Saturday April 29 1972
Grant is making a tape to John and I am writing this in the main room sitting at the yellow table with a candle in front of me because the electricity has faded out twice tonight.
We’ve had a nice day – a real holiday. After the plane this morning (which took off twice because there was a new pilot who wanted to practise), Grant and I took horses from Juan Ivan and trotted out to Rano Kau volcano up the hill.
It felt marvellous to be out and away from everyone on this stolid old horse who didn’t want to trot. The coast stretched out jagged and lined with white foam behind us and the sun burned down on the back of my neck and the scenery that I’ve been looking at for a month came alive with weeds and rocks and obsidian in the grass.
We reached the volcano after about one and a quarter hours and it was a staggering sight with sheer walls and muddy puddles on the bottom which was very big too.
There were two very different volcano craters on the island. Rano Raraku housed the quarry where the moai were carved with some left still attached to their matrix. Rano Kau , however, held water and reeds. In the old days, according to the old people, villagers would make the long trek to do their washing up there. Wild grapes grew there too.
We hurried back to lunch with Veriveri Tuki and arrived about an hour late, filthy with Mungo smelling like a sewer. I had him in the carrier on my back on the horse. I think our host was a bit offended that we arrived so disorganised but things improved. We had a nice lunch with lobster salad. His daughter looked a bit annoyed too, I discovered subsequently, because Grant had refused to change her husband’s money into dollars.
People always wanted to get dollars as the Chilean currency was very unstable at the time with rampant inflation.
Like the Hei lunch it was duller than the encounter that brought forth the invitation.
But people are gossiping with us now. A woman who dropped in to ask Veriveri to buy cognac for her, was thoroughly slated as a drunkard after she’d gone. The old man who is Georgina’s uncle said that Georgina was a bad woman for skiving off to Santiago and she keeps a bad house. And of course we should move into his instead. His tourist house is immaculately kept with candlewick bedspreads and shells and plastic flowers.
I do think we should begin reciprocating more conscientiously. One thing I am doing is giving an English lesson to Maria Tepano on Tuesday. Wonder if it will work. Hope it snowballs into a little class.
The lessons with Maria Tepano became important to us both. I taught her the language needed for handling tourists and she told me fascinating stories about the days before the plane and how things were managed.
Anyway after lunch we rode home and took our horses’ bridles off (made of rubber straps and string) and let them out on the lush grass in our backyard, well manured by Mungo’s nappies.
After a bit of a rest we trotted off again up the road to Vinapu in the cool of the late afternoon. I noticed again how very far away from the town the little old man who came back from the cinema with us lives. Half way up the hill with horses grazing around him. No water presumably. He has very yellow eyes and speaks only Pascuence. I wonder what his story is.
It’s hard to describe the beauty of our last ride. – partridges fluttering out of the grass – stones - ferocious erosion by the seashore and horses swinging their tails – riding back into the sunset with an old lady calling out “Iorana korua” to us. The row of silver tanks along the seashore, like a modern ahu. And the hills rolling.
When we got home the radio was blaring and the kids dancing and Carlo was a little drunk. He’d been given a momentary lift by two glasses of alcohol and a packet of cigarettes from Alvarez.
I’ve been feeling a bit ashamed about my feelings about Carlo. He has a lot to put up with just now and I’m sure a lot of his impatience with me is just symptomatic of this.
Tonight the electricity has been going off and on a lot. There’s a moth in the journal and I’m going to bed.