I spent about an hour enjoying that padded torpor, without memory, without weight, without disappointments. When I left I felt reconciled with the world, and when I saw that the opium den was only a few steps from the head office of the Party Daily, I had to smile.
The rickshaw was waiting for me, and I asked the driver to give me a complete tour of the city before returning to the hotel. No other form of transport gives the passenger that majestic ease, that sense of freedom, that cool air in the face. My rickshaw glided along the avenue skirting the Lake of the Found-Again Sword, in front of the Opera Palace and the Old Residence of the French governor, then back toward the river and the narrow lanes of the old city. I felt as if I were on a spaceship floating between past and present, but with no more need to make comparisons or to judge. History and politics had nothing to do with me. I was fascinated only by the life that continued to flower, tenacious, greedy and lascivious, amid that decay. The rickshaw raced through streets that buzzed with vices and temptations, and I took in only some disjointed images: naked bodies in a cone of light, women talking together, laughter and obscene gestures from girls by a door, an occasional rat scurrying along those walls unpainted for decades.
That night—I do not know if I dreamed it, or imagined it with open eyes—I saw myself throw away a dictionary which I had been using until then, and get a new one that contained only positive words. Later, half asleep, for no reason I remembered the words: “Take great care of your travel documents.” The fortune-teller of Phnom Penh! I went to check my passport and … lo and behold, my exit visa from Vietnam was not marked “surface travel.” The clerks in the Bangkok embassy had forgotten to write “Friendship Pass,” the Chinese frontier post. If I had turned up there I would undoubtedly have been sent back.
Though I was in Hanoi, it was not easy to obtain that visa. It took letters and recommendations, and two more days of waiting.
First the man cut away a little skin just behind the ear, then he plunged in the knife and slowly began probing for the jugular vein. When the blood began to gush out he collected it in a pot. The dog, its jaws tied, hung upside down by its feet from the door frame; it could not even moan. A crowd of children watched, most of them indifferent. The man skinned the dog and cut it up: the breast for stew; the legs, perhaps, to be roasted.
I had gone out for my morning run in the streets near my ramshackle hotel. The sight of that domestic butchering made me very angry. How could death—even a dog’s death—be so casual? I remembered a news item I had recently read: in Tokyo they had opened the first astrology shops for domestic animals, especially cats and dogs. In Hanoi they would have no problems of prediction: the destiny of dogs is to end up in the pot! Then I started blaming the dogs. They are supposed to have such a keen sense of smell: why do they not realize that these Vietnamese stink of the dog meat they have eaten for centuries? Why do they not realize that man, whom they think is such a great friend, has no scruples at all?
But the life of dogs went on, in the same absurd way as all other lives. As I ran I saw many other dogs, exactly like the one I had just seen quartered, playing with children, scuffling together and digging in garbage heaps from which the beggars had already helped themselves.
I tried to get the address of a fortune-teller in Hanoi, but it seemed that it would not be easy. I was told that nobody believed in them and that they no longer existed. Then, through the usual chain of chance encounters, I met a woman who knew of one. She herself had consulted her a few weeks before: her son, a drug addict, had taken the family television and gone to sell it at the port of Haiphong to buy heroin. She did not know what to do. “Wait three days and the boy will return,” the fortune-teller had told her. And he did.
My informant was the quintessence of everything that filled me with despair about Vietnam. She came from a family of great revolutionaries, she had been a guerrilla and had married a fighter. But when the war was over her husband had gone off with a younger woman and left her alone with her son and all his problems.
The fortune-teller lived not far from the Temple of Literature, and we went there by rickshaw. Her house was very modest, little more than a cube of cement. She was a thin woman of about fifty, with an unusual head of curly hair and a warm, friendly manner. She had begun to “see” after a grave illness. She had been cured by a ray of light that fell on her one day.
We sat on tiny stools around a low table. She did not want to know anything about me. She took both my hands and caressed them, looked into my face, and began speaking in a very sweet, affectionate voice. She asked me in what years my wife and I were born.
“That’s bad,” she said. “For one of the tiger like you it is absolutely not advisable, indeed dangerous, to marry a rabbit.” (The exact opposite of what the Singapore fortune-teller told me.) “It is your wife who has prevented you from making a good career and being successful. You should leave her, or at least stay far away from her for long periods, otherwise you will have grave problems of health.”
This was interesting. Using the system of interpreting each pronouncement with its own key, I could see some truth in this description of my relationship with Angela: if we had been together for over thirty years, it was partly because we had alternated long periods together with long periods of separation. When the children were small, if I was at home for more than two or three weeks Angela would say, “Isn’t there anything happening in the world? Isn’t there an offensive in Vietnam?” And something would happen, and I would leave. I would be away a couple of weeks, and the return would be magnificent for all. Many marriages die simply of boredom. That is certainly not what the fortune-teller meant, but it was what came into my mind.
“From now to the end of your life you will have no problems. There is only one, linked with the place where you live. Under your house there is a young dead man who prevents you from becoming rich.” (So that’s the reason!) “Every time you make some money he destroys it. You need to appease his soul with an altar, or to open a new door in the southwest corner of the house, facing India.”
A beautiful woman of about fifty had come in. She had listened to my “destiny” and was preparing to present her own case. She said she often came to the fortune-teller, who had become her best friend. A railway engineer, she had studied in China, had been a member of the Party and had married a high official. Her husband had had a lover, and the fortune-teller had helped her with advice. What advice? To have patience, talk with her husband, understand him, confront the problem together. The advice which any friend would give, but which neither her colleagues at work nor those in the Party had offered her. Is this not also one of the functions of fortune-tellers?
Again I found myself sitting among fifty-year-old women with marital problems, before a simple charlatan. But I found the women much more agreeable and interesting than my saintly revolutionaries-turned-businessmen.
I asked the fortune-teller if she saw any risks for me in airplanes. No, absolutely none, she said, but I should be very careful about trains. Those were more dangerous for me.
“Too bad. Tomorrow I’m taking the train for Lam Son and the Chinese border,” I said.
“Not that one! Don’t take it. It’s a train full of bandits and thieves. Often the police themselves pretend to be bandits and rob the passengers. Change your plans! Go by air! That train is dangerous for you!”
At that point I no longer knew if she was speaking as a fortune-teller or as a passenger of the Vietnamese railways. Either way, I was not going to take her advice.
20/A SHIP IN THE DESERT
There was a big storm during the night, but even that did not relieve the suffocating latrine stench of Hanoi Station. Like a defeated army in retreat, hundreds of passengers bivouacked on the stairs, in the corridors and along the platforms, waiting for trains. It was still dark, and every time I asked a policeman or a railway employee where I could find my train he waved his hand in a different direction. Finally a woman led me past rows of parked carriag
es, in front of trains about to leave, and handed me over to the man in charge of the express for Lam Son.
This train for the Chinese border was even more modest than the one on which I had come from Saigon; the straw mats on the wooden seats were even dirtier and more tattered. My presence created a great problem for the authorities: how should they protect me and my baggage? They decided to evict all the passengers from two rows of seats near the ones reserved for the police, so I would never be out of their sight. Anyone who tried to come near my seat was sent packing. Perhaps the fortune-teller was right after all, and the train was beset by bandits. Or was the danger in the policemen themselves? The court fortune-teller in Phnom Penh had also said that traveling at the end of July would be risky.
The train pulled out of the station at 5:30. It was just dawn, and from my window I saw Hanoi waking up, a desolate panorama of shanties, pigsties, garrets, hovels and patched huts—a vast rabbit warren. Every shack was ringed with barbed wire and walls topped with broken glass, to protect each pauper’s miserable patch from the pauper next door.
We crossed the Red River—red with silt that turned the water to mud. Old men were doing exercises on the bridge, in the lanes reserved for bicycles. It was there that the guerrilla fighters entered Hanoi in 1954, and that the defeated French departed. It was on that bridge that a Vietminh soldier gave a French officer a contemptuous kick in the backside.
The train was extremely slow. For hours we chugged through rice fields, and after the grayness of Hanoi I was comforted by their orderly calm and their age-old green beauty. At one station a man with a bamboo water pipe boarded the train. He had a basket containing an oil lamp, a teapot and two small glasses. You put a pinch of tobacco in the pipe, you inhale, you hear the water gurgling as the smoke passes through it, you breathe deeply and you remain in a daze. It is a bit like fainting, but the little glass of tea, strong and bitter, restores you.
Two boys caught riding without tickets were brought to sit next to me, handcuffed to the seat, and slapped by the policemen. One of them cried, but the other was stonily defiant as if he meant to get his own back some other time.
At the Dong Mo station the train stopped for half an hour to give everyone time to eat at stalls on the platform. When it started again the track led up a mountain. The train climbed so slowly that some youngsters were able to get off, drink from a fountain and jump on again. The mountains were wooded and damp. This was the strip of land that the Chinese occupied in 1979 to punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia and overthrowing Pol Pot. When they withdrew they destroyed everything in their path. In former times the line crossed the border and linked up with the Chinese railway system, but during the incursions the Chinese ripped up and carted away the last few miles of track, so when the train reached Dong Dan it could go no further. It had taken us exactly eight hours to travel the hundred miles from Hanoi.
I covered the last miles to the border on the back of a moped. The Vietnamese officials gave me a thorough going-over. The customs officers insisted on searching my rucksack, and the police, arrogant and rude, examined my overland visa with a magnifying glass.
The border posts of Vietnam and China are a little over half a mile apart. The road runs uphill through a dense wood, and I walked alone toward China, sweating, with the trepidation one feels when going to meet a beloved that one has not seen for a long time. Again the excitement of crossing a frontier that I could see and feel physically; again the joy of arriving in a different country, a joy I felt I had earned with the effort of walking slowly toward one of its passes. I rounded a curve, looked up, and there was China—its history, its culture, its greatness—in the shape of a grand old fortress whose high, studded wooden door bore three elegant characters: “Friendship Pass.” All around was a sober, ancient stillness. I felt a strong emotion, like coming home. The contrast could not be more explicit. I had left behind a poor, hard-bitten, stubborn little country, and was now entering a majestic empire, confident and full of itself.
This old, gigantic empire still called itself socialist, but by now even China seemed to know only one god. “Qian” was the first word that greeted me; qian, money, was the word I heard in every conversation during the five days I spent crossing China from south to north. The customs officers at Friendship Pass quarreled with the Liberation Army men for the privilege of changing my dollars on the black market. Passengers on the minibus that took me to the first railway station offered me, in exchange for qian, tiny monkeys, fat snakes and other rare jungle animals, most of them no doubt in the Red Book of endangered species. I didn’t buy any and they all traveled on, in their bamboo cages, toward the cooking pots of the great restaurants of southern China.
A small local train took me to Nanning. From there the tracks apparently continued without interruption to Europe, to Florence. One had only to buy a ticket.
Until a few years ago foreigners in China were privileged, treated as guests of honor. Their tickets were sold at special windows. Today it is no longer so. “Foreigners? In the queue like everyone else!” I was ordered by the first railway employee I turned to at Nanning Station. A few thousand people crowded before tiny hatches protected by steel gratings. Hefty policemen armed with electric batons kept the surging, sweaty, quarrelsome crowd at bay. Everyone was trying to find a way to jump the queue, to claim some privilege. When an army officer pushed in front of me I told him off in Maoist style, reminding him that the meaning of his uniform was to serve the people. Everybody laughed, as if that famous phrase of Mao’s, with which generations of Chinese had been brought up, had become a joke. But it worked, and the poor fellow beat a retreat.
It took me three hours to buy my ticket—time to experience a hostility which I had never before felt in China. The impatience between foreigners and Chinese is mutual, and in the Chinese it is now mixed with envy, anger, and an ever less concealed racial aspiration to settle old scores with outsiders.
Nanning is a southern Chinese city in full expansion. Its skyscrapers mimic those of Hong Kong. Luxurious new hotels, sparkling restaurants, nightclubs and massage parlors are the oases of a new privileged class who move about in Mercedeses, escorted by bodyguards and with portable phones glued to their ears.
From Nanning to Xian is 1,500 miles, and the train journey took two days and two nights. The ticket I had managed to get was valid only for the “hard seats,” but the head conductor was a self-styled “collector of foreign banknotes,” and by contributing a few dollars to his collection I managed to get a couchette.
The train was chock-full, but at every station more masses of thin, dirty people, loaded with baggage, threw themselves at the doors and tried to get on. In Mao’s day a Chinese who wanted to travel needed a special permit from the Party Secretary of his work unit. Today anyone is free to go where he likes, but with that freedom goes an absence of protection. The pressure of ideology has disappeared, and no other system of values or social norms has taken its place. Everywhere one sees a progressive lapse into anarchy. People with qian are increasingly powerful and aggressive, while those without it are more and more defenseless.
The train itself was a perfect illustration of this change. Gone are the days when the teapots, even those of the “hard” compartments, were constantly refilled with boiling water, when the corridors were swept regularly and women employees with pigtails jumped off at each stop to wipe the door handles. On my train nobody took care of anything. As the hours and days went by, the smell from the kitchens grew more and more similar to that of the toilets, outside which there was always an impatient, noisy queue of people banging on the doors.
As we passed through the Guilin region I saw the famous mountains, but what struck me most, as in Vietnam, were the rice fields and the accumulated labor embodied in them. Everywhere I go, agriculture gives me a sense of strength; I have the impression that these countries hold together because the peasants hold out. Mao regimented them and involved them in politics; his successors will have quite a task to
keep them at bay.
Xian announced itself with a yellowish cloud of dust and smog. On the walls of the houses along the tracks, where once you could read the latest political slogans, were big posters urging you to buy cigarettes, wine, motorcycles and beauty creams. The city appeared to be seething with activity. The minute I stepped out of the station I was accosted by a young girl in a miniskirt.
“My name is Milly,” she said in English. “Do you want sex?”
“Sex? Where?”
“Over there, in the Liberation Hotel.”
Smiling women, plastered with makeup, touted for business in dark corners. Young men with megaphones invited passersby into their “video halls.” Never in the five years I lived in China had I felt so much like an outsider, so insecure, so in danger of being attacked and robbed, as I did then.
A Fortune-Teller Told Me Page 33