My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction.
I was working for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. This was after my junior year of high school and I spent two months in the woods, wandering up and down dry canyons, scouting rock-art sites, mapping them. I lived out of my backpack.
One morning I saw André, the houseboy from the parish in Minembwe, set off down the hill with a chicken under his right arm. He’d stuffed the legs of his trousers into his rubber boots and he was wearing a crumpled dress shirt over a T-shirt. That was all he had on him—apart from the chicken, which he would carry all the way to Uvira to sell.
The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. And no electrical glow competes with the intensity of the stars there.
You must have seen them: these small towns and tiny villages of my homeland. They have learned one day by heart and they scream it out into the sunlight over and over again like great gray parrots. Near night though they grow preternaturally pensive.
In 1987, when I was twenty-four, I lived in a Tribeca loft with my former college roommates, George and Pablo. One evening that February, Pablo brought three sisters whom I’ll call the Viscontis home for dinner, commencing what promised to be the most hopeful chapter of my life.
June 4, 1989
A massacre took place in the capital city of the People’s Republic of China. The size of it shocked the world. Nobody knows precisely how many innocent people lost their lives. The government put the number of “collateral deaths” at two hundred or less. But many Chinese believe that it was more like three thousand innocent students and residents who were slain.
For reasons that escape me, I simply could not make myself go back and read the journals I kept during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Then, twenty-four years later, my resistance suddenly crumbled, though I had trouble deciphering my own handwriting, which I had miniaturized at the time to microscopic size. These texts are not reports on the actual filming—of which little is said.
Sent: October 18
Sitting here in the middle of the late monsoon. The atmosphere is a bit grim with illness and mourning and pointless family dramas. My tummy is shaky but that doesn’t stop me from eating excessive amounts of delicious food. Went to a Tamil movie and was bewildered that it looked like MTV.
Leaving kigali these days, one no longer sees the cloud of dust that streams of trucks and taxi-buses once raised above the doughnut stands, throngs of travelers, and gas-station shanties. This cloud over the Rwandan capital’s main avenue once marked the turnoff to a rutted dirt road heading south toward the Bugesera, a region of hills and marshes that lies to the south of the city.
Jack and Dwayne lived in apartment 6E in a twelve-story building facing Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One morning in the late fifties, I moved into the apartment above theirs with my two young sons, our clothes, a few pieces of furniture, some boxes of books and games and papers, including my divorce decree, and a carton or two of kitchen odds and ends.