Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  In the discotheque into which someone pushed me it is so dark that the waiter collects the bill with a flashlight. The eyes of the girls you meet here are black on black, where the darkness is most intense. Shirt collars stand out as the most glaring ultra-white, and the writing on the most glaring pieces of paper is impossible to see. At the next table someone smashed his glass on purpose. The waiter brought me a beer and wanted to know whether we also wanted señoritas.

  At the Indians’ request, we bring chain saws, machetes, and shotguns to the Río Cenepa, as well as a large canister of poison for arrow tips. They no longer know how to make it themselves. Vivanco says they will pay for a spoonful with a gold nugget.

  Río Marañón, 1 July 1979

  Nauta. The entire afternoon spent going upstream on the Río Marañón; I never fully woke up, having not slept much, and because the speedboat is overloaded there was no place to stretch out except on the roof. The children along the banks speak Spanish with a strange rhythm. The canoes are tied up along the bank with ropes made from liana bark, which is very tough. People spend their days here watching the river. An archaic calm and composure in the mothers’ gestures as they pick over their children’s heads, searching for lice. They bite the lice in two with their front teeth. In the marketplace people are lying on the tables, sleeping. Life stands still. Only the river is in motion, flowing sluggishly. In the tavern the half-naked tavern keeper did not bring us anything, because an old man with ragged clothes and a squashed ear was massaging his neck. Women and children in white garments passed by outside; they belong to a sect.

  Evening, before sunset. Stopping in a village beyond the mouth of the Río Tigre. A silent wall of children was waiting for us. We hung the hammocks, which are all too small, under an unoccupied roof. Not a sound from the river, not the slightest; it flows in complete silence. I cannot hear it even though it is just a few steps away. We all have the flu. In the light of the moon, which is not even half full, your own body casts a clear shadow, which obediently shrinks when you tell it to heel. Faces seated around a flickering lantern. Growing restless, I had gone outside to see whether the river was still there. At night the rivers have a fever. Yet onions are lying on the table. Outside in the dark all that can be made out of the Indians are their fingers, with which they are holding on to the porch railing. For a long time I stared in the direction of the faces in the pitch dark, till the fingers gingerly let go of the railing and plunged into the night.

  Río Marañón, 2 July 1979

  A rest stop in the village of Saramuro, from where Huerequeque set out just ten minutes before we got there. We will catch up with him in the evening, because our boat is more powerful. All morning I dozed on the roof of the speedboat, next to me Walter, who was drunk as a skunk and was sleeping it off. Only when the boat hit big waves now and then did I wake up for a moment and see the jungle and isolated huts passing. Today the river is not carrying as much dangerous driftwood as the day before. In Saramuro Vivanco bought meat, half of a wild boar. It is heavily salted to prevent spoilage. When I spat into the water, a fish snapped up the floating spit, but let it drift up to the surface again a few meters downstream.

  Río Marañón, 3 July 1979

  Leaden, labyrinths of weariness with no escape. Lying on the roof again. Stopping in a village before the confluence with the Río Pastaza. In the evening sun I saw the mountains off in the distance as delicate, unreal pink strips. The village boys were having their evening soccer game, and the teacher, hardly more than a child himself, was playing with them. We asked him whether we could sleep in the school. And there we spent the night, with a blanket on the floor and a mosquito net over us. The teacher is walleyed, and while talking with him I try to focus on one of his eyes. In a hut next door they cooked a chicken for us. The school itself is a hut on stilts, with a thatched roof and a raised, bouncy floor made of tough liana bark, split lengthwise. Under the hut grunting pigs, a few chickens, ducks, and dogs, the last almost naked from mange. On the platform a slightly raised fireplace made of clay, with two stones positioned parallel to one another to support a rack, actually two iron bars. The fire never goes out; it glows all night long. The children stare at us silently with their dark eyes. Garbage is tossed right down to the pigs, and dishwater is simply poured through the floor. Swarms of parrots fly screeching toward the evening sun as if they had urgent business of which we are unaware.

  A local man had hollowed out a tree trunk and filled it with a hundred pounds of cocaine, which he set adrift. He followed the floating tree trunk for weeks in a dugout, until he reached Leticia, over the border in Colombia. There the trail of the drifting tree and its escort was lost.

  When I went into the forest to take a shit, a pig followed me, snuffling and waiting with shameless greed for my shit. Even when I threw sticks at it, the animal took only a few symbolic steps backward.

  During our trip on the river heavy rain had begun to fall. We looked in vain for the village of Delfus, which seems to have disappeared, either because the river swept it away or because the river has changed course, leaving Delfus far inland in the jungle. While searching for our gasoline drums in Saramiriza we learned that they were being stored farther downstream, and we found the boat Huerequeque and the drums on land. A good twenty people live by the hut there, almost all children. The ducks stand out in the rain, silent and motionless, thinking intently about nothing at all. In the kitchen hut there are two fireplaces, the earth very nicely raised on beams, so that the fires burn on a clay hearth. Hanging above it smoked meat, several slaughtered tortoises, on a rack the flat head of a huge fish.

  Río Marañón, 4 July 1979

  The hut was so thick with mosquitoes that I took my coffee outside, flailing my arm. At night the boat is full of them, too. Only when we move at top speed, creating a stiff breeze, do the mosquitoes hold still, hiding in corners from the wind. Huerequeque arrived last night, and we loaded the wooden boat with nine drums of gasoline. I doubt the boat will make it through the Pongo de Manseriche rapids. I bought a few grams of gold dust in a little medicine bottle with a cork stopper. In Saramiriza the entire riverbank had been washed away, and soon the village will be swept away, too. An attempt was made to reinforce the oil depot with iron braces, but now the supports are standing in water, with the shore completely gone.

  A small green parrot with a yellow breast and black crest landed on my finger and preened. Its feet, gripping my finger, are very warm. A yellow-spotted kitten was lying outside in the dirt, dying. I could tell immediately from the way it was lying on its stomach, its hind paws stretched out. Bubbles of foam were bursting around its mouth, and it was racked by convulsions. When I moved away, the mother cat came and licked the kitten for a while, but then wandered off. Chickens came and began to eat the kitten, which was still alive, but soon let it be. A duckling came over, peeping, but at that point the kitten had almost stopped moving. On the large, smooth leaves of a banana plant droplets form; they are the color of silver balls. Wood and gold are the kitchen words. A fragment of speech floated to me on a rain shower; the Italians had apparently found gold in the Pongo. Next to me a parrot screeched and giggled like a human being. It kept calling in Spanish, “Run, Aureliano,” and would not stop. It was like the soundtrack of a Woody Woodpecker film. “Birds are smart, but they cannot speak,” Fitzcarraldo would teach his parrot to say in the film. The dead drag the living down with them.

  In the godforsaken garrison of Borja, below the rapids, an Indian soldier was reading Clausewitz in a Spanish translation. In the Pongo, our engine died twice because the waves buffeted the boat so hard that the gas tank was ripped off. The first time it happened, the boat rammed into the cliffs, because without the engine it could not be steered. The water level in the Pongo is rising, and it is hard to imagine that the large wooden boat with the gasoline drums can make it through. Still completely numbed from the immense power and fury of the rapids, when we reached the Pinglo garrison, I finally washed my hair; in
the last few days it had become all matted.

  In the Río Santiago the body of a soldier who had been shot came floating along, on his back, swollen, the legs bent at the knees and the arms bent likewise; he looked as if he were raising his hands. Birds had already hacked out his eyes and eaten away part of the face. The comandante here advised letting him float by—so as to avoid any trouble; they would have to deal with him farther downstream. He gave the swimmer a gentle nudge with his boot, and the corpse spun around once before the current took hold of him.

  In the evening we reached Santa Maria de Nieva as the last light was fading. On the way the boat ran aground and the propeller broke. While we were tied up on the bank replacing it, Indians watched us through the branches from their nearby hut, remaining silent and motionless, and they remained motionless as we set out again, going upstream. In Nieva, Jaime de Aguilar showed us gold dust, which he had folded neatly into a piece of stationery. The comandante in Pinglo makes hundreds of his Indian recruits pan for gold in the Río Santiago, and he already owns sixty-five beer bottles filled with gold dust. I saw youthful soldiers working on a sandbank.

  For the first time I saw cacao, freshly harvested. I peeled the kernel, which looks like a large, misshapen bean, and was disappointed by the bitter taste, for what is inside looks like chocolate. Our canister with twenty-six kilos of pure curare, for poisoning arrow tips, made a great impression. For a spoonful of this black, sticky mass, you can get yourself a woman to marry, I was told in a respectful whisper by a boatman, as he cleaned his toes with a screwdriver. Here all the proportions are off; the fishhooks in the little general store are as big as my palm, and bigger. The Indians paint their faces black, which makes them invisible.

  Santa Maria de Nieva—Río Cenepa, 5 July 1979

  Santa Maria de Nieva. W. dreamed he had received a whole zoo as a gift, and when all the animals escaped soon afterward, he had seen Vivanco rowing in a canoe with one of the escaped animals, but on a road, without water, rather than a river. The animals, once rounded up, were all slaughtered. During the night there was such a loud rushing sound that I thought it was raining, but it was the rushing of the Marañón. In the rafters above my bed cats were fighting furiously, with deafening howls; it went on for hours. Indians leaned on the windowsills and looked in at us impassively as we got up and had breakfast. A boy of about five joined our men’s circle at the table, quite matter-of-factly, as if he had belonged for a long time, and now and then chimed in with questions. Overnight, to judge by the crowing crescendo that swelled to a terrible roar, the roosters became giants. Up in the church a small cluster of Aguarunas, all members of a sect, were reciting their morning prayers, their arms crossed over their chests. To the left a Peruvian flag hung above them.

  Sailing up the Marañón. Before the confluence with the Cenepa there is a very beautiful Pongo through the last mountain chain. As we arrived in Orellana, the young men were playing soccer, among them the teacher. Today the village is known once more by its Indian name, Wawaim. Apparently rumors are swirling around to the effect that we are planning to dig a canal from the Río Cenepa to the Río Marañón, and that that will dry up the fields. A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no. A child had been bitten by a snake; I heard the mother wailing; she was crying, people told me, but it was a song of lament. Relatives arrived and an older woman joined in the singing. The child was lying on the floor in a hut, very quiet and solemn. Vivanco came running with medicine and tried to find out what kind of snake it had been, so he could administer the right serum.

  We ate at the house of the teacher, who has a table, whereas the women and children crouch on the floor. The salt was a flat brick, hard as a rock, from which we tried to scrape a bit, but we were given to understand that we should dunk the whole slab in the soup. The chicken was so tough that it was practically impossible to bite off a piece. Walter said it was a Formula–1 chicken. Aside from papayas there is almost no fruit here, no beer, which you find everywhere else, no coffee, no general store, but they do have yucca, corn, bananas, some chickens, no pigs, not much fish. The people’s gestures are unfamiliar, gentle and lovely; they move their hands like orchestral conductors in time with a soft, shy melody that emanates cautiously from the depths of the forest, like wild creatures that emerge from the sheltering leaves now and then to go down to the rivers.

  A spot on the bank of the Río Cenepa glowed in yellow and orange, and upon approaching I saw that it was a huge swarm of butterflies. We had to turn back because of a storm. Something entirely different is brewing on the nearby border with Ecuador; the Cordillera del Condor, visible from here in the misty, steaming forest, forms a natural barrier. There is a strong military presence, and a mortally afraid Indian soldier, not more than seventeen, fired a shot at our boat on the Cenepa; it struck the water near us. All those in the boat froze. I was about to slip into the water, but was then embarrassed and decided not to, because the young man seemed much more shocked at having shot at us than we in the boat were, his target. Here you have to show identification everywhere, even the Indian natives. The white people, the teacher told me, have always come to plunder, never for any other reason. A few months ago a lieutenant in the Peruvian army went berserk at a remote outpost on the Río Santiago. He declared war on Ecuador and attacked with twenty-four soldiers. He advanced over thirty kilometers into enemy territory along the river’s upper reaches, and apparently it cost a great deal of effort to go after him and bring him back.

  Wawaim, 6 July 1979

  For the night I had fixed myself a bed by laying flexible sugarcanes on a half-collapsed frame. In the part of the school that serves as a storage area, there is hardly room to sit—no table, just a few gasoline drums filled with stuff. Under my sleeping platform was a pile of hundreds of cheap sectioned plastic plates, the kind used in prisons. These absurdly inappropriate gifts from the Alliance for Progress are stamped with the American flag and a handshake logo. The plastic plates have a round indentation for plastic cups, but the cups are missing. I noticed that here even plastic rots, like all the organic matter. In the morning I woke up feeling the silent eyes of children watching me at close range through the loose wall slats.

  We discovered that Walter’s tape recorder had been stolen, as well as all the money Vivanco had been carrying. Some other things had disappeared, too, and everything had been rummaged through. Vivanco said nothing had ever been taken from him in an Indian village, and for that reason we wondered at first whether the thefts might have occurred while our stuff was being inspected at the Teniente Pinglo garrison or in Urakusa at the military outpost, where our papers had been checked, but we were soon able to eliminate that possibility. Jaime de Aguilar discovered that five or six adolescent boys were probably involved, and later in the day some of the money turned up on a bench, folded into a page from a school notebook. We did not want to make a big deal of it, because our position remains delicate until we can explain our intentions at a community meeting. With all the rumors flying around, with the pressure created by the military presence, whose effect on the people exacerbates the situation, and with the problems the oil company has created with its pipeline project—what is going to happen to us? An additional factor is that the community here is very split politically and furthermore under pressure from a political alliance that wants to extend its influence to Wawaim by means of threats and acts of violence. I was so starved for salt that I ate a whole handful; then I sharpened a machete in the company of several young men who were sharpening theirs. One of them used his machete to shave his sparse facial hair.

  Before the meeting got under way, a wild hubbub erupted. Vivanco and I were told we had to present our wishes and our plan in tandem. Another argument broke out over who would translate, and eventually the translating was done by someone affiliated with the Indian council from farther downriver, wh
o, as Jaime de Aguilar told us afterward, having listened from close by, had intentionally distorted the meaning of our words and even translated some parts completely wrong. He wanted to play himself up as a protector of the comunidad. It was crucial that we be prevented from digging a canal that would partially transform the settlement into an island. Among some in the crowd a brand of hostility sprang up that I had encountered previously only in the reports of early seafarers, except that now the natives were wearing “John Travolta Fever” and “Disneyland” T-shirts. It ended with everyone shouting at me and making menacing gestures, and one man brandished a spear and forced his way toward me, snorting furiously. He thrust the spear right at my belly, but retracted it with only centimeters to spare. Somehow I realized that this was just a sort of ritual attack, and to my own astonishment I stood there very calmly. A soft murmur spread through the crowd, expressing admiration, either for the fine pantomime of the feigned attack or for the composure of the apparent victim. Vivanco conducted himself remarkably in the situation, remaining self-controlled, friendly, modest. All of this has a long prehistory, of course: these people have been robbed and abused, their gold and oil taken from them. There have been border conflicts and political factions that aspired to impose an imported ideology based on the futile dream of a great revolution, an ideology making a last-ditch effort to find a home in this region. All fathers of families are eligible to participate in the communal deliberations, and I noticed that the overwhelming majority were boys, hardly older than fifteen. At that age most of them are fathers already.