Peggy glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. A decent hour for a round of visits. She closed her book, swallowed the last of her coffee and heaved herself out of her chair. She struggled to pull on her boots, threw on her heavy woollen poncho, and then grabbed her umbrella – just in case.
Outside the sky was a leaden lid pressing greyness into the soul of every living creature in Cholchol, this forgotten outpost of southern Chile.
Peggy had been re-reading Thomas Moore’s The Care of the Soul and now, limping along, she reflected on the difference between ‘care’ and ‘cure’. Cure implied that something could be fixed once and for all, but care was ongoing, with no end in sight. Care required constant attention to problems that may shift but would never go away.
She was going off to care for Cholchol´s sick and elderly – ‘the used, abused and utterly fucked up’ – a satisfying quote from Thomas Klise´s novel, The Last Western. After 30 years at this job, his description of the downtrodden pretty much matched her own. She headed toward the ruca, where she knew she would find some of the Mapuche women. The ruca, the village’s sole tourist attraction, had become an unofficial meeting place, a confessional, an as-needs-be clinic.
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