A Fortune-Teller Told Me (17 page)

“Are you rich?”

“No,” I replied, once again struck by the fact that money seems to be an obsession with all fortune-tellers, be they monks or blind men.

“But the numbers say you are,”
he insisted. I told him that when I was a child my family was so poor that during the war we really did not have enough to eat, and my mother sometimes made strange “cakes” with sawdust in them.

Grimacing, the monk consulted the signs on the horoscope and said,
“But in the past you’ve made big business deals, and once you lost many millions in one fell swoop.”

“No, I’ve never made any deals, and at no point in my life do I remember buying a single thing in order to sell it,” I said.

He looked perplexed, and a bit lost.
“Perhaps the time when you said you were born isn’t the right one. Could it possibly have been half an hour earlier?”
He hesitated for a moment:
“Or three-quarters of an hour?”
he said in an apologetic tone.

“Quite possibly,” I said. “Perhaps in 1938 in Italy they put the clocks back in September, so the difference between Florence and Bangkok would be one hour more.” This cheered him.

“Tell me if what I am about to say is true, and we’ll be sure we have the right time. You have been married for many years.”
(True. Now we’re getting somewhere.)
“Your wife is a stronger character than you.”
(Hard to admit, but it’s true.)
“You are something like a writer or a journalist.”
(This too?)
“You have a good brain, and you are a sincere, straightforward person.”
(Well …)

I told him all this was more or less true, and he was delighted.
“Remember, then,”
he said,
“whenever you see an astrologer: not eight in the evening, but seven, or a quarter past.” And
then he began his readings.

“You have a sort of shell around you. Your enemies can’t harm you. As for money …”
(Here we go again!) “
… you’ll always have some—now more, now less, but you’ll never be poor. You are intelligent and your lucky number is five. You have a life of highs and lows. Sometimes you are on top of the world, sometimes depressed. If you have a plan to do something special this year, be strong, carry it out! This is a good year.”
(I do indeed have a plan, the plan not to fly.)
“Nineteen ninety and 1991 were not particularly good years.”
(Wrong, 1991 in particular was wonderful: I traveled throughout the Soviet Union, wrote a book …)
“But the years to come will be excellent.”

“Venerable one, do you see no dangers in my life?” I asked.

“An excellent question,”
he said.
“No. I don’t see any.”

“Years ago I was told that 1993 would be a dangerous year for me, and that I must not take any planes.”

The monk looked at his papers, looked again, and said with great conviction,
“No, absolutely not. In the past, yes, your life was in danger several times, but not now. Have you any other questions?”

“Where is it best for me to live: in Asia or in Europe?” I asked.

He was quite relaxed by now, and spoke without hesitation.
“You should live here and there, but not where you were born.”
(You are right, my dear monk. Florence is a safe harbor, but not a place I could live in, at least not now.)
“The ideal for you is to be always on the move. If you stay in the same place for long your brain will stop working.”
(Very true. I am at my best when I am dumped in a place I know nothing about; curiosity is my best motivation.)

More women arrived, and came up the wooden stairs, timorous and respectful, bearing gifts. My time was up, but I asked one more question: “If I want to improve my life, should I change something? Should I change my wife? My job? Should I stop always wearing white?”

The monk laughed cheerfully, and told me with great conviction to leave everything as it was. I would have done that anyway, but I was glad we agreed.

End of sitting. Bows, money discreetly placed under the outsize book, and general exodus, backward on our knees to the stairs.

As soon as we were out of the monk’s sight, the two women hugged each other and began a chirpy conversation, only part of which was translated for me. They were enthusiastic about the man’s powers and
his advice about divorcing and making money. I realized that in fact he had talked of little else. All alike, these seers—monks or no! For all of them the important questions concern the material side of life—in tune with their clients, for whom money is the great obsession, the sole aim of existence.

We drove back to Bangkok through Chinatown, with its thousands of little shops. In each one, behind the counter or the cash register, is a Chinese whose only desire is to be rich. It struck me that not one of the fortune-tellers I had seen had ever used the word “happiness”—as if that were something nonexistent, or irrelevant. Or perhaps unattainable? Strange that it means so little to so many people.

I looked at the woman at the wheel of the Volvo, and thought of the readiness with which she was willing to forswear love in order to become a millionaire, and of her promise to give the monk a portion of her wealth, in the form of a Mercedes. She too was Chinese.

Chinese, all Chinese, were the shopkeepers I saw from the car window. Chinese the ferrymen on the river. Chinese the heads of the food industries. Chinese the builders of skyscrapers. Chinese the bankers, insurers and speculators. Chinese all those who were destroying Bangkok. Yes, they were the ones who were responsible! This was what passed through my mind as the car was again held up in traffic. Coming from southern China as emigrants fleeing the wars and famines in their homeland, they have done better in Thailand than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Here, thanks to the tolerance of the people and to Buddhism, they have found work, married, and become citizens with full rights. Expert artisans and clever traders, the Chinese soon amassed huge wealth. The Thais have little aptitude for war and business; they are playful, always keener on fun than on work. Strike a gong in Bangkok and you will see a Thai sketching a dance step; blow on a pipe and a whole group will lift their hands in the air, sway their hips and begin to dance.
“Mai ping rai”
is their favorite expression. It means “Never mind,” “It doesn’t matter,” “Why worry?” Has the wind blown the roof off your house?
Mai ping rai
. Do the streets of Bangkok flood at the first sign of rain?
Mai ping rai
. Has the city become unlivable?
Mai ping rai
.

The Chinese, with their innate practicality, have profited enormously from this Thai attitude, and have become masters of the city.
The biggest Chinese festival is the beginning of the lunar New Year. In Thailand those three days are not officially recognized as holidays, but Bangkok comes to a standstill. The streets are empty and the banks are closed because the Chinese, who control the biggest slice of the city’s economic activity, take those days off.

By now the same is true, in varying degree, of the other countries of Southeast Asia. If one day all the Chinese of the region took it into their heads to stay at home, close up shop and not go to work, the Indonesians would have no cars to drive, or cigarettes to smoke, or paper to write on; the Filipinos would have no ships to ferry them between their thousands of islands; the Japanese would have no prawns in their pots. Most of the skyscrapers under construction would remain unfinished. The whole continent would shake in its boots, because it is the Chinese of the diaspora who are the fuel that drives the engine of the Southeast Asian economic miracle. And who are they exactly? Descendants of coolies and merchants, of the poor devils who for decades have emigrated to seek their fortune in the
nan yang
, the South Seas.

As the two women chatted between themselves in Thai I went on thinking about these remarkable, devastating Chinese, missionaries of practicality and materialism. With their energy they are covering the whole world in cement—from Asia to Canada, where tens of thousands of them are arriving from Hong Kong in anticipation of its return to Peking’s rule in 1997. I recalled that one of the first big reports I wrote for
Der Spiegel
twenty years ago was about these same overseas Chinese. Then they were seen as a possible Maoist fifth column, always under suspicion and often victims of racial pogroms. How the world has changed in twenty years!

It struck me as a good idea to return to the subject for a new story, one that would take me from Thailand to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia. They were all places to which, with a bit of patience, I could travel without using planes.

A
t night Turtle House came into its own. The skyscrapers rising all around us were taking away more of our sunshine every day, but in the evening, when the gardener Kamsing lit the lights concealed in the trees, the torches around the pond and the little oil lamps in front of the statues of Ganesh and Buddha in the garden, the house again took on that warm, quiet, tropical magic which had induced us to come to Thailand after five years in the chill and depressing austerity of Japan.

When we arrived Angela and I worked like mad for two weeks to find the right place for every piece of Chinese furniture, every statue, every vase, every god, every scroll, every lampshade of pale yellow silk—the things that give a room atmosphere. We then called a halt, but the house felt better and better with time. It was like us: old and lived-in, full of all that so many Asian years had made of us. The story behind every object was what would remain with us. As for the objects themselves, we saw ourselves as no more than their temporary custodians.

The house had been described by
Architectural Digest
as “an oasis of tropical splendor in the concrete jungle.” What the article did not say was that termites were eating the beams, and the wooden floors were getting shakier and shakier. Rats, displaced by the bulldozers, dredgers and cement mixers that filled the whole neighborhood, found their last refuge with us, and in the night they often woke us with their shrill, riotous cavalcades in our attics, where they joyously reproduced. Luckily we also had a great number of squirrels, so if a guest became nervous about the strange shadows scampering along the branches of the mango tree over our dinner table, or the rustling in the straw roof
of the tree house we had had built among the branches of two coconut trees, we would say: “Don’t worry, it’s only the squirrels.” Well, the only difference is that squirrels have nice fluffy tails and rats have long pointed ones.

But the rats were deadly. Attracted by the bird food, they got into the aviary and murdered some of the most beautiful specimens I had collected, including a hoopoe that we called Mrs. Punk, and the “fairy-tale bird,” a bright green pitta that might have come straight out of the illustrations to Grimm’s fairy tales. Nor can we forget poor Callas, a nightingale: whenever I whistled, no matter at what hour of the day, she would launch into the most glorious arias I had ever heard.

Then there was Totò, an Indian myna which we bought when he was tiny. I had patiently taught him—at dawn, both of us in the dark under a big towel—to utter a few words in Italian. He would imitate the ring of the telephone, the barking of dogs and the calls of other birds, but he spoke mainly in Thai, saying things like: “If you love me, why don’t you tell me?” He drowned in his cage when it fell in the pond one stormy night.

Baolì, our beloved family dog, born on the Peak in Hong Kong, had lived with us for five years in Peking and another five in Tokyo. By the time we moved to Bangkok he was so old that he could hardly move, and he seldom barked anymore. We needed a guard dog, so we adopted a newborn puppy someone had left in a cardboard box under our car in a parking lot.

Angela used to spend hours reading and writing behind the mosquito netting on the veranda over the water. At first the deaths of the animals at Turtle House caused her a great deal of anger and grief. She wanted justice, or order at least, but in the end she accepted “the natural cruelty of our ecological system.” “This is no pussycat pond,” she would say, consoling herself for the fact that the big turtle ate the ducklings as soon as they hatched, the rats ate the birds, and the birds ate the little sparrows that came to peck the crumbs in their cages.

The events of the pond, the garden and the animals were a constant reminder of how important it is for people to have nature around them, to observe it and learn its logic and enjoy it. How can children grow up mentally healthy in the middle of a city, without feeling the rhythm of plant and animal life along with their own? Never in his history has
man drifted so far from nature as now, and this has been perhaps the worst of our mistakes.

The traffic in Bangkok made it hopeless to attempt any social life. To lunch with someone in town meant arriving home around five in the afternoon; an invitation to dine at some embassy meant setting out at least two hours before. Having built myself a workroom on the other side of the pond, I was one of the few people in Bangkok who could commute between home and office in a matter of seconds. Hence we resisted all inducements to go out, and used Turtle House to tempt people we wanted to see to come to us instead.