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

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 20 March 1993 a UN helicopter in Cambodia went down, with fifteen journalists on board. Among them was the German colleague who had taken my place.

CHAPTER TWO 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 seance took place in 1943 at our home in Monticelli, a working-class quarter of Florence. We had a neighbour 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, sceptical 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 Phi 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 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?

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.