The most lethargic sleepyhead among our boatmen, who always crashes into something when mooring his boat and misunderstands instructions, keeps reading and rereading, whenever he gets a chance, the same increasingly tattered letter, which he keeps under his sweat-drenched, sour- and rancid-smelling shirt. Every time he reads it, his face clouds over. Today his reading got us in trouble: he ran aground on a sandbank. But I gave him to understand that because of the letter he has my friendship and sympathy. In the morning Huerequeque swam by me, going upstream in baggy underpants, and Fuentes was pulling on a chest expander with alarmingly powerful springs, while on the opposite bank of the Camisea something was thrashing around oddly in the underbrush; from the way the branches were quivering, I guessed it was not a bird, but the invisible creature was squawking in a way that did sound like a bird after all, until finally a monkey appeared, swinging unmistakably into sight. I was surprised to see a monkey come so close to our camp. Maybe it felt safe because of the river between us. It began to rain. The river is a brownish green, staid and shallow. The banana fronds to the left of my hut are bursting with growth, shamelessly sexual. In the peace of the falling rain the landscape is practicing being submissive. The forest seems to be breathing deeply, and everything else holds still. Ferns are unfurling hesitantly, having kept their most delicate tips hidden. Flesh-eating flowers oozing oily invitations lure insects to their death. On rotting wood, slimy fungi brood poison. Today the forest’s travails seemed less burdensome, with decaying, rotting, and giving birth occurring with less effort. The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this. But is there justice in the desert, either? Or in the oceans? And in the depths? Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species—including Homo sapiens—crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.
I climbed into the Narinho’s clumsy little dinghy, and as I pushed away from the bank noticed that I had no oars in the boot, but by then it was too late. So I drifted downstream, passed the anchored Huallaga, and knew they would pull me out there. But when I shouted and whistled no one responded, and I found myself drifting faster and faster into the Pongo de Mainique, which looked brown, with white foam marking its terrifying rapids and cascades. I got caught on a slide of rushing boards and tree trunks, so slimy and smooth that I was soon moving much faster than the current itself. Up ahead, at the end of the boards, high above the most terrifyingly seething spot, I would be hurtled into the air as if from a ramp, but I jolted the boat with my body and slid sideways off the boards, flying high and far through the air, at which the bow reared up steeply against the cliffs, causing the broad stern to land hard on the raging water. The boat immediately filled up with water, and inevitably would have sunk at once if I had not thrown myself forward to prevent the stern from going under entirely. Half submerged, I raced and thrashed through the Pongo, and at the lower end I was thrown onto a Bavarian alpine meadow. I ended up lying half underneath the boat, and saw people approaching, a peasant woman in the lead. Since I wanted her to use her phone to call my crew, I pretended to be unconscious. That did me good. In the place on the meadow where I had vomited somewhat later, large, exotic moths congregated; or perhaps I had only urinated, and it occurred to me that maybe I had sugar in my urine, because otherwise why would butterflies have come from so far away? In fact the cows were also staggering, and even a herdsman, with a scythe over his shoulder, was tottering. I walked away, and the mountaintops bowed to a world that lay there shimmering in a trance.
Yesterday the Ashininka-Campas’ top chieftain appeared, pre-ceded by the rumor that he was Japanese, married to a Campa woman. The man is highly intelligent and clearheaded. We persuaded him to stay for the day. There is going to be a fiesta in the big camp tonight, at which the men plan to let themselves be shot at with arrows, and those being shot at have to catch the arrows in midair, a practice I always thought was just a legend.
In the administration building in the Indian camp all the ballpoint pens are tethered with liana fibers. As for the Campas, we have to hurry to get the work done, because many of them want to get home in time for the coffee harvest. Over everything hovers a Sunday stillness; the men are lying all around, one arm crooked under their heads. The thought thrust itself upon me, at first only a faint note from afar, that historically speaking the last trumpet is sounding for the Indians—in my lifetime. One of them had skinned a gleaming blue bird, its feathers more blue than anything I have ever seen. He told me he wanted to attach the feathers to his cushma, as decoration. Some of those lying down are picking lice off others as they lie there. From far upstream a dugout came by, accompanying a small, heavily laden balsawood raft. The man, woman, children, and dog on board stared at us without moving a muscle. The dog had scratched itself so hard that its ears were hairless and pink. Its scrawny shoulder blades protruded from its skeletal back.
We climbed up to the new platform and pronounced the verdict on those trees that had to be felled and those that could be left standing. In this baleful moment, when I was up in the tree’s crown, a little primeval lizard approached me on the mighty trunk, like a messenger from the depths of nature. It stopped right across from my face and stared at me intently in that motionlessness that only lizards can achieve, while it inflated its reddish throat pouch several times.
A small Campa boy of maybe seven is always sneaking around us in our smaller camp. He helps the boatmen by sitting in the bow, where he is the first to leap to the shore and tie the boat up. Since he turned up, everyone has been calling him comandante. Comandante, how are you? Laplace asked him today. I do not know, the comandante replied, and without another word went into the kitchen to watch what was going on there. Above the ship, which is tied up in the bend, I saw an eagle circling, the feathers at its wingtips spread wide. Half the underside of its wings was white, and it soared majestically.
The people who were due to arrive from Miami (Kinski, two lighting technicians, Bill Rose) did not make it to Iquitos because the plane could not land in the bad weather and was directed to continue on to Lima. From there they flew to Pucallpa and spent the night. Maybe it is not so bad if Kinski is to be prevented from cherishing any illusions as to the way our staging area looks.
Camisea, 14 April 1981
Big costume try-on yesterday. Paul’s hair was cut, and we tinted Kinski’s hair a bit. Several times Kinski threw a tantrum, once because someone touched his hair. Not even my hairdresser is allowed to touch my hair, Kinski screamed, completely out of control, but when I adjust his hat and his hair, he accepts my touching him. As he was bellowing about some other petty matter, mist quietly filled the valley, eating its way gently into the depths of the forest. Alan Dunn, as I recalled, had a talking watch that announced the time in a flat robot’s voice, and I wished I had it here.
I was reading the translation of Piave’s libretto of Ernani, published in Zurich in 1952, and in the foreword I came upon the breathtakingly idiotic comment that the most blatantly unbelievable passages had been deleted—when in fact it is precisely the incredible elements that account for the beauty of the story, or rather of opera as a genre, because those elements that cannot be accounted for even by the most exotic probability calculations appear in opera as the most natural, thanks to the powerful transformation of an entire world into music. And the Grand Emotions in opera, often dismissed as over the top, strike me on the contrary as the most concentrated, pure archetypes of emotion, whose essence is incapable of being condensed any further. They are axioms of emotions. That is what opera and the jungle have in common.
Camisea, 15 April 1981
Yesterday Gustavo arrived with the helicopter. We got up very early to make test flights. In the meantime the actors were hoisted into the treetop by pulley. Kinski played the suffering invalid to the hilt; supposedly he h
ad a fever and had been vomiting all night, but that is just what he says to call everyone’s attention to himself. From Pucallpa a message came by radio, garbled and almost incomprehensible, to the effect that the Cabaña plane had crashed in Oventeni with the pilot, the tall, thin one, and two or possibly more Campas on board. Two of the injured had been flown by way of Satipo to the intensive-care station in Lima. Kinski, realizing he was no longer the focal point of attention, began to bellow like a madman: his coffee had been luke-warm. There was no way to calm him down, which we desperately needed to do, since we were straining to hear the fragments coming over the shortwave radio so as to know whether we would have to organize further rescue efforts. After hours of his incessant ranting and raving, I ate the last piece of chocolate I had been keeping hidden in my cabin; I ate it practically in Kinski’s face, which he was holding very close to mine as he screamed his lungs out. He was so dumbfounded by my act of self-indulgence that all of a sudden he fell silent.
In the evening the Campas held their fiesta, to which I went, filled with dark thoughts. My collarbone was extremely painful, having almost completely separated from my breastbone when I was helping Vignati work the block and tackle. The cook came, but he could not help me. Eventually he and the doctor put a bandage around my chest and shoulders, so tight that at night I could take only shallow breaths. What is the next thing that will happen? Will there be an earthquake? Will the Huallaga sink? Will K. die?
Hunters had gone out and brought back rodents the size of guinea pigs, which the women roasted on a wooden spit, fur and all. They looked like rats but were tasty. During shooting yesterday, the Campas were distracted, shooting with arrows at something on the slope. I ran over and saw that they had shot a snake. It was pinned to the ground by several arrows, which it snapped at. We quickly filmed the scene, and once the poisonous animal had been killed, we went back to work.
A Japanese doctor operated on his own appendix.
Camisea, 16 April 1981
Early in the morning Walter dragged me out of bed, because he had heard over the radio that the Pongo, which already had high water, had risen another fifteen feet and was rising crazily at the rate of a foot per hour. We did not wait for the two supplementary cameras, supposedly arriving in the morning, but quickly packed our two ARRI cameras into the speedboat, and Mauch, Klausmann, and I set out at once. Les, whom I would have liked to have along because of his additional camera, even though it was only 16 mm, was slow to catch on, as is often the case with him, and stayed behind. Walter plans to fly up to Timpia later, in case the additional cameras do arrive, and then Les could go with him, but because it is raining steadily, I doubt it will be possible to land near the Pongo. I will do the sound, but whether the ship can be kept in place until we get there is highly uncertain. The seventy-horsepower engine started to go haywire, rhythmically rather than irregularly, and now we are stuck. That is the only reason I am able to write; it would be impossible with the powerful shuddering of the boat when it is running.
We got stuck four or five times, again and again. The fuel pump was shot. It was raining hard, and the jungle slopes were wreathed in mist. On a sandbank I found two sets of footprints, one barefoot and the other in shoes. I also found a raft made of heavy tree trunks tethered with lianas to pilings rammed into the sand. These bollards were already almost under water—that was how fast the river was rising. Wood and newly torn-off branches, their leaves still green, were drifting in the river current, which was picking up more and more speed. Small white birds fluttered agitatedly over our boat. There was a pervasive sense of expectation. The gravel on the river bottom was rolling as loudly as if the entire earth were in motion. There was a surging and thrumming and whooshing, and stones, hissing in their rage at being jolted out of their inertia, rolled toward the sea, which they would reach only once they had been ground to sand. It seemed like recalcitrance, a refusal, like a violation of the stones’ very nature. During one of our stops to repair the boat, I noticed heavy, black stones that gleamed out of the sand like eyes. They were heavier than all the others, and contained iron ore, as I could tell from the traces of rust on them. I found two stones, one of which was almost perfectly round, as unique as if it were a sacred stone, which hundreds of millions of believers had shaped to a perfection with their fervent kisses in the course of millennia. The gravel bank became transformed into a place of pilgrimage, the place of the sacred stones, which the river sought out in an everlasting pilgrimage, dispensing brownish watery kisses in its passionate piety. I should have a skilled goldsmith set that perfect stone in twining gold ivy, or in the arms of an octopus. Yet the river was wild and angry today, like an animal normally thought to be gentle.
For the Indios, the world ends at the Pongo; no one from here has ever gone upstream from the rapids, although sometimes trimmed tree trunks from rafts and other signs of faraway human life come floating down from an unknown world on the other side. At the edge of a sandbank I saw a corpse that had washed up and was partially buried in the sand. It was obviously a soldier, for the swollen body was still wearing army camouflage pants. He was lying on his back, his flesh waterlogged, his stomach distended. He was also wearing the tattered remains of an olive green undershirt and no shoes. No one dared to touch him. A grisly mystery surrounded him.
I recall experiencing a similar shiver of awe as a child in Sachrang, when I found a frayed piece of bright blue plastic that had floated down the brook and got caught on an overhanging branch. At the time I had never seen anything like it, and I kept it hidden for weeks, licked it, found it slightly stretchy, full of miraculous properties. Not until weeks later, when I had my fill of owning it, did I show it to anyone. Till and I discovered that when you held a burning match to it, it melted; it gave off black smoke and a nasty smell, but it was something we had never seen before, an emissary from a distant world high in the mountains along the upper reaches of the brook, where it vanished into gorges and there were no people. So where did it come from? Had it been blown into the mountains by the wind? I did not know, but I gave the plastic a name—what I do not recall. I do know it had a nice sound and was very secret, and since then I have often racked my brains, trying to remember that name, that word. I would give a lot to know it, but I do not, and I also do not have that delicate piece of weather-beaten plastic anymore. Having neither the secret word nor the plastic makes me poorer today than I was as a child.
My mother mentioned one time that sand was good for scrubbing rusty pans, so for her birthday I got my brother to help me fill several sackfuls with wet, heavy sand from the bottom of the brook. We gave her this extremely heavy gift, which we had managed to transport to the house on a handcart, an operation that took us almost all day. I cannot recall seeing my mother so pleased and moved ever again in her life.
For the film, the Pongo was a major and bitter disappointment. The water was very high, but that did not make the waves any more spectacular. For the entire time, the captain kept the ship facing into the current, with the engines at full throttle, and it did not wobble or crash into a cliff; it came pitching past us rather drearily in a sort of slow motion. They had forgotten to remove an old automobile tire from the prow, and from the railing hung a life jacket made of fluorescent orange Styrofoam or something similar. In our speedboat we would probably have been able to get close to the Huallaga, which was moored, but in the rushing river it would have been impossible for us to tie up, so we decided to set up the cameras and make contact with the crew somehow. From the frantic waving on the steamship I had concluded that any minute now they would have to cut the cables, or the ship would be jammed against the cliff and would sink. Finally a man came scrambling toward us along the extremely steep, slippery cliff, and I crawled toward him and managed to hand him a walkie-talkie, a fairly dangerous maneuver. In the process I slipped, but caught myself on the wet cliff, overgrown with algae and moss, because I was able to grab on to a tiny, scrawny shrub growing timidly out of a crevice in the rock. Ou
r boatman reacted with such alarm that only then did I notice how terrifying some of the maelstroms below looked.
I radioed the crew to ask whether they could keep the ship afloat through the night, because I had not completely given up on the arrival of two additional cameras. No, the captain replied, he did not think he could keep the ship in position any longer; it would snap its cables, because the water kept rising. I decided to have it set free at once, but what we saw then turned out to be quite boring. As I later learned, the pregnant woman was still on board, having now sailed through the Pongo twice in each direction.
Right after nightfall we turned back toward Camisea. I was completely drenched, because I had used my shirt to keep the rain off the sensitive directional microphone, which made raindrops sound like gunshots. The Plexiglas window at the front of the boat had broken in the Pongo, and I was sitting in the cold draft. We had to sail by moonlight. The moon was already quite full, and glowed through the wispy mist over the Urubamba. The mist had dug its claws into the jungle slopes with a beauty such as I had never seen before. A large bird of prey was perched in a bare tree, its prayerful posture resembling that of a heraldic creature. Gray herons stood motionless, as if carved of wood, on a gravel bank whose gray matched theirs. The river was rushing, and since it had no knowledge of anything beyond its own reality, it simply did its thing.
Camisea, 17 April 1981
(It is Good Friday, I have just been told, but no associations occur to me.) The flower I planted in the sand in front of my cabin is putting out small, fleshy blossoms, like fatty boils, which fall off after a day. I have not apprehended any bug at work today.
Shooting on the platform proved difficult, because it swayed in the wind and gave us so little room. To stay out of range of the camera, I clung to the underside of the platform or crouched in a corner. Kinski became nervous, but today my arguments with him were actually productive. Three large parrots flew over, keeping to a straight line and screeching. The wind carried off a couple of loose pages from my script, never to be seen again. Today I found my thoughts often dwelling on home, though I am not sure anymore where and what home is. People are probably sitting by the Chinese Tower in the English Garden, and on the autobahns traffic is at a standstill. Today the Camisea looks greenish and calm, exuding a delicate melancholy. Boats ply the river quietly.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 17