A Fortune-Teller Told Me (13 page)

“Of course,” I said instinctively, realizing as I did so how this fortune-telling business could easily become a drug, and how one might spend one’s life listening to essentially the same things, asking the same questions, each time waiting for the answer with fresh curiosity. So it is, too, at the casino when you put a handful of chips on the black or the red, on the even or the odd numbers: the more you play the more you want to, and you never get bored waiting for that “yes” or “no” of fate. And, just as at the casino one who loses is sure his luck will soon change, so it is with fortune-tellers: after hearing so many of them come out with perhaps one true and interesting point amidst a plethora of errors and banalities, we still hope to come upon the most gifted of all, the one who is never wrong, who sees everything clearly. Could it be the next one?

The woman was about fifty, stocky and broad-shouldered, with short legs, her hair still black, and light skin. She was clearly of Chinese origin, but I didn’t mention this—I didn’t want to get into a conversation that might give her clues as to who I was and where I came from. I sat opposite her without saying a word, and waited for her questions.

She sat for a few minutes as if in prayer, whispering some formula with her hands joined in front of her chest, her head slightly bowed and her eyes closed. She then peered into my face with great concentration and asked me to smile, saying she wanted to examine the way my mouth creased; she touched my ears and the bones of my forehead. Finally, she had me stand and lift the cuffs of my trousers, to get a good look at my feet and ankles.

This is an old Chinese system of divination, and it interested me because, of all the various systems, this one seemed the least nebulous.
A body, closely observed, can say a great deal, and if there is a “book” in which to read someone’s past—and maybe a hint of his future, too—it must surely be that shell of life that people wear from birth, rather than some manual of calculations based on the relation between the stars and the hour when one came into the world. People born at the same hour of the same day of the same year do not share the same fate, and they most certainly do not die at the same time. Nor do they have the same creases in their hands. But people with similar physical characteristics do often have similar attitudes, similar qualities and defects. So it is not impossible that one may be able to read in a person’s body the signs of his fate.

The reading of people’s destinies in their faces evolved in China from medical practice. Patients, especially women, would not allow anyone to touch them, so the doctors had to diagnose their ailments just by looking at them, especially their faces. By dint of observing vast numbers of patients, century after century, the Chinese have concluded, for example, that a small red spot on a cheek denotes a heart malfunction; a wrinkle under the left eye means a stomach problem. Similarly, all rich people are meant to have a particular curve of the nose, and people with power have a mole on the chin. Hence the idea that destiny is written in the body: one need only know how to observe it.

The Chinese discern the character of a person by his ears; in the forehead they read his fate up to the age of thirty-two, in the eyes up to forty, and in the nose from forty to fifty. The eyebrows show the emotional life, and in the mouth are the signs of good or bad fortune in the last years of life. In the crease of the lips, which changes with time, can be read what a man wished to be and what he has become. Not all that crazy, I thought. The body really can be an excellent indicator. Is it not true that after a certain age one is responsible for one’s face? And the hands, don’t they reveal things about the past that plastic surgery tries to erase elsewhere?

I was very curious to see what this woman would read in my face, my ankles, and especially in the small mole just over my right eyebrow. But her first words disappointed me.

“Your ears are indicative of generosity.”
(One of the usual gambits to put the “patient” in a good mood, I said to myself.)
“Your brothers and sisters all depend on you.”

“That’s not true—I have no brothers or sisters,” I replied aloud. “I’m an only child.”

She was unperturbed.
“If there are no brothers and sisters, then it’s your relatives. Your ears say that many of your relatives depend on you.”
(Yes and no, I said to myself, already resigned to more of these generalities.)

“As a young man you had great problems over money and health, but since the age of thirty-five everything has gone well from that point of view. You’re fortunate, because you have always had beside you someone you trust, someone who helps you.”

“Yes, indeed. I’ve been married for over thirty years,” I said.

“Yes, and you married your second love, not the first.”
(Not true at all—neither the first nor the second—but by now I had already given up hope of hearing anything interesting, and did not want to disappoint the lady.)

“Your ears indicate that one day you’ll come into a great inheritance from your parents.”
(Poor ears, they lie! From my parents—my father died some time ago—nothing of that sort can be expected. Certainly if today I asked my mother—eighty-five years old and affected by senile dementia—“Mother, where have you hidden the money?” she would raise a hand and, with that splendid smile that is party to the things she no longer knows, would say, “Over there … over there,” indicating with absolute confidence some point in the air. Well, that money “over there” is all I will ever inherit. Or should I reinterpret the word “inheritance,” taking it to mean not only money?)

The woman continued,
“In the house where you live is a place where you worship the gods and your ancestors. It’s good that you do this. Never give it up.”
(Ah, now this is interesting. In the home of every Asian, especially the Chinese, there is a place of that sort, usually a little altar, and it takes no great powers of second sight to imagine this. It is like telling a devout Christian: “There’s a crucifix in your house.” But this woman can see that I am a foreigner, in all probability not a Buddhist and certainly not given to ancestor worship. And yet she says this—and she is right. In my house there is just such a place. It came into being over the years. I had become interested in those gilded camphorwood statuettes that the southern Chinese have on their family altars, and I had bought a few in Macao. After a while, seeing them sitting on my shelves like ornaments, I had a feeling that they were suffering, removed
from their altars, that they had lost their meaning. I began putting sticks of incense beside them. Then in Peking, in an old secondhand shop near the Drum Tower where I used to drop in now and then to see what the peasants had brought to sell, I saw a beautiful altar of carved wood, one of those on which families used to keep little votive tablets for their ancestors, and I bought it. The Macao statues now had a home; and when my father died his photograph came to rest in the lap of a fine Buddha who by then occupied the center of the altar. Since then, every day I light a stick of incense, and with that little rite take a moment to remember him. He is buried in a big cemetery in Florence, one of those where you get lost in the maze of alleys and paths, and where every grave is exactly like all the others. I have never wanted to go there. His place for me is in my home, on that Chinese ancestral altar.)

“The house you live in, in Thailand, is in a beautiful place that makes you happy. Stay in that house as long as you are in this country.”

Again she studied my face, pondered, and said that money melts in my hand. (Well, there is a consensus on that, at least.) She said that I tend to be lucky, that I have instinct, that where the road forks I always choose the direction that turns out best, and that I always surround myself with the right people. She said that my mouth does not indicate regrets because in life I have always done what I wanted.
“You will have a long life,”
she proclaimed. Then she focused on my mole.
“Ah, this is a sign of your good luck, but it’s also a sign that you’ll die abroad.”
She paused a moment and added:
“There is no doubt about it: you’ll die in a country which is not your own.”

She asked if I had any questions. I tried to think of one, and remembered that in the autumn the English and German editions of my latest book, the story of a long journey through the Soviet Union in the months when the empire fell apart and Communism died, would be published.

“What should I do to ensure that this book will be successful and sell lots of copies?” I asked.

She concentrated, then replied with an air of complete certainty:
“The book must come out between September 9 and October 10; it must be neither too long nor too short; it must have a colored dust jacket, but the colors must not be too strong; and, above all, in the title there must be the name of a person, but not that of a woman.”

I burst out laughing, glad that Vladimir Ilyich was born male. The book was called
Goodnight, Mister Lenin
, and the dust jacket, long decided upon, was in pastel colors.

She concluded:
“And don’t forget that you must pray to Buddha and make offerings on the altar of your ancestors. Only if you do that will the book enjoy success!”

She did not ask for payment, only that I make a contribution to the association.

I spent several days reflecting on my decision not to fly and trying to analyze the real reasons behind it. There could be no denying that I wanted to do something different, to have an excuse for a change in the daily routine. But had I not also thought that by obeying the Hong Kong fortune-teller’s injunction I would avoid the possibility of that air accident about which he had been so emphatic? That was obviously so, but I found it hard to admit.

I realized that despite having lived many years in Asia, and having adapted myself to the life there, intellectually I still had my roots in Europe. I had not expunged from my mind the instinctive Western contempt for what we call superstition. Every time I found myself starting to feel that way I had to remember that in Asia “superstition” is an essential part of life. And anyway, I told myself, many of the practices that seem absurd today may originally have had a certain logic which with time has been forgotten. For example, acupuncture: it works, but no one can really explain why. And the art of
feng shui
was originally based on the careful study of nature: the nature which we moderns understand less and less.

In Chinese
feng
means “wind,”
shui
means “water.”
Feng shui
thus means “the forces of nature;” the expert in
feng shui
is one who understands the fundamental elements of which the world is made, and can judge the influence of one on another. He can evaluate the influence that the course of a river, the position of a hill or the shape of a mountain may have on a city or a house to be built, or a grave to be dug. Strange? Not at all. Even we, in planning a house, take account of the sun’s direction, and make sure the building is not too exposed to dampness.

For many centuries the principles of
feng shui
have had a decisive influence on Chinese architecture. The plans of all the ancient settlements of the Celestial Empire, beginning with the one that is now the city of Xian, as well as those of the Chinese diaspora, including Hué, the imperial capital of Vietnam, were based on considerations of
feng shui
. The same is true for all the imperial tombs, beginning with that of Qin Shi Huang Di, the first emperor, with his famous terracotta army. The position of a tomb is very important. A grave that is well located and exposed to “cosmic breath” can keep alive the soul of the deceased and bring happiness and well-being to future generations. A badly placed tomb, on the other hand, can bring the descendants misfortune after misfortune.

The art
of feng shui
was born in China, but today it is a common practice in much of Asia. When something goes wrong—a marriage, a business deal or a factory—the first thought is that something is out of joint with the
feng shui
, and an expert is consulted. A few years ago in Macao a newly opened casino was failing to attract customers. The cause, according to the
feng shui
man, lay in the color of the roof: it was red like the shell of a dead crab, rather than green like the shell of a live one. The roof was repainted and business boomed.

Anecdotes of this kind have cost
feng shui
some of its ancient respectability. But they have not reduced its popularity, and there are a growing number of people in Asia today who, on the advice
of feng shui
experts, propitiate fate by changing their furniture arrangement, the color of their office walls or the shape of their front doors. Even the earnest British directors of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, when they decided to build their big new head office in Hong Kong, turned to one of the best-known experts in the colony to avoid trouble with the
feng shui
. During the planning of that futuristic steel and glass edifice the architect, Norman Foster, was constantly in touch with this “master of the forces of nature,” taking note of what he said and following his recommendations. These determined a great number of architectural details, including the strange diagonal placement of the entrance stairway.