Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

by Werner Herzog

  Camisea, 7 April 1981

  During the night rain leaked through the roof at the head of my bed, and I dragged the bed to another spot, but water was dripping in there, too, so I rigged a canopy with my oilskin and a stick and in that way managed to stay fairly dry. An animal ran across my hand; it looks like a little tuft of wool, or, more precisely, a cotton ball, but it actually has six little legs and darts as quickly and evenly as if one were carefully blowing a fuzzy piece of cotton across the table. The river rose a bit, but the extreme conditions we were expecting did not materialize. The day is starting out quietly and sleepily, and I hope it will end the same way. Birds in the depths of the forest are responding to others even deeper in the forest. The carpenter is planing and pounding away, and the echo of his work reverberates back to me from the other bank of the river.

  I had woken up around three in the morning. The light was still on, and I was surprised that our generator was running all night. It felt as if an enormous butterfly had struck my head with its wings, as the imperial eagle is said to attack human beings with its pinions and beat them unconscious so that it can carry off lambs and little children unimpeded to its cliff-top nest, where its half-naked, screeching young are demanding to be fed.

  Off in the distance, past the bend in the river where we want to haul the ship over the mountain, I heard the men working in the forest, and then with a tremendous roar, like a distant disaster, a huge tree fell. It sounded as if all of nature were rising up in rage at some infamous deed. Long afterward there was silence in the forest, as if it were holding its breath, and only then did the men start calling to each other again.

  (I wondered at the way a brief moment of insight, of registering a particular image, can bring such consequences, with an almost inescapable mercilessness that grips me as much as all others who are involved, a pull that generates both joy and terror, determines the course of lives, brings children into the world, and causes deaths. Yet today the giant holds still for one last day. And all those who were riled up, who could not take the heat? The whole Bremen crew, with Andreas in the lead, who hung in there for so long and saw ever more clearly that he was not equal to the task, Izquerdo with the costumes, Adorf, that cowardly schemer, Arnon Milchan, the wheeler-dealer: behind each of them stands a small legion of those who have stumbled, suffered shipwreck, lost heart. I thought about the fascination of ski jumping, which persists in me like a dream without end. Is the desire to fly innate to all creatures? One should take a closer look at cows, dogs, lizards. Is not the ostrich, with wings that cannot carry it, the most unredeemed of all living beings?)

  All morning a very large moth sat on my dirty laundry, its proboscis bent forward as it feasted on the salt from my sweat. It flapped its wings from time to time, and, when it folded them upright, rubbed them against each other like two plates until they were even; the impression was one of ecstatic well-being, and outside by the porch green fruits fell to the ground. I collected a few of them and went at them with my penknife, because I had seen the Campas open them with their machetes and eat them. They resembled unripe walnuts, with a green, fleshy husk, and inside a hard, wrinkled wooden shell, enclosing a milky-white kernel. I found two delicate little feathers that had blown onto my porch, with light and dark brown horizontal stripes, and they seemed to me like souls that had wafted there. Then I explored the area behind the camp for the first time, penetrating far into the jungle. Today part of the technical crew is scheduled to arrive by way of Pucallpa.

  From Lucki in Munich I received a text consisting of only seven lines, so laconic that it made me worry all the more that I may not see my mother again alive. She refuses to be operated on. I went off by myself and stared into the river, which is smacking its lips lazily and happily, satiated with mud and leaves and rotting branches. The forest was filled with rich, sweetish rot. Footsteps make hardly any noise.

  I hide my troubles behind joking, and had a good laugh with some local children, whom I told that in Germany bananas had zippers, the fish died in the rivers, and the cars stood still because there were so many other cars they could not move. That really amused them. Then I told them that hammocks were hung up vertically so you could lean into them from a standing position when you wanted to sleep. The working girl from Iquitos, who plies her trade with two other young women from Iquitos, came to my table at dinner and gave me a message from El Tigre, whom she had just seen: he had finished the new treetop platform. When Mauch wanted to know what she had said, I gave him a translation to the effect that she had reported incidentally, if also rather hesitantly, that El Tigre, armed with his chain saw, had tried to rape her, but she had successfully warded him off. That, Mauch said, was much worse than Jack the Ripper, whereupon I replied that for a London city dweller it was unimaginable what barbarity a person living out in wild nature could be capable of. So much for the tone of the conversations over dinner this evening, accentuated by something truly bizarre: a small electric heater, which had probably been delivered to the camp in error, turned up on the table and elicited much interest.

  Camisea, 8 April 1981

  With the veins in my temples throbbing, I hurried up the steep slope to the tree with the new platform; the tree is not suitable for ladder rungs, and I arrived just as they were installing a block and tackle. Tigre was working bare-chested, and on his back were hundreds of yellowish flies, to which he paid no attention; he looked spotted. A delicate cloud of the same insects was buzzing around him. From atop the tree it was immediately clear that this lookout point is far better than the one we had chosen initially, and I gave instructions to enlarge the platform. Some of the Campas came down to the river with me, and I tried to match the Indios’ running gait, but no matter how fast I moved, I could hear the men’s breath right behind me and the smacking of their toes as they pulled them out of the bubbling, waterlogged clay. I have often paid close attention to the way they move: it is a bit like a slalom, in which they have already spotted the next obstacle—a protruding root, a dangling liana, a thorny branch—and circumvent it with a graceful turn of the entire body that starts two paces in advance and merges with the rapid trot, never interrupting the overall movement, whereas Europeans stop, advance in fits and starts, stumble, hesitate. Once an obstacle has been smoothly skirted, the next one has already been registered, and the steps toward it all contribute to a flowing, economical circumvention. Their torso bends, and their feet, I noticed, tend to go up onto rather than over an obstacle, provided it is stable. It is better to step onto a loop formed by a vine than to get one’s foot caught in it, and meanwhile the eye remains fixed on the objects one can grab onto in steep, slippery places without being stuck by a dozen thorns. One time I had grasped hold of a smooth sapling without noticing that a multilane highway of fire ants led up and down it. Then I made the mistake of trying to cut down the tree with my machete to protect those following behind me, but my blow was not strong enough and merely shook the sapling, sending fire ants raining down on me, getting under my shirt and in my hair, and for two days I was climbing the walls. That was during Aguirre.

  Upon reaching the Indians’ big camp, I greeted the old cook/ medic who had set Mauch’s shoulder, and told him how happy we all were to have him with us. He maintained a proud silence. By the fireplace in the kitchen, the little monkey who answers to the name of Tricky Dick Nixon ran to a guinea pig for help, clinging to its neck and pressing its face against the guinea pig’s head, chattering with fear. A peaceful evening had settled over the camp, full of quiet people and quiet conversations.

  For the last few days one thought keeps presenting itself: why can a four-legged stool wobble, while a three-legged one never does, and: if a person hangs himself in the attic and a breeze is blowing, how many additional ropes would one need to prevent the hanged man from swinging, or more precisely, from moving at all? The answer: one additional rope stretched from his feet to the floor and another from his belt to a wall, so the corpse cannot rotate around its own axis. But
how many ropes would one need, if necessary infinitely long ones, to fix oneself in the universe, definitively and unchangingly, and free of rotation? Is a fixed position in the universe even possible?

  Camisea, 9 April 1981

  Mauch’s birthday, Bubu Klausmann’s birthday.

  In the morning we went out to start shooting; twenty Campas had already built a light, very temporary scaffolding around the gigantic tree near the old platform. We filmed eight of them hacking away with their axes at the mighty roots, which extended like ribs up the trunk to a height of five meters, supporting the colossus. I carried the tripod and camera up to the old platform, hanging on to the rungs with only one free hand, and remembering Adorf, who had screamed for stuntmen. From now on I can safely call my rump zone Adorf.

  Later, after lunch, I scrambled up the steep slope to the plateau in a mere 180 seconds; Beatus, who did not think it could be done, hurried along behind me, keeping time. Once at the top, we threw ourselves down panting on the moldy ground, our hearts pounding wildly, and waited for the others. Felling the huge tree proved a challenge. It resisted and resisted, as the light slowly and relentlessly faded, and then the tree began to list to the wrong side, jamming Tigre’s chain saw, and the chain remained stuck deep in the wood. We hastily relocated the camera and equipment to a spot that seemed safe, but then, when I saw that the saw’s spark plug was not working, that the gas was contaminated, and that the chain had to be painstakingly freed with axes, I called the whole thing off, hoping no wind would spring up, not even a breeze, because it could seize the tree’s enormous spreading crown and bring the whole thing down. The ax blows echoed through the forest, and the mighty trunk sounded liked the resonance chamber of a gigantic musical instrument.

  In complete darkness a plane passed overhead, probably W., making one of those unnecessary and senseless blind night landings again. His absence makes a greater difference now, and when it is critical to keep several organizational threads in order, the task falls to me in any case. With all the work I already have, most of the time I am also the head of production. I doubt Walter was really indispensable as a mechanic’s helper on the Huallaga in the Pongo, though it is also true that anything involving the Pongo is risky. The largest wooden boat, with a seventy-horsepower engine, which was roped to one side of the Huallaga, was smashed in minutes by the rising waters, and the pieces sank, along with its engine. Cables snapped like violin strings, and the ship crashed into the cliff so hard that rivets on its hull went shooting out, and water rushed in, having to be pumped out constantly, but Laplace has fifteen men on board who know what they have to do.

  Waiting for a boat, we all went for a swim in the river. I swam in my long pants and tried to wash out the sticky resin from the tree. The giant tree, which twelve men would hardly be able to span with their outstretched arms, had oozed milky, sticky juice where axes and chain saws had sliced into it. It made a great impression on me the way El Tigre walked around the giant tree for a long time, measured the limbs with his eyes, estimated their weight, and with great precision and forethought notched some of the root ribs, depriving the tree of their support. It was like the preparations for imploding a Gothic cathedral.

  Camisea, 10 April 1981

  In the Pongo de Mainique the ship tore itself loose with a crew of sixteen on board and was almost destroyed. W. reported that the rapidly rising water caused a whirlpool to form by the edge of a cliff, which in turn drove the ship forward against the current, and that loosened the lines and steel hawsers, some of which were a good two inches in diameter; then the current seized hold of the ship with full force; the ropes snapped, the ship ended up at an angle to the rapids and listed so steeply that the second deck was touching the water. The boat banged into the cliff on the opposite side and thus righted itself somewhat, but the prow was bashed in and the Huallaga was tossed from wall to wall of the cliffs.

  Anja brought disturbing news about my mother. Because of the situation, Lucki will stay in Munich till the end of the month. An inexhaustible, indifferent sky is raining itself empty. It is getting grayer and grayer, not less and also not more, just all-encompassing. In weeklong slow motion beer cans are digging themselves into the sand. Flat patches of white foam try to come together as they drift by, but they are driven apart by the eddies in the water. The mournfulness of cardboard boxes soaked through days ago: I sense a great metaphor there.

  Yesterday a moribund infant died in the Indians’ camp.

  At noon, after more than a day and half’s resistance, the tree finally fell. Suddenly there were shouts—Quick! Get the camera out of the way. Mauch did not want to take it seriously, thinking he could duck behind a nearby tree if necessary, but in retrospect we realized that we would not have had a prayer, because the other tree he thought would shield him ended up smashed to bits, as if by a giant fist. I asked whether our work platform was in danger. Yes, said El Tigre, it is in danger. We evacuated the area immediately and took up a position on the opposite slope. Seconds later El Tigre, Huerequeque, and another motosierrista fled in our direction. The giant creaked and groaned, then there was a sound like an explosion, as if something inside the tree were tearing, but after this terrible inner shock it was still standing, and leaves and shredded lianas came raining down on us. Then the tree fell, a terrifying drama, a true cataclysm of the world, dragging everything nearby down with it, like a gigantic avalanche. It was a long time before things were quiet again. Bats flitted around, leaves continued to drift down, wasps had been dislodged from a nest in the crown, branches continued to fall from the surrounding trees long after everything seemed to be over.

  Camisea, 11 April 1981

  There is an amusing detail from the Huallaga’s accident in the Pongo: the Brazilian Ephraim, who was hurtled back and forth on the lower deck, was so terrified and in need of something vertical to hold on to that he wrapped his arms around a half pig’s carcass that was suspended there. People saw him hanging on to it and swinging back and forth.

  Today a seven-year-old Campa boy with an intestinal blockage was flown out to Atalaya. Dr. Parraga went along, and will operate on him there. The flight to Pucallpa would have been too strenuous and too risky; it is possible the boy would not have survived the transport.

  The helicopter of the Bolivian president, Barrientos, flew into a power line and crashed from a low altitude. He had suitcases full of money with him, presumably from drug deals. The helicopter immediately caught fire, but although people were there and tried to rescue him from the blaze, no one could get close, because the heat made the submachine guns carried by the president and his entourage start firing wildly, and in the hail of bullets no one dared approach.

  When the chata arrived with the two tractors on board, Campas with red painted faces and coca leaves in one cheek stood around and watched what we were doing. On the small barge women had built a kind of playpen among cables, oil canisters, and bunches of bananas, and a small child was playing in it. In the fenced-off area a little girl of about five was also standing. She did not speak, but stared at us unabashedly in a way that suggested we were all crazy.

  What I love most here is the brief stretch of time that represents evening in the camp, after the sun goes down and the sky is still bright and one or two stars begin to twinkle, though it still seems to be day, when the birds fall silent and the nocturnal animals gradually begin to make themselves heard, when the boats return, when the stillness becomes audible, before the Brazilians crank up their tinny cassette players to top volume in the dark. Today the river is completely hushed and glides by weightlessly, keeping to its laws and spaces; yet it always seems to me as if the river were secretly flowing much faster beneath its surface.

  Camisea, 12 April 1981

  Paul, Miguel Ángel Fuentes, and Miguel Vasquez arrived yesterday toward evening. Paul reported he had lost a workman while his barge was being unloaded. The stupid ruffian, he said, had slipped in his rubber boots on the slick, oily metal deck, fallen overboard, and
never surfaced. It had happened in the middle of Iquitos, and, Paul added irritably, his disappearance had caused all sorts of paperwork at various official departments. We drank some of the whiskey they had brought along and played cards, and without really knowing what I was doing or how, I kept winning madly.

  Huerequeque has come up with the ultimate card game: each player receives one card, which he is not allowed to look at. He sticks it on his forehead where the other players can see it; so you know what the others have and begin to bet on your own card, sight unseen. If one of the other players has a high number, you are going to be more cautious, of course, from which the other person can draw conclusions about the value of his card. On the other hand, you can bet an insanely high amount, and that is what Huerequeque almost invariably does, with the result that the opposite player immediately folds, even with an ace on his forehead, because with such a high bet on the table he has to assume his own card has a very low value. The best moment came when I was merely observing, and the improbable occurred, namely that all three players had a three on their foreheads. This made the chances extremely promising from any point of view, since each player could see two others with low numbers. It was a delight to witness how each reacted in character, showing joy or acting cold and indifferent so as to lure his opponent with a low bet into taking a reckless, ill-considered step. All of them eventually wagered everything they had, borrowed money, bet their houses, children, lives, but when the cards were revealed there were no winners, the bets were kept by the house, and not until the next round did everything fall to Huerequeque, of course.