A Fortune-Teller Told Me (39 page)

The sun, his sun, was preparing one of its splendid picture-postcard sunsets, a flaming sky behind the black silhouettes of the palms. A melancholy Indonesian song, blaring at full volume from speakers on board, announced my ship’s arrival: a big, beautiful yellow and white vessel filled to overflowing with people who trundled down the gangplanks in a never-ending stream—beautiful, slim women in brightly colored sarongs, men in batik shirts and black caps. “Pinang … Pinang … Pinang,” yelled the taxi drivers, motorcyclists and minibus drivers, tugging people by the arm, trying to grab baggage or children out of their hands to get them as customers. Oh, yes, this was the East, all right!

I thought of Singapore, which I had left barely a few days before and which already seemed so far away, as if on another planet. To me this world was beautiful—a world of cardboard boxes tied with string, bundles, embraces, pushing and shoving, problems solved between people and not between computers, with lots of superfluous words and gestures, but with more feelings, fewer laws, fewer rules; a world where a director-patriot-philosopher-murderer at a kiosk on the harbor-front generously offers drinks to all his friends, to his assistants, to a woman who has missed her ship for Jakarta, and to me, a foreigner.

With a fresh ticket in my hand I boarded the ship. I was bound for Medan.

T
he ship was a real joy: built about thirty years previously in a Hamburg shipyard, it had wooden decks, cabins with portholes, a restaurant, a ballroom, a bar, a mosque and a church. In sum it was a ship the way they used to be, a ship like a little city to explore, to walk from one end to the other, to climb from deck to deck, to stand at the rail watching the horizon, to scan the passengers for an interesting face, for someone to talk to.

We sailed among small deserted islands covered in palm trees. The sky and sea glowed like copper as the last rays of light grazed the earth. The spectacle had something religious about it. Passengers stood on the decks enjoying the beauty of nature gliding past, and with them stood the sailors in blue uniforms, the officers in white, the stewards in black trousers and red jackets with brass buttons, all silent.

Soon it was the hour of prayer. Then dinnertime.

What a wonderful invention, ships! Of course, I am told, they are bound to disappear for “market reasons,” because they no longer pay. That is how our world works, and so we deprive ourselves of one more pleasure. In the end we shall even get rid of women! Inventions of God! Of course, we shall do without them the day we find a way to make children more cheaply in test tubes without waiting nine months, the day we find there is no longer a “market” for love, and men can stick their willies in a machine electronically programmed to satisfy all desires with no risk of diseases—a machine that will ask nothing for itself, except money.

Hurray for ships! With their puffing and sighing and shuddering as they meet the caress of the waves, the embrace of the sea, ships have a human feel. Let us keep them alive as a token of love, to make the last romantics happy. Let us use them to cure the depressed. Let us prescribe
sea journeys for those who can no longer bear the burden of life, who feel suffocated and see no reason to carry on. Think what we shall save on pills—no more Valium and Prozac!

After dinner I went out on the stern and lay down on the wooden deck looking up at the sky. My gaze lost in infinity, I felt as if thanks to that Hong Kong fortune-teller I was rediscovering not only the pleasure of travel but that of life itself. Gone was the anxiety; no longer did I feel the passing of the days to be fraught with drama. I listened to those who spoke to me and enjoyed what was happening around me; I had leisure to put my impressions in order, to reflect. Time and silence—so necessary, so natural—have by now become luxuries which only a few can afford. That is why depression is on the increase.

In my case it started in Japan, where life was a constant rush, packed with obligations, every relationship difficult and strained. I never had—or thought I never had—a moment to catch my breath; never a moment when I did not feel guilty because of something else I should have been doing. When I got up in the morning I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders; there were days when just seeing the pile of newspapers under my door was enough to make my gorge rise.

In Japan the whole society is in a straitjacket, the people are always playing a part and can never behave naturally. Just being there was oppressive, but I was also paying the price of my bizarre trade, journalism. A foreign correspondent always has to be where there is some drama taking place, and one cannot spend years observing failed revolutions, unsolved crimes, disappointed hopes and intractable problems, and emerge unscathed. Vietnam, Cambodia, Tiananmen—always dead bodies, always people fleeing. Slowly one comes to feel that nothing is of any use, that the time for justice will never come. In the end it seemed to me that words—words used over and over, always describing the same situations, the same massacres, the faces of the dead, the tears of the survivors—had utterly lost their meaning. They had come to sound, every syllable of them, like the rattle of broken crocks.

It was natural to feel depressed in such circumstances, natural for anyone who still has an idea of what life could be and is not. Depression becomes a right when we look around us and see nothing and no one to offer us a spark of inspiration, when the world seems to be sliding into a morass of imbecility and cheap materialism, with no more ideals,
no more faiths, no more dreams. One has nothing great to believe in any longer, no mentor to emulate.

Rarely has humanity, as in these times, been without true leaders, guiding lights. Where today do we find a great philosopher, a great painter, writer, sculptor? The few who spring to mind are merely the products of publicity and marketing.

Politics more than any other sphere, especially in the West, is in the hands of mediocrities—thanks precisely to democracy, which by now has become an aberration from the original idea. Once it was a question of voting whether or not to go to war with Sparta, and then going there in person, perhaps to die. For most people today democracy means showing up every four or five years to put a cross on a piece of paper to elect someone who, precisely because he needs to please such numbers, must perforce be average, mediocre and banal—as majorities always are. If a truly exceptional person ever came along—someone with ideas out of the ordinary, with a perspective beyond pleasing everyone with promises of happiness—he or she would never be elected, would never win the vote of the majority.

And art, that shortcut to the perception of greatness? Even art no longer helps people to understand the essence of things. Music now seems to be made for the ears, not the soul; painting is often an offense to the eyes; literature, even literature, is increasingly ruled by the laws of the market. Who reads poetry anymore? Its exalting power has been clean forgotten! And yet a poem can light a fire in the breast as strong as the fire of love. Better than whiskey, better than Valium or Prozac, a poem can lift the spirit, because it raises the vantage point from which we see the world. If you feel lonely you can find more company by reading poetry than by switching on the television.

Angela says that if she could eliminate one of this century’s inventions, even before the atomic bomb she would choose television. She is not entirely wrong. Television lowers our capacity for concentration, blunts the passions and impedes reflection, imposing itself as the main—almost the only—vehicle of knowledge. And yet no truth is more illusory than that of television, which transforms every event and every emotion into a spectacle, with the result that no one can be moved anymore, or indignant about what is going on. Television has loaded us with huge masses of information, but left us morally ignorant.
It distracts us, helps the time pass—but is that what we really want?

The more one looks around, the more one sees that our way of living is becoming more and more senseless. Everyone is running, but where to? And why? Many believe that in this race for material things we are losing our old pleasures. But who has the courage to say: “Stop! Let’s look for another way”? If anyone did, most people—themselves depressed—would take him for a madman. If we were lost in a forest or a desert we would surely start looking for a way out. Why not do the same with this blessed progress, that lengthens our lives, makes us richer, healthier and better-looking, but deep down less and less happy?

It is not surprising that depression has become such a common illness. In a way it is almost heartening—it shows that inside people there is still a yearning for humanity.

At the end of five years in Tokyo, with its incessant noise and crowds, I felt as if I were poisoned, and decided I had to heal myself. After closing up the house and sending the furniture and books to Thailand, I shaved my head and went like a pilgrim to climb Mount Fuji. I wrote my last article on the disquieting character of Japan from the height of that ever less sacred mountain, and then withdrew to a forest refuge in the province of Ibaragi. For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baolì, whom I had taken with me. I spent hours reading, listening to the wind in the trees, watching butterflies, enjoying the silence. After years of constantly thinking about the fate of the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, Communism, the Chinese, the threat of Japan, my children’s future, problems of family, friends and the world, at last I had time to have time. Nature, marvelous nature, reached out a hand to me and put me back together.

On my return to Europe I went and saw a famous doctor. “If from time to time the weight of the world should seem too much to bear, take one of these,” he said, and gave me some Prozac. From then on, that packet always traveled with me, along with my passport, checkbook and driving license. I never once opened it, and with time it became a sort of good-luck charm, like the oil of the
dukun
, or the strip of green paper given me by the shaman in Singapore. Little did I imagine how useful it would be to me one day.

The ship continued its throbbing, confident course through the dark. As I gazed at the sky and inhaled great lungfuls of fresh night air, I felt as if I were filling myself with stars. If that monster we call depression, which is always there in the background, lying in ambush, had put in an appearance there, it would find no room to enter. Hurray for ships!

Toward midnight we passed Singapore. From afar even that city, so perfect, so proud and so oppressive, was only a vague luminescence on the horizon.

I was the only Westerner on board, and my presence attracted the attention of other passengers. One was an old Chinese man who, on discovering that I spoke his language, took me around to show me off to other amused
hua-ren
. Another was a tall, thin, extroverted Indonesian young man. When he approached me with the usual “Where are you from?” I quickly countered by asking, “Tell me, do you believe in the power of the
dukuns
?” Embarrassment, as often happens with Asians, threw him into an almost hysterical burst of laughter.

It took no time to get him to tell me about his experiences. He was the eldest of fifteen brothers and sisters, of whom five had already died of illnesses—“stomach trouble, fever, asthma.” One day a large sum of money disappeared from the house. The parents suspected a poor boy whom they had recently taken in as an adopted son-cum-servant. The mother and my young friend went to the
dukun
, who set a bowl of water before them. (Like my bowl in Florence when I was a child!) In it, as on a television screen, they saw the youth enter the room and take the money. They confronted him, he confessed and returned the money.

“Couldn’t it be that you and your mother projected the image of your suspicions onto the water?” I asked the young man. “If it had been a stranger, would you have seen him in the water just the same? How does one imagine a stranger?” He was surprised that I did not understand.