A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  At times, in those idle hours, I mentally reviewed the various fortune-tellers I had met, trying to find a common thread in all they had said. It seemed to me that the point of traveling is in the journey itself, not in the arrival; and similarly in the occult what counts is the search, the asking of questions, not the answers found in the cracks of a bone or the lines in your palm. In the end, it is always we ourselves who give the answer.

  “Will I die in the war?” the soldier asked the Cumaean sibyl, and from her grotto she tossed out a handful of disconnected words that had to be arranged to give her answer. The soldier had to choose whether the “non” should go before his dying, making the prophecy read “Ibis, redibis, non morieris in bello” (You will go, you will return, and will not die in the war), or before his return, to produce “Ibis, non redibis, morieris in bello” (You will go, you will not return, you will die in the war).

  As the days passed we watched for the points marked in pencil on the captain’s charts. For three days we sailed through open seas toward the island of Minicoy, but when we passed it all we could see was the faint flashing of a lighthouse. The leprosarium on the beach which the officers had told us about was impossible to make out even with a telescope.

  When we entered the Straits of Malacca we passed an island covered with palms, through which shone the white form of a Catholic church. This was the island of We’, where Nino Bixio was buried. Bixio was Garibaldi’s disillusioned companion, who came to Asia to seek his fortune and vent his frustrations after the Campaign of the Thousand. Once upon a time, passing Italian sailors would stand on the deck and salute, but that custom too has been abandoned.

  We entered the Bay of Singapore in the middle of the night. A storm had broken. The Chinese pilot who came on board whispered his orders into a walkie-talkie. Despite the storm, the moment the Trieste tied up at pier number four the cranes began to unload the containers and replace them with others bound for Japan, where the ship was to call before returning to Italy. The crew were forbidden to disembark. The resupply operations would be finished in a few hours, and the ship would leave again at once, trying to make up time and avoid the fines imposed by international regulations.

  When the police gave permission for Angela and me to go ashore, everyone was so busy working that the time for farewells and gifts was brief. The captain, in the name of the whole crew, handed us a paper bag with something light inside. I opened it when we got to the hotel. It was a flag: the flag of the Trieste, on which we had been the last passengers.

  24/THE RHYMELESS ASTROLOGER

  One gets used to everything. I was used to traveling slowly. Angela took the plane from Singapore, and in two hours she was in Bangkok, but I had two more days of travel ahead of me, by train. I stopped off in Kuala Lumpur, where my friend M.G.G. Pillai had managed to book an appointment for me with the famous fortune-teller, an Indian, whom I had not been able to see in April.

  The meeting took place in his “studio,” which was in the shopping arcade of one of the big hotels, surrounded by souvenir shops, airline offices, tailors who made suits in twenty-four hours, a barber and a newsstand. It was because of his fame—he was so much in demand that one had to book months in advance—that I was so curious to meet him.

  The minute I set eyes on the man I did not like him. He was small, about fifty, with thin curly hair, myopic eyes and a greasy forehead. I noticed at once that he had a tic—he kept jerking his right shoulder forward. My impression was of a weak person, not at ease with himself, certainly not one capable of “seeing” into other people’s lives. On his right hand he wore three rings. The most distasteful was a big one on his thumb, set with a coral. I do not know why, but I have an aversion to rings, and when I see them, even on a woman’s hand, I instinctively want to draw back.

  When I telephoned to confirm the appointment, the fortune-teller’s secretary told me that before seeing him I must not drink alcohol, tea or coffee. This immediately struck me as a little trick to impress the clients and give himself importance—as if there were something religious about reading people’s destinies in that hotel mezzanine, for a fee that depended on whether you wanted a forecast for three or six years or for the rest of your life.

  Father Willem, the Dutch missionary in Indonesia, was right: there is something in the invisible communications between people that has never been explained. You meet someone and take an instant dislike to him. Why? Why did I find that man, whom I had never seen before, absolutely unbearable? He had done me no harm—on the contrary, perhaps sensing my aversion, he went out of his way to be kind and accommodating. He tried hard to please me, and that annoyed me even more. Before he uttered a single sentence I already felt that he was a man without character, without inner calm, without wisdom. Perhaps I too, after seeing so many of these people who spend their lives meddling with the lives of others, had developed my own instinctive way of “reading” them, and had learned to distinguish the ones who really tried to understand and help from the quacks—to tell the ones with some special gift from the impostors.

  The famous fortune-teller told me he had been in his studio for twenty years. Before that he had been a teacher. I asked him if it had been some particular event, some trauma, that made him change his profession. He said no.

  As he prepared his desk, lining up his pens and arranging papers with the manic punctiliousness of a petty bureaucrat, he explained that his system was an Indian combination of astrology and palmistry. This, he said, allowed him to see even into the lives of a person’s parents, thus obtaining a more exact picture of the client’s character and destiny. Every word he said got on my nerves, and so did his gestures, and the spots of dirt on his red carpet. When I told him the hour and date of my birth, he irritated me even more by informing me—as if it were good news!—that he and I were born in the same month of the same year, only a week apart.

  So we were linked with the same animal. He, a tiger?

  He went through the usual calculations, aloud (to impress me, I thought). With foreigners the calculations are more difficult, he said, because one must take into account the latitude and longitude of the place of birth. Then he launched into a preamble that I had never heard from anyone else. And that was stupid as well: “I shall relate your past and your future on the basis of ancient Indian systems. What I tell you will remain absolutely between us. Discretion is very important. I shall tell you the whole truth, the good and the bad. I cannot be completely precise as to dates, because only God knows these things to the second. An astrologer can only be approximate. Have you seen any other astrologers in your life?”

  I nodded. He asked me what sign I was.

  “Virgo,” I said.

  “What? Haven’t the other astrologers told you that you are not a Virgo? You are a Pisces. Yes: 80 percent Pisces and 20 percent Leo. Those astrologers were not great masters.”

  The man was impossible. He took a big magnifying glass and a pocket torch and began to read my palm. After scrutinizing it for a long time he began: “Mr. Tiziano, in your family there are problems of diabetes, and you too suffer from it.” (I do not, you fool! I wanted to say, but I held back to see how far he would go.) “Your life is dominated by sex.” (I really wouldn’t say that!) “You are attracted to women and women are attracted to you. With sex you have had many experiences—of course not as many as Casanova, the greatest lover in human history, but at least half as many.” That pathetic line about “the greatest lover in human history” suggested to me that this must be his own deepest wish: to be Casanova, not an astrologer! I had a fleeting impulse of compassion for this spindly, stooping, greasy-haired gentleman. “This is absolutely certain: sex is very strong in your horoscope, and in your hand the Mount of Venus is prominent. To tell the truth, you can hardly even talk to a woman—what interests you is getting them into bed as quickly as possible. That is the spice of life for you, Mr. Tiziano. Isn’t that so?”

  I smiled, hoping to appear enigmatic and to encourage him to cont
inue.

  “In this respect you take after your father.” (My poor father, who met my mother, married her, and I think never knew another woman until he died at the age of seventy-seven.) “Your father’s still alive, isn’t he?” (I remained silent.) “Don’t be offended if I tell you this, but your father has always been a great ladies’ man. Your horoscope is clear on this point. There, I see your parents. Your mother is sad, the two of them are quarreling. When you were a child there were always quarrels in your house, about your father’s lovers. It caused you much suffering. In the early years of your life you also had problems at school: you were at the bottom of your class, while your brothers and sisters were brilliant.”

  “I have no brothers or sisters. I’m an only child,” I said, as if to punish him for his inanities, but he recovered at once.

  “Then that means that your mother must have had a number of miscarriages. That is why now you are interested in the occult, and why you have come to me to gain an understanding of your life. You bear the cross of all those souls.”

  The man was hopeless, but by now I found him comic—just as when at the opera someone sings out of tune. The first false note hurts your ears, the second still worse, but then you start waiting for the next, to laugh. I began to feel a certain pity for him as he fumbled about with his papers, his calculations and his words. I almost felt like suggesting something right for him to say, but evidently he too had his destiny, and it was to make a fool of himself.

  “As a young man you wanted to pursue a military career.” (It never crossed my mind, not even as a joke!) “You wanted to be an officer, but you didn’t succeed. Reading your palm, however, I see that now you often have to do with VIPs, important people in politics and the army. Recently you’ve had a hard time at work, because your bosses don’t appreciate you enough. And then you had a big love problem. In 1991 there was a woman in your life—one with light skin, very light, perhaps a Chinese or Korean—who made you suffer very much. She is no longer on the scene, but now I see another, a woman about to enter your life, who will cause you many problems.”

  “What woman, soothsayer?” I asked.

  “I see her very clearly: she is a Muslim woman.” (Not wearing a veil, I hope!) “Yes, because you’ll have more and more to do with Islam, and this woman is a follower of Islam. You must have had other Muslim women in the past,” (No, but what a pity!), “but this one is special. You’ve been married twice, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then your marriage is unhappy, and therefore you’ve had many, many other women in your life. When was your wife born?”

  “April 9, 1939.”

  “Ah, yes, yes! Your wife makes you unhappy: she is a petite-bourgeoise, a petulant, unbearable woman who never leaves you in peace. She is always worrying about what her friends and neighbors tell her.” (Poor Angela, this idiot reads the exact reverse of every coin!) “You have diabetes, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must have something wrong with your bladder, your liver … ah, yes, you’ve had hepatitis!”

  “No. Never.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s hard to tell about children, but it seems to me that the first one is …” (Now it’s a matter of luck) “a girl.” (He’s wrong again!)

  “No, a boy.”

  “Good, then you have two children, and the second one is also a boy … and, forgive me for telling you this, but then your wife had several abortions. Here, in your horoscope and in your hand, I see them clearly. Several abortions. You will make great progress in the last years of your life because in your hand there are two life lines,” (That seems to be true, they all see them), “and if you wish you could become a healer. Your twentieth year was a disaster.” (No!) “But the really terrible year when everything went wrong was 1971. You were confused and didn’t know what to do.” (On the contrary, that was the year I decided to come to Asia.)

  At that point I fell silent and just let him talk; I no longer wanted to contradict him, but the facts did it for me.

  “I see from both your horoscope and your hand that you have a birthmark on the sole of your foot, and that mole is significant.”

  My only mole is the one on my forehead, but I remained silent. He had me take off my shoes and socks, and he looked and looked with his flashlight. He found nothing. Anyone seeing the two of us—me sitting on a chair with my feet in the air, and him with a flashlight and magnifying glass looking for a nonexistent mole—would have burst out laughing.

  He returned to a more serious subject: my previous life. He began reciting a bizarre succession of reasonings and reckonings, with names of planets, numbers, more names and more numbers, until he finally reached his grand conclusion: “Eighty-eight, five, sixteen … This is clear: you were born Tiziano Terzani, in Florence, five years, five months and sixteen days after your previous death.”

  “And where did I die?”

  “No, that I cannot tell. That I do not see, but if you wish I can give you the address of someone who can. You see, I have had to specialize. The great majority of my clients are Chinese, and if I started talking about their previous lives I would go bankrupt. The Chinese do not care about past lives, only this life; they are interested in making money, and what they want to know is how far they can go in cheating their customers and deceiving their friends. For them only this life counts, not the one before or the one after.”

  My poor fortune-teller! Another victim of the prosaic character of the times, and of the diaspora Chinese! Perhaps a hundred years ago he would have been a better astrologer. Now he talked and talked, but none of what he said could be made to rhyme with the facts. I must have sent him a silent message of sympathy, because at long last he began saying more sensible things.

  “In my sector I am good at my job, and I can tell you one thing for certain: don’t go into business, you’ll lose everything. Never lend money, you won’t get it back. Don’t guarantee anyone’s loans and don’t play the stock market. Money is not made for you.” He looked at my left hand and said I had been in prison a couple of times in my life, and the reason was that I had annoyed government authorities and the army. There he was right.

  According to his price list I had purchased a forecast for the next three years, and he gave it to me with a plethora of dates and details. Essentially, he said, my biggest problem was health. “In 1979 you had a skin disease,” (No), “and it will come out again. Between now and your fifty-eighth year you will have a sudden, very serious illness … perhaps a heart attack. But I think you will survive. However, you must be very, very careful.” He said that in the next three years I would travel a great deal, and that, apart from the Muslim woman, I would have many lovers. I ran the risk of catching venereal diseases, perhaps even AIDS.

  He said that I would buy another house, and that I must be careful of dangerous sports. There was a good chance that I would lose my left eye. As for death, if I overcame the serious illness of the next three years I might live to the age of seventy-six, but he was not sure. He was sure that I would die far from Florence, probably in Vietnam or China, but anyway in the Orient, not in the West.

  I recalled a joke I had heard about fortune-tellers. “For the next ten years your life will be horrible, you will have great problems and nothing will go well for you,” says the fortune-teller. “And then?” asks the client anxiously. “Then? Then you’ll get used to it!”

  By this point I was used to the man’s stupidities. I didn’t want to offend him, so I asked what he had learned from twenty years of this work, and if in his opinion man had freedom of choice.

  “That is a question which has tormented Indian philosophers for six thousand years,” he said in the pontifical tone he adopted to lend weight to his platitudes. “Free will is an illusion. Much of life is predetermined. We are born in a family, a country, a time which we have not chosen, just as we have not chosen the body in which we are
born.” (He glanced at his own with a grimace of disgust.) “Knowing certain things in advance can help us to minimize the effects of our karma: light karma, that is, not the heavy kind. Heavy karma is like a typhoon striking a small island: you can’t change it, you can only wait until it passes. But one can influence light karma. With stones, for example,” and he displayed his rings, as if I had not already noticed them. “The body,” he said, “has an aura of its own and that can be strengthened. A great deal depends upon the proper choice of stones.”

  So this was the fashionable fortune-teller of Kuala Lumpur, the one even his colleague Kaka in Penang had said was very famous (although he had told Kaka he would die of a heart attack at fifty-two, and he was already sixty-five!). He was also the dullest, the most banal, the least inspiring of all the odd characters I had met in my travels.

  It was time. I felt that with him I could put an end to these encounters.

  25/TV FOR THE HEADHUNTERS

  Is it right that headhunters should abandon their rituals, however macabre, in favor of the more innocuous but equally inhuman practice of sitting for hours and hours in front of a box of illusions called television? Is it right that the warm, intimate light of oil lamps should be replaced by the flat, bluish glare of fluorescent tubes? That the sweet tinkling of bells on the eaves of a pagoda, stirred by the sunset breeze, should be drowned by the screech of a discotheque next to a lake on which plastic bags and empty imported beer cans float obscenely amid the shining expanse of lotus flowers?

  “Progress” has spread to every corner of the earth—even where there are no roads or airports yet, a simple antenna on a pole will pick up the seductive messages and poisonous dreams of modernity. There are few places left where one can still ask questions like those above, even rhetorically. One of them was a remote corner of eastern Burma, between the town of Kengtung and the Chinese border. For more than half a century, because of Burma’s internal events and the xenophobia of its rulers, the region had remained cut off from the rest of the world, and thus locked in the magic beauty of timeless things.