A Fortune-Teller Told Me (20 page)

I asked my fortune-teller if he really believed he could see someone’s past. He said yes, but that he could see into the future with even greater accuracy. The night before, for example, he had seen that I would come, a foreigner. How? By looking at his hands.

I inquired if he knew Italy, and what he thought about the state of the world.
“I only understand things that happen around me,”
he replied.

I liked the man. His work was not based on any method. He followed no astrological charts, he did no sums nor claim to interpret signs in the hand. He “felt” the person he had before him, and obviously after seeing thousands he had developed an unusual ability to read them. In this society, where little girls begin selling themselves at thirteen, where
teachers may not speak of AIDS and where the policemen are the bandits, he struck me as doing something of service. Part priest, part social worker, doctor and psychoanalyst, he did no one any harm. Quite the contrary. He was there to give advice, to comfort people, to impose taboos that gave the unfortunates of Betong a sense of being able to escape from their troubles and grasp something a bit better. All for the modest sum of 30 baht (75p) per consultation.

I asked the teacher if she would like to have her future told. Absolutely not! She was quite firm. A friend of hers had been engaged to a man she loved very much. Before marrying him she went with her mother to a fortune-teller who told her the marriage would be a mistake. She left her fiancé and has been unhappy ever since.

The rain had stopped and the sky was dramatically beautiful, with big clouds, golden sunbeams, and still some dense black pockets of rain in the distance. The chick released by the woman with the evil eye had climbed up on a coconut, and a big toad had advanced to the doorway. The papaya and banana trees were heavy with well-washed fruit.

I left Betong at dawn. The national anthem was booming from all the loudspeakers in the town, and dozens of big Thai flags were being hoisted in front of schools and police stations. The traffic stopped, and the population stood stiffly to attention.

As soon as I was outside Betong I began to feel I was no longer in Thailand. The villages are dominated by mosques, the men wear sarongs and Muslim skullcaps. Goats graze along the roadside, and lie down on the asphalt itself, so that taxi drivers have to take care not to run them over. Thailand is dissolving slowly, tolerantly, with no border posts, police or controls, with no precise confines except where Malaysia looms up, first with a barbed-wire fence, then another, then some gates and a hundred yards of unobstructed ground, like no-man’s-land. At long last you see the blue and white buildings of the border police and customs.

I walked between barriers till I reached a cabin window through which a woman glared at me. She was covered in a blue veil on which a pair of thick spectacles rested. Polite but cold, she asked where I was going and how long I intended to stay. She gave me a visa for two weeks.
The atmosphere was disquieting. “Death penalty for carrying drugs,” said a big notice surmounted by a skull and crossbones.

Where was the Malaysia of twenty years ago? The women in sarongs, wearing brassieres that always seemed a size too small, and skintight lace blouses? Where were the rich colors and bodies whose joy seemed to reflect nature’s? Swept away by Islamic austerity? In the Malaysia I knew in the seventies, religion was marginal. The Malays had their mosques and the Chinese their temples. The Malays ate their goats, the Chinese their pigs. But then, to defend themselves against the overwhelming economic power and materialist culture of the Chinese, the Malays began slavishly following Islam. They took away their women’s sarongs and gave them veils and loose two-piece gowns, and shut themselves up in the citadels of their mosques.

At the border post all the policemen and customs officials were Malays. The taxi drivers who offered to take me to the next town, Kroh, were all Chinese.
“Hua-ren”—
flower men, sons of the empire of flowers—they relished calling themselves, using an expression that is no longer heard elsewhere.

It was less than ten miles to Kroh, and my flower man lost no time in telling me about the problems of the country in which I had barely set foot. “They have the power and we’re second-class citizens. Just think! If I want to buy a flat I pay 100,000 ringit, and if one of them buys it he pays 90,000. For the same flat! Does that seem fair to you? They’ve all the privileges, we have nothing. They call themselves
bumiputra
, sons of the soil, but what soil? We too were born here, just like them. And anyway, the real
bumiputra are
the
orang asli
, the pygmies in the jungle! What counts is being a Muslim. And we’re not.”

I had just arrived, but he took it for granted I knew that “they” were the Malays, and that the great, unsolved problem of Malaysia was race. Race is everything. Race determines who your friends are, who your enemies are, what job you do, which doctor you see, which vet tends your animals. Race determines where you live, where you go to school, whom you marry and where you are buried. The Malays have the political power, the Chinese have the money. This form of apartheid is not written in any law, but it is rooted in the practice of the past twenty years. To the Chinese the situation seems unfair. But the Malays see it as the only guarantee of social equilibrium.

Originally, Malaysia was really inhabited by the jungle people, the
orang asli
. Then, a few centuries ago, the Malays came and took over. The Chinese have for the most part been here only a hundred years—the British needed manpower to exploit the country’s great natural resources, so they gave free rein to immigration. Together with the Chinese came the Indians, also encouraged by the British.

When the British granted independence to these territories, they took care that one race would not be numerically too superior to the other. The Malay Federation, born in 1957 with a population that was 40 percent Chinese and 50 percent Malay, was a land of great wealth in which the different races, it seemed, could live in harmony. The only real enemies then were the Communists. Now there are no more Communists, but the races are mutually hostile. The Chinese have become richer and the Malays more numerous. The Chinese now comprise only 32 percent of the population, the Malays 62 percent.

We had to pass several checkpoints. As at the border, the soldiers and policemen were all Malay. “They’re looking for weapons,” said the taxi driver. “In Thailand you can find all kinds, and the bandits go to Betong to buy them.”

“Like AIDS? That too comes from Betong.”

The driver was astonished. “There’s no AIDS in Betong. It’s a small, clean place and the girls are all fresh. AIDS is in the big cities, in Bangkok, in Pattaya.” So the march of AIDS continues.

Soon we were in Kroh. When I went to change money and find out how to get to Penang, I noticed that everyone was speaking Mandarin. Kroh too was practically a Chinese town. I spent a few hours there, just strolling around. As this was the first and last time I would set foot in Kroh, I felt I might as well stay there awhile. Kroh! I looked on the map. It was barely a dot.

With the decision not to fly I had regained possession of time: time to stop, to look around, to reflect. No one was waiting for me, and with great pleasure I let the bus for Penang leave without me in order to stay and chat with an old Chinese. He told me about his father who, when opium was a state monopoly, would go and purchase his dose in the building that is now the post office, and spend the rest of the day smoking. He told me about himself, how during the Japanese invasion he was
taken prisoner and sent to the river Kwai to build the “death railway.” He was one of the few to return.

It was a joy to let time go by unconcernedly. I took notes, chatted, let my thoughts wander. Slowly I realized that I was rediscovering the pleasure of travel, of getting to know a place and its people. As a journalist one often has to arrive in a city, interview a couple of people, write something up and leave. But to understand a situation it is not enough to speak to a minister, a general, an expert; and anyway, they always say what they have to say. The important thing is to spend time with them, get them talking about other things, and wait for their afterthoughts, in which they slip in what they really think, answering questions that have not been asked. That is the key to everything. I was tired of running here and there looking for quotations with which to pad out an article.

I traveled slowly and with enjoyment. Once again I had time to look, to get the feel of places. Crossing the border on foot from Thailand to Malaysia had enabled me to sense many things about the differences and tensions between the two countries. Naturally I could have read about it somewhere, but without experiencing anything, without seeing the colors, the people’s faces, without hearing their voices.

I adore traveling like that. Travel is an art, and one must practice it in a relaxed way, with passion, with love. I realized that after years of going about in airplanes I had unlearned that art—the only one I care about!

There is a story in Angela’s family about her paternal grandmother. A German, born in Haiti, well educated, she knew the classics, had read the great novels, could play the piano and was at ease in society. Before dying in Florence at the age of eighty-six, she said: “What have I done in my life? A bit of conversation!” If I have time for reflection at the end, I would like to be able to say: “I have traveled.” And if I have a grave, I would like a stone with a hollow from which birds can drink, inscribed with my name, the two obligatory dates, and the word “Traveler.”

The distance from Baling to Butterworth is fifty-seven miles. Our shared taxi passed large plantations of rubber and palm oil. The landscape was beautiful, green and orderly. Amid the vegetation at times we
could see the white houses of the planters. Everything was natural, luxuriant … except the women in their veils. The children were coming out of school, and I looked with dismay at all the little Malay girls in the hot sun, draped in their half-chadors—ankle-length light blue tunics—among their carefree Chinese classmates in short skirts and white blouses. Two peoples now distinct and separate. All in the name of Islamic spirituality versus the materialism of the Chinese? I too dislike materialism, but how can I consider these bigots allies, if they dress their daughters in that way?

The Chinese taxi driver looked at me and laughed. “When they dress in black, that’s when they’re really scary! Look,” he said, pointing to a row of deserted stalls in a market. “For them it’s a festival … and for a month they fast!” He laughed: the only way a good Chinese can celebrate a festival is by eating.

As I watched from the car window, it seemed to me that Malaysia could not continue living in peace much longer. I had the feeling that one day, when the cake to be shared is not large enough anymore, there will be another explosion, another pogrom, whose victims will be Chinese. The last was in 1969, with a death toll of several hundred
hua-ren
.

The short crossing from Butterworth to the island of Penang on board the windswept ferry was a pleasure as always, and I arrived at the old E&O Hotel in proper style, in a rickshaw pedaled by a Chinese. I had not been there for years, but it was like coming home. When I opened the door of room 147 I was assailed by a whiff of familiar smells, of moldy carpet, disinfectant in the bathroom. The sounds too were those of yore: the crashing of waves against the stone seawall at the end of the lawn, the cawing of crows in the palms and on the black barrels of old cannon pointing toward the horizon.

The E&O was like a sleeping beauty, and was pleasantly inefficient. Numerous servants, almost all Indian, walked around the open verandas with worn-out brooms in their hands, but the ants continued their march unperturbed and the termites gnawed away at the old wood. I ordered a lemon tea and was brought coffee.

I spent the afternoon committing my notes to the computer, reading the love letters (never sent) of an early British Governor here, and listening to the sea and the crows. I was happy. I was alone, and I found the solitude a magnificent companion.