A Fortune-Teller Told Me (49 page)

The train rolled through that misery, whistling all the time. It ran parallel with the main road, crossing it now and then. Often there was not even a level crossing and the whistle was the only warning. A man on a bicycle failed to get off in time and was knocked down. It happened on every trip, they told me. At last the loudspeakers broadcast some patriotic music, and the mellifluous voice of a woman announced that we were arriving at Hanoi. The train slowed as if it had to break a path through the vegetable gardens and houses, bicycles and children, almost grazing shops and street stalls, and entered the city.

The station, built by the French when Vietnam was a colony, looked like a miniature Versailles—a pathetic contrast with the mass of scrawny, dusty people who slept along the tracks and on the stairways.

“Do you know where to find an opium den?” I asked a rickshaw driver in front of the modest hotel for Vietnamese travelers where I was staying. The man shook himself out of his weary lethargy, smiled toothlessly, motioned to me to climb in, and pedaled away through the Hanoi night.

Along the broken pavements, lined with old houses whose yellow paint was now peeling, under beautiful French trees strangled by electric wires and signboards, swarmed the usual poor, pale, sickly humanity in shorts and singlets. Sweaty, tired, angry. Every entry hall was a little shop, every stall sold cigarettes or newspapers or petrol. Two stools at a little table made a café, a pump and a bucket of water was a tire repair shop. Every conversation looked like a quarrel, and often it was. Everything seemed to be rotting: the roofs, the doors, the walls, the people themselves. The city smelled of mold. I have always liked walking around cemeteries, but the vast graveyard that was Hanoi offered no
inspiration. The austere, silent, heroic Hanoi of the war was now just a city of poverty in which everything was for sale. A symbolic journey into the political illusions of my generation would begin from here, where the night again concealed a thousand secrets.

The rickshaw man had his own. He set me down in the city center, at the end of a dark passage between two large buildings. A young man beckoned to me and led me into the ancient belly of Asia, which the fire of the revolution had wanted to destroy forever, but which had come back to life. We crossed a court and went up the elegant wooden stairs of an old colonial house, past a row of huts built on what had been its balconies, around the edge of a terrace, along a gallery and up another small wooden stairway. Finally a little door brought us into the shadows of a beautiful room, its walls lined with bamboo, where the air was heavy with the sweet, familiar odor. On a little stove opium was being refined, boiling in an iron bowl. On the floor, covered with straw mats, lay some young people, each with his head against a wooden support. A beautiful, slim woman with very white skin moved from one to the other with the small oil lamp on which the pipe rested. By the light of that little flame I saw the shadows of other bodies stretched out along the wall, the outline of an inlaid frog on the pipe that passed from hand to hand, the tattoo of a butterfly on the naked shoulder of a girl lying beside me.

I spent about an hour enjoying that padded torpor, without memory, without weight, without disappointments. When I left I felt reconciled with the world, and when I saw that the opium den was only a few steps from the head office of the
Party Daily
, I had to smile.

The rickshaw was waiting for me, and I asked the driver to give me a complete tour of the city before returning to the hotel. No other form of transport gives the passenger that majestic ease, that sense of freedom, that cool air in the face. My rickshaw glided along the avenue skirting the Lake of the Found-Again Sword, in front of the Opera Palace and the Old Residence of the French governor, then back toward the river and the narrow lanes of the old city. I felt as if I were on a spaceship floating between past and present, but with no more need to make comparisons or to judge. History and politics had nothing to do with me. I was fascinated only by the life that continued to flower, tenacious, greedy and lascivious, amid that decay. The rickshaw raced through streets that buzzed with vices and temptations, and I took in
only some disjointed images: naked bodies in a cone of light, women talking together, laughter and obscene gestures from girls by a door, an occasional rat scurrying along those walls unpainted for decades.

That night—I do not know if I dreamed it, or imagined it with open eyes—I saw myself throw away a dictionary which I had been using until then, and get a new one that contained only positive words. Later, half asleep, for no reason I remembered the words: “Take great care of your travel documents.” The fortune-teller of Phnom Penh! I went to check my passport and … lo and behold, my exit visa from Vietnam was not marked “surface travel.” The clerks in the Bangkok embassy had forgotten to write “Friendship Pass,” the Chinese frontier post. If I had turned up there I would undoubtedly have been sent back.

Though I was in Hanoi, it was not easy to obtain that visa. It took letters and recommendations, and two more days of waiting.

First the man cut away a little skin just behind the ear, then he plunged in the knife and slowly began probing for the jugular vein. When the blood began to gush out he collected it in a pot. The dog, its jaws tied, hung upside down by its feet from the door frame; it could not even moan. A crowd of children watched, most of them indifferent. The man skinned the dog and cut it up: the breast for stew; the legs, perhaps, to be roasted.

I had gone out for my morning run in the streets near my ramshackle hotel. The sight of that domestic butchering made me very angry. How could death—even a dog’s death—be so casual? I remembered a news item I had recently read: in Tokyo they had opened the first astrology shops for domestic animals, especially cats and dogs. In Hanoi they would have no problems of prediction: the destiny of dogs is to end up in the pot! Then I started blaming the dogs. They are supposed to have such a keen sense of smell: why do they not realize that these Vietnamese stink of the dog meat they have eaten for centuries? Why do they not realize that man, whom they think is such a great friend, has no scruples at all?

But the life of dogs went on, in the same absurd way as all other lives. As I ran I saw many other dogs, exactly like the one I had just seen quartered, playing with children, scuffling together and digging in garbage heaps from which the beggars had already helped themselves.

I tried to get the address of a fortune-teller in Hanoi, but it seemed that it would not be easy. I was told that nobody believed in them and that they no longer existed. Then, through the usual chain of chance encounters, I met a woman who knew of one. She herself had consulted her a few weeks before: her son, a drug addict, had taken the family television and gone to sell it at the port of Haiphong to buy heroin. She did not know what to do. “Wait three days and the boy will return,” the fortune-teller had told her. And he did.

My informant was the quintessence of everything that filled me with despair about Vietnam. She came from a family of great revolutionaries, she had been a guerrilla and had married a fighter. But when the war was over her husband had gone off with a younger woman and left her alone with her son and all his problems.

The fortune-teller lived not far from the Temple of Literature, and we went there by rickshaw. Her house was very modest, little more than a cube of cement. She was a thin woman of about fifty, with an unusual head of curly hair and a warm, friendly manner. She had begun to “see” after a grave illness. She had been cured by a ray of light that fell on her one day.

We sat on tiny stools around a low table. She did not want to know anything about me. She took both my hands and caressed them, looked into my face, and began speaking in a very sweet, affectionate voice. She asked me in what years my wife and I were born.

“That’s bad,”
she said.
“For one of the tiger like you it is absolutely not advisable, indeed dangerous, to marry a rabbit.”
(The exact opposite of what the Singapore fortune-teller told me.)
“It is your wife who has prevented you from making a good career and being successful. You should leave her, or at least stay far away from her for long periods, otherwise you will have grave problems of health.”

This was interesting. Using the system of interpreting each pronouncement with its own key, I could see some truth in this description of my relationship with Angela: if we had been together for over thirty years, it was partly because we had alternated long periods together with long periods of separation. When the children were small, if I was at home for more than two or three weeks Angela would say, “Isn’t there
anything happening in the world? Isn’t there an offensive in Vietnam?” And something would happen, and I would leave. I would be away a couple of weeks, and the return would be magnificent for all. Many marriages die simply of boredom. That is certainly not what the fortune-teller meant, but it was what came into my mind.

“From now to the end of your life you will have no problems. There is only one, linked with the place where you live. Under your house there is a young dead man who prevents you from becoming rich.”
(So that’s the reason!)
“Every time you make some money he destroys it. You need to appease his soul with an altar, or to open a new door in the southwest corner of the house, facing India.”

A beautiful woman of about fifty had come in. She had listened to my “destiny” and was preparing to present her own case. She said she often came to the fortune-teller, who had become her best friend. A railway engineer, she had studied in China, had been a member of the Party and had married a high official. Her husband had had a lover, and the fortune-teller had helped her with advice. What advice? To have patience, talk with her husband, understand him, confront the problem together. The advice which any friend would give, but which neither her colleagues at work nor those in the Party had offered her. Is this not also one of the functions of fortune-tellers?

Again I found myself sitting among fifty-year-old women with marital problems, before a simple charlatan. But I found the women much more agreeable and interesting than my saintly revolutionaries-turned-businessmen.

I asked the fortune-teller if she saw any risks for me in airplanes. No, absolutely none, she said, but I should be very careful about trains. Those were more dangerous for me.

“Too bad. Tomorrow I’m taking the train for Lam Son and the Chinese border,” I said.

“Not that one! Don’t take it. It’s a train full of bandits and thieves. Often the police themselves pretend to be bandits and rob the passengers. Change your plans! Go by air! That train is dangerous for you!”

At that point I no longer knew if she was speaking as a fortune-teller or as a passenger of the Vietnamese railways. Either way, I was not going to take her advice.

T
here was a big storm during the night, but even that did not relieve the suffocating latrine stench of Hanoi Station. Like a defeated army in retreat, hundreds of passengers bivouacked on the stairs, in the corridors and along the platforms, waiting for trains. It was still dark, and every time I asked a policeman or a railway employee where I could find my train he waved his hand in a different direction. Finally a woman led me past rows of parked carriages, in front of trains about to leave, and handed me over to the man in charge of the express for Lam Son.