The pages that follow are the story of this strange journey, of my year with my feet on the ground…or should I say less than ever on the ground? That would be nearer the mark, for never have I flown without wings as I did in those thirteen months. A year of thirteen months? Yes, but that will be the easiest of my explanations.
The conclusion? ‘I never go to fortune-tellers. I like to be surprised by life,’ was the sibylline reply of an elderly lady in Bangkok when I asked her how many times a month she consulted them.
In my case the surprises came precisely because I did go to a fortune-teller. His prophecy lent me a sort of third eye with which I saw things, people and places I would not otherwise have seen. It gave me an unforgettable year, which I began by sitting in a basket on an elephant’s back in Laos and ended by sitting on a meditation cushion in a Buddhist retreat run by an ex-CIA agent.
His prophecy also – saved me from an air crash. On 20 March 1993 a UN helicopter in Cambodia went down, with fifteen journalists on board. Among them was the German colleague who had taken my place.
CHAPTER TWO A Death that Failed
The occult and I had always had a cold and distant relationship. The reasons, as for so many other things, are rooted in my childhood. In fact the estrangement began very early.
They placed a small photograph of a soldier at the bottom of a bowl of water, then covered my head with a big towel and made me sit there in the dark, bent over the bowl, with my eyes fixed on the quivering half-length image under the water. All around me the women sat silently, waiting.
It was my grandmother’s idea. She said an innocent soul had to be used, and apparently I fitted the bill. The seance took place in 1943 at our home in Monticelli, a working-class quarter of Florence. We had a neighbour called Palmira whose son had disappeared that winter in Russia during the retreat, and I was to discover if he was alive or dead, and try to see what he was doing at that moment.
I would have been glad to say I saw him eating at a table in a wooden hut with snow all around, but all I could make out was that sober, unsmiling face that fluttered with my every breath. The little black-and-white photo reminded me of others that I had seen on marble crosses in the Soffiano cemetery, but I didn’t want to say that. The episode is one of the clearest images I retain from my childhood, and I well remember the disappointment when they took the towel off my head and poured the water away. Palmira retrieved her photo and dried it with a handkerchief. One of the women said that if the attempt had failed it might be because I had somehow lost my innocence – unlikely, as I was barely five years old at the time. But then, who knows? Perhaps it had succeeded after all: Palmira’s son never did return from Russia.
Since that first experience, in the course of my life I have had no more than a normal, sceptical curiosity about the uncertain world beyond appearances; and instinctively I have always found some rational way to explain inexplicable things that sometimes took place before my eyes. Later, when I had children, I had more and more need of such explanations, because children constantly demand to ‘understand’.
Once in Delhi, where I had brought the family to celebrate my fortieth birthday (being keen to plant a symbolic seed in India, and thereby announce, formally, my intention of going to live there one day), an old Sikh came up to Saskia and Folco. They were eight and nine years old at the time. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘I’ll guess your grandfather’s name.’ Incredulous, they handed him a few rupees, whereupon he asked them several questions and, to their amazement, wrote the letter G on a piece of paper: my father’s initial, his name being Gerardo. I was hard put to convince them that behind this, like so many other Indian ‘miracles’, from people buried alive to ropes standing on end, there must be a trick: they had probably suggested the letter somehow in their answers to his questions. But no! They were certain that at the very least the man had read their minds. Then a couple of years later, while we were on holiday in Thailand, we were all witnesses to an event where there was no question of a trick.
We were staying on the island of Phi Phi with Seni, a Thai journalist who was an old friend of ours, and his girlfriend Yin. Phi Phi was a tropical paradise with blue sea, white sand, and huts of bamboo and straw, until it too was invaded by electricity, fax machines and concrete hotels with swimming pools. We were about to get into a boat to go and see the great, mysterious caves where for centuries the local people have gathered one of the foods most prized by the Chinese, swallows’ nests. Suddenly Yin realized that she had left her camera in their hut. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I’ll telephone Seni.’ Telephone? There was no such thing on the island! Yin moved away, her head in her hands and her eyes closed, as if she were making a great effort of concentration. A few seconds later, Seni appeared in the far distance, like a little black dot running across the white sand. ‘The camera! Yin, you forgot the camera!’ Coincidence? Of course it was. No shadow of doubt crossed my mind.
Folco, on the other hand, was highly excited. The boat, the sea, the mysterious caves with towering bamboo poles which the local boys climbed to collect the precious nests, no longer interested him now that there was the possibility – for him proven – of telepathic communication. He spent the day ‘doing exercises’, and in the evening, before dinner, he told us he would direct his thoughts to his mother, who had had to go to Florence. ‘What’s she doing at this moment?’ Saskia asked him. ‘Sleeping,’ he said. ‘I see her sleeping, with a blue light all around her.’ In Italy it was then early afternoon, there is no blue light in our house, and his mother never sleeps after lunch.
A week later, however, Angela came back from Florence and told us that on that particular day she had gone to Il Contadino, our country retreat in a village called Orsigna in the Tuscan Apennines. For once, right after lunch, she had taken a short nap in the children’s room, the one with blue curtains. A paranormal son? More likely just a successful game.
Like everyone else, I had heard and read about prophecies that had come true, about people who could do incredible things – fly, levitate, see into the past or the future – but I had never given them much weight. If even one of them were true, I asked myself, how could we go on living normally? If fate is written in our palms, or in the stars, how can we go on catching buses, turning up at the office and paying the electricity bills? Should we not chuck the life we lead and devote ourselves utterly to the study of these phenomena? But people go about their business, trains run, the post arrives, newspapers appear daily. I told myself that the paranormal world is the invention of a few, that it is the product of the distorted imagination, an expression, like others, of man’s need to believe in something beyond appearances; I need not bother about it. Thus for years I had lived in Asia without paying much attention to the occult side of things. I had visited temples and anchorites, I had heard all sorts of stories, but I had never allowed myself to be too impressed. Then, too, whenever I had occasion to check on one of those odd stories I always found something that seemed not to fit. Reality never quite squared with what I had been told.
In all my years in Asia I had never had my horoscope cast or consulted any of the numerous fortune-tellers, for whom I had always felt an instinctive distaste. When I was a boy, just after the war, gypsies would often stop at our house and ask to read my mother’s palm. She would refuse and bolt the door, saying they were all thieves who would hypnotize us and carry off the little we had. Her outbursts obviously had an effect on me.
Nor had I wanted to go to that fateful fortune-teller in Hong Kong. We had