1 Stars, the Sea The lamentations ended about noon. Some of the women had screamed and torn their hair. When they were gone, I went to see for myself. It was a small stone building by the cemetery in the hamlet called Hora Sfakion on the south coast of Crete, just a few houses scattered over the steep cliffs. I was sixteen. The tiny chapel had an opening, no door. In the half-dark within, I saw two corpses so close to each other, they were touching. They were both men. Later I was told that they had killed each other in the night; in that remote, archaic part of the world, they still had the vendetta, or blood vengeance. All I remember now is the face of the man on the right. It was lavender blue with splotches of yellow. Emerging from the nostrils were two enormous pads of cotton wool soaked full of blood. He had been hit in the chest with a load of buckshot.
At nightfall, I went out to sea. I was working for a few nights on a fishing boat; it would have to have been on the few dark nights either side of the new moon. One boat towed six skiffs called
lampades out to sea, each one of them with one man on board. There we were all dropped a couple of hundred yards apart and left to drift. The sea was as glossy smooth as silk, no waves. An immense silence. Each skiff had a big carbide lamp that was shining down into the deep. The lamp attracted the fish, especially cuttlefish. There was a strange method of fishing for them. At the end of a fishing line was a small shiny piece of wax paper about the size and shape of a cigarette. That attracted the cuttlefish, which grasped the booty in their tentacles. To help them hold on, the bait had a wire wreath fixed to it. You had to know just exactly how far down the lure was below the surface because the instant the cuttlefish felt themselves being pulled up into the air, they would straightaway relinquish their booty and drop back into the water. You had to accelerate the last arm's length of line so that you were able to swing the cuttlefish onto your skiff.
The first few hours were spent in silent waiting until eventually the artificial moon of the lamp began to take effect. Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older. I was completely convinced I would never see my eighteenth birthday because, lit up by such grace as I now was, there could never be anything like ordinary time for me again.
Copyright © 2023 by Werner Herzog. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
