A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  The crisis that Stefano Brunori had undergone twenty years previously was clear enough. It was one that sooner or later affects everyone in some way. As soon as you start asking questions you find that some of them, especially the simplest, have no obvious answers. You have to go out and look for them. But where? He chose the least expected direction, a difficult one. Perhaps he was attracted by the exotic, by the strange. Those alien words, new to his ears, appeared much more meaningful than the old familiar ones of his own language. Satori seemed to promise so much more than “grace.”

  And yet, if that young Florentine had chosen a path furnished by his own culture and become a Franciscan or a Jesuit, if he had retired to Camaldoli or La Verna instead of a monastery in Nepal, perhaps he would have found a solution that was more familiar, more suited, less lonely. And at least he would have been spared those terrible horns in the morning! Was he, like me, a victim of exoticism? Of a need to seek the ends of the earth? After all, I could perfectly well have become a journalist in Italy, in a land which is just as exotic as Asia, a land whose real story is yet to be told.

  When Chang Choub left, it felt as if we had known each other much longer than three days. He believed that at the Dalai Lama’s press conference we had simply found each other again. It cost me an effort to accept that “again,” but I too felt that we were joined by many, many threads which I would have liked to continue disentangling. Talking about his life had made me look again at my own; talking with him, I began for the first time to think seriously about meditation. I had seen the possible connection between the mind, trained through meditation, and powers including that of prescience. For the first time I had heard someone talk about techniques of meditation, and had been encouraged to try them out. It may be strange, but it is so. How many times had I seen advertisements for courses in Transcendental Meditation, or heard of young people going to meditate at a temple in southern Thailand? I paid no attention; it seemed to belong to another world, a world of weird, marginal people in search of salvation. I felt that it had no relevance for me personally.

  Chang Choub, with the life he led, brought all this before me again, and made me think that it might have something to do with me. When he left Turtle House, with his half-empty purple sack over his shoulder, it was as if he left behind a trail of little white stones—or bread crumbs?—to show me the way toward new explorations.

  We promised to meet again in India. I have felt for years that India is in my future. In origin the reason was simple. I had grown up politically in the 1950s, when anyone interested in the Third World came up against two great myths, Gandhi and Mao—two different solutions to the same problem, opposing bets on the destinies of the two most populous nations on earth, two hypotheses of social philosophy from which it seemed that we in the West also had something to learn. Having spent years among the Chinese, trying to understand what a disaster the myth of Mao had been for them, it seemed logical to go one day to India to see what had happened to the myth of Gandhi. Living in Peking or Hong Kong, whenever we felt fed up with the prosaic pragmatism of the Chinese, or noticed ourselves reacting in a Chinese way, Angela and I would say to each other: “India. India.” For us India had become the antidote to the mal jaune, that poison concocted of love and disappointment, of endless small irritations and great faith, which afflicts all those who put down roots for a while in the Middle Kingdom and then find that they cannot tear themselves away.

  I would have liked to move to India in 1984, when the Chinese took a decision for me that I would never have been able to take on my own, and thus did me an enormous favor: they arrested me and expelled me from their country. But at the time I did not manage it, and more years went by. To my original reason for wanting to go to India a new and more important one has been added: I want to see if India, with its spirituality and its madness, can resist the disheartening wave of materialism which is sweeping the world. I want to see if India can solve the dilemma and preserve its uniqueness. I want to see if in India the seed of a humanity with aspirations beyond the greedy race for Western modernity is still alive.

  Living in Asia, I have told myself again and again that there is no culture with the capacity to resist, to express itself with renewed creativity. Chinese culture has been moribund for at least a century, and Mao, in the effort to found a new China, murdered the little that remained of the old. With nothing left to believe in, the Chinese now dream only of becoming Americans. Students marched in Tiananmen Square behind a copy of the Statue of Liberty, and the old Marxist-Leninist rulers erase the memory of their crimes and their lust for power by letting the people run after illusions of Western wealth.

  Which Asian culture has preserved its own springs of creativity? Which is still able to regenerate itself, to develop its own models, its own alternatives? The Khmer culture, which died with Angkor eight centuries ago and was once again killed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in their absurd attempt to revive it? The Vietnamese culture, which can define itself solely in terms of political independence? Or the Balinese, now packaged for tourist consumption?

  India, India! I said to myself, nursing the hope—or perhaps the illusion—of a last enclave of spirituality. India, where there is still plenty of madness. India, which gives hospitality to the Dalai Lama. India, where the dollar is not yet the sole measure of greatness. That is why I made plans to go to India, and meet there my fellow Florentine escapee, Chang Choub.

  A rich woman from Hong Kong came to see me. She was in Bangkok to meet her guru, a Tibetan monk and follower of the Dalai Lama, “a very advanced teacher.” He belongs to the international jet set, at home in New York, Paris and London, and he has a following of such women, usually rich and beautiful, in constant attendance. He plays the guru and the women pay the bills, buy his air tickets, organize his life. “He’s the reincarnation of a great teacher. He can’t be bothered with such things,” said the understanding lady, a consenting victim—perhaps like Chang Choub?—of Tibet’s great, subtle, historic vengeance.

  Quite extraordinary, Tibet! For centuries it remained closed and inaccessible, removed from the world; for centuries, in isolation, cutting itself off from any other field of study, it practiced the “inner science.” Then came the first explorers. At the beginning of the twentieth century the British entered Lhasa; fifty years later the Chinese occupied the country and made it a sort of colony. A hundred thousand Tibetans fled, but that diaspora lit the fuse for the time bomb of revenge.

  Tibetan Buddhism, first practiced exclusively in the Himalayas and Mongolia, has been spreading throughout the world. Tibetan gurus have settled everywhere, from Switzerland to California, displacing the yogis who had formerly conquered the soul of Europe in its quest for the exotic. Their dogmas, once secret, have become best-sellers. Young gurus claiming to be reincarnations of old Tibetan teachers have become the mouthpieces of this ancient wisdom. With thousands of followers all over the world, they are looked after by little circles of rich lay nuns. Bernardo Bertolucci’s adviser on his film Little Buddha was one of these young gurus, born and raised outside Tibet, but a reincarnation of a great teacher. The capital of the Dalai Lama in exile, in Dharamsala, north of Delhi, has become a place of pilgrimage for thousands of young Westerners, and he has acquired the stature of a sort of second Pope, not only a spiritual leader, but also the head of the Tibetan government in exile.

  By occupying Tibet, the Chinese have indirectly sown the seeds of Tibetan Buddhism throughout the world, thus practically planting a bomb in their own house. Sympathy for the Tibetan cause is growing, and interest in the spiritual aspect has become political. The Dalai Lama is welcomed as a guest in the centers of world power. He has become the symbol of the struggle against Peking’s totalitarian regime.

  The other side of the coin is that the gurus, with their mythical roots amid the Himalayan peaks and their role as representatives of an oppressed people and bearers of spirituality, provide a perfect alibi for people who pursue redemption while remainin
g completely enmeshed in materialism. Because of the widespread disorientation from which our culture suffers, people have lost their natural skepticism. Today any charlatan can sell his spiritual potions if he gives them an exotic name.

  Am I too a victim of this phenomenon? Is that why I spend days listening to Chang Choub, why I obey the prophetic warning not to fly, and say “yes” when invited to see a new fortune-teller?

  The woman who had served as my interpreter with the blind fortune-teller made an appointment for me with her own astrologer-monk. So, one afternoon, again pretending that I was passing through Bangkok, I arranged to meet her and her friend in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel.

  Her friend drove a Volvo. She was of Chinese origin, an importer of medical equipment for Thai hospitals. She was in her late forties, a once-beautiful woman who had allowed herself to put on weight. For want of love? So I concluded while scrutinizing her. I reflected with amusement that, starting with that observation, I too could set up as a fortune-teller and talk to her of her past and her future.

  We crossed the Chao Paya by one of Bangkok’s many bridges. In the Bang Khun Non quarter we turned off the squalid, depressing cement road, lined with rubbish heaps and shapeless little houses, into a narrow lane. After about two hundred yards we arrived at the hushed, tranquil compound of a Buddhist temple. It was simple and austere, constructed entirely of wood, with long dormitories, beautiful inlaid panels under the eaves, and large windows where the monks’ orange robes were hung out to dry. The heat was stifling, but two large trees gave the complex of buildings an air of freshness.

  The monk we had come to see was sitting on the teak floor of a wide, shady terrace, surrounded by coffee jars, teapots, small cups and trays, rolls of toilet paper, packets of cigarettes and two fans. He was served by a young couple, his relatives, who handed him things from time to time with gestures of devout submission. Now and then they fanned their baby, a few months old, who slept peacefully with his bottle between two fat astrology books and a geomancer’s quadrant.

  The monk was about fifty, with a handsome head, and tattoos on his chest and arms. He drank tea nonstop and chain-smoked. Thai Buddhism is extremely tolerant and permissive. Monks are forbidden the use of intoxicants, and most Buddhists include tobacco in that category. But not the Thais, who find cigarettes and tea the best means of combating hunger during the long daily fast. Reading the future is also supposed to be against the rules; in fact Buddha himself forbade it. But in this the Thais follow the tradition of one of his disciples, Mogellana, who began telling fortunes immediately after Buddha’s death, using powers acquired thanks to the master’s teachings and through meditation.

  The monk welcomed us with a big smile and a fine burp. It was noon; he had just finished his big meal of the day, and would eat no more solid food until breakfast at dawn the next morning. My interpreter’s friend dropped to her knees and shuffled toward him. She had been there once before, but without giving her name. Her husband was one of the monk’s faithful disciples and frequent visitors, and she wanted, without letting him know, to have her future read by the same person who did it for him.

  The sitting lasted about an hour, but the surprising part came at once. “Your husband has many other women, and you should sue for divorce,” said the monk. The woman laughed. My interpreter explained to me that it was absolutely true about these lovers, and her friend had already secretly made arrangements for a divorce. She was only afraid that her husband would refuse to sign the documents, or that he would demand a mint of money for doing so.

  “You must leave the house you share with your husband, and go and live elsewhere. If you move during the month of October all will be well with you,” the monk said. My interpreter whispered to me that her friend had bought an apartment of her own already.

  “Once you are in the new house,” continued the monk, “you must make a choice: a new husband or a great deal of money. Take care: if you have even one boyfriend, you’ll never become rich.”

  “Venerable one,” said the woman, “help me to make a hundred million baht and I’ll buy you a Mercedes!” As if to show that she was in earnest, she took a fine electric thermos out of her bag and proffered it to him very ceremoniously with both hands, bowing her forehead to the floor.

  The rest of the session was banal and of little interest; in the end I fell asleep on the beautiful wooden boards. I was woken once my interpreter had had her session and had been advised. It was my turn.

  On a piece of paper I wrote the day and hour of my birth. Not the time in Florence, eight in the evening, but the equivalent in Bangkok, two in the afternoon. To tell the truth I have never known exactly at what time I was born. I remember only that my mother said it was “before supper.”

  The monk made some complicated calculations, consulted the quadrant and a thick book, and with a Biro on a piece of white paper he drew some circles inside a square—my horoscope, apparently—then some signs. He asked me some more questions, saying he had to check whether the time of birth I had given him was the correct one. He needed certain information about my past if he was to read the right future. It was as if there were different pages for different types of destiny, and before proceeding he had to make sure he was reading the correct one.

  “Are you rich?”

  “No,” I replied, once again struck by the fact that money seems to be an obsession with all fortune-tellers, be they monks or blind men.

  “But the numbers say you are,” he insisted. I told him that when I was a child my family was so poor that during the war we really did not have enough to eat, and my mother sometimes made strange “cakes” with sawdust in them.

  Grimacing, the monk consulted the signs on the horoscope and said, “But in the past you’ve made big business deals, and once you lost many millions in one fell swoop.”

  “No, I’ve never made any deals, and at no point in my life do I remember buying a single thing in order to sell it,” I said.

  He looked perplexed, and a bit lost. “Perhaps the time when you said you were born isn’t the right one. Could it possibly have been half an hour earlier?” He hesitated for a moment: “Or three-quarters of an hour?” he said in an apologetic tone.

  “Quite possibly,” I said. “Perhaps in 1938 in Italy they put the clocks back in September, so the difference between Florence and Bangkok would be one hour more.” This cheered him.

  “Tell me if what I am about to say is true, and we’ll be sure we have the right time. You have been married for many years.” (True. Now we’re getting somewhere.) “Your wife is a stronger character than you.” (Hard to admit, but it’s true.) “You are something like a writer or a journalist.” (This too?) “You have a good brain, and you are a sincere, straightforward person.” (Well …)

  I told him all this was more or less true, and he was delighted. “Remember, then,” he said, “whenever you see an astrologer: not eight in the evening, but seven, or a quarter past.” And then he began his readings.

  “You have a sort of shell around you. Your enemies can’t harm you. As for money …” (Here we go again!) “… you’ll always have some—now more, now less, but you’ll never be poor. You are intelligent and your lucky number is five. You have a life of highs and lows. Sometimes you are on top of the world, sometimes depressed. If you have a plan to do something special this year, be strong, carry it out! This is a good year.” (I do indeed have a plan, the plan not to fly.) “Nineteen ninety and 1991 were not particularly good years.” (Wrong, 1991 in particular was wonderful: I traveled throughout the Soviet Union, wrote a book …) “But the years to come will be excellent.”

  “Venerable one, do you see no dangers in my life?” I asked.

  “An excellent question,” he said. “No. I don’t see any.”

  “Years ago I was told that 1993 would be a dangerous year for me, and that I must not take any planes.”

  The monk looked at his papers, looked again, and said with great conviction, “No, absolutely no
t. In the past, yes, your life was in danger several times, but not now. Have you any other questions?”

  “Where is it best for me to live: in Asia or in Europe?” I asked.

  He was quite relaxed by now, and spoke without hesitation. “You should live here and there, but not where you were born.” (You are right, my dear monk. Florence is a safe harbor, but not a place I could live in, at least not now.) “The ideal for you is to be always on the move. If you stay in the same place for long your brain will stop working.” (Very true. I am at my best when I am dumped in a place I know nothing about; curiosity is my best motivation.)

  More women arrived, and came up the wooden stairs, timorous and respectful, bearing gifts. My time was up, but I asked one more question: “If I want to improve my life, should I change something? Should I change my wife? My job? Should I stop always wearing white?”

  The monk laughed cheerfully, and told me with great conviction to leave everything as it was. I would have done that anyway, but I was glad we agreed.

  End of sitting. Bows, money discreetly placed under the outsize book, and general exodus, backward on our knees to the stairs.

  As soon as we were out of the monk’s sight, the two women hugged each other and began a chirpy conversation, only part of which was translated for me. They were enthusiastic about the man’s powers and his advice about divorcing and making money. I realized that in fact he had talked of little else. All alike, these seers—monks or no! For all of them the important questions concern the material side of life—in tune with their clients, for whom money is the great obsession, the sole aim of existence.

  We drove back to Bangkok through Chinatown, with its thousands of little shops. In each one, behind the counter or the cash register, is a Chinese whose only desire is to be rich. It struck me that not one of the fortune-tellers I had seen had ever used the word “happiness”—as if that were something nonexistent, or irrelevant. Or perhaps unattainable? Strange that it means so little to so many people.