Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo Read online

  A canoe passed by, with three men in the bow rowing in unison with long poles. Behind them the boat is piled high with freight, on top of which a woman and a child are crouching.

  Afternoon: taking the speedboat to Pinglo, because a plane is supposed to be leaving from there. The boat’s vibration kept me awake for most of the trip; I stared in amazement into the jungle as it whizzed by. In Pinglo, as I had expected, the plane was not there, and we went to the farm on the opposite bank of the Río Santiago to bargain for the cattle that a farmer wants to sell; he has lived here for twenty-five years and is starting to find it too lonely. A cloudburst drove me onto the porch of his house, where I played with two newborn puppies. Not even the death of a chicken shall have been in vain.

  The Pongo was twelve feet above flood stage, but sailing through it was not difficult. I stood in the stern and held on to the roof for support. Saramiriza was as desolate as ever, and I fell asleep in the little shop with my head on the table, while between my feet hens rested, their chicks under their wings and their feathers all puffed up; one of the chicks stuck its little beak out through the feathers of his mother’s wing. The dogs were sleeping, everything was sleeping. Toward five in the afternoon a vehicle was leaving for the Estación Cinco, but an officious little man who had recently been put in charge of security up there would not let us get on; claiming all the seats were taken. Nearby, where the Williams pipeline folks once had their camp, all that remains is a leveled gravel area in the jungle, and around it, where there were dozens of brandy shacks, shops, and brothels, what is left are rotting timbers, like the skeletons of animals not native to the area. Between this dead zone and the pumping station at Cinco are a few utterly wretched wooden shacks, and we were able to spend the night in one of them. It is going to be a night of fleas, bedbugs, and mosquitoes. In the sandy area in front of the shack are a few wobbly tables and benches. Five glum Filipinos who work up at the station are sitting around, drinking warm beer and speaking Tagalog with each other, while for half an hour the same scratchy John Travolta record is played over and over again. Our gasoline drums that supposedly drifted upstream turned up here—empty—and the shack owner served up a story according to which he had bought them from a man whom he indignantly referred to as the thief. The man had died two months ago, however, and was thus hard to get hold of, unfortunately. César is coughing. He plans to go to Cuzco because there is some problem involving his house to deal with, as he says, and besides his Corsican wife is very pregnant.

  Saramiriza, 20 August 1979

  Soon the small transmitter in Saramiriza will be covered in a tangle of lianas and vines. They are already creeping from all sides up the guy wires. As we got to the river, a helicopter was just landing, being greeted with barking by one of the most wretched mutts I have ever laid eyes on. The dog was chasing the helicopter the way dogs sometimes chase a moving car, even though the draft from the rotor almost knocked it to the ground and was kicking up gravel at him. Then, at a slight distance, the dog lifted one leg and pissed in the direction of the helicopter.

  Spending the night in the utterly miserable and shabby shack that tried to pass itself off as a hotel. It looked like a bedbugs’ ball-room, but was not so bad in that respect. The hotel had an upper story, but the walls were bare boards and the building was half open on one side. There were no doors, and the floor had a large hole, covered with a sheet of black plastic to make it less noticeable. In the dark I stepped into the hole and descended in slow motion to the ground floor, pulling the plastic with me and landing in the midst of the innkeeper’s sleeping family. I climbed back up to my room by a ladder. The corrugated tin roof leaked, but it rained only briefly during the night. The next morning I was awakened by the call of the whistling bird that I remembered from Aguirre. They call it a wist-winsche. I was wide awake immediately, because there were several of them calling and answering each other at the same time.

  Last night I went to the kitchen, located in a wooden shack, sat down among the women and girls, and listened to their stories.

  The river flows fast here. On the gravel bank on the other side two black cattle are at the river’s edge, gulping water. We are going to wait all day for the plane. There is not a soul in the Saramiriza school, a rickety wooden structure. The hastily nailed-together wooden benches are deserted, and on the walls hang posters showing the nervous system, the useful and the harmful animals, the muscles, the cow’s stomachs. A child’s pencil drawing shows a cow, and beneath it various products from the cow are nailed to a board: representing leather, a piece from a battered, decommissioned soccer ball, a section of a belt, a shoe brush, gummy with black polish, but no shoe, not even a small piece of one. Representing cheese, pieces of tins from New Zealand that once contained cheese spread; representing butter, three pieces of some kind of tin with an Australian label, in several sizes, probably taken from the lid and the body, each with a red ostrich feather; representing milk, tins from Nestlé and Ideal. A dog ran by on three legs. In the general store I took two warm Cokes from the refrigerator, which was not working and had become a breeding ground for cockroaches.

  In the store, which has a total of two shelves, there are some T-shirts in cloudy plastic wrappers, the shirts wrinkled and discolored from exposure to the climate; also some rubber balls, padlocks, flashlight batteries. The entire upper shelf is filled with pictures of saints, the cheapest kind of print, the last gasp of the Nazarenes. One of the pictures shows the Virgin Mary appearing to the children of Lourdes, and Leonardo’s Last Supper is also there, tipped on its side.

  A primeval tortoise came crawling through the store, rocking its head and its body like an autistic person who wants to have nothing to do with the world. Outside pigs were grunting. The tortoise got stuck as it tried to squeeze under a plywood partition; its shell, which it cannot visualize, is too high, but it stubbornly works away, scrabbling with its claws in a futile attempt to move forward. The wooden floor is smeared with oil and smells of rancid grease. From the court-yard in the back, strewn with garbage, where dogs and pigs dig in the dirt, came the cries of an infant, and I went outside to check because the infants here never cry. The child was lying naked on a bundle of cloth on the ground, and the tortoise, which had somehow worked its way out after all, had been turned on its back by the mother, so it would not crawl over the child. It was lying there with its head and legs completely drawn into its shell. The mother, half Indian, came and picked up the baby, a girl, and showed me that she had just pierced her ears, but instead of earrings had pulled a piece of string through each hole and knotted the ends. Out in front a pickup was being loaded with green bananas and papayas. The crates of fruit were being pitched up. As the papayas flew through the air, the catcher in the bed of the pickup, who had to stack them, was singing, and the men throwing them were working to the rhythm of his song.

  When the float plane arrived, the only noteworthy event in the entire week, a few people here were spurred into action, a lethargic, reluctant action, as if this were a disruption, the incursion of history into the sluggish slumber of time. Last night an announcement came over the radio, allegedly from Gustavo for us, saying that the Huallaga is on the move in the direction of the Pongo de Manseriche. That cannot be true; now even the radio is spreading rumors. Nonetheless, our transmissions between seven and eight in the evening are our only connection to the camp on the Cenepa. César listens every evening to the transistor radio, when there is an hour of announcements about people being searched for and messages for strangers in the depths of the jungle.

  The amphibious plane flew to Andoa first, and will presumably return here and then continue on to Iquitos. By noon it was hot, and the wait seemed very long. We rolled the gasoline drums down the bank and pushed them into the water. There they were fished out and loaded onto Segundo’s large boat. This time we will at least get the gasoline to its proper destination, provided nothing goes wrong in the Pongo rapids. Our speedboat is stranded with gasket failure. The boatm
an forgot to take along spare parts and tools and is now waiting for a miraculous intervention that might revive the engine. Sweat, storm clouds overhead, sleeping dogs. There is a smell of stale urine. In my soup, ants and bugs were swimming among the globules of fat. Lord Almighty, send us an earthquake.

  Iquitos, 21 August 1979

  In the morning the goats leap, in the evening they have to sleep, Walter said to me at breakfast. Despite the jolly rhyme, the general mood is irritable, and I am probably going to have to let some people go, chief among them Alban, the woodcarver, who said he would deliver the figurehead a week ago, promised to do so without fail, but it turned out that he had not even procured the wood for it. I went and confronted him angrily. Yes, he had the wood, he swore, and showed it to me. So why would he not get to work right away? The wood had to dry first, he said, but tomorrow he would have the figurehead done. So how long would the wood need to dry? I asked. A week, a month, two years? No, not that long, he said firmly. So what was the next step, I asked. First he would turn the wood on the big lathe. I had him show me the lathe, and one look told me that it was a complete wreck, with the main axle broken. I asked whether he could replace the axle. Yes, soon. What did soon mean? Well, the axle had to be shipped from Miami—that was where the lathe was from. But he could carve the figure without the lathe, it would just take a little longer, a very little longer. With a pencil we scratched days and weeks onto a piece of plywood, and I added them up. According to my calculation, the figurehead could be done in three weeks at best, but more realistically in five or six. At that Alban looked at me with a somnam-bulistic gaze and said, no, not that long, no way. So when would he be done, I asked. He gazed heavenward, quivering with fervor, like one of the Nazarenes’ saints, and exclaimed, mañana, tomorrow!

  Problems with getting authorization for shooting—demands for money from all sides. The top army general informed us that first he had to issue a ruling on our project, and he did not know yet what he would decide; it depended on us whether he would be able to give formal confirmation of the existing permits, and I was so fed up that I promptly went to see him without an appointment. I let him have it and spoke so bluntly of the telltale signs of extortion that he stared at me in amazement and wished me all the best, as if I were someone setting out to swim the Niagara Falls. The time for diplomacy is past. My left leg is so inflamed from insect bites that it is swollen.

  Iquitos, 22–23 August 1979

  Yesterday at four in the morning, while it was still dark, Walter shook me awake to tell me that in half an hour a plane would be leaving for Lima. Still groggy with sleep, I jumped into my clothes, then into one shoe, then the other. But there seemed to be a sock bunched up in the shoe. I reached in to pull it out, and suddenly instead of a sock I was holding a tarantula, as big as my fist and hairy. At that moment my heart stopped beating. I hurled the spider to the ground, thinking, how banal and humiliating to die like this, and I considered briefly whether I should sit down or be whisked away standing. When I decided to remain standing to see what would happen, my heart began to beat again, first unevenly, like an engine that does not want to start in the cold. Unreconciled with myself and the world of big spiders, I sat in the jeep, saying not a word, and after a few kilometers of tearing along the engine overheated because our watchman had forgotten to put water in the radiator, though when we asked him as we were leaving, he swore he had done so. The engine got so hot that it blew the radiator cap high into the air, after I had taken the precaution of loosening it with my sneaker. We found the cap on the jeep’s roof. The airport offered a ghostly sight: all the lights were on, the terminal flooded with neon, but not a soul to be seen; we were the only ones in that eerie setting. Finally we found a guard. The flight had been canceled because the previous day a transport plane from Miami had torn a hole in the runway. That had thrown all the flight plans into confusion. Supposedly a flight to Cuzco would be taking off very soon, and from there it was possible to get to Lima. But I decided to stay here, even though it is urgent that we hold a press conference in Lima, because the rumors and allegations about us that people are spreading are getting crazier by the day.

  On the street outside was a porter with ulcers on one leg; he had wrapped a cardboard box around the leg and tied it with string. It went from his ankle to his knee. In the evening to the Chinese restaurant, and then I went to see a film from India, El Huerfanito, “The Orphan,” but the film had probably been mistitled by the distributor, because the plot had to do with a very rich man who suddenly became poor. Nonetheless he went on living in his palace, unmistakably a cheap set made of papier-mâché, with garlands of plastic flowers for decoration. There was a daughter to be married off, and the prospective bridegroom, a sleazy fellow with a little beard penciled on, fell in love on cue. Then songs were sung. Then came telephone calls. What? Horrors! said the rich man, who had a good heart, I am ruined. From then on there was lots of weeping, usually by four or five people at once, and the tears flowed most copiously when one of the sons was to leave home to get a job. All the poor folk in the town had already been invited to the wedding, which was called off now because the bridegroom’s parents refused to have anything to do with an impoverished rich man. The poor folk stood outside the former rich man’s door, weeping for him, but they looked like middle-class people, poorly disguised extras: only the one in the very front had a few symbolic rips in his sleeve. The poor folk at the door demonstrated their good hearts by rejecting the rich man’s last money, which he wanted to give them, and insisting that they would pray for him to become rich again. The rest of the rich man’s extended family formed picturesque tableaux in the background, then suddenly took one step forward in unison, and stood motionless, showing their emotion. That was the end of the film.

  At breakfast Andreas had remarked that he was missing some underpants; every time the laundry was done, a few pairs disappeared, and he wondered whether Doña Rosa, to whom he turned jokingly, was stealing them and secretly wearing them. Doña Rosa, the little old Indian woman, screeched, clambered onto the table, lifted her skirt, dancing and laughing, and demonstrated that she had no underwear on at all. Every time I leave Iquitos, she gives me a big hug, and I press her to me; she reaches up only to my diaphragm. The last few times I have lifted her up to hug her.

  At the market I saw a fish that must have weighed 130 kilos, a wide-mouthed, pale, giant fish without scales. The woman who was carving it up took an iron rod and brought it down hard on the upper edge of her butcher’s knife to hack off the head. When the head was finally severed, I could see the heart, still pulsing and quivering. It kept on pumping for a long time, even though there was no blood left. I bought four liters of siete raizes, containing an admixture of slightly fermented wild honey and essence from the chusuhuasi root. Today I gazed down for a long while at the floating town of Belén, as if for the last time. The rats scampering across the boards that form the ceiling above my bed kept me awake most of the night.

  Lima, 26 August 1979

  A completely pointless press conference given by us, grotesque from start to finish. The Lima Times, a little paper published in English, had reported that we had four Indians thrown into jail, made a habit of abusing Indians, and had destroyed their fields while shooting, and the news services are picking these stories up. What we have to say does not make a dent, because it does not make for a good story. Evaristo Nunkuag, chairman of the Indian Council, whom Wawaim does not want to have anything to do with, is being played up as the savior of those without rights, but no one cares to hear that he works as a contractor for the oil companies, recruiting Indian workers whom he exploits, or that he openly demanded bribes from us. There is no logic to the charge that we had four Indians arrested (how? by whom? where?), when practically all we are doing is maintaining a medical outpost, and the fact that we are far from ready to start shooting does nothing to disprove the allegations that we are ruining the Indians’ fields during filming. Fortunately the half-Indian waiters i
n their white linen jackets took pity on me during this absurd scene and kept slipping me one pisco after another. I barely made it out of the hotel—and after that there is a gap in my memory. Walter said I pronounced a passerby the president of Peru, and then I must have bumped my head very hard on something. For a good while I did not know where I was, who I was, or why.