Iquitos, 16 February 1981
A storm sprang up very suddenly and blew the pages of an old letter against the window screen. The rain came in horizontally under my roof. I made myself a cup of coffee, strong enough to knock a person dead. Outside the rain is raining, pouring off the roof. The large fronds of the banana plant bend reverently to receive the rain. The forest stands there, the soul of patience. The description of the rain sums up an entire continent.
After the rain the earth’s smell was so overpowering that I felt dizzy. In the west, when darkness falls, there is one spot in the sky without clouds that has a pale, unreal glow. The sky heaves like the waves in the ocean.
The news I received today is unambiguous: Robards will not come back to the jungle, under any circumstances. Medical reports, legal mumbo-jumbo to stake out a position against any possible breach-of-contract claims. Contacted Lucki in Brazil, Walter at the Camisea. Walter insists I should seek a legal ruling in the U.S. to force Robards to fulfill his contract, but I do not need any legal ruling to know that I am doomed. In the house I went, now completely alone, through all the abandoned rooms. With their bare mattresses they stared at me and I stared back, devoid of emotion, simply into the void. Gustavo and Claire now sit with me at night beneath the fluorescent lights in the office, besieged by mosquitoes. We say nothing. There is a whistling and crackling in our radio, but sometimes music floats in, like a xylophone from ethereal spheres. For a brief time a station from the Soviet Union came in quite clearly.
Iquitos, Lima, 18 February 1981
As Gustavo was driving me furiously through the potholes to the airport, and I was being bounced around in my seat, the idea came to me: why should I not play Fitzcarraldo myself? I would trust myself to do it because my project and the character have become identical.
Lima. I drove straight to the country club to see Mick, and spoke with him, then with Adorf. It is clear that if the whole undertaking is to go on, everything will have to start again at the beginning, because we cannot excise Robards from the existing negative. There are no halfhearted or considerate solutions. I raised the question with Mick as to whether he would play Fitzcarraldo, but he does not trust himself to do that, even if the character were to be approached altogether differently. Furthermore, his stop-date is coming close because of the world tour with the Stones. Adorf heard from Mick what ideas we had been playing with and is trying to curry favor, but he does not have what it takes, and he drew me into a rather stupid discussion about acting, claiming that as an actor he would have made a much better Kaspar Hauser than a clumsy amateur like Bruno S. Without even trying to be polite I told him I did not see it that way, I saw it differently, and I also told him he was out of the question for the main character. Now he is deeply offended. So be it.
I am thirty-eight now, and I have been through it all. My work has given me everything and taken everything from me. No one and nothing can throw me off course. The only other one who could also be Fitzcarraldo would be Kinski; he would certainly also be better than I, and after all, there was some discussion with him in the very early phase of the project, but it was always clear that he would be the last one who could see such an undertaking through to the end.
Later to the beach south of Lima with Mick, Adorf, and Joe Koechlin’s brother, who is a race-car driver. Stupid girls in bikinis, tanned surfers who had nothing to do and were revoltingly vapid. The sea had a strong smell, and the sky overhead was colorless and hazy. Next to a surfboard, a cormorant popped up from the water, looking so out of place and artificial that for a moment I thought it was plastic, like the fake ducks that hunters put out on ponds as decoys, but then it suddenly dived so elegantly that I gained confidence in cormorants. Disco music was blaring across the beach. Joe’s brother kept bending my ear about an auto race he had wanted to take part in but which was called off. In the evening with a larger group to a Chinese restaurant. We were in a sort of separate niche, as were the other guests in the place. There were eleven of us, ten, that is, plus me. I was the primary number. I wanted to steal away into another era, quietly and without creating a commotion.
Lima, 19–21 February 1981
…flat, swept bare, as if made of concrete. Unwavering, pressing onward. Praised be any tree that takes pity on me, where…
Lima—New York, 22 February 1981
The pressure on me even more intense. We could not make the planned stopover in Guayaquil in Ecuador because suddenly the airport has been closed to all civilian air traffic, which can mean only one of two things: the Ecuadorians are preparing for a military confrontation with Peru, or a military coup is taking place, both equally plausible since a Peruvian helicopter was shot down in the border region two days ago, despite the ceasefire, and the unrest among Ecuador’s military on account of the drastic price increases imposed by Roldos to finance the war effort. A combination of a military junta and an attack on Peru would be a third possibility.
In Panama the plane filled up with braying Americans. I could not see the canal from the window. As we flew over Cuba I saw a huge fire down below, certainly a kilometer long, an enormous, glowing worm.
New York, 23 February 1981
I phoned Kinski and got together with him at one in the morning. He ordered a bottle of champagne from room service, and that did me good. At noon today on the phone he said our nighttime conversation had been like too much potato salad: you felt stuffed and belched and it was better to forget the whole thing the next day. If I had debts of $20,000, I should be worried, but at $3 million in the red, the worries cease. I think he is right.
My personal affairs also in a deep crisis, at the breaking point. In the apartment near Lincoln Plaza, to which I still have a key, I carefully swept the crumbs from the table, straightened the cushions on the couch, placed the photos in their envelopes where they belonged, turned off the lights, and left the place with no sign of my having been there, as if I did not exist. In this state of inactivity, of waiting, of uncertainty as to how the insurance company, which is playing for time, will respond, I kept remembering how as a fifteen-year-old I played hooky with Till; at the time I think he had just finished his apprenticeship, and it must have been November. We hitchhiked to North Germany, and he wanted to go to Helgoland. We went our separate ways somewhere because he had picked up some girls and wanted to party with them for a while. In Düsseldorf, in ice-cold rain and fog, I broke into a cottage in an allotment garden and spent two days and two nights there, most of that time in a mildewed lawn chair. Then I broke into a fancy villa through a window and spent almost two more days in a young girl’s room. She still had dolls on her bed, but on the walls she had posters with rock stars, and among her clothes were minuscule beginner’s bras. Downstairs in the house, in the kitchen, an alarm clock was still ticking; the owners could not have been gone that long. I examined the house for hours, trying to find indications of how long they would be away: the date of the last newspaper in the wastebasket, how tightly everything was locked up, any written clue that might be lying around, how much food was in the refrigerator. There were eggs, milk, and vegetables, and anyone who leaves such things in the refrigerator is not away for weeks. Once, on the first evening, I had a terrible fright because the phone rang. I slept on the bed half dressed, with my shoes next to me so I could get them on quickly. When I ate, I collected the crumbs on a piece of newspaper. The second night it was about eleven, and I was already sound asleep, having not dared to turn on any lights, even though at that time of year it got dark around six; suddenly lights went on all over the house, there were voices, and the garage door opened. My room was above the garage, and there were people down there, so I could not escape out the window and over the garage roof. Nor was it possible to use the stairs. Breathless with fear, I locked the room from the inside. Soon after that someone pressed the latch. Mommy, did you lock my room, the girl on the other side of the door asked; who locked my door? Just then it grew quiet in the garage, and a man’s footsteps came up the
stairs. I climbed out onto the flat roof, jumped down into the garden, and scrambled over the hedge into the neighbor’s property. For a while I crouched motionless under a damp, cold, dripping tree and then sneaked out of there without a sound. I still remember the next morning: fields shrouded in November fog, crows, and cars passing by that had destinations, were coming from somewhere and going somewhere else.
I tried to phone M, but the phone rang twelve times and no one answered. I could hear crazy people shouting in the street below all the way up to my thirty-fourth-floor apartment. From the window I can see New Jersey being pummeled by a winter storm. Many people here talk to themselves.
New York, 24 February–4 March 1981
Very difficult days.
New York, 5 March 1981
Driving snow, everything white on white and gray on gray. Far below me on the streets, the traffic almost inaudible, even the fire engines’ sirens muffled.
New York, 6 March 1981
Among normal human beings again finally, not just lawyers and insurance adjusters, or so I thought. In the evening with D. at de G.’s place, where a little Italian colony was gathered. But the conviviality fell apart as soon as people began doing drugs. The whole thing seemed to have no purpose, other than that there was a meal at the beginning. A young woman who spoke German pulled up her skirt and showed her legs. Prela, the Albanian who claims he is a much better actor than Marlon Brando, dragged her with loud curses onto a bed that was heaped with coats, pulled down her pantyhose, called the rest of us to see, and dragged her by the legs over the mountain of coats, showed us her bare abdomen, and then, with even worse curses, left her lying there. The guests then made a big show of sniffing cocaine, after which any conversation collapsed, like a poorly constructed house of blocks thrown up by a cranky child. When I left the party, it was snowing hard, and on the Henry Hudson Parkway the cars were at a standstill in a hopeless traffic jam.
Then I flew to Munich. Meeting with all the partners and backers. Lucki had worked out a pitiless document in which all the eventualities were calculated down to the penny; even the unthinkable was expressed in numbers. But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.
Iquitos—Miami, 26 March 1981
After having only a day and a half to keep things in Iquitos from collapsing completely, I am flying back to the U.S. already. As I was packing, I heard something rustling above me, and saw a large spotted snake on the wire mesh that serves as my ceiling. Whenever I got close, it thrashed the tip of its tail very fast and frantically, vibrating like an engine. With Walter’s help, I drove it toward my porch, and tried to kill it with an iron rod, but it took off over the roof. The cabin is now standing on its stilts in water, with swamp all around. Frogs, even small fishes around me. When I arrived at night, everything was deserted, not a soul anywhere, deathlike silence, the house abandoned. Suddenly the Indian night watchman came toward me, noiselessly, with his light. I looked through the office for signs of life. All I found was the telex machine, fried by short circuits, the upper plastic parts melted as if after a war without witnesses. The number dial is punched in, like an eye into its socket. I groped my way to my cabin and found myself surrounded by bog. Frogs swam away as I approached and dove down to the bottom. I found the ladder lying on one side, among the banana plants, and as I put it in place, I stepped into a hole originally intended for a differently positioned support post and now full of putrid water. I felt utterly out of place, the more so because I was still wearing the black pin-striped suit and black oxfords I had put on for meeting with lawyers in New York.
New York, 27 March 1981
I was picked up at La Guardia by a limousine with darkened windows, and felt as though I were in a movie. The woman who picked me up was wearing a mink coat, and as the car rolled along she revealed that she had nothing on underneath. Evenings with Mick; it will not be possible to arrange the whole schedule around him in such a way that he will be done in time for the tour. Telephone calls. Adorf is making shameless demands, such a vain, stupid, devious person. He has to be removed from the film.
New York—Miami—Iquitos, 28 March 1981
In Miami I caught up with Mauch and Beat Presser. George Sluizer and the Brazilians came from Río by way of Manaus. In Iquitos angry mists drifted across the landscape, that was good.
Iquitos, 29 March 1981
Lunch with Huerequeque; we drank the Chivas Regal I had brought along. The water level in the Río Nanay is so high that it almost reaches the porch of his bar. The busted construction crane is still rusting on the scruffy lawn out in front. Apparently Huerequeque took it as collateral from a debtor, and on Mother’s Day, when he was plastered, he made the grand gesture of giving the wreck to his wife as a gift.
Iquitos, 30 March 1981
The dates we want at the opera house in Manaus are not available, because that is when a ballet company is having a guest appearance. We studied the dailies of the Río Camisea. Still many uncertainties. I found a frog under my pillow. In town a policeman stopped me on the motorcycle on some pretext and wanted to extort money from me, but I stepped on the gas and sped off. Now it is evening and the sky has opened up. Rain is streaming under the door and into the office, collecting along the wall on the garden side. In no time the stream has grown to a width of two meters, and in a matter of minutes the room will be under water. The water is pulsing under the door in bursts. Polyplike eddies of swiftly flowing water snake around the legs of my chair and reach for each other, soon combining to form a single surface. Around the pathetically small drain in the middle of the room cigarette butts are swirling. The screens at the windows have turned into walls of water, pulsing downward. With a push broom and other tools we tried to direct the flood onto the vacant lot next door. From the thicket over there lightning flashed toward us, raining down from the sky.
As I was walking to my hut I observed some disturbing creatures that resembled eels, reddish brown; presumably they are a kind of very large blindworm, though they seem to dry when exposed to the air. I saw two of these weird animals, looking as though they had slipped out of an enormous cadaver. One of them was trying, with swimming movements, or perhaps they were also drowning movements, to burrow, to snake its way under a dissolving strip of pona bark in the water. I cannot imagine a more deadly, naked, wormlike eelish parasite to have in my own innards.
Waited for hours for a phone connection. First I was told it would take an hour and a half, and once that passed, two more hours, and so forth. The radio meanwhile was emitting an unending jumble of incomprehensible, distorted voices. One time I heard the whistle we had always used as a signal in Camisea, but after that our camp in the jungle remained silent. Today the rushes seemed like something I had dreamed, or rather, like something someone else had dreamed and I had merely been told about. Being wide awake at night now seems natural; I hardly sleep. I do not know what real sleep is anymore; I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells.
I followed an electrical crackling and found in the wet wall little metal doors that were wide open, inside them a tangle of cables installed by the confused man from the electric company. They are all insulated poorly or not at all. Here we have the portals to death by electrocution. Today there is supposed to have been an attempt on Reagan’s life, according to the news from the local broadcasting station. In Poland Russian tanks are rolling toward Warsaw.
Iquitos, 31 March 1981
Massive burden on me; everything is too precarious: organization-ally, financially, timewise, in human terms. In town I purchased a Commercio to learn more about the assassination attempt on Reagan. At breakfast, without knowing any details, we had speculated as to whether he was dead and how it would look if Bush became president as a result.
Yellow birds laid siege to me. Last night I had to combat a fresh
invasion of army ants in my cabin; they overran me with their larvae, but they were easier to fight because they were so unusually large. First I tried spraying Baygon, but that did not work, and finally I swept the raving warriors off my platform into the swamp. Our work is not compatible with nature Amazon-style. The weather is bad, the chickens are not doing well, ditto the rabbit. The vermin in the earth is thriving. It is happy. The Chinese wok was filled with a jellylike, almost transparent mass, sticky and tough, and in its midst was a broken-off lizard tail, as if the poisonous bite of some nasty creature had melted the lizard into a tough, gluey mass. I set the wok to soak overnight, but even with scouring powder and a wooden stick for scraping I cannot get the disgusting stuff out. Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness.
No one was affected by our problems as much as Norman R. from the lab in New York, the man who looks like Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, and who greets his visitors by projecting porn photos on the wall. He called all the department heads into his office, and technical experts crowded in. He made a short speech and bowed to me, and it did my heart good. The second one was Schlöndorff, who reached me by phone and told me that he had gotten my letter belatedly after his return from Lebanon. He had prayed again for the first time since his mother’s death.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 14