I had Lucki explain the financial situation to me, and it is much grimmer than I wanted to admit to myself earlier. Tidying up, doing accounts, new timelines with Lucki. I burned papers by the kilo, all of which had great value in their time and now are merely ballast.
Iquitos, 13 July 1981
In the gray of dawn, I rode out to the Nanay. The early swamp birds were screeching as if they did not want day to come, and in the first, cold light many sleepy people came toward me, heading into town on foot. In the evening a garbled radio message from Camisea reached me, from which I gathered that there were problems there.
Iquitos—Lima, 14 July 1981
News from the camp somewhat clearer. Apparently Trigozo tried to confiscate the Caterpillar and prevent the shooting. Two policemen are supposed to have turned up at the camp, but then the situation calmed down. Virginia and Sylvia were scheduled to pick me up at the airport, to get me a microphone and several rolls of raw stock for the rest of the shooting on the Camisea, but at first they were not there. When they finally turned up, they had neither the film nor the microphone, although it had all been arranged several days ago and I had been told everything was ready. Lima cold, rainy, and hateful, as always. The slick waiter in the Argentinean restaurant glanced at my pants, etched by the jungle, and at first did not want to give me a table; allegedly everything was reserved, although the restaurant was almost empty.
Lima—San Ramón—Camisea, 15 July 1981
In the morning there was real brewed black coffee, which seemed a special delicacy after all the Nescafé, especially in Brazil. Flight in a twin-engine SASA plane over the Andes, almost brushing the snow-covered peaks. We were given thin hoses with oxygen, since the plane did not have a pressurized cabin. Tomislav was waiting for me in San Ramón, and first we hung around there for a while because his plane’s engine had to wait to be inspected. We made a brief stopover in Atalaya, and I picked up Peruvian soles, packed in such tight bundles that you could have killed someone with them.
When we landed in Camisea, we were received with silence at first, but gradually people thawed. On the way there Tomislav had already given me more details on what had happened. On Monday Pedro Morey had brought lunch to the trocha, the cleared strip, but the meat had gone bad, a scene reminiscent of the situation in Battle-ship Potemkin, where spoiled meat sparks a mutiny among the crew. Walter flew off the handle and fired Pedro on the spot, and Trigozo as well, because both of them had been increasingly neglecting their duties as administrators of the Indian camp. All the remaining Indians had worked extremely hard and hauled the ship the final distance to the top of the hill, but Trigozo treated them with complete disdain because he no longer detected the authority emanating from a fully staffed technical team. Trigozo’s Peruvian honor was offended by the firing, and he tried to incite the Machiguengas in Shivankoreni. He also went to Nueva Luz and brought from there confused Machiguengas who had never had anything to do with us. It was not easy to make out what he had told them, but at any rate he occupied the lower camp that evening, placed an armed guard outside the office, raised the Peruvian flag, and saw himself as master of the situation. The next morning the Caterpillar was surrounded by armed men, and one of them took possession of the key, without knowing that the Caterpillar could be started without it. Vignati was forbid-den by these usurpers of authority to film the ship. When Walter pushed some of them aside and started up the Caterpillar, one of them fired a shot in the air. At that Gloria, who tends to exaggerate, called Satipo on the radio to request help. That same day twelve Sinchis flew in, the elite antiterrorist squad, without knowing what was going on; apparently they expected to be received by a hail of bullets, and were accordingly dressed in terrifying getups. They even had light machine guns, hand grenades, and submachine guns, but I cannot rid myself of the suspicion that they had been idle for a long time and were using this occasion as a training exercise. All of Camisea had immediately gone into hiding. When I landed, six Sinchis strolled toward me in camouflage, young figures in top condition with slow movements and alert eyes, imbued with the sense of being the best of the best. Their leader strolled, his phallus erect under his battle trousers, among his athletic fighters, all Indians, by the way. The captain, it turned out, was smart and levelheaded, and promptly called a meeting in the camp to get all the facts. He immediately sided with the people from Nueva Luz, who complained that one of our people had touched a woman’s genitals. The matter was investigated right away, and it soon turned out that it was our medic, the one who had saved the woman who had gone around for eleven days with a dead fetus in her womb. The captain wanted to arrest Trigozo, who had told the Machiguengas all sorts of lies, but fortunately I was able to prevent that. The capitán’s profound insights into the Indians’ mentality and his attentive, alert calm impressed me. He assured the Machiguengas that they could call on him for help and protection any time, and when he left Shivankoreni, it was as calm as though nothing had ever happened. Still, I can well imagine the aftermath in the press.
Camisea—San Ramón, 16 July 1981
Long discussion with Walter and Vignati. The Shell Oil Company plans to get a foothold in the area, and there is even a plan to build a pipeline. I was shocked at how fast this will happen. The Machiguengas had been asking me for my support for a long time as they tried to acquire legal title to their land between the two rivers, so they could keep out loggers, gold prospectors, and oil companies, but the problem is that there has been no survey done to establish the boundaries of their territory. We decided to bring in a geographer from Lima to make a map that can be used as the basis for their land claims. Further decisions as to how our work is to continue simultaneously at different locations. I managed to persuade Walter to haul the ship over the relatively flat terrain on top of the slope before it plunges steeply down to the Urubamba, but insisted that he not lose his head, with the destination so near, and let the ship glide into the river without cameras and without actors. During our months-long absence an indigenous family would have to live on the ship; otherwise on our return we would find everything dismantled, and another family would have to live on the Huallaga, below the Pongo. So we have two identical ships, one on a mountain, the other on a gravel bank, both now with firm ground under their keels. We will continue working in different locations: Walter and Vignati first by the Narinho, and Lucki, with whom I spoke by radio, will fly to
L.A. to see to the supplementary contract with Kinski for October or November, while I will go to N.Y. to sift through the material in the film lab, and then to L.A. myself.
Before my departure we played soccer against the Indians from Shivankoreni, and lost. In the heat of the afternoon I was immediately drenched in sweat and was panting for breath. I took a young Indio from Nueva Luz with me on the plane, someone I had never seen before. He presented himself as a student, but in the hotel later he gave his profession as missionary.
In the evening I went into San Ramón on foot, into town. Indios from the highlands. A fat, whitish moon heaved itself up the mountain slope. You could smell the fires set to clear the jungle all around. There was a smell of stale urine. Children at a table next to me in a café were doing their homework, writing clumsily in a notebook. On the Plaza de Armas I saw a procession of children carrying paper lanterns. In front was a band, and the youthful musicians marched in military formation—in Prussian goosestep. An Indio from the highlands wearing a miner’s helmet slapped a shocked schoolboy hard, and—only then did I notice that he was probably insane—went looking for his next unsuspecting victim, took up a position before him, screamed at the surprised youth, and struck him with terrible, brutal rage. I watched him look for the next one, and then other people noticed what was going on and intervened, after which I left. On the ugly, two-lane bridge with iron supports stood a little girl of seven in her school uniform and silently reached out her hand with a half-eaten orange toward me. Last night around three I woke up in the camp. The moon was lighting up a pale haze over the slopes, and i
t suddenly became clear to me that I had to film this unrepeatable moment. I also had the feeling that Kinski was there. I leaped out of bed, naked, ran out onto the porch, and shouted, Jorge, Jorge Vignati into the night. Nothing stirred, and I called, Walter, Walter, get everybody up! And then I realized that I was standing there with my eyes open and only now really woke up. But I had seen the camp so clearly. In the uninhabited cabins lightbulbs are burning.
July—October 1981
Editing in Munich. Before I left Peru, I took two elected representatives of the Machuengas from Shivankoreni to Lima, where we had an audience with President Belaunde to talk about the legal title to their territory. Afterward the two men wanted to see the ocean, and we drove there. They cautiously tasted the water, which they knew would be salty. Then they got two empty bottles from a restaurant on the shore and waded, fully clothed, into the waves until the water came up to their chests. They filled the bottles, capped them carefully, and brought them home as proof that they had seen the ocean. The financial situation remained tense, but was not as dramatic as it had been for long stretches earlier. Another single-engine plane crashed, with serious injuries again, but all the passengers survived.
Camisea, 18 October 1981
Not until I was in the boat yesterday sailing up the Camisea did I come to my senses and realize, jerked out of the strange, unreal state I had been in, where I was and what I was doing. Before that I was in a fog. I climbed out of the small plane with such pressure in my ears that for a long time I could not hear anything and thought I was in a dream. The team’s camp is going to rack and ruin. Walls are falling down. Any building material from the jungle has been reclaimed by the jungle. Dust and dry leaves in the houses, the water ran dry months ago, and the porcelain sinks and toilets have a thick layer of dirt. The Camisea is as smooth as when we left, and the Urubamba has just as little water. After the most terrible rainy season in sixty-five years the region now had the worst drought in human memory. The hanging bridge of lianas leading to Kinski’s cabin can be used only with caution. In his washroom the floor has caved in. In Shivankoreni the beans were being harvested and dried. The women beat them out of the dry, rustling shells and separate the chaff in the wind. I was received with unusual warmth.
There seem to be more birds, and they are louder. Animals are in the camp, a little monkey with round saucer eyes; he always looks as though he were saying, “Fitzroy was here.” Then a small, yellow-brown songbird, not quite ready to fly; he peeps at me, runs after me, hops onto my toes when I walk, and is constantly weaving around between my legs, so much so that I am afraid of stepping on him. He thinks I am his mother. Today he sat on my hand for a long time, chirping at me, and when I put him on the table because I had to go he was beside himself. Our parrot is still here, and introduced herself by name, Aurora. The two black monkeys, including Tricky Dick, who had roles in the film, were eaten by the Campas before they left. There are three young women in the camp who belong to the boatmen.
Quispe, who has had his shoulder-length hair cut short, fixed up my room yesterday. It was in a sorry state. The mattress was moldy and soaked through, the door half ripped off its hinges, my bookshelf half dismantled. Someone pulled a board off, and now nails are sticking out. The river seems to be waking up; there are small dots of foam on the surface, and its color has changed to a washed-out dark olive, and the water seems to be moving a bit more briskly, but that may be an illusion. Yesterday the river seemed to be standing still. On the Urubamba I saw a little driftwood today, a sign that it is rising somewhat. It is still problematic to sail up the Camisea, even in small boats. Right above Shivankoreni it is so shallow in one place that it is hardly possible to get through. In the camp are: El Tigre, the old Chinese cook, the Sanitario, Quispe, three boatmen, including the dreamer, Pedro, the machinist who got the Caterpillar started today, and a few others. Today Tercero was supposed to arrive from Pucallpa, but he could not be found. Walter and I wanted to go up to the Pongo today to get a replacement for Julian on the Huallaga, where he had been living, also taking upriver a speedboat motor, groceries, and fuel. We hung around in Camisea for a few hours, but the promised plane did not show up, so we drank masato with the teacher and gave up on our plan. Over the radio we got more precise information on Tercero: he had impregnated one of the kitchen girls, had gone underground in Tarapoto, and had appeared again only in response to calls over the radio.
At night the camp was filled with the boatmen’s male hooting and joking. The motorista, who is lacking his incisors, played dances from the highlands on a strange, thin, long harmonica. I was awakened by the noise, but then slept almost twelve hours, having gone to bed at seven-thirty in the evening. During the day the camp now resembles an Indian settlement; it is quiet and holidaylike, as the villages are all year long. A cautious melancholy hangs over the whole place, like places remembered from childhood that have changed in the meantime.
Camisea, 19 October 1981
I had photos with me for El Tigre. He had not been home in two years, having worked for two years in a logging camp before he joined us. He had also never taken his quarterly vacation, to which he was entitled and during which we would have continued to pay him. When he got home, he found his wife had run off with another man. He went to his mother-in-law and said, I am going to take you, then. And that he did, but he did not last more than a week with her. Then he went to Pucallpa, tracked down his wife, bought her three hundred cases of beer, took her back to his native village, and set her up in a stand that sold drinks. Chino had a similar story: when he returned to Iquitos, his wife told him, Now you have money; buy me a sewing machine. He did so. A week later his wife ran away with another man, and the sewing machine.
Large green lizards are rustling in the leaves. Fish leap out of the water as if they actually belonged to the clouds in the sky. It is only through writing that I become myself. At the other end of the camp someone is hammering a board, and the sound comes back in a hollow echo from the forest. The forest does not accept these sounds. Last night there were thousands of winged creatures hovering around the lamps, raging in wild swarms like spherical catastrophes around the lightbulbs. One could eat only with the light switched off. In the morning, by the boat landing, where a more powerful lamp has been installed, there were piles of wings on the ground, like a snowdrift. Everywhere spiders have spun their webs under the roof, near the electric light, and with such a surfeit of prey they cannot attend to every captured gift; they have taut bellies, as plump as cherries.
Camisea—Pucallpa—Iquitos, 20 October 1981
The ship, the Narinho, is suspended only a few meters from the edge of the slope that leads down to the Urubamba. Finally tracked down by calls on the shortwave radio, Tercero showed up. Not only had he impregnated one of the cooks in the camp; by his own account, he had left Tarapoto for Chasuta, where he lay around drunk for three months and made all the females pregnant that, as he said, came within reach. With us, he assured us, he was fortunately safe from women.
Iquitos, 21 October 1981
Telex to Munich; for hours there was no way to get through. In the afternoon I disappeared into the abysses of sleep. I ran into Gloria, and she told me quickly that she was anemic, the little one had diarrhea, and she was pregnant again. With that she crossed herself, got up from the table, and hurried upstairs. I read the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard in an English translation. The really moving letters are Heloise’s, full of boldness and tragedy.
Iquitos, 22 October 1981
The decisions have been made: we start shooting again on 1 November; otherwise Cardinale, Kinski, and Lewgoy would not be available at the same time. Dear God, let the ship be afloat by then. The movie theater in town on the Plaza 28 de Julio has a new screen, which the owner showed me with pride. Between his feet and the rows of seats and also in front on the little wooden stage fat rats scampered in large numbers. Mugginess, humidity. The photos I have on the wall have curled up from the humidity and are all
mildewed, eaten away. The air hovers around bodies, dense and heavy. Above the forest a storm is gathering. The air is as fat as a pig, and lingers rigid and sweaty outside.
Lima, 24 October 1981
Costume try-ons with the conductor, Cuadros Barr, his orchestra, the singers, the chorus, for the staging of Bellini’s I Puritani on board the ship when Fitz returns. After that I went looking for Janoud, who has moved, and whose address I did not know exactly. According to W., at one and the same time his Swiss girlfriend turned up, wanting to domesticate him into a good Swiss, and Silvia, the Dutch woman, who in that respect is more broad-minded. I forced my way through several front gardens to the windows of locked-up houses, and peeked inside, but a quick look at the furniture allowed me to cross them off the list. Finally I came to a rear house, where there was not much to be seen, except that there were Dutch coffee filters in the kitchen; the lettering on the package immediately struck me as foreign, and that told me this was where Janoud was living, and furthermore, he was with the Dutch surgical nurse. As Walter told me, Janoud had thrown both women out and told them they should be so kind as to work things out between them, but Walter did not know what the outcome had been. I left a note stuck in the door and was not surprised when Janoud turned up with Silvia in the restaurant to which I had invited Cuadros Barr. Janoud hoisted me in the air and gave a shout that turned into crazy, terrifying laughter, which shocked the dignified waiters in their tuxedos, but then they shook off their dignified air and joined the uproarious laughter. Janoud had had typhus, and felt even more like an iron rod than before, though he had regained most of his earlier weight.
Cuadros Barr told me he had been riding a horse and had seen a snake in the grass that was pursuing a fleeing rat. Rats were very fast, he said, but the snake had been even faster, faster even than his briskly trotting horse.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 27