Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog

Author:Werner Herzog [Herzog, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Nonfiction, Film
ISBN: 9780062016461
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Iquitos—Camisea, 4 April 1981

Flight from Iquitos to Pucallpa with Faucett, and from there with Aguila’s small plane by way of Sepahua, where I handed over 4 million soles to Trigozo, compressed as usual into a brick, before we flew on to Camisea. The airfield was dry and firm.

Camisea, 5 April 1981

Jorge Vignati came to pick us up yesterday with the boat. Walter was busy with the slaughtering of a cow at the Indians’ camp. The camp peaceful and nice; they were all happy to have us back. The first thing I did was put my radio on the rough-hewn table on my porch and play, very loudly, the cassette with Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus. I noticed that two large ants, affected by the vibrations of the mighty tone, were acting like mad creatures, doing a rhythmic St. Vitus’ dance in front of the loudspeaker. They writhed, raced around crazily in a circle, and whirled as if an electrical current were running through them.

The water level is extremely low; the river is flowing quietly, and the camp seems sleepy, like a dismal tourist locale in the off-season, or rather like a place that never has visitors, never experiences a high season, yet continues to wait for something. The events of the past have vanished, like bad dreams. It has not rained in days; it is dry and hot, and the river continues to go down, threatening to dry up altogether.

Yesterday at the airport in Pucallpa two scruffy four-year-old Indio children asked me in all seriousness whether I needed a taxi, and presented themselves as drivers. I responded just as seriously that I needed to take another flight; was not one of them a pilot? No, they said, neither of them was a pilot. So there they stood, the two miniature taxi drivers, barefoot, smeared with mud, which had welled up between their toes, their bare bellies distended above the elastic waistbands of their gym shorts, their hair wild and black. They were very sure of themselves.

In the camp there is now an athletic black man with a large gap between his upper front teeth. In Oventeni he was a cattle driver for the Campas, and came here with a group of them. He is always chewing on a matchstick, and usually carries several of these toothpicks stuck into his nappy beard just below his ear; they stay there even in the strong breeze created by the speedboat, as he proudly pointed out to me. With Beatus, or Beat Presser, the stills photographer, I took the heaviest nylon string, certainly heavier than the strings on a tennis racket, and attached the largest and most fearsome fishhook with a knot. Then I tugged on the string as hard as I could, and the third knot finally turned out to our satisfaction. We fetched a chunk of meat from the kitchen and threw this bait into the water. I have a running bet with Klausmann that during our time on the Camisea I will catch a fish at least one meter in length.

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