A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  At this point it seemed only right to let him know why I had come to him, and to tell him about the prophecy of the Hong Kong fortune-teller. The blind man burst out laughing, and said, “No, definitely not. The dangerous year was 1991; you did then indeed risk death in a plane.” He was not mistaken. I shuddered at the memory of all the ghastly planes in which I had flown that summer of 1991 in the Soviet Union, when I was working on my book Goodnight, Mister Lenin.

  For a moment I had a sense of disappointment. Perhaps it was only because he knew I was firm in my resolve not to fly that he saw no danger in the future. As I told myself this, I realized how readily the mind will perform any somersault to rationalize what suits it.

  We thanked the man, paid, and left. In the little square we found the limousine with the driver in his fine white uniform. “Well?” the woman asked me. I did not know what to say. The strangest thing the blind man had told me was that as a child my real parents had given me to another family, and that only thanks to this had I survived. What a risk he took in saying such a thing! In the vast majority of cases it cannot be true, as it was not true in mine. Or perhaps it was? The Oriental Hotel’s car inched slowly through the traffic; my thoughts flew rapidly and delightfully in every direction.

  There can be no doubt that I am my mother’s son. Where else would I have got this potato nose, which has reemerged identically in my daughter? Yet it is equally true that in a certain sense I have never belonged to the family I grew up in. I felt this from an early age, and my relatives recognized it too, jokingly saying to my father: “But that one, where did you ever dig him out from?”

  The blind man had got the facts wrong, but he had hit on something profoundly true. One only had to interpret, to focus on that part of us that goes beyond our physical being, and ask where it comes from. In my case it does indeed come from “another family,” that is to say from another source than the genes that determine the shape of my nose, my eyes, and even certain gestures which now, the older I grow, I recognize more and more as those of my paternal grandfather.

  In the tenor of my parents’ ways there was not so much as a germ of the life I have lived up till now. Both of them came from poor, magnificently simple people. Calm people, close to the earth, chiefly concerned with survival—never restless or adventurous, never looking for novelty as I have always done since childhood. On my mother’s side they were peasants who had always worked other people’s land; on my father’s side, stonecutters in a quarry that is still called by their name. For centuries the Terzanis have chiseled the paving stones of Florence, and—it was said—those of the Palazzo Pitti. Nobody in either family had ever gone regularly to school, and my mother and father’s generation was the first that had learned, barely, to read and write.

  Where then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish for printed paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of the earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato—ten miles from the duomo.

  Among all my relatives there was not one to whom I could look for inspiration, to whom I could turn for advice. The only ones I felt indebted to were my father and mother, who I saw literally go without food to allow me to study after primary school. What my father earned never lasted to the end of the month, and I well remember how sometimes, holding my mother’s hand and trying not to be seen by anyone who knew us, I would go with her to the pawnbroker in the Via Palazzuolo with a linen sheet from her trousseau. Even the money for a notebook was a worry, and my first long trousers—new corduroy ones, good for summer and winter, indispensable for secondary school—were bought by installments. Every month we would go to the shop to hand over the amount due. It is hard to imagine today, but the pleasure of putting on those trousers is one I have never felt again with any other garment, not even those made to measure for me in Peking by Mao’s own tailor.

  As I grew up I had a great affection for my family and its history, but I never felt any real affinity for them—as if I really had been put there by accident. My relatives were irritated by the fact that I studied and did not start working at a very young age, as they had all done. A brother of my father’s, who dropped in every evening before dinner, used to say: “What’s he done today, the layabout?” Then he would trot out the wisecrack that so offended my mother: “If he carries on like this he’ll go farther than Annibale!” Annibale was a cousin, another Terzani, who had gone far indeed. Since boyhood he had worked as a city street cleaner, walking the tram tracks with a spade and rake to clear away the horse droppings.

  Why did I practically flee from home when I was fifteen, to go and wash dishes all over Europe? Why, when I arrived in Asia, did I feel so much at home that I stayed there? Why does the heat of the tropics not tire me? Why do I sit cross-legged without discomfort? Is it the charm of the exotic? The wish to get as far away as possible from the povertystricken world of my childhood? Perhaps. Or perhaps the blind man was right, if he meant that something in me—not my body, which I certainly got from my parents, but something else—came from another source, that brought with it a baggage of old yearnings and homesickness for latitudes known to me in some life before this one.

  Slumped in the backseat of the Oriental Hotel’s car, I let these thoughts whirl around in my head, and amused myself by chasing them as if they were not mine. Could it be that I believed in reincarnation? I had never thought seriously about it. But why not? Why not imagine life as a relay race in which, like the baton that passes from hand to hand, something not physical, not definable, something like a collection of memories, a store of experiences lived elsewhere, passes from body to body and from death to death, and all the while grows and expands, gathering wisdom and advancing toward that state of grace that concludes every life: toward illumination, in Buddhist terms? That would help to explain my difference from the Terzani clan, and to interpret the blind man’s statement that as a child I was passed from one family to another.

  At times we all have the disquieting sensation of having already experienced something that we know is in fact happening for the first time, of having already been in a place where we are sure we have never set foot. Where does this feeling of déjà vu come from? From a “before”? That would surely be the easiest explanation. And where have I been, if there is a “before”? Perhaps somewhere in Asia, an Asia without concrete, without skyscrapers, without superhighways. So I pondered as I watched the dull, gray streets of Bangkok as they slid past the window, suffocated by the exhaust of thousands and thousands of cars.

  My interpreter lived on the outskirts of the city, and I had offered to see her home. The car entered a bit of motorway I did not know. “A very dangerous stretch, this,” she said. “People die here all the time. Do you see those cars?” In the shadows of an underpass I saw two strange vans with Thai writing on them, and some men in blue overalls standing nearby. “The body snatchers,” said the woman. It was the first time I had heard the word in Bangkok. The story behind it was grisly.

  According to popular belief, when a person dies violently his spirit does not rest in peace. And if, in the moment of death, the body is mutilated, decapitated, crushed or torn to pieces, that spirit becomes particularly restless; unless the prescribed rites are quickly performed it goes to join the enormous army of “wandering spirits.” These spirits, along with the evil phii, constitute one of the great problems of today’s Bangkok. Hence the importance of the “body snatchers,” volunteers from Buddhist associations who cruise around the city collecting the bodies of people who have died violently. They put the pieces together and perform the appropriate rites so that the souls may depart in peace, and not hang about playing tricks on the living.

  Apart from murder victims and suicides, the most obvious candidates for becoming wandering spirits are those killed in road
accidents. That is why the Buddhist associations station their vans at the most notorious black spots on the roads, and why their men stand guard, tuned to the police radio frequencies, ready to rush to corpses at a moment’s notice. And they really do rush, for this kind of work has become so profitable that the charitable associations are in fierce competition, and each tries to take away more corpses than the others so as to get more donations from the public. The first to arrive has the right to the body, but the men from the different associations often come to blows over a dead person. Sometimes they carry off someone who isn’t dead yet. To advertise their public service each association holds special exhibitions with macabre color photographs of the victims, clearly showing the severed heads and hands, so that they can press for generous donations.

  That evening Bangkok really felt to me like a city from which there was no escape. Despite the competitive zeal of the body snatchers, the number of angry phii is constantly increasing. Finding no peace, they wander about creating disasters. In vain have thousands of bottles of holy water been distributed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Thailand to exorcise the evil eye from the City of Angels, which the angels all seem to have forsaken.

  5/FAREWELL, BURMA

  In January I heard that the Burmese authorities at the frontier post of Tachileck, north of the Thai town of Chiang Mai, had begun issuing some entry visas “to facilitate tourism.” You had to leave your passport at the border and pay a certain sum in dollars, after which you were free to spend three days in Burma and travel as far as Kengtung, the ancient mythical city of the Shan.

  This scheme was obviously dreamed up by some local military commander to harvest some hard currency, but it was just what I was after. I was looking for something to write about without having to use planes, and this was an interesting subject: a region which no foreign traveler had succeeded in penetrating for almost half a century was suddenly opening up. By pretending to be a tourist I could again set foot in Burma, a country from which as a journalist I had been banned.

  In Tachileck the Burmese had probably not yet installed a computer with their list of “undesirables,” so Angela and I, together with Charles Antoine de Nerciat, an old colleague from Agence France Press, decided to try our luck. We came back with a distressing story to tell: the political prisoners of the military dictatorship, condemned to forced labor, were dying in their hundreds. We brought back photographs of young men in chains, carrying tree trunks and breaking stones on a riverbed. Thanks to that short trip we were able to draw the attention of public opinion to an aspect of the Burmese drama which otherwise would have passed unobserved. And I had gone there by chance—or rather because of a fortune-teller who told me not to fly.

  This is one aspect of a reporter’s job that never ceases to fascinate and disturb me: facts that go unreported do not exist. How many massacres, how many earthquakes happen in the world, how many ships sink, how many volcanoes erupt, and how many people are persecuted, tortured and killed. Yet if no one is there to see, to write, to take a photograph, it is as if these facts had never occurred, this suffering has no importance, no place in history. Because history exists only if someone relates it. It is sad, but such is life; and perhaps it is precisely this idea—the idea that with every little description of a thing observed one can leave a seed in the soil of memory—that keeps me tied to my profession.

  The two towns of Mae Sai in Thailand and Tachileck in Burma are linked by a little bridge. As I crossed it with Angela and Charles Antoine, I felt once again that tremor of excitement, so pleasing but rarer as time goes on, of setting foot where few had been and where perhaps I might discover something. This had been a forbidden frontier at one time. There was said to be a heroin refinery just a few dozen yards inside Burmese territory. With good binoculars, you could make out a sign in English: “Foreigners, keep away. Anyone passing this point risks being shot.” Now in its place is one proclaiming in big gold letters: “Tourists! Welcome to Burma!”

  So, Burma too has yielded to the common fate. For thirty years it tried to resist by remaining isolated and going its own way, but it did not succeed. No country can, it would seem. From Mao’s China to Gandhi’s India to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all the experiments in autarchy, in noncapitalist development with national characteristics, have failed. And what is more, most have left millions of victims.

  At least the Burmese experiment had a fine name. It was called “the Buddhist way to socialism.” This was the invention of General Ne Win, who took power in 1962 and imposed a military dictatorship. He tried to spare Burma the severity of the Communist regime that ruled China on the one hand, and the American-style materialist influence that was taking root in Thailand on the other. Ne Win closed the country, nationalized its commerce and imprisoned his opponents, claiming that only in that way could Burmese civilization be protected. In a certain sense he was right, and ultimately this bestowed legitimacy on his dictatorship. In Ne Win’s hands Burma did indeed preserve its identity. The old traditions survived, religion flourished, and the way of life of the forty-five million inhabitants was not thrown into confusion by industrialization, urbanization and mindless aping of the West. By these means a country like Thailand has indeed been developed, but it has also been traumatized.

  The Rangoon authorities did not want too many foreigners to “pollute the atmosphere;” they doled out visas sparingly, allowing only seven-day visits. Those who went there came back feeling that they had seen a country still untouched by influences from the rest of the world. Burma was a fascinating piece of old Asia, a land where men still wear the longyi, a sort of skirt woven locally; where even women smoke the cheroot, strong green cigars rolled by hand, and not Marlboros; a land where Buddhism is still a living faith and the beautiful old pagodas are still places of living worship, not museums for tourists to stroll around.

  That Burma is now about to disappear, too. After a quarter of a century of uncontested power, Ne Win handed over the reins to a new generation of military men, who have imposed a dictatorship more brazen, more violent and murderous, but also more “modern,” than the former paternalistic one.

  One had only to walk through the market in Tachileck to see that the new generals who are now the masters in Rangoon have dropped all pretense of following “a Burmese path.” They have decided to put a stop to the country’s isolation, and have adopted as a model of development the one that for decades has been knocking at their door, as at those of the Laotians, the Khmer and now the Vietnamese: Thailand.

  Tachileck has already lost its Burmese patina. It has fourteen casinos and numerous karaoke bars. Heroin is on sale more or less openly. The largest restaurant, two discotheques and the first supermarket are owned by Thais. No transaction takes place in the local currency, the kyat. Even in the market the money they all want is that of Bangkok, the baht.

  It is the military and the police who organize tourist visas, who change dollars, who procure a jeep, a driver and an interpreter. I took it for granted that the interpreter assigned to me was a spy, and I managed to get rid of him by offering him three days’ paid holiday. In the market I had been approached by a man of about fifty who seemed more trustworthy. He was a Karen—a member of an ethnic minority hostile to the Burmese; a Protestant, and hence used to Western modes of thought; and he spoke excellent English. Meeting him was a rare piece of luck, because Andrew—a name given him by American missionaries—was a mine of information and explanations.

  “Why are the hills so bare?” I asked as soon as we left Tachileck.

  “The Thais have cut down the forests.”

  “Whose houses are those?” I inquired at the first village we came to, where several new dwellings stood out glaringly among the old dark wooden ones.

  “They belong to families who have daughters working in the brothels in Thailand.”

  “And those cars?”

  “They are on the way from Singapore to China. The Wa, they’re no longer headhunters. They’re smuggle
rs.”

  “In heroin?”

  “Only in part. Here in the south they’re in competition with Khun Sa, the real drug king.”

  We drove into the mountains, which still looked as if they were hiding a thousand mysteries. In the old maps this part of the world was labeled the “Shan States” because the Shan, who came from China in the twelfth century to escape the advancing Mongols, formed the bulk of the population. The whole region was a sort of living museum of the most varied humanity. Apart from the Shan there were dozens of other tribes living there, each with its own language, its own customs and traditions, its own way of farming and hunting. The encounter with these different groups, of which the Paò, Meo, Karen and Wa tribes became the best known, was one of the great surprises that greeted the first European explorers in the region.

  The long necks of the “giraffe women” of the Padaung, like the tiny bound feet of Chinese women, exemplified Asia’s bizarre aberrations. Even today, the Padaung judge a woman’s beauty by the length of her neck. From birth every girl has big silver rings forced under her chin. By the time she is old enough to marry her head will be sixteen to twenty inches above her shoulders, supported by a stack of these precious collars. If they were removed she would die of suffocation: her head would fall to one side and her breathing would be cut off.

  For centuries the Shan have resisted every attempt on the part of the Burmese to dominate them, and have managed to stay independent. The British too, when at the end of the nineteenth century they arrived from India to extend their colonial power, recognized the authority of the thirty-three sawbaws, the Shan kings, and left them to administer their rural dominions, which bore names like “the Kingdom of a Thousand Banana Trees.”