A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (27 page)

Thursday. Not much. Bitten by 80000000000000 mosquitoes. Matt makes stupid joke. If you look closely, he’s bandy-legged, I swear.

Friday. It’s amazing when you think about it. Here’s this tribe of Indians, totally obscure, don’t even have a name for themselves. A couple of hundred years ago two Jesuit missionaries trying to find their way back to the Orinoco stumble across them, get them to build a raft and then pole the two Godmen several hundred miles south while the said Godmen preach them the Gospel and try to get them to wear Levis. Just when they get near their destination the raft capsizes, the missionaries nearly drown and the Indians disappear. Melt into the Jungle and no-one sees them again until Vic’s researchers track them down a year ago. Now they’re helping us do exactly the same thing a couple of hundred years on. What I’m dying to know is does the tribe remember? Do they have ballads about transporting the two white men dressed as women up to the great watery anaconda to the south, or however they might put it? Or did the white men vanish from the tribe’s memory as completely as the tribe vanished for the white man? So many things to think about. And what will happen when we’ve gone? Will they disappear again for Another two or three hundred years? Or disappear forever wiped out by some killer bug and all that will be left of them is a film in which they’re playing their own ancestors? I’m not sure I can get my head round that.

My blessings on thee, daughter, sin no more.*

Love, Charlie

* Joke!!

Nothing from you Sunday or Wednesday. Hope Rojas has something tomorrow. Didn’t mean you not to write whatever I said. Will send this anyway.

Letter 5

Darling –

This priest outfit must be the most uncomfortable garment ever invented for Jungle travel. Makes you sweat like a pig,
comme un porco
. How did old Father Firmin keep his dignity, I ask myself. Still I suppose you could say he suffered for his religion in the same way I suffer for my art.

Sunday. My God, guess what? Fat Dick the sound man was peeing in the river last night when one of the Indians came up to him all agitated, making lots of gestures, sign language, sort of swimming with his hands and so on. Dick doesn’t follow him – in fact he thinks the bloke is trying to get off with him which is a bit of a laugh if you’ve seen the Indian women, until the Indian runs off and fetches Miguel who’s one of the guides. Lots more gestures and explanations and Dick zips up his trousers pretty smartish. Guess what? The Indian was telling him about this little fish that lives in the river and – you can guess the rest!!! Not much chance of this particular member of this particular tribe watching British telly the same night Fish Sparks was. And not much chance of Fishy learning enough of the local lingo to set up a sting like this. So we just had to accept he was right all along! Boy did he have the last laugh.

Monday. Here’s a funny thing. While the Indians appear to understand roughly what we’re doing – they’re happy to do retakes and don’t seem at all put out by this great big eye being pointed at them – they don’t seem to understand about the idea of acting. I mean sure they’re acting their ancestors and they’re quite willing (in exchange for some Mickey Mouse presents) to build us a raft and transport us upstream on it and be filmed doing this. But they won’t do anything else. If Vic says could you stand in a different way or use the pole like this and tries to demonstrate they simply won’t. Absolutely refuse. This is how we pole a raft and just because a white man is watching through his funny machine we aren’t going to do it any differently. The other thing is even more incredible. They actually think that when Matt and I are dressed up as Jesuits we actually are Jesuits! They think we’ve gone away and these two blokes in black
dresses have turned up! Father Firmin is just as real a person for them as Charlie, though I’m glad to say they like Charlie more. But you can’t persuade them about what’s going on. The crew think this is pretty stupid of them but I wonder if it isn’t fantastically mature. The crew think they’re such a primitive civilization they haven’t even discovered acting yet. I wonder if it’s the opposite and they’re a sort of post-acting civilization, maybe the first one on the earth. Like, they don’t need it any more, so they’ve forgotten about it and don’t understand it any longer. Quite a thought!

Wednesday. Ought to have said more about the job. Not going badly. Script isn’t what I remembered, but then it never is, usually because they’ve changed it. Matt isn’t too bad to work with. I asked Make-Up to give him a few mosquito bites but he refused point-blank. Said he wanted to be the pretty one for a change. Quite funny that – I mean it’s obvious that deep down he thinks he’s jolly good-looking! I suppose I’d better not tell him that thing you said about his face looking as if it was carved out of corned beef.

Thursday. Terrible thing happened. Quite terrible. One of the Indians fell off the raft and was drowned. Just swept away. We stared at the water which was pretty choppy and waited for the Indian to surface but he never did. Naturally we said we’d stop work for the day. Guess what? The Indians wouldn’t hear of it. What good old troupers they are!

Friday. Thinking about yesterday’s incident. We were much more upset about it than the Indians were. I mean, he must have been somebody’s brother or husband or something, but there wasn’t any crying or anything. I half expected that when we pitched camp for the night there’d be some sort of ceremony – I don’t know, burning a bundle of clothes or whatever. Not so. Same old jolly camp-fire life went on as per usual. I wondered if they hadn’t liked the fellow who went overboard, but that’s too obvious. Maybe they don’t distinguish between life and death in some way. Maybe they don’t think he’s ‘gone’ as we do – or at least not gone altogether. Gone to a nicer bit of the river. I tried this out on Matt who said, ‘Hey man I didn’t know you
had hippie blood.’ Matt is not exactly the most spiritual and sophisticated fellow you’ve ever met. Believes in making your own way through life, walking tall, shooting straight, balling chicks as he puts it and spitting in the eye of anyone who does you wrong. That at any rate seems to be the sum of his wisdom. He thinks the Indians are rather cute kids who haven’t yet invented the video recorder. I must say it’s pretty funny that a chap like him ends up playing a Jesuit priest having doctrinal disputes in the rain forest. The fact is, he’s one of those perfectly efficient American actors whose careers are decided by their image makers. I told him about taking six months off and doing rep in the provinces just to get back in touch with live acting and live audiences and he reacted as if I told him I’d had a mental breakdown. Say what you like, I think the stage is the place you learn to act. Matt can twitch his face in any direction and crinkle up his eyes knowing that his jailbait fans will be sitting there wetting themselves. But can he act with his body? Call me old-fashioned, but I think a lot of American actors just do a sort of swagger and leave it at that. Tried to explain all this to Vic, who said I was doing fine and Matt was doing fine and he thought we’d gel together on screen. Sometimes I do wish he’d LISTEN to what I say. Here comes the post, or rather the copter. Nothing from you yet.

– love, Charlie

Letter 6

Pippa love –

Look I know we said we wouldn’t talk about it and maybe it’s not fair cos I don’t know what state you’ll be in when you get this, but why don’t we just move to the country and have babies? No I haven’t fallen in the river or anything. You’ve no idea how good it’s been for me out here. I’ve cut out coffee after lunch and almost don’t smoke at all. Well the Indians don’t, do they, I say to myself. The Indians don’t need to support the mighty firm of Philip Morris Inc. of Richmond Va. When
things get tough they sometimes chew on a little green leaf, which I reckon is their equivalent of the occasional ciggy one takes when the director is behaving like a prize muffin. So why not cut it down like they do? And that Linda thing. I know you probably don’t want to hear her name ever again and if that’s what you want that’s my promise, but it’s all to do with London isn’t it? Not really to do with
us
at all. Just bloody London with its grime and filthy streets and the booze. Well that’s not really living, the way we do in cities, is it? Also I think cities make people lie to one another. Do you think that’s possible? These Indians never lie, same as they don’t know how to act. No pretence. Now I don’t think that’s primitive at all, I think it’s bloody mature. And I’m sure it’s because they live in the Jungle not in cities. They spend all their time surrounded by nature and the one thing nature doesn’t do is lie. It just goes ahead and does its thing, as Matt would say. Walks tall and shoots straight. It may not be very nice some of the time but it doesn’t tell lies. Which is why I think the country and babies is the answer. And when I say the country I don’t mean one of those villages just off the motorway full of people just like us buying Australian Chardonnay from the local wine merchant and the only time you hear an ooo-aarr accent is when you’re listening to the Archers in the bath. I mean the real country, somewhere hidden away – Wales maybe or Yorkshire.

Sunday. The baby thing. It’s to do with the Indians in a funny sort of way. You know I said they’re all fantastically healthy and yet there aren’t any old folks even though we thought they travelled around together in a group? Well, I finally got Miguel to talk to them about it and it turns out the reason there aren’t any old folk around is because they don’t live much longer than about 35. So I was wrong when I thought they were fantastically healthy and a good advert for the Jungle. The truth is it’s only the fantastically healthy ones who can get by at all. What a turnaround. But the point is, I’m now older than most of this tribe will ever be and that feels like a chill wind. And if we lived in the country then it wouldn’t be me coming home every night whacked out and wanting to be
looked after and having a squawking infant instead. If I only took the big parts and none of this TV crap I’d just go away to film, and then when I was around I’d really be around. See? I could make a playpen for him and buy him one of those big wooden Arks with all the animals in and I could get one of those bags you carry babies around in like the Indians have had for centuries. Then I’d go striding off across the moors to get the both of us out of your hair for a bit, what do you say? By the way, I really am sorry I hit Gavin.

Monday. Bit depressed, love. Had this ludicrous tiff with Vic about a line. Six bloody words, but I
knew
Firmin wouldn’t say them. I mean, I’ve been
living
this guy for three weeks now and Vic starts telling me how to speak? He said OK rewrite them, so I held things up for an hour and at the end of it he said he wasn’t convinced. We tried it out all the same, because I insisted, and guess what? Bloody Matt wasn’t convinced either. I said he couldn’t tell a line of dialogue from a line of coke and anyway his face was carved out of corned beef, and he threatened to punch me. Stupid bloody film.

Tuesday. Still boiling.

Wednesday. Amazing thing. You know I said about the Indians not understanding about acting. Well in the last 2 days Firmin and Antonio have been getting more and more hostile (which isn’t hard to do given how Charlie and Matt are currently feeling about one another) and you could really sense the Indians getting involved, following it all from their part of the raft as if their lives depended on it – which in a way they did I suppose because we were arguing about whether they had the right to be baptised and have their souls saved or not. They sensed this somehow, I don’t know. Anyway today we had the scene where Matt had to hit me with the paddle sort of semi-accidentally. It was best balsa wood of course, not that the Indians could know, but I duly went down poleaxed and Matt started pretending it was an accident. The Indians were supposed to look on at what was happening as if these two white men in skirts were barmy. That’s what they’d been told to do. But they didn’t. Lots of them came rushing over to me and started stroking my face and
wetting my brow and making a sort of wailing noise, and then three of them turned on Matt looking really nasty. Incredible! What’s more they might have done him an injury if he hadn’t pulled off his cassock pretty smartish and turned back into Matt, which calmed them down. Amazing! It was only old Matt, and that nasty priest Antonio had gone away. Then I slowly got to my feet and they all started laughing happily as if I wasn’t dead after all. The good thing was that Vic kept running so we didn’t miss any of it. Now he thinks he can work it in, which I’m pleased about because if this is the way the Indians react to me and Matt then maybe that’s a pointer to how the fans will go.

Thursday. Vic says the lab report on yesterday’s scuffle wasn’t too kosher. Bet bloody Matt’s been getting at him – probably knew the camera had caught him looking shit-scared. I said let’s wait and see how it prints and Vic agreed but I didn’t get good vibes. So much for Truthspiel: when they get it, they don’t use it.

Friday. I don’t think the script’s up to scratch, and the whole thing’s underbudgeted, but one thing I will say for it is that it’s ABOUT something. I mean, it isn’t afraid of the big issues. Most films aren’t about anything, are they, that’s what I find more and more. ‘Two Priests up the Jungle’ (which is what Old Fish Sparks sings from time to time to the tune of Red Sails in the Sunset) – sure, but it’s about the sort of conflict running through human life in every time and every civilization. Discipline v. permissiveness. Sticking to the letter of the law v. sticking to its spirit. Means and ends. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason v. doing the wrong thing for the right reason. How great ideas like the Church get bogged down in bureaucracy. How Christianity starts off as the religion of peace but ends up violent like other religions. You could say the same about Communism or anything else, any big idea. I think this film could be really quite subversive in Eastern Europe and not because it’s about priests either. Whether they’d distribute it is another matter. I said to Fish the film has a message for the trade unions as well if they could find it and he said he’d keep looking.
Pippa love, think about the baby thing, won’t you?