The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (29 page)

It was easy. I would scuttle into the kitchen and dive under the table, where I was hidden from view by the tablecloth. Then, when the staff in there weren’t looking, I would snatch a few bread rolls from near the window and stuff them into my pockets before sprinting back out of the door.

Only on one occasion did I steal something more precious: a banana. It sat in the middle of a glass bowl of fruit, almost like a decoration, and it seemed to be calling to me. I couldn’t resist it.

I was almost certainly one of the oldest children in the convent, the majority eventually being reclaimed or adopted into a life that no longer required iron bars. But I wasn’t quite the oldest. That title went to a lady called Francisca, who was around sixty and would sit in the corner of the convent and gossip with anyone who passed by. She told me she had been at La Casita for over half a century now, having never been claimed or adopted. Had it not been for Maruja, I could have been the next to take her title, because no one else knew I existed. I would think of Francisca often as I worked at my chores. She was my reason to keep doing them, in the hope I would be thought of as a good girl and somehow get out.

I saw every day of that first week at La Casita convent as just time to be ticked off until Maruja came to visit and I could show her what a good girl I’d been. But it was hard. For all the beatings and drudgery of life with the Santos family, this felt little better. The life I’d dreamed of wasn’t supposed to be like this: being made to get up at four in the morning to pray to a God who I still felt had abandoned me.

Where was this bountiful God everyone else seemed to worship, anyway? For if I had come to understand anything since leaving the jungle, it was that every human I encountered seemed to worship him. And seemed to want me to do so, too. As street kids, we’d sometimes be offered cheese and lemonade as a bribe to visit the city’s churches and sit through a short service inside. I always liked the cheese, but I hated the droning sermons, so when the bits of cheese got smaller and the lemonade changed to water, I stopped bothering – you could get better on the streets.

I didn’t like God. I’d watch the endless Catholic street processions, but I couldn’t reconcile this with what I knew of him. To me he was a punishing God – he’d even let his own son be crucified! – and if he was so good, then why hadn’t he found me my mama or given me a better life? The one he’d chosen for me so far seemed so unfair. To be starving all the time, to have every minute filled with work, to be told what to do, when to do it, how to do it, to be expected to see ‘obedience’ as the most important thing of all.

I should have been grateful. I was safe from harm, I was being cared for, I was with other children, but my principal memory of that time is of stultifying boredom, coupled with what was probably, looking back, a typical adolescent mindset. I railed against everything, almost as if by instinct.

There was one shining light and that was having Maruja in my life, and the knowledge that, unlike many of the children around me, I at least had someone, someone who cared enough to visit me. I had someone I belonged to. I wasn’t alone. And when Maruja came that first Saturday, I was almost beside myself with happiness. I was able to give a good account of myself as well, to let her know I had done as she asked and tried my best, and that my best, in the main, had been good enough.

And it was enough for me to see her – to know she was safe and well and that the Santoses hadn’t tracked her down and killed her for rescuing me. However grim my ‘better’ life was, that knowledge – and the belief that I would one day grow up and be able to leave the convent – kept me going.

But then the next Saturday, Maruja didn’t come.

Like children do everywhere, I tried to adapt. As Saturday followed Saturday and still no Maruja came, I tried to rationalise why that might be. At first I was terrified. Had the Santos family found out what she’d done? And if so, what had they done to punish her? Or perhaps she was in hiding, or maybe had had to leave the city altogether? Round and round my thoughts kept going. Why had she abandoned me?

I kept telling myself that she was safe and well, and there must be a good reason for her to stay away. I couldn’t quite believe the Santoses would hurt her – not really. She was the mother of several children and would be known to lots of people. So whereas they could kill me and no one would know or care, they surely couldn’t do that to Maruja.

But thinking that – believing that – was actually even worse, because that meant she had simply given up on me. Perhaps I’d displeased the nuns and they had let Maruja know, and not coming to visit was her way of punishing me. So I became bitter. It had always been too good to be true. I knew how humans worked, didn’t I? How badly they treated one another. After so many years now of unkindness and abuse, surely I should have learned my lesson.

But still I yearned for her and refused to give up hope. Still I believed I would one day find that fantasy figure who would love me and care for me and nurture me. And in the meantime, I would just have to get on with it.

And I did adapt to life in the convent, in that I found ways to make the time pass a little quicker. It might be difficult to imagine, if you’ve never been a prisoner yourself, just how mind-crushingly boring it is to be locked up all day. Yes, I was fed and cared for, and nobody beat me, and I was grateful for that, really grateful. But I still had no freedom. I saw the same view each day, ate the same food, saw the same faces
…
It was a predictable routine with no end in sight, and I was beginning to find it unbearable.

I was still trying to make the most of it in the early weeks of hope, because that’s what Maruja had asked me to do, but as the time passed I felt my will shrink within me. What was the point of living if this was to be my existence: one of a huge number of invisible kids – no more than numbers – who were so unwanted and unloved that they had been locked away?

I’d seen more life in a day on the streets, I recall thinking. I’d eaten lobster and steak, seen more sights, smelled more smells, lived more life. I’d been raised in the jungle, lived each day with the thrill of the unknown, seen animals and plants I might never see again and survived. Here, I felt I was dying.

Perhaps predictably, I found refuge in being naughty. At first cheeky – it felt so good to make people laugh, for them to notice me – and gradually just downright bad. With the life I’d led so far, I had no tolerance for rules and regulations, and couldn’t understand why such strictures were even necessary. But breaking rules – which I did for the sake of my sanity – had consequences. I didn’t mind being caught and told off by the nuns, though. To me, this meant attention. It meant I existed. Which, in a perverse kind of way, meant I mattered.

And I definitely became something of a comedian, very quickly adopting the role of ringleader and class clown, which gave me a degree of notoriety. I was also an endless source of ideas of mischief. We girls would often lie in bed late, whispering to one another. We had always been curious about the fusty old nuns and one of the perennial topics of our night-time conversations was what they might wear under their clothes. One night, I decided we should find out.

Only the bravest of the girls were up for ‘operation underwear’, the aim of which was to discover what went on behind closed doors – to find out where the nuns bathed and washed their clothes. This was one of the great mysteries that needed solving at La Casita, and we were determined to be the ones to do it.

So we made a plan. We stuffed our beds carefully with our pillows, to stump any night patrols, and set off in a flurry of suppressed giggles. I was partly responsible. As we left the dorm, I announced that ‘Sister Ramona must have the biggest, ugliest knickers ever! And let’s not even go there with Sister Dolores – woof!’

We searched the convent, high and low, over a period of an hour, climbing up to see in windows and peering through cracks beneath doors. It was fun, but it wasn’t exactly fruitful. But then I spotted a high window that appeared to be out of reach – a narrow pane of glass above a tall wooden door. It stood to reason – this was their living quarters, so this must surely be the place, and at this time they’d all be busy praying.

My monkey skills now came into their own. No other girl could shimmy up things the way I could, and with a leg-up, and to the amazement of all the girls below me, I hit the jackpot. This was indeed the place. Beyond the window was a sitting room, and in the middle of the sitting room was a row of identical, not to mention enormous, beige knickers, all hanging drying on an airing stand. But they weren’t all identical; some sported frills, a most un-nun-like thing, to my mind.

‘Whooaa!’ I said. ‘Whooaa! You should see this!’ I whooped.

‘Rosalba!’ hissed Janette. ‘We can’t!’

So, one by one, I helped each girl climb up and peer into the room, and finally our curiosity was satisfied.

But as there were many girls who’d still not witnessed the giant knickers for themselves, we planned another raid, which was even more audacious. There were a few times each day when the coast would be clear and, crucially, the door would be unlocked. Armed with this information, Janette and I set off a couple of days later and this time managed to pinch several pairs of the enormous pants off the airing stand.

It was perhaps an indicator of how dull and uneventful our lives were that prancing around with Sister Ramona’s enormous frilly knickers over my clothes was the best fun I’d had for a long time. And it was true for all of us: we laughed till we had no breath left for laughing, and our sides ached so much we were in real pain.

But it was nothing to the pain I had coming. Naturally, Sister Ramona reported her missing knickers to Sister Elvira, and Sister Elvira, quite sure who the ringleader must be, accused me of the crime. Which, of course, my teenage mind found extremely galling. She had no evidence it was me. She just made the assumption and acted accordingly.

‘Rosalba!’ she barked at me, her eyes ablaze with suppressed fury. ‘I know it is only you who could be so un-holy that you’d steal a sister’s private undergarments!’

She was right on this occasion, but I wasn’t about to own up to it, especially when I heard the other girls trying to suppress their chuckles.

‘You can’t prove it,’ I argued. ‘And I’ve been here all along!’

My defiance sent Sister Elvira’s anger into overdrive. She actually gasped. ‘In the presence of God, you lie!’ she cried dramatically. ‘Child, you have much coming to you!’ She glowered at me. ‘When will you learn? Now stand over there, by that wall, and turn to face it. And wipe that stupid smile right off your face!’

She then swept from the dormitory only to return moments later with a pair of building bricks, one in each hand. She transferred them to my hands after barking her instructions. I was to stand with my arms held above my head – I was on no account to bend them – and I was to stay like that, as punishment, for thirty minutes. ‘If the bricks drop, they hit your head,’ she explained, her tone waspish. ‘And that, Rosalba, will teach you a lesson!’

Easy, I thought defiantly. I can do this. It will be easy. But it wasn’t. After five minutes, all the blood had drained from my arms, and after ten both my elbows began quivering. But I did it. I held out. I would not drop those bricks. Which made it a victory. But, of course, it really wasn’t that at all. It was just evidence that I was turning into someone I didn’t want to be. A bad girl. A rude girl. A girl who didn’t care. I was slipping back into the mindset of a cynical, bitter street kid. The only solution? To get out of there, and fast.

*

The weeks in the convent soon rolled into months, and, as a prisoner, each day felt like something I needed to tick off. It was either that or become like poor Francisca. I was desperate to see Maruja and find out what had happened. I thought of her all the time and couldn’t allow myself to believe that she’d abandoned me of her own free will. She just couldn’t have.

But, once again, I would need to think carefully. The convent worked on a simple principle: it was locked at all times. (Locked to keep the nuns secure in their chosen vocation, and locked to keep the outside world away.) In the middle of all this, there were all of us – the orphans – responsibility for whom the nuns took very seriously. Charged with our care – which was actually a part of their vocation – they could not let us wander, or we might run away, and then their work to keep us safe would have been pointless.

It would first be necessary, therefore, to make a thorough inspection of the place, to see where there might be a chink in the convent’s armour – some security failing that I could exploit. It was on one such inspection of the inner walls, having snuck out of the refectory, that I came upon Imelda, washing up. She was an old fat woman who lived at the convent, not a nun herself but just someone who had found refuge among them. She was disabled, with two walking sticks, and had to sit down a lot.

‘You want to escape, don’t you?’ she asked me, eyeing the dry roll I was holding and had been nibbling from.

I blinked at her, shocked. ‘How do you know?’

‘San Antonio told me,’ she explained, as if the saints regularly engaged her in idle gossip. ‘I can pray to him, if you want,’ she added. ‘And the Virgin Mary, too. If I ask them, they’ll set you free. It will happen.’ She screwed her eyes up a little against the glare of the sun. ‘But there’s a condition. You must give me all your breakfasts for a week.’

I was worried now. Imelda might tell the nuns what I was planning, and then they’d keep an even closer eye on me than they were doing already. I couldn’t have that. I screwed my own eyes up a little, to match hers, and, since she was sitting and I was standing, tried to look menacing.

‘I don’t need you,’ I told her. ‘I can do it on my own. And if you say one word to the nuns, I’ll cut your tongue out.’ I thrust the roll towards her. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘take this and pray for my escape. And if nothing happens, I will kill you in the morning.’