A Fortune-Teller Told Me (6 page)

The next day we traveled north by jeep. The area around the Plain of Jars was one of those most devastated by the American war. The old capital, Xianghuang, literally no longer exists: it was obliterated by carpet bombing from B-52s. The new settlement, Phongsovane, is so far only a sprawl of wooden shacks.

To escape the bombs, the people of the region lived for years in the caves. Now they are rebuilding the villages with whatever materials the war left behind. The shells of cluster bombs—giant eggs that burst in the air and released dozens of murderous little booby traps—are used as fencing or animal feeding troughs; artillery shells serve as water containers.

“How old are you?” I asked a woman in the market at Phongsovane.
She looked at me, perplexed. “When were you born?” I persisted. “Before the war,” she replied. Which of the many wars was unclear. In human memory Laos has always been at war.

Thirty miles from Phongsovane is a fork in the road: one road stretches eastward toward Vietnam and the port of Vinh, the other continues north toward the old guerrilla capital Sam Neua and the Chinese frontier. Alongside the latter, about six miles from the fork, is the cave of Tam Piu. You can only gain access to it on foot, following the course of a little stream. An unexploded bomb is still lying in the middle of a meadow. The place is deserted.

Halfway up the steep cliff of whitish stone is a big, black, semicircular hole. The meadows are sweetly scented with fresh flowers, but the Laotians with us do not want to continue, because they can smell the odor of death. On we go, up an overgrown path, and venture inside this mouth in the mountainside. The walls are blackened by fire, with traces of phosphorus and pockmarks made by splinters of rock from a huge explosion that smashed the cave and brought great boulders crashing down. You walk amidst the debris—charred fragments of kitchen utensils, a sewing machine, the rags of the long-dead.

This was one of the famous caves where people lived during the war. Here, in the stone bowels of the mountain, the bombs of the B-52s could not penetrate. But in 1968 a T-28, a small plane used by the pro-American government forces, sighted the cave and scored a direct hit with a phosphorus rocket. The explosion within the stone walls was tremendous. Over four hundred people died. There were no survivors.

About thirty yards from the entrance the cave dipped, and only by the light of my pocket torch could I penetrate any further. Soon I realized I was walking on bones—some of them small, presumably children’s. In the absolute silence I imagined that I could hear, muffled as if by a veil, the cries of the dead. I thought of the participants’ different perspectives at that fatal moment: the pilot, tense and excited, aware of having scored a bull’s-eye; the havoc below, the cries of the wounded as they crawl to the depths of the cave, never to come out of it again.

Of course it was because I felt so moved that I “sensed” all this. But does not such a tragedy, or any other great sorrow, leave some sort of residue in the air and in the soil? What did the ancients mean by the
spiritus loci
, if not that something remains hovering in a place where something exceptional has happened?

On the way down the mountain we passed a group of children cutting wheels for one of their imaginary cars from the stump of a banana tree. “Have you been in that cave?” I asked them. One and all, they drew back from me, as if in terror. “No!” they cried. “You can’t go there! It’s scary, the
phii
are in there!” The spirits, ghosts.

In the West, this would be called something like “the Cave of the Martyrs,” and annual ceremonies would be held in their memory. Their story would be taught in schools. For the Laotians history does not bear this kind of meaning. In that hole are not the remains of their relatives, but only ghosts that have saturated the walls with wailing, suffering, horror. From this they must simply keep away.

In their vision of the world the relation between cause and effect is not the same as in ours. Shortly before my visit, near the Plain of Jars, a group of American experts had spent some weeks looking for MIAs (Missing in Action), pilots of planes shot down during the war whose deaths had never been verified. They dug in the jungle, sifting the earth to retrieve the least splinter of bone, and spent their evenings in Phongsovane. The Laotians did not show the least hostility toward them. Nobody even tried to show them one of the many children who even today are born deformed because of the chemicals released there by the Americans a quarter of a century ago.

The wife of the photographer of Phonsovane held one of these in her arms—a three-year-old child with a large square head and stubby hands with the fingers all stuck together. “Karma,” she said, Buddhistically attributing the horror of that child to some sin committed in his previous life.

To go from Xianhuang to Paksé in southern Laos I had to take another plane: the usual bouncing Chinese-made Y-21 with a pilot, a copilot, seventeen seats and a baggage compartment where the only toilet was. When I boarded the plane it was crammed full of mysterious floppy blue plastic sacks: they were in the aisle, on the empty seats, stacked to the ceiling in the baggage-toilet, piled against the emergency exit. I tried to lift one: very heavy. They were full of meat—pork and beef. In
Vientiane meat costs twice as much as in the Plain of Jars, and thus it was that the pilots supplemented their meager socialist wages. I remembered how, a few weeks earlier, in an airfield in the north, a Russian Antonov, just back from an engine overhaul, had been unable to take off and had caught fire. All the passengers had saved themselves by climbing out in time.

I wondered how anyone could get out of this plane, as every escape route was blocked by those heaps of flaccid bundles. I disliked the thought that if disaster struck, my flesh would be mixed with the meat in the sacks and nobody would be able to tell who had been who. But then I thought with relief of the Americans. I had heard that in the labs in Hawaii where they send what they find in their search for the MIAs, the Americans can determine whether a bone fragment belonged to one of their soldiers or not.

The sky grew dense and gray, and we threaded through heavy rain clouds and flashes of lightning among the steep, dark green mountains. The landscape had an extraordinary primitive beauty, but I could not enjoy it. Between one bounce and another I vowed that if this plane ever landed in Savannaket, where it was due for a stopover, I would get off and continue my journey by boat. And so I did.

The Mekong was flat and undramatic, its opaque surface broken now and then by great bubbles of mud. We glided slowly between the two banks that summed up the contradiction I would have liked to resolve: on the left the Laotian shore with villages shaded by coconut palms, dinghies moored below rough bamboo ladders, oil lamps gleaming softly in the silence of evening; on the right, the Thai shore with neon lights, canned music and the distant rumble of motors. On one side the past, from which everyone wants to tear the Laotians away, on the other the future toward which all and sundry believe they must rush headlong. On which shore lies happiness?

On December 31 I was in the forest of Bolovens, on a high plateau three thousand feet above sea level, with the Mekong to the west, the Annamite range to the east, and the Khmer plain to the south. This was the most heavily bombed region in the history of the world, because it was the assembly point for all the supplies coming from Hanoi along
the Ho Chi Minh Trail before they were redirected, either toward Cambodia in the direction of Saigon or toward central Vietnam. Not one building has remained standing from the colonial period, not one pagoda, not one village. Everything was demolished in the relentless earthquake of American bombs. Nature itself has been obliterated: the forest has become a scrubland, and even today you seldom hear a bird’s call. Only here and there on the fertile red earth have some Japanese and Thai companies begun to revive the famous coffee plantations.

I stayed in a wooden hut built over a waterfall. The roar of the water was deafening, and I spent New Year’s Eve pleasantly awake, imagining the strange 1993 that had reached its birth hour. An omelette of red ants’ eggs seemed perfectly suited to marking the occasion. By the time the hands of my watch casually swung past midnight, the decision not to fly had turned into an obvious one. With that slow, ancient descent by boat along the Mekong my days had already acquired a new rhythm. And yet I felt as if I were doing something bold, almost illicit. After a lifetime of sensible decisions, I now allowed myself a choice based on the most irrational of considerations. The limitation I was imposing on myself made no sense at all.

On the morning of January 1, 1993, to give my decision a symbolic flourish, I took my first steps of the new year on the back of an elephant. The route to Paksé crossed a valley which long ago had been the crater of a volcano. The grass was tall and very green, punctuated here and there by brilliant silvery plumes of the
lulan
that barely stirred in the wind.

The elephant basket was shaky and uncomfortable, but its height gave me a perfect opportunity to enjoy the world from a different perspective.

T
he car waiting for me in Takeck, on the Thai frontier post opposite Paksé, was like a time machine. It picked me up at the edge of ancient Laos, remote and still virginal, and in a few hours brought me back to the vulgar modernity of Bangkok—dirty, chaotic, stinking, where the water is polluted and the air lead-poisoned, where one person in five has no proper home, one in sixty, including newborns, is HIV positive, one woman in thirty works as a prostitute, and someone commits suicide every hour.

They call it “the City of Angels,” and perhaps it was once. The houses were built on piles, the streets were canals and the people went about by boat. The few streets on
terra firma
were lined with tall trees whose branches made tunnels of cool shade over the little traffic there was. The gilded spires of the pagodas soared above the houses and the palaces, even that of the king, who at the beginning of the century had called in an Italian architect to build him a throne hall.

Bangkok has never been a beautiful city, but it used to have charm; it was exotic. Sometimes the tropical heat was suffocating, but often a light breeze wafted in from the sea and up the Chao Paya River to blow unobstructed over the houses.

Among the flesh-and-blood human beings involved in the countless wheelings and dealings of a city that has long been known for its luxurious vices and its unsolved mysteries lived many other beings: invisible ones, born of the imagination, of the people’s love and fear. Like the other peoples of the region, the Thais call these beings
phii
, spirits.

To propitiate the
phii
and keep them quiet so they would not bother ordinary mortals, shrines were erected in their honor in every corner of
the city, in every street, in front of every house. The people were assiduous in leaving them food, little wooden elephants, plaster figurines of dancing girls, a glass of alcohol, cakes, sweet-scented garlands of jasmine.

Whenever they laid the foundations of a new house or dug a well, they immediately built a little altar to the Earth Spirit to apologize for the disturbance caused, and begged its protection in times to come. These apologies and prayers were regularly renewed with fresh offerings. If the felling of a tree proved unavoidable, its
phii
ceremoniously received a request for the use of a saw against it.

The
phii
of the plot of land where the old Erawan Hotel was built was so happy with the way it had been treated that it took to performing miracles, and today its temple is still one of the most frequented and most popular in Bangkok. One of its specialties is to aid the conception of male offspring, and thousands of sterile women have come to it with all sorts of offerings; some dance around it seminude at night.