She smiled and told me to try it, and I didn’t need telling twice. I shovelled it in, using my hands – I hadn’t realised I was so hungry – which seemed to amuse the policemen greatly.
‘Holy carajo!’ one said to the other, laughing. ‘She must be part animal!’
More food came out – fried eggs now and arepas. These were delicious fried corn patties: the bread of Colombia. It was a feast – a meal I knew I’d remember my whole life. And I ate till I could eat no more. I even finished the food they had ordered for themselves, and once I’d done so I looked quizzically at them, wondering what was to happen next. Were they going to take me back? Apparently not. They both smiled at me.
‘Off you go, then, gamina,’ one said to me kindly. ‘Off you go, and keep out of trouble!’
I ran off, the food jiggling in my huge grateful belly, and after I’d travelled a while – the park wasn’t too far from where I’d eaten – I saw them a bit behind me. I realised they’d followed me to see where I’d gone. Perhaps they’d hoped I might lead them to the home they were so sure I’d come from. Perhaps they were just curious. Perhaps just happy to see me safe.
I look back now and I still wonder. And I wish I could thank them. Street children are criminals and treated like vermin in Colombia. Most policemen, I would learn, did (and still do) treat them like dirt – arresting them and throwing them back to where they’d come from, unfed. I have no idea why these two acted as they did. No clue why they were so kind to me. But I’m glad they did, because they showed me that not all humans were cruel.
Even more than that. That maybe angels did exist.
22
Those policemen did me another important favour. They introduced me to the restaurant and the lovely smiling waitress. I went back there pretty much every day after that. I would go round the back and wait by the dustbins, hoping to see her because I liked her and wanted her to be my friend.
It was a posh restaurant. That I knew. It sold something called lobster, which was delicious. I’d never seen it before, never tasted anything like it. It was one of the boys who worked there who pointed it out to me and told me to try it. It was another moment in my life that has stayed with me always – the taste of the lobster, with its delectable pink sauce, and the boy’s grinning face as he watched me.
I would wait very patiently when I visited the restaurant. I knew I could easily slip inside and steal something from the kitchen, but I wanted to be given food, just as I had the day the policemen took me there. And because I was small and would always ask nicely, they never minded giving me their leftovers. It was at this point I learned another lesson – food that is given to you tastes better than food you have to steal.
The first day I went back there, the waitress recognised me immediately. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘How are you today?’, giving me a friendly smile. I don’t know what she thought of me turning up barefoot, in my dirty brown rag of a dress, but she was kind and let me have some food she was going to throw away.
She also asked me what my name was, and I told her it was Pony Malta. She laughed, just like the policemen had, but not in a mean way. She said it suited me. And she told me that her name was Ria.
Now I had a source of food that I didn’t have to steal, my days got better. I would still steal, of course – I couldn’t rely on Ria for everything – but having somewhere to go each day where I could be sure of a welcome was worth as much to me, almost, as having at least one guaranteed meal.
But it wasn’t to last.
‘Hey, Pony Malta,’ she said to me one day. ‘You know, I can’t do this every day. I will get into trouble. You can’t keep on coming here all the time. I’m sorry.’
It was a bitter blow, but I had an idea. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘let me work for it. I clean for you, I wash up for leftovers. Anything.’
Ria shook her head. Then looked at me and back to the restaurant. ‘How can I,’ she wanted to know, ‘when you’re so dirty? You have no shoes, and you’re not clean enough to be around a kitchen. It would be disgusting. You could end up making us have to close down.’
I took this in. I hadn’t even thought of something like that. ‘But, Ria, you help me. Please? You help me be clean. I don’t know how to. There is nowhere for me to get clean on the streets.’
Ria looked doubtful, but at the same time I could see she was thinking about helping me. It felt good to have someone looking at me like that. It had been such a long time. Not since the jungle had I felt that.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said. ‘I will have to ask my manager. Go on, now. Go. And come back tomorrow.’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ I said to her.
I went then, but just as I turned the corner she called to me.
‘Hey, Pony Malta!’ she called. ‘Just don’t get your hopes up, OK?’
I tried hard not to get my hopes up, because another lesson I’d learned during my time at Ana-Karmen’s was that hope was a pointless emotion. But when I returned the next day, it seemed that maybe I should have got my hopes up, because Ria brought out a lady whom I recognised. She was the restaurant manager, and she, too, remembered me from that first visit.
‘You were the little girl eating with those nice policemen, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, señora,’ I said politely. ‘And I could help you in your restaurant. I don’t ask for any money. Only food.’
She looked at me carefully, the way Ria had, as if inspecting me very thoroughly. ‘Well,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t know what you did to get involved with the police, but they said you were a nice little girl, and by the looks of it you are …’ She paused to think for a moment, rubbing her chin as she did so. ‘Hmm,’ she said finally. ‘You look about the same size as my Belinda – very skinny, very short, doesn’t get her looks from her mother, as you can see!’
Her laugh was good to hear. She laughed like she meant it. No one had laughed much at Ana-Karmen’s. Only the drunken men. ‘I have some old clothes you could borrow. Only for the restaurant, though – not to be worn on the streets, OK?’
I nodded vigorously. I couldn’t believe it. She was actually going to hire me! Useless Gloria, who always did everything wrong. But I wasn’t Gloria any more, I was Pony Malta, and I was clever. ‘Thank you, señora,’ I said. ‘I will be a good, good worker.’
‘So,’ the jolly woman said. ‘Ria, show her where the hose is and help her get cleaned up. And go and find Belinda and tell her to look out some old clothes.’
She waddled back into the restaurant and Ria winked at me. ‘Hey, Pony,’ she said, grinning. ‘You got in!’
I have no idea how old I was. My hair was growing longer again, that I did know. And I liked it. But I never seemed to get any taller. I am still tiny today – no more than four foot nine – so I must have been a pretty tiny, skinny, puny twelve year old. But, for all that, I was still turning into a teenager.
I had had the best possible luck. Someone – several people – had taken a shine to me. They had treated me so well – the best since I’d left my precious monkey family. They had trusted me and been kind to me and given me an opportunity. I was a filthy street kid – one of thousands – yet Ria had been kind to me. It was a miracle. But I soon tired of this new, more honest lifestyle even so.
At first, I was so excited. I remember going with Ria to the shower and getting myself clean. I was still so scared of water, but I didn’t let fear get the better of me. I stood under the shower and scrubbed myself till the water ran black down the drain. Then I donned Belinda’s soft, clean clothes. They didn’t quite fit; the knickers were much too big, so I pulled them together with the rubber band Ria gave me. But they were better than anything I had, and I was grateful.
Now respectable, I set to work as a washer-up in the restaurant kitchen. The rules were clear. I was not to be seen by the restaurant’s owners or the wealthy customers. I was to do the washing up and clean the floor and whatever else they needed doing. In return, I would be fed daily and once
a week I would be treated – I could have a dish of my choice from the restaurant menu.
Almost immediately, I began to fill out and feel better. I was full of energy and worked as hard as I could every day. I would work for six or seven hours straight and go back to San Antonio Park each afternoon with a full tummy. I also had a full feeling – a feeling of delicious tiredness, which meant I slept all the better and woke up raring to go.
But as the days passed, the novelty of my new job began to wear off. Though it was not like being at Ana-Karmen’s – where I’d been a slave and a virtual prisoner – I began to wish I didn’t have to trudge off to work every day. After all, some scheming part of my brain kept reminding me, I was good at stealing. I was an expert – I’d been taught by the monkeys. So why should I work all day – which did feel like being at Ana-Karmen’s – when I could get what I needed for free?
And so my resentment about not being like the other street kids began building and was made all the stronger by the fact that by the time I returned from my shift, all the best sleeping spots in the park had usually gone. I also felt different from my compatriots – separate from them, isolated. I had been one of them but now I wasn’t. Which felt all wrong.
And so, a mere few weeks after being given the chance to find a future, I turned my back on it. I finished my shift one day and quit. I felt grateful for the chance, grateful for the trust that had been placed in me, but I simply didn’t want to work there any more. I left my little uniform and Belinda’s shoes in a neat pile on the doorstep and walked away. I wanted to become a professional street kid again.
23
My day would start early. The smell of the local bakeries would wake every sleeping gamina, and the noise from mechanics and builders, which seemed constant in the city, would always keep us from falling back to sleep.
The first thing I did was carefully check my shoes. They were favoured by scorpions and snakes. And, being city-dwelling reptiles, if you disturbed them, they would retaliate. They were far less shy and timid than their jungle counterparts.
My shoes safe to slip my feet into, I would head off to find breakfast. Early mornings also saw the setting up of street stalls, which sold all sorts of things from toys and gadgets to household goods and hot and cold food. Breakfast would often be something stolen from a street stall: sometimes bread, sometimes a delicious string of barbecued sausages, though with the latter it was always a case of getting your fingers burned – I would have to bounce them in my hands to cool them while I ran away.
Being a street kid meant you were essentially running your own business. Exploiting ways to make money to survive. By far the most common way of doing that was to sell drugs, but for me that was never an option. It made no sense: the kids who sold drugs were all addicts. How stupid would it be to take something that made you worse off than you already were? It was hard enough to feed yourself and survive, without having to feed an addiction as well.
Everywhere I looked I saw the effects of drug-taking anyway: the orphans who’d deteriorate right before my eyes – from nice kids into ugly people, pathetic characters obsessed only with getting their next high.
With time on my hands now I had given up my job in the restaurant, I would spend chunks of the day just watching the world go by. I loved sitting on the benches and kerbs just observing people going about their lives. I got to know some of them, too. There was Guillermo, who ran the bicycle shop opposite the park. He was in his forties and always smiling. He would wave to me. Consuela, who worked at the dressmakers close by, was apparently his much younger girlfriend. Consuela entranced me; she seemed to be so clever. She could take what looked like a rag and, sitting on a bench herself, she would stitch it into something useful, like a pretty blouse. I always felt like I was watching a magic show when she did this. I couldn’t imagine ever being so dextrous.
Consuela was always friendly – one of the very few who were. And sometimes she’d pat the bench and tell me to come across and chat to her. I loved our chats. When I was with her I forgot I was a street kid.
But never for long. The park also held the promise of rich pickings. Businessmen, too, sat on the park benches at lunchtime with their jackets off, and I could always be tempted from my silent reverie or bouts of chatting by the irresistible lure of an unattended wallet.
I was unscrupulous. I loved sweet things, always had done, and so the food children ate particularly appealed to me. Snatching an ice cream from a child in the park was, literally, child’s play. It was as easy as plucking fruit from a tree. I was breathtakingly confident – far more than my fellow street kids – because the monkeys had raised me to be so. Where other kids would mostly get by on begging and rummaging in dustbins, I never thought twice about breezing up to anyone dining at an outdoor table and stealing the food straight off their plates. No matter how violent the city and how numerous us street kids, they simply never expected it to happen. My unorthodox upbringing had trained my imagination and my wild ways gave me an edge.
I would range around the San Antonio Park area, getting rides on the backs of buses. On occasion I’d also cling on to the back of a truck. We gaminas often did this – it was the mark of being a street kid. But ranging far and wide was a sensible tactic, too. It lessened the risk of getting caught.
A busy shop was always a good source of income, and as I grew more confident I began perfecting my art, following my own street-kid rules for success. You must not rush; you must on no account appear to panic, and you must first wash your face, comb your hair, clean your teeth and look smart. Also speak slowly and properly, and make sure you’ve already stolen some good clothes.
That done, the execution was easy. I would saunter into a shop and greet the owner politely. ‘Some bread, a jar of jam and a brush, please.’
The shopkeeper would get the items and place them on the counter. It was at that point that I would send him to fetch something else. ‘Oh,’ I’d say, my eyes wide and innocent. ‘And a can of cola.’
The minute he turned his back, I’d scoop up the other items and, before he could stop me, be out the door and have melted back into the crowd.
If I got a buzz from stealing, I got an even bigger one when I joined a street gang. Within a few months, I’d got to know lots of other street kids, and when I was asked to join their gang, it felt like I’d passed some sort of test. Me included, there were six of us – three boys and three girls – and we were quite a mix, not least in our odd assortment of names.
There was Sincabow, the black boy, then Daggo. Daggo was probably the oldest – he behaved that way anyway – and also the angriest. He’d run away from a vicious and violent father who would beat him and his siblings daily, while his mother just looked on and did nothing. Then there was Hugo – the one who wanted to be a bank robber. The girls were me – Pony Malta – then Mimi, probably the youngest (she was even tinier than I was), and finally Bayena, which means ‘whale’. Poor Bayena. She got her name for pretty obvious reasons – she was the biggest-bellied girl on the streets.
Bayena was very weak, and she didn’t like stealing. She was one of those new ones who’d not long been kicked out of home – too many mouths to feed – and knew nothing whatsoever about surviving. Hardened myself now, I sometimes got annoyed about how fussy and wimpy she was, but despite our differences we were a good team.
The clever thing about our gang was that we each had our strengths – our own trademark talents for stealing. But I could teach them all things, I realised, because I’d been learning my craft thoroughly. I had all the tricks of the trade up my sleeves. I knew, for instance, who the best targets were on the streets, and one of my favourites was to target women who wore skirts and carried brown paper bags.
A woman in a miniskirt was the best sight to see, ever. As long as they were also clutching a pair of brown paper bags, it meant the chance of some easy pickings. I’d stalk my target for a while, just to be sure of a decent exit, and then creep ever closer, till I was in range.
I’d keep low, which wasn’t difficult, and also silent, and then I’d pounce, yanking their pants down to expose their bare bottoms, enjoying the sound of their mortified shrieks as they dropped the bags and struggled to pull their knickers up again.
I was always amused to see how hard they seemed to find this simple task, which taught me another lesson: embarrassment makes you all fingers and thumbs! It worked every time. There’d be ample opportunity to gather up everything I could fit in two hands before I scooted off to enjoy my spoils. In fact, one of my best memories of being a street kid was my very first Christmas. Ladies in skirts, carrying paper bags containing their Christmas shopping, were, for me, almost like Father Christmas.
I was constantly adding to our repertoire of schemes. During the football season, I always did particularly well. I would steal people’s tickets while they queued to get in and then sell them on for double the price at the gate. I would also steal road cones and make my own impromptu car park – always on someone else’s land, obviously. Sometimes I’d even charge for a single free parking space, and people – particularly if they were late and just desperate to get a parking space before the game started – would cough up without even protesting. Over time I built up my own stash of cones that I hid away in a secret place so I could maximise my profits.
I also made money, for a time, as a shoe polisher. That didn’t last long, however, as a couple of months after I’d stolen my shoe-polishing box, someone else stole it. How rude.
Despite the odd setback, I grew more and more successful, and I became one of the best burglars and money-makers on the streets of Cúcuta. Eventually, my success – and my bravery – meant I was widely respected, and I was asked by the others to become leader of our gang. Even now, I remember how proud I felt to be admired by my peers.
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys Page 18
