This evening there was a strange bug crawling on my hand, like a primeval armored creature, one I had never seen before, and I watched it for a long time, fascinated. The frogs, the zapos, croak in querulous and mournful tones, and they all break off at once, as if there were a conductor among them. At night I had the feeling that there had been an earthquake in the distance. For a moment the countryside quivered and shook, and my hammock began to sway gently.
Wachintsa, 18 October 1979
As if the outside world with its commotion and earthquakes did not exist, as if an existence of insular harmony were within the realm of possibility, six Aguarunas from Wawaim are working in a zigzag with shovels and machetes to clear a firm path up to the comedor, up to me. They joke and talk about a girl they say is pretty. In the surrounding jungle the birds carry on their conversation without agitation, tranquilly. With his ax a man is hacking away at a felled tree trunk, which under his regular blows is slowly and willingly taking on the form of a dugout. Cows roam among the huts, large and gentle and slow-witted. The bull, an animal of immense proportions and colossal strength, stood next to me for a long time under a roof, letting himself be fanned by the wind and flapping his ears. He looked at me quietly and sadly, and when he left, he was limping badly. Apparently he got a large thorn stuck in his front hoof. In the kitchen beer and soda have run out. Les, who had hauled his camera up here and then did not find any beer, sat in silence for a long time, and when I asked him what was wrong, he said he had to get over this traumatic experience before he started working. He sat there for a good quarter of an hour brooding, then gradually came to life again.
Wachintsa—Pongo de Manseriche—Saramiriza—Iquitos, 19 October 1979
A confused day, which began with a visit from Nelson, the one-eyed Indian from Nueva Vida, who came to tell us about reprisals to which he had been subjected; allegedly, though I have my doubts about this, he had been summoned to appear before the justice of the peace from Chiriaco, who does not even have jurisdiction over his district, on a charge of high treason against his community, a crime that does not exist. His mother was with him and stood there on the gravel bank, crying, gesticulating, and afraid for her son, who has the reputation of being a brujo, a male witch, but because he was spurned by everyone I had felt bad for him and had given him a job.
We decided to sail downstream, showed our identification papers in Urakusa, where I had a bad argument with the major over the French agitator Eric Sabourin, whom the aliens bureau wanted to expel. Les filmed the confrontation, and the photographer from Stern magazine, who is with us, took pictures. The major had the film and the tape confiscated, but those involved managed to turn over only unexposed material. The photographer pulled a roll of unexposed film out of his camera and made a big show of trampling it as it curled on the ground, meanwhile managing surreptitiously to take further pictures of the soldier who was seizing a reel of Les’s film. The major, who had been the boastful megalomaniac, claiming to be the king here, the one who made everything happen and solved all problems, shriveled in a matter of minutes, with the cameras running, to the sphincter of his own asshole.
In Santa Maria de Nieva an absurd discussion with the police sargento, who harrumphed that he would get the Frenchman, he would “put the kid in the shade for a while,” and wanted to know if we would lend him our boat for the operation, and Walter, the fool, was all for lending it to him, but I said absolutely not. It turned out that the sargento actually wanted the boat so he could go and bring his deputy back from Saramiriza; the man had been lying around there drunk for the last two months, with all the wages for the police station here.
We spent the night there. In the evening the place was completely dead. My foot is badly inflamed, and there are problems. In one of the huts an older man was sitting with a book by a kerosene lantern, reading out loud to himself. On the grocer’s counter two scrawny boys were sleeping, their lanky limbs contorted, as if an explosion had hurtled them into a terrible, everlasting sleep. I gazed up at the starry sky, and it seemed as alien to me as I do to myself.
We hurried the next morning (Saturday?) to get to Saramiriza with the boat, so as to make the plane to Iquitos. On the way we saw an exhausted deer in the river, and I grabbed it by the hind legs and pulled it out of the water onto the boat. It thrashed around, but we managed to tie it down. It sighed loudly as we were holding it down and tying its legs together. Its coat was covered with little burrlike leaves, which were stuck to it.
Iquitos, 21 October 1979
Waiting, glowering sun, inactivity. Last night I had a fever. I played Zapo and hit the frog several times in the mouth with the thick bronze coin. On the way to Belén I saw a procession following a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The music up ahead was provided by a small, flat drum, a conch shell, and a little tin whistle, thin and capable of only four notes. An Indian was playing it. He was wearing a plastic hard hat, with the logo of a local company.
There is a kind of uneasiness bordering on panic that does not have its roots in anything factual—unlike the situation in Wawaim, which actually would give reason for unease—but is completely illogical: I had received two telexes, one of them from the U.S., with mysterious content; I have the impression it contains an extremely important message, but I cannot find it. It is lost. I have looked everywhere, then looked again, but the message is gone. I sleep badly and wake up with a start at the crack of dawn, wondering where that message can be. The actual news coming from Wawaim, all garbled on the radio due to electrical storms, cannot be understood. When Walter speaks German, scratchy fragments come through that might just as well be texts in Assyrian cuneiform; only when he speaks Spanish does an isolated word make it through to us. Upon leaving Wawaim I had a sense I was seeing the place for the last time.
Belén caught up as usual in its comforting tropical chaos. Pigs in the bog, children in such large numbers that there might as well be no adults, games of Zapo. A man was unloading large fish, dorados, and told me he watched the surface of the water and could tell when the dorados were hunting smaller fish in the warm, brown depths; that was when he cast his nets. All afternoon a phonograph record kept playing the same scratchy song about corazón, the heart. Gisela told me the telexes had turned up on the bottom of the swimming pool, murky with algae. Since then the day has taken on a different coloration.
Iquitos, 23 October 1979
During the night from Sunday to Monday I developed a high fever. My leg was throbbing and hammering, and the lymph gland on the left side of my groin swelled up and got very hard. In the morning there was a lot of pus in my foot. I drove to the new production house because only one of the telexes had been found in the swimming pool; the really mysterious one was still missing. Because I assumed that the paper had not been thrown into the pool on purpose but had been picked up by a storm gust and blown there the day before, I hunted all around the garden and near the swimming pool; finally I remembered the direction from which the last storm had come, followed that lead, and found the missing piece of paper.
I received a telex describing what a cherub is. Then I realized that I was developing a high fever and lay down upstairs in Gisela’s bed, hoping she would let me rest there. She made a poultice for my calf, and I started taking antibiotics. I was sick all day, and then the fever began to subside. I had received another telex, monosyllabic, saying it was the twilight of the gods, and I knew who had sent it and what the code meant. Then I was in the high mountains, Hindu Kush or the Himalayas, and at a great altitude I had to fight my way forward, sunk up to my chest in powder snow. I was going downhill to reach an enormous gorge where a stream was roaring. Two mountain climbers were roped below me and did not want to believe that I was following alone. The stream had eleven waterfalls. You could grope your way toward the first ones along a layer of ice, down the middle of which, a sort of groove, roared an open, foaming rivulet. The first of the waterfalls was the size of Victoria Falls—by moonlight—which made the proportions even g
reater. It cascaded straight down with a roar, and from below steam and foam billowed up toward me. I threw myself into the falls, but knew as I did so that there would be no going back, that I would then have to pass through the next ten cataracts. I had to rely on my hearing as my guide, because it was impossible to see anything amid the foaming vapors rising from those unspeakable abysses, but I could tell by the sound whether the waterfalls ended in a basin or struck rocks. I was spun around, weightless, as the water hurtled me downward, and then came the impact, as I was tossed hither and yon, the struggle against the massive wall of water that was descending on me. From the sixth waterfall on, still at least half the size of Niagara Falls, there was no more ice; and of course it must have been two or three thousand meters lower in altitude. Finally we emerged from under the eleventh waterfall, the mountain climbers and I, to find alpine pastures. We shook hands, for during the descent we had never been close enough to do so. We struck out along a path. Farther down we came upon an unoccupied mountain-patrol cabin, but we did not want to go in because it belonged to the Christian Socialist Union Party, which held socials there for the rural population. Finally we descended through a forest to a village. The first building was a musty stone goat shed. In the dim interior, damp and oppressively warm, sat my best friends from my childhood; they spent almost all their time there, pale, dirty, and pimply, almost rotting away from the bad air. They always sat half beneath a staircase, leaning against a damp stone wall and getting drunk on stale beer. So there they sat and stared at me, their eyes glazed and stupefied in their pocked, fleshy faces, and it struck me like a bolt of lightning that they had been sitting there just the same way when I had set out half a year earlier; they had not even left the musty corner to pee, but simply went on the shed floor. One of them was Kainz Ruepp, who had become a milker on the Fraueninsel in Chiemsee Lake and burned to death in his bed, presumably from a cigarette he had neglected to stub out.
A little girl led an even littler girl along a dusty road out into the world. A small green parrot was clinging to the older girl’s other hand and was speaking. The girls said nothing because the dust was so hot and parched their throats. The dust burned beneath their naked soles. The first houses were built on stilts. Plowing the centuries, today a dark sun rose, solemn and heavy, above the jungle, which was full of poisons. Orchids in heat steamed. The jungle reeked of sweetish sweat and fornication.
Eight months expunged, as if I wished they had never happened. A year of catastrophes, personal and related to my work. After the camp on the Río Marañón had been abandoned, except for the medical station, it was set on fire by the Aguarunas of the Indian Council. Newspaper photographers from Lima were invited to witness the event. I was made out by the media to be a criminal, and a grotesque tribunal was convened in Germany to judge me. Nonetheless I pressed on, knowing, or possibly only hoping, that time would show things in their proper light, that the facts would ultimately triumph over all the rest. Money troubles. I was so broke that I had nothing to eat. In Iquitos I sold two bottles of American shampoo at the market and bought four kilos of rice, which would feed me for three weeks. My daughter was born; something beautiful will remain.
A loose, undated slip of paper tucked between the pages: life is either dead on or dead off.
Iquitos, 2 July 1980
Upon my arrival, several large pieces broke off my incisor, which had been knocked out and replaced by a crown. I kept the crumbled fragments because I associate them with the most awful dreams, namely that my teeth are made of limestone, hollow inside, and liable at any time to be chewed up and crushed, like the most fragile stalactites formed in caves.
When a massive rainstorm moved in at noon, the music on my radio was like the intermittent buzzing of many insects. All the cassettes I left here months ago have been stolen, with only a few of the plastic cases remaining. The news and the photos César just brought from the upper Ucayali are bad; there is almost no area left where we would have the geographical features I need for the film. Gloria, Walter’s wife, is in her ninth month, her face so altered that at first I did not recognize her. I knew her, but I did not recognize her. W. is sure it is going to be a boy; the bruja prophesied that, the same one who magically healed his stomach ulcers.
Iquitos, 3 July 1980
Profoundly unreconciled to nature, I had an encounter with the big boa constrictor, which poked its head through the chicken wire surrounding its wooden cage and looked me fearlessly in the eye for a long time. Stubbornly confronting each other, we were pondering the relatedness of the species. Both of us, since the relatedness was slight, felt sad and turned away from each other. Out by the garden wall, in the direction of the banana plants, a washhouse had been built, with fresh concrete poured for the floor, but before the concrete had a chance to set up, ants had built canals and tunnels through it. Yesterday four motorcycles were supposed to have arrived from the U.S. by plane, but they are nowhere to be found. During my flight over the Andes I was able to see the Huascaran from very close up; its crevasses and glaciers were so forbidding and the mountain maintained its solitude so majestically that it took my breath away. Beyond it I saw the entire Sierra Blanca.
A plan to have a hut built for me on the edge of the jungle. I still have not found my way to the lagoon through the forest. There is a swampy area that can be crossed only when it is completely dried out. Walter’s rice crop out there never amounted to anything, because although the rice grew, no one wanted to harvest it. Now weeds are taking over the rice paddy.
Iquitos—Pucallpa, 4 July 1980
News from Wawaim that the oil prospectors have established a major foothold with Evaristo Nunkuag’s help, that he has signed a contract with them and is busy recruiting workers for them. It is possible that they have been planning for a long time to force us out because we would have tied up too many workers. Whatever the reason, it is not relevant anymore. I have to reorganize the entire production from scratch.
Iquitos—Pucallpa, 5 July 1980
Searching for a possible location. For reasons that could not be determined, we had been stricken from the train’s passenger list, but somehow we managed to get on board. I sat on a fold-down seat next to an Indian woman with her one-year-old daughter, who clung to my finger for an hour and looked me fearlessly in the eye. Walter had arrived in the morning and brought aerial photographs of the entire Ucayali, Tambo, and Pachitea regions, pieced together from small individual shots. My collarbone, which is half separated from my breastbone, hurts. It was news to me that there is a kind of meniscus there. I am just lucky that the injuries to the vertebrae in my neck did not leave me a paraplegic, as Lucki was initially told would be the case.
Studied the aerial photos carefully with several pilots. They make no promises. I saw a child that had painted itself all over with green paint, and I saw a crippled young woman in shorts climbing into a tree with her crutches.
I have 450,000 soles on me, bundled tightly to form a sort of large brick. The packet is as heavy as a brick, too. When I went to lie down, the packet reeked so strongly of stale sweat that I wrapped the money in a plastic bag and tied it up tightly.
Pucallpa, 6 July 1980
We got up early and ran into the German, Maulhardt, who has a tourist lodge on the Yarinacocha lagoon. It turned out that he owns a small plane and has highly detailed maps. Mostly because of those maps we went out to his place and had a long talk with the pilot. Everything here is focused on tourism in the most appalling way. That is the real sin.
Before my eyes a painting was condensing into shape; it could not decide between a tropical rain-forest theme and an East African savannah, even though this blending appeared perfectly natural. So it was a jungle, and two elephants were tearing leaves off the trees with their trunks, and then on the riverbank were some antelopes and hippopotamuses. They stood there motionless: as in a painting. Through the branches, very clearly visible, shone the full moon. Then one of the elephants started, turned its head, and stare
d at the moon, so startled that the other elephant took notice. Now the antelopes also jerked their heads out of the brackish water and likewise looked up at the moon, and at that I became aware that it was not the moon but the earth which had risen. The entire continent of Africa stood out clearly. Next the first elephant broke into a gallop and fled, while the second, in spite of its colossal size, raced off in the opposite direction like a rabbit in flight, taking great leaps, whereupon the antelopes streaked in a panic into the forest. Only then did one of the hippopotamuses turn languidly, wondering where the other animals had gone; it stared at the moon, and because its mind worked slowly, did not realize that the earth on which it was standing had risen in the sky. It looked so helplessly stupid that you could not help being moved. The painter working on the painting swished his brush around in the dabs of paint on a mahogany board, and after I had watched him for a while, I knew that he was only pretending to be painting; in reality he would never paint, only mix colors, for all eternity.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 7