Zero, The Tolerant Chimp

 

The photo’s old and faded, the color is terrible and some might even say it’s impossible to tell which one is the monkey, but still – there are moments in life that just have to be shared.  I found this photo a couple of months ago, tucked into a box filled with mementos of my time in West Africa: Liberian country cloth, carvings from Mali, Benin bronzes and silver bracelets from across west and north Africa.  The chimp (for she was a chimpanzee, and not a monkey) was one of my good friends during my time in Liberia, and we learned to know each other pretty well.

Zero, as she eventually was named, had been wounded by a hunter in the bush. Her baby had been killed and no doubt was served up for dinner.  But Zero, blinded in one eye and crippled by the shot, ran for her life.  She was tracked and finally spotted, huddled under a tangle of branches and vines and unable to go on. It was her relatively lucky day.  Despite the loss of her baby and her own wounds, she was picked up and taken back to our hospital compound, where she began her recovery under the care of the maintenance man and his wife.

She was named Zero because under normal circumstances she would have had zero chance of survival. But she not only survived, she thrived, basking in the attention and affection of an entire community. She began to spend her days outdoors again, staked on an extraordinarily long chain that gave her plenty of room to frolic. She did develop a certain laziness.  The joke was that if you sneaked up on her, you might catch her in the nearby hammock with a paperback in one hand and a lemonade in the other.

Eventually, she was allowed to begin roaming free while people were around. She made no attempt to leave the area, but stayed between “her” house and the community tennis court.  The court was a pitiful thing, with a red clay surface that required frequent wetting and rolling, but it had a net and a fence, and provided amusement and exercise for folks who needed both.

One day, an unlucky shot went high and over the fence.  Zero turned with the rest of us to watch the ball’s flight. Then, gimping along like the wounded creature she was, she went after the ball. We watched with astonishment as she picked it up, brought it back to the court, and handed it to one of the nurses watching the game. It was the beginning of a long and illustrious career as “ball chimp”. After that, every time someone entered the court, Zero would hoot and holler until she was allowed to come and watch with the rest of the crowd – not to mention fetching the balls that went over the fence. We fussed over her like crazy every time she did it, and she loved the attention.  The more approval she received, the more she wanted to help out.

We’d known she was intelligent, and observant, but after what came to be known as the great tennis-ball caper, people started watching her more closely. The family who’d taken her in had a baby – nearly a toddler – who liked to be in the yard. It wasn’t long before people realized that every time the baby started to move beyond Zero’s perimeter, the chimp would go after the child and gently bring her back. If that didn’t work, Zero would put up such a fuss that someone would come to see what was happening, and get the baby corralled. It wasn’t long before everyone had the system figured out.  With Mom keeping an eye on things, chimp and baby spent long hours playing togther, and Zero added baby-sitting to her list of achievements.

Given her playfulness, her hunger to live in the middle of things and her eagerness to please, it was hard not to think of Zero as just one more of the mischievous, delightful children who surrounded us, begging for attention and approval.  But she was much more than that.  She had suffered much in her life at the hands of human beings: the death of her baby, the loss of her habitat, the ability to come and go as she pleased. In those or similar circumstances, other chimps have grieved themselves to death, but that wasn’t Zero’s way.  She seemed to know she had been given a second chance, and that the humans who surrounded her were responsible for her life, as well as for the strangeness of it.

She was, in short, a creature filled with affection, gratitude and basic good humor, willing to accept the foibles of the humans with whom she would end her days. Everyone who knew her agreed there was more than simple instinct behind her actions. Perhaps because she knew grief, she seemed able to detect grief in people. If there were tears, she would amble over and stroke a hand or arm until the simple silliness of it overcame the tears with laughter.  Suspecting anger, she would cover her head with her arms and hop around, as though fending off punishment.  Chided for her own misbehavior, she would stand, and stare, and heave great sighs, as if to say, “And who are YOU, to tell me I’m not perfect?” 

She wasn’t perfect, that’s for sure.  But neither were we, and it was her willingness to tolerate our imperfections that helped us tolerate hers.  In the end, nothing more was needed.  A little honesty here, a little good humor there, and the chimp and her friends got along just fine. Every now and then, I wonder if it might work for people.

 

Copyright © 2008 Linda L. Leinen.   All rights reserved.

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