. ‘You are happy if you live near water.’ That is true: in Hong Kong we always had a view of the sea, and in Italy, at the country retreat in Orsigna, we hear the rushing of a mountain stream.

Then came the prophecy that was to rule my life for a year: ‘Beware!’ said the old man: ‘You run a grave risk of dying in 1993. You mustn’t fly that year. Don’t fly, not even once.’ He added, ‘If you survive an air accident in that year, you’ll live to be eighty-four.’

There is no connection between the precise description of past events and the accurate prediction of the future, but obviously the one lends credibility to the other. For that reason, as I discovered later, almost all fortune-tellers use the same system, and thus I could not get the old man’s words out of my head. His ‘guess’ about my past could not be accounted for by statistical probability. This story of a close encounter with death could not be brushed off as equally likely to be true or false for anyone who entered his little room in Wanchai. It was not like telling a woman ‘You have children’ or ‘You have no children.’ My experience in Poipet put me absolutely outside the range of the average.

And if in some way of his own the old man had hit on the truth, and could see backward to 1975, might he not perhaps also be able to see ahead to 1993?

Put that way, the question was not the sort that can easily be ignored; and the idea of spending a year looking for an answer attracted me immensely – especially in the few days leading up to that portentous deadline.

On 18 December 1992 I flew from Bangkok to Vientiane. On the twenty-second, on board a small, jolting Chinese-made plane, I arrived in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos.

CHAPTER THREE On Which Shore Lies Happiness? (#ulink_92c8edfd-4453-5822-96f3-a22c1f5f56c9)

In one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the prince – soon to become Buddha, the Enlightened One – is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present – like the river, which at one and the same moment exists not only where he sees it to be, but also at its source and at its mouth. The water which has yet to pass is tomorrow, but it already exists upstream; and that which has passed is yesterday, but it still exists, elsewhere, downstream.

Sitting high on the Wat Pusi hill in Luang Prabang in the golden peace of sunset, I looked down at the heart-stirring confluence of the small, impetuous Nam Khan River and the broad, majestic Mekong, and thought of Siddhartha’s vision. It seemed to me that that conjunction and mingling of muddy waters was, like life – mine included – made up of so many streams. It seemed that past, present and future were no longer distinguishable one from another: they were all there, in that relentless flow. Fifty-five years had slipped away like the great river rolling towards the China Sea; the rest of my time on earth was already welling up in the Himalayan slopes, already underway, moving towards me along the same channel, clearly defined and counted to the last hour. If I had had a higher perch than that hill I might have been able to see more of the river, in both directions. And thus could I have seen more past, more future?

I was alone, and as can happen when one is surrounded by nature, far from any other human presence, the mind slips free of the bonds of logic, and the imagination runs wild. The most absurd thoughts arise at the threshold of consciousness. Yes: perhaps what we call the future has already happened, and only because our view is limited do we fail to see it. Perhaps that is why some people can ‘read’ it as easily as we see the light of a star which has been extinct for centuries. Perhaps the secret lies in breaking away from the dimension of time – time as we normally conceive it, made up of years, hours, seconds.

Laos was an ideal psychological preparation for my decision not to fly, and thus in a way to place myself outside time. As a country it has for years instinctively chosen to do just that. Without access to the sea, sheltered by impenetrable mountains that isolate it from China and Vietnam, protected by the Mekong which separates it from Thailand without a single bridge to link its two banks, Laos, despite wars, invasions and pressure from its neighbours, has continued in its ancient, detached rhythm of life. Though even there the calendar says one is in the twentieth century, the mind of the Laotian people remains in an epoch all their own, and they have no intention of leaving it.

In recent years the Thais have built superhighways leading to their bank of the Mekong, and have suggested to the Laotians in a thousand ways that just one bridge would enable them to link up with the Thai road system, giving them direct access to Bangkok and creating a point of easy access for tourists loaded with dollars. The Laotians have remained unconvinced. ‘No, thanks. We don’t need a bridge,’ they have replied every time. ‘We want to carry on living our own way.’

Sadly, however, that way of life is on the wane. Not because the Lao have suddenly changed their minds, but because in our day a country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officials of the UN and half the world’s governments are passionate prophets of ‘development’ at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American general in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied village to the ground, said proudly: ‘We had to destroy it to save it.’

The same thing is happening to Laos: in order to save it from underdevelopment, the new missionaries of materialism and economic progress are destroying it. The hardest blow has been dealt by the Australians. With the kindest intentions, their government has built a fine big bridge over the Mekong River. It has cost the Laotians nothing – except their last virginity. With their innate suspicion of everything new and modern, they are already calling it ‘the Bridge of AIDS’.

At heart the Lao belong to the past, and it is only by the accident of being located in the middle of Indochina that they have been forced to live amidst the violence of the contemporary world. They have paid a very high price for it. To supply the Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam, the Hanoi Communists opened through the forests of Laos what became famous as ‘the Ho Chi Minh Trail’; and to close that path, between 1964 and 1973 the Americans ‘secretly’ dropped more bombs on Laos than fell on Germany and the whole of occupied Europe during the Second World War: two million tons of explosive.

Even now, in peacetime, Laos is prevented by its geographical position from living the life it desires. It is forced to become ‘modern’, to serve as a link between China and Thailand, a corridor between two powerful neighbours obsessed with the idea of progress.

Still, for the moment, one need only set foot in Laos to feel that there is something uniquely poetic in the air. The days are long and slow, and the people have a tranquil sweetness that is not found elsewhere in Indochina. The French, who well knew the peoples they ruled, used to say: ‘The Vietnamese plant rice, the Khmer stand there and watch, and the Laotians listen to it growing.’

I set foot in Laos for the first time in the spring of 1972. On a small balcony of the Hotel Constellation in Vientiane a blonde hippie girl was smoking a marijuana joint so strong you could smell it all the way up the stairs. Seeing me approach, she whispered to me, as if to confide a secret formula for understanding all things, ‘Remember, Laos is not a place; it is a state of mind.’

Indeed, I never forgot it, and twenty years later I wanted to see Laos again before it too became ‘a place’ – a place like all the others, lit by neon, full of plastic and cement. I found a journalistic excuse in two news items: one on the opening of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to tourism, the other on the construction of the great trans-Asian motorway from Singapore to Peking. The Laotian section, after the building of the Mekong bridge, was to run through the old royal capital, Luang Prabang, cutting in two one of the most peaceful and romantic places in Asia, one of the last refuges of the old charm of the Orient.

I found Luang Prabang as fascinating as I remembered it, huddled in its moist green valley, surrounded by peaks that seem painted by a Chinese brush, dominated by the hill of Wat Pusi from which the temples, built in artful disorder on the strip of land between the Mekong and the Nam Khan, shine with a seemingly eternal splendour.

At dawn I saw once more the moving spectacle of hundreds of monks as they issued from their monasteries and filed along the cobbled main street to receive offerings of food from the population kneeling on the pavements. Yes, that very street: the one destined to become part of the Asian superhighway. Fortunately, I learned, some old residents had found the courage to oppose the project, and the governor himself had pronounced in favour of an alternative route. Will Luang Prabang be saved, then? Not at all. Another plan, opposed by no one, will transform the present modest landing strip into a large airport capable of receiving jumbo jets full of tourists.

What an ugly invention is tourism! One of the most baleful of all industries! It has reduced the world to a vast playground, a Disneyland without borders. Soon thousands of these new invaders, soldiers of the empire of consumerism, will land, and with their insatiable cameras and camcorders they will scrape away the last of that natural magic which is still everywhere in this country.

In Asia, when an old man sees a camera pointed at him, he turns away and tries to hide himself, covering his face. He believes the camera will deprive him of something that is his, something precious which he will never recover. And is he not perhaps right? Is it not through the wear and tear of tens of thousands of snapshots taken by distracted tourists that our churches have lost their sanctity and our monuments their patina of greatness?

Tibet, to protect its spirituality, for centuries forbade anyone to cross its borders; that is how it preserved its very special aura. There it was the Chinese invasion that broke the spell; in the name of modernization, of course. One of the most disturbing bits of news I have read in recent years is that the Chinese, to facilitate (what else?) tourist access, have decided to ‘modernize’ the lighting of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace-temple, and have installed neon lights. This is no accident: neon kills everything, even the gods. And as they die, the Tibetan identity gradually dies with them.

The great Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, in a particularly moving passage about the disappearance of the old Japan that has been swept away by modernity, eulogizes the shadows that contributed so greatly to creating the atmosphere, and thereby the soul, of the traditional houses of wood and paper. The dim interior of the Potala served the same purpose: you had to penetrate the recesses of that extraordinary palace in penumbra, and only by degrees did you discern, by the flickering light of butter lamps, the grimaces of the ogres and the benign smiles of the Buddhas. Neon holds nothing back. It clips the wings of anyone who still yearns to let his spirit take flight.

At the beginning of this century Pierre Loti arrived with the trepidation of a pilgrim at Angkor, in Cambodia, on a cart pulled by black oxen, to ask hospitality of the monks who lived in the temples. Twenty years later Cook’s Travel Agency were organizing tours and dance shows by night amid the ruins, and selling centuries-old stones to tourists as souvenirs.

The man who in 1860 ‘discovered’ Angkor for humanity – and for tourists – paid for that conquest with his life. Few know that his grave is still there, east of Luang Prabang. I wanted to go and pay my respects to that adventurous scientist, whose story had always fascinated me. His name is Henri Mouhot. He was a French naturalist who travelled in Indochina when it had just become a colony. His plan was to go up the Mekong to China. Before setting out he had read an account written ten years earlier by a monk who had seen strange ruins in the jungle not far from the town of Siem Reap.

In a letter Mouhot tells how one day he was walking through the forest, humming La Traviata to keep himself company, when suddenly, amid thick foliage under gigantic trees, he felt himself observed by two…four…ten…a hundred stone eyes, all smiling at him. I have often tried to imagine what he felt at that moment, a moment that made his journey and his death worthwhile. After spending some time amid the ruins of Angkor, Mouhot resumed his walk northward. He passed through Luang Prabang, but while he was marching along the Nam Khan River, beyond the village of Naphao, he fell ill. On 19 October he wrote, ‘I am stricken by a fever.’ Then for some days there are no entries in his diary, till on the twenty-ninth we come to the last words, written in a shaky hand: ‘My Lord, have mercy on me.’ Mouhot died on 10 November 1861. He was thirty-five years old.

Going to visit him was a much simpler matter: it took half an hour by car from Luang Prabang towards Ban Noun, then about ten minutes on foot down an escarpment, and up an overgrown path. When I reached the grave I felt as if Mouhot were dying at that very moment. Nothing had changed. The river ran with the same quiet murmur, the forest whispered with the same thousand voices, and in the distance a solitary woman was walking with a wicker basket on her shoulders – a woman of today, but also a woman of then, over 130 years ago.

The grave is where Mouhot died, in a fold of the hillside about thirty yards above the bed of the Nam Khan, as if his companions had wished to make sure the current would not carry him away. There is a mound of cement, behind which a great tree stands guard. To the left, waving like a banner, is a tall, joyous tuft of green bamboo.

The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo was right, in his poem in praise of tombs. They are a great inspiration, and I have always felt attracted by these simple, touching traces of life left by Westerners as they travelled the world. How many hours I have spent in Asian cemeteries for the foreign dead – in Macao, Chiang Mai, Nagasaki, Yokohama – trying to feel my way into the lives of these people who died far from home, trying to retrace the stories locked within the few formal words carved in stone. Ships’ captains struck down by fever when barely in their twenties, young mothers who died in childbirth, sailors from one ship who succumbed in the space of a few days, obviously to a sudden epidemic. Sometimes an old man, mourned by children and grandchildren, whose life – so the epitaph says – was an example to many others. Adventurers, missionaries, traders: unknown names.

What is the strange fascination of tombs? Can it be that they really hold something more than bones? Perhaps with the memory of the dead there also remains some stamp of their presence. Perhaps the stone itself is imbued with their history. The grave of Mouhot, a silent, solitary presence, forgotten on the bank of the Nam Khan, truly seemed to speak. The mere fact of my going there had somehow given it life. Or was it that without the dimension of time, this past was always there, present for anyone willing to be moved, to be inspired?

I had chosen Laos as my last destination of 1992 because it was a place from which, if I decided not to fly, I knew I could easily return overland to Bangkok. From the first moment my visit was marked by curious new thoughts. The fact that in some way I had begun looking into the less usual side of experience made me notice all sorts of things that would have escaped me at other times. Suddenly, everything appeared to have a link with the other world; people whose acceptable social faces were all I normally saw now revealed a second nature, and moreover, one that was much more in tune with what interested me.

On my last day in Luang Prabang I took a boat up the Mekong to the caves of Tham Ting with their seven thousand Buddhas. During the war these famous caves in the steep mountainside high above the river had come under fire from the Pathet Lao, the Communist guerrillas who controlled the whole surrounding area, and I had never succeeded in getting there. By now many of the old statues had been stolen and sold to Bangkok antique dealers, but I wanted to go there nonetheless. Was my future not symbolically flowing down the Mekong towards me? I wanted to go and meet it.

In the main cave a group of Laotians were kneeling before a stone Buddha, enquiring about their future. I did the same. The process is simple. Slowly, with hands joined, you shake a boxful of little bamboo sticks until one of them falls to the ground. Each stick bears a number corresponding to a slip of paper with a message. Mine was eleven, and the message was:

Shoot your arrow at the giant Ku Pan. You will certainly kill him. Soon you will have no more enemies and your name will be known in every corner of the earth. Your people need you and you must continue to help them. If you go in for business you will lose every penny. You will have no illnesses. Travel is a very good thing for you.

I did not think much of this, but later, when I pulled the little scrap of paper out of my pocket during the Christmas dinner at the French embassy in Vientiane, it was like the spark that ignites a great blaze. Soon, around that very formal table served by silent waiters in livery, the talk was all about fortune-tellers, prophecies and magic. Everyone had a story, an experience to tell. Perhaps because we were dining by candlelight, in a great white house surrounded by bougainvillaea and orchids, nestling in a mysterious garden populated with old statues of explorers – or perhaps because Europe and its logic seemed further away than ever – it was as if my slip of paper had opened a Pandora’s box and this were an hour of unwonted confessions.

‘A fortune-teller really changed my life,’ said a beautiful, elegant woman of around forty, recently arrived from Paris, who sat opposite me. While still at university she had become pregnant by a fellow student, who had died immediately afterwards in a skiing accident. A common friend had stayed by her side, and a great love had developed between them. But one day this friend’s mother had been to a fortune-teller who had said, ‘Your son is about to become the father of a child which is not his, and he must absolutely not do it. It would ruin his life.’ When the mother told her son this he was so shocked that he called off the wedding. ‘And that,’ said a gentleman sitting to the right of the ambassador’s wife, ‘is how I became the father of that child.’

This sounded to me like a typical case: the mother had somehow got the fortune-teller to say what she herself could not say to her son, and thus, through the authority of the occult, obtained the result she wanted. But the other diners were rather impressed, and the woman herself was totally convinced of the fortune-teller’s powers. As for my fortune-teller in Hong Kong, everyone agreed that I must heed his warning and refrain from flying.