A Fortune-Teller Told Me (28 page)

At this point my companions wanted to satisfy their own curiosity. “Does Ticciano have another life? Does he have lovers?” one of them asked.

Ka Non looked at her hands and pronounced:
“Ticciano is an extrovert, he likes to mix with people, especially women, and women admire him. Some even fall in love with him. But he doesn’t take advantage of this. He finds it difficult to be unfaithful.”

They all laughed, and I laughed too, stripped bare as I was.

My session had put everyone in a good mood, and the woman who had recommended Ka Non insisted that her sister, my Christaon lady, must now consult her. She was a Catholic, a believer, and she considered that she was committing a sin, but she yielded nonetheless. The procedure remained the same: name, television in the hands, trance; but the answers were quite different from mine.

“You have great problems,” said Ka Non without hesitation. “Your husband is continually unfaithful, and now he has a lover he is especially fond of. A friend has robbed you of a large sum of money. A while ago someone put the evil eye on you. Much of it you have overcome, but a few traces remain. I feel it. That is the cause of your problems.”

The woman was aghast, and began to weep. It was all true. Her husband had always had other women, and two million Malay dollars had disappeared with a friend to whom she had entrusted them for a joint investment. The cure? A mixture of flowers and perfumes in her bath every day. Ka Non’s husband wrote out the recipe.

Ka Non accompanied us to the door. As we took our leave she said to me:
“Soon you will fulfill your mission. Now that you have seen once, you will see again.”
And with that sibylline pronouncement she let us go.

One of the sisters drove the van. The other was in shock. She said that for some time she had known she must do something, but she was afraid. She even feared her own powers. Once, for example, walking past a bar where she knew her husband spent many of his evenings, she had said, “I hope that place burns down.” The next day she heard it had been destroyed in a fire.

One of the women remembered the translation of “pintar.” It means “genius.”

The hotel I was staying in was dusty and grimy, but the sort I like, with large rooms, high ceilings and wooden stairs: everything rather threadbare, but with a past. For two nights I had slept very well in the big bed with its kapok mattress and hard pillows stuffed with tea leaves. But the third night I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt I was in a place full of stairs with people of different colors climbing up and falling down. I tried to catch them all, but didn’t have enough arms. At one point all the stairs shuddered as if in an earthquake, then tumbled down on top of each other and on top of me, too. I woke with a start and realized that the bed really was shaking. Day was dawning, and building work had begun next door to the hotel. Workers in yellow helmets swarmed around bulldozers that were digging their rapacious steel teeth into the ground. A giant crane was driving iron piles for a new building in the heart of old Malacca.

E
very city has its own way of presenting itself, of putting its best foot forward. Singapore’s is the airport. The airport is its made-up face, its shop window, its visiting card. People arrive and depart there, and they really need see nothing else, the airport being the essence of all that Singapore has to show: its efficiency, its cleanliness, its order, its status as Asia’s biggest supermarket of consumer goods, futility and respectability.

The charms of the airport were lost on me, earthbound as I was. Like all the other undesirables, penniless backpackers, immigrant Malay day laborers and poor Russian traders, I arrived in Singapore by the back door: overland from Malaysia. That was how the Japanese arrived in December 1941. In those days Singapore expected everyone, even possible invaders, to come by sea; the sea was its link with the world, the sea was its wealth, and toward the sea pointed all the artillery of its formidable defenses. They were utterly useless. The Japanese avoided the big guns by simply taking them from the rear. In the same way I avoided being seduced by Singapore: I saw its rumpled early-morning face, without makeup, unprepared and from an unintended angle.

The Causeway, an artificial umbilical cord linking Singapore with Malaysia, underlines the fact that this vainglorious island city-state is, physically at least, a mere minuscule appendix of the great Malay peninsula. There is nothing special about it, nothing spectacular. I approached it at dawn. Through the train window I saw, against the background of a bloodred sun, four tall chimneys pouring black smoke into the air. Alongside the railway ran three huge iron pipes for the imported water that keeps the city alive, and a superhighway jammed with the cars and motorcycles of commuters who live in Johore Barhu, where the cost of living is lower, and work on the island, where wages
are higher. Singapore looked like any other place in Asia, with the shacks, the rubbish heaps, the rusty corrugated iron, the patches of vegetation and weeds—remnants of nature waiting to reclaim any land left to itself.

The first Singaporeans I saw from the train were like those I had known years ago: plastic sandals, black shorts and white T-shirts, exactly like the protagonist of one of the first stories I heard when I came there to live in 1971. A doctor had among his patients an old man in black shorts and singlet, so simple and humble that he squatted in the waiting-room armchair with his shirt rolled up over his stomach. The doctor took him for a pauper and charged him less than the others, sometimes not at all, until one day he looked out of the window and saw him climb into a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. He controlled the city’s entire rice trade.

For me that old man has always been the epitome of the Chinese of the diaspora: self-assured but inconspicuous, powerful but reserved and modest for fear of arousing the jealousy of the gods or the rulers. There are very few left like that. The new generations of Chinese are afraid only of not being seen to be rich. They wear all those things that give them security and—they think—respectability. Singapore is like that, too; hence its eagerness to be on display, all shiny and modern, starting at the airport.

The railway station, on the other hand, had a dilapidated air which I liked. When it was built, in the 1920s, it was completely paved and tiled with colored rubber that muffled the noise. The silent elegance of those days was enhanced by the shabby calm of a place that is no longer fashionable. Few Singaporeans use it; many do not even know it exists. The old station has no part to play in the Singapore of our times: it is an embarrassment, like a poor relation.

We got off the train and had to queue for an hour for passport control. The policemen sat in smelly cubicles, surrounded by huge books, some nearly a foot thick, containing the list of all Singapore’s “enemies.” There were no computers and every passenger was checked, minutely, by hand. The most assiduous in filling out the forms and answering the usual questions were a group of Russians, who tried their best to ingratiate themselves with the impassive customs officials.

In my mind echoed the opening line of the
Romance of the Three
Kingdoms
, the great Chinese classic: “Empires wax and wane.” How quickly the Soviet Empire had waxed and waned! Only a few years ago the Russians were the proud citizens of a great power, and as such they were feared and respected. Now, poor devils, half ridiculous and half pathetic in blue jeans and trainers, they travel for days and days by train toward the Mecca of consumer goods, hoping to fill their bags with something they can sell back home for a ruble or two: calculators and silk panties, cigarette lighters, video recorders, electronic gadgets and brassieres.

It really is a strange animal, the economic system which nowadays is expected to save the world! No one makes anything with their own hands anymore, no one works out how to make a cooking pot or a flute or a cart; the best thing they can think of is to go to another part of the world and buy something to resell elsewhere, at a profit.

Shopping, shopping, shopping. In rich countries it has become a way of life, in poor ones a way of surviving. Is there not perhaps something profoundly wrong in all this? And is it not understandable that some of the young, like the “madmen” of Al Arqam, are trying, with their autarchy, their turbans and their women in black, to have nothing to do with it?

For some people, the sight of the world rushing ever more blindly toward materialism reinforces the belief that only some dreadful event, like a plague or a great famine, can restore order and give men back a sense of life. With the end of the millennium so near, such ideas readily find followers, especially among idealists looking for a cause. The current resurgence of religious fundamentalism, in its different versions, can also be seen in this light.

For me, returning to Singapore was like going to find one’s first love again. It was there, in 1965, that I first smelled the tropics, first enjoyed the heat and the colors; it was there that I realized how being far away made me feel at home. I was only there for a few days, but the impression ran deep. In 1971 I came here to live. I had left Olivetti, had studied China and the Chinese language in New York, and as I could not find a way of getting to Peking and did not want to go to Taiwan, I had decided to go and live among the Chinese of “the third China,” the
China of the diaspora. We stayed in Singapore four years. There Saskia took her first steps, Folco went to his first school, and I wrote my first book.

I had friends and acquaintances in Singapore, but I had not told anyone I was coming. I wanted to revisit the city alone, to form my own impressions, and above all to be free to write what I wanted without fear of getting my friends into trouble. Because Singapore is like that: behind all its alluring and welcoming shopping malls, shopping arcades and shopping centers, it remains a police state, a society shot through with a subtle fear. Also, I wanted to be like a newcomer, to give myself to what Singapore had now become, and what so many foreigners found extraordinary.

It did not take me long to realize that in the fifteen years I had been away from Singapore, the city had changed beyond recognition. There were new streets, new flyovers, new gardens and squares. Even the people were no longer the same. I saw them at the bus stops, all elegant and well dressed; but nobody spoke. I noticed more and more people with nervous tics, as in Japan. The warmth and kindness of the Indians, the voluptuous naturalness of the Malays, the sarcasm of the Chinese, the leisurely pace, due perhaps to the sluggish heat of the tropics, had disappeared.

The heat itself had disappeared. I remembered Singapore as being torrid, at times scorching. There was an hour after lunch when even in our house among the trees the air was so steamy and immobile, the chirping of the cicadas so deafening, that we used to lie under the fan and wait for the liberating crash of a rainstorm or a breeze from the sea. In the new Singapore, however, it was literally cold. Cold in the hotels, in the shops, in the public buildings, in the offices, icy in the restaurants, in the underground, in the taxis, in the hospitals, houses, cars. Apparently the conditioned type was by now the only air Singapore could breathe. The whole island seemed to be under a huge bell jar, living an artificial, efficient life that had lost contact with the surrounding nature, with the heat of the Equator. Women no longer wore light blouses, floral sarongs or silk trousers; the new national costume had become the jacket and skirt with stockings or tights, just like London or New York.

Once upon a time Singapore was a city full of smells—smells of
mold, damp earth, fresh fruits, decaying vegetables, fried garlic, rotting wood. These too had disappeared.

For a visitor like me, the new
Homo singaporianus
inevitably first presented himself as a taxi driver, and the initial impression was horrible.

“Take me to Alexandra Park.”

“Are you going to see friends?”