This is one of those posts that does not really follow a neat structure. It was written instinctively, because I felt like telling a little more of my story. Yes, I am someone who gets her palms read, journey after journey. And yes, I have also had my future traced in the grounds of coca mate and coffee. There are moments when I even find myself half believing what palm readers, shamans and self-proclaimed gurus tell me along the way.
Which is curious, considering that I do not believe in horoscopes, I am a convinced agnostic, and for many years, cynicism and distrust were my most reliable survival tools.
It all started almost as a joke, on the first Saturday of June 2004. It was a warm, starry evening, and Brera (one of Milan’s beating hearts) felt like summer. I was walking out of a concert at the Arcimboldi, one of those rare evenings when I was there purely for pleasure and not for work. One of those nights that leave you lighter.
I was strolling with a friend, laughing for no reason. He was about to change his life. I was about to spend a week by the sea in Liguria before heading back to Paris. Only good thoughts, only good energy. That is when I crossed the gaze of a woman I would later describe as happy, or perhaps she was reflecting my own mood. I could not guess her age. I remember her slightly hoarse voice from too many cigarettes, her bright eyes, and the faint smell of talcum powder. She felt more like an artist than a fortune teller, almost a poet.
My friend and I exchanged a look. Why not, we thought, to laugh a little more. I sat in front of her, shuffled the deck laid out on the small round table, and handed her card after card following her instructions. She began telling me a modern, extraordinary fairy tale. My own, in a Pretty Woman sort of way. The more she spoke, the more we laughed. The following afternoon, I started living that very story.
A few months later, in Russia, I repeated the experience. This time, I entrusted my hands to a violist from the Mariinsky Theatre. It was not the same. Natalyia already knew me, not personally, but she knew I travelled constantly for work, the kind of circles I moved in. One thing did strike me, though. She told me I gave excessive weight to every tiny detail of daily life, and that this habit makes you unhappy even when everything seems to be going well. I still think about that.
In December 2004, my ping-pong between the Paris Opera and the Calatrava Palau in Valencia began. Airports quickly became my free time. One evening at Orly, a distinguished, elderly man of Franco-Burmese origin complimented my nail polish. It was a metallic grey gel with red streaks. After a few polite exchanges, he asked to read my palm. He told me how the fairy tale that had begun during my Italian summer would end—just that, and with a bit of advance notice.
The following summer I spent in Kenya, between Malindi, the overly touristy Watamu and the savannah. It was a journey that shook my certainties and the determination that had so far defined my life in theatre. It was also when I understood that Mal d’Afrique is very real. The young boy who read my coffee grounds did not speak of these inner upheavals. Instead, he told me I would not have children and that I would always have more than one job at the same time. He was right so far, and I still do not know whether that is a blessing or a curse.
When I returned from Kenya, I was not well. A close friend kept giving me one Tiziano Terzani book after another. Until then, Terzani had been, to me, my grandfather’s former colleague at Olivetti and a war journalist. I did not know his writing. It opened a new world from the very first pages. A fortune-teller told me that my desire to travel slowly, overland, talking to people and sharing fragments of life along the way, had become almost essential. And with it, inevitably, my habit of having my future read in the folds of my hands.
From that moment on, and for several years, Asia became my primary destination. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Sri Lanka, China, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. In all these countries, palmistry is considered an art. The art of narrating the future, yes, but also of describing a person through their character traits. That is what I love most.
Having your palm read is exciting, entertaining and sometimes unsettling. You sit there, often uncomfortably, while someone studies your hands, draws lines with a pen, rarely meeting your eyes. They talk while you observe their gaze, their voice, making sure not to say a word so as not to influence them. Apart from the initial greetings and the ritual question about place, date and time of birth, I never speak or ask anything until they are finished. It forces them to improvise. The impostor is immediately recognisable. So is the one who genuinely cares.
I will never forget the very thin old man who first spoke to me about future and growing colon issues, under a tamarind tree near the U Bein Bridge in Amarapura. Nor the grumpy palm reader on the beach of Unawatuna who spoke of the pain of someone close to me and my responsibility to be there. I have also encountered many who drowned me in predictable promises of money, love, children, temporary work problems that resolve themselves, eternal happiness and dangerous journeys home.
Do these encounters influence me? Not at all. They have become a small personal ritual, a moment of pause I allow myself when I meet an inspiring gaze outside a temple or on a dusty, exotic pavement. I take mental notes. I smile at how many of them describe the same supposedly tormented nature as mine, thinking that Mata Hari and Sarah Bernhardt did it long before me.
And perhaps that, too, is a way of travelling.
P.S. I’m writing this during an Emirates flight to Bangkok. I will be spending the next 40 days travelling through northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. More fortune-tellers’ stories on their way 😉
