A Fortune-Teller Told Me (21 page)

T
he news I had unconsciously been waiting for came the next morning. There it was, in the newspaper which was hanging in a plastic bag on my hotel room’s doorknob, the
New Sunday Times
. Only a few lines long, on an inside page, dated March 20, Phnom Penh:

In that first moment I felt absolutely nothing. Then I had a sudden wild sensation of joy. I felt as if I had read the announcement of my own death, and I rejoiced at being alive. I had an impulse to share this pleasure with someone, to buttonhole the first passerby and say, “Have you seen this? Have you seen it?” But there was nobody around. It was barely dawn, the hotel was deserted. Everyone I might have telephoned—Angela in Bangkok, my children in Europe—was asleep at this hour. My head exploded with a thousand questions, fragmentary thoughts that popped into my mind unbidden. I thought about the fortune-teller in Hong Kong, about who might have been on that helicopter—Joachim Holzgen, for one, the colleague who had taken my
place. I thought how lucky I had been. I thought of going to the airport and boarding the first flight for Phnom Penh. Now that the prophecy had been fulfilled, there was nothing more to fear. No? Was not the accident a further warning? The year was not over.

I read and reread those printed words, fascinated, as if there were something magical about them. In the end, however, they began to seem just a news item like any other, a few lines about something bygone, a world far away, something that had no more to do with me than a crash on the New Zealand stock market or a typhoon in Bangladesh or a ferry that had gone down in the Philippines. All that now concerned me was what I had to do, how to get in touch with
Der Spiegel
, how to help Holzgen. That is how it has to be: when you have obligations, when you have to organize something, your emotions are mastered, set aside. The need to be practical prevents you from being overwhelmed by your feelings. That is why death is attended by so many rites. The sorrow of losing a loved one would be unbearable if one did not have to think about the funeral, how to dress, what music to have. Every people has evolved its own forms of distraction. The Chinese, always so practical and materialistic, have gone to extremes in banishing sentimentality from the pain: their funerals always end in great banquets.

It was Sunday, and my office in Bangkok was closed. But my computer had in its memory the number of the portable phone of the German doctor who was head of the UN hospital in Phnom Penh. That would unquestionably be where the injured had been taken.

“Holzgen of
Der Spiegel?
Yes, he’s here … hang on, I’m going to his bed.” In a few seconds I had Joachim on the line. As soon as he recognized my voice, he yelled: “To hell with you and your fortune-teller! You see? He was right, damn it!” He had a broken leg and his spinal cord was compressed, but he would be all right. He told me that the helicopter’s rear rotor had stalled, and the pilot had lost control. When they hit the ground the fuel tanks opened, and several colleagues found themselves drenched in petrol. By a miracle there was no spark.

I made a few more phone calls and then went out for a long walk. Passing the big Chinese temple in Pitt Street, I had an impulse to thank the gods. I bought a handful of incense sticks and offered them at several altars, and with that I considered the episode closed.

It was not to be. The story of the helicopter kept whirling around in my head. I could not see it as the realization of the prophecy; nor as a simple coincidence either. I went on repeating to myself that in the light of reason every prediction is half-true and half-false, that the helicopter might or might not have crashed; but I found it difficult to set my mind at rest and accept that the event had been a simple matter of statistical probability.

Up till that moment, the whole business of the fortune-teller and his prophecy had been partly a game, and the resolution not to fly a sort of bet between me and me to put myself to the test. Well, the game was over. It was no longer a matter of something being theoretically possible. That something was staring me in the face, and in a way that left me horrified. Suggestion did not come into it this time. Subjective projections of fantasies or my fears were irrelevant, for the news was an objective fact: the helicopter had well and truly crashed.

Was this proof that the fortune-teller had been right? What had he “seen”? “Seen?” In my heart of hearts I most assuredly did not want it to be thus. I liked to think of the occult as a possibility, not a certainty. I wanted to hang on to my doubt, not to become a believer. All my life I have avoided faiths, and I certainly did not want to talk myself into adopting this one. In accepting the fortune-teller’s prophecy and deciding not to fly I had wanted to add a bit of poetry to my life, not another reason for despair. Because if this episode proved that everything was written, then life had no meaning anymore. There was no point in living.

Since the beginning of the year I had paid particular attention to reports of planes that had crashed or made emergency landings. Each time I asked myself if I might have been on them. The answer was always no. But this one? In Cambodia! This was
mine
. The helicopter that crashed was one I should have been on. There was no doubt about it. Then was it my fault it had crashed? Suddenly I felt guilty. Guilty before my friend Jean Claude Pomonti of
Le Monde
, and Ira Chaplain, the photographer from
Der Spiegel
, both of whom had been injured, and poor Holzgen, who had taken my place. It seemed an act of disloyalty on my part not to have been with them on that helicopter, just because of a prophecy. Yes, but if I had been on it, might I not have been the spark to have made a bonfire of them all? My mind kept somersaulting uncontrollably.

Being in Penang reminded me of an old friend who lived in the city. He was from a Chinese family, had been educated all over the world, and had become a well-known figure who had played an important role in the development of several Asian countries. We had been students together in the States, on the same scholarship, and had kept in touch over the years. I telephoned, and by chance he was in, resting after an expedition into the jungle to look for a rare species of palm.

He sent a driver to fetch me in an old blue Mercedes. Crossing Penang, I could see that some people were trying to save and preserve the city, while others were gnawing away at its quiet, provincial elegance and trying to modernize it. In the old residential quarter a few colonial villas, intensely white amid the lush greenery of their gardens, had been restored to their former splendor; others had, as they say, been “converted”—as if it were a matter of changing religion. One had become a semiautomated distributor of Kentucky Fried Chicken, another a high-class nightclub. A third was being demolished, and on a large signboard was an artist’s impression of the block of flats that would take its place.

My friend’s childhood home was in poor condition, but still imposing. The walls were in need of paint, sheets had been thrown over the armchairs, the paper lanterns under the portico were torn, there was dust on the shelves, and the scattered relics of many lives; but that did not spoil its character as a solid, almost grandiose residence. It was built in the 1920s. My friend’s father had ordered the tiles from England, and as he was a doctor he had had the symbol of Aesculapius, two serpents entwined around a staff, carved in the fine wood of the stairs and the balustrade that dominated the drawing room. In one room there were dozens of Balinese paintings, in another a host of wooden statues from Borneo; the first floor was filled with models of boats from the Sunda Straits and stacks of beautiful dried palm leaves, each in its own transparent envelope. In a sitting room were a grand piano, two cellos, and a spinet on which my friend played Bach “as it was played in Bach’s day.” In the garden were large aviaries with many colorful and vociferous tropical birds, about which he knew everything.

Built for a large, well-to-do family, the house was now empty except for a couple of caretakers. Altogether there was something ghostly
about the place, and the ghost was my friend, Lim Cheong Keat. Architect, botanist, musicologist, musician, patron of the arts, essayist and ornithologist, he had made that house his retreat from the world. It was a repository for all the things he loved, and he went there from time to time to enjoy them.

After years of professional success, he had left most of his work to younger colleagues. He was an intelligent and cultured man, and he was in deep despair. He saw the “development” he had worked for going in the wrong direction, destroying the environment and making people more miserable. He saw his own country increasingly divided by race. He was disillusioned with public life, in which all decisions were dictated by considerations of money, in which no one had the courage to pursue an idea anymore, except that of lining their pockets.

Cities all over the world, he said, are decaying because they are no longer populated by their original citizens, but are more and more invaded by transients and people who come to make money. Even the conservation of Penang was being promoted for the wrong reason: to attract tourists.

It was as if Cheong Keat had long been waiting for someone on whom to unburden himself, without reserve, and without fear of being taken for a madman. How I understood him! His despair was mine. Is it not dispiriting to see ancient cultures being eroded and overwhelmed by alien fashions, notions and banalities?

For years Cheong Keat had had a house on Bali, and used to go there regularly. He no longer does so. Now, he said, even there, people perform rites whose meaning they no longer know; they participate in ceremonies without understanding why. “They’re acting a role they’ve learned by heart. The rainbow has gone mad.”

Recently, his research on palm trees had often taken him into the jungle, and he had begun to take an interest in the
orang asli
, the true original inhabitants of Malaysia, of whom only a few groups now survive. Living for centuries in the forest, they acquired a remarkable knowledge of nature, and their shamans became great experts on the different plants and their properties. But now they too are attracted by modernity. They are leaving the jungle and becoming urbanized, and all that knowledge, accumulated over generations, is disappearing. The shamans are dying off without handing down their secrets, and none of
the younger generation are interested in learning them. After all, what use is jungle lore when everything you could wish for is in the city? For Cheong Keat it was a torment.

I too have seen that old wisdom disappear in my own world. When I was a child, there was someone in every family who knew the medicinal herbs and where to find them in the woods. My maternal grandmother used to prepare bitter cough mixtures, and applied hot plasters to my chest for bronchitis. For my mother that knowledge was already lost: she preferred going to the chemist. Today, who looks at the moon to see if it is the right time to transplant a tree so that it will root well, or to cut it down without having worms eat the wood?

Science having been put on a pedestal, everything nonscientific seems ridiculous and contemptible. Thus we have discarded innumerable practices that could have been of service to us. In Orsigna, when someone cut himself with an axe or a scythe he went to Alighiero, who made the sign of the cross and muttered a secret formula which his father had taught him. He then ran his hand over the wound, and the bleeding stopped. For shingles there was Ubaldo who, having caught it twice, could now “mark it” and thus cure others of it. He would prick his finger with a pin and trace a circle around the affected area with his blood, while murmuring some kind of prayer. And the “fire” passed. I have seen it done. Now even in Orsigna everyone goes to the hospital, and those who know how to perform the “markings” grow rarer and rarer.

St. Francis, they say, used to talk to the birds. In his day this was exceptional, but a few hundred thousand years ago it may not have been. Then, perhaps, everyone could understand animals. And perhaps they could also feel the approach of certain events. The Australian Aborigines must have retained some of these primitive skills: how otherwise could they arrive punctually at the funeral of a chief by setting out days before his death?