I had El Tigre and Quispe dressed in the costumes for the scene in the rubber camp. Quispe turns up at my hut almost every evening. Initially he came under all sorts of pretexts, but now he has a single, unconcealed mission: he wants to buy a fifty-horsepower speedboat motor from me, but he does not have quite enough money. I tried to make it clear to him that even if I gave him the motor as a gift he would not get any pleasure out of it, because every two weeks at the latest something goes wrong with it, and when there is lots of sand in the water, the cooling system invariably clogs, often after only one or two days, and he would certainly have a very hard time getting replacement parts; even for us, with all of our contacts, it was fairly complicated to order the right ones in Miami and get them through customs. I also tried to point out tactfully that he speaks only a little Spanish, and that in Miami they do not understand Quechua. But the motor remains Quispe’s dream, and one he continues to dream boldly and persistently. To this day he has not been able to explain what he wants to accomplish, except that one time he indicated he was thinking of opening up a commercial route through the Pongo. Even if that is pointless and devoid of any compelling economic necessity, I feel embarrassed, and when we are done with our work here I will make him a gift of the motor as a symbolic payment for a week of his services.
Camisea, 30 April 1981
In the morning we shot a fairly major scene, which I had hastily jotted down last night. Lewgoy arrived after quite an odyssey, but in good spirits. He spent the last eight months performing in a Brazilian soap opera as a genial grandfather figure, and he told me that being here with me made him feel reborn. Four filters for the Caterpillar arrived with him, sent by Gustavo, but it immediately became obvious that they were the same wrong kind he had sent before. Walter hinted today that we will probably not be able to free the Huallaga, which is aground in the Pongo, until the next rainy season. The crew seems to have mounted a winch incorrectly, and the entire cast-iron unit cracked as a result.
I rode up the Camisea with El Tigre and twenty Campas; in a second large boat we had pona bark and palm roofs for building the rubber workers’ camp. On the next sandbank above our camp I saw a rather large alligator, at least two and a half meters in length, and even though Mauch saw it, he did not want to believe it was an alligator and not a piece of driftwood. I had them turn the boat and head straight for the sandbank, at which the alligator slipped into the water. On the very next sandbank we saw another one, which looked even bigger. We talked about New York, where several crocodiles have been found in the sewers, brought to the city from Florida and kept in people’s bathtubs as pets and when they got too large, they were flushed down the toilet. Some of the animals had grown quite big, because initially they were able to keep themselves fed on rats, and later on sewer workers, as Mauch cheerily speculated.
A story about children who want to compete in a test of courage; all six of them, brothers and sisters, lay their heads on the railroad track as a train is approaching, but with their faces turned away from the train. The winner would be the one who kept his head on the track the longest. What happened was this: not one of the children, not a single one, moved his or her head off the track, but the alert engineer managed to stop the train only meters away from the children. A story about a childhood friend of Sepp Mosmeier’s in south Tyrol who climbed up a pylon and grabbed hold of the high-tension wire above a railway embankment. He was shaken for several minutes, and the current burned and charred his insides completely, but his hand remained clasped around the high-voltage wire. At last he fell off, and the most terrible part, which remained engraved on Sepp’s memory forever, was the sound, the noise his friend made as he fell onto the trap rock covering the embankment. Because his bones had turned to charcoal, there was a crackling and crashing as if someone had dropped down a sack of briquettes. The story of the soccer fan who swore he would cross the Rhine at Cologne by night, balancing on the bridge railing, if his soccer team did not slip in the standings. He had made it almost all the way across when the police hauled him off the bridge and had him transported to an insane asylum, where it took him a long time to convince the doctors that he had not been trying to commit suicide.
Camisea, 1 May 1981
A day I would rather forget. Shooting without a clear sense of purpose. Standing on a pile of dirt, I quarreled with Walter. Mauch constantly squabbling with Walter; a confused message from the film lab in New York; Kinski threw a tantrum; Gloria ran away from Walter, leaving the camp early in the morning with the child, but returned in the evening. I threw away my shoes, which were falling apart anyway, and now go barefoot, like everyone who lives here for a while.
Camisea, 2 May 1981
In the morning I spoke with Lucki over the radio. The connection was clearer than ever before, probably because there was no interference caused by storms. Lucki will get here on Tuesday.
Quispe is sleeping in Don Aquilino’s sedan chair, woven from lianas. Kinski is having himself photographed by Beatus, manically, for hours on end, using up roll after roll of film. The smoke from the fires over which the balls of rubber are being turned on a spit rises to the treetops. The white turkey is spreading its tail in the jungle. A man came walking through the damp leaves, placing each foot carefully. The trees bleed white. Lianas have intertwined, forming braids, and dangle thus conjoined from the crown of the sky. The jungle serves as a damper to all conversations; everything becomes quieter, calmer. A large butterfly soared like an eagle. In the jungle theater the audience was still clapping for two days after the curtain had been rung down. I put out a huge hook, not for fish this time but for alligators. Despite several tries, I did not manage to capture their growling evening serenades, their ugly mating calls, on tape. Today the jungle softened all sounds. I rolled a piece of newly poured sheet rubber into a little ball, which bounces in odd ways. My hands and the little ball smell just like smoked eel. Huerequeque brought me a type of liana known as clavehuasca, as thick as a man’s arm. This liana has an odd structure: there are six or eight segments of dark and light wood, like wedges of cake. You can pull out the wedgelike dark pieces in a sort of strip, and the taste is delicious, the aroma unlike anything else, perhaps closest to sandalwood. They use it to flavor pisco, mixing in a spoonful of honey.
After work today Lewgoy was beside himself about Kinski, who was an absolute pestilence, but part of it seems to be Lewgoy’s attempt to distract us from the trouble he has learning his lines. While he was sounding off, I was using a needle to dig a thorn out of my foot, and was so focused and calm that suddenly my calmness carried over to him.
Camisea, 3 May 1981
The earth lay there, a freshly plowed field. Horses gamboling in the meadow paused, their coats steaming. It was very early in the morning. In town the blackbirds in the park were bustling about. The things unspoken were patient for the time being. Nothing was caught on my hook. Rotting fruits were besieged by beautiful butterflies. A doctor was attending to a beheaded chicken. Children picked up a run-over hedgehog from the road; it was completely flattened, and dried like parchment by the sun. After days of arduous hiking through the jungle, explorers came upon an old, worn-out automobile tire leaning against a tree. The boatman bails out the canoe with even motions, full of mechanical profundity. For a film, a white horse was led, accompanied by a torch, through the catacombs under the Villa Borghese in Rome. In ancient Greece there were stumbling gods, and they often laughed, too. One of them worked as a smith. A man sailing solo around the world grew a crop of watercress on a moldy felt blanket.
The man paused in mid-motion; his weapon clattered gingerly to the ground, his gaze was fixed on the distant mountain of his misery. Then he collapsed, struck by a bullet, while he reached for something imaginary in the void, or rather, as he seemed to try, with a reflective gesture, to hang on to his life, disappearing into an imaginary void, he hurtled into the finality of his end.
An old man, who had been the last person living on a windswept island far
from the stormy coast, with the mail boat bringing him onions and flour only now and then, died one evening with the natural casualness of all things out here. Days later a very large fish was caught on the dead man’s ground line, still in the water.
Camisea—Satipo—Camisea, 4 May 1981
I did not have a boat, so I quickly constructed a large wheel out of lianas, which floated well, and on which I could stand and move myself along with a pole in the water. A few other people were with me, following me on tiny rafts, crafted from three balsa trunks. When we had reached Shivankoreni, cold mist came shooting at us as if from an explosion, billowing and rolling. It was like a glacier wheezing and coughing at us. Behind it came a dull, deep rumbling of debris and heavy pieces of rock. Then I saw a brown, muddy wall of water, about two meters high, rolling toward us. It lifted me up on my ring and swept me sideways into a chakra, in which corn was planted. But that was only a sort of precursor to a much higher wall of white, swirling spray, which rushed along the riverbed, as if driven by an explosion. Lifted high on our light materials, we were able to save ourselves. Once arrived in Shivankoreni, which was situated high on the riverbank but was nonetheless inundated by the flood, I saw all the people out and about, hunting for their pigs, which the water had swept away.
For the shooting we did yesterday in the Pongo, we hoisted Lewgoy onto a cliff ledge by the waterfalls. It turned out to be as difficult as hauling up a piano. Paul came with us and had us let him off with a few other men by the sandbank, so he could bury the cadaver, which was digging its way more and more into the sand. He wanted to give a decent burial to the bold swimmer, who had crossed the Pongo, after all, and conquered it.
The crew of the Huallaga, which is completely high and dry, told me without any attempt at gilding the situation that they were fairly sure the boat could not be floated again until November, when the next rainy season began. Before that the water was unlikely to rise significantly, unless there were torrential downpours. But there were no signs of any such thing. For days we have had cloudless skies and brilliant, starry nights. Last night Zézé wanted to record croaking frogs for the soundtrack, and went looking for a quiet spot. Eventually she set up in the little bay by my hut, and scanned with her flashlight in all directions. Very close by, the glowing eyes of a large alligator were staring at her quietly, whereupon she fled, screaming, to the other end of the camp.
The time of the white swallows has arrived. An ailing chicken is trying to make friends with our white turkey; it always sleeps on the ground, cowering in the turkey’s shadow. As a child I once read a book about the ancient Germans that described how a young woman set out on a long journey on foot, for which she tied hefty pieces of beech bark to the soles of her feet as sandals. That is the only thing I remember from the whole book.
Today Mauch and I plan to fly out to Satipo to look at rushes, at least a small portion of the material we have filmed, so as not to be completely unsure of how it is coming out. The plane, which is also supposed to pick up fuel there, made a quick run down to Sepahua to fetch something else, but now it has been hours, and it is still not here. We have been waiting in the church, which has a corrugated tin roof that is heated up in the sun and is crackling and creaking. Swallows fly by, very close, without a sound. A new season has arrived, irrevocably.
In Satipo we were plunked down without warning in a strange, ugly world. The town is the last, most seedy outpost of civilization. We were taken to the revolting house of the local cinema owner, cluttered with knickknacks of the kidney-shaped table era. A dusty little keg and a set of brandy glasses were suspended from a plastic guitar, and the room also had a green plastic duck, sassy ashtrays, and even a telephone. The local phone book has about twenty entries. A repulsively fat woman, who was digging bundles of money out of a dingy old plastic bag and counting the bills on the table, demanded, without pausing in her counting, 30,000 soles for projecting the rushes. After much haggling she came down to 10,000. The screening was the craziest I have ever experienced: the format all wrong, so that a quarter of each frame was missing on the left, most of the sections running as a reversed image, out of focus, and the light gave out so often that it was almost impossible to make anything out. To add insult to injury, the projectionist kept trying to coax sound out of the silent footage, even though I repeatedly shouted up to his booth; but his efforts, which resulted in electrical crackling and popping that sent a shivers through one’s body, would not stop. Distracted by the nonexistent soundtrack, the projectionist did not notice that an insect’s wing had got stuck in the lens, presumably that of a dragonfly, whose form was most of the time superimposed on half the image. Nonetheless, with a little imagination we could draw conclusions as to how the film would look.
During the return flight Tomislav urged me to take the little plane’s controls for a bit, and it felt good. Below me in the jungle I saw a deep ravine with a waterfall that surely measured more than a hundred meters from top to bottom and disappeared into a funnel of towering trees. All the rivers have shallow water, the Tambo, the Ene, the Perene, the Pangoa, the Satipo, the Picha; there is no denying that the rainy season is past. Once back over the jungle it struck me that the people in Satipo were like vomit—ugly, mean-spirited, unkempt, as if a town in the highlands had regurgitated its most degenerate elements and pushed them off into the jungle. Upon our return to Shivankoreni, which I could hardly wait for, some winged creature promptly flew into my ear, as if it had been fired at me. It felt as if its wings were made of metal, rotating like a lawnmower that wanted to bore its way into my skull. Once it had been removed and I could hear normally again, I heard the frogs outside testing the night. Night should watch out for me!
Camisea, 5 May 1981
The day began in a sleepy and depressed mood. Paul is going to fly to Iquitos to sign a contract with the oil explorers for transports on his ship. During the night, an enormous earth slide occurred on the cleared strip where the Caterpillar had been working. No one heard anything, but it took down all the trees along the upper rim. At some point, amid the night sounds I felt something while half asleep that caused my hammock to sway slightly, and I had a sensation as if the earth were quaking and trembling slightly. In the morning the fish in the river were behaving strangely, constantly shooting to the surface. I do not really have to count Kinski’s rabid tantrums. Yet when we were shooting, he was frighteningly good.
Camisea, 6 May 1981
As we were shooting at night in the chief’s hut, toward the end of the scene an Indian in overalls suddenly dashed into the shot, the best take we had, but I think it happened so late in the process that it probably does not matter. He wanted to bum a cigarette off Kinski. Silent tongues of lightning licking in the distance, and we all stayed up very late, until the rain and lightning had reached us here. In the morning I woke up and knew immediately from the sound of the river that it had risen. I started up in alarm, but then saw that as soon as it was light Vignati had steered the Narinho to safety on the right side of the river, taking advantage of the barely sufficient rise in the water level. For a brief moment nature had shown herself well disposed toward us. The Urubamba, however, has not risen—nothing to hope for there.
Lucki arrived with Walter from Pucallpa. Upon catching sight of my brother, I was filled with brotherly feeling. They had two prostitutes from Iquitos with them, to relieve the two we have here. News and mail from our mother, and an adventure story from Burro about a river of gold in India. Otherwise, depressing news. Lucki brought a recording of Ernani, which he had made in an Italian opera house. I had a hard time expressing myself, and jumped from one unfinished sentence to the next, as in a brook filled with slippery rocks one keeps hoping for traction on the next one.
Camisea, 7 May 1981
All morning Huerequeque was sharpening his machete on a flat stone, saying nothing. One of the whores from Iquitos sat across from me eating her breakfast, likewise saying not a word. Last night a swarm of men had gathered hesitantly ar
ound her—the Brazilian bulldozer operators, several boatmen, and El Tigre also came by, wearing a freshly ironed shirt, the first I’d ever seen him in. He said he wanted to visit with me, but after a few pleasantries he turned to his actual goal, the woman. The river is shallow but brownish. Strange birds are shrieking on the opposite bank. An alligator drifted by, belly-up and white all over, with all four legs stretched out. The bulldozer will not start; this time several hoses in the hydraulic system are shot. In the camp numb stillness has settled in, holding everything in a tight grip. Far off in the forest chain saws are at work. A decision to move our operations to Iquitos for a while is becoming increasingly unavoidable, because here too much lengthy preparation would be necessary before we could shoot properly. The drawback is that transporting people and materials will cost us about five days, but the summer is coming down on us with swords wielded slowly and inescapably by an unknown hand. A light haze over the landscape, filled with the cries of animals.
I was startled to realize how much money we have spent already, and Walter simply did not want to believe the figures Lucki presented, because he has lost all sense of context. A shouting match today during shooting between him and Kinski after Miguel, the chief, uttered dark hints about Kinski, whom all the Campas hate. Miguel told me I must have noticed that during Kinski’s outbursts his people silently huddled together, forming groups, but I should not think they were afraid in any way of the madman’s screaming; rather, they were afraid of me, because I was always completely calm in the face of his tantrums. After work I saw that some of them were using machetes and a stick with a sharpened tip to break open a large rotted tree that must have been on the ground for years. They dug out of the decaying wood fat, yellowish whitish maggots bigger than cockchafer grubs, with dark, sturdy heads. They squirmed on the men’s hands before the men ate them, slurping as you slurp oysters. Suddenly they came over to me, and before I knew what was happening I had three of those writhing creatures in my hand as a gift. They gave me to understand I should try them, and stared at me intently in happy anticipation. For a moment I struggled with my civilized instincts, but then decided to eat them. They are supposed to be especially tasty when you roast them over a fire briefly, and they are also supposed to be unusually high in protein and fat.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 21