A Fortune-Teller Told Me (42 page)

I had to be in Cambodia for the elections organized by the United Nations, and luck was on my side. The overland route was difficult and dangerous. The frontier with Thailand was officially closed, and the Khmer Rouge, having decided to boycott the elections, were threatening the road between Poipet and Battambang. The foreigner’s only point of entry was the Phnom Penh airport.

One day, however, I had seen a small notice in a Thai newspaper announcing that a ship bound for the Cambodian port of Kompong Som was taking on cargo in Bangkok. I had telephoned: the ship belonged to a young American, a fledgling shipowner. I invited him to dinner at Turtle House and persuaded him to take me on board. Leopold had joined me enthusiastically.

A fine character, Leopold. Born into an old patrician family, many of whom had given their lives for France, he had been a law student in Paris in 1968, and had “made revolution.” Frustrated at the way it turned out,
he had gone on the road: India, Nepal, Thailand, and then Indochina. I met him in Saigon in 1975, in the garden of the Hotel Continental, after the city had been taken by the Communists. Of good bearing, elegant, always in a beautifully ironed silk shirt, Leopold was not in Vietnam for the same reasons as the rest of us journalists, businessmen or adventurers. He was an observer of life, and Saigon in 1975 was an ideal place to indulge that passion. Later, after years of wandering, he wanted to prove to himself that he too was capable of doing something. He went to Bangkok, where through a series of coincidences he started a jewelry factory. He gave it a high-sounding French name taken at random from the Paris telephone directory, and it made him a fortune.

“But one can’t spend one’s life making useless things like jewelry,” he said fifteen years later when we met again. He had decided to make the factory over to the workers as a cooperative, and to devote himself to something else. “Giving is better than selling,” he said. “In future if I need anything they’ll help me. In Asia gratitude is more binding than any contract.”

Our departure was postponed from day to day. It was raining and the ship could not load its cargo of sugar. Then at last we were told to come to Quay 5 at Tomburi, across the Chao Paya, the great river of Bangkok.

An appointment with a ship is like one with a woman you have spoken to only on the telephone. You go to meet her, all curiosity and with an image in your mind, the product of fantasy, and regularly it fails to match the reality. Small, rusty, haphazardly repainted in light blue and white, her decks filthy and littered with cigarette butts, her Maltese flag blackened by smoke from the funnel and her mainmast bent from some encounter with a crane, the
Nagarose
was not as I had imagined her.

Accompanied by a tall and distinguished young sailor who seemed utterly out of place on that old tin can, I stowed my sack in the cabin that had been allocated to us. It was minute, baking hot and with no ventilation. On the door I was surprised to see a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of the Burmese resistance to the military dictatorship. “I was one of her bodyguards,” said the young man in excellent English. “I was in my third year of physics, but when she was arrested I had to flee.” All the crew were Burmese. Many, like him, were former students who had fled to Thailand to escape the repression.

We slipped our moorings at six in the evening. The
Nagarose
had
made barely a hundred yards when a glorious girl, wrapped in a beautiful close-fitting sarong, appeared on deck. Making her way to the stern she arranged a garland of jasmine flowers, some strips of colored silk, sticks of incense and a bunch of orchids. “It brings luck. It’s our protection,” said the captain, also a Burmese. He was a man of forty to fifty years intensely lived, to judge by his face.

The ship glided away, hugging the left bank of the Chao Paya, passing the Naval Academy, several pagodas and a Chinese temple surmounted by a large yellow sculpture in the shape of a coin. Here and there rows of old wooden houses on piles could be seen, each with a ladder from which children were diving into the water. In the old days, when the river was the main avenue of access to Siam, these were the first sights that greeted travelers before they saw the sparkling roofs of the Royal Palace in the distance.

At nine o’clock we reached the mouth of the river. We dropped our Thai pilot and made for the open sea. Ahead of us lay hundreds of fishing boats with lamps hung on long poles over the dark water. We seemed to be moving toward a city full of lights and life.

Our dining room consisted of a rough table bolted to the floor and two benches, but the dinner would not have disgraced any restaurant. It was magnificent, like she who had prepared it, the girl we had seen before. She was twenty years old, dark-skinned, with high strong hips, and unusually full-breasted by Thai standards. On her wrist she wore several bracelets, one of which had a little gold bell that supplied a musical accompaniment to all her movements.

The captain had seen her selling T-shirts in a Bangkok market. She had just arrived from the provinces and this was her first job. He asked how much she earned, and offered her a thousand baht ($25) more per month to perform the office of his wife. Done! Then he managed to hire her as the
Nagarose’s
cook. Both seemed happy enough with the arrangement. The “hired wife” is an old tradition in Thailand, and Leopold and I readily agreed that it was a most civilized one.

We sailed all night among the fishermen’s lights. Sleeping below decks was impossible. The ship had been made in Norway, for northern seas, not the tropics. Big pipes belched heat from the engine room into the cabins, turning them into ovens. You couldn’t walk barefoot on the steel-plated floor of the corridor, it was so hot. Only the big cock-roaches
scurried happily back and forth. The crew had their bunks below, but the captain slept in a comfortable hammock, hugging our cook and enjoying the cool breeze from the only fan on board.

Leopold and I abandoned our cabin and lay down on the upper deck at the foot of the funnel, but neither of us could sleep straight away. The night, the atmosphere of the ship, and once again the sense of being completely outside the everyday world, had dealt me that exhilarating feeling of freedom which is my drug. To Leopold it dealt a great desire to talk and laugh.

“Just think of that American who says: ‘I am the owner of the
Nagarose
.’ He’s maybe never set foot on it, and spends all his time in an air-conditioned office sorting out problems of insurance and sugar-loading. And you and me? Here we are enjoying his ship!” said Leopold. The idea that the American had only a piece of paper declaring him to be the ship’s owner, while we, without even a ticket, had the run of it, made me laugh too.

“In life one should always be as on this ship: passengers. There is no need to own anything!” he went on, as if to justify his decision to get rid of the factory.

I think it was then that Leopold first spoke to me of John Coleman. “He’s an exceptional man. You must meet him. He’s really a great master, and he can teach you to meditate.”

We fell asleep where we were. Now and then, with a change of wind, I felt puffs of smoke blowing over me, but I was too tired to move. I was awakened by the sun.

I spent most of the day on deck. At the stern the ropes were coiled in big rings, forming nests in which a prehistoric bird might have laid its eggs. I stayed there sunbathing and reading Somerset Maugham, sometimes aloud so that Leopold could join in the “conversation.” I did not spare him the story of how Maugham, when he arrived in Bangkok, went to stay at the Oriental Hotel and had an attack of malaria. The German manageress, rather than have him die there, tried to persuade a doctor to take him away. Poor Maugham! He would be turning in his grave if he could see how today the Oriental boasts of him as one of its illustrious guests, with a suite named after him, all his books, specially
bound, in a showcase on the Bamboo Veranda, and his photograph on the menu with suggestions as to what he might have eaten for breakfast and drunk at sunset.

In the afternoon the heat became unbearable, but it was the rainy season, and at three o’clock the daily storm punctually brought its cool relief. Afterward the sky was like a vast fresco of blues and blacks and grays, with a few very white clouds, motionless like grandiose monuments.

The ship made slow progress—in fact sometimes it seemed to be motionless. Once the fire alarm suddenly went off, but nobody seemed to get excited. It was caused by an overheated accumulator, and the captain gave orders to reduce the speed even more: three knots at the maximum. We would reach Kompong Som a day late.

The sea was a desert. The only ship we saw for hours on end was another old freighter with a Burmese crew. Our sailors knew them, and tried to make contact by radio, but no one replied.

“Travel makes sense only if you come back with an answer in your baggage,” said Leopold. “You’ve traveled a lot; have you found it?”

For him too the ship was a break, a release from routine. He spent the long empty hours reflecting on matters close to his heart, and I was like the sandbag at which a boxer practices punching. This time the fist hit me hard, because I knew I had not found the answer. Quite the reverse: along the way I had lost even those two or three certainties that I used to think I possessed. Perhaps that was the answer, but I refrained from telling Leopold so. Trying to lighten the tone of the conversation, I said that I traveled because my nature is that of a fugitive: sooner or later I always have to escape from where I am. Leopold was not satisfied.

“We’ve both spent half our lives in Asia, and we’ve had some pretty strange experiences,” he said. “We must have got at least a clue from it all. We can’t go home with nothing in our bags but a few yarns to spin, like old sailors.”

I have never thought about that baggage; still less about what to put into it on the way home. If I ever want to return.

The ship was wheezing painfully, and every breath sounded like her last. Suddenly we heard a loud clashing sound, like stones in a grinder. The
long-haired youth in charge of the engine scratched his head and disappeared into the hot belly of the ship. This time it was a pump that had broken down. Fault put right. On we went.

For dinner the beautiful cook had prepared a stew of pigs’ trotters, fried fish and vegetables with ginger, and rice. We all ate together except for the two lads who stayed on guard above, scanning the pitch-black sea where not a single light was to be seen. As if the food were not already spicy enough, the Burmese constantly helped themselves to red peppers from an old glass jar. After dinner the youngest sailor prepared little packets of betel for everyone.

The captain realized that betel was not our favorite dessert, so he sent for a bottle of gin and another of lemonade, and we spent the small hours together. For him we were the break, the respite from routine, and he wanted to unburden himself. He was forty-four years old, and had been sailing for twenty. He had been everywhere and had done a bit of everything, from smuggling cigarettes to smuggling electronics. His family were in Rangoon, but he could not go back there: he had taken a stand against the dictatorship and would be arrested. He had chosen the members of the crew one by one, and they were utterly loyal to him. The man looking after the ship’s machinery was an engineer, two of the ship-boys were architectural students. Because of the military dictatorship Burma had remained backward and was now treated with contempt, especially by the Thais, he added.