A Fortune-Teller Told Me Read Online Free Page A

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 byfortune-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 April 17, 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 April 18 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 center 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, gray, 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