A Fortune-Teller Told Me (43 page)

The Thais, he said, think of nothing but money. Even their Buddhism is mercenary. In Burma, on the other hand … he put his hand in his shirt to show me his Buddha. Then he noticed that I too had one at my neck and, as is done in these cases, each of us took off his chain and in cupped hands offered it to the other for admiration.

His Buddha had saved him on a number of occasions, and I said the same of mine. Perhaps it was true, but I had never thought about it before. I had it around my neck that time in Poipet when the Khmer Rouge were about to shoot me, but neither then nor afterward did I make the connection. For me that Buddha was not an amulet, it was a matter of habit, like the watch you automatically put on your wrist every morning. I had had it since 1972. When I first came to Cambodia I had noticed that in battle the soldiers would put the Buddhas they usually wore round their necks in their mouths. They
told me it helped to repel the bullets, and I decided that I needed one too.

I bought a little ivory Buddha and had it mounted by a Chinese goldsmith. It had to be blessed by a monk, and Pran, my interpreter—who later became famous when the story of his life under Pol Pot and his flight into Thailand became the subject of the film
The Killing Fields—
suggested that I go to the head of the most sacred pagoda of Phnom Penh, at the top of the mysterious hill in the middle of the city. He organized the ceremony and fixed the price: I would pay to have a scene from the life of the Enlightened One frescoed on the coffered ceiling which the monks were restoring.

And so one afternoon I found myself sitting on the ground in front of a dozen or so monks who intoned strange litanies designed to protect me.

“From what?” the head of the pagoda asked Pran, between one chant and another.

“They ought to know,” I whispered. Pran translated back and forth, but the monk still did not understand what I wanted to be protected from.

“Well, just tell me, what work does your foreigner do?”

“He’s a journalist.”

“Ah. Very good,” exclaimed the monk, as if this finally clarified everything. “Then he must be protected from fire, water and syphilis.” And he returned energetically to his chanting with the others. The little Buddha was handed back to me, I made the agreed offering, and since then none of those three dangers has troubled me.

But my Buddha also has its taboo: I must take it off when making love. Pran explained to me, however, that “in urgent cases” it was enough to swing it round to my back by a simple tug of the chain. The important thing was that it should not see!

The beautiful cook began reading some comics in the hammock under the fan. Then, realizing it was hopeless waiting for the captain, she fell asleep. We carried on chatting. After the first bottle of gin the captain wanted to start a revolution to free Burma from the dictators, Leopold wanted to free the world through meditation, and I wanted to take everyone back in history to find the point where we had taken the wrong turn.

At last I went to my sleeping place under the funnel. With a rustling sound the ship continued to cleave the phosphorescent waves. The night was extraordinarily dark, and the sky, with millions of stars, seemed to have a depth that I had never seen before. I slept very well until a wonderful smell of incense and fried eggs reached me from the kitchen. The beautiful cook had been the first to get up; she had tidied everything, made her offerings at the little altar, and was now preparing breakfast.

“One day she too will free herself from her slavery to the captain, and we’ll find her as a hostess on a Thai International Airlines plane, serving frozen omelettes,” said Leopold. She undoubtedly dreamed of such a future, but I could not wish it for her.

We entered the harbor of Kompong Som one day late. Somerset Maugham, more than half a century before, had taken a fraction of the time to cover the same distance. The beaches were whiter than white. Behind the crests of the palm trees there were no buildings to be seen, and from a distance Cambodia looked like a desert island. The sailors were ready to disembark, having showered and put on clean trousers and shirts. As we came closer we could see the port nestling in a bay, but the motorboat that should have delivered the pilot didn’t leave the shore.
“Nagarose
here …
Nagarose
, do you read me?” the captain called repeatedly on the radio. Nobody answered. An hour. Two hours. Nothing. The crew got back into their work clothes and returned to their various jobs around the ship.

Stretched out on one of the benches in the dining room, I read Maugham. On disembarking, he too had gone to Phnom Penh and from there to Angkor. Like so many other visitors he had been especially struck by Ta Prom, the temple that had been left to the jungle. There, in the nature that was reconquering the stones laid by man, he had felt “the most powerful of all divinities.”

Personally, I have always been more impressed by the temples in which the work of man seems in itself to touch the divine. There are a few places in the world in which one feels proud to be a member of the human race, and one of these is certainly Angkor. Behind its sophisticated, intellectual beauty there is something profoundly simple, something
archetypal and natural that reaches the heart without needing to pass through the head. In every stone there is an inherent greatness whose measure remains firmly in the mind.

There is no need to know that for the builders every detail had a particular meaning. One does not need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu in order to understand. You have only to let yourself go, and you feel that somehow Angkor is a place you have been before. “The ruins of Angkor had already appeared to me in the visions of childhood, they were already part of my museum,” wrote Pierre Loti in 1901, remembering how, as a child, he had looked out of the window of his home and tried to see those mythical towers.

In 1972, from a window in the Grand Hotel of Siem Reap, I too saw those towers, the towers of Angkor Wat; but I could not reach them. The Khmer Rouge had occupied the whole temple complex, and those gray pinnacles, rising above the green of the forest, were for me an unattainable mirage. The road that runs from the hotel to the temple was cut by a ditch after five miles. That was the front, and to go near it meant to put one’s life in the hands of some sniper hidden in a tree.

Eight years later, when I managed to go the last four miles of that road, Angkor seemed to me even more moving, more tragic, more mysterious than I had imagined it. The Pol Pot regime and the Khmer Rouge had just been overthrown by the Vietnamese intervention, and the Cambodians I met, ill and starving, seemed like survivors of a lost and disoriented race that no longer had any connection with the greatness declared by its monuments.

Over the centuries the Khmer people had forgotten Angkor, the great capital built between the ninth and eleventh centuries and abandoned in 1431 after the Siamese devastated it with fire and sword. If it were not for Henri Mouhot, who “rediscovered” Angkor for the world, and for the Cambodians themselves, the Khmer would not have a history to look back on.

And yet, in that immense complex there was everything. There was life: past and future. Yes, because Angkor was, among many other things, a sort of prophecy in stone left for posterity. Or at least so it seemed to me when I first stood there amid the screeching of monkeys and the chirping of cicadas. That impression has never left me.

I was the only visitor at the time. Accompanying me was Pich Keo,
one of the old guides, who had survived the massacres of Pol Pot. Cambodia was a vast field of death, and in a strange way the grandeur of Angkor seemed to reflect the greatness of that tragedy. In one of the great bas-reliefs I saw the same scenes of torture—people quartered, cut to pieces, impaled, beaten to death, or fed to the crocodiles—as those I had heard of while traveling through the country. The stories told to me by survivors of the death camps were there, carved in stone ten centuries before. A prophecy? A warning? Or simply the recognition of the immutability of life, which is always joy and violence, pleasure and torture? In the bas-reliefs it was so. Next to the scenes of frightful suffering were others of great serenity; beside the terrible executioners were sinuous dancing girls. Orgies of pain and orgies of happiness, all under the great stone smiles, under the half-closed eyes of those mysterious faces in the jungle. I had no doubts: the message of Angkor remained what it had been for centuries. On the lintel of a door, an ancient hand had chiseled a message that Pich Keo translated: “The wise man knows that life is nothing but a small flame shaken by a violent wind.”

The hours passed. Night fell. From the radio room I heard the voice of one of the crew constantly calling:
“Nagarose
here …
Nagarose
, do you read me?” No reply. Not until ten the next morning did the ship’s radio pick up an answer. The pilot would come, but not immediately. We must wait. He came on board in the early afternoon, and at four o’clock Leopold and I said goodbye to everyone and disembarked. We were in Cambodia, free to go where we liked … but without an entry visa. That would be a problem when we left, I thought. The most urgent problem now was to get to Phnom Penh.

From Kompong Som to the capital is 185 miles. The asphalt road is one of the best in the country, but because most of the supplies pass over it, also the most hazardous. Government soldiers disguised as Khmer Rouge, real Khmer Rouge, and plain bandits lay tree trunks across the road, sack the trucks and rob the cars. Once in a while, to make sure of being respected, they murder a couple of people.

We went to a hotel in Kompong Som. It had been opened not long before to accommodate officials of the United Nations and all the other organizations involved in the international effort to bring democracy to
Cambodia. Our first impression was that democracy, marching to the tune of dollars, was definitely on the advance. Kompong Som, which only a year before had had only a few feeble lamps alight after eight in the evening, was now a
ville lumière
, with several restaurants and bars open until all hours, and a big discotheque where scores of girls flocked from the nearby villages, dressed like dolls and made up like kabuki masks. Prostitution, I have come to learn, is the first sign of liberalization and economic recovery.

My room was right under the dance hall, and I did not fall asleep until one in the morning, when the pounding beat of the music stopped and a cheery crowd—girls for rent or already rented, experts in humanitarian aid, soldiers and international police, businessmen and election observers, all tired and sweaty—filed between two rows of Khmer beggars in old military uniforms, who appealed to their distracted charity with empty hats, amputated legs, arms without hands, and pathetic smiles. The international community, which had come to Cambodia to bring democracy, was finally going to bed.

In Kompong Som the most important United Nations unit was a battalion of the French Foreign Legion. A colonel received us: tall and elegant, with blue eyes and two scars on his cheek that might have been made to measure, self-assured and most civil. On hearing Leopold’s unusual surname, he gave him a fixed stare: “Like the lieutenant of Dien Bien Phu?”