The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

by Marina Chapman

  ‘And he refused to do his last job.’ Juan sighed again. ‘Yes, I think it’s time now.’

  I held my breath. Time for what? Were they going to kill him as well?

  ‘So,’ I heard the first man say. ‘How best to eliminate him?’

  ‘My mother Maria,’ I heard Juan tell the others. ‘She’s our best bet.’

  Mrs Santos? She was a murderer as well? This really shocked me, and in my surprise I dropped the bottle of cleaning fluid from my sweaty hand. Crash! It went clattering to the floor, though thankfully it didn’t break. I snatched it up with shaking fingers and fled to the kitchen.

  Juan, who must have heard it, followed me in there moments later. And when he saw it was me, I saw something like relief flood his face. ‘Was that you?’ he said. ‘Making that noise out there?’

  I nodded hurriedly.

  ‘Stupid animal,’ he barked. ‘Just be more careful!’ He then turned to go back to his friends, but before he did, he had one more comment to make. ‘You,’ he said, not even bothering to turn around, ‘you, little orphan, will be dealt with.’

  26

  It was the summer and perhaps a public holiday in Cúcuta. I’m still not sure which, but perhaps it was a saint’s day of some sort. All I know is that it was definitely a time for family. There seemed more people on the streets than usual, and no one appeared to be working. There were children about, I remember, and family members visiting. I recall it being lunchtime, and because of the heat – given that there was a houseful of people – someone had left the front door open. For them it was a chance to allow a welcome breeze in. But for me it represented a very different opportunity.

  It was a chance to get out.

  The Santoses were very careful about keeping me a virtual prisoner. Which was hardly necessary, because by now it was clearer to me than it had ever been that to try to run away would not be the answer to my misery. I think I had become so used to being beaten, to being thought worthless and useless, to being ignored, that a part of me believed I must deserve it. I had been treated so badly and for so long by so many people that why wouldn’t I believe I deserved it? If I did choose to run, I was sure they would track me down. And even if they failed to, running away would just return me to the equal or worse misery of living life again on the city’s streets.

  And by now there was another reason to stay put: Maruja. For the first time in my life that I could remember I had been shown love and care, and our fledgling relationship was very precious to me. Maruja was like a diamond – the only shining light in a world of darkness – and there was no way I was going to give her up.

  And it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to lose her companionship; I genuinely hoped that at some point she might take me in. I had no idea when this might happen, but I believed that it was possible, so I was prepared to wait for as long as that took.

  But to get out for just a little while was a beguiling idea. I was a caged bird and I wanted to fly just a little. Not far or for too long – just for a little while. I wanted to see other children, perhaps play. I had no fixed intentions. Though if I got the chance to scavenge while I was out, then I would. I had so little of my own, and there were things out there somewhere that I wanted and that I knew I could get for myself. A comb and a toothbrush. Perhaps some soap, even. So, with the family all so preoccupied by lunch and conversation and siestas, I sneaked out of the front door and melted away into the heat.

  The road the Santoses lived on ran down to the river, and there was a bridge about twenty-five feet from the house. I was soon there, my direction governed by the sound of nearby children who were buzzing around the large bins nearby. I liked bins – I well remembered the sorts of treasures you could find in them. So, seeing the children pulling various items out, I decided I would go down and join them.

  The bins in Cúcuta, which were like small rusted skips, had always been a draw for me. You could find every kind of thing inside them. As well as food, you could get your hands on parts from rifles, old tools and all types of clothing, as well as broken toys, pots and pans, and thrown-away gifts. Today, though, I was to find something the like of which I had never seen before or would wish to again.

  Once at the bin area, and being too small just to reach in, I quickly clambered up into one and began my inspection. I knew I shouldn’t be out too long or someone would notice my absence, so I rifled through the contents of the first bin at speed. Finding it lacking in anything that was of immediate use to me, I climbed nimbly down and moved on to the next.

  It was here that I found something more intriguing. It was a rectangular metal box that looked a little like a moneybox. It put me in mind of the cashbox I’d seen in the Santoses’ office, though a little longer and deeper. It had the same slot in the lid for coins. Excited now, I held it up to my ear and shook it, imagining the great wealth that might be stashed within. To have money could change everything. It might even bring me freedom. Money could buy things that I could only dream of having, but, more importantly, it could buy me a way out of my miserable existence. I had no idea quite how, I just instinctively knew it could.

  Whatever was in the box made a sharp metallic sound. Coins, at the very least, I thought excitedly, inspecting it more carefully. All I had to do now was find a way to get into it. I scrabbled further in the rubbish, looking for something that might help me. The box was heavy in my hands, clearly made of thick metal, and looked very secure, just as I’d have expected it to be. There was no way I would get inside it using my fingers.

  Clutching the box under my arm, I scrabbled down from the bin, with the intention of finding a rock, or perhaps even a discarded hammer, with which I could force the lid open. Once out, I became aware of two boys, both around my age, who had the unmistakeable look of young drug dealers. I knew they were focusing on me and my new treasure.

  I had good reason to be nervous of their attention. There was no honour among street children beyond their individual gangs, and stealing from other kids who’d found useful stuff in rubbish was obviously less effort than having to find it yourself. I knew this because on lazy days I’d done it myself.

  By now I’d left the bin area and was up on the bridge itself. Across the river and across the city, the air was full of the sights and smells of a lazy summer afternoon. The scent coming from the barrows that sold lemonade and empanadas would normally have made my stomach rumble and commanded my attention, but I was too preoccupied. I had only one thing on my mind now: how to get inside my box. And, as yet, I had found nothing I could use.

  ‘Hey, gamina!’ I heard a voice and turned around to see the two scruffy street kids. They’d followed me up onto the bridge and now stood before me. Close up, I could see that they were a little younger than I was. One pushed me. ‘Hey, gamina!’ he said again.

  ‘What?’ I answered, pulling myself up to my full height and scowling. I wasn’t big, but I could still carry myself like the leader of a street gang, even if by now I wore a maid’s simple dress. I was just thinking things through – should I just save myself the trouble, let them steal the box, open it and then steal back the contents? – when the decision was taken away from me. The bigger of the two boys just yanked the thing from me, and the two of them sped away, laughing.

  ‘Say goodbye to it, gamina!’ they hooted.

  Naturally, I followed. Cross at being so easily stripped of my treasure, I forgot about the fact that I needed to return to the house. All that concerned me was keeping up with them and finding out what was in the box. If it turned out to be worthless, then I could leave them to it, obviously, but if it did contain something of value, then I wanted it. There was no way I was going to give it up – no way. I was the expert and somehow I would take back what was mine – probably by scurrying down and taking it back while they were rejoicing.

  I followed them downriver, intending to stay close till they stopped and opened it, but was dismayed to watch them scale the high fence on the bank and disappear far below me to the
dry riverbed. They were taller than me, plus one had been able to give the other a leg up, and alone I had no chance of following. I knew where they were headed: to the underside of the bridge’s arches. It would be a good place to get the box open out of sight of prying eyes. One of them had something to use to do it, too. They were too far away to see exactly, but it looked like a large nail, and from my vantage point it looked like they were having some success. And that was the moment when the world exploded.

  Inside the box had been a bomb. The whole bridge went up, right before my eyes. And in the middle of it all I could see both their bodies. They were lifted high into the sky and returned to the ground in separate parts. I watched their limbs fly through the air and their stomachs being torn open, the insides spilling out as they landed. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing, couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear. I was trapped inside my head, silently screaming. They shouldn’t have died, my mind kept telling me, they shouldn’t have died. It could have been me lying dead now. It should have been.

  Sound returned slowly, then it gathered pace and clarity. ‘Are you all right?’ someone was asking me. ‘Are you hurt? Are you OK?’

  ‘What happened?’ someone else was saying. ‘Did you see what happened?’

  I couldn’t answer them. I was numb with shock. All I could do was cry.

  It seemed the whole street, the whole area, the whole city was on the scene now, and in the middle of the smoke and the clamour and the screams of frightened children, I picked out Estella, who was gesticulating. ‘Get back in the house!’ she snapped. ‘Quickly! You shouldn’t be out here!’ She obviously assumed I’d just arrived at the bridge, as she had, having heard the explosion.

  Then, presumably seeing my lack of reaction, she beckoned Consuela over and inspected me more closely. ‘Consuela,’ she wanted to know, ‘what’s up with Rosalba?’

  ‘She seems sleepy,’ Consuela suggested. ‘Maybe she only just woke up.’

  Estelle slapped my face to try to get me to focus. ‘Ayee!’ she shrieked. ‘Look – she’s wet herself!’

  I then felt myself being half-lifted, half-dragged, as they both manhandled me back to the house.

  Inside, they made me soup to try to revive me, but I couldn’t eat it. There was meat floating in it, and it was meat on the bone, which filled my head with the horrible images I’d just witnessed. My stomach heaved violently just seeing it. But if I expected sympathy, very little was forthcoming. Instead, the Santos men, who seemed increasingly sure I must know something about what had happened, spent the rest of the day interrogating me.

  ‘Stop it!’ Consuela kept crying, as Juan repeatedly shook me to try to get some sense out of me. ‘Can’t you see she’s traumatised by something?’

  He ignored her. ‘What d’you know?’ he kept shouting at me. ‘What happened? Was it a bomb? Did you see anyone?’ On and on and on it went, well into the evening, and I realised that with the bomb being so close to where we lived, the Santoses had decided it must have been intended for them.

  *

  I was in a haze for days and have only the vaguest memories of what happened in the immediate aftermath. I’m sure the police must have been involved and there would have been some kind of investigation. It would also have been reported in the local newspaper, El Diario. But as the boys appeared to have been street kids, with no family to mourn them, interest would probably have soon died down.

  Their deaths haunted me, however, day and night. I couldn’t get the image of them out of my mind and was plagued by the thought that it should have been me who died instead of them. Why had fate arranged it for those boys to snatch the box from me? Why had I been unable to scale that high fence? Why had I been spared and their lives taken so violently? I had no idea, but I was alive. It appeared that I had cheated what fate had planned for me and I figured that there must be a reason. That thought made me determined to find myself a better life.

  And my dear and only friend Maruja seemed to feel the same way. Living so close by, she would hear me crying, hear my screams as I was beaten with the electrical flex, and hear my whimpers as I tried and failed to sleep. Some mornings, anxious to see her, I would climb the boughs of my special tree, and it would hurt so much to do so that she’d hear those cries too. But, strange though it might seem, the anger and upset in her eyes would immediately make me feel a little better, for it meant she cared about me. I’d never felt sympathy from someone before, and it was a wonderful thing to feel. It meant everything.

  But there was another emotion growing in Maruja: fear. By now our private language had become more sophisticated, and we could communicate easily, albeit silently, when we met. And increasingly Maruja spoke about the danger I was in. Since the explosion at the bridge, there seemed to be a new tension in the area, and one day, a few weeks later, Maruja told me she felt certain the Santoses had become paranoid about me, fearing I knew things about their business that could harm them badly. And so they wished to get rid of me as a matter of urgency.

  I was already aware of this feeling myself, particularly since I’d been caught overhearing Juan’s heated conversation about getting rid of one of the members of his group. I could tell something was going on, as the Santos sons had begun acting strangely around me. I was sure they were just waiting for the right opportunity to arise to dispose of me, and I was as scared as I’d ever been. Yet I knew that to run away would be to just prolong the agony. With all their criminal connections in Cúcuta, they would soon track me down and, alone and penniless, where else could I go?

  It seemed I was about to get my answer. While I would have given anything to go to Maruja’s, it was not an option for her to take me in. I wished for nothing more than to be cared for by her, as she cared for her own children, but I knew it was something I could never ask of her. She would then be in danger herself.

  But one day when I expressed my despair at my situation, she told me she might be able to help. She had been thinking about what she could do for some time now and had come up with a safe place where the Santoses wouldn’t find me. All I had to do, she explained, was get out of the house somehow and meet her at San Antonio Park at noon the next day.

  ‘Could you do that, do you think?’ she mimed at me.

  I nodded. It would be difficult to escape the house again. It might even prove impossible, but I didn’t want to think about that. I would find a way to do it. I would have to find a way. I would rather die, I decided, than not do so.

  As I lay on my mat on the back patio that night, I tried for hours to come up with a decent plan. The best-case scenario would be for most of the family to be out, but since that was unlikely, I had to think of something that could conceivably work even if they were in.

  By eleven the following morning, things weren’t going my way. Mr Santos and Juan had been in the office since breakfast and were showing no signs of going anywhere. As the minutes ticked by, I kept imagining Maruja waiting and waiting in San Antonio Park and the chance of my escape slowly dissolving. Now Maruja was helping me, everything suddenly seemed so urgent. If she was as frightened for my life as I was, then how long did I have? I could be murdered the very next day.

  I was interrupted in my gloomy reverie by the phone ringing. I could hear Mr Santos barking gruffly into the receiver, followed by the sound of chairs being scraped back and keys being grabbed. Yes! I thought, feeling relieved as the office door flew open and both Mr Santos and Juan emerged.

  Consuela, who was sitting at her sewing machine and listening to the radio, barely looked up as they passed.

  ‘Consuela,’ said Mr Santos, ‘Juan and I have to go out on business. Tell your mother we don’t know when we’ll be back.’

  Consuela, who wasn’t interested in their various comings and goings, muttered, ‘Yeah, OK.’ And of me, standing in the kitchen doorway, they took not the slightest bit of notice, which was probably a good thing, as they might have seen the relief flooding through me reflected in the grin on my face. Finally. My
chance. Now it could happen.

  I carefully closed the kitchen door on Consuela, who was once again engrossed in her sewing. Now I could put my plan into action, which first involved a liberal spraying of cleaning fluid around the kitchen, to disguise the smell of what was to come.

  My plan involved a request to go to the shop to get kerosene, and with only Consuela to contend with I thought I had more chance of being allowed to go. But first I needed to create a need for kerosene, which, with a half-full bottle, we currently didn’t have.

  I didn’t have long, so I wasted no time in pulling apart the cooker on which I had just begun cooking lunch. The fuel was dispensed from an assemblage of pipes at the back, consisting of an inner bottle that hung upside down within another larger fuel bottle, the kerosene being dispensed via a wick. As the level of fuel in the outer bottle dropped, so air could enter the smaller bottle and allow more kerosene to be dispensed. The fuel would then travel along a pipe to perforated rings on the hob itself and so provide a flame on which to cook.

  All I had to do was disconnect the kerosene supply bottle and carefully tip the contents down the sink. And since I’d disconnected and refilled the bottle scores of times before, it was a job – were my fingers not shaking quite so badly – that I could almost do with my eyes closed. It was soon done, shakes or otherwise, and once the now empty bottle was re-attached, all I had to do was to relight the stove and wait for the flame to peter out.

  ‘Consuela!’ I called, as I watched it slowly splutter into nothingness. ‘There’s no flame. I think we must be out of kerosene!’

  I pulled the kitchen door open slightly and made a big show of cursing and moaning about the time and wondering how on earth I’d cook everyone’s lunch. But Consuela was clearly more engrossed in whatever she was listening to than I thought, as she took no notice of me whatsoever.