This morning there were pigs under my house. The yucca plants have all been ripped out of the ground, and all the banana plants around have rotted and collapsed, so there is open ground around my hut. I did not even unpack properly, just left everything where it was. The water around the cabin is gone, but the ground is still muck. Everything has changed.
Camisea, 20 June 1981
The little tigrillo is dead. We had shot our scenes with him and put him back in his enclosure, but the big tigrillo, usually so forbearing, promptly bit him to death. Vignati has a broken rib. Working quickly on the film. For the moment Kinski is neutralized, because Sygma in Paris has sent a photographer who is taking thousands of shots of Kinski a day, so he is distracted in manic self-absorption. I observe all this with indifference. In four days we will be out of money, and what will happen then I know only too well. The pleasant things? They are all associated with individuals’ names: Cardinale, Vignati, Huerequeque, Paul, the majority of the team. I began to distribute my few earthly possessions: my radio, arrows, petrified objects, my music cassettes, a cushma; that made me feel lighter. I saw a wall blackened by fire. In a photo of Machu Picchu I began to climb the steep rock faces. My footbridge leads for no reason to my hut, where I do not live anymore, just spend the night. We had emergency meetings to discuss the situation, as elsewhere they do emergency slaughters.
In Belén a boy was floating around in a large plastic bowl that he was using as a boat, rowing with his hands, and fetched beer from a likewise floating store. For the first time I saw one of the mighty paiche in a boat; it was lying bent on the floor of a dugout and had its mouth wide open, like a tunnel into a mountain. The world is spotty and hard to decipher. Photos taken with special film from planes over the Cologne–Trier area reveal the original sites of Roman structures and castelli in the flat fields. When cigarettes are tossed into the night, they fall into bottomless abysses, fade into the void, leaving a delicate trail of sparks as they disappear, deeper and deeper. Ah, I was thinking of a star that would be very small, from which I could push off with my foot, thus dislodging it from its orbit forever, as one pushes away a skiff in quiet waters.
Iquitos, 21 June 1981
Work in the floating House Fitz. In the evening I had a long talk with Walter on the radio; he said it had been completely dry today, and the ship had moved. If it stayed dry, he was sure it could be pulled up to the support post in only two days. He would get it positioned at the bottom of the slope, but in such a way that the quarterdeck would still be in contact with the river.
At night I got a hysterical call from a journalist in Rome, asking what was going on with Cardinale, was she still alive, would she survive the terrible accident? What accident? I asked, alarmed; I had just had dinner with her. No, the caller insisted, I was lying; she had been hit by a truck and was seriously injured.
Iquitos, 26 June 1981
Brisk work with Claudia Cardinale in Iquitos. On the 24th, the Festival of San Juan, I gave everyone the day off. Only Mauch, Vignati, and I continued working, as a kind of second unit. The whole town was out and about in a festive mood, and in the evening I put two girls from Huerequeque’s bar on the back of my motorcycle and, slightly drunk, rode out to the airport, where I forced my way on the bike into the large, almost deserted departure concourse, and after making two circuits inside, pursued by a policeman, rode out again. A few birds were flying around inside the hall. I also saw a rat running away from me, which, as it took evasive action, went skidding over the polished terrazzo floor. It slid a long way in its original direction, while its legs flailed furiously, trying to brake. Outside I saw a bird with a green and brown stomach perching on a large, rusty cogwheel.
In the Italian press and now apparently also in Argentina, rumors have spread like wildfire that Claudia Cardinale has had an accident. Somehow the Italian journalist managed to reach me again, in the office. Following the promptings of inspiration, because you cannot dispel a rumor with the truth but only with an even wilder rumor, I told him the whole situation was actually far worse than had been reported; the barefoot half-caste mestizo Indian who had run over her had not only been drunk; he had promptly raped the accident victim, even though shocked bystanders gathered around. At that there was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then the receiver was hung up.
Outside the house, Doña Lina grabbed a chicken by the throat and with a quick twist tried to break its neck, but the chicken remained intact, and Doña Lina had dislocated her wrist. I took her to the hospital and went to a nearby restaurant by myself, which did me good. The waiter was pouring a glass of wine for a guest who had left long ago.
Iquitos—Camisea, 27 June 1981
Moving back to the jungle camp, with the usual complications, in a Twin Otter. Kinski flew in his own Avionetta; that was a clause in a bizarre supplemental contract he had forced me to sign and without which he would not have returned to the jungle. Yet he had always flown in a special plane anyway. Further provisions in the contract, which for some unknown reason was written in English, insisted on: a particular brand of mineral water, no male chickens in the camp—he could not think of the English word for rooster, and I was not about to help him—and no female voice on the radio, by which he meant Gloria, and I also told her in advance that it did not bother me if I was in charge of the radio, but I could predict that she would be offended. I told her I was relieving her of the conflict that would ensue if Kinski had a tantrum over her; I was ordering her, as her boss, not to use the radio anymore. For the few days we still had here, I would order the supplies from Iquitos myself. I tried in vain to make it clear to her that if working with Kinski made it necessary I would even paint my clapper board green; such things did not do anything to change the one and only goal for which we were all here and that we had lost sight of, namely, to make a film.
Kinski came toward me on a speedboat on the Camisea. He was bellowing and foaming at the mouth. As he stood in the bow, he flailed with his machete at an enemy only he could see. I heard him around two bends of the river before he reached me, screaming at the boatman in French. Apparently he had seen from the plane just before landing that the ship was still at almost the same spot by the river, but he did not realize that it was already tilted uphill. He screeched like a madman that I was a traitor that he would not participate in any shooting; he would see me in court in Los Angeles. The water level in the river had gone down unbelievably, so much so that we had to climb out of the speedboat in some spots to get past shallow areas. I listened to Kinski, but as I did so was mechanically bailing out the boat with a tin plate. The forest, likewise silent, absorbed the high decibels like me with a certain ease. But Kinski is falling apart; there is nothing holding him together anymore.
Camisea, 28–30 June 1981
Brisk work for the last three days. The day before yesterday we were already shooting at five-thirty in the morning, in the fog. The most important event: the ship is moving up the slope, swiftly; tomorrow it will reach the first muerto. Strangely enough, Walter gathered all the members of the Peruvian technical crew at this particular time, and they all announced that they were going on a solidarity strike unless I immediately broke the contract I had signed with Kinski that prohibited Gloria or any other woman from using the shortwave radio. Then Tercero, the bulldozer operator, delivered a bombastic, stupid lecture to the effect that he was a Peruvian and as such knew what honor was. I remarked that it was my radio, after all, and whether this impugned my honor or not, I could use it, and no one else. I also told him that I was the one who was paying him, not Walter. To judge by his surprise, that was news to him. I also asked Tercero to turn down his music at night, whether he stayed or not. Kinski’s often empty, ritualized gesticulating has now found a kind of Peruvian equivalent. Later I took Walter aside and told him that if he wanted to leave, he could of course do so, and I asked him what the last three years of work, which just now was taking an extraordinary leap forward, had been all about. What o
f the honor of the roosters, who no longer had a home with us and had to forgo the privilege of being warmed in our pots? Walter smiled, but in order to maintain his official posture, he said the work no longer interested him. Get over to the strip, and take all your people with you, I said, otherwise you will arrive too late for hauling the ship. When we did the towing, everyone was there, even Kinski, who favored us with one of his raving tantrums.
Then further outbursts of rage by Kinski because of the new photographer from Sygma, alternating with fits of weakness, which the doctor treats with remarkable restraint, since there is nothing wrong with Kinski. Then renewed threats from Kinski that he is going to leave immediately. The problem is very simple: at the moment the ship is more important than he is. But then, because he is impressed in spite of himself, he displays flashes of contagious enthusiasm. I staged an accident in which several Campas are mowed down by a turnstile that spins backward. Fitz comes running and pulls one of the wounded away, bleeding, and Kinski shrieked with bloody hands—the blood was in a cup at the accident site, concealed from the camera—calling so believably for help that the doctor, who was aware that it was just acting, was so alarmed that he jumped between the two cameras with his first-aid kit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this happening and managed to pull him down just in time; as they assured me later, it looked good, like a player sacking an opposing quarterback. The Campas applaud me after every day of shooting, and often after a particularly successful sequence, but this time they clapped both for Kinski and for my successful tackle. As they clapped for the ship, which toiled up the slope, groaning with resistance, without actors on board, Kinski again put on the air of one suffering from a fatal illness, and thus at least got the doctor’s attention. In the evening he was full of threats: he would see to it that the film was a bust; this was not the first time; he had already done this in dozens of cases. I listened to him unmoved, although I knew what a trail of destruction he has left behind him in his life. Then he threatened to do a whole lot of other things—he did not give a fig for the laws, and for the things he had already done he should have gone to jail long ago. Then he described what he had done to his two daughters, Pola and Nastassja, probably meaning that as a threat; for that alone he would have been given a twenty-year sentence in the U.S.; I should watch my back, he was not deterred by anything.
Most of the Indians are gone, and much seems empty and useless to me. Now that they are gone, I am left behind like an accident victim at the scene. Outside the frogs are bellowing. The shadows of moths around the lamp throw crazed patterns of fear on my table. As we got into the boat, I said to the team, I, Werner, son of Dietrich and Elisabeth, will finish this film.
The ship jerked, and with a groan that almost sounded human, the cables snapped. I was on board. Moving faster and faster and finally racing like a wounded animal, the ship slid back down the slope and hit the water like a torpedo. The slide continued for miles, there was no stopping it. Parts of the railing and the superstructure broke off and were tossed in the terrible waves the ship set in motion. I saw everything as if in slow motion, especially how the superstructure was torn off. Then the ship swung around and headed backward toward a place on a beach that was full of people. I wanted to shout, but the swimmers did not hear me. The ship plunged stern-first into the crowd, drilling itself deep into the sand, burying everyone without a sound, for no one cried out. Still in slow motion I saw the ship, like a biblical plowshare, throwing an ice cream stand into the air. Spinning around itself in terrible inertia, like a leaf slowly swirled from the ground, the stand flew over the beach. Then I saw the forty-meter-high water tower in Darwin, Australia, where the hurricane had whirled a refrigerator through the air. Forty meters above the ground the enormous container displayed a rectangular dent where the refrigerator had hit it.
In the air in his single-engine plane our pilot reads comics. At the moment the airfield in Camisea is so good, he says, that he would like to land the Concorde there. I saw Japanese who had scaled Mount Everest lighting up cigarettes on the peak, at eighty-eight hundred meters above sea level.
Camisea, 1 July 1981
We got up very early, when it was still dark and foggy, talking softly. Hot tea; silent figures; very slowly, the first shimmer of light. We had good fog, just as I had hoped. The ship on the foggy slope was like a primeval animal, asleep. While the fog lingered, I wanted to have the ship towed up to the muerto right away, but one of the lengthwise skids got hung up and would not move. Two hours later, when the obstacle had been worked on for a long time with chain saws, we tried it again, but with a terrible shudder one of the massive wheels in the winch broke, and the steel cable, crushed flat, became completely jammed. Because the repair can take an unspecified time, I decided to leave Vignati here with the camera as a second unit to film the ship when it reached the top. So I could send Kinski back to Iquitos in late morning.
At night on board the ship, resting at a steep angle, further work with Huerequeque, the Indian boys McNamara and El Comandante, as well as Miguel Ángel Fuentes and Paul. The people on board stood and moved vertically, but once it was dark night all around and the eye had lost any reference point, the picture was reversed: the ship was positioned horizontally, and only the people were standing on an extreme slant, as if there were something wrong with gravity. When we were back on even ground after work, gravity felt different to us, a new sensation.
Camisea—Iquitos, 2 July 1981
Up again at the crack of dawn. When the sun came out, I saw the following: a rainbow partially shrouded in fog had one end in the Camisea, right by the bend from which we wanted to tow the ship, and arched over the mountain in the direction of the Urubamba. To a man we all understood this to be an omen, looked at each other in silence and went to work with a sense of lightness. During the night the pulley block had been replaced, and so early in the day we towed the ship eleven meters uphill in sixty seconds, almost to the first muerto. All the conflict and everything that had been dammed up during the long, wearing years of working together vanished, and W. and I fell into each other’s arms.
In the afternoon flying to Iquitos, an orderly departure, an orderly arrival. For the first time in my life I rode a motorcycle through a movie theater. After the screening of the rushes, which I slept through, as I usually do, it was raining so hard that to shelter my motorcycle from the deluge I rode through a side entrance into the theater and past the screen, then up the middle aisle, past the rows of seats, then through the women’s restroom into the lobby, which was closed off with a grille, and there I left it.
Manaus, Brazil, 3–11 July 1981
Shooting in the Manaus opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, placed in demented tropical splendor in the middle of the rain forest by rubber millionaires at a time when there was hardly any town here. Kinski in total dissolution, on the point of collapse; no one will ever know what it cost me to prop him up, fill him with substance, and give form to his hysteria. Claudia Cardinale is a great help, though, because she is such a good sport, a real trouper, and has a special radiance before the camera. In her presence K. usually acts like a gentleman and certainly has his lovable moments. Werner Schroeter handled the staging of the end of Ernani, because to this day I have never been in an opera house as a member of the audience. When the baritone learned that Doña Elvira was going to be played by a transvestite from France, he withdrew in a huff to his hotel room and locked himself in for two days and two nights with the phone unplugged. He was indignant. In addition, Doña Elvira does not sing, but is merely lip-synched by Sarah Bernhardt, who has a wooden leg, while a fat singer in the orchestra pit matches her voice to her lip movements. Since we always shoot at night and during the day I am helping with the preparations, I hardly slept for almost a week; my memories are vague, as if of something very remote that I had heard rumors about.
Iquitos, 12 July 1981
No electricity, no water, everything unfamiliar, abandoned, empty. Last night I had a long conversati
on with Vignati on the radio. The ship is up the hill, and Walter insists that we should tow it down to the Urubamba without delay, or rather, let it slide, because that way we can save ourselves months of rental for the winch and steel cables. The only problem is that the Urubamba, usually ten or twelve meters deep, has only fifty centimeters of water at the place where the ship would have to glide in, and that would mean the ship would lie across the current until about October. It would dig itself deep into the sand, and a dramatic rise in the water level would then crush the immobilized ship. Walter also has no idea of Kinski’s state of inner dissolution, and in any case Kinski is back in the U.S. now.
I sneaked back and forth over the footbridge between my hut and the office, feeling as if I no longer belonged here. Lucki is the driving force now; I have no idea what I would do without him. Huerequeque is on the mend, though he has lost weight. The caged toucan shrieked despairingly and hoarsely behind me. Tracks of snakes, tracks of hogs; dust on everything; spiderwebs.
Spent almost the entire day in complete apathy, reading and sleeping, without doing one or the other properly. Deathly silence in the town, no one out on the street because it is census time. The birds kept still as if in exhaustion, the jungle did not stir, it was like a muggy July afternoon above fields of ripe grain shimmering in the heat. A desolate day out of which all life had been drained. In my hut, which is more and more empty, the sublime and the ghostly have taken up residence like siblings who no longer speak to one another.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 26