Had a quiet day at home today. Grant forbade me to go out (because I was sick) and went and explained to Maria de Tepano that I couldn’t come (to teach English). I managed to stay in bed till 11.30 which was nice.
Luis asked for aspirin “in case he got sick in the country” and two men came by selling meat – the son of Emilio Paoa and someone else but aside from that it was a peaceful morning. When I got up I felt rather weak but decided since it was hot for once that I would wash the sheets. For some reason the tank was overflowing like fury and Rosa seemed singularly helpless and uncomprehending of the problem. Once I had established that she really didn’t know what was wrong I tried all the taps until one of them seemed to stop the flood It’s an incredible system full of unlikely looking rubber tubes.
I got the washing done and wrote to Pat and made pancakes for tea. Grant came home about six. The kids were wild as usual and Chico ran off to play at Juan Ivan’s and came back with a sopapilla (deep fried bread dough) and a contented expression. Christian shat in both the bathroom and the bedroom today. Mungo played at being pushed around in an upside down stool this evening. His medicine seems to make him very sleepy. He ate most of an egg today.
Wednesday May 17th 1972
So Mungo has a little boy cousin! The telegraph man was walking along entwined with Patty of the Ikas and I hailed them and he produced the telegram from his pocket. I wonder what he (Max) looks like. A terrible name though. Anyway bless them both. I wish I could see him.
It’s been a busy day though we got up latish. Christian had shat in both the lavatory and the bedroom. Grant sent him to his room and we discussed the matter with Rosa coming to no real conclusions. It’s obviously a sign of him being disturbed because of the defiant way he does it but all Rosa says is “Muy malo Christian”(Christian is very bad) Anyway I gave him breakfast by himself later and tried to elicit a promise not to do it tomorrow but didn’t. It’s hard to know what to do when we don’t even know if Carlos and Georgina are returning tomorrow.
I went on down to the cooperatve and the ECA leaving Mungo behind. I went via the church with Grant and we stopped in at the English tourists on the way to retrieve Grant’s pamphlet. We chatted about the Gilbert Islands and here and Betty said that leprosy usually took two years to achieve a negative result and some people still came up positive after ten years.
There was nobody much at either the ECA or the cooperativa and on the way home I met the telegraph man. After lunch I set off with Mungo for the church and Adriana Ivan Araki Pacomio caught up with me and we walked down together. We chatted about this and that and she said she was excited about the trip of the Conjunto to Tahiti and New Zealand. I asked what they had done with the money they had earned and she said some had gone on clothes and she was saving some. She comes from a family of ten. She looks far more sophisticated after the trip. They are dancing in the school on Friday. It’ll be interesting to see if they are more professional looking now than before.
I worked on Grant’s file for a couple of hours this afternoon and Mungo slept on the padre’s bed. He’s slept a lot today. We are up to 1960.
At about 4.15 I decided to go down to the matrona and see if I couldn’t get started on the records. It was a disastrous visit. She was taking a shower prior to going out so I thought I’d just leave a piece of paper with what I wanted to know on it. She looked at it and it dawned on her that we wanted actual personal details on people if not the names. She absolutely said no and it would be a violation of professional ethics and everything else. Perfectly true of course but I’d been asking for these things for weeks and in her featherbrained way she’d just said she’d ask the doctor and then not done it. The doctor on the other hand seems willing to give Grant any information he wants. I just hope that in her general annoyance she doesn’t go spreading it around that we’ve been asking her to violate professional secrets. She said that the reporter last week had annoyed someone with questions and nothing could be secret here and that Chilean law was very strict about such things. Also there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding when Grant left a message yesterday that I couldn’t come because I was ill and Nora thought I meant she was to come and see me and she got the message too late, fortunately. But altogether, it strikes me, our relationship is heading for the rocks.
On the way home I picked up Grant and we bought a couple of things from Moise Tuki’s boutique and asked for tomato puree. He didn’t have any in the shop but he gave us his bell with a key on and said to call in at the house and ask Mercedes to give us some. We did this and she gave us two tins and said to come if we ever wanted anything else and it was our house etc.
We met the judges secretary today looking very long faced because some dollars and francs had been stolen from his desk. This was evidence from a previous robbery by kids. He thinks he knows who did it – a crazy man = but apparently there has been another robbery recently too – the dentist who has been hoarding dollars for ages.
The hoarding of dollars was very common at the time because the Chilean escudo was undergoing massive devaluation at the time.
It was quite hot today, though chilly tonight.
Tuesday May18th1972
Today was rather unsettling in a number of ways. I went down to the church this morning after Grant because Mungo was sleeping and wrote a letter to Mummy.
“Mummy” seems very childlike now but then was not an unusual way for grown up children to refer to their mothers in England and at the time I was still an English person. I’d only spent four months in Australia.
I filed all the cards and put a couple of screws into the padre’s car for him because my hands were smaller and could fit into the places the screws went.
This scene still sticks in my head. The padre and I had almost no language in common but he mutely offered me shelter in his house and seemed to understand the pressures I was sometimes under as a young mother in a strange place. He had an old car and beckoned me as I left his house one day and mimed what he needed from me, and my satisfaction of understanding and being able to do it achieved a deep rapport between us for that moment anyway.
We met the plane and of course Georgina and Carlos weren’t on it. I felt sorry for the kids who had been washed and brushed in case and we rushed home to get a packet of special biscuits which were greeted with ecstasy. I wanted to have a demure tea and make them feel cared for but alas my plans went awry.
There was a knock at the door and in walked one of Carlos’s elder sons sent here to keep him out of trouble with the police – very beautiful looking and very young. He flung a box of biscuits at the children (the same kind as mine) and they settled down to guzzling them all and then another box after. I suppose it doesn’t matter.
We were a little ruffled by this sudden new arrival without a word from Carlos and have started thinking very seriously about moving out. I’m going to see Maria de Tepano tomorrow to see if she has any ideas.
At the airport the mad old lady who gives Mungo bananas and apples and was wearing a flower behind her ear today said to me she had “news” for Grant. I got him for her and she told him she’d had a letter from an American friend saying someone had been sent from America to kill President Allende and she was very pleased. She’s as nutty as anything.
Actually, as it turned out, she was not so mad, politically speaking. Things were then getting difficult in mainland Chile and people were divided about the merits of the socialist government, as well as all the undermining by the US government. Though It must have been of great concern to parents of children who were going to High School on the conti, I’m struck now by how uninvolved the people I moved among were. Many did not feel the Conti was their country and its troubles were far away. But my knowledge of such things was undoubtedly limited by my poor Spanish at the time
At the post office Grant picked up tons of letters – from the university and everywhere else. I had one from Grandma addressed simply Julia Macall, Easter Island. But it got here! And another from the FPA which disturbed me a bit. My cervical smear came back negative for cancer but with “some abnormal cells present” and I should have another test within twelve months. I was irrationally a bit scared. I’m going to write and find out exactly what this means.
We went to the hotel tonight and had drinks with Ana Rapahango and Norma and Adriana Ivan from down the road. My drink made me feel a bit sick.
POST PROD
A bit about nissology