Iquitos, 1 April 1981
Walter was back from Camisea, had got drunk at Paul’s on his way to the house, and once here screamed and shouted for a long time in his most vulgar manner. He seems burned out, disoriented, disheartened. I will see what I can do for him. We made a video test with Paul and Huerequeque, and it is clear to me that I will have to be very patient when I work with the two of them; Huerequeque especially comes across as inhibited and awkward, contrary to his nature. For José Lewgoy I will combine the characters of Borja and Don Aquilino into one; there are too many minor characters in any case. Wilbur, Mick Jagger’s part, I will remove from the script altogether. I do not want to look for a substitute for him.
Iquitos, 2 April 1981
A day fraught with struggles. W. wants to send everyone home Saturday, the team and the actors; his internal compass has stopped working. Today Vivanco is also arriving from the camp. He has closed himself off completely from the others and is acting weird. For a long time he was suspecting Cucho of conspiring against him, was seeing plots everywhere, and was blaming us for the failure of his marriage; yet we had sent him off quite early to have a vacation in Cuzco with his French wife, but he got hung up with some random women in Lima and told us later they had refused to let him go. I discovered that bizarre power struggles had occurred in the camp, of the kind that can happen only in the jungle. They involved the prostitutes that are part of the amenities of camps in the rain forest, because otherwise there would be problems with all the loggers and boatmen going after women in nearby Indian settlements. One prostitute had played Trigozo, Cucho, and Vivanco off against each other, letting them go at one another so she could move up the ladder to get the position of deputy camp administrator. A clever story, but I promptly and unceremoniously had her shipped back to Iquitos on the first available transport.
Paul told me how a friend of his had been attacked one night. He had married a native woman, but after a while all he did was drink; he stopped working, which annoyed the woman and her secret lover, who had been living well off him. He was found murdered in his bed; they had given him one on the noggin, Paul said, and the guy had promptly kicked the bucket.
Under the blazing hot corrugated tin roof of the house out in front, hundreds of bats have taken up residence, and at night they swarm out through the angled vents in the gable window. The washroom on the second floor has a hole in the ceiling, which has gone unrepaired all year—the only thing that would be needed is a piece of ugly pressed cardboard. One of the bats must have come down through the hole. Yesterday it was lying, gleaming black in the white sink, its wingtips with their grappling hooks and its legs slightly extended, and gazed at me with its black eyes. It did not fly away, it was dying, very quietly yielding to its fate, and also entirely without fear in the midst of this tremendous event it was experiencing. Today the bat was still there. Someone had neatly laid a strip of toilet paper over it. It was dead, its position unchanged. I left it there and did not use the sink, not out of disgust or hygienic considerations but out of an unarticulated sense of respect. One of my favorite words in Spanish has always been murciélago, bat. My life seemed like an invention to me, with its pathos, its banalities, its dramas, its idling.
Mauch, whose birthday is Saturday, which is why we were speaking of his parents, who lived in Württemberg, described the death of his father at the age of eighty-two; when someone dies at that age, he said, there is a folk saying in his region to the effect that you can no longer blame the midwife. We talked about the sphinx by the Cheops pyramid in Giza, which the Ottoman Turk artillery had used for target practice. We talked about how simple mathematical rules can be translated into language, but I have long been preoccupied with the question of how Zorn’s lemma could be translated into prose.
As I was on my way to the costume depot on Calle Putumayo, word came from Lucki that we are in the clear as far as the Second German Television Broadcasting Company is concerned. The others would probably follow suit, he said, and the insurance underwriters would most likely support the decision. Franz at the costume depot was visibly relieved, speaking of prayers that had been heard, and I responded, half jokingly, that our prayers resembled intense comments directed into a darkened room from which no answer came and which we had to assume was completely empty, not even occupied by a large, taciturn guy on a throne, who might be able to hear us but did not even bestow on us so much as an echo from the void, other than the echo of our stupid hopes and our self-deception. After I had got that off my chest, we laughed and had a beer.
Iquitos, 3 April 1981
Preparations for the trip to the Camisea; under pressure to get started there before the level of the river sank too far and made it impossible get the ship back to Iquitos. I became lost in imagining an unknown river with headwaters in dreamed-up mountains of alabaster and sapphires and ending in a sea of emeralds. Lord, grant me to see an unknown fish at my feet. Was not a scaly, breathing animal caught off the coast of West Africa an actual fish that otherwise exists only in fossilized form? A Chinese general had his troops assemble and summarily baptized two hundred thousand men with a garden hose. In the depths of my heart I decided that my favorite plant was the fern, and not only because of its name: fern beaded with rain. I carry my world with me in a little net made of liana fibers. Death is hereditary.
Paul unloaded six Broncos from his freighter. One of the Indian workmen climbed into the driver’s seat and out of curiosity tried out the steering, the windshield wipers, and the gearshift. In the process, he backed the vehicle into the river. It sank, but he was rescued. Later Paul managed to pull it out with a tractor. Today several men attacked him with knives in his bar, something that almost never hap-pens here. They took a case of champagne. In the evening the drug dealer came by, having bought his way out of jail after two days, and returned the case of champagne, saying his people had misunderstood his instructions. He apologized and paid twice the value of the case. He then proceeded to booze it up, celebrating his freedom in Paul’s bar with his boys, in the course of which he grabbed a machete and with a few powerful strokes beheaded all dozen champagne bottles.
Iquitos—Camisea, 4 April 1981
Flight from Iquitos to Pucallpa with Faucett, and from there with Aguila’s small plane by way of Sepahua, where I handed over 4 million soles to Trigozo, compressed as usual into a brick, before we flew on to Camisea. The airfield was dry and firm.
Camisea, 5 April 1981
Jorge Vignati came to pick us up yesterday with the boat. Walter was busy with the slaughtering of a cow at the Indians’ camp. The camp peaceful and nice; they were all happy to have us back. The first thing I did was put my radio on the rough-hewn table on my porch and play, very loudly, the cassette with Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus. I noticed that two large ants, affected by the vibrations of the mighty tone, were acting like mad creatures, doing a rhythmic St. Vitus’ dance in front of the loudspeaker. They writhed, raced around crazily in a circle, and whirled as if an electrical current were running through them.
The water level is extremely low; the river is flowing quietly, and the camp seems sleepy, like a dismal tourist locale in the off-season, or rather like a place that never has visitors, never experiences a high season, yet continues to wait for something. The events of the past have vanished, like bad dreams. It has not rained in days; it is dry and hot, and the river continues to go down, threatening to dry up altogether.
Yesterday at the airport in Pucallpa two scruffy four-year-old Indio children asked me in all seriousness whether I needed a taxi, and presented themselves as drivers. I responded just as seriously that I needed to take another flight; was not one of them a pilot? No, they said, neither of them was a pilot. So there they stood, the two miniature taxi drivers, barefoot, smeared with mud, which had welled up between their toes, their bare bellies distended above the elastic waistbands of their gym shorts, their hair wild and black. They were very sure of themselves.
In the camp there is now a
n athletic black man with a large gap between his upper front teeth. In Oventeni he was a cattle driver for the Campas, and came here with a group of them. He is always chewing on a matchstick, and usually carries several of these toothpicks stuck into his nappy beard just below his ear; they stay there even in the strong breeze created by the speedboat, as he proudly pointed out to me. With Beatus, or Beat Presser, the stills photographer, I took the heaviest nylon string, certainly heavier than the strings on a tennis racket, and attached the largest and most fearsome fishhook with a knot. Then I tugged on the string as hard as I could, and the third knot finally turned out to our satisfaction. We fetched a chunk of meat from the kitchen and threw this bait into the water. I have a running bet with Klausmann that during our time on the Camisea I will catch a fish at least one meter in length. The agreed-upon prize is five pisco sours; I have already lost ten in a similar bet.
In Camisea I waited with Mauch in the sweltering heat, which brings everything but the flies to a standstill, for the plane that is to take us to the Pongo. Pale coffee beans are lying in the sun to dry, and around me children are talking softly in Machiguenga. Walter flew on ahead, to track down Trigozo somewhere along the way, to whom I had handed the 4 million soles yesterday, as agreed upon;
W. thought I should have kept some of the money for him, Walter, because it was essential that he appear up by the Pongo with money on him. Except that he had failed to breathe a word of this to Trigozo, Chavez in Pucallpa, or me. As his plane came in for a landing, I saw that it had a bit of green brush caught in the landing gear, and upon closer inspection I saw that a lot of long, green grass was caught in it.
W. told us he had landed with Pino in a village whose landing strip was overgrown, with meter-high grass to the left and right of the runway, which had become narrower than the wingspan. Before takeoff the two of them cleared the strip with machetes.
When the water is low, the Pongo looks pretty harmless. We found the Huallaga in good shape, already past the narrows we dubbed the Gate of Hell. Something is broken on the rudder, and Laplace has brought along steel cables to secure it, but they do not seem strong enough to me. Laplace is confident he has things under control, however. There is a pregnant woman on board with a two-year-old daughter who is very trusting. On the steep bank the crew has used a piece of tin bent into a channel to divert a clear, cold waterfall, and under the cascade of water the woman was bathing her child in a plastic pail. On deck, on the large mirror behind the bar, the crew has taped a tropical pinup, a vulgar blonde, kneeling, with her voluptuous ass straining toward the viewer.
From above the Pongo Mainique, where there is another world, inaccessible and unknown, a fourteen-year-old Campa boy ran away from home, I was told, and took along his three-year-old sister; he wanted her to share his freedom and the new experiences he expected to find below the rapids. They passed through here on an improvised balsa raft, barely large enough to carry them, passed through the Pongo, then Timpia, Camisea, and the Río Picha. They did not stop till they reached Sepahua. There their story is lost.
As we were landing back in Camisea, the sun was going down and the moon was rising, a sickle moon, skinny and as sharp as a knife, like a glowing thread of steel. It had rained briefly and violently, and over the forest hung delicate white swaths of vapor, as fine as veils or spiderwebs. The rain forest took on a virginal cast, hiding the silent murders in its depths beneath veils that seemed to have been tossed over it by fleeting dreams. Above the whole scene, the sun, already out of sight, caused the narrowest strips around rapidly darkening clouds to glow, making all the contours blaze, as if marked by brilliant fire.
Camisea, 6 April 1981
This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight; I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without pleasure, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, leaving me like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.
While getting into the boat, Mauch slipped, fell, and dislocated his shoulder. We immediately drove him to the other camp, where the medic was, but the old cook was also sent for; he was said to be a specialist, for births as well. When he arrived, at first we looked at each other apprehensively. His fingers were bony, with nails like those of man who has been felling trees in the forest. His face very Indian, a few lone hairs on his chin, a woolen cap on his head. In the meantime, Mauch, whose main problem was his tendency to faint, had been given a shot in the shoulder by the medic. Now the cook dipped his fingertips in the fat he had brought along in a greasy piece of newspaper. With extraordinary caution he began to feel Mauch’s bones, checking the position of the shoulder blade, the collarbone, the humerus, and then gently massaged the muscles, which had gone into spasm from the pain. I tried to tell him it was not the shoulder blade that had been injured but the shoulder. He looked at me with perfect composure, indicating that I should be still; we were sure that soon he would bend M.’s arm and with a large rotating motion snap the bone back into the joint, but nothing of the sort occurred. The cook massaged and tapped the shoulder area with his infinitely careful fingers, then exerted a slight pressure, which hurt Mauch for a moment. Something had shifted, Mauch said, but that could not be it. Yes, it was, the cook gave us to understand, as he simply walked away. In fact the shoulder was back where it belonged, and Mauch, who had dislocated it before, simply could not believe it.
El Tigre, the toughest and most daring of our woodsmen, who always hides his shoulder-length black hair under his blue hard hat—I have never seen him in a shirt, but never without his hard hat and machete, both of which he probably takes to bed with him—showed me his ring finger, which had been crushed when he was felling a tree and almost torn off. Our cook, the medic’s assistant, had set the splintered bones in the shape of a finger, stitched the tendons together, and saved the digit. It looks impressive, although, as El Tigre told us, he can no longer put a ring on it. Another man got caught in a boat’s screw, and our cook stitched together his severed Achilles tendon. He also saved a woman who had been carrying a dead baby for days, unable to deliver it. He had managed to extract the baby. I recall Robards’s arrogant disrespect for everything Peruvian; he demanded American doctors, considering even our French-educated doctor inferior.
We let Mauch, who was pretty exhausted, sleep it off, and scrambled with El Tigre up the cleared pathway to the vertical gravel bank. By itself the lane looks boring. Banal details and slovenliness preoccupied me for the rest of the day, things brought about by W.’s cynicism and dismissed by him as inconsequential. We are out of toilet paper, and that immediately makes the general mood very bad. In addition, we had promised, in response to numerous requests, to bring back a considerable amount of honey; I had ordered thirty one-liter jars in Lima, but W. had decided it was not important and canceled the order. When we arrived, he told us the honey was still with the rest of the groceries in Sepahua, but today, when two fully laden boats arrived, there was only a very cheap jam that no one wants. In itself the honey is not that important, but since it had been specifically asked for and had also been promised, and everyone was looking forward to it and asking about it every day, our organizational skill loses credibility more rapidly as a result of such small details than if something abrupt and serious had happened. So much for life in a rain-forest camp.
The razor-sharp sickle moon rose with mathematical precision above the rain forest, still rejoicing steamily, and then it was the cicadas and nocturnal voices that quickly pinned down the darkness in the great abyss of the night. Now and then a fruit falls to the ground
with a thud. A strange Indian woman has arrived at the camp; no one knows who she is or what she wants. She does not speak either Ashininka-Campa or Machiguenga, and she has twins with her, about three years old, who also do not speak. They came and watched me as I hauled in the hook, from which the huge piece of bait had been nibbled away by small fish. Then they came into my cabin without any inhibitions and looked around to see where I kept all my things. They checked out my few possessions, their faces stony as they remained silent. The children look very Indian, but their clothing is quite urban. The woman no one knows moved around the camp as if she were planning to settle in.
Walter and Huerequeque got hung up in the Pongo de Mainique. They managed to get through the first malpaso, but then the water rose so fast in the course of three hours that they did not dare take the speedboat out of the Pongo. Pino, the pilot, reported this over dinner. We talked about two Swiss mountain climbers who play mental chess while roped together on a rock face. They are climbing the north face of the Eiger and calling out their moves to each other. Very far away, off to the east, we can hear persistent thunder, a constant soft rumbling, almost inaudible, but we all prick up our ears because it must be an unbelievably terrible storm coming down. Here it is perfectly dry, but a cool, gentle wind has sprung up, and the Camisea’s beginning to rise imperceptibly. At the moment it is lower than I have ever seen it. The moths and insects buzzing around the light are more restless than usual. A rushing sound can be heard from the river and the trees on the opposite bank, and in undue haste one fruit after another tumbles out of the big tree and rattles into the motionlessness all around. The forest is perfectly still. I brought in everything from outside because I am afraid the river will rise fast. As I was scanning the area with my flashlight, without warning rain began to pour down. The thunder is edging closer over the forest. Everything seems to be holding its breath in anticipation of something terrible.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 15