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

in the 1960s at Columbia University in New York. His wife, a well known cinema director, was a granddaughter of the last warlord of Yunnan. Like all good Chinese she loved to gamble and was extremely superstitious. Once in a while she used to go to Macao and – like me – spend entire days playing blackjack, baccarat, and especially fan tan, that very simple but addictive game in which the croupier empties a bowlful of buttons onto the table and then slowly divides them into groups of four with an ivory chopstick. One has to guess the number of buttons that are left over at the end: none, one, two or three? The charm of the game is that you can follow it from on high, standing at a railing, and you place bets and collect your winnings by lowering and raising a little wicker basket on a string.

      Every time she went to Macao, before taking the hovercraft my Chinese friend would go and consult her fortune-teller to find out whether those were auspicious days or not. ‘He’s one of the best in Hong Kong. He’s someone you should get to know. Come along with me,’ she said, finally overcoming my resistance.

      The man lived in one of the many old tumbledown beehive-tenements of Wanchai. The doors of the flats were left wide open even at night to let in air, but they had big padlocked grilles to keep thieves out. We climbed several flights of stairs before arriving at a grille like all the others. I saw the red glow of a little altar on the floor, with a bowl of rice and some tangerines offered to the tutelary deities and ancestors. I recall a pleasant smell of incense. Behind an old iron desk sat a Chinese man of about seventy. He wore a sleeveless vest and his head was shaven like a monk’s. His bony hands were resting on some old books and an abacus.

      I stood to one side as the old man gave my friend the advice she sought. Then, pointing in my direction, he said in Cantonese, a dialect I did not understand, ‘He’s the one I’m interested in.’ And I gave in.

      First he measured the length of my forearm with a string, then he felt the bones of my forehead, asked me when I was born and at what time of day, made a few calculations on his abacus, looked into my eyes and began to speak. I was expecting the typical vague formulae used by fortune-tellers, which one can interpret at will, pull this way and that like a rubber band, and if one so desires always succeed (more or less) in squaring with reality. Had he said, ‘You are married but there’s another woman in your life,’ I might have thought, ‘Ah, perhaps that’s the one he means.’ Had he said, ‘You have three children,’ I could have enjoyed playing with the idea that besides Folco and Saskia I might have sown another somewhere in the world. But when my Chinese friend began translating I could not believe my ears: ‘About a year ago you were about to die a violent death, and you saved yourself by smiling…’ Yes, that was true enough, but how could this old man I had never seen describe so exactly an episode which only I knew about, which even my Chinese friend had never heard mentioned before?

      It had happened in Cambodia, exactly a year before. I had left the country a few days before the fall of Phnom Penh on 17 April, and in Bangkok, in that haven of peace and luxury that is the Oriental Hotel on the Chao Paya River, I was grinding my teeth at the thought of those friends and colleagues who had stayed put to see what was happening in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge moved in. My not being there with them struck me as a terrible personal defeat, which I was not prepared to accept. I rented a car, drove to the Thai city of Aranyaprathet on the Cambodian border, and on the morning of 18 April I walked across the iron bridge that spans the frontier. What I had in mind was the crazy, stupid, reckless notion – proof of how little I then knew about the Khmer Rouge – that from there I would find a way of getting as far as Phnom Penh. And off I set along the road on foot.

      I passed crowds of panic-stricken Cambodians racing in the opposite direction, cars crammed to overflowing with people and baggage, horns blaring. They were all terrified, all trying to escape to Thailand. One of them waved to me to turn back, but I took no notice. I had just reached the centre of Poipet when the Khmer Rouge, in single file, began entering the town. The government soldiers threw away their arms, took off their uniforms and fled. There was no resistance, no shooting. The first Khmer Rouge troops passed by as if they had not seen me, but a second group grabbed hold of me, turned their machine guns on me and shoved me up against a wall in the market square. Yelling something that sounded like ‘CIA, CIA! American, American!’ they prepared to shoot me.

      Until then I had seen the Cambodian guerrillas only as corpses abandoned after a battle beside a road or a rice field. These were the first that I saw alive: young, fresh from the jungle, with dry, grey, dusty-looking skin and fierce eyes, red from malaria. ‘CIA! American!’ they kept shouting. I was sure they were going to shoot me. I thought it would be a quick and painless death, and worried only about how the news would reach my home, what suffering it would cause my family. Instinctively I reached into my shirt pocket and took out my passport. Smiling pleasantly, and speaking for some reason in Chinese, I said: ‘I am Italian. Italian. Not American. Italian.’

      From the cluster of spectators behind the guerrillas a man with pale, almost white skin – no doubt a local Chinese trader – stepped forward and translated into Khmer: ‘I am a journalist, don’t kill me…wait till a political cadre comes, let him decide…I’m Italian.’ And I went on smiling, smiling, waving my passport. The Khmer Rouge lowered their guns and entrusted me to a very young guerrilla who scrutinized me curiously for hours. Now and then he would run the barrel of his big Chinese pistol around my face and over my nose, my eyes.

      Towards sunset an older guerrilla arrived on the scene, evidently the leader. Without even looking at me he talked with his men for a few very long minutes, then turned to me and said in perfect French that I was welcome to liberated Cambodia, that these were historic days, the war was over and I was free to go.

      Later that evening I was again between the beautiful cool linen sheets of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. ‘If somebody aims a gun at you, smile,’ I have told my children since. It seemed to me one of the few lessons in life I could give them.

      But the encounter left me with something more than a ‘lesson in life’. The real fear, as always, came later. For months I had nightmares; I often relived the scene in slow-motion, and not always with a happy ending. Obviously the experience had left its mark.

      But how had the old Chinese fortune-teller, in his musty little Hong Kong flat, managed to see that mark? If I had been slashed with a knife or wounded by a bullet, my skin would have shown a scar that anybody’s eye could have seen. But with what eye had he seen the scar that the Khmer Rouge had left inside me, not even I knew where? Was it mere coincidence? This time it really was hard to believe.

      After looking into my past, the old man spoke of my relations with the five natural elements, fire, water, wood, metal and earth. ‘You love wood,’ he said. That is true: whenever I can I surround myself with wooden objects, and of all perfumes I like sandalwood best. ‘You are happy if you live near water.’ That is true: in Hong Kong we always had a view of the sea, and in Italy, at the country retreat in Orsigna, we hear the rushing of a mountain stream.

      Then came the prophecy that was to rule my life for a year: ‘Beware!’ said the old man: ‘You run a grave risk of dying in 1993. You mustn’t fly that year. Don’t fly, not even once.’ He added, ‘If you survive an air accident in that year, you’ll live to be eighty-four.’

      There is no connection between the precise description of past events and the accurate prediction of the future, but obviously the one lends credibility to the other. For that reason, as I discovered later, almost all fortune-tellers use the same system, and thus I could not get the old man’s words out of my head. His ‘guess’ about my past could not be accounted for by statistical probability. This story of a close encounter with death could not be brushed off as equally likely to be true or false for anyone who entered his little room in Wanchai. It was not like telling a woman ‘You have children’ or ‘You have no children.’ My experience in Poipet put me absolutely outside the range of the average.

      And if in some way of his own the old man had hit on the truth, and could see backward to 1975, might he not perhaps also be able to see ahead to 1993?

      Put that way, the question was not the sort that can easily be ignored; and the idea of spending a year looking for an answer attracted me immensely – especially