A Fortune-Teller Told Me (37 page)

It was possible, he thought. “My grandfather knew three prayers and he used to say them, when we were small, to take away our toothache until we could get to the dentist. Believe me, it worked. Well, I’m a priest, I know those prayers, but if I say them they have no effect. Why? Perhaps because I don’t believe in them. On my island, when someone breaks an arm and can’t go to the hospital because it’s too far away, the family find a black chicken and pound it to a pulp in a pot. Then they put this poultice on the arm, and in four days it’s cured. Sometimes the bone isn’t set correctly and the arm remains a bit twisted, but the bone’s knit. How to explain it? Why a black chicken and not a white one? I don’t know, I don’t know, but it works; I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

The missionary spoke impetuously, with passion, not to convince me, but as if he had to convince himself anew. The stories he told were the sort one always hears sooner or later in Asia. You listen and you forget because you cannot believe them. But here they were coming from a man of the cloth, a man who had spent his life with the problems of the spirit, and who spoke from an experience of over thirty years.

“And love?” he said, returning to a subject that seemed close to his
heart. “When a man desires a woman he tries to get hold of a hair, a piece of clothing, anything that belongs to her. He takes it to the
dukun
, who makes a little packet and has him put it under his pillow … and one night the woman comes to him. She can’t help coming. She does it in a sort of trance, but she comes. It’s incredible.”

Father Willem told me that, not long after he had first set foot on the island he once said jokingly to a
dukun:
“Try with me! Send me a pretty girl!” The older priests, none too pleased, gave him a word of warning: one should never challenge these people. Faith, they said, is a great defense against magic, but even faith has its ups and downs, and a powerful
dukun
might be able to overcome it.

To understand the practices of black magic, said Father Willem, one had to understand that in the eyes of an Indonesian there was no clear dividing line between inanimate objects and living beings, whether men or animals. For an Indonesian many objects have life. The
kris
for example, the ceremonial knife, has a spirit of its own, just as a body that loses life, a corpse, still has a spirit in it. The power of the
dukun
consists in knowing how to use this spirit, whether that of a
kris
, a nail, or someone who is dead. What remains in the corpse of someone who has died a violent death, especially if he has been hanged or stabbed or has committed suicide, is a very powerful force in black magic.

Just as amulets can be “charged” with a positive energy that protects the person carrying them, so an object—a knife, for example—can be charged by the
dukun
with a negative force that turns it against the person using it, making it the weapon of an involuntary suicide. Father Willem had heard of a
dukun
who could do this by concentrating for at least a month on the object he wished to animate. The principle is that a charge of energy is transferred from the mind of the
dukun
into the object by a process of meditation.

It is also, said Father Willem, important to understand the way people express themselves on the subject of magic. On his island, for example, they say the
dukun
is capable of talking to plants. What they mean is that he knows all qualities of the roots, the leaves and the flowers. They mean he can use plants to concoct poisons that kill or potions that apparently bring the dead back to life.

I found Father Willem’s interpretation of magic particularly interesting, because it was similar to what I thought I understood about
feng
shui
. In his opinion, behind the practices of the
dukun
lay the natural human aspiration for harmony, the need to reestablish a marred equilibrium. A man suffers because a woman does not love him? Magic is used to restore harmony by making her fall in love. Someone has committed a crime for which he has not paid the penalty in accordance with justice? Let him pay by magic.

“I can’t understand how it works,” said Father Willem, “and that’s the truth. But take the case of Belitung Island, quite near here. In the middle of the island there’s a mountain. On the top of the mountain they erected a transmitter for the Jakarta television station. To get there they built a road right up to the summit. You can reach it by jeep, but first you must get permission from the guardian spirit of the mountain, the
penjaga
, a strange being that lives at its foot and controls access to it. Try going up there without its permission! The jeep stalls, it seems to have run out of petrol or to have broken down. I don’t know how to explain it, but believe me, that’s what happens.”

It came naturally to Father Willem, as by now it does to me, to complain of the way the world is losing the diversity that first inspired his—and my—fascination with Asia. “It’s sad, but even magic is dying out,” he said. “People turn more and more to Western medicine. Television opens up the world and everyone wants to become like everyone else. Sad, but that’s how it is.”

He stopped, as if looking for the words to say something he had had in mind for some time, but found difficult to express. “And now I find myself involved in a strange phenomenon: they’re moving more and more toward my civilization, and I’m moving more and more toward theirs. This has turned into a real problem of conscience for me. I am a priest, I came here to bring my faith, but somehow I’m more and more interested in theirs; I’m fascinated by their world, the real world, the one that lies beneath the world of appearances, the one created by Islam, by Buddhism, even by my Christianity.”

How I understood him!

This conversation with Father Willem hung about me like a lingering scent, and when next morning I went jogging and saw that church on the hill with its white bell tower, I felt a keen pleasure, a kinship deep down inside me at the thought that it held a missionary who was in some way under the spell of magic.

Nordin had gone to see the Chinese who had the boat that was to take us to Lingga, and Michael had found us a guide for the island. But at the last minute, when everything had been arranged, I decided not to go. I preferred to keep hold of the image of the Bunyans which I had formed from Michael’s stories on the first evening. Anything further I saw or heard could only count as a disappointment.

I did not even want to see any more of Michael. Nordin told me he was setting things up for taking groups of Australians to the island. He had already prepared leaflets advertising “Adventures in the Lost Empire.” So even Lingga was on its way to becoming a tourist attraction; and the Bunyans—I was certain about this—would make themselves more and more scarce.

I decided to leave. At six the next morning the weekly passenger ship for Jakarta was scheduled to call at Kijiang, the main port of the island, about nineteen miles from Tanjung Pinang. Buying a ticket wasn’t easy, but by tipping an agent Nordin managed it. Meanwhile, however, everything I heard about these voyages between the islands made my hair stand on end. Many of the ferries had light hulls made of fiberglass that could never withstand a rough sea. Nobody obeyed even the most basic safety rules. Boats licensed to carry a certain number of passengers crammed two or three times as many on board. There were never enough life jackets or lifeboats. The fire extinguishers were not in working order, the safety exits were always blocked by people and baggage … I had no choice: I was lucky to have found a ticket. Anyway, the fortune-tellers all told me I wouldn’t die before I was eighty.

Nevertheless, I had a very bad night. The bath tap refused to turn off properly, and the water dripped nonstop. As I lay half asleep I had the impression that a terrible storm had struck the city, and that the ship would not sail. I was obviously looking for an excuse not to go. I wrapped a towel around the tap and fell asleep, but only to dream: I had come to our country retreat near Florence, but nowhere could I find my hiking boots. I was supposed to go camping, but without the boots I
was unable to leave the house. I was acutely disappointed. I looked everywhere for the boots, but could not find them.

I woke, and the dream seemed to me a very clear message from my subconscious: don’t sail, the ship will sink! I turned over all the stories I had heard about premonitions. What, though, is a premonition? Pure chance. How many of us, at least once in our lives, have had a premonition and changed our plans: we decide against taking a plane, against getting into a car—and then nothing happens: the plane doesn’t crash, the car doesn’t have an accident. But then it happens that someone misses a train on which a bomb explodes. A premonition, people say.

Insomnia feeds obsessions, and my mind went through more twists and turns than my body as I tried to sleep. I won’t die until after I am eighty? Of course, because it is written that tomorrow I shall not get on that ship! That’s why I had the warning dream. My mind was reeling with this nonsense. The fact is that there is no solution to this problem of fate, I told myself. Either you can see life as being written somewhere in advance, or you can see it as being written by you every minute as you go along. Both versions are true. Every decision can be seen as either a free choice or a product of predestination.

Is that not perhaps the meaning of Oedipus’s prophecy, which lies at the very roots of our culture? A fortune-teller tells his father, Laius: “Your son will kill you and become his mother’s lover.” To avoid this, Laius gets rid of Oedipus by sending him far away. And just because of that act the returning Oedipus can kill Laius without knowing he is his father, and, without knowing that she is his mother, he can become Jocasta’s lover. If Laius had ignored the fortune-teller, nothing would have happened; the prophecy is fulfilled precisely because he takes it seriously and does his best to avoid the consequences. So fate is ineluctable, and the prophecy is part of it: it precipitates events which men, left to themselves, would never choose to bring about. The Greeks understood and said everything five centuries before Christ, and today we have to reinvent and rediscover it all!

I imagined a stormy sea, and how the ship would roll over and sink like a stone in a matter of seconds. I remembered another story which I had heard that day from Nordin, who in his youth had been a fisherman. His grandmother had taught him that when the sea gets rough and frightens you, you must take two fresh eggs, one in each hand, say
some prayers, shut your eyes, concentrate intensely on your own survival, and then throw the eggs into the waves, one fore and the other aft. The sea subsides. Nordin said he had done this on a number of occasions and it always worked. But where would I find two fresh eggs in the middle of the night?

Through the window I saw the ugly neon star of the mosque, and my mind took a leap: star, stars. What a fantastic combination of stars there must have been in the fifth century before Christ! So many great spirits, all born at the same time: Sophocles, Pericles, Plato and Aristotle in Greece; Zoroaster in Persia; Buddha in India; Lao Tse and Confucius in China. All, more or less, in the space of a hundred years. Today many, many more people are born, but not a single one who can measure up to those. Why? Is the reason in the stars?

Someone knocked at my door. It was four o’clock. The taxi I had ordered was ready to leave. There was no escape. Premonition or not, I was on my way to Jakarta. We drove off toward the park in impenetrable darkness. The car was an ancient relic, the product of several cannibalizations held together with wire. As we passed through the open country a group of armed men with pocket torches blocked the road and signaled to us to stop: police or bandits? “Police
and
bandits,” replied the driver. He gave them a pack of cigarettes and on we went.

We put a few more miles behind us, then the car spluttered, wheezed, had a coughing fit, and stopped. It had died on us. The driver opened the bonnet and fiddled with some wires, but whatever he did to try and bring it back to life got nowhere. He was worried, but when he saw me laughing merrily, he relaxed. He lit a cigarette and sat on the bonnet.