the house and the pond, then they sang some beautiful litanies, sprinkled holy water over everyone and everything, and ate before noon, as is required of them, the vegetarian food we had prepared.
After that, and after a swarm of wild bees had come and built an enormous honeycomb on a tree in the garden – a symbol of great good luck for the house – all troubles ceased.
But now I was facing a difficult year. I had assumed that even if I could move only very slowly, I would be able to get around by boat. I could not have been more wrong.
Bangkok is a port: hundreds of ships dock there every day, and several times a week the local newspapers publish a thick supplement listing the names and destinations of all the vessels and the times at which they load cargo. We began telephoning around for information about sailings to the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Singapore. We may as well have been asking for the moon. I talked with chief clerks, chairmen and managing directors. No use. The politest would say, ‘No, not us. But try another line.’ Or, ‘Yes, we used to carry passengers, but now…’ Impossible. Ships no longer transport anything but goods, preferably sealed in containers which are loaded and unloaded automatically by computer-operated cranes.
To stave off the temptation to give up the whole project I began telling everyone about the Hong Kong fortune-teller and my decision not to fly for a year. This reinforced my commitment, but above all I attracted the sympathy of various Thai friends who suddenly felt ‘understood’. The fact that I had taken a Chinese fortune-teller’s prophecy seriously meant that I had entered into their logic, that I had accepted the culture of Asia. This flattered them, and they declared their willingness to help me, even if only with suggestions and advice. One of the most commonly repeated was: ‘Don’t worry. Try to acquire some merits!’
The underlying idea of acquiring merits is that fate is not ineluctable: a fortune-teller’s predictions must be taken as a warning, or as indicating a tendency, but never as a sentence without appeal. Suppose a fortune-teller sees that you are about to fall gravely ill? Or that someone in your family will soon die? No need to despair. Make offerings in a temple, help an unfortunate, free some caged animals, adopt an orphan, pay for the construction of a stupa or donate a coffin to a poor man, and you will deflect what is otherwise coming for you. Obviously one must be guided by a professional in the choice of the quality, quantity and object of the merits to be acquired, but having done this, one’s destiny has to be examined anew, or rather, it is returned to the hands of the person concerned. Fate is negotiable; you can always come to an agreement with heaven.
Despite all the advice I was given, it was difficult to get an answer to the simple question: ‘Who is the best fortune-teller in Bangkok?’ I had the impression that everyone wanted to keep his favourite to himself. And then too, they are all convinced that the best fortune-tellers are to be found not among themselves but somewhere else. The Thais say the best are in Cambodia, the Cambodians say India, the Chinese that nobody can equal the Mongols, the Mongols believe only in the Tibetans, and so on. It is as if each one, conscious of the relativity that surrounds him, wants to preserve the hope that the absolute exists elsewhere. ‘Ah, if only I could go to that fortune-teller in Ulan Bator!’ a Javanese will say, thus keeping alive the hope that in some other place the key to his happiness can surely be found.
My case was simpler: I was in Bangkok and I wanted to see a fortune-teller there. I wanted to begin my flightless year by reconfirming my fate, by having my future read again. After all, since my encounter with the Hong Kong fortune-teller I had consulted none other.
Since none of my Thai acquaintances was able to recommend a fortune-teller, my friend Sulak Sivaraksa came to mind. He is Thailand’s leading philosopher, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. A convinced Buddhist, he has been a persistent critic of the way his country is abandoning its traditions, and he never misses a chance of attacking those he believes have strayed from the traditional Buddhist path. The Thai establishment does not care for him, and because of his outspokenness he has been accused of lèse-majesté, a crime that no longer exists elsewhere, and has spent some time in prison. The last time they arrested him I went to see his wife, thinking she would be distraught. Not at all! She had consulted a fortune-teller who had assured her that in a few days Sulak would be released. That is just what happened: the fellow had named the day and the hour. I decided to consult him.
I knew where he lived, and that he was blind. I needed an interpreter, but I did not want to take my secretary or anyone who knew anything about me: he or she might, even if unconsciously, give the fortune-teller a clue as to my trade or my family. So I telephoned an agency that provides secretaries for visiting businessmen. Pretending to be a guest at the Oriental Hotel, I made an appointment to meet my escort in the hotel lobby. The woman who arrived was about fifty, plump, with big glasses. She was delighted at the idea of not having to translate clauses of contracts and conversations about buying and selling.
The fortune-teller lived in the heart of Chinatown, and the Oriental Hotel’s cream-coloured limousine, with a driver in white gold-braided livery, crept at a snail’s pace into the marvellous, chaotic Vorachak quarter which is still one of the noisiest and liveliest parts of Bangkok – still unchanged, thank God, with its thousands of shops selling hardware, pumps, curtains, nails, coffins, sweets; with its myriad smells of incense wafting from little altars at the back of every hole in the wall, or balsam from the pharmacies; with the usual teeming crowds of overseas Chinese in their black shorts, immutable with white undershirts pulled up over their bellies, as if to air the navel and to stimulate the qi – the vital force – which, according to them, has its true centre there.
The fortune-teller lived at the far end of a tangle of little streets reachable only by foot. Finally we found his house. But it was not a house, exactly: through a big iron grille that opened on to the street we entered a large room that doubled as shop and home, where goods and gods cohabited. On one side, among the sacks of rice, was an old iron desk. Behind it, on a cane chair, was a blind man. More perching than sitting, he was massaging his feet, as the Chinese do, convinced that the bodily organs, from the heart to the lungs, the intestines to the liver, are controlled from there; it is enough to know the right points to touch. His eyes were blank. Where the pupils should have been were white spots that seemed always turned skywards. On the desk was a small teapot, a dish of tangerines – a symbol of prosperity – and an empty turtle-shell. The room was filled with a strong smell of incense from a large altar in one corner, full of statuettes made of gilded wood and representing gods and ancestors, the dead not as they were in life, but as they would have liked to have been. This is a curious tradition among the southern Chinese. An uncle failed the Imperial examination? Never mind: after death he is represented as a mandarin. Another had dreamed of being a policeman? After death he appears on the ancestral altar in uniform, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Many of the fortune-teller’s statuettes held raised swords, as if to protect him in his blindness. An old woman in green silk pyjamas, perhaps his wife, had just finished eating at a round table. She put wicker covers on the pots with the remains of her meal and sat down on a stool at the sink and began washing up.
Slowly, as if he did not want to hurry our relationship, the blind man began whispering something. My assistant translated. It was the usual question, to which I gave the usual reply: ‘I was born in Florence, Italy, on 14 September 1938, at about eight in the evening.’
He seemed satisfied, and began performing some strange calculations with his fingers in the air. His sightless eyes, still raised to heaven, brightened as if he had a great secret with which to capture my attention. His lips whispered a sort of nonsense rhyme, but he said nothing intelligible. A Chinese girl in white pyjamas ran in, handed something to his wife and dashed off, first joining her hands over her bosom in salutation to all the impassive ones on the altar. An old clock on the wall ticked for long minutes. I had the impression that the blind man was searching for something in his memory, and had found it.
At long last his mouth opened. ‘The day you were born was a Wednesday!’
