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September 27 - October 19, 2021
At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.
When you shoot an elephant, it stays on its feet for ten days before it falls over.
A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.
Among some in the crowd a brand of hostility sprang up that I had encountered previously only in the reports of early seafarers, except that now the natives were wearing “John Travolta Fever” and “Disneyland” T-shirts.
All of this has a long prehistory, of course: these people have been robbed and abused, their gold and oil taken from them. There have been border conflicts and political factions that aspired to impose an imported ideology based on the futile dream of a great revolution, an ideology making a last-ditch effort to find a home in this region.
I felt somewhat encouraged and also took comfort in the simple fact that the Indian cook who had arrived from Santa Maria de Nieva was called Grimaldo. I find the sound of that name comforting somehow.
are behaving with almost mathematical correctness toward each other.
Then alone in the house with the gangly young bookkeeper from the city, whose mere presence is death to any meaningful thoughts.
It was an Argentinean film, with one very thin man and one very fat one, blondes with bursting breasts and naughty lingerie, which was hanging up to dry in the kitchen belonging to one of the women. Because of his girth, the fat man could not duck down very well, so he kept bumping into the dangling panties and bras, rolling his eyes in ecstasy. Andreas’s girl screeched with laughter. In one scene the fat man was also playing tennis.
The mechanic who was summoned first fetched his assistant, then both of them got drunk and sat around on the ground singing; actually it was more a chanting without melody, which soon died away because both of them fell asleep. An hour later I woke the assistant, who seemed less drunk, but he just stared at me, as if from a great distance, sang the end of a verse they had not finished, and slumped over again.
at night whole herds of guinea pigs scrambled over me,
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.
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.
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.
“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
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New York, 29 September 1979 After a dramatic blow-up with his wife, a man rushes into the bathroom, hastily weighs himself on the scale, then shoots himself.
Jack Nicholson wanted me to meet him on the set of The Shining; he said he would like to do something with me, but does not want to go to the jungle and wonders whether we could not shoot the whole thing at home in a studio.
For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do—out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation—look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.
seemingly peaceful, but that is deceptive, because in its inner being nature is never peaceful.
I received a telex describing what a cherub is. Then I realized that I was developing a high fever and lay down upstairs in Gisela’s bed, hoping she would let me rest there. She made a poultice for my calf, and I started taking antibiotics. I was sick all day, and then the fever began to subside. I had received another telex, monosyllabic, saying it was the twilight of the gods, and I knew who had sent it and what the code meant. Then I was in the high mountains, Hindu Kush or the Himalayas, and at a great altitude I had to fight my way forward, sunk up to my chest in powder snow. I was going
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I was made out by the media to be a criminal, and a grotesque tribunal was convened in Germany to judge me.
Before sundown César and I rode to the other side of the lagoon to have a look at the lodge the American missionaries were having built. They are here under the pretext of doing linguistic research to further destroy the Indians’ culture.
Many of the missionaries were out swimming and sunning their obese bodies like pigs on a small wooden platform,
Thought for a long time about the inertia and the unique rhythms of cultural history, for instance why the Middle Ages did not end in Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Albania until two or three centuries later than elsewhere, and in some parts of that region still have not ended.
I went to the movies and saw a film in which a madman wanted to exterminate the race of blacks, but three muscular athletes stopped him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good lord!
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.
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.”
Two thoughts that do not belong here have been preoccupying me amid the uproar of getting everything reorganized: how can it be explained that Latin left no traces in Germania south of the Limes, yet in England such lasting traces were left in English, even though the Roman occupation was far more fleeting there; and are not stars that are moving away from us at a speed near that of light also on a collision course with us, as in mathematical reality a bullet we fired on earth that flew around the globe would have to hit us in the back?
Oppressive heat. Sleepiness. Does the devil keep a logbook?
The men, drunk by now, were mindlessly intent on finding a woman for the night, as if there were no tomorrow, while the mosquitoes, impelled by a similarly mindless principle, paid no heed to whether a person was drunk, horny, or dying.
Iquitos, 21 December 1980 I was supposed to get Claudia Cardinale settled in her hotel suite, which extended over two floors. As we entered the room, we noticed that on the upper floor, which could be reached only by way of a spiral staircase, a horse was standing, one of those noble Thoroughbreds, its bridle held by its jockey, a skinny, gnomish man. Klieg lights were set up because a commercial was being shot in the suite. We were told the room would be available shortly; we should go ahead and drop the luggage there. The word was—a rumor was flying around the hotel—that Cardinale’s bosom
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In a play staged recently in a student theater by the initiators of the tribunal against me, with some Indians from Cenepa as actors, I was portrayed, according to Henning, as always appearing for shoots with a fat cigar in my mouth; it seems to have escaped general notice that I have not done any filming yet. All this is part of the daily dance.
We had rented a car for him, but it turned out that the key did not fit; it actually belonged to a construction crane.
Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one is there. He has taken possession of almost all the forks. This morning he stole the milk bottle used by Gloria’s little daughter, and Gloria saw him out in the bushes sucking on the nipple until the bottle was empty. She is convinced the monkey will rape the baby, and she wants him shot before he does so.
Robards and Adorf, those cowards, whose real problem stems from their appalling inner emptiness, had refused to get into the car with Sluizer, terrified that the strikers might shoot at them. To
Adorf is revealing himself increasingly as a whiner, a stupid star full of posturing who cannot stand it that the Indian extras are sometimes more important than he is, the famous actor. Furthermore, he is simply cowardly, sneaky, and dumb, high-decibel dumb, as Mauch says.
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.
The forest is keeping still as if in ardent prayer.
why should I not play Fitzcarraldo myself? I would trust myself to do it because my project and the character have become identical.
I am thirty-eight now, and I have been through it all. My work has given me everything and taken everything from me. No one and nothing can throw me off course.
I hardly sleep. I do not know what real sleep is anymore; I just have brief, strenuous fainting spells.
Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness.
My life seemed like an invention to me, with its pathos, its banalities, its dramas, its idling.
his father at the age of eighty-two; when someone dies at that age, he said, there is a folk saying in his region to the effect that you can no longer blame the midwife.
Was not a scaly, breathing animal caught off the coast of West Africa an actual fish that otherwise exists only in fossilized form? A Chinese general had his troops assemble and summarily baptized two hundred thousand men with a garden hose. In the depths of my heart I decided that my favorite plant was the fern, and not only because of its name: fern beaded with rain. I carry my world with me in a little net made of liana fibers. Death is hereditary.
Today several men attacked him with knives in his bar, something that almost never hap-pens here.
