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

For Angela, always

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE A Blessed Curse

CHAPTER TWO A Death that Failed

CHAPTER THREE On Which Shore Lies Happiness?

CHAPTER FOUR The Body-Snatchers of Bangkok

CHAPTER FIVE Farewell, Burma

CHAPTER SIX Widows and Broken Pots

CHAPTER SEVEN Dreams of a Monk

CHAPTER EIGHT Against AIDS? Raw Garlic and Red Peppers

CHAPTER NINE The Rainbow Gone Mad

CHAPTER TEN Sores Under the Veil

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Murmurs of Malacca

CHAPTER TWELVE An Air-Conditioned Island

CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Voice from Two Thousand Years Ago

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Never Against the Sun

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Missionary and the Magician

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Hurray for Ships!

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Nagarose

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Buddha’s Eyelash

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Destiny of Dogs

CHAPTER TWENTY A Ship in the Desert

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE With my Friend the Ghost

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Peddlers of the Trans-Siberian Railway

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Better than Working in a Bank

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Rhymeless Astrologer

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TV for the Headhunters

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX New Year’s Eve with the Devil

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Spy who Meditates

EPILOGUE And Now What?

Index

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE A Blessed Curse

Life is full of opportunities. The problem is to recognize them when they present themselves, and that isn’t always easy. Mine, for instance, had all the marks of a curse: ‘Beware! You run a grave risk of dying in 1993 – You mustn’t fly that year. Don’t fly, not even once,’ a fortune-teller told me.

It happened in Hong Kong. I had come across that old Chinese man by sheer chance. When I heard his dire words I was momentarily taken aback, but not deeply disturbed. It was the spring of 1976, and 1993 seemed a long way off. I did not forget the date, however; it lingered at the back of my mind, rather like an appointment one hasn’t yet decided whether to keep or not.

1977…1987…1990…1991. Sixteen years seem an eternity, especially when viewed from the perspective of Day One. But, like all our years (except those of adolescence), they passed very quickly, and in no time at all I found myself at the end of 1992. Well, then, what was I to do? Take that old Chinese man’s warning seriously and reorganize my life? Or pretend it had never happened and carry on regardless, telling myself, ‘To hell with fortune-tellers and all their rubbish’?

By that time I had been living in Asia solidly for over twenty years – first in Singapore, then in Hong Kong, Peking, Tokyo, and finally in Bangkok – and I felt that the best way of confronting the prophecy was the Asian one: not to fight against it, but to submit.

‘You believe in it, then?’ teased my fellow-journalists – especially the Western ones, the sort of people who are used to demanding a clear-cut yes or no to every question, even to such an ill-framed one as this. But we do not have to believe the weather forecast to carry an umbrella on a cloudy day. Rain is a possibility, the umbrella a precaution. Why tempt fate if fate itself gives you a sign, a hint? When the roulette ball lands on the black three or four times in a row, some gamblers count on statistical probability and bet all their money on the red. Not me: I bet on the black again. Has the ball itself not winked at me?

And then, the idea of not flying for a whole year was an attraction in itself. A challenge, first and foremost. It really tickled me to pretend an old Chinese in Hong Kong might hold the key to my future. It felt like taking the first step into an unknown world. I was curious to see where more steps in the same direction would lead. If nothing else, they would introduce me, for a while, to a different life from the one I normally led.

For years I have travelled by plane, my profession taking me to the craziest places on earth, places where wars are being waged, where revolutions break out or terrible disasters occur. Obviously I had held my breath on more than one occasion – landing with an engine in flames, or with a mechanic squeezed in a trapdoor between the seats, hammering away at the undercarriage that was refusing to descend.

If I had dismissed the prophecy and carried on flying in 1993, I would certainly have done so with more than the usual pinch of anxiety that sooner or later strikes all those – including pilots – who spend much of their lives in the air; but I would have carried on with my normal routine: planes, taxis, hotels, taxis, planes. That divine warning (yes: ‘divination’, ‘divine’, so alike!) gave me a chance – in a way obliged me – to inject a variant into my days.

The prophecy was a pretext. The truth is that at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one’s life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock’s tick can tell us. This was my chance, and I could not let it slip.

But there was a practical problem. Should I stop working for a year? Take leave of absence? Or carry on working despite this limitation? Journalism, like many other professions, is now dominated by electronics. Computers, modems, fax play a paramount role. Snappy, instantaneous television images transmitted by satellite have set new standards, and print journalism, rather than concentrating on reflection and the personal, limps after them in the effort to match the invincible immediacy (and with it the superficiality) of TV.

During the days of the Tiananmen massacre, CNN was broadcasting live from the square in the centre of Peking, and many of my colleagues preferred to stay in their hotel rooms and watch television rather than go out and see what was happening a few hundred yards away. That was the quickest way of keeping up to date, of following events. Moreover, their editors were seeing – thousands of miles away – the same images on their screens; and those images became the truth, the only truth. No need to look for another.

How would my editors react to the idea of having an Asia correspondent who, on a whim, took into his head not to fly for a whole year? What would they think of a man who in 1993 suddenly became a journalist from the beginning of the twentieth century, one of those who would set off at the outbreak of a war and would often arrive when it was already over?

My chance to find out came in October 1992, when one of the two editors-in-chief of Der Spiegel passed through Bangkok. One evening after dinner, without much beating about the bush, I told him the story of the Hong Kong fortune-teller and announced my intention of not travelling by plane in 1993.

‘After what you’ve told me, how can I ask you to fly to Manila and cover the next coup d’etat, or to Bangladesh for the next typhoon? Do as you think best,’ was his reply. Magnificent as usual, my faraway masters! They saw that this caprice of mine might give rise to a different kind of story, one that might offer the reader something the others lacked.

Der Spiegel’s reaction obviously took a load off my mind, but still I did not finally commit myself to the plan. The prophecy would take effect at the beginning of the new year, and I intended to make my decision at the very last moment, the stroke of midnight on 31 December, wherever I might find myself.

Well, I was in the Laotian forest. My celebratory feast was an omelette of red ants’ eggs. There was no champagne to see the New Year in; instead I raised a glass of fresh water, and solemnly resolved not to yield for any reason, at any cost, to the temptation of flying. I would travel the world by any possible means as long as it was not a plane, a helicopter or a glider.

It was an excellent decision, and 1993 turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn. What looked like a curse proved to be a blessing. Moving between Asia and Europe by train, by ship, by car, sometimes even on foot, the rhythm of my days changed completely. Distances became real again, and I reacquired the taste of discovery and adventure.

Suddenly, no longer able to rush off to an airport, pay by credit card and be swept off in a flash to literally anywhere, I was obliged once again to see the world as a complex network of countries divided by rivers and seas that required crossing and by frontiers that invariably spelt ‘visa’ – a special visa, what is more, saying ‘surface travel’, as if this were so unusual as to cast suspicion on anyone who insisted on it. Getting from place to place was no longer a matter of hours, but of days or weeks. I had to avoid making mistakes, so before starting out I pored over maps. No longer were mountains beautiful, irrelevant frills seen from a porthole, but potential obstacles on my way.

Covering great distances by train or boat restored my sense of the earth’s immensity. And above all it led me to rediscover the majority of humanity whose very existence we well-nigh forget by dint of flying: the humanity that moves about burdened with bundles and children while the world of the aeroplane passes in every sense over their heads.

My undertaking not to fly turned into a game full of surprises. If you pretend to be blind for a while, you find that the other senses grow sharper to compensate for the lack of sight. Avoiding planes has a similar effect: the train journey, with its ample time and cramped space, re-animates an atrophied curiosity about details. You give keener attention to what lies around you, to what hurtles past the window. In a plane you soon learn not to look, not to listen: the people you meet, the conversations you have, are always the same. After thirty years of flying I can recall precisely no one. On trains, on Asian ones at least, things are different: you share your days, your meals and your boredom with people you would otherwise never meet, and some of them remain unforgettable.

As soon as you decide to do without planes, you realize how they impose their limited way of looking at things on you. Oh, they diminish distances, which is handy enough, but they end up diminishing everything, including your understanding of the world. You leave Rome at sunset, have dinner, sleep a while, and at dawn you are in India. But in reality each country has its own special character. We need time if we are to prepare ourselves for the encounter; we must make an effort if we are to enjoy the conquest. Everything has become so easy that we no longer take pleasure in anything. To understand is a joy, but only if it comes with effort, and nowhere is this more true than in the experience of other countries. Reading a guidebook while hopping from one airport to another is not the same as the slow, laborious absorption – as if by osmosis – of the humours of the earth to which one remains bound when travelling by train.

Reached by plane, all places become alike – destinations separated from one another by nothing more than a few hours’ flight. Frontiers, created by nature and history and rooted in the consciousness of the people who live within them, lose their meaning and cease to exist for those who travel to and from the air-conditioned bubbles of airports, where the border is a policeman in front of a computer screen, where the first encounter with the new place is the baggage carousel, where the emotion of leave-taking is dissipated in the rush to get to the duty-free shop – now the same everywhere.

Ships approach countries by slowly and politely entering the mouths of their rivers; and distant ports become long-awaited goals, each with its own face, each with its own smell. What used to be called airfields were once a little like that. No more. Nowadays airports have the false allure of advertisements – islands of relative perfection even amid the wreckage of the countries in which they are situated. They all look alike, all speak the same international language, that makes you feel you have come home. But in fact you have only landed at the outskirts of a city, from which you must leave again by bus or taxi for a centre which is always far away. A railway station, on the other hand, is a true mirror of the city in whose heart it lies. Stations are close to the cathedrals, mosques, pagodas or mausoleums. On reaching them you have well and truly arrived.

Despite the limitation of not flying, I did not stop doing my job, and I always managed to arrive in time where I needed to be: for the first democratic elections in Cambodia, for the opening of the first line of communication – by land! – between Thailand and China via Burma.

And that summer I did not forgo my annual visit to my mother in Italy. I travelled the historic route by train from Bangkok to Florence: over thirteen thousand miles, passing through Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Siberia and so on – a journey which in itself was not exceptional in the slightest, only that nobody had done it for a long time. It took a month, accompanied by the clickety-clack of the wheels and the varied whistles of different countries’ locomotives, to cross what still looks on the map like a small fraction of the earth.

I returned to the East from La Spezia, this time with my wife Angela, in a battered ship of the Lloyd Triestino line, by the great classical route through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. We were the only two passengers on board. The rest was a cargo of two thousand containers and a very Italian crew of eighteen men.

If I had not invented the excuse of the fortune-teller, I would have done nothing of all this, and 1993 would have been a year like so many others, without one of the events that signal the passage of time.

How many great stories can there be in the life of a journalist? One or two, if he is lucky. I have already had my share of such luck: I was in Saigon in the spring of 1975 when the Communists arrived and ended the Vietnam war, which for my generation was what the Spanish Civil War had been for the generation of Hemingway and Orwell; and in the summer of 1991 I was in the bowels of the USSR when the Soviet empire fell to pieces and Communism died. Perhaps one day, if I am really lucky, I may have a chance to witness another great event, but until then I have to sharpen my curiosity on things that are less obvious, less striking.

With the decision not to fly I also took another, a logical extension of the game. I decided that wherever I might go that year I would seek out the most eminent local fortune-teller, the most powerful sorcerer, the most revered oracle or seer or visionary or madman of the place, ask him to look into my future, and try to learn something of my fate.

They came in all shapes and sizes. Every meeting was a new adventure, and along the way I collected dozens of warnings and much wise advice about how to live, as well as oils, amulets, pills, powders and prescriptions guaranteed to protect me from various dangers. I carried them all with me, and at the end of the year I was weighed down with gadgets, little bottles and paper packets. The power of each was linked with some taboo that had to be observed on my part: in every system, religious or otherwise, the dispensation of a benefit is always indissolubly connected with some effort to be made, some merit to be gained. An excellent principle, I believe, though in practice I was forced to limit my performance of these ‘duties’.

If I had obeyed all the warnings and prohibitions, my life would have been much more complicated than I had already made it by renouncing flight. On an Indonesian island I met a bomoh, an expert in black magic, who told me I must never, never, piss against the sun. Another said not to piss against the moon. In Singapore a shaman, a woman who spoke in rhyme in ancient Chinese, counselled me never again to eat dog or snake. Another seer told me never to eat beef, another to remain strictly vegetarian for the rest of my life. An old lama in Ulan Bator read my whole destiny in the cracks in a sheep’s shoulderblade burnt in a slow fire of dried cow-dung, and then handed me a little packet of dried, perfumed grasses from the Mongolian plain, to be used like smelling-salts in the event of danger. A Buddhist monk outside Phnom Penh splashed me, fully dressed as I was, with the same water he used to treat local epileptics.

Many of the fortune-tellers were just colourful characters, at times out-and-out charlatans just trying to make a living. Some, however, were truly remarkable, with a rare understanding of the human condition, an unusual psychic gift that enabled them to read other people’s minds or to see ‘scars’ undetectable by the normal eye. Some left me wondering if indeed they had an extra sense. Is it possible? Is it possible that over the millennia man has lost through disuse certain capacities which were once natural to him, and which survive today in only a few individuals?

The history of the world is full of prophecies and portents, but we tend to feel, especially in the West, that all this belongs to the past. In Asia, however, the occult is still invoked to explain current events at least as often as economics or, until recently, ideology. In China, in India, in Indonesia, what we call superstition is still very much part of everyday life. Astrology, chiromancy, the art of reading the future in a person’s face or the soles of his feet or the tea leaves in his cup, play a very substantial role in the life of the people and in public affairs, as do the practices of healers, shamans and the masters of feng-shui, the cosmic geometry. The name to give a child, the purchase of a field, the sale of a portfolio of shares, the repair of a roof, the date of a departure or a declaration of war, are governed by criteria that have nothing to do with our logic. Those criteria determine how millions of marriages are arranged, how thousands of buildings are planned and constructed. Political decisions which affect whole populations are based on the advice of individuals expert in consulting the occult.

People have always searched for the meaning of life, trying to comprehend its mystery and find a key to the future, and to influence their fate. Chinese, as a written language, was born not as a means of communication between men, but as a way of consulting the gods. ‘Should I make war on the neighbouring state or not?’ ‘Will I win the battle or not?’ A king wrote these questions on a flat bone which was then pierced with a red-hot needle. The divine answer appeared in the cracks caused by the heat – one had to know how to read them. Those bones, with those ideograms of 3500 years ago, are the first known Chinese ‘manuscripts’.

Today the Chinese, especially those in the South-East Asian diaspora, still constantly interrogate their gods, for example by tossing up two pieces of wood shaped like large beans in order to receive counsel from heaven. If both pieces fall face up, the answer is yes, face down means no, one up and one down means try again.

The old fortune-teller’s prophecy offered me a chance to learn about the different ways in which people seek this kind of advice, to explore new paths of knowledge, to look into the mysterious world of intuition and suggestion that so often beckons to us but is seldom taken seriously. My study of superstition was also a response to a changing Asia: I wanted to see what remained of that ‘mysterious East’ which has for centuries attracted so many Westerners. The newspapers say Asia is going through a period of boom, that the next century will be Asia’s. This excites the bankers and financiers who see the world through the graphics on their highly sophisticated computers. But in reality Asia is not only a continent experiencing joyous economic growth: it is also killing itself by pursuing a model of development which it has not itself chosen, a model imposed upon it by the logic of profit which today seems inexorably to dominate all human behaviour.

Ancient cities are being bulldozed to make room for anonymous ‘modern’ developments; a whole popular culture is being pushed aside by the irresistible force of new models from abroad, spreading by satellite to the remotest hut in the Burmese jungle or on the Mongolian plain. A fearful wave of materialism is engulfing everything and everyone. Yet even among the young in Asia, as a reaction against this tendency and the immense disorientation it has produced, there is a revival of interest in the old beliefs, in the occult, in phenomena that have their roots in tradition.

Perhaps this is happening all over the world. Now that social groups are becoming increasingly fragmented and the natural world is ever more receding from people’s daily lives, now that all problems are supposed to be solved by science alone, now that death is no longer lived chorally as it still was when I was a boy, but has become a taboo more and more excluded from life, people are more perplexed than ever about their destiny, and look for solace, understanding, friendship and hope wherever they can find it. That is why the East, with its aura of exoticism, has again become a source of inspiration for many young Western people, who look to Eastern religions and practices for the answers they no longer seem to find in schools or churches at home. More than the great philosophers of the homegrown variety, Oriental mysticism, Buddhism and Asian gurus seem to be able to help those who want to escape the prison of consumerism, the bombardments of advertising, the dictatorship of television. Western youth, coming from a super-organized world, where everything is guaranteed, where even their desires seem dictated by an interest which is not their own, is more and more interested in exploring Oriental paths of spirituality.

On various occasions while travelling in Asia I have seen European figures cloaked in the orange or purple robes of Buddhist monks, but I had never taken much interest in their stories. This year I had a reason to stop and listen; and thus I met, for example, a former journalist, like me a Florentine, who had taken the vows of a Tibetan monk, and a young Dutch poet who had chosen an austere life of meditation in a temple south of Bangkok. Both, in different ways, were victims of the disorientation of our time. It is certainly because of this disorientation that in European telephone directories the pages listing chiromancers, astrologers and seers are growing thicker and thicker. Their clientele is no longer limited to credulous ladies, to the gullible, the lonely or the ignorant; this was another discovery I made. In the course of the year I realized that my curiosity about this twilight world was shared by a huge number of people; people you would never suspect, people who would open up and tell their stories only when I admitted that I meant to take my prophecy seriously. It may be a platitude, but the problem of destiny, of good or evil fate and how to deal with it, sooner or later arises in everyone’s mind.