centre of one of those neighbourhoods that have best preserved the atmosphere of old Bangkok. Across from the Academy is the Great Temple, which in Thailand is rather like the Vatican, being the residence of the Patriarch, the head of the Buddhist Church.
I had arrived early in the morning. Along the pavements were dozens of stalls displaying religious trinkets. There were lucky charms and amulets against the evil eye, statuettes of divinities and venerable abbots from ages past, and the highly realistic little wooden phalluses which it is believed increase male virility and make women give birth to boys.
The Thais have unbounded faith in the powers of the occult, and these little markets of hope and exorcism are among the most colourful and profitable in the country. No Thai walks out of the door without carrying some amulet or other. Many wear whole collections of them around their necks, hanging from thick gold chains. Thais will spend huge sums to procure a powerful amulet, or to be tattooed with signs that can ward off danger and attract good luck. No part of the body is spared: it is said that a certain lady who recently became the wife of one of the most prominent men in the country achieved her goal thanks to some very special shells tattooed on her mount of Venus.
While I was talking with the astrologer-general in the main hall of the Association, from two adjoining rooms came the voices of teachers giving lessons to classes drawn from all over Thailand. Even astrology has been affected by the process of democratization. Originally it was a court art, studied and practised only by kings or for kings. Knowledge of the stars and their secrets was an instrument of power, and as such had to remain a monopoly of the few. Now astrology, too, has become a consumer good, accessible to all. Rama the First, the founder of the dynasty that currently reigns over Thailand, was an excellent astrologer, and predicted that 150 years after his death there would be a great revolution in the country. And lo and behold, at the time appointed, the revolution occurred: in 1932 the absolute monarchy was forced by an uprising of intellectuals and progressive nobles to become constitutional.
‘And the present king, Bumiphol, is he a good astrologer?’ I asked.
‘I cannot say anything about my king,’ replied the general, avoiding a subject which is still very much taboo in Thailand. There are too many unresolved mysteries, too many whispered prophecies – including the one about the dynasty coming to an end with the next king, Rama the Tenth – for a Thai to discuss the royal family with a foreigner. The general even refused to admit what everyone knows: that King Bumiphol, like his predecessors, has astrologers in his service, and it is they who determine the times of his public appearances and fix his appointments.
The Academy has a small garden, unkempt but not unpleasing, with a litter of newborn kittens and a couple of mangy dogs, some shirts hung out to dry, and a cement deer pretending to drink from a waterless fountain. Along the verandas stood a number of small tables, each with a palmist studying the lines of a proffered hand with a big magnifying glass, or an astrologer making calculations and drawings on sheets of squared paper and recounting the past, predicting the future, or just giving advice to intently listening women.
Was I becoming like them, even if with the justification of wanting to explore ‘the mystery of Asia’? In accepting the injunction not to fly, was I not perhaps behaving like those little old women who came to receive from the stars some constraint or prohibition in the hope that gain would ensue?
I stopped to watch a woman who had brought not only her daughter but the daughter’s fiancé, obviously to have him vetted before considering him as a potential son-in-law. As the fortune-teller performed his calculations they all looked on with intense absorption.
The general told me that that very day, it so happened, one of the most famous seers in the country had come to the Association, a woman who combined various methods of divination, but who was especially expert in the reading of the body. Was I interested in consulting her?
‘Of course,’ I said instinctively, realizing as I did so how this fortune-telling business could easily become a drug, and how one might spend one’s life listening to essentially the same things, asking the same questions, each time waiting for the answer with fresh curiosity. So it is, too, at the casino when you put a handful of chips on the black or the red, on the even or the odd numbers: the more you play the more you want to, and you never get bored waiting for that ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of fate. And, just as at the casino one who loses is sure his luck will soon change, so it is with fortune-tellers: after hearing so many of them come out with perhaps one true and interesting point amidst a plethora of errors and banalities, we still hope to come upon the most gifted of all, the one who is never wrong, who sees everything clearly. Could it be the next one?
The woman was about fifty, stocky and broad-shouldered, with short legs, her hair still black, and light skin. She was clearly of Chinese origin, but I didn’t mention this – I didn’t want to get into a conversation that might give her clues as to who I was and where I came from. I sat opposite her without saying a word, and waited for her questions.
She sat for a few minutes as if in prayer, whispering some formula with her hands joined in front of her chest, her head slightly bowed and her eyes closed. She then peered into my face with great concentration and asked me to smile, saying she wanted to examine the way my mouth creased; she touched my ears and the bones of my forehead. Finally, she had me stand and lift the cuffs of my trousers, to get a good look at my feet and ankles.
This is an old Chinese system of divination, and it interested me because, of all the various systems, this one seemed the least nebulous. A body, closely observed, can say a great deal, and if there is a ‘book’ in which to read someone’s past – and maybe a hint of his future, too – it must surely be that shell of life that people wear from birth, rather than some manual of calculations based on the relation between the stars and the hour when one came into the world. People born at the same hour of the same day of the same year do not share the same fate, and they most certainly do not die at the same time. Nor do they have the same creases in their hands. But people with similar physical characteristics do often have similar attitudes, similar qualities and defects. So it is not impossible that one may be able to read in a person’s body the signs of his fate.
The reading of people’s destinies in their faces evolved in China from medical practice. Patients, especially women, would not allow anyone to touch them, so the doctors had to diagnose their ailments just by looking at them, especially their faces. By dint of observing vast numbers of patients, century after century, the Chinese have concluded, for example, that a small red spot on a cheek denotes a heart malfunction; a wrinkle under the left eye means a stomach problem. Similarly, all rich people are meant to have a particular curve of the nose, and people with power have a mole on the chin. Hence the idea that destiny is written in the body: one need only know how to observe it.
The Chinese discern the character of a person by his ears; in the forehead they read his fate up to the age of thirty-two, in the eyes up to forty, and in the nose from forty to fifty. The eyebrows show the emotional life, and in the mouth are the signs of good or bad fortune in the last years of life. In the crease of the lips, which changes with time, can be read what a man wished to be and what he has become. Not all that crazy, I thought. The body really can be an excellent indicator. Is it not true that after a certain age one is responsible for one’s face? And the hands, don’t they reveal things about the past that plastic surgery tries to erase elsewhere?
I was very curious to see what this woman would read in my face, my ankles, and especially in the small mole just over my right eyebrow. But her first words disappointed me.
‘Your ears are indicative of generosity.’ (One of the usual gambits to put the ‘patient’ in a good mood, I said to myself.) ‘Your brothers and sisters all depend on you.’
‘That’s not true – I have no brothers or sisters,’ I replied aloud. ‘I’m an only child.’
