A Fortune-Teller Told Me (35 page)

The
dukun
joined his hands. I observed his long, dirty fingernails and the vacant white eye which suddenly, in the dim light of the candles, appeared to see. He began reciting an extraordinary litany in which my name was intoned with the words Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, Pakistan, Jakarta, India, Europe, America, Australia, New York, Asia, Germany, Rome. Names of cities, countries, continents, repeated at random, backward and forward for minutes on end in an obsessive crescendo: all the places where I could go with the assurance of being protected and respected as a superior being.

The ceremony was over. We made our way back to the big table and I asked the
dukun
to tell me his story. How had he discovered his powers? No. He could not answer such questions. If I had come in the morning he would have told me all, but the propitious time of day had passed. Even he had his taboos, and were he to break them he would lose all his power. He said only that his name was Ismail, that he was seventy-seven, that he had come to Pulau Bintan from Java after the war, and that he was descended from those white-bearded sages portrayed in the prints above the altar. Those were extraordinary people, he said: if they wished, they could make themselves invisible. That he could not do, but he was able to stop bullets, and for that reason many young men of the island came to him before going to do their military service. He made them invulnerable.

The
dukun
was good with words—which is perhaps the real power of most of these magicians. At a certain point he said that he and Sukarno, who had led Indonesia to independence and who was president until 1967, had the same great-grandfather. Sukarno had great powers, said the
dukun
, and it was directly from Sukarno that he had received his own. If Sukarno’s car or plane ran out of petrol, he had only to urinate into the fuel tank and the engine would start running. His last wife had wanted to remarry, but on the eve of the wedding he had appeared before her and the marriage had not taken place. Did I know that Sukarno was not dead? It was his statue that had been buried. The real Sukarno was still alive, wandering around Indonesia. The
dukun
was absolutely convinced of this, and in a way he was not mistaken. Sukarno died in 1970, but his presence is felt in Indonesia perhaps even more today than when he was at its head. As time goes by the myth grows, and even his successor Suharto, after almost thirty years in power, has to reckon with this ghost that still circulates in the archipelago and in whose name all sorts of miracles are performed. By now Sukarno has become the tutelary divinity of whatever is connected with magic in Indonesia. Which is almost everything.

A computer programmer who loses a disk goes to the
dukun
to find out where to look for it; the police enlist the services of magicians to help trace a thief or identify a murderer; high government officials consult masters of magic before approving important contracts already vetted by economic and financial experts. Recently a group of car mechanics claimed they could iron out dents by using magic. They do it in a few hours and for a fraction of the normal price. Even the representative of the World Bank in Jakarta turned to them to have his Toyota repaired. All of these people come from Biltar, Sukarno’s birthplace, and like the
dukun
they claim to have received their power from him.

I asked the
dukun
what he thought about the fact that man had been on the moon. Again he flung up his grimy hands. “It’s not true. Man can’t go to the moon because the moon is God’s creation. Man’s imagination can go to the moon, but not man. Human beings have limits, and these limits must be respected, otherwise terrible things happen.” I could not but agree with him.

On the table in front of us was one of those little plastic envelopes
containing colored medicines one comes across in every market throughout Asia. “Do you believe in modern medicines?” I asked the
dukun
. Of course he did. He took them himself, and recommended them to his patients for ailments with a physical basis. The problem, he said, was that these medicines were not up to curing any sickness that had been brought on by magic. These would only respond to a magic that was stronger. For example, madness, he said, was caused by magic, and there were no medicines capable of curing it. People would come to him after having tried the city doctors to no avail. The boy who had served us tea intervened to tell us that many women who had been brought in by their relatives with frightful tremors and convulsions would go away calm and tranquil after two or three days’ treatment.

“It’s not I who do it,” said the
dukun
. “It’s God who does it through me.”

It was time to pay. The driver had said there was no fee; only if the client was satisfied did he leave anything. But when I asked Nordin he suggested the equivalent of twenty dollars. A fortune here, I said to myself, but if the oil worked … And then, I could not come and probe into these people’s minds with the excuse about planes, and not leave behind some token of gratitude, some goodwill that might bring me at least as much benefit as the oil.

Discreetly, making sure no one noticed, I fished out a pocketful of rupees and concealed them in my hand. Making a slight farewell bow, I held out my right hand to the
dukun
, supporting the wrist with my left in that courteous gesture which is obligatory in Asia. He did the same; our hands met, and as he felt the money his face brightened into a beautiful, broad smile of satisfaction. He was very happy, and I felt protected and important.

On the way back Nordin told of his own experience with a
dukun
. In 1979, two years after he had come to Bintan and begun taking tourists to the nearby Island of the Bees, he started feeling ill. He was constantly weak, had headaches, and often vomited during the night. The doctors gave him medicines, but he grew even worse and could no longer move. His wife called in a
dukun
, a woman. She gave him some ingredients to drink, some leaves to apply to his body, and after three days Nordin, “light of religion,” was in shape again. The explanation? The people of the Island of the Bees had put the evil eye on him. They were jealous
because he spoke English, and by bringing tourists to the island he profited from their existence without sharing anything with them. The woman
dukun
performed some countermagic and the evil eye disappeared. But she warned Nordin that for the rest of his life he must show more respect for others, must not bother them needlessly and must share what he earned with those who helped him.

Nordin took this advice very seriously. Well, what can one say? There is no denying the fact that all revolutionaries and positivists have seen these magicians, in their different versions, as enemies of modernity and exploiters of the people. They have even tried to eliminate them physically—as Mao did in China—to free the people from the shackles of superstition. But who has taken their place? Who now teaches these important banalities? Who gives lessons in common sense, even if mediated by potions and oils? And besides, even in these there may lurk some sense!

Nordin reached for his wallet and pulled out a paper-thin piece of metal with writing on it, which the woman
dukun
had given him. That was his protection, and he always had to have it on him. But was it not merely a reminder? Did it not recall, every time he saw it, his promise not to “bother people”? A knot in his handkerchief would have served the same purpose, but it would have had less of the sacral, the magical. Nordin also had a taboo of his own in connection with this little piece of metal: he had to remove it every time he went to the toilet, and he must never eat meat that was not
halal
, slaughtered in the Muslim way. Everything had to remind him of his duty toward others.

I thought again of my
dukun:
he was the first fortune-teller who had not mentioned money, getting rich or not getting rich, coming into an inheritance. Nor was there anything materialistic in the other stories I had heard about
dukuns
. I welcomed this departure from the Chinese.

We drove back along the coastal road. The storm which had threatened did not materialize, but the sky was low and gray. The sea, so smooth and clean, was a joy to behold: very pale green near the shore and very dark, almost black, at the horizon. The beach was narrow and fringed with coconut trees. About a hundred yards from the water’s edge we saw fishermen building huts on piles. These would be swept away by the monsoon in September, and rebuilt the following April. Every year the same, for generations: they build houses to live in, to fish
from with big nets hung from the porch, and to be carried away by the sea.

“The fishermen are Malays. Their customers are Chinese. It’s the same all along the coast,” said Nordin. “If the fishermen don’t fish, the Chinese lend them money to live on, and get it back with interest from the future catch. Now and then the Malays run amok and attack Chinese shops, and we have a bit of a massacre.” He said this in the same tone he used to describe how the sea destroys the houses every year. Even massacres seemed to be a seasonal matter.

The great pogrom of 1965, launched by the military who later brought Suharto to power, was aimed at the Communists; but the people, especially in the small islands, took advantage of it to settle their own accounts with the Chinese. More than half a million people were slaughtered in a matter of days. Some of the most atrocious crimes occurred on the peaceful and paradisal island of Bali.

That evening we ate at the local market amid dozens of stalls, each with its own specialty. Seafoods, meats, vegetables and an endless variety of fish were displayed in the light of acetylene lamps: a fascinating mosaic of colors and forms, with strong odors wafting about. Oil flared in the big cauldrons, which the Chinese cooks handled like conjurers. Packs of dogs and beggars circulated in the darkness behind the stalls. From under a table appeared a little boy who offered to shine my shoes. “One at a time,” Nordin warned me. “If you give him both together he’ll run off and sell them, and you’ll be left barefoot. He won’t know what to do with one on its own, so he’ll polish it for you.”

In the crowd Nordin saw the only other white man who seemed to be on the island, and beckoned him over to our table. “He knows everything about the island of Lingga,” said Nordin by way of introduction. Michael was Australian, a former philosophy student, he said. He was about forty, had come to Indonesia a few years ago, and had ended up in Lingga. Since then the island had become his obsession.

“Why Lingga?” I asked.

“Lingga’s the capital of the Bunyan people. You know who they are, don’t you?”

“No.”

“The Bunyan are the soft people. Do you follow? We’re the hard people,” said Michael, touching my skin to show that it was solid, hard. “They, you see, are soft. Do you follow? In Lingga there are lots of them, but no one can see them. They live their own lives. We live ours, and only occasionally do we mix with them. One of the hard people, like you and me, has been known to marry a Bunyan. It happens. But only seldom. I know a man on Lingga who married a beautiful Bunyan girl. He had to go to bed with her once a week, on Thursdays, otherwise he was free, and could even marry another woman.”

I listened, fascinated. People continued to cook, eat and beg all around us; the little boy polished my second shoe. Michael talked very seriously about the Bunyans, in the way that others might talk about the stock market. I found his stories quite magnificent. In the Chinese tradition too there are marriages between dead souls, arranged by the parents of the deceased; this is done, for example, to prevent an unmarried girl from returning as an evil spirit to disturb the young men of the village.

“One Thursday this fellow forgot his appointment,” continued Michael, “and the Bunyan girl took offense and was no more to be seen. In the past, when people got married on Lingga the Bunyans would go to the wedding, and they would lend their golden plates for the guests to eat off. Once, however, a guest hid one of these plates with a view to stealing it, and after that the Bunyans stopped going to weddings. Around the same time one of the three mysterious peaks of the mountain on Lingga split. The mountain’s sacred; it’s only four thousand feet high, but nobody can climb it.”

Michael said that there are people who claim to have reached the top, but they only have the vaguest memories of how they did it. He knew a woman who had fallen ill, and the doctors had said she was done for. Then, on the point of death, she vomited up some strange herbs and recovered. She said she had been seized by seven Bunyan girls, carried to the top of the mountain to eat in a meadow, and then taken back to her bed. This had saved her.

“The Bunyans,” Michael went on, “always have everything clean around them. If a house is dirty they’re no more to be seen. They’re friendly, they want to help the ‘hard’ people, but they also want you to respect what’s theirs. If you go into the forest and cut down a tree that
belongs to the Bunyans, you get lost and can’t find your way home. The
gharau
, for example, the tree used in making the world’s best incense, which the Chinese have come here to buy for centuries, belongs to the Bunyans. All the
gharau
trees are theirs, and woe to anyone who cuts them down without asking permission. They give it to those who treat the forest as they should, who cut the undergrowth and keep the clearings tidy, who respect their dwellings.”