The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (16 page)

Perhaps understandably, given the kind of animal Ana-Karmen seemed to be, Sophia decided to take me on anyway. Once she had poured enough water into the giant pot, she approached me without fear and grabbed my upper arms while once again babbling at me. Again, though I couldn’t understand what she was saying, her intention was obvious: she was also pointing at the pot and trying to drag me over to it.

I hated being touched by her. It felt unnatural and violent. The touch of the monkeys had always been so gentle. A soft furry arm snaked around my shoulder in affection. The gentle probing of nimble fingers combing my hair for grubs. This was so different and also very rough.

Now she seemed to decide she needed help. ‘Lolita!’ her shout rang out. ‘Imelda! Elise!’

Whatever the sounds meant, they got a swift reaction. Just as a warning cry made the monkeys react quickly, so this barked noise brought reinforcements. Now there were four women intent on subduing me, and even with my terror of the water making me stronger, I was no match for four fit, grown women. One I could have managed. I intuitively knew that. But together they were unassailable and seemed to know it. Within seconds they had lifted me, kicking and shrieking, and dumped me in the water.

The shock of it made my whole body tremble. Would I now dissolve? Would being immersed rip the skin from my limbs? I remembered how I would sit up in the canopy and listen to sounds far below me of jungle animals in the river in palpable distress. I could hear them splashing, bellowing and howling their terror, and often wondered what fate might have befallen them there. To my mind, no creature was ever safe in water. And similarly petrified, I began to shriek as well.

They took no notice. Instead, they went straight into action, one of them picking up an instrument of torture – a long stick with a rough-looking brush at one end. Another held a ball of something slimy on a string. I would come to understand that this was soap – a giant ball of soap made from leftover slivers of old soaps all stuck together. They attacked me with both, scrubbing my poor delicate skin and my matted hair. I had never felt so violated.

And I resisted – resisted with a strength I didn’t even know I had – but it didn’t seem to make a bit of difference. They continued to manhandle me, scrubbing my limbs with rough, fast-moving hands. This was nothing like the monkeys’ grooming. They were scrubbing at my flesh viciously – invading me, it felt like – and taking no notice of my obvious shock and pain.

It’s difficult to convey now how distressing all this was for me. I had no memory of my early years. I only knew the jungle. And once again, for all my nakedness and lack of self-consciousness, I had a powerful sense of being taken over, of being enslaved. For the first time in my life I felt my body was no longer mine and that I was just a powerless object for them to do with as they pleased. The loss of control was almost impossible to bear.

By now the water, which had started out clear, was a deep brown. I could no longer see the bits of myself that were under the surface, yet still the three women continued to manhandle me and scrub me, getting increasingly angry about my shrieking and splashing. And then, after some more gabbled speech, I was again lifted. They took me out of the filthy water and stood me on the floor, and while I stood and shivered, they dragged the pot of filthy water from the room.

So perhaps I wasn’t to be cooked and eaten after all. But if I thought the worst of the ordeal was over, I was horribly mistaken. Within moments the pot was back and once again they began to fill it. They were going to plunge me into it all over again! This time my resolve was even stronger than before, and I made so much fuss – wriggling and shrieking and flinging my limbs in all directions – that they obviously decided they might as well abandon the second dunking and instead lifted me back onto a small, scratchy floor mat. Here they set about scrubbing me all over again, only this time using rough cloths that they moistened in the fresh water before setting about me as if trying to flay my skin off. Looking back, perhaps they had little choice in the matter. They needed to clean me and I was making it very difficult. It might have been as much about self-protection as anything.

By the time I was as clean as I was going to be, and dry, I had run out of both the energy and the will to fight back. Now, my shrieks of indignant protest reduced to desolate whimpers, I just let them get on with their next job, which seemed to be to encase me in clothing. But these were clothes unlike anything I’d seen in the Indian village. They were also unlike the teeny scraps of tops and skirts they wore themselves. They seemed to want to dress me up to look like the hunters.

First, an enormous, stained shirt that looked like it was big enough for three of me was hauled unceremoniously over my head. Then my feet and legs were channelled into some equally huge brown trousers, which were itchy and billowing and smelt horrible. They wouldn’t stay up – that was obvious – so a belt was fetched. It was white and stretchy and, like the string that held the skirt of the young Indian mother, it was knotted to hold the trousers up around my tiny waist.

I felt wretched. I was too hot, and my body felt restricted and enclosed. But they weren’t done with making me miserable. They also wanted to force me into a stiff pair of shoes: sandals with a top made from some kind of multicoloured stringy material. But again they drowned me. I couldn’t walk in them, and they frightened me. They made such a loud slapping sound every time I moved one of my feet that I stayed rooted to the spot, afraid to move. My defiance flared again. I was not going to wear them, and this time, when I flipped them angrily from my feet, the women, thankfully, didn’t argue.

The worst was still to come, though. My hair. Much as it had driven me mad on occasion – getting in my way and causing me to scratch in itchy hell – my hair was still a part of me: my protection, my coat, my shelter. So when one of them approached me holding a big metal implement, it was just as well I had no idea what she was about to do with it or I would have found the strength of twenty Indian chiefs. But before I could even begin to guess at the purpose of the caiman-jawed tool, there was a chopping sound and my hair – all my hair – was on the floor.

I now knew better than to fight. I reached behind my head to see if there was any left there, only to feel the cropped ends of it bristle against my palm. My head also felt light – so incredibly light – and now sat so differently on my shoulders. Without my curtain of black hair, I felt exposed again. Vulnerable. I had nowhere to hide any more.

The skin on my body looked strange now I took time to inspect it. It was a revelation: so pale and smooth, it looked as vulnerable as I felt. It was as if I was a tree and my bark had been stripped back, exposing the pale, delicate wood underneath.

All trace of the jungle had been stripped from me. It was there, on the floor, in the form of my lost hair, and there, in the tub, in that cloudy brown water. All gone. I was beginning a new chapter.

I had still been given nothing to eat or drink. In fact, the only thing the women seemed to want to put into my mouth was a small bristly brush on a long stick. It was yet another physical assault, but by now I was exhausted and had no fight left in me to stop them. So they yanked my lips open and while two held me rigid, the third put some sort of white stuff on the brush and then applied it to my teeth with vigour. This too was a shock, for the taste was bizarre – like nothing I remembered having tasted in the jungle. And there was another surprise: it also seemed to fill my mouth with bubbles. But of all the indignities I’d suffered up till now, this was definitely the most pleasant. It tasted good.

Finally, the brushing done, they gestured that I should spit all the bubbles into the tub and allowed me a handful of water. And with that, it at last seemed they were done with me. My mouth was wiped, my hand taken by one of the three women, and I was marched back to be inspected by Ana-Karmen. Returning to the room reminded me of my stomach, and I glanced hopefully towards where the fruit and bread had been. But it hadn’t been for me. It had gone and the surface stood empty. No one even seemed to care that I was starving.

Indeed, Ana-Karmen, having given me another sour-faced inspection, seemed to have other ideas. Huffing and puffing, she yanked my arm and pulled me into yet another room, this one being vaguely more recognisable to me as it contained things I had seen in the Indian camp that I remembered were used for cooking and eating.

But still there was no sign that I was about to be given food. Instead, Ana-Karmen pointed at a mat on the floor and gave me a short push towards it. I was to lie there, she seemed to indicate, and go to sleep for the night. The day was done. I duly did as I was told.

*

I thought of escape that night, but only very fleetingly. Traumatised as I was by being imprisoned in a confined space (I was used to confined spaces, but ones I could leave at will), I was much, much more frightened of what lay outside. I had already found myself frustrated by door handles – what were they? How did they work? My hands could make no sense of them – and my natural urge to climb had also proved fruitless, as the one small, high kitchen window was barred.

But it wasn’t these obstructions so much as my own fear that ensured I stayed. I was an animal and I was in a place where there was food – why would I leave it? Outside, I felt sure I would be killed in an instant. The horrors of my arrival were still fresh in my mind, particularly the cars, which really scared me.

It was almost impossible to sleep that first night. Where once, so long ago, I had been confused and disorientated by the jungle, I was now deeply unsettled by everything that wasn’t the jungle. For a start, unlike my cosy nest in the tree trunk, the floor I was trying to sleep on was hard and unyielding. How did these people sleep in such a fashion? How could they get comfortable without tree boughs to rest their heads on, or the soft warmth of a monkey nearby?

And where was the proper darkness? It never seemed to come. The moon was so bright without its gentle veil of canopy, and the bright lights the people seemed to want to fill their world with seemed to sneak under my eyelids even though they were tight shut. And the noise – there was so much disconcerting unfamiliar noise here. I was used to the jungle night brigade of darkness-loving animals, and though I’d sometimes be woken by the sound of a nearby predator, I felt safe in my cocoon and would soon return to sleep. Here, though, like the light, the noise was constant.

There also seemed to be some sort of machine in the room I lay in. I didn’t know what it was, but it seemed to hum at me all night. There was also the sound of water dripping constantly from somewhere. But it wasn’t like the gentle plip-plop of morning dew or raindrops. It was a tinny repeating sound that seemed to bore into my brain.

And when I did manage to sleep a while I was tormented by nightmares, something that would continue for many days and weeks. It was such a terrible thing to think that I had lost my beloved monkey family and even worse knowing I would probably never see them again. Through my determination to try to find a life with one of my own species, I had become an outcast: completely isolated, anxious and scared. And more lonely than I thought I could bear.

The morning brought no sign that any of that was about to change. It seemed hours after I’d woken that I was finally given food – a bread roll, which tasted strange, but, being ravenous, I soon devoured it. But that was all. What I mostly recall of that first morning was that I was left in the corner while everyone dashed to and fro, ignoring me, all speaking to each other in their unintelligible babble. I also remember needing to defecate and, unable to communicate my needs, going outside, unremarked, into the scrubby garden. It was such a sad place in comparison to the lush green of the jungle, with just a few sparse bushes and some sad rows of plants. I remember doing my business and thinking once again about escaping, but the fear of what might be beyond the fence quickly put all such thoughts out of my mind.

Ana-Karmen put me in the charge of one of the women and set me to work immediately. It was probably a steep learning curve for all concerned and not just because of our inability to communicate. I had very little idea what ‘work’ was, let alone the mechanics of how to do it.

I had, of course, spent many hours watching the Indians in the jungle. I had observed them going about many different aspects of their daily business, which included preparing food, washing clothes, looking after their children, and so on. But in this odd, enclosed environment, nothing seemed to make sense. I had no memory of ‘houses’ – not of this strange type, anyway. No memory of ‘windows’, much less that one would climb up and clean them. I had no sense of what dust was or why it was necessary to be rid of it. I certainly had no idea what a stain might be.

But Ana-Karmen was clearly determined that I would learn. And quickly. So right away I was given instruction in how to clean things: how to wield a cloth and some spray and how the one worked with the other. I have a strong memory of one of the girls holding her own hand over mine and showing me how to make swirly movements with it. And I also began to understand the concept of ‘names’: Sophia, Lolita, Imelda.

It was the latter two that gave me my first-ever lesson in what would become my principal occupation: doing the chores no one else wanted to do. No more playing with pretty flowers or crushing leaves to make paint. All the colour was to disappear from my life and be replaced by the dull tones of servitude. And the most important lesson was how to mop floors.

A mop seemed to me to be a strange-looking thing. Reminiscent of a stringy upside-down flower on a thick stalk, it was first dunked in a large container containing foamy greenish water before being applied, for some unfathomable reason, to the floor. Why did they want the floor to be wet? It made no sense at all. When it rained in the jungle, for all the cooling relief of it, the wetness underfoot was mostly a hindrance. Yet, strangely, it seemed to be desired here. The mop was thrust towards me and the women gestured that I take it. So I did so and wet the floor some more.