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

Order of the Child Mary. An orphanage and a school were opened, later a hospital and a leprosarium. As the years went by, Kengtung was caught up in the political upheavals of the region, and troops of several armies passed through it as conquerors: the Japanese, the Siamese, the Chinese of the Kuomintang and then those of Mao. Last came the Burmese; but the Italian mission is still there.

      Today nothing has changed on the ‘Hill of the Spirits’: the buildings are all there, well kept and full of children. Father Bonetta died in 1949, and with other missionaries who never returned to Italy, he lies in the cemetery behind the church. Five Italian nuns remain: three in the hospital, and the two oldest in the convent, together with the local novices.

      ‘When I first came here you couldn’t go out at night because there were tigers about,’ said the oldest, Giuseppa Manzoni, who has been in Kengtung since 1929 and has never gone back to Italy. Speaking Italian does not come easily to her. She understands my questions, but most of the time she answers in Shan, which a young Karen sister translates into English.

      Sister Giuseppa was born in Cernusco. ‘A beautiful place, you know, near Milan. I always went there on foot because there was no money at home.’ Her parents were peasants. They had had nine children, but the seven sons all died very young and only she and her sister survived.

      Sister Vittoria Ongaro arrived in Kengtung in 1935. ‘On 22 February,’ she says, with the precision of someone remembering the date of her wedding. ‘The people had little, but they were better off then, because there were not the differences between rich and poor that there are now.’

      The Catholic mission soon became the refuge of all the sad causes in the region. Cripples, epileptics, the mentally disabled, women abandoned by their husbands, newborns with cleft palates (left to die by a society that sees any physical deformity as the sign of a grave sin in a previous life), found food and shelter here. Today it is such people who tend the garden, look after the animals, and work in the kitchens to feed the 250 orphans.

      It grew late, and as we got up to leave I asked the two nuns if there was anything I could do for them.

      ‘Yes, say some prayers for us, so that when we die we too can go to Paradise,’ said Sister Giuseppa.

      ‘If you don’t get there,’ I said, ‘Paradise must be a deserted place indeed!’

      This made them laugh. All the novices joined in.

      As we walked to the gate Sister Giuseppa took my hand and whispered in my ear, this time in perfect Italian with a northern accent, ‘Give my greetings to the people of Cernusco, all of them.’ Then she hesitated for a moment. ‘But, Cernusco, it’s still there, isn’t it, near Milan?’

      I was delighted to confirm it.

      As I went down the hill I felt as if I had witnessed a sort of miracle. How encouraging it was to see people who had believed so firmly in something, and who believed still; to see these survivors of an Italy of times past, which only distance had preserved intact.

      People born into a family of poor peasants at the beginning of the century, in Cernusco or anywhere else in Italy, could not dream of having the moon: their choices were extremely limited, which meant that they had a ‘destiny’. Today almost everyone has many alternatives, and can aspire to anything whatsoever – with the consequence that no one is any longer ‘predestined’ to anything. Perhaps this is why people are more and more disorientated and uncertain about the meaning of their lives.

      Children in Cernusco no longer die like flies, and none of them, if asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ would reply, ‘A missionary in Burma.’ But does their life today have more meaning than that of the children who at one time might have answered in that way? The nuns in Kengtung had no doubts about the meaning of their lives.

      And the meaning of mine? Like everyone else, I often wonder. Certainly one is not ‘born to be’ a journalist. When I was little and my relatives bombarded me with the usual stupid question, which seemingly must be inflicted on all children in all countries and perhaps in all ages, I used to annoy them by naming a different trade every time, and in the end I invented some that did not exist. It is an aspiration that I continue to nourish.

      After three days in Kengtung Andrew and his friend had not yet found me a fortune-teller. Perhaps Andrew’s Protestant upbringing made him reluctant, or perhaps it was true that the two most famous fortune-tellers were out of town ‘for consultations’. Finally, on our last evening, we found one playing badminton with his children in the garden of his house. But, with great kindness, he excused himself: he received only from 9.30 to 11.30 in the morning, after meditating. I tried to persuade him to make an exception, but he was adamant. He had made a vow imposing that limit ‘to avoid falling victim to the lust for gain’. If he broke that commitment he would lose all his powers, he said. His resistance impressed me more than anything he might have told me.

      On the way back to the border we saw the chained prisoners again. This time we were prepared, and managed to give them a couple of shirts, a sweater, some cigarettes and a handful of kyat.

      At the border we were given back our passports, without any visa stamp. Officially we had never left Thailand, never entered Burma. A fast taxi took us to the city of Chiang Rai. We spent the night in a sparkling new, ultra-modern hotel, where young Thai waiters dressed like the court servants of old Siam served Western tourists dressed like explorers in shorts and bush jackets. The next day they would be taken in air-conditioned coaches to Tachileck, where they would be photographed under an arch that says ‘Golden Triangle’, visit a museum called ‘The House of Opium’, and buy a few Burmese trinkets of a kind that by now can be found in Europe as well.

      A French mime, with a bowler hat and walking stick, who had been hired by the hotel on a six-month contract, did a Charlie Chaplin turn between the tables of the restaurant, in front of the lifts and among the customers at the bar, in an attempt to liven up the atmosphere. I could not have imagined anything more absurd, after the chained prisoners, the monks and men who chopped off heads.

      The next morning Angela and Charles caught a plane, and were in Bangkok in two hours. I had ahead of me four hours by bus to Chiang Mai and then a whole night on a train. Inconvenient. Complicated. But the idea of keeping to my plan still amused me. I remembered how as a boy, on my way to school, I tried not to step on the cracks between the paving stones. If I succeeded all the way I would do well in a test or write a good essay. I have seen this done by other children in other parts of the world. Perhaps we all from time to time have a primordial, instinctive need to impose limits, to test ourselves against difficulties, and thereby to feel that we have ‘deserved’ some desired result.

      Thinking about the many such bets one makes with fate in a lifetime, I reached the bus station easily enough, then the railway station, and finally Bangkok.

       CHAPTER SIX Widows and Broken Pots

      It was inevitable: I began to have doubts. Along came the old familiar voice of my alter ego, true to form, ready to question every certainty. The doubts first surfaced when I began investigating the topic of fortune-tellers and superstition from the point of view of a journalist. Was I not perhaps wasting my time with this business of not flying? Had I not succumbed to the most foolish and irrational of instincts? Was I not behaving like a credulous old woman? As soon as I looked at the subject with the logic I would have applied to anything else, it struck me as absurd.

      I began by going to interview General Payroot, the secretary of the International Thai Association of Astrology. He was a distinguished looking gentleman of about sixty, lean and erect, with thick grey hair, cut very short like that of a monk. When I came in he handed me not one but, as happens more and more often in Asia, several visiting cards, each of which gave a different address and different telephone and fax numbers.

      ‘Why the International Thai Association of Astrology?’ I asked, to start the ball rolling.

      ‘We also hold courses in English, for foreign students; last