A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

But even that sensible separation, which for centuries has made the British British and the rest of us “Continentals,” has now disappeared because of a claustrophobic tunnel under the sea. Somewhere there is someone who is pushing to make the world turn faster and faster, and to make people more and more the same—in the name of something called “globalization,” the meaning of which few understand and still fewer have said they want.

  In London I was in the hands of my publisher. Between one appointment and another I asked my “minder” if she could help me to find a fortune-teller. She made an appointment for me at an address in Monmouth Street; I was to ask for Mr. Norman.

  I stepped out of the taxi somewhat embarrassed. It is one thing to visit an old lama in Ulan Bator as an explorer, a journalist looking for some truth, and another to go to a fortune-teller in the middle of London. There one feels the need of an alibi, even for oneself. But I had none.

  My embarrassment increased when I found that the address I had been given was a shop with “Mysteries” painted on the window. It was a sort of supermarket, or school, or temple, of the occult. It was surprisingly crowded with young “alternative” people: punks, apprentice wizards and young witches on active service. For sale on the shelves were all the books of magic, miracles, mystery, all the tomes on Buddhism, Oriental philosophy, astrology and chiromancy, that one could imagine. Anything you might want to know was there. Everything which I imagined I had sniffed out myself could undoubtedly be found in one or other of those little books or those records and videos lined up on the shelves.

  At the cash register was a girl with fiery red hair in great long curls. I paid her $15, went up a stairway covered with a straw mat, and arrived in a room divided into many cubicles, each with its fortune-teller and its posters of Indian or Buddhist divinities. In one I even saw a glass ball.

  “I am Norman. Do you have an appointment?” The man was about sixty; he had a sallow complexion, a prominent chin, hair receding at the temples. He was wearing a black leather jacket and dark trousers. In his hand he held a lighted cigarette. He took me into his cubicle and had me sit across from him at a cheap little table. There were some psychedelic posters on the walls. I was entitled to half an hour of consultation, he said, and to get my money’s worth we had better begin at once.

  He handed me a pack of cards with pictures in bright colors and asked me to shuffle them three times. Then he took every seventh card from the deck, laid them out in a pattern, and began his analysis: “You are beginning a new cycle of your life, and you are about to take some steps in the dark. As you are a man who likes challenges, you will meet with success. Great success, no doubt about it. Look—in this pack there are four powerful cards, and you have three of them here, all together. So I tell you: just do whatever you like and you’ll succeed. Only you must take care of your health, because you are a man who uses a great deal of energy. At times too much. Try to keep your battery always well charged.”

  I interrupted to ask him to tell me everything, absolutely everything he saw, even if he saw horrible things.

  “There is nothing negative in what I see in the cards. Of course you too will die one day, like me, like everyone, but the cards do not tell me when. I don’t see your death here. Perhaps an astrologer could do it. You’re a man who likes to be under pressure, to be in danger, to take risks; but if a bullet comes along it misses you, perhaps by a fraction of an inch, and you survive. This is what the cards say. Your whole life is under a precise sign: ‘Lucky rather than rich.’ Here are the cards, see?” (I saw nothing but some pictures which meant nothing to me.) “These are the cards of fortune, but there are none of the cards of wealth, not even one. In the cards I also see a woman, a woman with a strong character who plays a great part in your life.”

  Norman went on for twenty minutes, chain-smoking, reshuffling the cards, having me choose one and laying out his patterns again before pronouncing on various themes that I knew well by now. They were the same in Bangkok, in Ulan Bator and in London: the death of a person close to me in recent months or in the months to come; a person younger than me whom I should try to get along with during October; a friend who might betray me; long journeys between October 10 and November 20, and so on.

  I looked at my watch and decided to use the last ten minutes to talk about Norman rather than about myself. I interrupted again and asked him if he believed the things he said he saw in the cards.

  “Not 100 percent, otherwise we would no longer have any responsibility for our actions,” he said. “The cards read the shadows of things, of events. What I can do is help people to change the position of the light, and then, with free will, they can change the shadows. That I really do believe: you can change the shadows.”

  This seemed one of the best descriptions I had heard of fortune-tellers’ work: changing the shadows. Accurate too, if, as Pirandello and Rashomon have taught us, there is not one truth but many, depending on who looks at things and how he does so.

  I told Norman why I was there, and in return, lighting yet another cigarette, he told me why he was there. For years he had been a teller in a bank. He couldn’t stand it anymore, and left. He went from one job to another, and none of them paid enough to live on or gave him as much satisfaction as reading the cards. Of the $15 fee half went to him, the other half to the shop. At the end of the day he felt he had truly helped at least a couple of people.

  I liked Norman. By no means did he have special powers—if he had, he would have stopped smoking!—but he had a good deal of common sense. I felt that he was sincere, and that once in a while he really did help someone dispel a bit of shadow and bring more light into his life. Like the fortune-teller in Betong who could tell by “feeling” when a girl had AIDS, like the woman in Hanoi, like the witch of Ulan Bator.

  I would have liked to board a ship in London and sail down the Thames to the sea, like one of Conrad’s voyagers, but the ship for Hamburg departed from Harwich, so I had to take a train to the coast. Even that was enjoyable, though, as it gave me time to take in the beautiful, orderly English countryside, unspoiled by anything, not even the usual high-tension pylons. It seemed as though particular care had been taken of the landscape to preserve its naturalness. And that was heartening. From the minute I arrived in Europe, I had been struck by how well this continent carried its age. It had not tried to give itself another face; it was proud of the one it had, and made an effort to preserve it. After the Asian mania for self-destruction this was a great relief.

  The ship left Harwich in the early afternoon, and at dawn the next day we reached the mouth of the Elbe. It was six more hours before we docked at Altona, but they were six very pleasant hours, slowly sailing between the elegant banks of this river which has seen so much history, and which has brought Hamburg all its wealth.

  Hamburg is a port: something I have always known but never truly understood until, like a Hanseatic sailor returning after months at sea, I saw on the horizon first the roofs of Cuxhaven, then the small houses of the captains and the white mansions of the rich merchants shining through the majestic trees at Blankenaese, and at last the green copper church spires of the city. I had been in Hamburg dozens of times, but it had taken a Hong Kong fortune-teller to make me feel its true soul.

  That was not the only surprise. When I went to see the chief editors of Der Spiegel they said: “We know you want to go and live in India. Good. The job of correspondent will be free at the end of this year. From January 1 we would like you to be in Delhi.”

  Well, well. The old blind man in Bangkok was right, and so were all the fortune-tellers who said I would move to another country in 1994. I said nothing, but the thing did seem strange. However, it would be a problem for me to leave Bangkok so soon. And how would I go? By plane? I remembered that one of my fortune-tellers had said that a good time to move would be after April 8. After some discussion it was agreed that I would move to India on May 1, 1994, which would satisfy everyone’s needs—even those of my destiny.


  The Hong Kong fortune-teller, after all these years, continued to shower me with blessings. The next were eighteen long, restful days of silence and solitude on board a ship sailing from Europe to Asia, crossing the great seas of history: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean.

  For some strange reason we tend to think of human events as taking place on land. We see the past in the physical solidity of monuments, in things that have been built, in the remains of things destroyed, in tombs. But much of history—often the most dramatic part—is written on the seas, where men have left no record of themselves, where everything has sunk without trace, and the water is just as it was a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago: illegible. The sea has inspired man’s dreams of conquest; on the sea the fates of civilizations and empires have been played out. It was the promise of unknown lands beyond the sea that spurred the great navigators to entrust their lives to the waves.

  Sea travel is one of the oldest and most enjoyable ways of moving about the world. But unfortunately, as I had already discovered, it is rapidly disappearing: another of those pleasures which, through our compulsion to be modern, we are wiping out. Ships still exist, and they all still have some cabins for passengers, but the rules of bureaucracies and insurance companies have made them inaccessible.

  I was lucky. In Singapore I had had supper with Roberto Pregarz, who ran the old Raffles Hotel in its last years of glory, before it too was modernized and became a deluxe tourist supermarket. I had asked him if he knew anyone in an Italian shipping line that sailed to the Orient, and he had given me the address of a friend of his, a captain on the board of Lloyd Triestino. I wrote to him, and received an encouraging reply. If I would sign some papers releasing the company from liability for anything that might happen to me on board, I could travel—this time with Angela—on a container ship, the Trieste, that was sailing from La Spezia to Singapore at the end of September. A real gift.

  The gift began with La Spezia itself. I knew the city only by name, and if it had not been for that ship, I probably would never have set foot there. I would have missed the pleasure of knowing a lovely nineteenth-century city, built by an admiral on the orders of Cavour, who had a strong aesthetic sense, when the newly united Italy needed an arsenal and a base for its navy. The departure of the Trieste, scheduled for a Saturday, was postponed first to the Monday and then to the Wednesday, so we had plenty of time for a side trip to Porto Venere and a whole day in Lerici, enjoying the gracious idleness of a seaside resort out of season.

  Returning to La Spezia by bus along the coast, we saw the imposing, awkward form of the Trieste as it sailed into port. The ship was two hundred yards long, and its whole deck was occupied by stacks of containers. They looked like apartment blocks with a few narrow corridors between them; it was like a deserted city.

  With the advent of containers, ships have lost their old shapely elegance, and ports have lost their lively swarms of humanity. The “new” port of La Spezia looked like the set for a science-fiction film. Giant cranes moved back and forth, loading and unloading immense iron boxes of all colors, setting them down on lorries, on ships, on stacks of other boxes—all automatically, to the sound of a continuous alarm that did not alarm anyone. In all the vast quadrangles of the port we did not see a living soul, as if everything was maneuvered by some distant computer, and men no longer existed.

  It felt good to sail away and watch the lights of that spectral port merge with the others twinkling along the bay in the smoky darkness of the night.

  For nearly three weeks we did not touch land. As the days passed, there was always some goal to look forward to: the sight of Scylla and Charybdis, the Strait of Messina, the Suez Canal, the stop at the Bitter Lakes, the entrance to the Red Sea. We had a spacious, comfortable cabin with a large porthole. The crew was reduced for economic reasons to a minimum of eighteen men who, because of the shifts of work below decks, we hardly ever saw.

  The days went by quickly, punctuated by the ceremonies of lunch and dinner in the salon. We dined with the officers, elegant in their white uniforms—gentlemen in the old style, full of mariners’ wisdom and sea stories to entertain their guests. The food, prepared by a Neapolitan cook, was excellent, and the menu was never repeated.

  I got up with the sun and ran a dozen times around the ship each morning. Then for hours and hours I would sit at the stern, reading or dreamily looking out to sea, or watching a lone crew member scraping the rust off a capstan far away along the deck. In the silence, broken only by the creaking of the containers which shifted slightly with the rolling of the ship, I thought I finally understood sailors: they too were fugitives, they too were escaping from the world on land, from social commitments, from the weight of relationships, to live for weeks and months in that ever-changing universe of water and sky, to welcome the apparition of an island through the fog, or a lighthouse blinking in the darkness.

  But sailors are a dying race. Already they are no longer called by the old names: able seamen, mates and boatswains have been abolished, and in their place, for trade-union reasons, there is a new category of comuni polivalenti—Italian bureaucratic jargon for all-purpose workers.

  The same thing is happening with the marine knowledge accumulated over the centuries: the modern world has no more use for it. Now everything is done by instruments. Once a sailor had to train his eyes, to learn to discern the presence of a shoal of fish by a rippling of the surface, to assess a harbor’s navigability or detect a reef. Now all this expertise has been supplanted by sonar and radar, which every year become more accurate. But what a fund of knowledge is being lost! How many natural antennae are falling from men’s heads, to be replaced by electronic antennae!

  “Everything is automatic. There’s no more need to look at the sea,” said the captain sorrowfully. The sea, when you look at it, is so extraordinary! Different every hour, with different colors, different densities, sounds, movements, different spectacles: once it was dolphins swimming alongside the ship, once a whale diving quickly as if frightened by our monstrous size, or shoals of flying fish playing with the keel, or sharks on their way to mate and breed in the bay of Djibouti.

  Every conversation in the salon ended with a lament for all that had changed in ships, and for the poetry which technology has stolen from life at sea. According to the chief engineer, it is the fault of the Americans: after spending so much money going to the moon they found nothing there to exploit, so now they’re trying to recoup their investments by recycling the technology developed for that trip for civilian uses and hawking it all over the world. He was convinced that soon all large international shipments will be made by submarines entirely controlled by computers, with no crew at all and no need to face the difficulties and contrary forces that affect surface navigation.

  The cook particularly objected to the telephone, because of which everyone had lost the habit of writing home. You spent a lot of money for three minutes of conversation a week in which all you said was, “Hello, can you hear me?” “Yes, I can hear you very well.” “So can I.”

  All the time on board we had a vague sensation of witnessing something that was ending. Then one day that sensation became precise: our voyage was a funeral. Shortly after we passed Cape Guardafui (“look and flee”) the radio operator received a message from the trade unions urging the crew to go on strike: the state enterprise that owned the Trieste was negotiating to sell it. When it returned to Italy the ship would pass into the hands of some multinational company that would rename it, register it under a flag of convenience, and replace the Italian comuni polivalenti with Asian seamen, perhaps Chinese, paid less than $50 a month. So, this was the last voyage of one of the few remaining ships to fly the Italian flag.

  Sitting at the stern, I wondered how much longer such a world can last, based exclusively on the inhuman, immoral and philistine criteria of economics. As I strained my eyes to make out the silhouettes of distant islands, I imagined one inhabited by a tribe of poets, h
eld in reserve for a time when humanity, after this dark age of materialism, will begin once again to sustain its existence with other values.

  One of the great pleasures of the ship was having time to let my thoughts wander unrestrained, to indulge in fantasies and play with the most absurd notions. At times I had the sensation of sifting through the whole ragbag of memories accumulated in my life.

  Taking time for oneself is a simple cure for the ills of the soul, but one which people apparently find difficult to allow themselves. For years, in moments of depression, I had dreamed of sticking a note on my door saying “Out to lunch,” and making that absence last for days or weeks. Now, finally, I had succeeded. I had all the time in the world to watch a flock of swallows that came aboard as we crossed the Mediterranean, flying out over the sea from time to time and then returning to hide among the containers. I had time to think about time, about how I instinctively always find the past more fascinating than the future, and how the present often bores me, so that only by thinking of how I will remember it later can I enjoy the moment.

  For shipboard reading I had brought two books by Mario Appelius, a prewar Italian journalist who has now been completely forgotten. He was put on the index for having been a supporter of Mussolini: another example of how, in these times of vaunted freedom of thought, heavy prejudices are still with us.

  Appelius was a great traveler, with an instinct for history and a deep understanding of humanity’s dramas. His descriptions of a meeting with an overseas Chinese in an opium den in Phnom Penh, or the crowning of a child emperor in the ancient city of Hué in Vietnam, are masterful. Appelius understood much about the character of colonialism, about the aspirations of Asian peoples and the consequences of modernity which in his time already threatened the survival of old cultures and civilizations. His sorrow for the disappearance of the Kas, mythical savages of the Laotian mountains, was quite authentic. But because he remained to the end a convinced fascist—it was his voice on the radio that repeated the famous wartime slogan “Dio stramaledica gli inglesi!” (May God supercurse the British!)—he became a nonperson, an unmentionable name. In reading his book, I felt I did something to redress the balance.