The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (17 page)

‘
Estúpido
!
Estúpido
!!’ Imelda snapped, making me jump. She exhaled loudly, then wrapped both her hands around mine, pulling me this way and that as we weaved backwards across the floor. My feet were getting tangled in my flappy, too-long trousers, while the mop trailed glistening arcs of liquid in our wake.

She then let go of me and gabbled something else that meant nothing but which I took to mean that I should try doing it again. And I did – I tried so hard to do it just the way she’d shown me, but I just couldn’t seem to make my arms work the way hers had, and both she and Lolita started shouting at me again.

And that was me all day – ‘Estúpido! Estúpido!!’ I heard it millions of times – so often that I thought it was my name. I tried so hard – all I wanted was to please them so they wouldn’t shout at me – but it was impossible, for I understood nothing. I had spent long hard years amassing the skills of the jungle, but here I was useless. Worse than useless, in fact. I couldn’t seem to coordinate my limbs the way they could. I couldn’t even open a cupboard door, because I couldn’t work out how to twist a handle. I could push and I could pull, but the action of twisting it eluded me. I couldn’t scrub. I couldn’t spray with their funny spray bottles. I couldn’t wipe.

Ironically, once I got the hang of it, I really quite liked mopping. It was water, yes, but water that I could control. I liked seeing how the water in the bucket changed colour as the dirt from the floor was mopped up and swirled in. I liked splashing the mop-water on my bare feet, to cool them. I liked the gentle ploppy sound beneath my feet. I liked that the more water you put on the mop, the more came out. Such simple things, really, but a much-needed source of fun.

But my games irritated the girls. I irritated them daily because my domestic ineptitude knew no bounds. I had no memory of simple things like plates, for example – at least, not plates that went
smash
! if you dropped them. ‘
Esfragil
’ was a word that had no meaning for me until the point when a wet plate, which Lolita had indicated I should dry, slid from my clumsy fingers and exploded into a million pieces across the floor. How had it done that? Why had it done that? I stared wide-eyed at the mess at my feet, fascinated.

I didn’t associate the ‘crash’ sound with anything being wrong – why would I? I just looked at pieces on the floor, trying to understand it, because I’d not seen a texture like it before. Ana-Karmen came to hit me, so I naturally ran to hide, but for what misdemeanour, I didn’t know. I was just curious. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, no, I broke a plate. Now I’m in trouble!’ The whole concept was completely alien to me. Yes, I was shocked at the volume and intrigued by the discovery of a new noise. But again, I was in control of it. I knew where it had come from, so maybe that’s why I didn’t fear it so much. I was just desperate to understand.

The jungle now seemed so much more comprehensible to me. There were hard things and soft things, and each had its purpose. A rock was hard: good for lodging nuts in, to crack them. A flower was delicate, perfectly suited its purpose – to bloom. But what was this thing ‘Esfragil’? Why did humans have so many things that weren’t fit for purpose? Windows that got dirty, floors that got dusty and things to eat and drink from that broke if you dropped them? Perhaps these humans were the ones that were ‘estúpido’!

They certainly seemed estúpido. Because the complexities of their world simply baffled me. Why exactly did they make everything so complicated? Clothes fastenings that confounded me, eating implements that irked me, rules and regulations that seemed designed to confuse me and which seemed to serve no other purpose but to do so. I was a picture of inadequacy with so much to figure out. And in the meantime, I got shouted at and beaten several times a day. I got beaten for doing wrong, and when I tried to escape the beatings, I got beaten again. Not a day went by when I didn’t grieve for my lost monkey family and wonder why I had left them for this hell.

*

I didn’t know it then, of course, but the hunters had delivered me to the village of Loma de Bolívar, a tiny place in northern Colombia about thirty minutes from the centre of a city called Cúcuta. It could have been a hundred metres or a hundred miles from the place where I’d been born. But it meant nothing, because the only home I knew now was the jungle: a home I had abandoned to be here.

The house I was now imprisoned in was owned by Ana-Karmen and seemed to be inhabited by a number of young women and several children of varying ages. It was single storey and very basic, with four or five rooms in total, in all of which there were beds – some covered by what I now recall as a hospital-style curtain rail. There was a patio to the side, with a big yard attached to it, and an ugly garden with few plants but several fruit trees. There were goats in the garden, and I loved them from the outset. There was also one dog – a scruffy animal, but a loving one – and sufficient bugs and creepy crawlies to give me at least a small sense of home. But, as with everything in this place, it was as if the sound and colour had been turned down. Compared to their jungle relatives, these creatures were dull and insubstantial.

I felt as dulled by my surroundings as they appeared dulled to me, my world now reduced to the dimensions of the tatty cane fence. I had been bought by Ana-Karmen to be her slave. I imagine the polite expression then might have been ‘servant’, but since I received nothing from her bar the rudiments necessary for survival, the word ‘servant’ would be wholly incorrect.

Naturally, as a child who was by now completely feral, such definitions were of no use or interest. All I knew or cared about were the things that mattered to me personally: how to understand what was required of me, how to make myself understood, and how to get through each day without being punished too much, all of which were very, very hard.

But since I had no thought of escaping to the even more terrifying outside world, all I wanted was to be able to fit in. I wanted to be pretty, like Ana-Karmen’s girls. I wanted to play with the other children in the street. I wanted to be elegant and wear nice orange shoes and gold jewellery, bracelets and earrings that caught the sun and reflected it back again. I wanted to be decorated, garlanded, like I had been with my jungle flowers, only all shimmery and sparkly and golden. But none of this was for me – that was made very clear. I was tolerated only because I was potentially of use, and when I failed to be, naturally I was punished.

The wooden spoon in Ana-Karmen’s belt – initially so terrifying – soon seemed the mildest of punishments. And I was punished constantly, because it seemed I could do nothing right: a situation that seemed to both enrage and delight Ana-Karmen since, though it angered her, it also gave her a reason to inflict pain.

She smoked cigars, so a cigar burn on my arm was a favourite. She liked to whip me, too, sometimes with a belt or a rope and at other times – the worst – with a length of braided electrical cord. Within days she had hit me more than once with a frying pan and more than once clenched my skinny neck between her sweaty, chubby hands. Within a fortnight, she had also learned about my profound fear of water and seemed to take particular delight in spraying me with the powerful hose out in the yard.

It seemed I could do absolutely nothing to escape her cruelty. I was puny and terrified and had no idea what I could do. I had chosen this path – chosen to leave everything that mattered. So I put my head down and waited for the storm to pass.

Over the following weeks, I existed in a strange sort of purgatory, suspended in a place where I felt completely alone. I was no longer one of the monkey troop, and ached for them constantly, yet neither was I a part of this strange new world I lived in, where it seemed I could do nothing right. But at least I was making progress. Little by little I was beginning to grasp the odd word and phrase. It was by the tiniest of increments, and I had a long way to travel, but I was a child and trying to learn was instinctive.

Adapting physically to the sweeping change in my life was very hard. My spoken language was still made up of animal noises, and I didn’t know how to smile or make facial expressions that corresponded to those I saw around me. I climbed constantly. It was an effort of will not to climb up things: in the house initially, where I would climb up onto worktops, and soon outside, up the trees in the garden.

I couldn’t stand properly. It still felt unsettling and unnatural, and, left to my own devices, I would squat any time I was stationary. I especially liked to squat in corners. To be in a corner was to feel safe. My back and sides were covered. And though it wouldn’t save me from a beating it still felt instinctive to do it, especially in those corners that held big plants in pots and where there was sufficient space to slide in behind them.

If I needed to move somewhere, I would still scuff along the ground on all fours. I knew humans walked on two legs and tried hard to copy them, but I was constantly hindered by my unconscious mind, which would have me back in my default position unless I made a huge effort of will. It was as hard for me as it would have been for a human in the jungle ordered to get around on four limbs instead of two. And every time I was caught doing any of these things that came so naturally, Ana-Karmen, equally naturally, would discipline me.

Perhaps the hardest discipline to learn, however, was how to behave at mealtimes. Simply learning to sit and eat at a table was so difficult. I had no idea about tables and cutlery and crockery (other than that the latter was so fragile), and would automatically take my food to the floor in the corner and set about quickly eating it with my fingers. That was the way things had worked in the jungle. You found something to eat and you took it to a quiet spot, wolfing it down quickly and guarding it as you did so. If you didn’t, then it would obviously be stolen by another monkey. So to sit with others and eat together was unthinkable.

My table manners, consequently, were appalling. I would grab at food, stuffing it into my mouth in big handfuls, and with some kinds of food this inevitably meant chaos. I was given things I’d never seen before, such as meatballs in lumpy liquid sauces that would run down my forearms and drip from my elbows, as well as lodging on and in my face and hair. They would be served with another bewildering food called spaghetti – long strings, like vines, which seemed impossible to eat, especially with all that sauce dripping from them.

My fellow diners – the girls, Ana-Karmen, the other children – clearly found my manners repulsive. I could tell by the disgusted way they looked at me. But I knew no better and found it very hard to learn. Their lifestyle was just so incredibly complicated.

Most of the time I lived on bread rolls and a bitter drink called coffee, which would be given to me in something called a cup. It took me a while to understand the concept of drinking a hot drink in the first place, but served in a shallow bowl with a handle and a ring of gold round the top of it just seemed the strangest thing ever. So I would get my coffee by dipping my bread into the mug and ‘drinking’ my hot drink in that way.

If ‘boiling hot’ was a new thing for me, so was ‘ice cold’, and I remember my first experience of it clearly. I was given an ice lolly – actually frozen fruit juice set into an ice tray with a little piece of wood stuck into it – which was so cold against my lips it actually hurt me. I thought it was alive, too, because it stuck to my tongue when I licked it. Terrified, I threw it across the room.

Tastes, too, were as much of an adventure as temperature. As well as the bitterness of coffee, there was the lardiness of butter and the strange, rubbery texture and blandness of pasta, which was not like eating proper food at all. I mostly loved the fruit bowl and the reassuring familiarity of its contents, though being allowed anything from it was painfully rare. Mostly, in any case, I was permanently hungry, so these details were of only passing importance. If I was given food and drink, I gladly consumed it.

*

Eating and drinking were not the only things that involved an intense learning process at Ana-Karmen’s. I was equally taxed by the way humans dealt with the other main bodily functions. After a few days of sleeping on the mat on the kitchen floor or in the garden, I was ‘promoted’ to being allowed to sleep in a bed. Once again, I didn’t know what to do with it. I would sleep on the floor under it, believing the frame was a canopy, there to protect me.

Similarly I was flummoxed by the toilet. I had no inkling of what the toilet was for and had been making use of the bushes in the garden until one day I was caught in the act. A high-pitched scream was followed by a lot of babbling and the appearance of Ana-Karmen, who bellowed her disgust at me, gesticulating wildly. Sophia then thrust a pair of weird utensils in my direction, seeming to demand that I pick up my waste with them. I was appalled: not only frightened of Ana-Karmen’s crimson-faced fury but also disgusted that she should want me to do such vile thing – pick up my own excrement? Why would I do that?

In the end, I kicked soil over it and fled into the house, closely followed by Ana-Karmen, Sophia and Lolita. I was then dragged by the latter two to a tiny outside lean-to. Suspended by my armpits over the thing they called the toilet, it was made clear that this was where my business should be done.

I was so frightened as they did this that I could hardly draw breath, for beneath me, buzzing with flies, was a deep and stinking hole, the stench from it so strong it made me gag.

But the old toilet was as nothing compared to the ‘new’ one they also had, for, though it didn’t stink like the other, it was a hole filled with water, into which I was sure I could fall and die. I was even more terrified when they pulled a chain above my head and a sudden rush of new water gushed underneath me, accompanied by a loud roaring sound. Once again I bolted and, despite my fear of Ana-Karmen and her electrical cord, I continued to sneak out and secretly use the garden.

*

Within a few days, I was also given a new set of clothes. Whether they realised I would be less clumsy if I didn’t have to wear the enormous trousers I don’t know, but one day Elise came and measured my body. I struggled as she did it, as I had no idea what she was doing, but a couple of days later I was presented with the results of her efforts. I had been made another pair of itchy trousers, as thick and unappealing as the last pair, only this time they were the right size and stayed up on their own. I was also given a white short-sleeved blouse, which was decorated with bits of lace and within a day or two was spotted with bits of food, too.