Iquitos, 18 December 1980
A message about some emergency reached us from the camp on the Camisea, but only half of it got through before the power failed, and since then the connection has been dead. Apparently an Indian woman in the late stages of pregnancy came to our medic, with the child in her womb dead. She cannot deliver it, and, so far as I could make out, she will die if nothing is done. This morning our telex also gave up the ghost. All we can do is try to send a plane from Pucallpa, if we can get a connection somehow. Otherwise the only hope I have is that Cucho can bring the woman in the speedboat to the Río Sepahua or to the missionaries on the Río Timpia, because they are better equipped than we are at the moment.
From the few days of my absence, the costumes and props are in a mess, and so, according to Uli, is the entire production, because Walter is utterly disoriented and can seemingly focus only on the ship; otherwise he has lost all sense of continuity and perspective. Come what may, I will try not to put off the actual shooting; any other course would be psychologically catastrophic. To quote General Patton, the only direction is forward; the rear guard will fall in place in its wake; organization, logistics, and everything secondary will be swept up in the momentum.
I have a snake on my roof again. A little while ago I heard something rustling up there, and then something dark fell into the banana fronds with a thwack. I took a look, and it was a poisonous brownish snake that had caught a bird, which was still peeping. I tried hitting the snake with a stick, but it disappeared like lightning into the grass. Only now and then did a blade quiver, and from the piteous cries of the bird I could tell where the snake was. I did not follow it into the grass, because I discovered that another snake was on the thatched roof, and directly above me a third snake was trying to get from a banana frond onto the platform of my hut. I tried to strike it with the machete, but the snake was too fast for me.
The power is still out. Evening descended on the countryside. What would happen if the rain forest wilted like a bouquet of flowers? Around me insects are dying, for which they lie on their backs. A woman in the neighborhood is suckling a newborn puppy after her baby died from parasites; I have seen this done before with piglets. The current in some malpasos before the Río Camisea seems to be too strong for our ship. A voice saying, There goes the whole project, keeps droning in my head like church bells, while lightning flickers above the silhouettes of the trees. Henning was supposed to come tonight with money, but I hear he is not coming until Saturday. We have nothing left here, and it is urgent that we get food supplies up to the Camisea, buy tools in Lima, and pay the workers. Outside a bright moon is floating now above the treetops. The frogs, thousands of them, suddenly pause, as if they were following an invisible conductor, and start up again all at the same time. Their conversations come and go in curious waves. Waxy moonlight, as bright as neon, is shimmering on the banana fronds. I was called to the telephone in the house, and fell off the ladder that leads to my platform. It was one of very few phone calls that ever get through to us, and a stranger on the line was trying to make it clear to me that I was a madman, a menace to society.
Iquitos, 19 December 1980
In the morning a sinister-looking man appeared in our office. He was missing his upper front teeth and was wild and wily, and it seemed to me he would be willing to commit murder if you made it worth his while. The thought had just crossed my mind when in an unobserved moment he darted upstairs and forced his way into Gloria’s room, giving her a good scare. Allegedly he was just looking for an advance. A young captain is here from Atalaya, the first and only one who has impressed me as reliable. He calculated calmly that the ship might need twenty days to get from Atalaya to the Camisea, without counting on favorable conditions. That scared the daylights out of me, because the ship needs two weeks just to get to Atalaya, and there is no chance of doing better than that. Gloria’s still crying hysterically. The telex machine has not been fixed yet, but for the first time in a long while the electricity is back on in the city.
Two thoughts that do not belong here have been preoccupying me amid the uproar of getting everything reorganized: how can it be explained that Latin left no traces in Germania south of the Limes, yet in England such lasting traces were left in English, even though the Roman occupation was far more fleeting there; and are not stars that are moving away from us at a speed near that of light also on a collision course with us, as in mathematical reality a bullet we fired on earth that flew around the globe would have to hit us in the back?
When I am in my cabin and toss the tea remaining in my tin cup out the window, the liquid spurts through the screen onto the banana fronds outside, but the tea leaves remain suspended in the window screen in a flat, strange pattern, harshly reduced by one dimension, betrayed. They stay there as a two-dimensional reminder of the turbulent way in which the tea went through the wire mesh.
I sent off my Christmas letters, knowing they would arrive late or more likely not at all. The Christmas tree in the post office, consisting of a few bare branches decorated with strips of silver foil and green cellophane, as well as a little package, touched me to the quick. Outside I looked down at the river for a long time, trying to regain some composure. Chatas, flat barges, are chugging along, carrying pipes for distant oil-drilling operations. Belén is partially under water. Today at daybreak the birds were pleading for the continued existence of the Creation. For them, anything but the continuation of the status quo is deadly. My watch has stopped now once and for all, but for a long time I have been thinking in Amazonian terms anyway: before dinner, after the storm, toward evening. A blind, barefoot beggar was groping his way along the wall of a house. A woman was drinking water from an aluminum pot in which slimy fish from the river, with big eyes, were floating. One of them was dead, its underside white, belly-up. Then a child drank from the pot.
At the market in Belén I saw a young woman so beautiful that I was startled. In my bamboo room I used a boarding pass, which had yellowed quickly in the climate here, as a bookmark, and I saw that it was only from this past summer. I cannot remember why I took that flight. That piece of cardboard will soon disappear into a filing case, and only the tax people will be interested in it, but it was life, my life. I tried transcribing the tape of Huie’s Sermon, but much of it is almost unintelligible, and there are large gaps. A rooster crowed itself hoarse, for hours on end. Oppressive heat. Sleepiness. Does the devil keep a logbook?
In Belén I drank sugarcane brandy with some of the porters, barefoot wild fellows, whom I took along later to the costume depot. One of them was wearing a decorative circlet around his neck plaited from a length of liana and was constantly scratching his balls. Big black ants were darting back and forth on mysterious errands along a beam on which my arm had been resting. When they began carrying their milky white eggs, I knew this was serious business for them. The men, drunk by now, were mindlessly intent on finding a woman for the night, as if there were no tomorrow, while the mosquitoes, impelled by a similarly mindless principle, paid no heed to whether a person was drunk, horny, or dying.
Iquitos, 21 December 1980
I was supposed to get Claudia Cardinale settled in her hotel suite, which extended over two floors. As we entered the room, we noticed that on the upper floor, which could be reached only by way of a spiral staircase, a horse was standing, one of those noble Thoroughbreds, its bridle held by its jockey, a skinny, gnomish man. Klieg lights were set up because a commercial was being shot in the suite. We were told the room would be available shortly; we should go ahead and drop the luggage there. The word was—a rumor was flying around the hotel—that Cardinale’s bosom was the most beautiful in the world; this had been officially established by a legal decision. Outside the river flowed by, drunk for all eternity. Fall foliage floated away to the south on the water. At Christmas the rich folks of Iquitos go water-skiing on the Amazon. In the gold country of Punt, tonsillectomies are performed with a vacuum cleaner. Benjamin wants to find sun temple
s and hidden treasure when he is grown up. One morning an angry country woman sawed off her chickens’ beaks with a fretsaw. I wondered whether a dog could be disguised as a pig. Then my ship dissolved in its reflection in the waves into slow-moving arrows. A sudden gust of wind woke me, and I noticed that the light was on and my mosquito net was billowing like a sail, trying to get away from me. Outside a fire was sending out sparks in the wind; our night watchman, César, is heating up tar to spread on our artificial rubber balls to make them look authentic. The sky lowering and black, the horizon shimmering malevolently as if with northern lights.
Iquitos, 23 December 1980
Henning’s birthday. Chaos with the costumes. Izquerdo, whom Gisela screamed at in German, promptly quit; that way he will at least be home for Christmas. Bill Rose, obviously drunk, sent a confused telex from Miami full of dire insults aimed at Alan Greenberg, who quit before he even started with us. Alan had got word to me that Bill had called him without reason and without warning, threatening to murder him and making no sense. At the camp on the Camisea there was a terrible storm. It uprooted huge trees, which completely destroyed some of the buildings. In a play staged recently in a student theater by the initiators of the tribunal against me, with some Indians from Cenepa as actors, I was portrayed, according to Henning, as always appearing for shoots with a fat cigar in my mouth; it seems to have escaped general notice that I have not done any filming yet. All this is part of the daily dance.
Last night a bat got into the office, where it fluttered around desperately for a long time, unable to find the open windows. At the marketplace I saw a porter carrying a squealing pig on his back with a forehead strap and speaking to it in Quechua as he made his way down to the dwellings on stilts. I jumped out of my skin because the trees were yelling at me. Has it come to this—that the trees are yelling at me?
Iquitos, 1 January 1981
Brotherly love at midnight. In the meantime Mick Jagger has arrived with Jerry Hall. Two of his suitcases did not make it, because he had sent them to I-Quito. We had rented a car for him, but it turned out that the key did not fit; it actually belonged to a construction crane. Mick took a taxi out here, and because the driver did not want to carry him the last hundred meters through the muddy ruts, even for twice the price, I found him groping his way in the dark, in a tuxedo and tennis shoes. Shaking with laughter, he told me that Robards and Adorf had confided to him that they had both had wills drawn up because they were going to be working in the jungle.
Our lighting man had no compunctions about tapping into the electric feeder line out by the new equipment shed, for all to see. Suddenly everything out there had power. For weeks the electric company had been promising us every day that they would get us hooked up, but they had never sent anyone. Chaos in Mexico, out of the clear blue sky. The agent there dismissed all the actors and production team members, canceled the contracts, claiming she received instructions to do this in a telex from us. Lucki managed to get on a flight today from Miami to Mexico to sort out the mess. The Caterpillar is going to be shipped from Miami too late; from there it is supposed to go to Lima/Callao, then overland to Pucallpa on the Río Ucayali, and then on a chata as far as the Urubamba and the Río Camisea. From the point of view of timing, this can be a catastrophe in the making. For days the shipment with the lights and the camera was nowhere to be found, because the plane could not land in Iquitos during a rainstorm and was diverted to Lima. There everything was unloaded, then a plane broke down, and everything was stuck in customs because Faucett Airways could not locate the bills of lading. The Brazilians, actors, and sound team will get here too late, but the Narinho II is sailing upstream faster than we expected. And: the general strike has supposedly been called off.
Iquitos, 2 January 1981
Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one is there. He has taken possession of almost all the forks. This morning he stole the milk bottle used by Gloria’s little daughter, and Gloria saw him out in the bushes sucking on the nipple until the bottle was empty. She is convinced the monkey will rape the baby, and she wants him shot before he does so. Around his waist the monkey still has the piece of electrical cable with which he had been tethered, and when he climbs he holds the cable high in the air with his tail, with which he can grasp things as well as with a hand; that way it cannot interfere with his movements.
Behind my back, Walter has flown up to the Camisea, leaving the chaos in his wake. He has reduced the number of extras for the scene of the ship’s departure from five thousand to half that number, and I went with Mauch to the boat landing and calculated how many we would need to have a believable number to distribute over the riverbank. If we also want to fill the road up above, it will have to be at least sixty-six hundred extras. No one should be scared off by the work involved. After all, I do not even have an assistant, and the hard core of the team will consist of about sixteen people. If the same film were being produced in Hollywood, they would not get by with fewer than 250.
Iquitos, 3 January 1981
Since yesterday everything seems to point toward the general strike as being on again. We received word directly from the strike committee, and George Sluizer has also heard directly from the general charged by the government with gathering enough troops to maintain order in case the strike gets out of hand. The Narinho II is stuck in Pucallpa; the gear mechanism (?), brand-new (?), failed, and it can take up to a week for a replacement to come from Miami, without figuring in delays resulting from a possible strike. Supposedly five Mexicans, and from Brazil the sound team and the actor José Lewgoy, are to arrive tonight. It is unsettling that a queue stretching two hundred meters has formed outside the office of Faucett Airlines—people wanting to get out of Iquitos before the strike begins. Piercing heat, and no rain to cool things down.
Iquitos, 4 January 1981
The Mexicans arrived so late at night and on a plane that was not listed on any flight plan that at first I thought my brother Lucki had hijacked a plane just to get here on time. Claude Chiarini was with them—what a pleasure to have him back with me. Mick Jagger helped out as a driver to get all the new folks to their hotel. The sound people are stranded somewhere in Brazil; we will have to manage somehow. Things are still on hold with the ship, but we have to take the plunge. Wrangles over the costume shop, because the makeup people need to spread out in the building. An obstinate, whiny tone, always the signal that chaos is about to erupt, like a lava eruption. President Belaunde wafted in from Lima and spoke to a large crowd on the Plaza de Armas, and people seem to have calmed down.
Iquitos, 5 January 1981
Around midnight Lucki woke me with the news that the strike was happening after all; it would begin on Monday with a warning strike, and starting the following Monday would be a general strike, continuing indefinitely. An emergency meeting during the night. Walter and Vignati were in favor of not shooting, while I am in favor of going ahead, on the condition that if we run into resistance we have to be smart enough to call off our plans.
In the morning everything in town was closed, and our twenty-five people at the Safari Hotel will not have anything to eat for lunch or dinner. We are going to walk to the costume depot with spaghetti and ready-made sauce, and cook for everyone there. The mood is good; we will manage in spite of everything. To wait now and not work would be like a psychological avalanche, sweeping us all into a depression. It does not worry me that I have never worked with any of these actors before, or with a good part of the technical team. My composure is keeping all the others’ chins up now.
Iquitos, 6 January 1981, second day of shooting
Yesterday afternoon we got started without fanfare by shooting an empty chair, everything purely mechanical at first, but at least the camera was rolling. Robards and Adorf, those cowards, whose real problem stems from their appalling inner emptiness, had refused to get into the car with Sluizer, terrified that the strikers might shoot at them. To explain to them that
we had already put forty people onto the ship, that Mick Jagger had crisscrossed the city in his car shuttling people and was already at the shooting site, did no good, and I decided to shoot without them. A rainbow that suddenly appeared in the sky behind Mick during the first shots gave me courage. The Brazilians made it onto the ship in the nick of time, still carrying their suitcases, their personal luggage, as well as the sound equipment. They unpacked the Nagra tape recorder, positioned the microphones on the set, and everything got under way before I even had a chance to exchange more than a hasty greeting with them. Lucki flew back to Munich by way of Miami to get money. He has a report on the first day, a personal report from me to the partners, and the medical forms for the insurance company; without those items there can be no action in the bank accounts.
Iquitos, 10 January 1981
Night shoot with the monks. Not one of them could get out a single coherent line of dialogue. The monk from Mexico, at night the pilgrim at his mission station, caused a scene this morning at the hotel, running down three flights of stairs to the reception desk clothed in nothing but his flowing beard, shouting and raving. Now, during dinner at Don Giovanni, he meekly asks if he can have a minute with me alone. The tropical humidity is so intense that if you leave envelopes lying around they seal themselves.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 11