Since among the warriors were the best shooters and also the best arrow catchers, I had them show me what they sometimes do for entertainment. They shoot arrows at a man, and as he leaps aside he makes a lightning-swift grab and catches the missile in midair. I had them remove the arrow tips, but the whole maneuver did not look particularly impressive. I had imagined I could use it for the film somehow, but I gave up the idea, which was good only in my imagination. A lot of masato was prepared, probably to celebrate the return of the warriors. Several women are chewing cooked yucca and spit-ting the mush into troughs. The quantity alone suggests that in the very near future we will have a lot of drunks. Now the troughs have been left to ferment. At the dinner table I listened over my walkie-talkie as Vignati, Laplace, and thirty men struggled with hawsers and winches to drag the Narinho to the other bank. They sound pretty desperate, because the water level is falling, and if the ship does not get to the other side soon, it will be too late.
Camisea, 26 April 1981
Last night Paul felt lousy. His blood pressure was way up, and Parraga gave him two shots. The Brazilians were throwing a party, for the purpose of which they had been nursing and feeding a fire between two mighty tree slices, which were glowing inside. Pisco was being passed around, and a large hunk of freshly slaughtered pork was roasting over the fire. After only a short while I was pretty drunk, and inadvertently scorched my headband, which had been drenched with sweat. Staggering a little, I left the area that Zézé had marked off with bright pennants cut out of comic books and hung up on a string. While reading the mail I had received I fell asleep, but woke up several times because the hooting and hollering got so loud outside. I realized that my light was still on and I really should turn it off. But until two in the morning I simply could not muster the strength. This morning I woke up with a hangover and was annoyed at myself. Walter arrived yesterday, bringing word that the Huallaga was stuck even worse than before. Starting Monday he could fly in about another hundred Campas from a mission station, and he also brought mail that had reached Atalaya by way of Iquitos, as well as magazines and groceries. The plane was loaded almost to capacity with two hogs, which I assume were brought alive, but I did not ask for details because I did not want to have my mental image taken away: of the little Cessna with two massive hogs buckled into the passenger seats. The freight included three large turkeys, one of which keeps spreading his tail to intimidate me, gobbling, and putting on a great show of agitation. This turkey, this bird of ill omen, is a pure albino, so it is quite a sight when it fans its great white wheel, spreads its wings, whose tips trail on the ground, and puffs up its feathers. Snorting in bursts, it launched several feigned attacks on me and gazed at me with such intense stupidity emanating from its ugly face, which took on a bluish purple coloration and had tumorlike wattles, that without more ado I pulled a feather out of its spreading rear end. Now the turkey’s sulking.
My shoes are rotting away under me. My underwear keeps disappearing. The Narinho has run aground in the bend, and its twin, the Huallaga, is resting by the Pongo on an island of gravel that keeps getting larger. There is one way of measuring good and bad here: high water good, low water bad. The Caterpillar needs new filters for gas and oil for its transmission to work properly. The diesel fuel that is delivered here is always diluted with water. This is not the end of our trials and tribulations. I am so directly in touch here with the fundamentals of the material world that today I was thinking I am also on very intimate terms with death. If I were to die, I would be doing nothing but dying. Huge leaves are crashing down, like planes out of the clear blue sky. The only thing left to complete the picture are a couple of pterosaurs. Yesterday I sat on the ground for a long time and cracked nuts with a machete. The green husk that surrounds them like walnuts stained my fingers brown, like those of chain smokers, and it does not wash off. Anja asked what I was doing and whether she might have some. I sat there like a Neanderthal man, cracking nuts and wiping the sand off the white edible part, and I thought to myself, I am doing exactly what I can do, no more, no less.
Not until yesterday did I receive a detailed message from Lucki, describing how risky and complicated our mother’s operation had been. At first they had tried to keep me from worrying. I stared for a long time at my freshly washed socks, still damp, on which butterflies striped in black and green were carrying out some ritual. Paul had given me a wad of brownish blackish, sticky chewing tobacco, saying it would make me feel better about Mother. I stuck it in my cheek, and because it was the first chewing tobacco of my life, this moment felt important to me. From my porch I spat the tobacco juice onto the ground, and on the spot where it landed a small butterfly is sitting, white wings edged in black, which in turn are dotted in white, and the white is so white and real that it hurts, and the black as black and real as the sins of the Pope.
To distract myself, I thought back to the first detective novel in which I had guessed the identity of the murderer correctly. The story was about a Dr. Brixius who committed the murder by sending his victim’s son a toy, a kind of outer-space pistol, which supposedly allowed one to see a tiny screen with a scene from a science-fiction film if one looked into its muzzle while pressing the trigger. Dr. Brixius knew that the victim’s son was off at a Boy Scout camp located on a moor, and assumed correctly that the father would not be able to rein in his curiosity. Thus the victim shot himself, because Dr. Brixius had rigged the toy and built an actual loaded pistol into it. After reading just a few pages, I had Dr. Brixius pegged as the murderer, which was probably not all that difficult, given that it was a particularly sleazy detective story.
When I got to the big camp, the masato was almost all gone, and beneath a palm-frond roof Machiguengas and Campas were dancing to Peruvian pop tunes played on a gramophone. David, the chief, was already very drunk and spoke to me in Quechua, determined to show me that in addition to Ashininka-Campa he also spoke Quechua. Then he urged me to test his knowledge of Aymara and another Indian language, and I kept assuring him that I was very impressed. Many of the men were wearing trousers that spread at the bottom like funnels and had been in style ten years ago. One of the two little black monkeys was clinging to the neck of one of our prostitutes from Iquitos. I noticed people swarming around one of the huts, where there seemed to be some disturbance; I could hear a woman crying. Miguel Camaytieri, the young chief, was lying on one of the sleeping platforms that took up a whole length of the building, his fist grasping the blouse of a very young woman, who was likewise lying there. Apparently this woman is not his wife but someone else’s. She was crying. In response to my questions about this drama, I received evasive answers, to the effect that everything would be taken care of, and I should stay out of it. The fat Dominican padre flew in for half an hour with several guests from Picha, and joined the dancing. In the forest I found a rotting tree with bizarre fungi growing on it. I questioned the Brazilian bulldozer operator, and without hesitation he told me that to clear a new swath he would need about twelve days, if he worked day and night. That sent a shock right through me. It is not raining, which worries me quite a bit. Today Kinski roasted a chicken over a smoky fire, his eyes tearing. Les fixed calamari for lunch, after a plane had brought them from the coast by way of San Ramón. I laid out test strips in the sand along the bank, with honey, urine, laundry detergent, beer, and soap, to see what attracts butterflies most effectively. They often alight in extraordinary numbers, attracted by something, and I would like to place Fitz in the middle of a swarm like that.
I had read in a two-week-old newspaper that a man in Miami failed to pay his insurance premium, and the computer, which could not handle the situation, went haywire and sent him twenty-five hundred reminders.
Camisea, 27 April 1981
It is foreseeable that our internal and external situation is going to worsen rapidly. It is getting harder and harder to say when we will be able to get back to shooting. The water level continues to sink, with the result that both boats are incr
easingly stranded. This morning I woke up because the three young Campa women who do the laundry for us had been constantly flushing the toilet, just for the fun of it.
In the dissonant concert that constitutes this part of the world, clouds, ore deposits, and human beings without exception did their part today to drag the nature of the creation into plain view.
Preparations for a nocturnal scene in Miguel Ángel Fuentes’s hut, as if it were located on the cleared swath. All we have to do is add an identical railing to the porch. Tomislav, the pilot, arrived from Atalaya, bringing all sorts of things, but he had left behind the one really critical item, the filters for the Caterpillar. The Narinho is solidly and firmly aground, the Huallaga likewise, the bulldozer will not move, there is no rain, and the water level in the river is quietly falling toward ever new record lows. But we can still work: Fitz’s cabin, Don Aquilino in the Pongo, the beginning of hauling the ship. Wearing his costume, Kinski poked around in the banana fronds outside my cabin and had Beatus take hundreds of pictures of him surrounded by the luxuriant leaves. Then the two of them moved on a few meters to the edge of the jungle, where Kinski amorously leaned his cheek against a tree trunk and then began to copulate with the tree. He thinks this is immensely erotic: the child of nature and the wild jungle. Yet to this day he has not ventured so much as ten meters into the forest; this is one of his poses. His Yves St. Laurent jungle suit is far more important to him than the jungle itself, and I snapped at him without any real reason when he expected me to happily agree that the primeval forest was erotic. To me it was not erotic at all, I spat, only obscene.
Little Michaela was riding the albino turkey today, with her mother, Gloria, holding her on, and the turkey played along good-naturedly. In a tree near me there is a spiderweb, so sturdy and close-meshed that it is filled up with heavy rotting leaves like a shopping net, and all the time I have been here it has not been torn off, even by wind and rain. In the woods I found a fleshy plant that keeps its upper leaves folded up and pointing skyward, as if praying. There is a delicate vine resembling a fern that spreads so flat over the bark of the trees up which it climbs, wafer-thin, lovely, and deadly, that I often thought it was only painted on, in dull enamel. Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker a leafy plant like slender hare’s-ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite.
In the rain, which does not come, our laundry always stays on the line. A river, already half-dead, had its source in the Black Forest. The sun, El Comandante told me, spends the nights lying on a stretcher. Gather, gather, gather. Gather words, my friend, but no one will ever succeed in describing fire exhaustively. From the radio all we hear are electrical whooshing sounds. Our boats are meandering about on the Camisea.
Yesterday in the speedboat one of the boatmen had left a large chunk of butter in the sun on a flat glass saucer (late-Woolworth style), and had covered it with a page torn from a porno magazine. Repulsive-looking men copulated with blowsy blondes, who strangely enough had kept their bikinis on. I saw that the butter was melting and would soon turn to liquid, so I pushed the saucer into the shade up front in the bow, but on two stops I made later the boatman had pulled the saucer back into the blazing sun. The butter is salted, and comes out of cans imported from Australia. I did not ask why the boatman was putting the covered butter in the heat that way, but with silent determination we continued the duel all day and into early evening to get the butter into the sun, then into the shade. In the last rays of the sun an enormous tree suddenly burst into bloom with blossoms of glowing yellow, as dense and as yellow as a hail of gold. It happened so fast that from one second to the next the blossoms were there, as if a light had been switched on, and just as quickly they were extinguished again.
Huerequeque found a large piece of petrified wood and gave it to me. We talked about tortoise dances, about fish dances. The notion that fish dance preoccupies me.
Camisea, 28 April 1981
While we were shooting on Miguel Ángel’s porch, an Indian gave me a huge beetle with a sort of forked nasal horn. I wanted to keep it for Burro, and tried all sorts of ways to kill it, but it withstood all attacks, and after that I respectfully left it in peace. There are cracked nuts lying around on the ground, and around them extremely fine threads and webs of fungi have formed, like cotton candy, and I saw a large ant completely enveloped in delicate white threads. Upon closer inspection I realized that the ant was not even there anymore, that this most delicate web of fungi had expunged everything and had taken on the morphology of the ant. What revealed that this was not an ant but a wad of fungus in masquerade of an ant was betrayed by this dainty, merciless murderer only because a fine stem and a tiny umbrella were growing out of the putative ant.
The day slips away from us in terrible idleness. Beyond the mountain range a storm is brewing, but it will not reach us. The sun is shining, nothing is moving, the river lies there green and still. Leaves tumbling from the trees render our condition that much more final. From the distant mountains an eagle came swooping toward us at a great altitude. An enormous blue butterfly with wings that looked as if they were carved out of jacaranda wood veneer floated past my table mechanically, as if it were being pulled jerkily on strings. I swam upriver as far as the little quebrada on the opposite bank, but turned back because there were too many biting insects over there. On the riverbank there I found a discolored strip of film, lying in the underbrush, brownish and sticking out of the sand. It had been uncovered as the water receded.
In a Viennese café a man orders a coffee without cream. They were out of cream, the waiter says; would it be all right to have a coffee without milk? In Communist East Germany a man goes into a department store and asks for a refrigerator. He had come to the wrong place, he is told; the store across the way had no refrigerators; over here there was no furniture.
In bureaucratic offices, defenseless paper comes under attack.
Camisea, 29 April 1981
Last night there was a storm in the distance, which gave us a flicker of hope that the water in the Camisea or the Urubamba might rise and let us free one or both of the ships. Then it even rained on our camp, and we got caught up in frenetic card games, in which entire weekly salaries changed hands and were won back. But today I could immediately tell from the color of the water that nothing had changed. The Camisea had risen by only twenty centimeters.
José Lewgoy was supposed to arrive here by way of Pucallpa, but somehow we lost him along the way. Apparently he made it to Pucallpa, and then flew on to Atalaya, but because the visibility between there and here was so low, the pilot refused to bring him. Lewgoy then apparently flew on to Satipo, but no one can confirm that for me.
On my porch I had some tree mushrooms that I had recently found in the jungle. This morning they were full of holes made by little brown beetles. The holes were as straight and clean as if they had been made by electric drills, and since the beetles had apparently just gone to work, their smooth, shiny brown rear ends were still sticking up out of the holes. I pulled one of these little borers out by his hindquarters, which made him very cross.
In the meantime the dreams of panning for gold have taken a new pitch: people’s fantasies are circling around a single nugget, one chunk as large as a mature hog. Paul told me he would immediately construct a solid raft, after first painting the chunk black, and then he would make a run for it. We discussed whether we would find an entire petrified river out here, like petrified wood. It would be recognizable because leaves that had fallen on its surface would be frozen in place and would not move. The water would consist of diamonds, and brooks feeding into the river would have solidified into reddish brown semiprecious stone. We pictured the diamond river lying there in its grand, timeless tranquillity. Maureen was eating shrimp, and by mistake ate a red rubber canning ring, which because of its color she had failed to recognize after it fell into the dish. Once you have tasted this delicacy, I told her, you will never go back to shrim
p. We also voted on whether forgotten skills such as tug-of-war, the standing broad jump, and three-legged racing should be reintroduced as Olympic sports. At one Olympiad, probably in Stockholm in 1912, pairs of runners had tied two legs together and raced as three-legged creatures.
There is a big problem involving Laplace: he took me aside and explained that Walter was constantly bickering with him, and he could not go on working under these conditions; he wanted to leave. Laplace is talking about leveling the slope to a mere 12 percent grade, but that would look like the narrow strip of land that forms an isthmus. I told him I would not allow that, because we would lose the central metaphor of the film. Metaphor for what, he asked. I said I did not know, just that it was a grand metaphor. Maybe, I said, it was just an image that is slumbering in all of us, and I happened to be the one to introduce him to a brother he had never met.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 20