Kinski and Paul came along without much hesitation. Kinski took me aside, and in one of our rare moments where we revealed ourselves, he told me that if I went down with the ship he would go with me. I replied simply that he knew how the ship was built, with steel reinforcement beams inside and separate buoyancy chambers; I had no desire to drown, and had taken technical measures against such an eventuality. We hastily shook hands. I grabbed the phonograph and asked Gisela for some sewing needles, because the record player had no needle. But then our departure was delayed considerably. I had learned from the pilot, who had radioed up to the Huallaga from the Indians’ camp, that people seriously wounded by arrows had just arrived from the upper reaches of the Camisea, and that emergency operations were already under way. I hurried to the first-aid station and saw a native man and a woman, both of whom had been struck with enormous arrows. They had been fishing for the camp three hours upstream by speedboat, and had spent the night on a sandbank. During the night they had been ambushed and shot at close range by Amehuacas. The woman had been hit by three arrows and almost bled to death. The wounds were close together. One arrow had gone all the way through her body just above her kidney, one had bounced off her hip bone, and the most life-threatening one was still sticking in her abdomen, broken off on the inner side of her pelvis. I spent several hours helping out while she was operated on, shining a powerful flashlight into her abdominal cavity and with the other hand spraying insect repellent to try to drive away the clouds of mosquitoes the blood had attracted. The man still had an arrow made of razor-sharp bamboo and almost thirty centimeters long sticking through his throat. He had broken off the two-meter-long shaft himself, and was gripping it in his hand. In his state of shock he refused to let go of it. The arrow’s tip, which looked more like the point of a lance, had spliced open one of his shoulders along the collarbone and was sticking crossways through his neck, with the tip lodged in his shoulder on the other side. He seemed to be in less immediate danger and was operated on only after the woman. Here is what had happened: the man, his wife, and a younger man, all three of them Machiguengas from Shivankoreni who provide us with yucca, had gone up the Camisea to hunt. They were sleeping on a sandbank, and during the night the woman woke up because the man next to her was gasping strangely. Thinking a jaguar had got him by the throat, she grabbed a still glowing branch from the fire and jumped up. At that moment she was struck by three arrows. The younger man woke up; he had a shotgun with him and, grasping the situation, fired two shots blindly into the night, since everything was happening in pitch darkness and complete silence. None of the three saw any trace of the attacking Amehuacas; they disappeared, leaving only a few footprints in the sand. Not until the next morning toward eleven did the wounded reach us in their peke-peke, which the younger man, uninjured, was steering; they came just as I was about to set out with Kinski and Paul.
Since in the meantime assistants more competent than I had shown up, I did not stick around when they laid the man with the arrow through his neck on a makeshift kitchen table and administered anesthesia. I could not in good conscience leave the others on board too long in the rapids, where the water level had begun to rise crazily just as I was departing. We landed by the Pongo, with mud flying, and had zero visibility as we taxied, because the dirty water had splashed all over the windshield. Added to that, we had a slight tailwind all the way to the end of the cabbage field.
Once on board, we got everything ready: Vignati with a camera up on the bridge, strapped to the back wall, and Paul in the role of captain. The real captain was there with him, as was Walter, so that Paul could take the helm during the moments when we were shooting, something he actually knew how to handle. Next to the bridge we anchored the phonograph and nailed down a small tripod for Beatus. On the mid-deck Kinski, Mauch, and I took our places to film Fitzcarraldo stumbling onto the deck half asleep. Juarez was positioned in relative safety farther upfront with the sound equipment, and Les Blank and Maureen had joined us at the last moment. Klausmann and Raimund had set up atop a cliff in the ravine.
From the moment we set sail we picked up speed, moving on an angle, and had several good collisions with the cliffs on either side, but then the Huallaga turned and moved much faster, heading downstream with the current. Walter called to me from up above that we were going to hit the side on the left, and we filmed Kinski again as the cliff approached with menacing rapidity; Kinski ran past us too soon, heading for the stern, so that Mauch had to pan to follow him, with the result that we absorbed the collision facing backward. I had one arm around Mauch, and was holding him steady, while with my other hand I clung on to a window frame, but the collision was so powerful that it knocked us off our feet and sent us hurtling through the air. I saw the lens jolted off the camera and sent flying. Somehow we spun around our axes as we ourselves went flying, and Mauch, with one hand under the camera, landed flat on the deck, with me on top of him. Mauch immediately balled up in a fetal position, screaming. I immediately thought it was his shoulder again, but it was worse; his hand had been split between the ring finger and the little finger by the crashing camera, deep into the root of his hand. He also had a gash on one side of his forehead. Kinski yelped as if he were injured, though he had only banged his elbows a bit, but when he saw Mauch he quickly forgot about himself and helped out like a good sport as we provided first aid.
Below the rapids the ship ran aground on a sandbank. The prow had curled up like the top of a sardine can, the anchor had been driven through the ship’s side, and water was getting into the hull. Vignati had been buffeted around so violently in his harness that he had two cracked ribs, and when Beatus pulled his head away from his firmly fastened-down camera, he was thrown against it. He was very woozy and asked me several times whether we were going to shoot now. We decided we had to get Mauch to the doctor as fast as possible, so we set out in the speedboat as darkness was falling, since I did not want to fly with so little light. We completely forgot about the two men up on the cliff in the middle of the Pongo. Mauch and I lay down in the boat and looked up at the stars. We saw two satellites, and then fog settled over the river. Before it got completely dark we saw two condors on the bank.
Mauch was operated on by Dr. Parraga, with our extraordinarily skillful cook putting in the sutures. Since all the anesthesia had been used up during the almost eight hours it took to operate on the two people wounded by arrows, Mauch was soon in agony, and even analgesic spray did not do much good. I held his head and pressed it against me, and a silent wall of faces surrounded us. Mauch said he could not take any more, he was going to faint, and I told him to go ahead. Then he thought he was going to shit in his pants from the pain, but he could not decide between the two options, and in the end did neither. On a hunch I sent for Carmen, one of the two prostitutes we have here because of the woodcutters and the boatmen. She pushed me aside, buried Mauch’s head between her breasts, and comforted him with her lovely soft voice. She rose above her everyday existence, developing her inner Pietà, and Mauch soon fell silent. During the operation, which lasted almost two hours, she said over and over, “Thomas, mi amor,” to him, while the patient yielded to his fate. As I stood watching, I felt a deep affection for both of them.
At night ten Campas came along to our camp to stand guard. Some of them were armed with shotguns, others with bows and arrows. They glided into the darkness of the jungle, and I did not see them again till morning, when they gathered by my cabin, talking quietly. I asked to be given the arrow that had gone into the woman’s hip and also the tip of the arrow that had been shot through the man’s throat. Both patients are doing relatively well; they will both live. I was able to exchange a few words with the man, who was hooked up to an intravenous drip; he could already whisper a bit. He had been incredibly lucky, because the lancelike tip had grazed his carotid artery but not severed it. I was amazed at the thickness of the extra-long arrow shafts and the sturdiness of the large feathers fastened to them.
This mo
rning thirty men set out in the mist, almost all Campa warriors, in peke-pekes, all armed, to sail to the place where the attack had happened, follow the tracks and, they said, apprehend the criminals to turn them over to the authorities. May Heaven prevent that. Almost nothing is known about the Amehuacas; they live semi-nomadically along the upper reaches of the Camisea, about ten days’ journey from here, and apparently they had followed the river downstream while the water level was so low, presumably looking for turtle eggs, now in season. All attempts in the past by the military or missionaries to establish contact with them failed, because the Amehuacas never let themselves be seen, and attacked only by night. Nor could they be located from the air, because unlike all the other tribes they do not make clearings, chakras, which are cultivated for a few years before the tribe moves on. Yet quite a bit of their language is known, because about ten years ago a very sick Amehuaca boy came floating down on a balsawood raft and survived in the Atalaya hospital.
I tried to prevent the sortie, but very quickly a common resolve was reached. It was the women, by the way, who picked the warriors. So-and-so cannot go; he does not shoot well enough, they announced, and no one protested. Half the men had shotguns. Ten of them hunkered down in each of the large canoes. The only provisions they took along were bunches of green bananas. Their departure was quiet, almost casual. They disappeared slowly upstream amid the mist, water, and trees, which fused into a gray, unknown world like a vague vision.
I had a violent, absurd quarrel with Kinski about his mineral water, with which he wants to wash himself now. Otherwise peace and quiet. Suddenly Kinski started yelling again, but it had no connection to anything here. He was beside himself, calling Sergio Leone and Corbucci rotten vermin, no-good so-and-sos and cyclopean ass-holes. It took a long time for him to wear himself out. Then his yelling flared up again briefly, as he called Fellini a bungling idiot, a fat bastard. Then in late morning I finally got some sleep.
Camisea, 23 April 1981
Last night, when I went to my cabin to lie down, I found two Campa warriors on my bed, one in the hammock, and three on the porch. I asked what they were doing there. They were my guards, they replied, and showed me their bows and arrows. Two of them, who had shotguns, seemed especially proud of serving as my bodyguards. They said they had to watch over me because my cabin was the farthest upstream and thus most at risk. Gentlemen, I told them, I feel perfectly safe with such excellent fighters guarding me, but I wondered whether they could not possibly take up their duty posts not on my bed but out in the jungle in a somewhat more forward position, where the enemy was likely to sneak up, if at all. No, they said simply, they would keep watch here, they wanted me constantly in sight. When they saw me put a pillow on the floor, they cleared off my bed and settled down on the porch, where they talked quietly among themselves all night long. Now and then one of them would make the rounds, and the swaying of the flexible bark floor communicated itself to my bed, which kept waking me. They had cigarettes but nothing to light them with, so they asked me for matches. Since I did not have any, I gave them my new lighter, assuming I would not see it again, but found it the next morning neatly placed beside me. My flashlight, which I had been missing as well, turned up in my hammock.
This morning on the ship the first encounter between Fitzcarraldo and the Indians. After they had touched him gently with their fingertips, Kinski scrubbed his hand with alcohol while we were still in the speedboat, on our way back to camp. During the shooting all the Campas got distracted and interrupted their work because from the railing one of them had shot an arrow at a fish in the water, but had missed the fish, which took cover beneath an overhang, and all of them were waiting with their bows taut for it to emerge, which, however, it did not do. The arrow dug itself into the river bottom, with a bit of the shaft sticking up above the water and swaying in a strange, extraordinarily slow, eccentric motion in the current. Walter and Vignati were at the Huallaga to prepare the ship for sailing out of the Pongo, the idea being that if they shifted the ballast to one side and flooded some of the watertight compartments, I could film the boat leaving the rapids at an oblique angle, but there was no need to hurry, because the Huallaga was jammed firmly onto the sandbank, just as we had left her. In the afternoon dynamite charges were set off, from which the Indians flee. Off camera they enjoyed the explosions and wanted me to give them some dynamite, which some of them have been using for years to make fishing easier. Several times I sank deep into the mud, barefoot, and was in a bad mood, even though the day itself did not warrant it. In the evening we all threw ourselves into the Camisea, and even Mauch groped his way into the splendid water, holding his bandaged hand high. In some places the river is only a meter deep now, so that it is hardly possible to take the speedboat to go from one camp to the other. The water is becoming clearer and clearer; now it is a transparent green, and only slightly cloudy, which lets you see to the bottom. If the water level stays this low, however, we are bound to fall behind schedule. I was in a bad mood today; even the flies got on my nerves. When we played cards, I staked everything on one card, having been winning all evening; since I had an excellent hand, and in addition drew the queen of hearts, a kind of joker, I pulled everything I had out of my pocket, but still lost to Klausmann, who was holding the bank. That assuaged him somewhat for our having forgotten to rescue him from his slippery perch on the cliff in the Pongo until three in the morning. Outside silent lightning flashed in the distance, a hopeful sign for us.
In Iquitos the chief of the secret police won half a pharmacy at cards one night, as well as a tractor and a brickworks. Because people from the tax agency are always at the table during such high-stakes games, each of the players quickly establishes a business and is thus almost completely free of tax obligations, as the Peruvian government uses tax advantages to encourage entrepreneurship in the jungle. One man won $360,000 in one night and paid only a negligible part of that in taxes, because together with his girlfriend, whom he had met that same evening, he promptly founded a company.
Today gold fever broke out in the team, sparked by Huerequeque, Paul, and Laplace, who, once the film is finished, want to pan for gold mechanically, using a floating platform on the upper Río Santiago. Now all of them are dreaming their dreams about gold. Large moths fluttering around the lightbulb are casting hasty shadows, as large as if they came from startled nocturnal birds. In my pants, when they came back from the wash, was a soggy mass of notepaper on which I had jotted down various important things, but the paper was so dissolved and stuck together that I could not decipher any of it. At night I read a Spanish comic book, printed in brownish ink in a small format. Red-skins had attacked the circled wagons of settlers, and thanks to their numerical superiority succeeded in mowing them all down, including the hero of the story, a young ranger, but he was merely unconscious. He was scalped, but survived, because two trappers rescued him. Later these two, fighting by his side, were attacked with arrows in cowardly fashion from the rear, and lost their lives. The battle was necessary because the wife of the scalped hero had been captured by the Indians—they were Omaha. She always stood with her voluptuous breasts pointing at a favorable angle into the frame, and the warrior Gray Bear forced his attentions on her in his teepee. The hero, who was not completely recovered yet, managed to free her by stealth, but then he did not want to take her back, because he could not be sure that the child she was carrying was not Gray Bear’s. He then set out to hunt scalps, and after he had acquired fourteen of them he was captured in an ambush. Before he was burned at the stake, he was allowed to participate in an unequal hand-to-hand match with Gray Bear, in the course of which each of them killed the other. The story ended with the chief expressing regret that two brave warriors had fallen. You cowardly dog, someone in the story said at one point to a redskin; go to hell! whereupon the white man took an arrow in the heart after doing in the Indian. Texas 1800 was the title of this comic series. The beautiful woman always wore bras that gave her breasts a nice
round shape. The scalping victim always wore a hat and suffered from terrible headaches; only in bed did he have his head bandaged. One time he outsmarted three Indian hunters with a trip wire. Among the captive women there was also a sexy blonde, but toward the end of the story she was completely forgotten.
I was told that the Campa women whose husbands went off to war had picked a plant with a black flower in the jungle; if it wilts, that will tell them the warriors are in trouble. Today an Amehuaca arrow came floating down the river, which was a cause for worry. Many boats passed today, without meaning, destination, or purpose.
Camisea, 25 April 1981
All the branches that overhang the water negate the river’s movement. Likewise the bare, barkless limbs of large trees that are stuck in the bottom. Every object the river’s flow takes hold of sways and swings according to the rhythm of its own strength or weakness. Some react rapidly, some languidly, some with majestic slowness, some nervously, but all in almost compulsive resistance.
A disturbing thought came to me and refused to go away: that I had failed to build a tree house for my little son.
Some of the Campas have used short strips of 35-mm film that they must have scavenged from the trash to make themselves hair bands, and today Machiguenga women from the big camp turned up with similar adornment, though made of 16-mm film, which can only come from Les Blank. Pacho, who had a thick felt-tipped pen, was pestered by the women to write their names on their forearms: Elisa, Sonia, Asunción. Today, when we were shooting on the Narinho, the ship drifted backward into the bend by the gravel bank and did not react when given full throttle. The ballast had been unloaded because we wanted to start pulling the ship over the mountain soon, and as a result, the screw was lifted too high out of the water and could not take hold. Then, swerving suddenly, while three boats alongside tried to prevent it, the ship turned, almost crushing the boats, which could not free themselves fast enough, while the boat drifted past the gravel bank. Branches flew across the deck, lianas were ripped down, and we floated toward a very shallow spot, where the Narinho would have run aground, but with all the boats pushing, we managed to nudge the ship back into the bend, from which we thought we could pull it with winches to the other bank, where the crossing of the ridge is to take place. During these maneuvers the boats with the warriors returned from their expedition, and in one boat I saw a man lying strangely curled up. I thought for a moment they had brought back a captive, but then the figure sat up, and it was one of our men, who had just been sleeping. Later, in the Indians’ camp, I learned that they had not made any contact with the Amehuacas and had found no more traces of them. They reported that in one place not very far upstream they had encountered masses of zungaros, all well over the size of a man, but they stayed too deep in the river to be in range of their arrows. They wanted to know if we could not give them some dynamite so they could hunt the fish more easily. I told them we needed it all for the film.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 19