Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  The rain has stopped, but the river continues to rise. Only now does real sadness settle over the land, rigid with silence. What today was murder will be called an emergency slaughter tomorrow. The camp is sinking into a deep depression. Now and then a boat arrives without any purpose, bringing nothing, and disappears again. Someone was poking around in a pile of rotting branches, looking for nothing in particular. The day has the aura of nights haunted by fear. I found myself wishing intently and completely in vain that an Indio would sharpen his machete on a flat stone, and in the process make a hundred years fly by in no time.

  In an old newspaper that Alan Dunn brought, I read about a skiing competition that took place four weeks ago, four weeks that had slipped by, passed in no time, long-ago weeks. Mauch wanted to cheer me up with nonsense poems, of which he keeps a supply for such moments. He said, “A fool sings every type of song, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. A wise man sometimes sings at night, but always short and never long.” I borrowed a bow and arrow from a tattooed Indian and shot an arrow into the sky.

  Camisea, 9 February 1981

  Comings and goings of boats with no particular purpose. Our landing platform is gone for good. As we were filming last night, the river was going down so fast that we constantly had to maneuver the ship to keep it from running aground by the bank where only a little while ago deep, gurgling water was streaming. Robards is being flown out today. Claude examined him before lunch and is now writing a report for the insurance company in French. I had seen Robards at the crack of dawn, when it was actually still quite dark, hurrying through the camp without his dentures, his hair flying and his eyes crazed, like King Lear through the deserted chambers in his castle.

  And this is how things seemed to end for the film at that time: as Jason Robards took off, the Machiguenga children in their threadbare cushmas stood behind the plane in the whirlwind caused by the propeller and let their clothing billow. When the plane turned in place, they ran like fluttering birds in a half circle, still blown by the propeller’s blast. Grass tufts were flattened, and bits of damp earth were churned up. By one of the huts the children had tied a length of sound tape, probably lost by our soundman, knotted together in several places, between a post and a tree. It was so taut that it continued to hum and sing long after the plane could no longer be seen.

  Nonetheless: whatever I can still do, I must do. When I got into the boat again, there was a swarm of butterflies glowing in brown and yellow around me. The sun glitters on a silent river, which, though falling, is still much too high and seems to be slithering up on something that must be far off, hidden in the mighty landscape. All the bushes are still under water, up to their highest branches, saying no to the current and standing up to the flood. I tossed a crumpled paper handkerchief into the river, and the next moment a very large fish snatched it under the surface, but let go of it right away, so that it popped up again briefly. The Indian boatman was playing the harmonica as he transported me back to the camp.

  Jerry Hall gave me a piece of chocolate with a filling of brittle, half melted but so delicious that it rendered me speechless, and an Indian gave me a jaguar’s large fang to wear around my neck as an amulet. We shot some footage with Mick and the little Indian boy who is called McNamara in the film, and both of them did such a good job that the team broke into applause. During the scene Mick was bitten on the shoulder by one of the monkeys and laughed so uproariously about it afterward that it sounded like a donkey braying. Whenever we take a break he distracts me with clever little lectures on English dialects and the development of the language since the late Middle Ages.

  At night I brooded for a long time and quite unsystematically, trying to recall where I once saw a dinosaur footprint in petrified mud. Then I thought of my father, who had told me during the summer on the phone that he had recently almost been blackbirded. Then I thought about him and my mother. My life was handed to me between somewhere and nowhere.

  Camisea, 10 February 1981

  Very early in the morning I climbed with César to the highest point between the rivers, then up onto the platform. About halfway we heard a plane overhead that we could not account for. I was shocked again at how steep it was and wondered how a ship could ever be hauled up and over the mountain. Back down at the river I washed the sweat off my body, being careful because scores of large, cobalt blue butterflies had settled on my skin, and I did not want to scare them off. A large wasps’ nest with hollow chambers bobbed lightly by on the water, like a cotton ball. Chunks of earth gently break off the bank and plop into the water. Mauch was trying to cheer me up by telling jokes. Someone asked a lumberjack who was looking for work where he had worked last. In the Sahara, he replied. But there are not any trees there, he was told. Not anymore, said the lumberjack.

  We filmed from the small plane that had come; securely tethered, Mauch leaned out the open side door, and I served as his focus puller; it would have been too risky to put any more people on board with the landing strip so muddy. The aerial shots were rather disappointing, though. There was too much turbulence, and even if it had been calm one could still have had the impression that the shots were taken from an express train. Mick, Jerry Hall, and Adorf left us right after dinner; they are flying out to Lima.

  Camisea, 11 February 1981

  Waiting on a sandbank that is normally firm but whose edges are so sodden that you sink way in. The ship, with more than a hundred Indians on board, is not in position yet. Over the walkie-talkie by which I communicate with the woodcutters on the other side of the river—where they are using chain saws to notch a series of big trees, which, we hope, will fall down in succession like dominos—I suddenly heard radio traffic from the U.S., from Kansas City. A woman was talking with her husband, on the road as a trucker, and the conversation sounded strangely artificial. The woman especially was speaking as though she were in a TV commercial, yet it was a private conversation, overheard in the depths of the rain forest. I wanted to break in and say hello, but my transmitter is not nearly powerful enough. Vignati came out of the forest, his hair matted and full of black flies. He was flailing at them, and we picked the nasty things out of his woolly hair.

  Trees falling all the rest of the day. When these giants fall, the sound is the exciting part. The mightiest tree of all sighed, then screamed, then farted, then crashed with incredible force into the forest. Long afterward large limbs continued to snap until they finally fell silent. A bat colony fluttered off in confusion, along with swarms of wasps, birds, a cloud of small flying insects. Tiny, thin caterpillars flee, humping their midsection, then throwing their front section ahead, rushing along in a caterpillar gallop.

  The jungle is steaming now as if after a thousand years of rain. The river flows aimlessly along. A shadow, rising from the forest, darkened the sky. The moon, tentative today, will not dare to peek behind the horizon. Tonight I am hitching my boat to barren, fainthearted stars. Once the sky turned pitch black, unfamiliar fruits from an unknown tree plunked onto the damp ground around my hut.

  Camisea, 12 February 1981

  In the morning a Cabaña Airlines plane circled over the camp. People were all in a tizzy as to who would get to fly out first. In the meantime this question comes to mind: is it worthwhile to live out there in a decoded world, inhabited by decoded people? The Mexicans are roaming around restlessly, the way Robards did earlier. At nightfall, when it is pure insanity to land, another plane circled over us—it can only be Pino from Cabaña, no one else would be that reckless. The plane, whatever it is, has to land because there is no illuminated landing strip for eight hundred kilometers around. Quiet voices in the camp. Half-asleep, I kept listening to the calls of the nocturnal birds and changes in the atmosphere. I wanted to record some of the sounds, but could not drag myself out of bed.

  My cabin: several steps, consisting of a sturdy tree trunk into which treads have been sawn as the natives do here, lead up to the platform that serves as a porch. There I have a crude table, roughly
hewn from boards, two benches, and a hammock, as well as wooden hooks where I hang my raingear. Behind that a single room, which you enter through a swinging bamboo door. There are three windows, all fairly small, two of which can be closed with bamboo blinds that roll down. A bed with mosquito netting, the mattress stuffed with sea grass and hard; it has peaks and valleys, into which one has to fit one’s body carefully. The room also has a hammock, hung diagonally, and a primitive wooden shelf for my tapes, the two books I have with me, and some odds and ends. By the entryway two small wooden shelves, one above the other, where I keep my toiletries. Underneath them, hanging from a nail where I can find it always by feel, the flashlight. Toward the foot of the bed, i.e., on the side with the door and the porch, which faces the river, two poles are braced in the corners of the room at chest height. Over the left one I drape all my clothes, over the right one my towels. But so much dust and loose fiber drifts down from the thatch of palm fronds that forms the roof that every day there is a layer over everything, which, however, can easily be shaken off. I have three stools, each knocked together from a thick slice of tree trunk and three legs. The floor is springy pona bark held up by posts that raise it about a meter above the ground. On the floor stands my radio, with a cord long enough to let me take it out to the porch. The toilet and washroom are in a two-stall out-house about fifteen meters behind my cabin; half the camp residents use it, and usually there is a line. My lightbulb, mounted in a basket, provides too little light for reading. When I am lying down, I brace the flashlight between my shoulder and my neck so it will shine on the book. Usually the only time I can read is at night, but I soon get tired. When I go to bed, I always put my little travel alarm clock, my flashlight, and a book next to and under the pillow. The clock itself is silent; the alarm peeps like the insects outside, and only when I have it right by my head do I realize that it is meant for me. During the day I carry the alarm clock folded up in a small leather pouch on a second belt around my waist, because I do not have a wristwatch that works anymore, and hardly anyone else in the film crew has one. In the pouch I always have writing material, the notebook, the clock, a penknife, and sometimes my Minox or a compass. In Iquitos I always have my sunglasses in the pouch to protect my eyes from the dust when I am riding the motorcycle.

  The river has fallen to its lowest level, but now it began to rain hard again, and from the sound I can tell it will continue through the night. On my mosquito net, in the light, sits a green, prehistoric-looking animal, motionless, gazing down at me.

  Resortes keeps asking me what time the helicopter is coming, a highly doubtful proposition because of the war along the border with Ecuador. He practically ambushes me so he can fire the question at me. Sarah, who has worked herself all the way up the launchpad for discontent, spoke in all seriousness of the helicopter and commuter planes, four of them today alone. All I said was: the helicopter is not coming, but when it comes, it comes, and the flights will take off when they take off. Despite my explaining the situation to each of them before we started the project, many people do not want to grasp that we are at the headwaters of the Amazon, and that it is often not possible to land, even if one wanted to. Recently, when we packed the body harness into the small plane in Camisea, removed the door, and strapped Mauch and me in, a two-engine plane was circling overhead, from where I do not know, and wanted to land but then flew off again. Meanwhile in the camp Adorf had shouted that there was a big plane coming in, and they all threw their heavy luggage into a boat to get to it, Adorf leading the pack like a shipwrecked passenger ruthlessly pushing everyone else off a plank into the water. Walter told him the plane was not ours, and besides, it had not landed. No, no, it was there, Adorf shouted at him. Walter shouted back, asking whether he had actually been at the airfield. No, it was there, Adorf shouted, he had seen it. But because the airfield is several kilometers away, he finally believed Walter, who had just come from there.

  During breakfast all of us had still joked that I should, like Pizarro, on his wretched island off the coast of Peru, draw a line in the sand, step over it and ask who would stay with me, who would step over the line. Even without Robards we still have enough work left, for a while at least. My thoughts are occupied by the image of the first man who stepped over the line. He was a man from the island of Crete, Pedro de Candia.

  Janoud will remain in the camp, after everyone has left. Janoud told the story how he, at the age of six, together with his family, had climbed a hill in the Vogtland and watched the blazing glow in the sky, and they all knew that Dresden was burning.

  Camisea, 13 February 1981

  A bad night with little sleep. Incessant downpours, rumbling thunder, and my roof is not completely watertight. I rigged up my rain poncho to protect me from a leak. Now in the morning it is a heavy, steady rain, everything gray on gray. The jungle has become dark and colorless, and stands there motionless. Now the river is rushing by twice as fast, angry, a gleaming brown, full of dark dirt and fast-moving driftwood. From yesterday’s low-water mark it has now reached the highest level I have seen yet. One minute a post where canoes tie up was still sticking up above the surface by about a hand’s breadth, and the next it had disappeared altogether. The mood is good; we are resigned to our fate. Every leaf is dripping, and the drops crash like meteors into the puddles out in the open. A great, steady rushing sound has settled over the land. The jaguar I thought I heard during the night was probably a howler monkey, which has now fallen silent. The Cabaña plane certainly will not be able to take off from the muddy airstrip today, and there will not be any helicopter, either. The camp is very quiet, as if dead. No motion, no sounds, no birds in the jungle, nothing; only rain, which refuses to stop. The forest is keeping still as if in ardent prayer.

  Looking into the river is like gazing into a flickering fire; you cannot take your eyes off it. Without pause whole islands of decaying branches and wood drift by, everything that was rotting on the floor of the rain forest. Around large, uprooted trees, tangles form of old branches and all the stuff that was decaying on the ground. An endless layer of wood and detritus drifts along on the surface of the water. To travel by motorboat or take off or land in a hydroplane would be impossible because of all the drifting debris in the water. The water is creeping closer and closer to me. The bushes along the bank are now out in the middle of the stream, with only their crowns poking out, battered by the force of the current. The banana plants farther upstream are already under water. In the small bay right in front of me a powerful counter-current has formed. Along with the drifting wood, there is more and more white foam now. Several enormous trees, tangled in each other, drifted by like swirling islands. The rolling of heavy rocks on the river bottom. Has anyone heard rocks sigh?

  Río Camisea, 14 February 1981

  The river somewhat lower today. Mauch, Vignati, and I made our way up the slope with machetes and at the highest point between the rivers scrambled up onto the platform and let the wind rock us. We were all alone with the jungle, floating gently above its steaming treetops, and I was no longer afraid at the thought of hauling a huge ship over the mountain ridge, even if everything in this gravity-ridden world seemed to argue against it.

  Iquitos, 15 February 1981

  Dissolving the camp. The airfield in Camisea was so soggy that the pilot, coming to his senses, did not dare to take more than two people on board, so Miguel Ángel Fuentes, Klausmann, and I took a boat down to the Picha, to board the plane there, where the runway is much firmer. But the plane had trouble gaining altitude, and shaved the tops off some bushes at the end of the runway, so that even Pino, the pilot who will take any risk, broke out in a sweat. Refueling in Atalaya, and from Pucallpa on to Iquitos with Faucett.

  The house that serves as our headquarters was deserted, with only Gustavo and Claire still living there. When I went to my cabin, a sense of desolation seized me. The bed full of dried rat droppings, dust everywhere, no running water. The banana fronds rustle in the wind, but none of it per
tains to me anymore. No mail had come. I found an unwashed undershirt of mine hanging over the porch railing. The things I collected here in Iquitos now seem useless. As I approached my hut, the path was almost completely overgrown with brush; I was like a stranger, and the house did not recognize me. A man was hacking away at the yucca plants with his machete. My frying pan is all rusty. On the wall hang things that seem to stare at me in bewilderment, wondering whether I still belong to them. In the afternoon I fell asleep in the hammock on my porch, my limbs heavy. Several times I tried to get up, until the setting sun reached me under the palm roof, and burned me in the face, as if filled with hatred. At that point I withdrew into my four bamboo walls and tried to take in the situation. I ate a few cookies that I found in a tin. Unmoved, the birds in the forest were exchanging information. A twig cracked, but no one was coming. It is a hot, sultry afternoon, drained of meaning.

  In the evening, I was invited by Henning and Uli to have dinner at their house. It was a nice, quiet evening, and it did me good to be with them. It is dawning on me that I am done for, even if I forbid myself to think so. Rats scurried across my room when I returned. I changed the sheets in which the animals had been living and felt my helplessness. Then, even though it was late, I washed my hair in my shower—the night watchman had turned on the water for me. So here I am. The nocturnal cicadas are sawing away at time. The sky hangs there, helpless and silent. The night is forcing its way in through my window with its blackness. A bird has strayed under my roof; it betrayed its presence by rustling. I pointed the flashlight at it, but that only confused it more, and I let darkness take over.