Fish Soup, Cat’s Cradles, and the Shadow of the Moai.
14 -15 April, 1972
Friday, 14 April
We spent most of today at Luisa Ika’s place out at Tahai and I looked at some statues for the first time. Grant explained Professor Mulloy’s reconstructions to me including a very big chicken house which I couldn’t believe was simply for chickens.
Professor Bill Mulloy was an archeologist who made many expeditions to the island and was responsible for restoring ceremonial sites, especially the ahus where statues had fallen.
Tahai is an astonishing place – so beautiful and rugged - and dead. I was filled with pity for the people who have to live in the shadow of these statues. Below the four big moai is something like a little harbour. It makes you feel quite excited at first because it suggests commerce and life at some time in the island’s history. And then you realise there is simply not enough water for it to have been a harbour and that it must have simply had a ritual purpose.
Oh Julia 26 -only now do I recognise your need for commerce and “life” and how you were trying to shape the place into something you could understand and like. You were not unlike the priests using rongo rongo boards for firewood simply because they didn’t understand their use and needed firewood to cook wafers for communion. I suppose homesickness took many forms and at least you did no harm.
The day at Mana’s was nice. He came to the house with an elderly Atan lady around 9.30 and picked me up after collecting a few tomato plants off Carlo and we picked up Grant from the post office. In the morning Grant talked to Mana’s wife Luisa and took her genealogy.
One of the most significant research tools for Grant was gathering family trees and working out links between people as well as the shapes of families. It was a time honoured ethnological practice.Often in the process, stories would be told; who made a clandestine voyage from the island when it was forbidden by the government, who died when and how, which families were related and hence not allowed to intermarry and all sorts of other issues. The genealogy book went on being a such a sacred object in our family that when Grant’s study caught fire in 1990, Mungo, then 19, ran in to rescue it and only retreated when his hair was catching fire. The charred relic was tenderly recopied.
She had ten children, the first two of whom died and they were married after four years of living together. She said she’d only slept with one man, her husband. She talked to other men, but with the body – no.
She works incredibly hard. Gets up at 5am and goes to bed at 12 or 1 if there is more work to be done. She gave us a huge lunch of salad soup. ( I can’t remember what this odd sounding dish was now) which we couldn’t manage, and meat with rice. She also served ‘pan’ and guava jam. The pan is a cross between bread and pancake and very rich. Mungo screamed about lunchtime and on her instructions I took all his clothes off He did have a bit of a nappy rash and she told me to wash him in warm water and put talcum powder on him and let him go without a nappy. “He’s a baby so it doesn’t matter”
She bore all her children at home with Mana holding her back and her holding the bed. They were all big babies, she said and Mana said they’d been brought up on fish soup and bread and not much milk. Interesting. Both Carlo and Mana have pronounced against too much milk.
One of the sons, Alberto, went to New York to be brought up there but came back after six months. There is a photograph album with lots of pictures of him by a television set and an electric stove and at the zoo. He’s home now looking none the worse for the ordeal.
In the afternoon all the boys came home from work and played with Mungo There is one son, several cousins and a nephew all very much of an age. They taught me two new cat’s cradles of which I think I can still do one. They all ate hanging around the kitchen. There seems to be no notion of sitting at table to eat. All water at Mana’s place is brought in from ten miles away although he is building a lavatory. At present there isn’t one – only a very public bench with a hole in it.
I talked to a neighbour a little as well – the woman with the two week old baby at the airport and Mana’s sister who has one baby boy of nine months who is still breastfeeding. She is very old and worn looking but the baby is fat and flourishing and obviously very much loved. I think that the husband has left her for the continent. Another tubbier looking woman was there with a little girl. They tried to show me some kai kai too. They also said for some reason to do with Mungo’s teeth that my next one would be a girl.
It wasn’t.
I felt full of life and easiness after visiting that family. They seem a happy lot and there’s always a lot going on. Mungo enjoyed it too and ate a great plate of semolina.
Saturday, 15 April
I forgot to mention that we went to a rehearsal on Thursday of the conjunto that went to Santiago today. It took place at the school and was supposed to start at 9pm but in fact got going at about 10.30. Quite a lot of people were there including the governor and the terrible tourist woman who claims to be a professor.
We all sat around the walls of the school hall and waited and finally saw the dancing. It began with a solemn pascuence chant given by the boys dressed in grass skirts and necklaces of straw and accompanied by a skin drum, two horns clacked together and other bits and pieces. The girls were a bit tense but danced wiggling their grass skirts and funny little bikini tops with tassels on them. They had none of the abandon of the best dancers here, like Soledad, and looked altogether a bit too well brought up. The performance warmed up a bit and included some kai kais with their chants.
Apparently the group has 50 costumes altogether. We only saw 30 – the grass skirt outfits and the girls’ feather skirts and flowered head dresses and Elena next doors’ shell garments that I saw being made when I went there with Georgina.
The dance left me with a very mixed impression. A lot of care and love had gone into the costumes but the dancing was anything but authentic. The grand finale was like something out of South Pacific with lots of waving goodbye and throwing of flowers (this was only mimed at the rehearsal). It all seemed oddly vulgar – even the kai kai chanting with the rolling drum in the background. I felt the meaning of this type of dancing lay in the doing rather than the watching and the conjunto was part of the revival of things touristic rather than artistic.
This comment seems very judgmental and unfair now.
The whole thing finished very late and we trogged home in the dark feeling cold for the first time. We’ve all got some kind of cold now.
Carlo told us at lunch that Georgina has 3 more children. The oldest is a girl who has for some reason been more or less adopted by the ex governor of the island and is living in Santiago now. The other two are living with Georgina’s parents.
That is Juan and Luisa, the parents of Georgina. Maria/Suzy, Milagrosa,Victoria, and nine more living. Luisa bore sixteen children in all. Luisa became a close friend later when we moved into the little house in front of theirs.
The ten year old boy smokes and is a little tearaway and the seven year old seems to be turning out queer, C says, because he likes playing with dolls and doesn’t like being rough. Carlo maintains that his way of bringing up kids is ‘straight” whereas the island way is uneducated and uncivilized. He also said that most young girls have a baby somewhere. Georgina did not tell him how many she had when they were married but he considers those before marriage her responsibility and those after, his. On the continent a man can be imprisoned for unlawful sexual intercourse. He himself served 20 days in gaol. But not so here.
Victor was crying this morning so I took him into our room. He was very hot and needed clothes taking off but basically he seemed to want company because he cried again when I put him back after about an hour. The bedroom next door is very foetid and stuffy. I wished I could adopt him because he’s an affectionate little boy. He’s a bit spotty now.
Mungo has a touch of diarrhea for the first time. The other kids have been fighting a lot today. Coca is home for the weekend. They really don’t have enough to do though, today. Coca has a pile of little shells that she is threading. I offered to take them out for a walk but Carlo says it’s best they stay quietly at home.
Salad soup sounds like a vegetable stew to me. Well done remembering the Kai Kai