A Fortune-Teller Told Me Read online

  Today the Chinese, especially those in the Southeast 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 faceup, the answer is yes, facedown 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 behavior.

  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 superorganized 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 traveling 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.

  The pages that follow are the story of this strange journey, of my year with my feet on the ground … or should I say less than ever on the ground? That would be nearer the mark, for never have I flown without wings as I did in those thirteen months. A year of thirteen months? Yes, but that will be the easiest of my explanations.

  The conclusion? “I never go to fortune-tellers. I like to be surprised by life,” was the sibylline reply of an elderly lady in Bangkok when I asked her how many times a month she consulted them.

  In my case the surprises came precisely because I did go to a fortune-teller. His prophecy lent me a sort of third eye with which I saw things, people and places I would not otherwise have seen. It gave me an unforgettable year, which I began by sitting in a basket on an elephant’s back in Laos and ended by sitting on a meditation cushion in a Buddhist retreat run by an ex-CIA agent.

  His prophecy also—saved me from an air crash. On March 20, 1993 a UN helicopter in Cambodia went down, with fifteen journalists on board. Among them was the German colleague who had taken my place.

  2/A DEATH THAT FAILED

  The occult and I had always had a cold and distant relationship. The reasons, as for so many other things, are rooted in my childhood. In fact the estrangement began very early.

  They placed a small photograph of a soldier at the bottom of a bowl of water, then covered my head with a big towel and made me sit there in the dark, bent over the bowl, with my eyes fixed on the quivering half-length image under the water. All around me the women sat silently, waiting.

  It was my grandmother’s idea. She said an innocent soul had to be used, and apparently I fitted the bill. The séance took place in 1943 at our home in Monticelli, a working-class quarter of Florence. We had a neighbor called Palmira whose son had disappeared that winter in Russia during the retreat, and I was to discover if he was alive or dead, and try to see what he was doing at that moment.

  I would have been glad to say I saw him eating at a table in a wooden hut with snow all around, but all I could make out was that sober, unsmiling face that fluttered with my every breath. The little black-and-white photo reminded me of others that I had seen on marble crosses in the Soffiano cemetery, but I didn’t want to say that. The episode is one of the clearest images I retain from my childhood, and I well remember the disappointment when they took the towel off my head and poured the water away. Palmira retrieved her photo and dried it with a handkerchief. One of the women said that if the attempt had failed it might be because I had somehow lost my innocence—unlikely, as I was barely five years old at the time. But then, who knows? Perhaps it had succeeded after all: Palmira’s son never did return from Russia.

  Since that first experience, in the course of my life I have had no more than a normal, skeptical curiosity about the uncertain world beyond appearances; and instinctively I have always found some rational way to explain inexplicable things that sometimes took place before my eyes. Later, when I had children, I had more and more need of such explanations, because children constantly demand to “understand.”

  Once in Delhi, where I had brought the family to celebrate my fortieth birthday (being keen to plant a symbolic seed in India, and thereby announce, formally, my intention of going to live there one day), an old Sikh came up to Saskia and Folco. They were eight and nine years old at the time. “If you like,” he said, “I’ll guess your grandfather’s name.” Incredulous, they handed him a few rupees, whereupon he asked them several questions and, to their amazement, wrote the letter G on a piece of paper: my father’s initial, his name being Gerardo. I was hard put to convince them that behind this, like so many other Indian “miracles,” from people buried alive to ropes standing on end, there must be a trick: they had probably suggested the letter somehow in their answers to his questions. But no! They were certain that at the very least the man had read their minds. Then a couple of years later, while we were on holiday in Thailand, we were all witnesses to an event where there was no question of a trick.

  We were staying on the island of Ph
i Phi with Seni, a Thai journalist who was an old friend of ours, and his girlfriend Yin. Phi Phi was a tropical paradise with blue sea, white sand, and huts of bamboo and straw, until it too was invaded by electricity, fax machines and concrete hotels with swimming pools. We were about to get into a boat to go and see the great, mysterious caves where for centuries the local people have gathered one of the foods most prized by the Chinese, swallows’ nests. Suddenly Yin realized that she had left her camera in their hut. “Wait,” she said, “I’ll telephone Seni.” Telephone? There was no such thing on the island! Yin moved away, her head in her hands and her eyes closed, as if she were making a great effort of concentration. A few seconds later, Seni appeared in the far distance, like a little black dot running across the white sand. “The camera! Yin, you forgot the camera!” Coincidence? Of course it was. No shadow of doubt crossed my mind.

  Folco, on the other hand, was highly excited. The boat, the sea, the mysterious caves with towering bamboo poles which the local boys climbed to collect the precious nests, no longer interested him now that there was the possibility—for him proven—of telepathic communication. He spent the day “doing exercises,” and in the evening, before dinner, he told us he would direct his thoughts to his mother, who had had to go to Florence. “What’s she doing at this moment?” Saskia asked him. “Sleeping,” he said. “I see her sleeping, with a blue light all around her.” In Italy it was then early afternoon, there is no blue light in our house, and his mother never sleeps after lunch.

  A week later, however, Angela came back from Florence and told us that on that particular day she had gone to Il Contadino, our country retreat in a village called Orsigna in the Tuscan Apennines. For once, right after lunch, she had taken a short nap in the children’s room, the one with blue curtains. A paranormal son? More likely just a successful game.

  Like everyone else, I had heard and read about prophecies that had come true, about people who could do incredible things—fly, levitate, see into the past or the future—but I had never given them much weight. If even one of them were true, I asked myself, how could we go on living normally? If fate is written in our palms, or in the stars, how can we go on catching buses, turning up at the office and paying the electricity bills? Should we not chuck the life we lead and devote ourselves utterly to the study of these phenomena? But people go about their business, trains run, the post arrives, newspapers appear daily. I told myself that the paranormal world is the invention of a few, that it is the product of the distorted imagination, an expression, like others, of man’s need to believe in something beyond appearances; I need not bother about it. Thus for years I had lived in Asia without paying much attention to the occult side of things. I had visited temples and anchorites, I had heard all sorts of stories, but I had never allowed myself to be too impressed. Then, too, whenever I had occasion to check on one of those odd stories I always found something that seemed not to fit. Reality never quite squared with what I had been told.

  In all my years in Asia I had never had my horoscope cast or consulted any of the numerous fortune-tellers, for whom I had always felt an instinctive distaste. When I was a boy, just after the war, Gypsies would often stop at our house and ask to read my mother’s palm. She would refuse and bolt the door, saying they were all thieves who would hypnotize us and carry off the little we had. Her outbursts obviously had an effect on me.

  Nor had I wanted to go to that fateful fortune-teller in Hong Kong. We had just moved there from Singapore, and in the British colony we had found a very old Chinese friend from Shanghai, a fellow student in the 1960s at Columbia University in New York. His wife, a well-known cinema director, was a granddaughter of the last warlord of Yunnan. Like all good Chinese she loved to gamble and was extremely superstitious. Once in a while she used to go to Macao and—like me—spend entire days playing blackjack, baccarat, and especially fan tan, that very simple but addictive game in which the croupier empties a bowlful of buttons onto the table and then slowly divides them into groups of four with an ivory chopstick. One has to guess the number of buttons that are left over at the end: none, one, two or three? The charm of the game is that you can follow it from on high, standing at a railing, and you place bets and collect your winnings by lowering and raising a little wicker basket on a string.

  Every time she went to Macao, before taking the hovercraft my Chinese friend would go and consult her fortune-teller to find out whether those were auspicious days or not. “He’s one of the best in Hong Kong. He’s someone you should get to know. Come along with me,” she said, finally overcoming my resistance.

  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 April 17, 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 April 18 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 center 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 co
rpses 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, gray, 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.

  Toward 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.