A stifling feeling of pressing forward with something that ultimately could not be done. If all of this were in another country, I would have fewer reservations. The greatest uncertainties: the actors, the new camp, the ship over the mountain, the scope of the undertaking, which no one has grasped yet, the Indians, the financing—the list can be added to indefinitely. Seen from the plane, the sheer expanse of the jungle is terrifying; no one who has not been there can picture it. We do not need virtuosos of syntax.
Two stops on the flight from Manaus to Iquitos. One of the landing strips was in the middle of the jungle, and I saw no signs of a settlement. The second was in Tabatinga, and I seemed to have a hazy image of the town, as if welling up from the depths of memory, as if I had been there before, but for a long time I was unsure whether it was not a place I had visited in my dreams. The stacked-up gasoline drums, the little terminal with its corrugated tin roof seemed as familiar as a repetitive dream. Walter was there to pick me up in the jeep, which was covered with dust inside, even though it is brand-new, and we stopped to see Gloria, who, as my intuition had told me, had given birth to a little girl on Walter’s birthday. The baby had not been given a name yet. She looked very contented. Andreas was there, and we immediately discussed the new method he had suggested for getting the ship over the ridge. On the face of it, his system of inflatable pontoons seems to make good sense, but I am dubious, for one thing because you need to have some experience handling them, and for another it will not look good on the screen. It has to be basic, primitive, and obvious, as if each moviegoer had just come up with the idea himself. Andreas had brought along plenty of mail, half eaten by the parrot but still legible. Vivanco flew to Cuzco, and I hope he carries out his assignment well, though he is a magnet for bad luck and terribly indecisive. Walter’s still dreaming of a decree from the Belaunde government, as if such a thing were thinkable outside normal official channels, and his insistence on that idea has a somewhat paralyzing effect.
According to an English scholar—and his view is shared by the majority of his readers—the opera house in Manaus, the Teatro Amazonas, is a spaceship, not built by human beings. He simply rejects all reports of its construction—the blueprints, the photos, all the supporting documents—claiming they are government forgeries. How, Walter asked, did the theater end up in Manaus? I told him it must have landed there. The entire theory is interwoven with the legendary figure of an Indian prince from Portuguese colonial times. Supposedly this prince appeared very openly in those days, and still appears, but only secretly, late at night, to stage his sexual orgies there, for only in that location does he succeed in having an erection. The beauty of all this is that a fever dream became a reality in the jungle and is now being transformed back into a pure jungle fantasy.
The enormous remaining boa constrictor will die in its cage, I think; it leans its ugly head against the wire and has a heartrending air such as you see only in the dying. I thought it must be thirsty and carefully poured water on its mouth and head, but it merely stared at me from the depths of a loneliness that had little connection left with earthly things. So we decided to release the boa. Walter and I shook it out of the cage, because it did not want to budge. The women watched from a safe distance, not looking happy. The snake crawled right back into its enclosure, yet when I checked later, it was gone, and there was a clear trail in the sand leading toward the jungle. At night the place where the snake had disappeared was thronged with twinkling fireflies, and overhead a clear, starry night sky. Andreas, our mathematician, was playing chess with his girlfriend, losing most of the games, but he accepted that with mathematical decorum. A white pawn is missing, and has been replaced with a bullet casing, much too large, which usually becomes the object of attacks early in the game. For the first time in my life mosquitoes are leaving me completely indifferent, not that I have accepted the superior power of nature. It is more of a dispassion-ate scorn with which I am leaving my skin and blood undefended. God grant us one good day, a single one, amen.
Iquitos, 4 August 1980
The Huallaga just returned from Pucallpa, and I spoke with the crew. The trip had gone well, but had taken a very long time because the water in the Ucayali was very shallow. What is going to happen, I wondered, if extremely shallow water in this mighty river causes such problems, and what can we expect if we encounter such conditions many tributaries farther upstream? Additional disquieting news came from César Vivanco in Cuzco; the bureaucracy there seems to have documents about the Camisea that are not even known in Lima. The carpenters are doing good work. The sun is hot. Our fate continues to be suspended in suspense.
A man was walking down the dusty road to the Río Nanay, shuffling a deck of cards as he went. On the plane a woman began to sing litanies, and then, her eyes growing wilder and wilder, to rail at evil spirits. Not until we had landed and taxied to a stop did she calm down. Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all? Drastic measures, he whispered to me, were appropriate only for someone who had not set foot on this continent yet. To fail to embrace my dreams now would be a disgrace so great that sin itself would not be able to find a name for it.
Fragments. Two weeks on the Río Camisea. Upon returning to Iquitos, I found the little bookshelf in my cabin encased in a termite mound; I had to peel the few books, the radio, letters, and journals out of the hard coating, and the most recent journal, which was on top, has been devoured, except for the cover, which is covered in plastic. One passage is left: “…broods a storm. Hate is seething over the rain forest. Where in the depths of history has the word ‘reprobate’ gone missing?”
Iquitos, 25 September 1980
Henning and Uli came back from Puerto Maldonado. There actually is a ship in the jungle there, and they brought photos. The ship is small, however, in terrible shape, and in no way suitable, so that puts an end to another wild-goose chase. I am still prepared to set out on any other that might present itself. Up to now connecting by radio to the Camisea has worked only once, and I do not have much confidence in our radio. Sometimes the men working on the ship come, and sometimes they do not.
Iquitos—Pucallpa—Camisea, 5 October 1980
Yesterday’s flight almost ended in disaster. The plane had already attained a high rate of speed for takeoff when a strange cracking reverberated through the entire plane, and the pilot barely managed to bring the craft to a standstill before the end of the runway. We were told there was a small technical repair that needed to be done, and we should remove our carry-on luggage and also get all our bags from the hold; we would be taking off shortly. Translation: this plane would never fly again. I walked around the stranded plane and saw that all the fins in the engine under the right wing had snapped. We continued our trip on a small Cabaña plane, which happened to be there by mistake, but upon taking off from Pucallpa we were so overloaded that we almost did not make it into the air. I have never experienced such a close call. When we landed on the boggy strip by the Camisea we were so heavy that we skidded past the end of the runway into grass as tall as a man, and mowed down a wooden post with one wing. It left a deep dent in the wing. Our party included the cameraman Mauch, Walter, George Sluizer, who will be a particular help in Brazil, and the more reckless of the two pilots.
Iquitos, 5 December 1980
Mick Jagger’s assistant, Alan Dunn, arrived and inspected everything. He seemed to like what he saw here. Big problems with Walter, which I accept almost with indifference. Less panic than usual at the costume department. Lucki in Munich was supposed to let us know about the interim financing, but for days no news arrived. I know, however, that he will take care of it. The deadlines are inexorably closing in on us. As if descr
ibing a distant, unfamiliar world, Dunn told us there was a half a meter of snow on the ground near Cologne. Laplace Martin, the engineer from Brazil, arrived, his neck and wrists weighed down with gold chains; even his ballpoint pen is gold. Nonetheless he makes a solid impression. Almost all contacts broken off. Life is blowing away from me like fallen leaves.
In the costume shop was a carpenter who always looks at you strangely and distractedly. It took him six days to make two sets of shelves for the hats. For three of those days he was hammering on the wall, for reasons not obvious to me. When this job was done, he attached a molding to Gisela’s closet, for which he had to climb into the closet. I saw him kneeling inside. Then we did not hear anything more from him and forgot all about him. When we got worried hours later and opened the closet to check, we found him asleep on his knees.
Outside the screened window of my cabin on stilts the banana fronds stand motionless in the steamy evening, and little frogs soar in long leaps from frond to frond, landing with a splat on the pale leaves. As soon as it gets dark, they begin their dialogue with the frogs perched on the thatched roof. I am at the intersection of their exchanges. In the last light, the frogs on the other side of the leaves show through as if the leaves were waxed paper.
Another strike is in the offing, and the post office is already closed. Soon the airport will shut down, too. How will we get all the urgent technical dispatches from Miami? Robards’s and Jagger’s contracts have not been signed yet, either, and even if they were, how would they reach me? It has been raining so hard that the road to the Río Nanay, where our headquarters is located, is like a mud patch for pigs to wallow in. I look at the pictures of my son, Burro, again and again; I have tacked them to a piece of plywood by the window. I also have pictures of Lotte Eisner and Walter Steiner, the ski jumper. I would like to fly myself now. The second, identical ship, on which work is proceeding at a crazy pace, still will not be ready in time.
Iquitos, 6 December 1980
From the brackish water of what must have been a swimming pool years ago, I fished out with a broom a thin, very lively snake, which immediately disappeared into the grass. I spent a long time admiring the anteater we have had around here recently as it used its unbelievably long, agile tongue to rake termites together on a board and then lick them off.
Almost all the people working here are on the verge of collapse, have reached the limit of their endurance. Izquerdo was throwing up all day, but probably more because not one of the extras we were counting on came to be fitted for a costume. Vignati’s disappeared to Satipo and is over a week late getting back. Sluizer, who just joined us for the first time, is reorganizing some of the procedures and exudes human warmth. Laplace left us, headed for Brazil; he speaks Portuguese with me, and I answer in Spanish, and we understand each other. We bury everything important in casual asides, and when I explained to him recently why it had to be a full-sized ship that we hauled over the ridge, he smiled to himself, this man with the dark face and pitted skin who never laughs, and he shook my hand and said nothing. Then we nodded to each other, and he rode off in the jeep, while behind him a storm with horrendous flashes of lightning burst. It messed up my electric wristwatch.
Iquitos, 7 December 1980
Fiesta time in Pucuchama. All along the road into town stands had been set up, selling beer and grilled meat, and there was dancing everywhere. I played a game of chance several times and lost each time; the principle was like roulette, except that there were no balls but a live guinea pig under a small wooden crate, which was raised by a rope. Numbered Swiss chalets were set up in a circle, each with a dark entryway, and the guinea pig dashed around uncertainly for a while before quickly making up its mind and disappearing into one of the doors. The prizes were little bowls made of pink and light green plastic, and I kept on betting until I had no more money on me.
This morning I got up very early to try to put through a call on the phone. Two campesinos came and brought chickens into the office—Walter had ordered them. When they left, I knew that I would never be the same again. I looked out at the pale trees in the jungle and tried to imagine Munich in the snow, with my little boy celebrating Advent—without me.
A woman arrived from the Río Napo with her children; her husband is working up on the Camisea for us. She was in a hysterical state because she had heard that her husband had been murdered by Indians and eaten. I managed to establish radio contact, and because it was Sunday, her husband had the day off and was not at work in the jungle. He was called to the radio and could speak with her directly. She wept for joy and wanted to give me the two chickens she had brought along as provisions. I had to show her the chickens we had purchased that morning to prove to her that we already had more than we needed.
Still no news from Munich about the financing, but I am counting on Lucki, who is probably in Paris with Gaumont at the moment. At breakfast a bad mood in the house because of an overflowing toilet. I promptly took steps to solve the problem, because something like that immediately assumes an importance out of all proportion to much greater misfortunes. It was as if I had taken the house’s temperature. Later I drove to Paul’s bar. On the street outside a little procession was passing, led by a barefoot man carrying a white child’s coffin on his shoulder, behind him several women with umbrellas to protect them from the blazing sun, while all around the horizon was a menacing black and gray. In broad daylight lightning was flashing silently all around, and a thunderstorm was swirling on the horizon, while up above in the middle there was just enough room left for the glowing murderous blade of the sun, toward which silent clouds of dust whirled and snaked, glowing and malevolent. The thunderstorm held off all afternoon, but then descended far off over the rain forest, sweating and steaming, as if out there an enormous, violent rape were being carried out.
At night the chickens, frightened by something, screeched like pigs being slaughtered. An airplane passed overhead, going north, and I have been lying awake for a long time, because I cannot suppress a voice inside me saying it is going to crash.
Iquitos, 8 December 1980
This morning, when I checked on the telex machine, Gloria was trying to make contact with the Narinho, the rusted-out ship that we had gotten to float here from Colombia made buoyant with six hundred empty oil drums, but the on-board receiver must have been turned off. A young woman had shown up; she had no way to reach her husband, an electrician, who was on the ship. In the morning her child had been throwing up for two hours, then went into convulsions and was suddenly dead. I did not know what I should say to the woman. She turned her face to the wall and cried; she had been keeping it in until then. I took her hand and held it, and when her silent sobbing had relaxed somewhat, I took her on the motorcycle and rode to the boat landing. The boatman did not want to set out because he was waiting for the cooks, but I hustled him off with the woman to the place where the Narinho was anchored. The woman was still very young, and it had been her first child, a son, only half a year old.
A still day, sultry. Inactivity piled on inactivity, clouds staring down from the sky, pregnant with rain, fever reigns, insects taking on massive proportions. The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything. The laundry on the line refuses to dry. As if part of a conspiracy, flies suddenly descend on the table, their stomachs taut and iridescent. Our little monkey was wailing in his cage, and when I approached, he looked and wailed right through me to some distant spot outside, where his little heart hoped to find an echo. I let him out, but he went back into his cage, and now he is continuing to wail there.
Mexico City—New York, 15–16 December 1980
In the waiting area for the flight to the U.S.; I spend too many deadening hours in airports—Miami, Kennedy, La Guardia, to name only a few of the worst hellholes. Bleary-eyed from a sleepless night, I let myself be cheated by the man
at the currency-exchange counter; he seems to have developed an infallible eye for his customers’ weaknesses. It was less than $20, but I felt like a dumb tourist, and brooded without much inspiration on ways to get back at him. The hotels were almost completely booked, and the only way I got a room was by taking one on the thirteenth floor. From there I saw hens on the flat roof of a modern building next door. I recall that in Tokyo once, in the innermost inner city, among the metastasizing concrete, I actually heard roosters crowing at daybreak.
In New York I went to the entryway, only two blocks from my apartment, where John Lennon was shot. In Central Park a crowd had gathered spontaneously for a silent vigil that kept growing and growing. The degree to which people were feeling genuine shock and dismay made an impression on me, even if the demonstration was plagued by all the inanities that also formed part of his era: joints were passed around, posters of gurus were held up in the crowd, and vague demands for peace were voiced—for what peace, where? A young woman wearing a paleo-hippie outfit held up a banner reading, “All he said is give peace a chance.”
The Robards and Jagger contracts still not signed. In the afternoon a weather front with black clouds moved in rapidly from the west, and there was a shaking and howling around the building. On the thirty-fourth floor, where my apartment is, I felt a slight swaying and then saw driving snow out the window. It lasted only a few minutes, and then the whole thing was over. I have not seen snow in such a long time.
Iquitos, 17 December 1980
Landed in Iquitos beneath a massively heavy sky. As the plane glided in, the storm dumped darkness and pounding rain over the countryside. Powerful lightning. I still have 50 soles in my pocket, the equivalent of 15 cents, but no one has come to pick me up, probably because my message never got through. Outside the storm is moving away to the distance, leaving eddies of vapor rising from the concrete. I saw Gustavo drive by in the Bronco without a care in the world, never suspecting that I could have arrived. During the strike the tires on two of our motorcycles and one of the cars were slashed, and Gustavo, that idiot, drove into town with a gun in the car. Unthinkable what would have happened if a patrol had spotted it. Because of the precarious situation, the airport is swarming with heavily armed police, who brandish their submachine guns in the empty arrivals building, where there are not even imaginary enemies, and have riot helmets hooked to their belts. The mood is nasty; you can cut it with a knife.
Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Page 10
