Camisea, 8 May 1981
Last night Kinski got little sleep because on the big, swaying liana suspension bridge near his cabin a lot of most vigorous fornicating was carried out. One of the ladies from Iquitos had selected the swinging bridge as a particularly suitable spot, where she laughed and joked with her suitors before the panting and groaning began, and the bridge swayed and creaked an accompaniment. Apparently she promptly gave H.P. a social disease. Reverend Father, my fat Dominican, thou who so firmly vouched for these ladies, I would gladly do without the globs of fat in my soup and without the bread for breaking, but please restore my lack of faith! I did not see God today. According to the statistics, 85 percent of all existing species are beetles and insects of various sorts; so where are we on the scale of God’s favor?
Camisea—Pucallpa, 9 May 1981
To my great surprise, the first thing I encountered this morning was a bleating sheep with thick, dirty wool. It came toward me from the jungle, and I wondered whether it was not a dreamed sequel to a bad night, in which confusing happenings with boats torn from their moorings had kept me tossing and turning. But then I realized that Julian was sharpening his knife on a flat stone to slit open another sheep that he had just slaughtered. This other sheep had had its throat cut on the chopping block, and the one that was still alive was watching from close by, not sure whether it should stick by its comrade, to whom it seemed drawn, or should flee. So it fled a few paces, no doubt recognizing danger in the bright red blood on the ground, but then was compelled by lack of understanding and an unknown, all-powerful fate to face its own fate.
Working on the Narinho, which we cautiously sailed back and forth close to our camp. Then the water carried it back to the bend in the river, where it ran aground on the gravel bank on the side of the river from where we wanted to haul it over the mountain. At night some startled swallows that had strayed into the darkness under the roof over the kitchen. We played cards, and I brooded over the hero of my story, who rides into the mayor’s office, smashes in a door, and gallops right into an assembly of his enemies, on whom he, as surprised as they are, lets loose a hail of bullets until both his Colts’ chambers are empty. From then on he is an outlaw.
Pucallpa—Iquitos, 10 May 1981
Mist in the morning, vultures on the roof of the Hotel de Touristas, which has just been dedicated and is already heading straight toward dilapidation. Paper has blown into the swimming pool, which no one uses. The water is a slimy green, and brownish algae have taken up residence on the bottom. The rungs of the ladder have become perches for large water beetles. At the Pucallpa airport I haggled with a pushy cabdriver for a ride to the Vatican for 5,000 soles. In the evening, because the pilots were not taking off, I went out to eat with Mauch and Paul. We met up with Paul’s friends, Marcel, the Belgian consul from Iquitos, and Felix, the German mechanic from Aschaffenburg, both of them marked by decades in the Amazon region, both the biggest crooks imaginable. Still, I cannot recall having seen anyone with as hearty a laugh as the Belgian. Paul says he was the chairman of the Iquitos tennis club, but since there are not any tennis courts in Iquitos, I am trying to translate tennis club into something more like drug cartel; at any rate, Marcel misappropriated several million and for that reason had to slip away to Pucallpa.
Iquitos, 11 May 1981
Vignati’s birthday. Shooting in the foundry, then Kinski up in the church tower. Lucki, Klausmann, Beatus, and Raimund did not get here until late afternoon, coming by way of Atalaya and Pucallpa. Many things are missing, friction as a result of the move.
Iquitos, 12 May 1981
Because he could not breathe anymore within the circle, but without it was done for…
…and so as not to appear unsociable as a result of basically necessary and unavoidable murdering…
Iquitos, 13 May 1981
Unsociable. The children put the cat into the laundry dryer and turned it on. The cat survived. After that it was not sociable anymore.
Around my house on stilts the water is black; the banana fronds are decaying, and swarms of small, finger-length fish with thick heads gather just under the surface and fight each other for my spit. A footbridge of boards with empty snail shells and small, dark brown to reddish mussel shells lying on it now leads to my cabin. The ladder is new. I found everything just the way I had left it, but as dusty as if I had been away for years. Completely different birds and animals are around me now, also in the lake overgrown with trees and brush: gavilánes, a kind of eagle, herons, large falcons. They squawk strangely at each other, flap away from me into the bare branches, fish snails out of the water, and crack them open on my footbridge. The sounds during the night have stayed the same, but in the morning, when I wake up, I find myself in a different world.
When Lucki left Camisea one day after me, the Narinho was already completely beached, resting on the gravel bank so that one can walk around it, as if a kindly mountain had lifted it. Someone broke into the costume depot on Calle Putumayo, even though Franz and Gisela were sleeping there, and two sewing machines were stolen. The thieves drank rum, left the empty bottles lying around, and pissed on the floor. They also took some costumes. Across from our headquarters overlooking the Nanay there was a huge explosion in a boiler, fortunately after the work day in the factory there was over. The one night watchman was blown to pieces and sent flying. A smallish bloody piece of him landed with a splat on our porch. After this terrifying event the entire neighborhood sought refuge in our office, thinking Ecuador had dropped a bomb, that war had broken out again, and that we would have information and could provide some protection for the time being. An old woman had armed herself with a machete so she could defend her grandchildren. Claire, who abandoned our telex machine after the explosion and was utterly confused, handed around chewing gum and thus calmed the agitated crowd somewhat.
The old Narinho, which served as the model for the Narinho on the Camisea and the Huallaga in the Pongo, is up to its middle deck in water and has been dismantled by thieves from the neighborhood to such an extent that hardly anything of the superstructure and the cabins remains. We have hired a man to locate the missing parts in nearby huts and buy them back. Recently, while we were checking out a new bar in which to hire crew members, because the previous place is under water, one of the guests uttered the ultimate insult to another—su madre—and on Mother’s Day to boot, which immediately led to a ritualized brawl, with stools being hurled through the air and other guests trying to separate the insulter and the insultee. I hired both of them as extras, after they had quickly buried the hatchet and were drinking beer together. A dwarf missing his front teeth also wanted to get into the film.
In the jungle Huerequeque had found a battered bucket seat from a helicopter that had crashed there, and took it with him as a sort of talisman. On the flight from Camisea to Pucallpa I saw in the west, toward the mountains, dramatic cloud formations such as I had never seen before. In the jungle great loops of rivers glittered like gold, and in the sky all the doomsday mythologies were playing themselves out. In a few spots it was raining, causing double rainbows to form. The sky flared up across its entire expanse, and in the clouds battles were raging, with lightning darting toward the earth like swords. The edges of the most distant clouds glowed like angry, seething ore, with black mountain ranges welling up around them, and above them red cloud banks glowed bloodily. Stormy, blazing, primeval lights passed over the forest, drawing veils of dark and orange-yellow rain with them. Everything was being transformed ceaselessly into ever-increasing ecstasy, and the horizon lit up in a pulsing madness of beauty. As night fell, it drew everything down with it. The last revolt against the darkness was fearsome and bloody and grisly; far, far off in the distance the cloud mountains writhed as if suffering cramps. The last sun poked its fingers into wounded, bleeding towers of cloud. Then, all of a sudden, everything was extinguished. In the darkness lightning flickered without pause. I had almost stopped breathing, and knew that I had seen what h
ardly any human being had ever witnessed.
Next the following ensued: I had crashed a single-engine plane into the jungle, but had escaped with only minor injuries. Taking a taxi into a city, which soon turned out to be New York, I called the driver’s attention to a large plane flying low overhead toward the airport. From its fuselage issued a delicate streak of black smoke, which trailed through the sky above the skyscrapers, and at the moment when I realized I had crashed that day and would now experience my crash as an observer, there was a jerk, and the plane’s tail broke apart, though the plane could still fly straight ahead. Large pieces of aluminum flew off, the smoke spread, as if pulled on a string and billowing darkly and malevolently, and the plane tipped slightly downward. For a brief moment I was looking down from above, probably from another plane circling in a holding pattern, and I saw the rear half of the cabin’s roof shear off. I saw the passengers seated in rows, turned to pillars of salt in their fear. Behind them strips of aluminum dangled, pierced with holes, like the steering wheels of racing cars, to make them lighter. I saw the galley for the stewardesses and the rest-rooms, and two men were standing there, pressed to the wall to keep out of the gale. One of them did not have a jacket on, but was wearing a shirt and tie. For a brief, terrible moment when I saw them they were clamped fast against the wall; behind them the plane was torn off. Then I saw a young man with the raging wind rushing through his blond curls. He hastily pulled off his shoes and I saw him clamber out onto the struts and frame members poking out of the rear of the plane, which was now racing straight down into the skyscrapers. He did not want to plummet to his death sitting motionless like the other passengers. His decision was obvious from the few actions I saw. The air current struck him like a blow, hurtling him down until he was nothing but a dot in the distance, and my gaze followed him as he disappeared like a shot into a gorge, while the plane remained on course, though descending even more steeply. Before it plunged into the buildings, which created a magnificent fireball that remained hanging over the city like a marsh marigold, the plane was almost entirely ripped to pieces. Just as in operas from the last century, something merely presumed to be true, a tragedy whose consequences were irreversible, like death, in other words the idea that something had happened that did not actually happen, changed an entire life once and for all. When we celebrated Lucki’s and Vignati’s birthdays I sat there until the last guest had left. Then I rode my motorcycle to my hut, going over the bumps and potholes so fast that my ribs hurt from the impact. In the dark, a man appeared on the road in the beam of my headlight. He was pointing with strange urgency to the ground. As I ran over the viper that was crossing in front of me and left it behind writhing, I understood what he had meant.
Today I encountered a religious procession that blocked my way; I assume it was taking place because of the assassination attempt on the pope, which I had learned about from a passing reference in a telex. Information on the important events in the world reaches me only in fragments consisting of simple five-word statements.
Iquitos, 14 May 1981
In the morning I can see the water glinting as I look down through the cracks in my floor; at a low angle the sun casts reflections into my room made of bamboo. At night two banana plants near my hut collapsed; one of them has fallen across my footbridge. I saw water birds as big as peacocks whose wings have entirely different colors on top and underneath, as leaves sometimes do. They have a strange way of flying, with their long legs dangling behind them. Paul commented that whether the buckshot in his gun is too fine or not is not his problem but that of the alligator. I rode to see Huerequeque to give him some reassurance about the scene we are going to shoot today, but his wife advised me to let him sleep; he was very drunk, and if we woke him, he would start drinking again.
In the evening I was the only living being in the house aside from Claire. Claire is pregnant. I am writing by the light of two skinny candles that will soon have burned down. Since this afternoon there has been no electricity. The phone calls that reach me are long-distance calamities, fraught from the first minute with misunderstandings and hurt feelings, interrupted by the electrical gaps that the stuttering current creates. Outside in the darkness four thousand frogs are crying for a savior. The frogs have lowly thoughts and carry on lowly research. I wish a taxi would come and take me somewhere. Yet not for anything in the world would I want to dream the others’ dreams. At the candle’s end, the wick curls without any reverence for the inevitable.
I miss the swallows on the Plaza de Armas. The city government decided to ignore the interests of four hundred thousand birds, and now they stay away because all the trees on the plaza were summarily cut down, leaving the birds nowhere to sleep.
Iquitos, 15 May 1981
In the middle of town, amid the throng of mopeds and motorcycles, a small, unkempt, emaciated horse came toward me; it had run away from somewhere, and no one was paying any attention to it. Ah, one horsepower, said Mauch, who was seated behind me on the motorcycle. In the burglary on Putumayo Street it was not only the sewing machines that were taken but, strangely enough, also letters that were waiting for the team to pick up. Two of them were for R., whom I tried to comfort by pointing out that at least he knew that letters addressed to him had been lost, whereas I was equally certain that there had been none there to steal that were addressed to me.
Iquitos, 16 May 1981
Arrival of Lewgoy, Grande Otelo, Rui Polanah. Nocturnal turmoil about Lewgoy, who had presumably picked up isangos from the grass on the airfield, as had already happened to Lucki, Walter, and Sluizer before him. He is scratching like a madman against the mites, yelling that they are from the sheets at Paul’s, where we had him spend the night for the time being, since the Holiday Inn is full. When the water pressure in the entire city failed and then the electricity went out, he apparently set out on foot in the middle of the night for the Holiday Inn, assuming that he would find both there.
We spent the afternoon in the costume depot, where Kinski also showed up, trying on a fine dark blue suit, which he liked very much. All logic and also the script speak unambiguously in its favor, but when I saw him in it, I had a hard time recognizing Fitzcarraldo; before my inner eye he has already assumed archetypal form in his white linen suit and the large straw hat. I promptly told him so and could see him working himself up to a tantrum. I told him that when I imagined myself as the audience, long after I had seen the film the figure of Fitzcarraldo had to be a fixed phenotypical concept, and the inflexible principle of a single white suit could be broken only at the end with a tuxedo—that was what my instinct dictated. Wavering between a tantrum and a glimmering of understanding that I had ignited in Kinski, he suddenly began to pay close attention, and I knew he had grasped my point. Now anyone who tried to win him over for the blue suit and pointed out the lack of logic would be chased off by Kinski in a fit of rage.
Iquitos, 17 May 1981
During the night there were powerful thunderstorms, nearby and in the distance. After that a steady rain set in. Banana stalks hurtled, rustling and slapping, into the water. There they are drifting now, with pale leaves, like corpses in the water. Water fowl with grotesquely skinny legs and even more grotesquely long toes clamber about on the rotting remains of the stalks as they drift along. More and more creatures are seeking refuge in my hut, because it is the only stable platform sticking above the water. The days are becoming more and more melancholy. The house in front of me is almost always empty, as if abandoned by refugees. We have a second young ocelot for the scene we are shooting on Monday, and a toucan. They gazed at me from their cages with such a submissive air that I was terribly moved. Water is dripping from the roof, but the rain does not refresh anything. The cat has thrown up on the porch. The chickens are standing in the rain, getting soaked. My suit is hanging from the rafters of my palm-frond roof, covered with mildew. There is mildew on my shoes and my notebook. You hang up laundry, but it does not dry. My shirts disappear without a trace. Of the fi
ve rabbits Walter wanted to use for breeding, on the supposition that they would multiply in a geometric progression to 256,000 in a year, only one is still alive, its coat pathetically matted. This morning a tarantula the size of my fist was sitting in front of me on the table, and for the first time in my life I was only half-afraid. Nonetheless, I killed it in businesslike fashion with a broom. Just as mass can undergo compression, spiders can probably also be compressed, condensed, and the result is tarantulas.
Iquitos, 18 May 1981
Today as we were working, Grande Otelo, that agile puny runt who seems to have children all over the place, and whose wife, as Lewgoy told me, killed the child they had together and then herself, suddenly appeared to me as the devil in a film unreeling before my inner eye, in which Walter Matthau would have to play God. The idea appealed to Otelo, and we agreed that in this world only one lion could remain alive, and that lion would have to be played by Rui Polanah.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 22