A Fortune-Teller Told Me (26 page)

By the end of the fifteenth century Malacca was the largest emporium in the Orient. The products of several continents were traded there, and people came from all corners of the earth. Apart from the Malays and Chinese there were Persians, Arabs, Indians from Gujarat and from the southern empire of Kalinga, there were Africans and the mysterious Lequios, who sailed as far as Japan and who, to thank their gods for surviving a storm, would sacrifice a virgin by beheading her at the stern of a junk. Someone has counted the languages that were spoken in Malacca at that time: eighty-four.

In 1511 the Portuguese arrived. They, unlike the Chinese, came as conquerors. Alfonso de Albuquerque had sailed from Goa with a fleet of eighteen ships and eight hundred men to attack the city and put it to fire and sword. The sultan managed to escape, but his palace was razed to the ground and his treasury sacked. Three ships, laden with booty which Albuquerque intended to send to Lisbon, were caught by a sudden storm shortly after setting sail from Malacca. They are still lying undisturbed on the seabed. Whether, as is claimed, they contain gold which the sultan had hidden in the secret tunnel under the city remains a mystery. It is not even certain that the tunnel ever existed, but for centuries the children of Malacca have been told that if they ever find the
entrance they must on no account set foot inside it: no one has ever returned alive to reveal its whereabouts.

The Portuguese remained masters of Malacca for 130 years, and that was the city’s period of glory. It was not only an important trading center, but the launching pad for the Christian conquest of the soul of the Orient. Missionaries from Europe would stay at the Franciscan seminary in Malacca to recover their strength after their long voyage and to prepare themselves spiritually. From there they sailed for Macao and Nagasaki, hoping by hook or by crook to enter and establish themselves in the closed and strictly forbidden universes of China and Japan.

The most famous among these men of God was Francis Xavier, a Spanish Jesuit who arrived in Malacca in 1545. It was here that he performed his first miracles—including reviving a baby girl who had been dead for three days—and demonstrated his gifts as a seer by forecasting the victory of the Portuguese in a naval battle hundreds of miles away. On various occasions, moreover, he warned sailors against boarding ships which then sank. By his death in 1552, probably of malaria, on the small island of Sanqian in the mouth of the Pearl River near Canton, Francis Xavier had laid the foundations for Christian missions in several parts of Asia, from the Molucca Islands to the Philippines and Japan.

The account of what happened to Xavier’s corpse can hold its own among the tales of the mysterious East. In Sanqian there were no ships to take the body back to Christian soil, so it was placed in a simple coffin with some lime and buried. Two and a half months later a Portuguese vessel dropped by. Xavier was exhumed, and to everyone’s astonishment the cadaver was found to be intact. The sailors hailed it as a miracle. One of them took a knife and cut a piece of flesh from the thigh as a relic, and blood flowed as from a living body. When the corpse reached Malacca the plague then raging in the city came to a sudden halt. Xavier was buried in the Church of St. Paul on the hill overlooking the harbor. After nine months, however, he was exhumed again and taken to Goa. The body was still intact, and a Portuguese noblewoman cut off the little toe from one foot as a keepsake. The stories of Francis Xavier’s miracles, and of his body that death failed to decompose, soon reached the Vatican with a request for his canonization. The Pope demanded proofs. In 1614 the tomb was reopened, and the right arm was cut off and sent to Rome.

In 1622 Xavier was declared a saint, but the mutilations did not end there. Over the centuries all his toes disappeared except for one big one; in 1951 his left ear was cut off. What remains of the body is now in Goa, where to this day it is exhibited for a month every ten years in the Basilica del Buon Gesù. One arm bone is in Rome, another in Macao, in the Church of Coloane.

Until quite recently the priest at this church was an Italian, Father Mario Acquistapace. He had been a missionary in China until 1949 when the Communists expelled him, and had then gone to Vietnam, where I met him in his orphanage north of Saigon. In 1975 the Communists had again driven him out. He ended up in that last remaining patch of Christian territory, taking care of lepers. Every time he celebrated mass, after blessing the faithful he would raise his arms and face the wide-open door of the church, from which Communist China could be seen across a narrow stretch of sea, and would say:
“Vade retro, Satana!”—
Go back, Satan!

He died in good time: in 1999 China will recover Macao, and Francis Xavier’s reliquary.

Almost the only place without a bone of the saint is Malacca itself. For centuries there was not so much as a statue in his honor. In 1953 the bishop ordered one from Italy and had it placed on top of the hill that overlooks the port. Three months went by. Then one night, in the midst of a thunderstorm, a branch of a nearby casuarina tree fell, and cleanly severed (mark the coincidence) the statue’s right forearm—precisely where it had been amputated from the corpse itself. And thus the statue remained—mutilated.

Malacca’s golden age ended in 1641, when the Portuguese were defeated and driven out by the Dutch. The Dutch were in turn driven out by the British, and the British, expelled temporarily by the Japanese in 1942, departed for good in 1957 after granting independence to what became the Malay Federation. All of them left their legacy of monuments, tombs, memories, legends, and innumerable ghosts. Today Malacca is the most haunted city in the world. There are beautiful houses in which no one will live, and places where one is never alone.

Every evening, among the ruins of the Portuguese fort, people see
the forms of two young people embracing. The man was one of Albuquerque’s sailors, the woman a nun. They were discovered making love and sentenced to death. He was decapitated and she was immured alive, but their passion is undying.

Some time ago a highly respected judge said there was a woman in his office whom he could not get rid of. In former times the building had been a poorhouse, and it was regarded as quite natural that some wretch, among so many who had died there, should return to seek justice.

Even the German electronics company Siemens, when they came to Malacca to set up a factory, had difficulties with ghosts. From time to time the guards would see strange characters entering and leaving the building without clocking in or out. Whenever someone tried to stop them they melted into thin air, only to reappear shortly afterward. An expert in black magic, a
bomoh
, explained that in building the factory a small Indian temple had been destroyed, and that the spirits who used to live there were now without a place of their own. Siemens agreed to build a new temple elsewhere, and that solved the problem.

In a shoe factory, a female worker had suddenly started screaming, tearing off her clothes and running about like a maniac. Another woman followed her example, then another, and in no time at all the whole place was in an uproar. It took three days and the sacrifice of a she-goat to appease the spirits and normalize production.

Ghosts did not provide the only explanation for incidents of this kind: the young people who had grown up in their
kampongs
found difficulty in adjusting to city life, the discipline of the production line, and reacted by “running amok.”

In fact the two explanations were not at all contradictory. I, like the Malays, preferred the one which gave the name of “ghosts” to the frustrations of so many young people. They had eagerly abandoned their work in the fields to go into the factories, but soon realized that in doing so they had not bettered their lives or made themselves any happier. Quite the contrary.

Malacca is a city unlike any other. I could not see anyone, or go anywhere, without being told strange stories. One woman, with a university
education, told me that the people of Malacca took care not to let their children go on the beach after sunset, because they would be kidnapped by the gnomes.

“The gnomes?”

“Yes. No one has seen them, but everyone knows they’re there, because they leave a trail of perfume behind them.” Not long before, a stolen child had been found by a
bomoh
inside a coconut tree. He had his mouth full of chicken droppings which the gnomes, having little idea of what humans ate, had offered him. “It was even in the newspaper,” she assured me.

I had asked about a restaurant with traditional cuisine, and someone had recommended a place in the old Portuguese quarter. I was eating an excellent boiled cod with potatoes, onions, black olives and raw garlic when the chef-proprietor sat down beside me and asked: “Sir, are you in need of protection?”

Michael Texeira, aged seventy-six, a Malay-Portuguese and a Catholic, had served in the British army and been captured by the Japanese. After the war he was sent to fight against the Communists. He had married when he was very young. He and his wife, Nancy, had had seventeen children, of whom fourteen were still alive. Twenty years previously Nancy told him her belly could stand no more: another baby and it would burst. Punctilious in their obedience to the Church’s laws, they had decided to have no more sexual relations, and this, Michael told me, had given him the power to cure people and free them from the devil. He did this with a small wooden crucifix that his parish priest had brought him from Rome, where he had been on a pilgrimage.

“Of course,” I replied. “One always needs protection.”

Michael put the crucifix in a glass of water, whispered some prayers, passed the glass around my head, over my chest and my hands, and concluded that I had no problems, as the devil had never been in my body.

What most interested me was the story of his marriage. “Was it a love match?” I asked. Not in the least. It was his mother who had chosen Nancy for him. At the time of their wedding he had only ever seen her once. He said that they had had a happy life together and were still very close.

Even in the tradition of arranged marriages—still so widespread in Asia—is there a wisdom that we Westerners, with our cult of free choice, have given up along the way?

Ali, the taxi driver who took me back to town, was a Malay. He and his wife already had four children, but were set on having more. “The rich make more and more money, the poor more and more children,” he said, “but the poor are happier because they have time to be with their families. The rich, never: they are always busy.”

“Was it a love match?” I asked. No, Ali’s marriage had been arranged, too. His father, a bus driver, had come to an agreement with the girl’s father, who had a market stall.

“We took one look and we hated each other. But there was nothing to do. Even at the wedding we couldn’t stand each other. Love began only with the first child, but since then it has grown and grown.”

Are the Asians perhaps right in their principle: “Love the one you marry, don’t marry the one you love”?