Friday 19th May 1972
We are both rather worn out after a day, as they say, of maximum effort. We were up at seven and I got Juan Ivan’s bread as well as ours this morning. The kids were breakfasted and we both wrote letters feverishly to catch tomorrow’s plane. I wrote to Sarah and the FPA (Family Planning Association in the UK who’d said I had a suspicious pap smear).
Luis (Georgina’s brother and our next door neighbour) bought butter (again, I think this was margarine) today! It’s in the ECA frigorifico again. After that we went down first, to the post office and then to the hotel for Grant to buy a couple of Easter Island books. We met the waterman at Alvarez and I bought a couple of lollipops (UK English for ice lollies). Mungo was astounded at this bounty and got very anxious when I tried to lick the drips off his.
It was a beautiful morning. There was some kind of meeting going on in the hotel and very few people around. After that we had a look at Mana Ika’s brother’s house which we’ve been offered at 100 escudos a month. It was almost comically shack like. We tried to think how to fix it up and liked the view, if nothing else The roof was all holey and there was no window but a lock on the door. We’re bearing it in mind.
We worked at the index until about 5.30. Before I joined Grant I went to see Maria Leontina (my student) about an alternative place to stay and she says her mother, Mamaflora, has a spare unfurnished house which we may be able to have. I’m seeing her tomorrow. Maria is very warm towards me now. I almost trust this but don’t quite dare. She turfed me out when the tourists came back anyway which I thought showed me she accepted me more.
This seems a bit paradoxical but I think I meant that I was being treated as an insider rather than an outsider. Or it may have been that I was looking scruffy and lowered the tone of the place!
I walked up the hill with a certain Maria Ika who has four children and lives far out. She says two of her babies died at one year old.
This evening we went to the conjunto in the school. (the dance troupe had just returned from the conti and was to perform for the locals) We waited about an hour while they fixed the lights and then there was a kind of prizegiving to the women who had helped in various ways, and a few men too, Kiko included. A lot of boring speechifying which was finally cut off by the audience who clapped the director of the school off the stage. The dancing was tremendously well received and indeed more relaxed and professional than before. A lot of lewdities were yelled up from the audience which livened the performance up a lot. We are really worn out now. Pedro (Carlo’s son newly arrived from the conti) has brought Soledad home.
Sunday May 20th 1972
Just recovered from a very troubled night. We got to bed really very tired indeed and Grant had asthma and Mungo woke up and was inconsolable. I couldn’t find out the reason at all and couldn’t quiet him with Bonjela (a gum soothing ointment), aspirin or anything else. Finally Grant got mad and leapt out of bed in the violent way he has and started smacking Mungo. I was furious and sickened and we had a first class row and I vowed to go home next day. It was hard to sleep because I couldn’t bear even to touch Grant and that’s difficult in a single bed! Anyway Mungo settled down but I was so angry I had no intention of letting Grant sleep at that point and every so often would mutter some new insult which would set Mungo off again. When we went to sleep, all of us, he woke again and this time I found out the cause. The grey cat had got into his cot! It must have hid when I looked before. No wonder Mungo didn’t like it. Once I’d chucked it out we all slept until until the plane zoomed in at 6.30.
Shortly after that there was a knocking which I thought was the kids (for whom we felt responsible as their parents were on the conti) and so leapt up naked and peeped out the door. Then I realized it was coming from the window and there was Papiano looking in with a bag of bananas. We’d forgotten he’d promised us some in his cups at the hotel on Thursday night.
I remember cat. incident incident well and how the whole household was assembled to watch us when we emerged from our room. Nobody said anything though.
There were Veronica and another girl in Pedro’s room. Apparently Veronica and Soledad stayed the night and Rosa has requested that Pedro not bring birds home any more.
Soledad had a go at me this morning for “aspirin for the teeth” and a suitcase to carry Victor’s clothes in. I was cross.
Lots of people left on the plane today. Two sisters from the hospital, Patti, three tourists from Maria’s house.
(Patti was a young woman who roamed the island, often sleeping out of doors.)
8.20pm
We’ve just had supper after a lesson with Maria (my student and daughter of Mamaflora who had offered us a house to live in) and a talk about the house which seems actually to be possible except that there is no lavatory and we’ll have to build an outside one (and locate cement for doing it). There are lots of other things to do like getting the water fixed and arranging some kind of furniture and of course getting something to cook on. We’re going to see Mamaflora tomorrow to talk about it more.
The lesson was good today. I taught Maria Leontina a few alphabetical things and the two near future tenses.
We came back tonight and Luis was home and already drunk with friend Johnny. Rosa laughed at him and waved and said “El perdido es volvado” [The lost soul is returned] and waved at him.
Luis had been out all night to Rosa’s displeasure.
Luis says the baby is being baptized tomorrow and some of his friends are coming to eat chicken , “and Rosa’s friends”. Rosa said rather touchingly that she had only one friend and that was me. We’ve grown quite close lately, especially after last night when she listened in to the rather violent row between me and Grant. We moaned together this morning about the wayward Pedro introducing birds into the house and getting the place a bad name.
Tomorrow Grant and I are going down to the baptism though Rosa refuses to. We are to take photographs.
We all sat round the table and Luis croaked out a couple of songs with his guitar and then Veronica and Anamaria Tuki showed up and had coffee. They were looking for Pedro who had gone to the cinema. I was darning a shirt of Grant’s. Then Luis made some fulsome remarks at me and Grant and fed everyone present a spoonful of salad and chased Rosa out to the kitchen with hers saying he’d go away for three weeks if she didn’t eat her spoonful of salad. He was feeling jolly and boyish in his cups tonight. Johnny, who had worked at Vaitea for ten months hasn’t been paid yet, he says.
Vaitea was the government ranch and if true this might have reflected the economic troubles the Allende government was experiencing at the time.
We are going to mass at 7am tomorrow and getting the baby baptized Jacqueline afterwards, Luis said devilishly that he liked the name Fatima but Rosa said she didn’t like that name and wants Jacqueline. They agreed on that.