Parallel lives in the history of the exploration of the Amazon: from the conquistadors to Colonel Fawcett, passing through the cinema of Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski.
di Marco Maculotti
Cover: Fitzcarraldo (1982)
"An ancient Indian legend tells that Curupira has lived in the forest along the Amazon River since time immemorial, a strange genius, a slightly deformed dwarf with upside-down feet, who is the tutelary deity of immense green universe and the author of strange spells. In fact, it may happen that, as one enters the forest, suddenly everything gets confused in the labyrinth of vegetation: everywhere trees, vegetable walls, ghosts evoked by the reflections of light and the continuous recomposition of new arabesques in the realm of perennial metamorphosis. The Curupira curse, at this point, does not forgive ».
What Ernesto DeMartino defined the "Magical existential risk" in the Amazon does not apply only to the Indian - think of the numerous eschatologies of "Land Without Evil" that took root in Iberoamerica through the centuries -, but also and above all for the conquistador and the white explorer: the jungle, as Silvano Peloso points out,
it risks annihilating it precisely because it awakens the previously denied possibility of concretely experiencing the limit between cosmos and chaos […]. The power of seduction and death of the forest is all here: in the possibility of regression to a golden age whose advent would mean the collapse of the constituted world and the risk of chaos without redemption [...] the desperate race for a call that is within us, before being outside, until dissolution and death.
An exhaustive estimate of European settlers and explorers who, starting from the XNUMXth century, ventured into theGreen Hell and they have been absorbed in order to never return is probably impossible to draw up: too few are the testimonies written over the centuries, although some chronicles have come down to us, starting from those of conquistadores. Yet many Spanish and Portuguese expeditions attempted to penetrate its secrets. The rationality of the colonists was clouded by the mythical tales of the Indians they described golden cities built by disappeared civilizations still existing in the tangle of the jungle, which sank due to an earthquake or flood: a sort of South American version of the Shangri-La, or rather the Shamballah, Indo-Tibetan.
It is certain that Lope de Aguirre - as very well evidenced by the interpretation of Klaus Kinski in the film by Werner Herzog Aguirre, fury of god (1972) - was one of the first victims of this Amazon mirage: as Peluso writes,
Aguirre lives on this invincible illusion: for him Eldorado is not only the seduction of wealth, it is an ancient dream, which awakens in the ancestral depths of consciousness, pouring out its uncontrolled magma on men and things.
Another character of the Herzogian cinema comes out better, also personified - equally divinely - by Kinski: Fitzcarraldo (1982), he too, like Aguirre, struck by a miraggio apparently impossible - in his case, the construction of a large Opera House in Iquitos, an Amazonian village isolated from the rest of the world, to show the biggest names in opera - to be achieved by even more paradoxical means, if possible: by passing the own ship above a mountain, at the point where two rivers almost meet. A feat that interested, as well as the protagonist of the film (Herzog is inspired by the biography of Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald, who lived between 1862 and 1897 and became famous as the rubber baron) and his crew in stage fiction, the director and the actors themselves, who with the help of the native populations succeeded incredibly in their enterprise. The miracle of Fitzcarraldo thus merges with that of Herzog: the boundary between cinema and metacinema, between cinematographic fiction and reality falls completely.
The end of one of the most iconic characters who ventured several times into the Amazon jungle, chasing his own staff, remains a mystery to this day. Amazon mirage: we are talking about the British colonel Percy H. Fawcett, who disappeared in the Brazilian jungle during the 1925 expedition, carried out together with his eldest son Jack. A 2016 film directed by James Gray entitled The Lost City of Z (it .: Z - lost civilization).
Fawcett's interests went far beyond the purely economic and market-oriented interests of British colonialism, which at that time wanted to ensure, by means of the explorations financed by the Royal Geographical Society, the monopoly of rubber market: the colonel, dedicated to occult studies and close to theosophical circles, was in possession of secret information regarding the existence of a mythical civilization lost in Mato Grosso, which he called "Z", as his discovery would have removed the veil on last mysteries in the history of mankind. Already in a letter sent during the 1921 expedition Fawcett revealed that he had seen it personally masses of ancient ruins whose walls suggested to him the idea of a defensive function against a supposed flood coming from the Atlantic.
Fawcett, driven by the teachings of the Secret Doctrine di Madam Blavatsky (who knew the explorer's brother personally), was convinced that he was in the presence of the last Atlantean outposts, in his opinion built by the so-called White Gods of amerind mythsi: Quetzalcoatl, Viracocha, etc. These suggestions did not fail to arouse the interest of other explorers, such as the German journalist, in the following decades Carl Brugger which he picked up from Tatunca Nara, ruler and prince of the people of the Ugha Mongulala, a tale that seems to confirm many of the insights and confidential information in Fawcett's possession.
However, when the time came to approach "Z", pessimistic about his chances of survival, he preferred to go back and entrust his readers with the final judgment on the veracity of the narrative. Thus Brugger survived his Amazonian mirage: but he was unable to do anything when, in 1984, a few years after his report was published, he was shot dead on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro. Neither the name of his killer nor the motivation for this execution were ever discovered.
