then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish for printed paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of the earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato – ten miles from the duomo.
Among all my relatives there was not one to whom I could look for inspiration, to whom I could turn for advice. The only ones I felt indebted to were my father and mother, who I saw literally go without food to allow me to study after primary school. What my father earned never lasted to the end of the month, and I well remember how sometimes, holding my mother’s hand and trying not to be seen by anyone who knew us, I would go with her to the pawnbroker in the Via Palazzuolo with a linen sheet from her trousseau. Even the money for a notebook was a worry, and my first long trousers – new corduroy ones, good for summer and winter, indispensable for secondary school – were bought by instalments. Every month we would go to the shop to hand over the amount due. It is hard to imagine today, but the pleasure of putting on those trousers is one I have never felt again with any other garment, not even those made to measure for me in Peking by Mao’s own tailor.
As I grew up I had a great affection for my family and its history, but I never felt any real affinity for them – as if I really had been put there by accident. My relatives were irritated by the fact that I studied and did not start working at a very young age, as they had all done. A brother of my father’s, who dropped in every evening before dinner, used to say: ‘What’s he done today, the layabout?’ Then he would trot out the wisecrack that so offended my mother: ‘If he carries on like this he’ll go farther than Annibale!’ Annibale was a cousin, another Terzani, who had gone far indeed. Since boyhood he had worked as a city street cleaner, walking the tram tracks with a spade and rake to clear away the horse droppings.
Why did I practically flee from home when I was fifteen, to go and wash dishes all over Europe? Why, when I arrived in Asia, did I feel so much at home that I stayed there? Why does the heat of the tropics not tire me? Why do I sit cross-legged without discomfort? Is it the charm of the exotic? The wish to get as far away as possible from the poverty-stricken world of my childhood? Perhaps. Or perhaps the blind man was right, if he meant that something in me – not my body, which I certainly got from my parents, but something else – came from another source, that brought with it a baggage of old yearnings and homesickness for latitudes known to me in some life before this one.
Slumped in the back seat of the Oriental Hotel’s car, I let these thoughts whirl around in my head, and amused myself by chasing them as if they were not mine. Could it be that I believed in reincarnation? I had never thought seriously about it. But why not? Why not imagine life as a relay race in which, like the baton that passes from hand to hand, something not physical, not definable, something like a collection of memories, a store of experiences lived elsewhere, passes from body to body and from death to death, and all the while grows and expands, gathering wisdom and advancing towards that state of grace that concludes every life: towards illumination, in Buddhist terms? That would help to explain my difference from the Terzani clan, and to interpret the blind man’s statement that as a child I was passed from one family to another.
At times we all have the disquieting sensation of having already experienced something that we know is in fact happening for the first time, of having already been in a place where we are sure we have never set foot. Where does this feeling of déjà vu come from? From a ‘before’? That would surely be the easiest explanation. And where have I been, if there is a ‘before’? Perhaps somewhere in Asia, an Asia without concrete, without skyscrapers, without superhighways. So I pondered as I watched the dull, grey streets of Bangkok as they slid past the window, suffocated by the exhaust of thousands and thousands of cars.
My interpreter lived on the outskirts of the city, and I had offered to see her home. The car entered a bit of motorway I did not know. ‘A very dangerous stretch, this,’ she said. ‘People die here all the time. Do you see those cars?’ In the shadows of an underpass I saw two strange vans with Thai writing on them, and some men in blue overalls standing nearby. ‘The body-snatchers,’ said the woman. It was the first time I had heard the word in Bangkok. The story behind it was grisly.
According to popular belief, when a person dies violently his spirit does not rest in peace. And if, in the moment of death, the body is mutilated, decapitated, crushed or torn to pieces, that spirit becomes particularly restless; unless the prescribed rites are quickly performed it goes to join the enormous army of ‘wandering spirits’. These spirits, along with the evil phii, constitute one of the great problems of today’s Bangkok. Hence the importance of the ‘body-snatchers’, volunteers from Buddhist associations who cruise around the city collecting the bodies of people who have died violently. They put the pieces together and perform the appropriate rites so that the souls may depart in peace, and not hang about playing tricks on the living.
Apart from murder victims and suicides, the most obvious candidates for becoming wandering spirits are those killed in road accidents. That is why the Buddhist associations station their vans at the most notorious black spots on the roads, and why their men stand guard, tuned to the police radio frequencies, ready to rush to corpses at a moment’s notice. And they really do rush, for this kind of work has become so profitable that the charitable associations are in fierce competition, and each tries to take away more corpses than the others so as to get more donations from the public. The first to arrive has the right to the body, but the men from the different associations often come to blows over a dead person. Sometimes they carry off someone who isn’t dead yet. To advertise their public service each association holds special exhibitions with macabre colour photographs of the victims, clearly showing the severed heads and hands, so that they can press for generous donations.
That evening Bangkok really felt to me like a city from which there was no escape. Despite the competitive zeal of the body-snatchers, the number of angry phii is constantly increasing. Finding no peace, they wander about creating disasters. In vain have thousands of bottles of holy water been distributed by the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Thailand to exorcize the evil eye from the City of Angels, which the angels all seem to have forsaken.
In January I heard that the Burmese authorities at the frontier post of Tachileck, north of the Thai town of Chiang Mai, had begun issuing some entry visas ‘to facilitate tourism’. You had to leave your passport at the border and pay a certain sum in dollars, after which you were free to spend three days in Burma and travel as far as Kengtung, the ancient mythical city of the Shan.
This scheme was obviously dreamed up by some local military commander to harvest some hard currency, but it was just what I was after. I was looking for something to write about without having to use planes, and this was an interesting subject: a region which no foreign traveller had succeeded in penetrating for almost half a century was suddenly opening up. By pretending to be a tourist I could again set foot in Burma, a country from which as a journalist I had been banned.
In Tachileck the Burmese had probably not yet installed a computer with their list of ‘undesirables’, so Angela and I, together with Charles Antoine de Nerciat, an old colleague from the Agence France Press, decided to try our luck. We came back with a distressing story to tell: the political prisoners of the military dictatorship, condemned to forced labour, were dying in their hundreds. We brought back photographs of young men in chains, carrying tree trunks and breaking stones on a riverbed. Thanks to that short trip we were able to draw the attention of public opinion to an aspect of the Burmese drama which otherwise would have passed unobserved. And I had gone there by chance – or rather because of a fortune-teller who told me not to fly.
This
