A Fortune-Teller Told Me (57 page)

The Hong Kong fortune-teller, after all these years, continued to shower me with blessings. The next were eighteen long, restful days of silence and solitude on board a ship sailing from Europe to Asia, crossing the great seas of history: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean.

For some strange reason we tend to think of human events as taking place on land. We see the past in the physical solidity of monuments, in things that have been built, in the remains of things destroyed, in tombs. But much of history—often the most dramatic part—is written on the seas, where men have left no record of themselves, where everything has sunk without trace, and the water is just as it was a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago: illegible. The sea has inspired man’s dreams of conquest; on the sea the fates of civilizations and empires have been played out. It was the promise of unknown lands beyond the sea that spurred the great navigators to entrust their lives to the waves.

Sea travel is one of the oldest and most enjoyable ways of moving about the world. But unfortunately, as I had already discovered, it is rapidly disappearing: another of those pleasures which, through our compulsion to be modern, we are wiping out. Ships still exist, and they all still have some cabins for passengers, but the rules of bureaucracies and insurance companies have made them inaccessible.

I was lucky. In Singapore I had had supper with Roberto Pregarz, who ran the old Raffles Hotel in its last years of glory, before it too was modernized and became a deluxe tourist supermarket. I had asked him if he knew anyone in an Italian shipping line that sailed to the Orient, and he had given me the address of a friend of his, a captain on the board of Lloyd Triestino. I wrote to him, and received an encouraging reply. If I would sign some papers releasing the company from liability for anything that might happen to me on board, I could travel—this
time with Angela—on a container ship, the
Trieste
, that was sailing from La Spezia to Singapore at the end of September. A real gift.

The gift began with La Spezia itself. I knew the city only by name, and if it had not been for that ship, I probably would never have set foot there. I would have missed the pleasure of knowing a lovely nineteenth-century city, built by an admiral on the orders of Cavour, who had a strong aesthetic sense, when the newly united Italy needed an arsenal and a base for its navy. The departure of the
Trieste
, scheduled for a Saturday, was postponed first to the Monday and then to the Wednesday, so we had plenty of time for a side trip to Porto Venere and a whole day in Lerici, enjoying the gracious idleness of a seaside resort out of season.

Returning to La Spezia by bus along the coast, we saw the imposing, awkward form of the
Trieste
as it sailed into port. The ship was two hundred yards long, and its whole deck was occupied by stacks of containers. They looked like apartment blocks with a few narrow corridors between them; it was like a deserted city.

With the advent of containers, ships have lost their old shapely elegance, and ports have lost their lively swarms of humanity. The “new” port of La Spezia looked like the set for a science-fiction film. Giant cranes moved back and forth, loading and unloading immense iron boxes of all colors, setting them down on lorries, on ships, on stacks of other boxes—all automatically, to the sound of a continuous alarm that did not alarm anyone. In all the vast quadrangles of the port we did not see a living soul, as if everything was maneuvered by some distant computer, and men no longer existed.

It felt good to sail away and watch the lights of that spectral port merge with the others twinkling along the bay in the smoky darkness of the night.

For nearly three weeks we did not touch land. As the days passed, there was always some goal to look forward to: the sight of Scylla and Charybdis, the Strait of Messina, the Suez Canal, the stop at the Bitter Lakes, the entrance to the Red Sea. We had a spacious, comfortable cabin with a large porthole. The crew was reduced for economic reasons to a minimum of eighteen men who, because of the shifts of work below decks, we hardly ever saw.

The days went by quickly, punctuated by the ceremonies of lunch
and dinner in the salon. We dined with the officers, elegant in their white uniforms—gentlemen in the old style, full of mariners’ wisdom and sea stories to entertain their guests. The food, prepared by a Neapolitan cook, was excellent, and the menu was never repeated.

I got up with the sun and ran a dozen times around the ship each morning. Then for hours and hours I would sit at the stern, reading or dreamily looking out to sea, or watching a lone crew member scraping the rust off a capstan far away along the deck. In the silence, broken only by the creaking of the containers which shifted slightly with the rolling of the ship, I thought I finally understood sailors: they too were fugitives, they too were escaping from the world on land, from social commitments, from the weight of relationships, to live for weeks and months in that ever-changing universe of water and sky, to welcome the apparition of an island through the fog, or a lighthouse blinking in the darkness.

But sailors are a dying race. Already they are no longer called by the old names: able seamen, mates and boatswains have been abolished, and in their place, for trade-union reasons, there is a new category of
comuni polivalenti
—Italian bureaucratic jargon for all-purpose workers.

The same thing is happening with the marine knowledge accumulated over the centuries: the modern world has no more use for it. Now everything is done by instruments. Once a sailor had to train his eyes, to learn to discern the presence of a shoal of fish by a rippling of the surface, to assess a harbor’s navigability or detect a reef. Now all this expertise has been supplanted by sonar and radar, which every year become more accurate. But what a fund of knowledge is being lost! How many natural antennae are falling from men’s heads, to be replaced by electronic antennae!

“Everything is automatic. There’s no more need to look at the sea,” said the captain sorrowfully. The sea, when you look at it, is so extraordinary! Different every hour, with different colors, different densities, sounds, movements, different spectacles: once it was dolphins swimming alongside the ship, once a whale diving quickly as if frightened by our monstrous size, or shoals of flying fish playing with the keel, or sharks on their way to mate and breed in the bay of Djibouti.

Every conversation in the salon ended with a lament for all that had changed in ships, and for the poetry which technology has stolen from
life at sea. According to the chief engineer, it is the fault of the Americans: after spending so much money going to the moon they found nothing there to exploit, so now they’re trying to recoup their investments by recycling the technology developed for that trip for civilian uses and hawking it all over the world. He was convinced that soon all large international shipments will be made by submarines entirely controlled by computers, with no crew at all and no need to face the difficulties and contrary forces that affect surface navigation.

The cook particularly objected to the telephone, because of which everyone had lost the habit of writing home. You spent a lot of money for three minutes of conversation a week in which all you said was, “Hello, can you hear me?” “Yes, I can hear you very well.” “So can I.”

All the time on board we had a vague sensation of witnessing something that was ending. Then one day that sensation became precise: our voyage was a funeral. Shortly after we passed Cape Guardafui (“look and flee”) the radio operator received a message from the trade unions urging the crew to go on strike: the state enterprise that owned the
Trieste
was negotiating to sell it. When it returned to Italy the ship would pass into the hands of some multinational company that would rename it, register it under a flag of convenience, and replace the Italian
comuni polivalenti
with Asian seamen, perhaps Chinese, paid less than $50 a month. So, this was the last voyage of one of the few remaining ships to fly the Italian flag.

Sitting at the stern, I wondered how much longer such a world can last, based exclusively on the inhuman, immoral and philistine criteria of economics. As I strained my eyes to make out the silhouettes of distant islands, I imagined one inhabited by a tribe of poets, held in reserve for a time when humanity, after this dark age of materialism, will begin once again to sustain its existence with other values.

One of the great pleasures of the ship was having time to let my thoughts wander unrestrained, to indulge in fantasies and play with the most absurd notions. At times I had the sensation of sifting through the whole ragbag of memories accumulated in my life.

Taking time for oneself is a simple cure for the ills of the soul, but one which people apparently find difficult to allow themselves. For years, in moments of depression, I had dreamed of sticking a note on my door saying “Out to lunch,” and making that absence last for days or
weeks. Now, finally, I had succeeded. I had all the time in the world to watch a flock of swallows that came aboard as we crossed the Mediterranean, flying out over the sea from time to time and then returning to hide among the containers. I had time to think about time, about how I instinctively always find the past more fascinating than the future, and how the present often bores me, so that only by thinking of how I will remember it later can I enjoy the moment.

For shipboard reading I had brought two books by Mario Appelius, a prewar Italian journalist who has now been completely forgotten. He was put on the index for having been a supporter of Mussolini: another example of how, in these times of vaunted freedom of thought, heavy prejudices are still with us.

Appelius was a great traveler, with an instinct for history and a deep understanding of humanity’s dramas. His descriptions of a meeting with an overseas Chinese in an opium den in Phnom Penh, or the crowning of a child emperor in the ancient city of Hué in Vietnam, are masterful. Appelius understood much about the character of colonialism, about the aspirations of Asian peoples and the consequences of modernity which in his time already threatened the survival of old cultures and civilizations. His sorrow for the disappearance of the Kas, mythical savages of the Laotian mountains, was quite authentic. But because he remained to the end a convinced fascist—it was his voice on the radio that repeated the famous wartime slogan
“Dio stramaledica gli inglesi!”
(May God supercurse the British!)—he became a nonperson, an unmentionable name. In reading his book, I felt I did something to redress the balance.

At times, in those idle hours, I mentally reviewed the various fortune-tellers I had met, trying to find a common thread in all they had said. It seemed to me that the point of traveling is in the journey itself, not in the arrival; and similarly in the occult what counts is the search, the asking of questions, not the answers found in the cracks of a bone or the lines in your palm. In the end, it is always we ourselves who give the answer.

“Will I die in the war?” the soldier asked the Cumaean sibyl, and from her grotto she tossed out a handful of disconnected words that had to be arranged to give her answer. The soldier had to choose whether the
“non”
should go before his dying, making the prophecy
read
“Ibis, redibis, non morieris in bello”
(You will go, you will return, and will not die in the war), or before his return, to produce
“Ibis, non redibis, morieris in bello”
(You will go, you will not return, you will die in the war).

As the days passed we watched for the points marked in pencil on the captain’s charts. For three days we sailed through open seas toward the island of Minicoy, but when we passed it all we could see was the faint flashing of a lighthouse. The leprosarium on the beach which the officers had told us about was impossible to make out even with a telescope.

When we entered the Straits of Malacca we passed an island covered with palms, through which shone the white form of a Catholic church. This was the island of We’, where Nino Bixio was buried. Bixio was Garibaldi’s disillusioned companion, who came to Asia to seek his fortune and vent his frustrations after the Campaign of the Thousand. Once upon a time, passing Italian sailors would stand on the deck and salute, but that custom too has been abandoned.

We entered the Bay of Singapore in the middle of the night. A storm had broken. The Chinese pilot who came on board whispered his orders into a walkie-talkie. Despite the storm, the moment the
Trieste
tied up at pier number four the cranes began to unload the containers and replace them with others bound for Japan, where the ship was to call before returning to Italy. The crew were forbidden to disembark. The resupply operations would be finished in a few hours, and the ship would leave again at once, trying to make up time and avoid the fines imposed by international regulations.

When the police gave permission for Angela and me to go ashore, everyone was so busy working that the time for farewells and gifts was brief. The captain, in the name of the whole crew, handed us a paper bag with something light inside. I opened it when we got to the hotel. It was a flag: the flag of the
Trieste
, on which we had been the last passengers.

O
ne gets used to everything. I was used to traveling slowly. Angela took the plane from Singapore, and in two hours she was in Bangkok, but I had two more days of travel ahead of me, by train. I stopped off in Kuala Lumpur, where my friend M.G.G. Pillai had managed to book an appointment for me with the famous fortune-teller, an Indian, whom I had not been able to see in April.

The meeting took place in his “studio,” which was in the shopping arcade of one of the big hotels, surrounded by souvenir shops, airline offices, tailors who made suits in twenty-four hours, a barber and a newsstand. It was because of his fame—he was so much in demand that one had to book months in advance—that I was so curious to meet him.