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

At dawn I left, by air, for the Plain of Jars, a strange valley amid the mountains of northern Laos, which is scattered with huge, mysterious stone vessels, some over seven feet high, all beautifully carved. But by whom? To hold what? Anthropologists say they were funerary urns of an ancient population of Chinese origin, now extinct, but the Laotians prefer to believe their legends. ‘They are amphoras for wine,’ they say. ‘The giants made them. At the top of the mountain there is an enormous stone table where, from time to time, the giants meet for their banquets.’ But no one had ever managed to reach it.

I spent three days in the region. The ripe opium poppies were beginning to shed their red, purple and white petals, and women were cutting open the bulbs to collect the precious sticky black juice in old bowls. The Muong, the mountain people, were celebrating their New Year. Young people were at their most popular sport: playing ball as a way of finding a mate. In each village rows of girls in traditional dress stand for hours on end opposite rows of boys and throw cloth balls back and forth while chanting an old ditty: ‘If you love me, throw better. If you want me, improve your looks.’

I was accompanied by a very special guide, Claude Vincent, a cultivated Frenchman of about fifty who had lived in Laos since he was a boy. He had married a Laotian woman, and remained in the country even after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. In the years of the war we had often met, but had never known each other well; for him I was one of the many journalist-vultures who descended on Laos, attracted by its dead. Now it was different, and Claude wanted to make me understand his love for a land to whose ancient, beautiful soul he is fervently attached.

I realized this when, tired after an afternoon exploring the Plain of Jars, we retired for the night to an inn without electricity or water. We talked about the Communists: wherever they went, in China as in Cambodia, the first thing they did was to abolish the popular traditions. They fought against superstition, eliminated fortune-tellers and banned the old ceremonies. I asked Claude how the Pathet Lao had behaved. In reply he told me about something that had happened to him a few years before.

It was a Sunday in 1985 in Vientiane, and Claude and his family planned to have a picnic on the bank of the Mekong. One of his nieces was very excited about the trip, but she went down with a high fever and they decided to leave her at home. She was terribly upset and insisted that she must, absolutely must go to the river. Not to take her was out of the question.

They found a place on the bank, the adults eating and the children playing by the water. Only when it was time to go did they realize that the little girl was no longer there. They searched for her everywhere, but she had vanished. In desperation they consulted a famous clairvoyante, who went into a trance and told them: ‘Next Friday, at 3.45 in the afternoon, go to the bend in the river. There, in front of the pagoda, you’ll find her. She will have blue marks on her body: one under her arm and one on her chest.’ The family went, and at the appointed hour the child’s body floated to the surface, bearing the blue marks described by the woman.

Claude told me that the clairvoyante had made contact with the Spirit of the River and asked it to yield up the child’s body in return for the sacrifice of seven chickens and a pig. The family’s problem was how to give the Spirit the promised reward. These were the hardest years of the Communist regime. There were informers in every neighbourhood, and Claude was afraid of getting into trouble if he organized the ceremony. He went to ask the advice of a high party official. The response surprised him. ‘You absolutely must make the sacrifice. You promised it to the Spirit of the River and you can’t break your word,’ he said, and reminded Claude that during the war every time the Pathet Lao crossed a river, the last man in the patrol had to turn back and call to a non-existent comrade. The Spirit of the River habitually carries off the last of a line, and in that way the guerrillas hoped to deceive it. ‘Today that practice has become a military order for all patrols crossing watercourses,’ said Claude in conclusion.

(#litres_trial_promo) The idea that in Laos even the Marxist-Leninists had remained above all Laotians, and in their own way outside time, was enormously pleasing.

The next day we travelled north by jeep. The area around the Plain of Jars was one of those most devastated by the American war. The old capital, Xianghuang, literally no longer exists: it was obliterated by carpet bombing from B-52S. The new settlement, Phongsovane, is so far only a sprawl of wooden shacks.

To escape the bombs, the people of the region lived for years in the caves. Now they are rebuilding the villages with whatever materials the war left behind. The shells of cluster bombs – giant eggs that burst in the air and released dozens of murderous little booby-traps – are used as fencing or animal feeding troughs; artillery shells serve as water containers.

‘How old are you?’ I asked a woman in the market at Phongsovane. She looked at me, perplexed. ‘When were you born?’ I persisted. ‘Before the war,’ she replied. Which of the many wars was unclear. In human memory Laos has always been at war.

Thirty miles from Phongsovane is a fork in the road: one road stretches eastward towards Vietnam and the port of Vinh, the other continues north towards the old guerrilla capital Sam Neua and the Chinese frontier. Alongside the latter, about six miles from the fork, is the cave of Tarn Piu. You can only gain access to it on foot, following the course of a little stream. An unexploded bomb is still lying in the middle of a meadow. The place is deserted.

Halfway up the steep cliff of whitish stone is a big, black, semicircular hole. The meadows are sweetly scented with fresh flowers, but the Laotians with us do not want to continue, because they can smell the odour of death. On we go, up an overgrown path, and venture inside this mouth in the mountainside. The walls are blackened by fire, with traces of phosphorus and pockmarks made by splinters of rock from a huge explosion that smashed the cave and brought great boulders crashing down. You walk amidst the debris – charred fragments of kitchen utensils, a sewing machine, the rags of the long-dead.

This was one of the famous caves where people lived during the war. Here, in the stone bowels of the mountain, the bombs of the B-52S could not penetrate. But in 1968 a T-28, a small plane used by the pro-American government forces, sighted the cave and scored a direct hit with a phosphorus rocket. The explosion within the stone walls was tremendous. Over four hundred people died. There were no survivors.

About thirty yards from the entrance the cave dipped, and only by the light of my pocket torch could I penetrate any further. Soon I realized I was walking on bones – some of them small, presumably children’s. In the absolute silence I imagined that I could hear, muffled as if by a veil, the cries of the dead. I thought of the participants’ different perspectives at that fatal moment: the pilot, tense and excited, aware of having scored a bull’s eye; the havoc below, the cries of the wounded as they crawl to the depths of the cave, never to come out of it again.

Of course it was because I felt so moved that I ‘sensed’ all this. But does not such a tragedy, or any other great sorrow, leave some sort of residue in the air and in the soil? What did the ancients mean by the spiritus loci, if not that something remains hovering in a place where something exceptional has happened?

On the way down the mountain we passed a group of children cutting wheels for one of their imaginary cars from the stump of a banana tree. ‘Have you been in that cave?’ I asked them. One and all, they drew back from me, as if in terror. ‘No!’ they cried. ‘You can’t go there! It’s scary, the phii are in there!’ The spirits, ghosts.

In the West, this would be called something like ‘the Cave of the Martyrs’, and annual ceremonies would be held in their memory. Their story would be taught in schools. For the Laotians history does not bear this kind of meaning. In that hole are not the remains of their relatives, but only ghosts that have saturated the walls with wailing, suffering, horror. From this they must simply keep away.

In their vision of the world the relation between cause and effect is not the same as in ours. Shortly before my visit, near the Plain of Jars, a group of American experts had spent some weeks looking for MIAs (Missing in Action), pilots of planes shot down during the war whose deaths had never been verified. They dug in the jungle, sifting the earth to retrieve the least splinter of bone, and spent their evenings in Phongsovane. The Laotians did not show the least hostility towards them. Nobody even tried to show them one of the many children who even today are born deformed because of the chemicals released there by the Americans a quarter of a century ago.

The wife of the photographer of Phonsovane held one of these in her arms – a three-year-old child with a large square head and stubby hands with the fingers all stuck together. ‘Karma,’ she said, Buddhistically attributing the horror of that child to some sin committed in his previous life.

To go from Xianhuang to Pakse’ in southern Laos I had to take another plane: the usual bouncing Chinese-made Y-21 with a pilot, a co-pilot, seventeen seats and a baggage compartment where the only toilet was. When I boarded the plane it was crammed full of mysterious floppy blue plastic sacks: they were in the aisle, on the empty seats, stacked to the ceiling in the baggage-toilet, piled against the emergency exit. I tried to lift one: very heavy. They were full of meat – pork and beef. In Vientiane meat costs twice as much as in the Plain of Jars, and thus it was that the pilots supplemented their meagre socialist wages. I remembered how, a few weeks earlier, in an airfield in the north, a Russian Antonov, just back from an engine overhaul, had been unable to take off and had caught fire. All the passengers had saved themselves by climbing out in time.

I wondered how anyone could get out of this plane, as every escape route was blocked by those heaps of flaccid bundles. I disliked the thought that if disaster struck, my flesh would be mixed with the meat in the sacks and nobody would be able to tell who had been who. But then I thought with relief of the Americans. I had heard that in the labs in Hawaii where they send what they find in their search for the MIAs, the Americans can determine whether a bone fragment belonged to one of their soldiers or not.

The sky grew dense and grey, and we threaded through heavy rainclouds and flashes of lightning among the steep, dark green mountains. The landscape had an extraordinary primitive beauty, but I could not enjoy it. Between one bounce and another I vowed that if this plane ever landed in Savannaket, where it was due for a stop-over, I would get off and continue my journey by boat. And so I did.

The Mekong was flat and undramatic, its opaque surface broken now and then by great bubbles of mud. We glided slowly between the two banks that summed up the contradiction I would have liked to resolve: on the left the Laotian shore with villages shaded by coconut palms, dinghies moored below rough bamboo ladders, oil lamps gleaming softly in the silence of evening; on the right, the Thai shore with neon lights, canned music and the distant rumble of motors. On one side the past, from which everyone wants to tear the Laotians away, on the other the future towards which all and sundry believe they must rush headlong. On which shore lies happiness?

On 31 December I was in the forest of Bolovens, on a high plateau three thousand feet above sea level, with the Mekong to the west, the Annamite range to the east, and the Khmer plain to the south. This was the most heavily bombed region in the history of the world, because it was the assembly point for all the supplies coming from Hanoi along the Ho Chi Minh Trail before they were redirected, either towards Cambodia in the direction of Saigon or towards central Vietnam. Not one building has remained standing from the colonial period, not one pagoda, not one village. Everything was demolished in the relentless earthquake of American bombs. Nature itself has been obliterated: the forest has become a scrubland, and even today you seldom hear a bird’s call. Only here and there on the fertile red earth have some Japanese and Thai companies begun to revive the famous coffee plantations.

I stayed in a wooden hut built over a waterfall. The roar of the water was deafening, and I spent New Year’s Eve pleasantly awake, imagining the strange 1993 that had reached its birth-hour. An omelette of red ants’ eggs seemed perfectly suited to marking the occasion. By the time the hands of my watch casually swung past midnight, the decision not to fly had turned into an obvious one. With that slow, ancient descent by boat along the Mekong my days had already acquired a new rhythm. And yet I felt as if I were doing something bold, almost illicit. After a lifetime of sensible decisions, I now allowed myself a choice based on the most irrational of considerations. The limitation I was imposing on myself made no sense at all.

On the morning of 1 January 1993, to give my decision a symbolic flourish, I took my first steps of the new year on the back of an elephant. The route to Pakse’ crossed a valley which long ago had been the crater of a volcano. The grass was tall and very green, punctuated here and there by brilliant silvery plumes of the lulan that barely stirred in the wind.

The elephant basket was shaky and uncomfortable, but its height gave me a perfect opportunity to enjoy the world from a different perspective.

CHAPTER FOUR The Body-Snatchers of Bangkok (#ulink_ed54f2ec-2aed-5815-b0e5-4ed37bba3df5)

The car waiting for me in Takeck, on the Thai frontier post opposite Pakse’, was like a time machine. It picked me up at the edge of ancient Laos, remote and still virginal, and in a few hours brought me back to the vulgar modernity of Bangkok – dirty, chaotic, stinking, where the water is polluted and the air lead-poisoned, where one person in five has no proper home, one in sixty, including newborns, is HIV positive, one woman in thirty works as a prostitute, and someone commits suicide every hour.

They call it ‘the City of Angels’, and perhaps it was once. The houses were built on piles, the streets were canals and the people went about by boat. The few streets on terra firma were lined with tall trees whose branches made tunnels of cool shade over the little traffic there was. The gilded spires of the pagodas soared above the houses and the palaces, even that of the king, who at the beginning of the century had called in an Italian architect to build him a throne hall.

Bangkok has never been a beautiful city, but it used to have charm; it was exotic. Sometimes the tropical heat was suffocating, but often a light breeze wafted in from the sea and up the Chao Paya River to blow unobstructed over the houses.

Among the flesh-and-blood human beings involved in the countless wheeler-dealings of a city that has long been known for its luxurious vices and its unsolved mysteries lived many other beings: invisible ones, born of the imagination, of the people’s love and fear. Like the other peoples of the region, the Thais call these beings phii, spirits.

To propitiate the phii and keep them quiet so they would not bother ordinary mortals, shrines were erected in their honour in every corner of the city, in every street, in front of every house. The people were assiduous in leaving them food, little wooden elephants, plaster figurines of dancing girls, a glass of alcohol, cakes, sweet-scented garlands of jasmine.

Whenever they laid the foundations of a new house or dug a well, they immediately built a little altar to the Earth Spirit to apologize for the disturbance caused, and begged its protection in times to come. These apologies and prayers were regularly renewed with fresh offerings. If the felling of a tree proved unavoidable, its phii ceremoniously received a request for the use of a saw against it.

The phii of the plot of land where the old Erawan Hotel was built was so happy with the way it had been treated that it took to performing miracles, and today its temple is still one of the most frequented and most popular in Bangkok. One of its specialities is to aid the conception of male offspring, and thousands of sterile women have come to it with all sorts of offerings; some dance around it semi-nude at night.

In the course of the past ten years Bangkok has been overwhelmed by the craving for modernity, and gigantic building works have turned the entire city upside down: the canals have been covered over and transformed into asphalted roads; magnificent century-old trees have been felled; entire streets of old houses have been swept away by bulldozers, and dozens of skyscrapers, with their deep-set steel and cement foundations, have been erected in their place. The earth has been opened, turned over, drilled, pulverized, and although here and there someone has taken the trouble to apologize to the phii, the disturbance has been so tremendous that many of them are very angry. The city is now swarming with these invisible presences, which take their revenge by driving people mad and causing frightful disasters. At least, that is what the old residents of Bangkok believe.

In September 1990, barely a week after we had arrived in Bangkok, a tanker full of liquid gas overturned right in the middle of the city, not far from where we lived. A cloud of death enveloped dozens of cars and houses, a spark set off an explosion, and more than a hundred people were burnt to a cinder.

A few months later, in the early afternoon, we heard a deafening roar and saw a dense, black cloud rise sky-high in the port district. A chemical depot had exploded, killing dozens of people. It is still not known what chemical products were involved, but since then more than two thousand people who found themselves in that pestilent cloud have suffered from inexplicable skin diseases and difficulty in breathing. Many children have been born deformed.

Disasters came one after another. One of the most dramatic was a fire in a doll factory where 190 girl workers were burned alive. To prevent the possibility of theft the management had padlocked every exit, and the girls were trapped.

Bangkok now lives under a malign spell, a city bewitched by the evil eye. People say it is too built up, that from the weight of all the skyscrapers it is sinking several inches every year, and will soon be swallowed up by the sea. Already it is hotter, because the cool coastal breeze of past years is blocked by new buildings. And there is a water shortage. But what is it that most worries the politicians and the leader writers of the local papers? That the poor have nothing to drink? No. Rather that the ‘massage parlours’ – as brothels in Thailand are coyly termed – lack sufficient water to wash the private parts of their numerous customers.

For every disaster there is an immediate, obvious, rational explanation: gas explodes because the safety regulations are not observed; factories are firetraps because instead of paying for proper fireproofing the bosses prefer to pay bribes to the officials who are supposed to check that the laws are obeyed. And yet it is the phii explanation that rings truest, because it sums up the essence of what is happening not only in Bangkok but in many other parts of the world: nature is taking revenge on those who fail to respect her, and who, out of pure greed, destroy every kind of harmony.

In Bangkok, we moved into the most beautiful and enchanted house we have ever lived in, an oasis of old Siam amid the horror of so much cement. Yet it had no altar in which to house the spirit of the place.

‘Here the spirit is very much alive, and you really must feed it every day,’ we were told by the American writer Bill Warren, the previous tenant. The ‘spirit’ was an enormous meat-eating turtle, almost three feet across, that lived in the pond on which the house is built.

I was happy: the house was on water, as the Hong Kong fortune-teller had recommended, and the turtle, for one like me who has lived so long among the Chinese, is the symbolic quintessence of a positive force. Legend has it that a turtle can live for centuries, which is why the Chinese have always erected steles bearing imperial edicts on the backs of great stone or marble turtles. And in the Chinese tradition the turtle has another great merit: it is the symbol of the cosmos. The lower part of the shell is a square, the earth; the upper part is a sphere, the heavens. The turtle has always been used in divination because, enclosing this totality, it holds the key to time and space, and thus can understand the past and read the future.

Our turtle was another victim of progress. It had lived for heaven knows how many years in the city’s canal system; then, when the canals were cemented over, and the water that formerly ran past and under the house became a stagnant pond, it remained there, trapped.

On our arrival the turtle decided to hide, and even though we rebaptized the place ‘Turtle House’ in its honour, it continued to make itself scarce. We knew it was around somewhere, because now and then one of our ducklings would disappear, but it did not seem to feel at ease with us. Similarly the people who worked at Turtle House; they began complaining of one ailment after another: the gardener coughed non-stop, the cook could not stand on her feet, and my secretary had a constant headache. Some of their relatives had road accidents; two died. Clearly our arrival had thrown the order of things out of kilter, and we had to find a way to restore harmony.

Some Thai friends suggested that Angela and I should present ourselves to the Emerald Buddha, the phii of all the phii of Bangkok, and announce to him that we had arrived in Thailand and would like to stay there for a few years; others advised us to have Turtle House exorcized to rid it of all possible negative influences.

We did not think twice: one morning we went to Wat Prakeo, the big temple on the river in front of the Royal Palace, to prostrate ourselves before the famous statue of Buddha; and on 9 April, Angela’s birthday, we had nine monks come to the house. In their hands they held a very long white thread with which one of them encircled the house and the pond, then they sang some beautiful litanies, sprinkled holy water over everyone and everything, and ate before noon, as is required of them, the vegetarian food we had prepared.

After that, and after a swarm of wild bees had come and built an enormous honeycomb on a tree in the garden – a symbol of great good luck for the house – all troubles ceased.