A Fortune-Teller Told Me Read Online Free Page B
Author: Tiziano Terzani
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.
Toward 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 in the few days leading up to that portentous deadline.
On December 18, 1992 I flew from Bangkok to Vientiane. On the twenty-second, on board a small, jolting Chinese-made plane, I arrived in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos.
3/O N W HICH S HORE L IES H APPINESS ?
I n one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha
, the young brahmin—contemporary of Buddha, the Enlightened One—is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present—like the river, which at one and the same
Toward 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 in the few days leading up to that portentous deadline.
On December 18, 1992 I flew from Bangkok to Vientiane. On the twenty-second, on board a small, jolting Chinese-made plane, I arrived in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos.
3/O N W HICH S HORE L IES H APPINESS ?
I n one of the many fine passages in Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha
, the young brahmin—contemporary of Buddha, the Enlightened One—is sitting on the riverbank. It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present—like the river, which at one and the same
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