is written in the body: one need only know how to observe it.
The Chinese discern the character of a person by his ears; in the forehead they read his fate up to the age of thirty-two, in the eyes up to forty, and in the nose from forty to fifty. The eyebrows show the emotional life, and in the mouth are the signs of good or bad fortune in the last years of life. In the crease of the lips, which changes with time, can be read what a man wished to be and what he has become. Not all that crazy, I thought. The body really can be an excellent indicator. Is it not true that after a certain age one is responsible for one’s face? And the hands, don’t they reveal things about the past that plastic surgery tries to erase elsewhere?
I was very curious to see what this woman would read in my face, my ankles, and especially in the small mole just over my right eyebrow. But her first words disappointed me.
‘Your ears are indicative of generosity.’ (One of the usual gambits to put the ‘patient’ in a good mood, I said to myself.) ‘Your brothers and sisters all depend on you.’
‘That’s not true – I have no brothers or sisters,’ I replied aloud. ‘I’m an only child.’
She was unperturbed. ‘If there are no brothers and sisters, then it’s your relatives. Your ears say that many of your relatives depend on you.’ (Yes and no, I said to myself, already resigned to more of these generalities.)
‘As a young man you had great problems over money and health, but since the age of thirty-five everything has gone well from that point of view. You’re fortunate, because you have always had beside you someone you trust, someone who helps you.’
‘Yes, indeed. I’ve been married for over thirty years,’ I said.
‘Yes, and you married your second love, not the first.’ (Not true at all – neither the first nor the second – but by now I had already given up hope of hearing anything interesting, and did not want to disappoint the lady.)
‘Your ears indicate that one day you’ll come into a great inheritance from your parents.’ (Poor ears, they lie! From my parents – my father died some time ago – nothing of that sort can be expected. Certainly if today I asked my mother – eighty-five years old and affected by senile dementia – ‘Mother, where have you hidden the money?’ she would raise a hand and, with that splendid smile that is party to the things she no longer knows, would say, ‘Over there…over there’, indicating with absolute confidence some point in the air. Well, that money ‘over there’ is all I will ever inherit. Or should I reinterpret the word ‘inheritance’, taking it to mean not only money?)
The woman continued, ‘In the house where you live is a place where you worship the gods and your ancestors. It’s good that you do this. Never give it up.’ (Ah, now this is interesting. In the home of every Asian, especially the Chinese, there is a place of that sort, usually a little altar, and it takes no great powers of second sight to imagine this. It is like telling a devout Christian: ‘There’s a crucifix in your house.’ But this woman can see that I am a foreigner, in all probability not a Buddhist and certainly not given to ancestor-worship. And yet she says this – and she is right. In my house there is just such a place. It came into being over the years. I had become interested in those gilded camphorwood statuettes that the southern Chinese have on their family altars, and I had bought a few in Macao. After a while, seeing them sitting on my shelves like ornaments, I had a feeling that they were suffering, removed from their altars, that they had lost their meaning. I began putting sticks of incense beside them. Then in Peking, in an old second-hand shop near the Drum Tower where I used to drop in now and then to see what the peasants had brought to sell, I saw a beautiful altar of carved wood, one of those on which families used to keep little votive tablets for their ancestors, and I bought it. The Macao statues now had a home; and when my father died his photograph came to rest in the lap of a fine Buddha who by then occupied the centre of the altar. Since then, every day I light a stick of incense, and with that little rite take a moment to remember him. He is buried in a big cemetery in Florence, one of those where you get lost in the maze of alleys and paths, and where every grave is exactly like all the others. I have never wanted to go there. His place for me is in my home, on that Chinese ancestral altar.)
‘The house you live in, in Thailand, is in a beautiful place that makes you happy. Stay in that house as long as you are in this country.’
Again she studied my face, pondered, and said that money melts in my hand. (Well, there is a consensus on that, at least.) She said that I tend to be lucky, that I have instinct, that where the road forks I always choose the direction that turns out best, and that I always surround myself with the right people. She said that my mouth does not indicate regrets because in life I have always done what I wanted. ‘You will have a long life,’ she proclaimed. Then she focused on my mole. ‘Ah, this is a sign of your good luck, but it’s also a sign that you’ll die abroad.’ She paused a moment and added: ‘There is no doubt about it: you’ll die in a country which is not your own.’
She asked if I had any questions. I tried to think of one, and remembered that in the autumn the English and German editions of my latest book, the story of a long journey through the Soviet Union in the months when the empire fell apart and Communism died, would be published.
‘What should I do to ensure that this book will be successful and sell lots of copies?’ I asked.
She concentrated, then replied with an air of complete certainty: ‘The book must come out between 9 September and 10 October; it must be neither too long nor too short; it must have a coloured dustjacket, but the colours must not be too strong; and, above all, in the title there must be the name of a person, but not that of a woman.’
I burst out laughing, glad that Vladimir Ilyich was born male. The book was called Goodnight, Mister Lenin, and the dustjacket, long decided upon, was in pastel colours.
She concluded: ‘And don’t forget that you must pray to Buddha and make offerings on the altar of your ancestors. Only if you do that will the book enjoy success!’
She did not ask for payment, only that I make a contribution to the Association.
I spent several days reflecting on my decision not to fly and trying to analyze the real reasons behind it. There could be no denying that I wanted to do something different, to have an excuse for a change in the daily routine. But had I not also thought that by obeying the Hong Kong fortune-teller’s injunction I would avoid the possibility of that air accident about which he had been so emphatic? That was obviously so, but I found it hard to admit.
I realized that despite having lived many years in Asia, and having adapted myself to the life there, intellectually I still had my roots in Europe. I had not expunged from my mind the instinctive Western contempt for what we call superstition. Every time I found myself starting to feel that way I had to remember that in Asia ‘superstition’ is an essential part of life. And anyway, I told myself, many of the practices that seem absurd today may originally have had a certain logic which with time has been forgotten. For example acupuncture: it works, but no one can really explain why. And the art of feng-shui was originally based on the careful study of nature: the nature which we moderns understand less and less.
In Chinese feng means wind, shui means water. Feng-shui thus means ‘the forces of nature’; the expert in feng-shui is one who understands the fundamental elements of which the world is made, and can judge the influence of one on another. He can evaluate the influence that the course of a river, the position of a hill or the shape of a mountain may have on a city or a house to be built, or a grave to be dug. Strange? Not at all. Even we, in planning a house, take account of the sun’s direction, and make sure the building is not too exposed to dampness.
For many centuries the principles of feng-shui have had a decisive influence on Chinese architecture. The plans of all the ancient settlements of the Celestial Empire, beginning with the one that is now the city of Xian, as well as those of the Chinese diaspora, including Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam, were based on considerations of feng-shui. The same