A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East. Tiziano Terzani

his country is abandoning its traditions, and he never misses a chance of attacking those he believes have strayed from the traditional Buddhist path. The Thai establishment does not care for him, and because of his outspokenness he has been accused of lèse-majesté, a crime that no longer exists elsewhere, and has spent some time in prison. The last time they arrested him I went to see his wife, thinking she would be distraught. Not at all! She had consulted a fortune-teller who had assured her that in a few days Sulak would be released. That is just what happened: the fellow had named the day and the hour. I decided to consult him.

      I knew where he lived, and that he was blind. I needed an interpreter, but I did not want to take my secretary or anyone who knew anything about me: he or she might, even if unconsciously, give the fortune-teller a clue as to my trade or my family. So I telephoned an agency that provides secretaries for visiting businessmen. Pretending to be a guest at the Oriental Hotel, I made an appointment to meet my escort in the hotel lobby. The woman who arrived was about fifty, plump, with big glasses. She was delighted at the idea of not having to translate clauses of contracts and conversations about buying and selling.

      The fortune-teller lived in the heart of Chinatown, and the Oriental Hotel’s cream-coloured limousine, with a driver in white gold-braided livery, crept at a snail’s pace into the marvellous, chaotic Vorachak quarter which is still one of the noisiest and liveliest parts of Bangkok – still unchanged, thank God, with its thousands of shops selling hardware, pumps, curtains, nails, coffins, sweets; with its myriad smells of incense wafting from little altars at the back of every hole in the wall, or balsam from the pharmacies; with the usual teeming crowds of overseas Chinese in their black shorts, immutable with white undershirts pulled up over their bellies, as if to air the navel and to stimulate the qi – the vital force – which, according to them, has its true centre there.

      The fortune-teller lived at the far end of a tangle of little streets reachable only by foot. Finally we found his house. But it was not a house, exactly: through a big iron grille that opened on to the street we entered a large room that doubled as shop and home, where goods and gods cohabited. On one side, among the sacks of rice, was an old iron desk. Behind it, on a cane chair, was a blind man. More perching than sitting, he was massaging his feet, as the Chinese do, convinced that the bodily organs, from the heart to the lungs, the intestines to the liver, are controlled from there; it is enough to know the right points to touch. His eyes were blank. Where the pupils should have been were white spots that seemed always turned skywards. On the desk was a small teapot, a dish of tangerines – a symbol of prosperity – and an empty turtle-shell. The room was filled with a strong smell of incense from a large altar in one corner, full of statuettes made of gilded wood and representing gods and ancestors, the dead not as they were in life, but as they would have liked to have been. This is a curious tradition among the southern Chinese. An uncle failed the Imperial examination? Never mind: after death he is represented as a mandarin. Another had dreamed of being a policeman? After death he appears on the ancestral altar in uniform, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Many of the fortune-teller’s statuettes held raised swords, as if to protect him in his blindness. An old woman in green silk pyjamas, perhaps his wife, had just finished eating at a round table. She put wicker covers on the pots with the remains of her meal and sat down on a stool at the sink and began washing up.

      Slowly, as if he did not want to hurry our relationship, the blind man began whispering something. My assistant translated. It was the usual question, to which I gave the usual reply: ‘I was born in Florence, Italy, on 14 September 1938, at about eight in the evening.’

      He seemed satisfied, and began performing some strange calculations with his fingers in the air. His sightless eyes, still raised to heaven, brightened as if he had a great secret with which to capture my attention. His lips whispered a sort of nonsense rhyme, but he said nothing intelligible. A Chinese girl in white pyjamas ran in, handed something to his wife and dashed off, first joining her hands over her bosom in salutation to all the impassive ones on the altar. An old clock on the wall ticked for long minutes. I had the impression that the blind man was searching for something in his memory, and had found it.

      At long last his mouth opened. ‘The day you were born was a Wednesday!’ he announced, as if he expected to surprise me. (Right. Bravo! A few years ago he might have impressed many people with that calculation, done entirely by memory. Now it seemed much less impressive. My computer does the same thing in a few seconds.) His satisfaction was touching, but I was disappointed and my interest flagged. I listened to him absent-mindedly. ‘You have a good life, a healthy body and a lively mind, but a very bad character,’ he said. ‘You are capable of great anger, but you are also able to calm down quickly.’ Generalities, likely to be true for anyone sitting before him, I thought. ‘Your mind is never still, you are always thinking about something, which is not good. You are very generous to others.’ Again, true for almost anyone, I told myself.

      I had placed a small tape recorder on the table, and took notes as well, but I suspected I was wasting my time. Then I heard the woman translate: ‘When you were a child you were very ill, and if your parents had not given you away to another family you would not have survived.’ My curiosity revived: true, as a small child I was not very healthy. We were poor, it was wartime and we had little to eat; I had lung trouble, anaemia, swollen glands. ‘From the age of seven to twelve you did well at school, but you were often ill and you moved house. From seventeen to twenty-seven you had to study and work at the same time. You have a very good brain, capable of solving various problems, and now you have no worries because you studied engineering. From the age of twenty-four to twenty-nine you went through the most unhappy period of your life. Then everything went better.’

      It is true that as a child I was often ill, but not that I began working at seventeen. It is not true that we moved house, but the years between twenty-four and twenty-nine were the most unhappy of my life: I had a job with Olivetti, and thought of nothing but getting away, but did not know how. As for engineering, I studied law.

      I was not impressed: it looked like a typical case, where the fortune-teller’s pronouncements have a fifty-fifty chance of being true. My mind wandered. I looked at his hands, which were caressing the turtle-shell on the desk. I heard his continuous whispered calculations, like a computer sifting its memory. Obviously he was mentally shuffling cards. But perhaps his real strength was instinct. Being blind, not distracted by the sight of all the things that distracted me, perhaps he was able to concentrate, to sense the person he had before him. Perhaps his instinct told him that my attention was wandering, because he suddenly broke off the singsong recital.

      ‘I’ve bad news for you,’ he said. For an instant I was worried. Was he going to warn me about flying? ‘You’ll never be rich. You’ll always have enough money to live, but never will you become rich. That is certain,’ he declared.

      I almost laughed. Here we were, in the middle of the Chinese city where everyone’s dream is to become rich, where the greatest curse is just what the fortune-teller had told me. For the people here it really would be bad news, but not for me: becoming rich has never been my aim.

      Well then, what would interest me? I asked myself, continuing my silent mental dialogue with the blind man. If I do not want to be rich, what would I like to be? The answer had just taken shape in my head when it came to me from him, still reading his invisible computer. ‘Famous. Yes. You’ll never become rich, but between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty-two you will become famous.’

      ‘But how?’ I asked instinctively, this time aloud.

      The translation had hardly reached him when he lifted his hands and, with a widening smile on his lips, began tapping an imaginary typewriter in mid-air. ‘By writing!’

      Extraordinary! The blind man could of course guess that anyone sitting before him would like to be famous, but what gave him the idea that I might do so by writing? Why not by starring in a film, say? Had I perhaps told him? Told him mentally, in no actual language – there was none we had in common – but in that language of gestures comprehensible to anyone who could…see?

      Unconsciously, internally, at the very moment when I asked, ‘But how?’ I answered the question and mentally made the gesture