A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  Nordin took this advice very seriously. Well, what can one say? There is no denying the fact that all revolutionaries and positivists have seen these magicians, in their different versions, as enemies of modernity and exploiters of the people. They have even tried to eliminate them physically—as Mao did in China—to free the people from the shackles of superstition. But who has taken their place? Who now teaches these important banalities? Who gives lessons in common sense, even if mediated by potions and oils? And besides, even in these there may lurk some sense!

  Nordin reached for his wallet and pulled out a paper-thin piece of metal with writing on it, which the woman dukun had given him. That was his protection, and he always had to have it on him. But was it not merely a reminder? Did it not recall, every time he saw it, his promise not to “bother people”? A knot in his handkerchief would have served the same purpose, but it would have had less of the sacral, the magical. Nordin also had a taboo of his own in connection with this little piece of metal: he had to remove it every time he went to the toilet, and he must never eat meat that was not halal, slaughtered in the Muslim way. Everything had to remind him of his duty toward others.

  I thought again of my dukun: he was the first fortune-teller who had not mentioned money, getting rich or not getting rich, coming into an inheritance. Nor was there anything materialistic in the other stories I had heard about dukuns. I welcomed this departure from the Chinese.

  We drove back along the coastal road. The storm which had threatened did not materialize, but the sky was low and gray. The sea, so smooth and clean, was a joy to behold: very pale green near the shore and very dark, almost black, at the horizon. The beach was narrow and fringed with coconut trees. About a hundred yards from the water’s edge we saw fishermen building huts on piles. These would be swept away by the monsoon in September, and rebuilt the following April. Every year the same, for generations: they build houses to live in, to fish from with big nets hung from the porch, and to be carried away by the sea.

  “The fishermen are Malays. Their customers are Chinese. It’s the same all along the coast,” said Nordin. “If the fishermen don’t fish, the Chinese lend them money to live on, and get it back with interest from the future catch. Now and then the Malays run amok and attack Chinese shops, and we have a bit of a massacre.” He said this in the same tone he used to describe how the sea destroys the houses every year. Even massacres seemed to be a seasonal matter.

  The great pogrom of 1965, launched by the military who later brought Suharto to power, was aimed at the Communists; but the people, especially in the small islands, took advantage of it to settle their own accounts with the Chinese. More than half a million people were slaughtered in a matter of days. Some of the most atrocious crimes occurred on the peaceful and paradisal island of Bali.

  That evening we ate at the local market amid dozens of stalls, each with its own specialty. Seafoods, meats, vegetables and an endless variety of fish were displayed in the light of acetylene lamps: a fascinating mosaic of colors and forms, with strong odors wafting about. Oil flared in the big cauldrons, which the Chinese cooks handled like conjurers. Packs of dogs and beggars circulated in the darkness behind the stalls. From under a table appeared a little boy who offered to shine my shoes. “One at a time,” Nordin warned me. “If you give him both together he’ll run off and sell them, and you’ll be left barefoot. He won’t know what to do with one on its own, so he’ll polish it for you.”

  In the crowd Nordin saw the only other white man who seemed to be on the island, and beckoned him over to our table. “He knows everything about the island of Lingga,” said Nordin by way of introduction. Michael was Australian, a former philosophy student, he said. He was about forty, had come to Indonesia a few years ago, and had ended up in Lingga. Since then the island had become his obsession.

  “Why Lingga?” I asked.

  “Lingga’s the capital of the Bunyan people. You know who they are, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “The Bunyan are the soft people. Do you follow? We’re the hard people,” said Michael, touching my skin to show that it was solid, hard. “They, you see, are soft. Do you follow? In Lingga there are lots of them, but no one can see them. They live their own lives. We live ours, and only occasionally do we mix with them. One of the hard people, like you and me, has been known to marry a Bunyan. It happens. But only seldom. I know a man on Lingga who married a beautiful Bunyan girl. He had to go to bed with her once a week, on Thursdays, otherwise he was free, and could even marry another woman.”

  I listened, fascinated. People continued to cook, eat and beg all around us; the little boy polished my second shoe. Michael talked very seriously about the Bunyans, in the way that others might talk about the stock market. I found his stories quite magnificent. In the Chinese tradition too there are marriages between dead souls, arranged by the parents of the deceased; this is done, for example, to prevent an unmarried girl from returning as an evil spirit to disturb the young men of the village.

  “One Thursday this fellow forgot his appointment,” continued Michael, “and the Bunyan girl took offense and was no more to be seen. In the past, when people got married on Lingga the Bunyans would go to the wedding, and they would lend their golden plates for the guests to eat off. Once, however, a guest hid one of these plates with a view to stealing it, and after that the Bunyans stopped going to weddings. Around the same time one of the three mysterious peaks of the mountain on Lingga split. The mountain’s sacred; it’s only four thousand feet high, but nobody can climb it.”

  Michael said that there are people who claim to have reached the top, but they only have the vaguest memories of how they did it. He knew a woman who had fallen ill, and the doctors had said she was done for. Then, on the point of death, she vomited up some strange herbs and recovered. She said she had been seized by seven Bunyan girls, carried to the top of the mountain to eat in a meadow, and then taken back to her bed. This had saved her.

  “The Bunyans,” Michael went on, “always have everything clean around them. If a house is dirty they’re no more to be seen. They’re friendly, they want to help the ‘hard’ people, but they also want you to respect what’s theirs. If you go into the forest and cut down a tree that belongs to the Bunyans, you get lost and can’t find your way home. The gharau, for example, the tree used in making the world’s best incense, which the Chinese have come here to buy for centuries, belongs to the Bunyans. All the gharau trees are theirs, and woe to anyone who cuts them down without asking permission. They give it to those who treat the forest as they should, who cut the undergrowth and keep the clearings tidy, who respect their dwellings.”

  “But how do you recognize them, these Bunyans?” I asked.

  “Easy!” intervened Nordin, who had followed the whole conversation and seemed to find it all quite normal. “You only have to look at their upper lip, here.” He pointed to his own mouth. “The Bunyans don’t have this division that we have, here under the nose. Their upper lips are flat right across.”

  At midnight the market was still bustling with people. On my way back to the inn, I was struck by something I had not previously noticed. Amidst the crowds there was an extraordinary number of madmen: peculiar, grubby types with copious beards and tufts of long tangled hair. One of them paced back and forth, a sack in his hand, constantly turning to stare at the ground as if he had lost something; another rushed about intoning litanies; others dragged plastic bags full of useless rubbish. One stood leaning against a lamppost as if expecting someone.

  “Who are you?” he asked me in perfect English as I brushed past.

  “Who are you?” I found myself instinctively replying. It was dark and I could not make his face out. When I tried to approach him and see if his upper lip was flat, he ran off.

  15/THE MISSIONARY AND THE MAGICIAN

  Every place is a gold mine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passersby, stand in a corner of the market, go for a
haircut. You pick up a thread—a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met—and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theater of humanity.

  I was in Tanjung Pinang simply because it was the one destination possible for those wanting to leave Singapore by sea. I meant to stay there just a couple of days, long enough to find a ship bound for Jakarta. But little by little I became involved in the daily life of the town, and I could have spent weeks there, following up something or someone that had caught my interest. Tanjung Pinang: another of those places, hard to find on the map, where I landed up through that infinite chain of chances which had begun with the Hong Kong fortune-teller.

  One morning I had got up very early, run for half an hour and then gone looking for somewhere to have breakfast. And that was how I came to meet Old Yang. He had just finished removing, one by one, the numbered wooden boards that formed the door of his restaurant, had lit a cigarette and begun sweeping. First he pretended he had not noticed me, as is the way with Asians, convinced as they are that there can be no communication with a foreigner. I addressed him in Chinese, which reassured and surprised him.

  “I am Chinese too,” I said.

  “Chinese?”

  “Yes. I belong to an ethnic minority: the Italians.” The joke never fails. China is a great empire, populated mainly by the Han—the “flower men”—but also by a great many “people in small numbers,” minorities: the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Kazaks, the Dai, the Hui, the Miao, and—why not?—the Italians. From the Chinese point of view it is quite plausible; in fact, every now and then there is someone who does not realize it is a joke.

  Old Yang was a classic Chinese of the diaspora. His father was from the province of Canton. He arrived on Pulau Bintan at the end of the last century with nothing but the singlet and shorts he had on, and worked in the bauxite mines as a coolie. When he had saved enough, he had a wife sent over from his village in China, and produced five children with her. Old Yang was the firstborn, so he had remained in Tanjung Pinang to look after his father and then to run the restaurant his father had opened. His two brothers and two sisters, by contrast, were sent to study in China in the early 1950s. In those years tens of thousands of young Chinese, children of poor emigrants, returned to the mother country from the various countries of Southeast Asia. China was liberated, the universities, once the preserve of the rich, were open to all, and to study was free. To the Chinese of the diaspora it seemed the ideal chance to give their children a Chinese education. Many never returned. They got caught up in the drama of that long-suffering land, and became victims of the Cultural Revolution. The fact that they came from abroad, from families who lived in capitalist countries, made them suspect. They were denounced as spies and counterrevolutionaries and sent to labor camps, to be reeducated or to die.

  It was only in 1972, thanks to Chou Enlai, who took a personal interest in these “seeds of the dragon” scattered around the world, that the survivors were able to leave China discreetly. But where could they go? The countries they originated from, all engaged in fighting against Communist guerrillas, suspected those who came back from China of being Maoist agents and would not permit them to return. A few thousand remained for years and years in the limbo of Macao. Old Yang never saw his siblings again. One brother was beaten to death, the other was unable to leave China and is still living in Dailian. His two sisters, after years in Macao, finally got to Hong Kong and thence to Canada, in that ceaseless migration that has taken the Chinese to every corner of the earth.

  While we were talking, Yang’s son walked in. A businessman, one of the new generation. He had formed a company with some in-laws in Singapore, and bought and sold land on the island. He too had the beeper and the Ray-Ban case attached to his belt. His dream? To emigrate. Where? “To any country where the average per capita income is higher than here,” he replied. Typical!

  Old Yang and Young Yang were born and had lived all their lives in Tanjung Pinang, but they had no affection for the place, no real contact with its original inhabitants. They found the Indonesians rude and uncultured, and boasted of belonging to “the great Chinese civilization,” of which, however, they bore precious little. They felt themselves to be Chinese: their ancestors were Chinese and their descendants would be Chinese. China was their mother country. Where that China lay was far from clear. It was not the China of Mao and Deng Xiaoping—too poor; not Taiwan—too small and insignificant. It lay in the idea of China, an undefinable Chineseness with which the great multitude of the diaspora identify themselves.

  Of Pulau Bintan, Old Yang said: “It’s an excellent spot, there’s freedom to do business here, and if things go badly, we can always turn to our relatives in Malaysia, or ask for help from those in Singapore.” That is how the Chinese reason wherever they have emigrated: for them the countries they live in are rather like chessboards on which they play out a game.

  Indonesia has a population of 190 million. The Chinese constitute barely 2 percent, but 70 percent of the country’s trade is in their hands, and the top five industrial groups and the major banks are theirs. Everything is the product of Chinese companies: from soap to cement, from cigarettes to coconut oil. Even Tanjung Pinang is largely in Chinese hands: they control most of the shops and the boats that shuttle between there and the nearby islands, and they are involved in all the new development projects. The city’s first karaoke bar belongs to a Chinese, and so do the brothels, disguised here too behind the innocent signboards of barber shops.

  There I had the whole story of the diaspora Chinese—strong, tough, hardworking, always ready to move on and adopt the passport of any state that would guarantee them security and protection. One of their new ways of making money is to build, to cover everything in cement—and in this activity the Chinese are in the forefront. By now their influence extends all over Asia. They are destroying Bangkok. Soon they will do the same with Rangoon, Hanoi and every other city to which they have access. It is the diaspora Chinese who, with their massive investments, are now remaking the coastal cities of China in their own image. They are the new models of success, heroes of the Chinese youth disoriented by the failure of Maoism. The Chinese of the diaspora seemed to me more and more like missionaries of that materialism from which I was trying to escape.

  During my morning run I had seen a Catholic church on a hilltop, and Nordin told me the priest was a Frenchman who had been there at least ten years. Certainly this must be a man to talk to.

  That afternoon I went there on foot. Churches are always oases of peace, order and cleanliness, with their ranks of pews and the notice boards listing the times of masses and prayers. I enjoyed the contrast with the smelly chaos of the city, but, to my disappointment, the priest was not there. He had gone to another island on a retreat, and would be back in two weeks. I had already turned away when a cleric came after me, saying: “If you like, there’s a Dutch father here.” I waited awhile in a beautiful airy room. The sun was streaming in. A tall, elegant man of about fifty appeared. He had long blond hair and was dressed in brown trousers and a white shirt, with leather sandals on his feet. Father Willem was in Tanjung Pinang for a few days’ visit, like me. He came from Bangka, an island further south, toward Java. The Dutch, being interested in the tin mines, had given Singapore to the British in exchange for Bangka. Not a good bargain!

  Father Willem had traveled all over the archipelago, and in his opinion the situation was practically the same on every island: the Chinese are a minority everywhere, and everywhere the most enterprising, the most active, the wealthiest. The difference between them and the local people, he said, was simple: “An Indonesian goes fishing and has a good catch. He’s happy, he goes home and for days he enjoys his earnings and feels he can put his feet up. A Chinese goes fishing and has a good catch; he thinks, ‘This is the good season, and I’ve found the best waters.’ He unloads his boat, goes fishing again and catches a lot more fish.”
Father Willem believed it was a question of race, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  I mentioned that someone had spoken to me of the Bunyans. Of course, he said, they were famous even on his island, but Lingga was their capital.

  And magic?

  “Here magic is the real world,” he said, as if wishing to make his position clear in case I was the usual dismissive skeptic. “If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about Indonesia. Magic is everywhere; magic determines people’s lives more than anything else.”

  Father Willem was born in Holland before the war, and had come to Indonesia as a missionary in 1960. He had remained there, becoming an Indonesian citizen so as to avoid problems of visa and residence. “When I arrived, as a good European, I thought that magic was superstition, and I wouldn’t accept any part of it. But with time I’ve learned to respect it. It’s something I now bear in mind. At the risk of your misunderstanding me, I might go so far as to say I believe in it. In magic there’s something profoundly real, and true. Here the people say they are Muslims, or Christians in the case of my parishioners, but that’s all on the surface. Underneath there’s that other world, with these beliefs which are so much stronger, hence so much more genuine.”

  There are two kinds of magic, he explained. White magic, practiced mainly by the Chinese, who make use of it to get on in business or to arrange good marriages; and black magic, practiced exclusively by the Malays, to control the will of other people, to do harm, to carry out vendettas. He said that in Java a friend and colleague of his, Father Lokman, had spent more than thirty years studying black magic, and had himself acquired some powers as a medium. His conclusion was that magic has to do with brain waves.