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

by Marina Chapman

  But it was warm and, compared to the nightmare of getting here, peaceful. Though I still felt scared, I could also begin to sense that this might be some sort of home. Perhaps it was just another version of the Indian camp I had so yearned to live in. A place where I might be welcomed and cared for.

  But though my mind grabbed onto positives, a part of me knew better. If that were so, then why was the woman still gripping me so tightly? Why were the expressions on the hunters’ faces so hard?

  ‘Ana-Karmen!’ The man’s voice boomed in the small space. I didn’t understand the words — it was just a harsh and sudden sound to me — but, as had been the case all along, the tone was clear. I followed his gaze and could soon hear the sound of someone coming. It was a fat woman who had shuffled in from another part of the dwelling and now approached us with an equally hard look on her face. Years of relying on my instincts for survival made me stiffen. She was old and tired-looking, with evil green eyes and a heavily lined face — no doubt the result of years of nurturing the sour, angry expression that occupied it now.

  Nothing seemed good about this woman. Every fibre of my body seemed to want to shrink away from her. Happily, though, she seemed to want to keep me at a distance, too. The humans communicated in their weird, unintelligible language, the fat woman, whose many chins seemed to have lives of their own, repeatedly darting disgusted glances in my direction. I knew what her expression meant as she cast her gaze over me — I had seen the same look on the Indian chief’s face.

  This did not look as if it was going to turn out well, and I felt cold dread once again overtake me. The hunter woman still held on tightly to my hand, as if fearing that I’d choose to run away — which I might have done, had the idea of what was outside not felt every bit as terrifying a prospect.

  I watched as the fat lady then waddled off and left us, aware that whatever trace of compassion had still existed in the hunters when we arrived here had now drained away as surely as the rains did.

  The woman returned with something in her hands. Two things, in fact. On one hand perched a green parrot, its plumage bright and unusual. I wasn’t even sure I’d seen one like it. And in the other hand she held several pieces of something — I didn’t know what they were but they looked a little like a wad of dried-up leaves. They crackled slightly as she held them out and waved them towards the man and woman. More unintelligible babble was now exchanged, though not the wad of leaves, even though it was clear to me that the fat lady wanted the hunters to take them.

  It was at this point that I felt a push in the small of my back. At the same time, my arms were released and the truth about what was happening became clear. I knew so little of this world, knew so little about so much, but some things, I think, are universally straightforward. This was one of them — I was being exchanged. I had seen it happen once at the Indian camp, when I saw a man giving another his bananas. I had been surprised by it then: a monkey would never willingly give their food away. But in return, the other man had given him a pot of something. I didn’t know what, but it seemed the same sort of thing was happening now. The fat woman had given the hunters the bird and dead leaves, and in exchange they had given her me.

  As if to reinforce that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life by leaving my family in the jungle, the next few minutes and hours remain horribly sharp in my memory. I watched the man and woman leave, returning the way we had just come. I recall how they never so much as turned round. I remember the heat of my hand where the woman had held it, and how I flexed and released my fingers as I watched them go.

  I felt as if I drowning, as if my heart were being submerged into a sea of regret. Why had I chosen this path? Why had I left my home for this? Why had I trusted that the hunter woman would save me and care for me? The devastation when the woman left was total. I would never trust a human being again.

  In a state of shock but beginning to come to my senses, I started to take stock of my surroundings. I recall seeing food in a bowl, some pieces of fruit that looked familiar from the jungle, and something that looked similar to a kind of bread I’d watched the Indian women make. I remember my hunger. I was starving. I had barely eaten in two days, and to snatch some was almost an automatic action. I certainly didn’t anticipate the wooden implement that slapped down on the back of my hand, however, nor the pain that went through me as it connected.

  After a few days, I would come to anticipate that feeling all too well. I would also begin to learn the names of things. The vicious implement was called a ‘wooden spoon’. Ana-Karmen kept it stowed in her belt at all times and would pull it out and use it at the slightest provocation. Right now, though, like Ana-Karmen, it was just an agent of pain. Just like the humans who had swapped me for a parrot and a pile of leaves I’d learn were called ‘money’. I had a great deal to grasp and I would learn faster than seemed possible. But the first important lesson had already been absorbed. I would never trust a human again.

  *

  Ana-Karmen (whose name would so soon take shape for me) closed the door on the hunters and the night. I kept my head low as I studied this strange new creature. She had a big lump on her neck that wobbled when she spoke, and her eyelids were painted with smears of livid blue and green — like that of a beetle’s wing case but not at all pretty.

  I felt sure her intention was to harm me — kill me, even — though I perhaps had enough innate intelligence to realise that had she wanted to kill me she wouldn’t have made an exchange for me. What would have been the point? Even so, I was riddled with nerves. What did she intend to do with me now I was trapped here? I felt so anxious that every part of me was taut and poised for action. If she attacked me, my body was already saying I would fight her in every way I knew.

  That I could fight was something I didn’t doubt. As well as fear, I felt anger. Anger at myself for having come here, anger on behalf of all the trapped animals, anger especially at the death of that poor monkey, though I consoled myself that he had at least been spared further torment.

  Ana-Karmen spoke, opening her mouth and letting another stream of noise out, her chins wobbling threateningly as she did so. She reminded me of a bird I used to enjoy watching in the jungle. It was a nocturnal bird that had a big red-balloon chest and never failed to entertain me. He would stand up, pick up leaves, turn around, inflate his chest, then deflate it, turn around and sit down again. And then he would do it all again.

  I had no idea why he did it, and it was the same with Ana-Karmen. I had no idea what she was trying to communicate, so I couldn’t answer. Which seemed to infuriate her. She gabbled the sounds at me once again, this time pulling sharply on my ears for good measure. I shrieked in shock and pain, and perhaps it was at this point that she too learned a lesson: that however much she shouted, I couldn’t understand her. And another lesson, too: that I couldn’t talk.

  ‘Sophia!’ Once again the sound boomed around the tiny dwelling. It made me jump. And as I did so, another person arrived from somewhere. I didn’t know where, quite; it would be a few days before I worked out the layout of my new home. But there were clearly other rooms here — who knew how many? And people, too. This new person was another woman, but younger. Though her face seemed slightly older and her eyes were dark and sunken, she reminded me of the mother I’d seen in the jungle having her baby. She was slender and more graceful, and the thing I remember most clearly was that she wore bright orange shoes. Like Ana-Karmen, she also had paint on her eyes: this time a bright blue with black lines. Like me, she seemed scared.

  She was joined by another girl, who looked and spoke differently, and when I return to these memories now her difference still remains. I wonder if perhaps she was disabled in some way. They called her ‘La Bobita’, and she looked a little like the women from the Indian camp, with darkish skin and a long, shiny black fringe. She seemed to spend all her time stationed in the corner of the kitchen and apparently couldn’t talk — she only made strange spastic utters. When she was beaten, th
ough, she screamed. Just as I did.

  After a burst of snapped orders — again, the tone was unmistakeable — Sophia duly led me to another room. I still had no idea what any of them planned to do with me, only that they seemed disgusted by my presence. They certainly looked at me as if they could hardly bear to touch me.

  As soon as I entered this new, darker chamber and saw what was in the middle of it, I froze. In the centre of the space stood a big battered container that seemed to be made of the same shiny material as some of the Indian camp cooking pots and which Sophia began filling from huge containers of water. Was she filling this to cook with, as the Indians cooked the roots? And then another thought made me flatten myself hard against the wall. Were they filling it so they could cook me?

  It’s impossible to adequately describe the emotions that filled my head at that moment. I had survived in a wild place for a very long time. I had done so with nothing but my own wits to help me. I had made my own mistakes and I had made my own rules. And bar leaving the Indian camp all that time ago, I had never been made to do anything. Such memories that lingered of my time before the jungle were now so vague as to be nothing more than wisps of impressions: about the pea pods, the path to the allotment, my black dolly. I was as much a wild animal as I could be, and now I was a cornered wild animal. I tensed again, waiting for the woman to pounce, and made noises that I hoped would convey to her that I was not going in that water however hard she tried to make me, that I was an animal she would be unwise to take on.

  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.

  17

  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.