us, so that when we die we too can go to Paradise,’ said Sister Giuseppa.
‘If you don’t get there,’ I said, ‘Paradise must be a deserted place indeed!’
This made them laugh. All the novices joined in.
As we walked to the gate Sister Giuseppa took my hand and whispered in my ear, this time in perfect Italian with a northern accent, ‘Give my greetings to the people of Cernusco, all of them.’ Then she hesitated for a moment. ‘But, Cernusco, it’s still there, isn’t it, near Milan?’
I was delighted to confirm it.
As I went down the hill I felt as if I had witnessed a sort of miracle. How encouraging it was to see people who had believed so firmly in something, and who believed still; to see these survivors of an Italy of times past, which only distance had preserved intact.
People born into a family of poor peasants at the beginning of the century, in Cernusco or anywhere else in Italy, could not dream of having the moon: their choices were extremely limited, which meant that they had a ‘destiny’. Today almost everyone has many alternatives, and can aspire to anything whatsoever – with the consequence that no one is any longer ‘predestined’ to anything. Perhaps this is why people are more and more disorientated and uncertain about the meaning of their lives.
Children in Cernusco no longer die like flies, and none of them, if asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ would reply, ‘A missionary in Burma.’ But does their life today have more meaning than that of the children who at one time might have answered in that way? The nuns in Kengtung had no doubts about the meaning of their lives.
And the meaning of mine? Like everyone else, I often wonder. Certainly one is not ‘born to be’ a journalist. When I was little and my relatives bombarded me with the usual stupid question, which seemingly must be inflicted on all children in all countries and perhaps in all ages, I used to annoy them by naming a different trade every time, and in the end I invented some that did not exist. It is an aspiration that I continue to nourish.
After three days in Kengtung Andrew and his friend had not yet found me a fortune-teller. Perhaps Andrew’s Protestant upbringing made him reluctant, or perhaps it was true that the two most famous fortune-tellers were out of town ‘for consultations’. Finally, on our last evening, we found one playing badminton with his children in the garden of his house. But, with great kindness, he excused himself: he received only from 9.30 to 11.30 in the morning, after meditating. I tried to persuade him to make an exception, but he was adamant. He had made a vow imposing that limit ‘to avoid falling victim to the lust for gain’. If he broke that commitment he would lose all his powers, he said. His resistance impressed me more than anything he might have told me.
On the way back to the border we saw the chained prisoners again. This time we were prepared, and managed to give them a couple of shirts, a sweater, some cigarettes and a handful of kyat.
At the border we were given back our passports, without any visa stamp. Officially we had never left Thailand, never entered Burma. A fast taxi took us to the city of Chiang Rai. We spent the night in a sparkling new, ultra-modern hotel, where young Thai waiters dressed like the court servants of old Siam served Western tourists dressed like explorers in shorts and bush jackets. The next day they would be taken in air-conditioned coaches to Tachileck, where they would be photographed under an arch that says ‘Golden Triangle’, visit a museum called ‘The House of Opium’, and buy a few Burmese trinkets of a kind that by now can be found in Europe as well.
A French mime, with a bowler hat and walking stick, who had been hired by the hotel on a six-month contract, did a Charlie Chaplin turn between the tables of the restaurant, in front of the lifts and among the customers at the bar, in an attempt to liven up the atmosphere. I could not have imagined anything more absurd, after the chained prisoners, the monks and men who chopped off heads.
The next morning Angela and Charles caught a plane, and were in Bangkok in two hours. I had ahead of me four hours by bus to Chiang Mai and then a whole night on a train. Inconvenient. Complicated. But the idea of keeping to my plan still amused me. I remembered how as a boy, on my way to school, I tried not to step on the cracks between the paving stones. If I succeeded all the way I would do well in a test or write a good essay. I have seen this done by other children in other parts of the world. Perhaps we all from time to time have a primordial, instinctive need to impose limits, to test ourselves against difficulties, and thereby to feel that we have ‘deserved’ some desired result.
Thinking about the many such bets one makes with fate in a lifetime, I reached the bus station easily enough, then the railway station, and finally Bangkok.
CHAPTER SIX Widows and Broken Pots
It was inevitable: I began to have doubts. Along came the old familiar voice of my alter ego, true to form, ready to question every certainty. The doubts first surfaced when I began investigating the topic of fortune-tellers and superstition from the point of view of a journalist. Was I not perhaps wasting my time with this business of not flying? Had I not succumbed to the most foolish and irrational of instincts? Was I not behaving like a credulous old woman? As soon as I looked at the subject with the logic I would have applied to anything else, it struck me as absurd.
I began by going to interview General Payroot, the secretary of the International Thai Association of Astrology. He was a distinguished looking gentleman of about sixty, lean and erect, with thick grey hair, cut very short like that of a monk. When I came in he handed me not one but, as happens more and more often in Asia, several visiting cards, each of which gave a different address and different telephone and fax numbers.
‘Why the International Thai Association of Astrology?’ I asked, to start the ball rolling.
‘We also hold courses in English, for foreign students; last year we had two Australians.’
It doesn’t take much to become international, I thought; and I imagined those two, now in some Australian town, making a living by saying heaven knows what about people’s destiny, with the prestige of having studied in Thailand, one of the great centres of the occult.
‘Also,’ continued General Payroot, ‘we maintain contacts with the astrological associations of various countries. The German one in particular.’
‘The German one?’
‘The Germans are at the cutting edge in this field; they are brilliant. I myself have studied in Hamburg.’ He had indeed: years ago this distinguished gentleman – in all truth an infantry general in the Royal Thai Armed Forces – had been a cadet at the famous Führungsakademie. In the morning he had attended classes in warfare, and in the evening he had learned about the stars at the local Institute of Astrology.
After retiring from the army he devoted himself full-time to his two pet creations: a school for fortune-tellers, with the specific intention of disseminating the ‘German method’, and an ‘astro-business’ company which combines astrology with economic research to predict the behaviour of the stock market. ‘The system is already fully computerized,’ the general explained to me proudly. Clients paid an enrolment fee plus 5 per cent of all profits from investments recommended by the ‘astro-business’.
My meeting with the general-astrologer took place in the headquarters of the Academy of Siamese Astrologers, a handsome, spacious wooden villa built at the beginning of the century. The floors were of polished teak, the open verandas were ventilated by large fans revolving
