Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  Today Walter and I are going to fly to Lima to take care of the most important bureaucratic details. There is also an aerial photo-graph of the Río Camisea and the Río Urubamba waiting for us that will presumably provide more exact information on the terrain’s geographical features. For the end of the week I have booked a seat on the plane from Iquitos to Manaus, and from there I will make my way somehow to Rio; it is not possible to reserve a flight to Brazil because there are no telephone connections. My urinalysis revealed an abnormally high number of leukocytes, which may indicate an infection.

  Lima, 16 July 1980

  Lima cold and awful, damp and foggy. Lunch in a pseudo-Florentine restaurant run by a Chinese. A blind beggar woman begged so insistently with her dead eyes fixed on me that I recoiled. She had a child in her lap who also stared at me wordlessly. From midday on, news began to dribble in that there had been a military coup in Bolivia, and soon the city was filled with rumors to the effect that in this country, too, the military were planning a coup because of the strikes taking place everywhere. Although we still have a number of things to attend to, we decided to fly back to Iquitos before the airport could be closed, because Iquitos is an island in the jungle without any overland connection to the outer world. At the airport some army trucks were parked ominously, ready to be deployed. They were full of young Indian soldiers, who looked out from under the tarpaulins, silent and scared.

  Met Janoud, who was allegedly out in the highlands for three months. We laughed a lot. Our friendship has stood the test of time. We talked about Munich, about the winter, about snow. I remember seeing Janoud sitting in my basement at three in the morning, with night and snow outside, and the cellar was freezing because he had mislaid the key I had given him, yet again, and had broken a window to get in. Janoud had pulled a woolen cap down over his ears and was bending over a light box, sorting photos, so absorbed that I had to call him several times from outside. Finally he looked up and stared at me with a face that was filled with the jungle and the Indian markets in his photos. He did not recognize me because I did not fit into the scenery of his images and thoughts. In the morning I went into his room. It seemed he had not gone to bed at all because he had to leave that morning. He was standing and staring motionless into an open wardrobe, which was empty. I greeted him, but he did not hear me. I tried to speak with him, but his gaze was stuck so far inside the dark, empty wardrobe that he did not register my presence.

  Iquitos, 17 July 1980

  In the afternoon a heavy tropical rain pelted down, and I was surprised to see that even during the cloudburst the vultures continued to circle. As if felled by a fever, I could not shake off the notion that a press conference had taken place at which only three reporters had appeared, among them a shapelessly fat woman who tormented me with such pointless questions that I finally lost my temper and hurled my glasses into the grass. I knew this was the only thing that would be reported, and I sat there as if paralyzed and stared at my radio, waiting for the terrible moment when the incident about the sunglasses would be broadcast. I was damned to immobility, frozen, and the terrible thing was that now time also stood still, and the only thing that could get it moving again would be this report. Then Janoud sighed, the way dromedaries sigh in their sleep. Had his mother been on an oasis while she was pregnant with him, surrounded by sighing dromedaries? People do say that the Indians are certain that hummingbirds, which whir their wings unimaginably fast, have more than just their own life.

  Bats are nesting in the top of the house, and before dark they fly out through the vents and flutter aimlessly around the house. We were sitting outside, batting silently at the mosquitoes all around us. A girl from the neighborhood came by and wanted Gustavo to see her, and Gustavo made a very indecent remark to the girl, barely fifteen. All she said was ay diosito, oh, lordy, and ran off, but she wanted G. to follow her.

  In Belén a falling-down drunk followed me aimlessly, and I lost sight of him. As I was sitting for a while on the steps by the marketplace that lead down to the floating huts, suddenly he reappeared. I noticed him only because he urinated directly behind me, leaning on a post. The only reason he did not hit me was that his shirt was hanging out of his pants in front and diverted the stream. A tourist boat with blaring, overmodulated loudspeaker announcements passed by, but promptly turned in the Río Itaya and sailed away again, as if so much pura vida were too much to impose on anyone.

  Iquitos, 19 July 1980

  In Belén, which keeps exerting a pull on me for no reason, a woman was selling soup from a large tortoise shell. An older Chinese man was sitting nearby on a threshold and making frantic movements, as if he were drawing a thread out of the interior of his eye. He was insane, and thus cut off from all ordinary human behavior, and he was engrossed with such extreme exclusivity in what he was doing that he drew not only my attention but also that of all those who were eating the woman’s soup. As if under a compulsion we all stole glances at him, embarrassed at the thought that someone might catch us looking. I have never seen anything resembling the intensity with which he was pulling that imaginary thread out of his eye, and later, when I passed him on my motorcycle, he looked up slowly and stared me so penetratingly and so insanely in the face that it scared me. On the way I lost the wicker hamper I had tied on to the back of my motorcycle, and never noticed, pursued as I was by that gaze. Later I did not want to go back and look for it. The sky turned black and flickered silently with distant lightning. Once at home I got everything lying around outside under cover. The sky is fomenting an angry battle, plotting something dark and dreadful.

  One of the Brandenburg concertos that I sometimes play on a cassette always lures a little black bird to the window. It hops around on the wall outside, paying no heed to the fragments of broken Coke bottles stuck on the top to deter intruders, and woos the music with its song. For days I have apparently been writing the wrong date, but do not want to correct it, except that today the Olympics seem to have started somewhere, and then this: the bats are out, around the house and now close to my head as well.

  Iquitos, 20 July 1980

  Because of the strike there was a large rally today on the Plaza 28 de Julio, with speakers shouting and gesticulating the way Mussolini used to in the thirties. I went to the movies and saw a film in which a madman wanted to exterminate the race of blacks, but three muscular athletes stopped him. Toward the end, when a man burst into flames after being shot and ran off, a living torch, the entire movie house exploded in laughter. The cheering continued to the end of the film. On the way home, I stopped by a hut where a dark crowd of people was clustered outside a window. From inside came the sound of two thin fiddles, a rattle, and a monotonous flute. Dancing was going on inside, and when I cautiously pushed my way past the half-naked bodies to the window, I saw that the people inside were dancing around a seated plaster Jesus wearing a halo. Above him was a canopy made of mosquito netting, and around him were plastic flowers, stuck into the dirt floor. The dancers were holding handkerchiefs. I stared in through the window for a long time.

  In the office I noticed new black lines along the crack where the walls and the ceiling meet. Upon closer inspection I discovered they were freshly constructed termite tunnels. I poked into one of them with my ballpoint, and termites came tumbling out; they were very surprised. Before I left the city, I was stopped on my motorcycle, which still does not have a license plate—I thought that was why the two policemen had stopped me. But one of them merely turned the key with an apologetic shrug, killing the engine. The big flag was being taken down, and a nervous honor guard fired a salvo, while two trumpeters tried in vain to blow a melody at the same time.

  At dusk I rode the motorcycle to the airport, and, as usual at this time of day, flies, bugs, and other insects came to life and flew into my face, my hair, and also into my collar and down my shirt. Hours later on the plane I could still feel bugs scrabbling inside my underwear where I could not get at them. The flight was overbooked, and three
passengers were assigned to the same seat next to me. Two of them were accommodated somehow, but the third spent the entire flight in back by the toilets.

  Rio de Janeiro, 21 July 1980

  At night I woke up in Cattaneo’s apartment and when I saw that the clock was showing three-thirty had the dreadful feeling that it was afternoon already, and I had slept through the entire night and half the day, and had missed everything. In my confusion I was not sure what that everything was, but there was no question it was vitally important. I lay there with my eyes open, unable to move, and listened to the traffic streaming by outside. Then I peeked through the blinds and saw a deep blue sunny sky, rocky islands, and swimmers. The clock still mercilessly showed half-past three, and it was too late for everything. Why, oh why, had they shown so much consideration for me and not called me for breakfast? Finally I forced myself to get up and open the window. Outside it was night. My clock by now said four, but it was four in the morning. From then on I woke up every half hour; I had been warned deep inside, my leaden exhaustion disturbed.

  Spent the actual day restlessly. In the evening I went to one of the finest hotels here and crashed the vernissage for a lousy artist. No one realized that I was not invited, so I drank several of the cock-tails being served. I sat down between a large fern in a terra-cotta pot and a column, so as to be undisturbed. Tiredness. I felt a great weight dragging, dragging me down, and had the sense I was involved in something that exceeded my abilities and my strength, something I was not made for. This sense was so overwhelming that I was glad to be able to sit. I stayed there a long time, which seemed to provide some relief from the weight. Then an elegant young woman wanted to discuss art with me; what kind of art, I barked, and she said something confused about my hostility to art per se.

  Rio de Janeiro, 21–26 July 1980

  Very early in the morning the cripples bathe at the beach. Then young houseboys and nannies all in white take the rich people’s babies out for a stroll. The baby carriages form clumps where the infants’ employees gather to chat. Gisela Storch arrived, and we immediately went to check out the costume depot here, a thoroughly sobering experience. In the evening stayed late at Carlos Diegues’s. Glauber Rocha was nowhere to be found, and Rui Guerra is apparently in São Paulo. I learned that Armando was still living in his old house, whose foundations the excavations for the new subway missed by a hair. All the other buildings around it were torn down, I heard, and he was killing himself with alcohol.

  On the beach, boys launch kites that they let sail over the promenade and the street and flutter among the high-rises. One fell and got tangled in a VW bus, which dragged the nylon cord along till it broke. The kite was dangling from the front bumper and ended up under the bus, where it fluttered crazily, trying to break free. It was banging back and forth so violently that the vehicle stopped in the middle of traffic, and the passengers got out and cut the line.

  São Paulo, 27–28 July 1980

  At the screening of Every Man for Himself and God Against All the hall was so overcrowded that during the discussion that followed, to which even more people came, those trying to force their way in pressed so hard against those standing that people were fainting, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that they could be carried outside. Once it was all over, I went with some of the people to a house where they sang to drive away the shadows.

  Belém do Pará, 29 July 1980

  Into town with Gisela; because there is no sense of history, only a panting, sweating present, there is no hope of finding any historical costumes here. A sense of the uselessness of everything I am doing; the most important things are happening elsewhere. We went to the editorial offices of the Jornal a Provincia do Pará to get some information, but all we found were large fans, bored editors drinking caipirinha, and everything at a standstill. No one was working. The typewriters upended on wooden typing tables from the thirties, rather like beached boats. Then to the radio station, where many people were trying to get in for the live broadcast by the King of Radio, or at least that was how he was announced, though he looked more like a pimp, draped in gold chains, his shirt unbuttoned down to his waist, his hair pomaded. A woman had a seriously malnourished little child lying on her lap, wearing a woolen cap, its eyelids drooping. It was too weak to cry, and the infant’s eyes seemed to express the knowledge that it was going to die. The woman said into the microphone that her neighbor had simply abandoned the child outside. She was always drunk, and instead of her breast she had given the child cachaça. Brandy! Brandy! shouted the King of Radio, and punctuated the rest of the woman’s story with the exclamation Cachaça…Cachaça. The studio audience, all poor folks, none of them wearing shoes, responded enthusiastically to the King’s shouts, while the child unobtrusively died a bit more. Now the King, enthralled with himself, shouted, That whore! The woman who had taken in the neighbor’s baby was barely given a chance to talk about herself—that she already had twelve children of her own—because the King struck up a rhythmic chant of The whore! The whore! Our appeal for clothes worn by people’s grandparents was not read until after we had left.

  Outside it was dark already, and on the street, where everything was still steaming from a hard rain, two cables belonging to a high-tension line had snapped and were touching on the paving. Sparks flew, there was a fierce cracking sound, and the cables sprang apart, thrashing in the air, and touched again. Amid flashes they jolted apart even more violently, and the people on the street were afraid to go by until the cables, more and more crazed, spewed forth flames and tumbled from the pylons.

  Belém do Pará, 30 July 1980

  I sent off mail, hoping for a change that it would not arrive, because this is a time of padlocked hearts. No one came in response to our appeals, and I said to Gisela, whose mere presence makes her a witness to such a defeat, that if here no one came, in Manaus we could not expect even half of no one to come. Toward evening lovers meet in the park by the bandstand. Night descends very quickly. The universe’s light simply burns out, and then it is gone. The light just goes missing here. Under a fan a slight, dark local poet sat writing, but no one in this city ever seems to read; there is not a single bookstore for a million inhabitants. Life is dragging us down. I weighed myself in a pharmacy and found I was too heavy. The delicate needle on the scale moved more and more slowly, and it was almost a minute before it finally stood still, as if my weight were increasing the longer I stood on the scale. Maybe, I thought, the scale also weighs one’s thoughts.

  Belém do Pará, 31 July 1980

  A touch of fever in the morning. We drove about eighty kilometers by car to look for an old locomotive that I need for the story. We found a few dilapidated railroad cars, rusting away, and later a locomotive, but it was mounted on a cracked concrete pedestal as a monument. The whole thing surrounded by high grass and brush, to the left and right concrete benches, also crumbling, painted in bright colors. There is also part of an old turbine, cemented into the ground to celebrate progress. On another pedestal was a plaster statue of an unknown, representing the heroism of the place. He was missing one arm. I fell asleep in the car, and when I woke up, my clothes were drenched in sweat. I bought a Coke, and I noticed that the people here have Coke dispensed into a plastic bag and take it home that way to avoid paying the bottle deposit. On two days in a row I was confused by the Amazon, which is so broad here that you cannot see the opposite bank. It was flowing briskly in the wrong direction, and at first I thought I had lost my sense of direction, until I realized that the ocean current was at work; here the Amazon flows backward and forward.

  Manaus, 1 August 1980

  The idea of having an entire opera performed in the opera house here, not just an excerpt for Fitzcarraldo, was well received. From my wretchedly noisy hotel room I see oceangoing ships going upstream as far as Manaus to be unloaded. A maid came and was about to steal something from the minibar when she noticed me, and pretended to be counting the bottles of cola and beer. Among the boats tie
d up higgledy-piggledy by the market hall, one had a tiny platform protruding from one side on which a large, sad-eyed dog was chained. The chain around his neck is fastened with a large padlock, and nearby lie drunken boatmen. A woman, likewise drunk, crawled onto land over a swaying gangway, ending up among the trash on the ground, and took a long time getting her feet into her sandals, while a man kept stabbing a large knife with great concentration into a tin can on the ground. A barefoot workman with a very heavy load on his back, held in place by a forehead strap, saluted me with a panted capitán. A paper cup that he kicked inadvertently whirled and was still dancing about when he disappeared onto a barge.

  Manaus—Iquitos, 2 August 1980

  Fever. The women on the plane fat, sweaty, inconsiderate; the children already the same. I flew to Iquitos with reluctant longing.