The ship continued its throbbing, confident course through the dark. As I gazed at the sky and inhaled great lungfuls of fresh night air, I felt as if I were filling myself with stars. If that monster we call depression, which is always there in the background, lying in ambush, had put in an appearance there, it would find no room to enter. Hurray for ships!
Toward midnight we passed Singapore. From afar even that city, so perfect, so proud and so oppressive, was only a vague luminescence on the horizon.
I was the only Westerner on board, and my presence attracted the attention of other passengers. One was an old Chinese man who, on discovering that I spoke his language, took me around to show me off to other amused hua-ren. Another was a tall, thin, extroverted Indonesian young man. When he approached me with the usual “Where are you from?” I quickly countered by asking, “Tell me, do you believe in the power of the dukuns?” Embarrassment, as often happens with Asians, threw him into an almost hysterical burst of laughter.
It took no time to get him to tell me about his experiences. He was the eldest of fifteen brothers and sisters, of whom five had already died of illnesses—“stomach trouble, fever, asthma.” One day a large sum of money disappeared from the house. The parents suspected a poor boy whom they had recently taken in as an adopted son-cum-servant. The mother and my young friend went to the dukun, who set a bowl of water before them. (Like my bowl in Florence when I was a child!) In it, as on a television screen, they saw the youth enter the room and take the money. They confronted him, he confessed and returned the money.
“Couldn’t it be that you and your mother projected the image of your suspicions onto the water?” I asked the young man. “If it had been a stranger, would you have seen him in the water just the same? How does one imagine a stranger?” He was surprised that I did not understand.
At long last I was sailing through the Straits of Malacca, as I had wanted so much to do when I was in Kuala Lumpur. Yet they never looked like real straits: when you saw one shore you did not see the other, and most of the time both were invisible, giving the impression that you were on the open sea.
By the third meal on board I began to hate religious tolerance: as the Muslims eat no pork and the Hindus are vegetarians and the Bataks I know not what, we always had to fill our stomachs with a tasteless cabbage-and-potato soup, big plates of white rice and some small fried fish. The fact that all Indonesians are required to believe in a god, and the many different gods must all be respected, was certainly not conducive to good cuisine on board.
We called on schedule at Belawan on the east coast of Sumatra, the ship’s loudspeakers blaring forth at full blast the same melancholy tune they played at every port of call. Moored along the quay were rusty old ships, flying the washed-out flags of unheard-of countries, all there to load the great, stinking wealth of the island: rubber.
From Belawan to the city of Medan is a good twenty miles, which I traveled in a cart pulled by a motorcycle. This time I think my first impressions were right: Sumatra is a rich island, but full of poor people. We passed fertile palm plantations, but alongside them, amid dirt and heaps of plastic bags, were the fetid hovels of the poor devils who worked them. Wherever these people settled, churches sprang up. It intrigued me to find out how many there were, but I soon lost count. There were churches of all denominations. Again, it was a question of market forces: as every Indonesian was now required more or less by law to have a god, merchants had moved in to exploit this new market in souls. There were Baptists, Charismatics, Evangelicals, Seventh-Day Adventists and lots more. As far as the government was concerned, the more missionaries the better: they all do their bit in the fight against Communism.
I stayed in Medan for four days. I wanted to see a few prominent Chinese who, here as elsewhere, held the strings of the economy, but before getting to work I called at the office of the Pelni Lines. I asked the director what had happened to the weekly ship from Medan to Jakarta, the one I had not taken. He looked at me, understandably worried. “Nothing, sir. Why?”
So the ship had not sunk, and my premonition was wrong. Better so: otherwise fear for the future would have entered my every thought. And yet one still suspects that there might be such a thing as premonition, and when it turns out to be right, once in a thousand times, or ten thousand, or a million, that suspicion is reinforced. To prove the contrary with facts is much simpler, but also less interesting. Is it not the same with prophecy?
While I was traveling, the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, was killed by a bomb, probably planted by the Tamil Tigers—the same guerrillas who assassinated the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. Premadasa was known to have in his retinue some famous astrologers and experts on the occult; the opposition had even accused him in Parliament of relying on their advice to run the affairs of state. Had no one warned him? Had no one put him on his guard? Yes. In a Medan newspaper I read that an astrologer from the countryside—not one of the president’s usual crew—had gone to see him and warned him to be very careful between April 14 and the beginning of June. In that period, he said, the president must avoid traveling and appearing in public. The man was right. But what about all the others, the ones Premadasa consulted regularly? And those who at the beginning of the year had forecast health, wealth and happiness for the president? As in roulette: there is always some player who places his bet on the lucky number. But for each round the winner changes.
Medan too was a gold mine—a gold mine for me, that is—a place where I could follow threads leading to many worthwhile stories. In Medan, a Chinese showed me an old photo of the family of Tjong Ah-fei, the man who to all intents and purposes had founded the city. He had arrived, penniless, from China at the end of the last century, and in a short time he owned eight hundred properties, fifteen plantations, a bank, the opium monopoly, and the house which today, though abandoned, is still the most fascinating of the city. In 1908 Tjong Ah-fei married a beautiful Chinese girl of sixteen, and in 1921, after doing great charitable works, building hospitals, schools and a temple, he died. The photo, with the widow in the center, the children and about twenty relatives in order of seniority, was taken in 1927. In the front row, towering over the Chinese and with a devil-may-care look in his eye, was a young white man.
“And this one, who’s he?” I asked.
“An Italian. It’s a long story,” said the Chinese. It took me two hours to unravel it. Pietro Maurizio Lungo, born in 1899, was a tennis player, cyclist and racing-car driver who worked as a dancer in a nightclub in Geneva. There he met Tjong Ah-fei’s young widow, who took her tubercular children to Switzerland every year for the air, and in 1927 he came to Medan as her “secretary.” An elegant man of the world, Lungo set the fashion for this provincial city. He introduced cycling to Sumatra and organized the first bicycle races on the island. In 1959 he met a beautiful Javanese woman forty years his junior and married her. To do so he had converted to Islam.
By the time I arrived, Lungo had been dead for some years, but I managed to find his Javanese wife and their two daughters—the eighteen-year-old had just won the title of Miss Medan. They got out old photograph albums, letters and newspaper clippings. I could happily have got lost on the trail of another of those adventurous, footloose Italians who have left their traces all over the world.
The same Chinese who had shown me the photo of Tjong Ah-fei’s family told me about a most unusual temple. It is run by a sect of vegetarian virgins, each of whom, to carry on the tradition, adopts two young girls. These virgins read the future—one of them by using the petals of a flower picked in their garden. How could I not go there?
From the road I could not tell that it was a temple. The Chinese in Indonesia have no right to their own identity: they are not allowed to speak their language in public or teach it to their children, they have to take Indonesian names and give up their own, and they are not allowed to display signs with Chinese writing on them. So the gold characters on a large black panel in the Tem
ple of Celestial Fortune were hidden, like everything else, behind a high peripheral wall. Once I was inside, however, it was like being in a corner of old China—clouds of incense, statues of various deities on the altars, courtyards with pots and plants, a papier-mâché tiger with dozens of little candles at its feet, and a sort of oven in which the faithful burn wads of money to show the gods how little they care for material blessings. The money is obviously counterfeit—the gilt-edged banknotes are issued by the “Bank of Hell”—but the gods are unaware of this. Always practical, my Chinese!
Even the virgins were in the old style, dressed in pink silk pajamas, with their long hair tied in a bun at the back of the neck. The one who told my fortune sat at a high square table, pale and beautiful. She sent me into the garden to pick a flower—a sort of large daisy with a yellow center and white petals—then asked me when and where I was born, and looked at my face and hands. Pulling off the petals one by one and laying them out before her like cards, she announced that if I had not had an operation before I was thirty-eight, I would have one at sixty; that I would live to be over seventy; that I was destined to marry a second time and have a third child, a boy. Perhaps I looked worried, because she added that the second marriage need not be official. I would be able to keep the second woman as a xiao lao può—a “little wife,” a concubine. I did not yet know the woman, but I would meet her the following month, in June. There was no doubt about this: the petals said I must have two wives and a second son besides the one I already had and my daughter. (There she hit the mark.)
As for my professional life, I had made a mistaken start. (Quite right—dealing in typewriters at Olivetti certainly suited me less than banging on one.) Only at thirty had I begun really doing what I wanted. (Right again.) And only after thirty-eight had I been successful. (Well, yes and no.)
The virgin told me I must be very careful during my fifty-ninth year, because then there would be a great obstacle. (Always that year, when I want to be in Hong Kong to see the end of the colony.) Between sixty-four and sixty-six years of age I must avoid going to dangerous places or war zones. (What the devil made her think that this was a possibility?) In that period, too, there is an obstacle.
On the question of money she repeated what all the others had told me: money slips through my fingers. Her advice was to put a gold ring on my left middle finger. In any case I need not worry, because in my old age I would be rich and would leave plenty of capital and property to my three children. She may have been reading in the petals, but she seemed to be looking at the same pages of the same book which others had read to me already.
She said that for me this was a very lucky year, with many novelties including the “little wife” I was soon to meet. I was tickled by this beautiful nun who so insisted on my having a second wife, and found myself asking her, “But couldn’t it be you?” She gave a little laugh and ended the interview by apologizing if she had said things that had not pleased me, or anything that was not true. She blessed the petals with a few words and a gesture of the hand, packed them tightly into a piece of fine pink paper and gave it to me as an amulet. I was to go nowhere without it. The taboo? I must be vegetarian. But I could eat fish now and then if I liked.
The next morning as I was having breakfast at the Hotel Dharma Deli, a legacy of the Dutch colonial period, a distinguished-looking Indonesian gentleman sat down next to me. He had come from Jakarta on business. He was an official of the Ministry of Forests—a low-ranking official, he explained. Married? he asked me. For a change I said no, and in this I seemed to him very fortunate. His second wife did nothing but quarrel with the first, and he had had to put her out of the house together with their two children. He had remained with his first wife and three children, but now he missed the others. Who had sent him to me to tell these stories? Was it Heaven, to put me on guard against the “little wife” I was to meet the following month?
In Medan some countries of the world are represented not by professional diplomats but by honorary consuls, usually old-time residents with a long experience of the place. I was sure I could learn something from them, so I went to see the German consul. He was away, but his secretary suggested some people to see, and made a couple of appointments for me. Finally we got on to the usual subject.
“Dukuns? My grandfather was a famous dukun in the region of Lake Toba,” said the secretary. “He was a rajah, a prince. When the revolution against the sultanate reached even here, many other rajahs were slaughtered and their homes burned, but my grandfather was spared because he had used his powers for everyone’s good. The people of the village hid him underground and kept him there for days on end. When he died he was 118 years old. He was an expert in black magic, but first and foremost he had a thorough knowledge of forest herbs. My grandmother helped him a lot; she mixed medicines for his patients, and most important she raised ducks … but only red ones.”
“Ducks?”
“Yes, because my grandfather’s powers came from red ducks. He had to eat at least one a week, and it had to be cooked without anyone tasting it. When he received patients Grandfather always held a wooden stick carved with many figures. We still have that stick in the house. It was the symbol of his powers.”
The secretary’s grandfather had had seven wives and eighteen children. Her own father was the eldest son of the first wife, and as such should have inherited the powers of the dukun. “Grandfather, on his deathbed, called my father to him and whispered something in his ear, but my father said he was very sorry, he couldn’t do it: he had studied, he had converted to Christianity and become a Protestant pastor, he couldn’t have anything to do with magic,” she said. “Grandfather died a very disappointed man at not being able to pass on his secrets.”
The young woman remembered her grandfather’s house as a place of great peace and serenity. This was a formula I knew of old—as if there really were a relation between harmony, equilibrium with nature, and the exercise of occult powers. For that, if for nothing else, I felt it was a shame that her father had not wanted to maintain the old tradition on the shores of Lake Toba. Another page ripped out from the book of human knowledge?
From Medan I took a ferry that crossed the Straits of Malacca and set me down in Butterworth, a city on the Malaysian coast across from Penang, and from there I took my beloved old train for Bangkok. It was full of backpackers and those seasoned foreigners—American ex-soldiers, German petty crooks and an assortment of dropouts who survive by running bars with girls for rent—who have to go to the Thai consulate in Penang every three months to renew their “tourist” visas.
At the end of my compartment—second class, because there is air conditioning in first and you could die of cold—I noticed a monk. He was tall, with the usual orange tunic and shaved head, and a yellow canvas bag over his shoulder. He had dark skin, and from a distance I took him for an Indian. I went and sat next to him, and found that he was in fact a tanned Dutchman. He was thirty-five years old, and had been born in Surinam, where his father was a judge. At sixteen he was sent to Holland to study. He had scarcely arrived when he went through a crisis. “I came from a world that was poor, with no modern conveniences, where people were relatively happy, and I found myself in a world of wealth and comfort where everyone was unhappy.” This had set him “on the search path,” as he put it: six years meditating in India as a yogi with a “great teacher,” never cutting his hair or beard, wearing nothing but a rag around his waist; then as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka with various teachers.
“Buddhism is very well suited to our Western mind,” said Bikku—he chose to be called thus, by the simple name of all monks in Thailand. “It meets our need for rationality. A principle of Buddhism is: ‘Don’t believe anything you can’t prove, don’t believe in anything you can’t experience yourself.’ The teachers are important, all of them. The great difference is that the Thai Buddhists only show you the way, you must make it on your own, while the Indian teachers tell you: ‘Believe, have faith in me and I�
�ll take you to paradise!’ And in the end you follow the path sitting on their shoulders.”
Only in a train, with so many hours of travel ahead, with the countryside gliding pleasantly past the windows and a fine sudden tropical storm with bucketing rain you catch by the handful to splash your sweaty face, can you let yourself go like that, and talk without worrying about the time or the apparent absurdity of the conversation.
“Bikku, do you believe in the powers?” I asked him.
“Of course. It’s through meditation that one acquires them.” Of this he had no doubts. Through meditation he had managed to cure himself of a throat tumor, he said. From his bag he fished out a small purple book, which in a few pages told the story of a Burmese nurse who was given up for lost by the doctors. She began meditating, and she was cured of cancer. You need only believe, the power of faith does the rest.
Bikku said there is no cure for all illnesses, and that every healer is able to cure only certain diseases. It is the same with the powers. There are masters who can materialize another person’s thoughts (you are thirsty, and the master creates a glass of water in your hand), others who know how to talk to plants or to postpone their own death. The teacher of his teacher in Sri Lanka had lived several hundred years, and his own teacher, Ananda Maitreya, was now ninety-seven and could go on living as many years as he cared to, through meditation.
Speaking of powers, Bikku said one must be ultracareful in developing them. An important role of the teacher is that of guide, because the powers can be used for evil as well as good: they can cure, but also kill. The bomoh and the dukun use, for black magic, the same powers the monks use on the path of enlightenment.
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 27