A Fortune-Teller Told Me (47 page)

One of the haunts where the representatives of the international community met in the evening was “No Problem,” a sort of club-café-restaurant which had opened in an old colonial villa. One evening, sitting next to a table of strangers, all UN officials, I heard someone talking about a German journalist who had been told by a Cambodian fortune-teller not to fly, and who had saved himself at the last minute by not boarding the Russian helicopter that had crashed in Siem Reap. By now the story had a life of its own; it would be told and retold, each time with new details and new additions, and thus would become more and more true.

I spent my last evening in Phnom Penh at the palace. Sihanouk was showing the diplomatic corps the latest product of one of his old hobbies: filmmaking. The film was a love story between a young man dying of cancer and a nurse. The title seemed designed to exorcise one of the many prophecies that concerned our host:
See Angkor … and Die
.

The palace, faintly illuminated by the warm glow of a few torches against the ochre-colored walls, seemed more and more beautiful and unreal. Sihanouk, on great form, was clutching a microphone and translating the Khmer dialogue into French and English. We were in the small open-air pavilion in front of the Throne Hall. A fresh breeze drifted lightly among the columns. Under the star-studded sky reigned a magnificent, surrealistic peace.

At dawn, Hoc and I left by taxi for Battambang, expecting to reach the Thai border by nightfall. The Khmer Rouge had been relatively quiet and the traffic was running smoothly as far as Poipet. The frontier post was theoretically closed, but we had heard that the UNTAC officials could go to Aranyaprathet in Thailand for shopping or dinner.

In Poipet the taxi set us down in the market square. I instinctively went to see the wall against which the Khmer Rouge had put me in April 1975. I stood there a few minutes in silence, as if it really were somebody’s tomb. I thought of the many things that had happened to me since, of the many places I had been, the people I had known, the countless words I had written. I thought of all the things I would not have done had my life ended there—so much, and after all, nothing.

I saw a white car with the UN logo heading toward the border. At the wheel was a young Japanese woman on her way to Aranyaprathet to meet her fiancé. Both she and the military frontier guards thought that I too was from UNTAC, and in a flash I found myself outside Cambodia. I found a car, and during the last couple of hundred miles to Bangkok I slept, without nightmares and without dreams.

T
he month of June had passed without the prophecy of the virgin of Medan coming true. I had not met my
xiao lao può—
the second “little wife” she had promised me—or if I had met her I was not aware of it. I had used that month to prepare for my annual trip to Europe. Above all, I had been trying to obtain visas for the different countries whose borders I would have to cross by train. This was no easy task, because some of them, including Vietnam, would like all visitors to arrive at an airport. Only after long explanations and arguments would they concede an overland visa, valid only for the particular frontier post named in the passport.

I spent the last evening choosing what to take with me, knowing that where I was going there would be no trolleys, escalators or porters to make things easier. I had said goodbye to everyone and was already feeling the familiar thrill of beginning a journey, the sense of relief that always fills me when I know that I cannot be reached, that I am not booked or expected anywhere, that I have no commitments except those created by chance. How wonderful it is to mix with a crowd as an ordinary traveler, free from one’s own role, from one’s self-image, which at times can be a cage as tight as that of the body; to be sure you won’t meet anyone with whom you will have to make conversation, and to feel free to send to the devil the first person who tries to start one.

In this mood, with only the weight of a backpack on my shoulders and one piece of hand luggage, I left Turtle House one morning to begin a great journey, one of the longest of my life and one of the slowest: Bangkok to Florence. Though I was heading west, I had to begin by going east. As it was impossible to cross Burma toward India, I had to
enter Cambodia and then pass through Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Siberia, and on and on until I reached home.

“Even a journey of ten thousand leagues begins with the first step,” say the Chinese, who have a proverb for every situation. My journey would be about 12,500 miles, but that very first step seemed the most difficult: how could I get to the station in time? Sukhumvit Road was completely choked with traffic; in half an hour my car had moved barely a dozen yards, and there was no hope that the situation would change. I thanked the driver and jumped on the back of a motorcycle-taxi which, by zigzagging between cars, cutting through narrow side lanes, going the wrong way down one-way streets and often mounting the pavement, got me to the station on time.

The train took five hours to reach Aranyaprathet, speeding through the “kingdom of smiles” that smiles no more. The Cambodian border was crowded with people pursuing an extremely profitable activity: smuggling. Loaded with bags and bundles, hundreds of Thais and Cambodians went back and forth undisturbed from one country to the other, under the eyes of the soldiers of both sides. I tried to slip through by mixing with the crowd, but my white clothes betrayed me and I was stopped at once: “No, no, foreigners cannot cross. It is forbidden,” said the soldiers. “Foreigners must go by plane.” I knew the old refrain, but did not lose heart. In Asia no prohibition is absolute, no rule inflexible; and soon, for a very reasonable price, I was “smuggled” into Cambodia on the backseat of an “authorized” car.

Before the war the Cambodian railway line went all the way to Thailand; but with the country in ruins and all its resources up for auction, the tracks from the border have been sold as scrap iron. The train to Phnom Penh now starts from the city of Sisophon. The train? Well, not exactly. Two or three times a week a string of broken-down cattle cars, loaded with contraband and passengers, many sitting on the roof, braves the 206 miles to Phnom Penh. The time of departure is erratic and is never announced in advance, so as to confuse the bandits who regularly attack and loot the train. All it takes is a mine or a tree trunk on the track; the bandits—or soldiers of the regular army?—open fire, kill one or two luckless passengers to scare the others, grab everything and leave. The news is given at most two lines in the local newspaper. Sometimes not even that.

I settled down among the baskets, bundles and passengers. They were all Khmers with very dark skin, the Khmer of the countryside and the forest, people of another age.

The simple, orderly beauty of the rice fields helped me to shake off the thought of the bandits, but when the train finally entered Phnom Penh I drew a sigh of relief, even though the station presented a disheartening scene, occupied as it was by an army of beggars, homeless people, desperate characters of every kind—those produced in the past by war and those produced now, with equal cruelty, by the free-market economy.

In Phnom Penh I remembered the monk that Hoc had told me about, the one who appeared sometimes as a young man and sometimes as an old one. With the journey I had before me, I thought it would not be a bad idea to “recharge” the Buddha I wore on my neck. Hoc was not sure if the monk was still alive. His wife had heard that he had been killed by bandits who had robbed his monastery. We decided to try anyway the next morning, very early so that I could go on to Saigon.

It was the sort of dawn that leaves you with an eternal sense of nostalgia: the dark tops of sugar palms against the immaculate pastel sky, the water motionless in the rice fields reflecting the gold of the pagodas. We went on Hoc’s motorbike. For the last three miles the road was full of holes, and we laughed at the idea that before “recharging” the Buddha we were unprotected, and might get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere.

The monk had not been murdered, or at least not his youthful incarnation. More than a magician or guru, he looked to me like a paratroop commander. A strong, muscular man, he ruled his 120 monks with an iron fist.

Hoc explained my case to him: the danger of flying and my Buddha which had not been recharged since 1972. The monk said that for a proper job I should go to seven pagodas and have it recharged by seven monks, but since I did not have time, I should at least offer seven white lotus flowers to the great image of the Enlightened One enthroned in his temple. I did so, reflecting that the number seven has been magic in all cultures and all times: the seven days of the week, the seven dwarfs,
the seven fat years and seven lean years, the seven-league boots, and the seven lotus flowers. Even in Cambodia!

The monk told me to lay out not only the Buddha on its chain but all the other objects that I usually carried with me, especially when traveling. These too had to be “charged” so they would protect me. Meanwhile he went to look after some other patients.

A group of young men, mentally disturbed or epileptic, were waiting for him. Brought from various parts of the country, they stood in a corner of the garden under a big tree, naked except for a
krama
around the waist. Beside them was a goatskin full of water. Some of them were too agitated to stand still, others were trembling. They all kneeled down. With both hands the monk picked up a bucket, plunged it into the water, and with all his strength, reciting aloud some prayers or magic formulae, poured it over those wretches: one bucketful after another until the goatskin was empty and the madmen, whether by magic or just from the cold shower, had all quieted down.

Hoc told me the monk was expert in curing the traumas of war, and that all these men were ex-soldiers. Luckily my case was different: a “half bath” would do, said the monk, but if I preferred I could strip naked like the others. I preferred not. He took the Buddha and the objects I had selected: my old Rolex, my old Leica, and a clip I use to hold money in my pocket. He put them in a silver bowl, scattered some jasmine flowers over them, laid his hands on top, said some prayers and sprinkled them—just as well!—with a few drops of water. But as for me, while I sat on a chair with a crown of flowers in my joined hands, he slowly poured a whole basin of water on my head. It ran into my collar and down my back. And then another basinful, and another. Chanting the whole time. Instead of concentrating on the blessing, I was thinking the madmen had been much wiser to take their clothes off. By the end of it I was soaking wet.

When the ceremony was over the monk gave me a small image of Buddha on laminated paper. Whenever I felt in danger, he said, I must immediately press it against the center of my forehead and strike it with the palm of my hand as if to drive it into my head. He demonstrated with a couple of whacks that set my whole brain spinning.

We made our offering and left. As we went out, Hoc translated an inscription I had noticed on one wall of the temple: “Life is not yours, and it can be taken from you at any moment. Reflect on this.”