A Fortune-Teller Told Me (12 page)

The Catholic mission soon became the refuge of all the sad causes in the region. Cripples, epileptics, the mentally disabled, women abandoned by their husbands, newborns with cleft palates (left to die by a society that sees any physical deformity as the sign of a grave sin in a previous life), found food and shelter here. Today it is such people who tend the garden, look after the animals, and work in the kitchens to feed the 250 orphans.

It grew late, and as we got up to leave I asked the two nuns if there was anything I could do for them.

“Yes, say some prayers for 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—What do you want to do as a grown-up?—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.

I
t 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 gray 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 centers 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 behavior of the stock market. “The system is already fully computerized,” the general explained to me proudly. Clients paid an enrollment fee plus 5 percent 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 slowly on the ceilings. The setting had much to recommend it, too, being at the center of one of those neighborhoods 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 colorful 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 mound 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 practiced 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?