A Fortune-Teller Told Me (5 page)

At the beginning of this century Pierre Loti arrived with the trepidation of a pilgrim at Angkor, in Cambodia, on a cart pulled by black oxen, to ask hospitality of the monks who lived in the temples. Twenty years later Cook’s Travel Agency were organizing tours and dance shows by night amid the ruins, and selling centuries-old stones to tourists as souvenirs.

The man who in 1860 “discovered” Angkor for humanity—and for tourists—paid for that conquest with his life. Few know that his grave is still there, east of Luang Prabang. I wanted to go and pay my respects to that adventurous scientist, whose story had always fascinated me. His name is Henri Mouhot. He was a French naturalist who traveled in Indochina when it had just become a colony. His plan was to go up the Mekong to China. Before setting out he had read an account written ten years earlier by a monk who had seen strange ruins in the jungle not far from the town of Siem Reap.

In a letter Mouhot tells how one day he was walking through the forest, humming
La Traviata
to keep himself company, when suddenly, amid thick foliage under gigantic trees, he felt himself observed by two … four … ten … a hundred stone eyes, all smiling at him. I have often tried to imagine what he felt at that moment, a moment that made his journey and his death worthwhile. After spending some time amid the ruins of Angkor, Mouhot resumed his walk northward. He passed through Luang Prabang, but while he was marching along the Nam Khan River, beyond the village of Naphao, he fell ill. On October 19, he wrote, “I am stricken by a fever.” Then for some days there are no
entries in his diary, till on the twenty-ninth we come to the last words, written in a shaky hand: “My Lord, have mercy on me.” Mouhot died on November 10, 1861. He was thirty-five years old.

Going to visit him was a much simpler matter: it took half an hour by car from Luang Prabang toward Ban Noun, then about ten minutes on foot down an escarpment, and up an overgrown path. When I reached the grave I felt as if Mouhot were dying at that very moment. Nothing had changed. The river ran with the same quiet murmur, the forest whispered with the same thousand voices, and in the distance a solitary woman was walking with a wicker basket on her shoulders—a woman of today, but also a woman of then, over 130 years ago.

The grave is where Mouhot died, in a fold of the hillside about thirty yards above the bed of the Nam Khan, as if his companions had wished to make sure the current would not carry him away. There is a mound of cement, behind which a great tree stands guard. To the left, waving like a banner, is a tall, joyous tuft of green bamboo.

The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo was right, in his poem in praise of tombs. They are a great inspiration, and I have always felt attracted by these simple, touching traces of life left by Westerners as they traveled the world. How many hours I have spent in Asian cemeteries for the foreign dead—in Macao, Chiang Mai, Nagasaki, Yokohama—trying to feel my way into the lives of these people who died far from home, trying to retrace the stories locked within the few formal words carved in stone. Ships’ captains struck down by fever when barely in their twenties, young mothers who died in childbirth, sailors from one ship who succumbed in the space of a few days, obviously to a sudden epidemic. Sometimes an old man, mourned by children and grandchildren, whose life—so the epitaph says—was an example to many others. Adventurers, missionaries, traders: unknown names.

What is the strange fascination of tombs? Can it be that they really hold something more than bones? Perhaps with the memory of the dead there also remains some stamp of their presence. Perhaps the stone itself is imbued with their history. The grave of Mouhot, a silent, solitary presence, forgotten on the bank of the Nam Khan, truly seemed to speak. The mere fact of my going there had somehow given it life. Or was it that without the dimension of time, this past was always there, present for anyone willing to be moved, to be inspired?

I had chosen Laos as my last destination of 1992 because it was a place from which, if I decided not to fly, I knew I could easily return overland to Bangkok. From the first moment my visit was marked by curious new thoughts. The fact that in some way I had begun looking into the less usual side of experience made me notice all sorts of things that would have escaped me at other times. Suddenly, everything appeared to have a link with the other world; people whose acceptable social faces were all I normally saw now revealed a second nature, and moreover, one that was much more in tune with what interested me.

On my last day in Luang Prabang I took a boat up the Mekong to the caves of Tham Ting with their seven thousand Buddhas. During the war these famous caves in the steep mountainside high above the river had come under fire from the Pathet Lao, the Communist guerrillas who controlled the whole surrounding area, and I had never succeeded in getting there. By now many of the old statues had been stolen and sold to Bangkok antique dealers, but I wanted to go there nonetheless. Was my future not symbolically flowing down the Mekong toward me? I wanted to go and meet it.

In the main cave a group of Laotians were kneeling before a stone Buddha, inquiring about their future. I did the same. The process is simple. Slowly, with hands joined, you shake a boxful of little bamboo sticks until one of them falls to the ground. Each stick bears a number corresponding to a slip of paper with a message. Mine was eleven, and the message was:

I did not think much of this, but later, when I pulled the little scrap of paper out of my pocket during the Christmas dinner at the French embassy in Vientiane, it was like the spark that ignites a great blaze. Soon, around that very formal table served by silent waiters in livery,
the talk was all about fortune-tellers, prophecies and magic. Everyone had a story, an experience to tell. Perhaps because we were dining by candlelight, in a great white house surrounded by bougainvillaea and orchids, nestling in a mysterious garden populated with old statues of explorers—or perhaps because Europe and its logic seemed further away than ever—it was as if my slip of paper had opened a Pandora’s box and this were an hour of unwonted confessions.

“A fortune-teller really changed my life,” said a beautiful, elegant woman of around forty, recently arrived from Paris, who sat opposite me. While still at university she had become pregnant by a fellow student, who had died immediately afterwards in a skiing accident. A common friend had stayed by her side, and a great love had developed between them. But one day this friend’s mother had been to a fortune-teller who had said, “Your son is about to become the father of a child which is not his, and he must absolutely not do it. It would ruin his life.” When the mother told her son this he was so shocked that he called off the wedding. “And that,” said a gentleman sitting to the right of the ambassador’s wife, “is how I became the father of that child.”

This sounded to me like a typical case: the mother had somehow got the fortune-teller to say what she herself could not say to her son, and thus, through the authority of the occult, obtained the result she wanted. But the other diners were rather impressed, and the woman herself was totally convinced of the fortune-teller’s powers. As for my fortune-teller in Hong Kong, everyone agreed that I must heed his warning and refrain from flying.

At dawn I left, by air, for the Plain of Jars, a strange valley amid the mountains of northern Laos, which is scattered with huge, mysterious stone vessels, some over seven feet high, all beautifully carved. But by whom? To hold what? Anthropologists say they were funerary urns of an ancient population of Chinese origin, now extinct, but the Laotians prefer to believe their legends. “They are amphoras for wine,” they say. “The giants made them. At the top of the mountain there is an enormous stone table where, from time to time, the giants meet for their banquets.” But no one had ever managed to reach it.

I spent three days in the region. The ripe opium poppies were
beginning to shed their red, purple and white petals, and women were cutting open the bulbs to collect the precious sticky black juice in old bowls. The Muong, the mountain people, were celebrating their New Year. Young people were at their most popular sport: playing ball as a way of finding a mate. In each village rows of girls in traditional dress stand for hours on end opposite rows of boys and throw cloth balls back and forth while chanting an old ditty: “If you love me, throw better. If you want me, improve your looks.”

I was accompanied by a very special guide, Claude Vincent, a cultivated Frenchman of about fifty who had lived in Laos since he was a boy. He had married a Laotian woman, and remained in the country even after the Pathet Lao seized power in 1975. In the years of the war we had often met, but had never known each other well; for him I was one of the many journalist-vultures who descended on Laos, attracted by its dead. Now it was different, and Claude wanted to make me understand his love for a land to whose ancient, beautiful soul he is fervently attached.

I realized this when, tired after an afternoon exploring the Plain of Jars, we retired for the night to an inn without electricity or water. We talked about the Communists: wherever they went, in China as in Cambodia, the first thing they did was to abolish the popular traditions. They fought against superstition, eliminated fortune-tellers and banned the old ceremonies. I asked Claude how the Pathet Lao had behaved. In reply he told me about something that had happened to him a few years before.

It was a Sunday in 1985 in Vientiane, and Claude and his family planned to have a picnic on the bank of the Mekong. One of his nieces was very excited about the trip, but she came down with a high fever and they decided to leave her at home. She was terribly upset and insisted that she
must
, absolutely
must
go to the river. Not to take her was out of the question.

They found a place on the bank, the adults eating and the children playing by the water. Only when it was time to go did they realize that the little girl was no longer there. They searched for her everywhere, but she had vanished. In desperation they consulted a famous clairvoyant, who went into a trance and told them: “Next Friday, at 3:45 in the afternoon, go to the bend in the river. There, in front of the pagoda, you’ll
find her. She will have blue marks on her body: one under her arm and one on her chest.” The family went, and at the appointed hour the child’s body floated to the surface, bearing the blue marks described by the woman.

Claude told me that the clairvoyant had made contact with the Spirit of the River and asked it to yield up the child’s body in return for the sacrifice of seven chickens and a pig. The family’s problem was how to give the Spirit the promised reward. These were the hardest years of the Communist regime. There were informers in every neighborhood, and Claude was afraid of getting into trouble if he organized the ceremony. He went to ask the advice of a high party official. The response surprised him. “You absolutely must make the sacrifice. You promised it to the Spirit of the River and you can’t break your word,” he said, and reminded Claude that during the war every time the Pathet Lao crossed a river, the last man in the patrol had to turn back and call to a nonexistent comrade. The Spirit of the River habitually carries off the last of a line, and in that way the guerrillas hoped to deceive it. “Today that practice has become a military order for all patrols crossing watercourses,” said Claude in conclusion.
^*
The idea that in Laos even the Marxist-Leninists had remained above all Laotians, and in their own way outside time, was enormously pleasing.