It was December 1991, and at Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City they were going to present Toto to the public, a baby orangutan who had survived thanks to the intensive care of the zoo’s veterinary team, especially the director, who had taken care of Toto and his older brother Jambi almost as if they were her own children after their biological mother had complications during birth and was unable to produce enough milk.
His recovery had been widely covered on television, and I was very excited about the possibility of seeing him in person. I was ten years old, and these kinds of public presentations did not happen very often, so my sister, who was ten years older than me, and I decided to go. The presentation was going to take place in the morning at the zoo’s central building.
My house was nowhere near the city. We took a bus, then the subway, and then walked for a long time. It took almost two hours to get there. By the time we reached the building there were already quite a few people, maybe fifty, and while we waited, more and more people kept arriving. I have no idea how many of us there were in the end, but everything was packed. Everyone was pushed toward the front, looking up at the second floor, where there was a balcony they were supposed to come out onto.
We did not want to move because we had managed to get fairly close. But I really had to pee. I had already been holding it for a long time, and I was never very good at holding it anyway. I did not know where the bathrooms were or how much longer they were going to take, so I told my sister I could not wait anymore and had to go find one. She said she would stay there and save our place, and that I should look for her when I came back.
I squeezed my way out of the crowd and started looking for the bathrooms like crazy. I would ask someone and they would send me in one direction; I would get there and it was not there, so I would ask again and get sent somewhere else. I kept running around and could not find anywhere to go. I do not even remember anymore if I eventually found the public bathrooms or ended up going behind a bush because I was so desperate.
The point is that once I had peed and my common sense had returned to my body, I no longer remembered how to get back.
I do not know how common it was back then to leave children alone in crowded places, but that day I understood why it seems unthinkable now. When you are alone, places become more chaotic, bigger, and more frightening. There was the noise of voices everywhere, people walking in every direction, and zoos are particularly labyrinthine.
Everything looked the same. First because I had not paid much attention when I walked away, and then because, from my height, I could mostly see the shapes of people around me. I could not see whole buildings or long paths opening in front of me. I could see my own steps and the currents of people moving around.
I ran because I did not want to miss the presentation of the baby orangutan, but the more I ran, the less recognizable the place became. I could not find anything familiar, much less my sister.
I panicked.
I stopped near a small circular area with a fountain and began to cry. I felt lost inside a sea that kept changing shape, without knowing what to do. The people passing by did not know where the presentation was. Nobody stayed with me. Maybe they did not really see me because I was crying inwardly.
I was lost for around ten minutes, long enough to feel as though the world was collapsing around me. I had no money. I did not know which subway or which bus I would have to take to get home. Telephones worked with coins, and at some point my sister was going to have a heart attack from worrying about me.
Then the sound of the water falling from the fountain brought me into a kind of personal silence.
I slowly began going over in my mind the paths I had already explored, and suddenly a memory appeared:
I had already been there.
In that exact situation.
But not in real life. In a dream.
I suddenly remembered having had a dream in which I could not find my sister in a world full of people. It was the same daylight, the same noise of thousands of voices, the same clothes, and the same fountain.
I had no idea I had already dreamed it until that moment. What else could it have been?
And in that dream, I had found my way back.
I could clearly see which path to take, whom to follow, where to turn, and where my sister was. I opened my eyes as if someone had just revealed a map to me from above, and there it all was, everything I had just remembered, except now it was happening in real life.
I followed the steps I had seen in my head. I followed the people. I looked where I remembered looking.
Things began to fit.
I could not believe it.
I became so excited that I started running again, but now with a completely different feeling in my chest. It was no longer desperation. It was excitement.
Suddenly I was standing in front of the building where the presentation was taking place.
I still could not believe it, and I had arrived just in time. From the back of the crowd I saw the director come out onto the balcony holding the baby orangutan in her arms, carrying him like a child. He was wearing a little diaper and sucking one of his fingers, and she held and rocked him with great tenderness.
Everyone was incredibly happy. They shouted, whistled, clapped, and laughed. I did too. I kept jumping so I could see better, and I wanted to get his attention. The baby curled into the director’s arms. I think it was too much noise for him.
She said a few words, showed him to everyone again, and went back inside. The whole thing probably lasted two minutes, but seeing him was very emotional. I was crying again, except this time from happiness.
He was so beautiful.
It felt beautiful that he had survived and that so many people loved him.
When it was over, everyone began to disperse, and not long after that I heard my sister’s voice:
“Did you get to see him? Or did you miss it?”
Nothing about, “Why did you take so long?” “Why are you crying?” or “Did you find the bathroom?”
Nothing.
I did not tell her anything either. I told her yes, I had found the bathroom and that I had managed to see him from the back. I asked if we were going anywhere else, but we were not. We walked back to the subway, then took the bus, and got home before noon.
The whole way back I kept thinking about what had happened.
I did not understand what it was then, and I still do not understand it. But whatever it was, it pulled me out of a moment of panic, allowed me to see Toto from far away, to feel happy for him, and to experience something very strange that never happened to me again.
What was that?
Had I really dreamed it before, or had my mind built a map in the form of a story because that was the easiest way for me to follow it?
Can something be experienced as if it were already a memory?
Maybe I had not paid attention to the path, but my subconscious had. Maybe the sound of the water allowed me to access something I had already registered. Or perhaps instinct guided me.
But how?
What is intuition?
An extra sense that senses what?
Something you cannot see, but can feel?
Can something be sensed before it happens?
I do not understand any of it. But the experience itself makes me think about how little we know about ourselves, and of what we know, how little we use; of what we use, how little we remember; and of what we remember, how little we actually live.
Toto died in 2021, close to thirty years old, six years after Jambi, sick and in poor conditions of captivity.
Years later I found a recorded interview with María Elena Hoyo, the director of the zoo at the time. That was when I discovered that around five hundred people had gathered that day. Many children had brought gifts: drawings, bananas, and all kinds of things.
I also discovered something else.
The baby the director brought out onto the balcony that day was not Toto.
It was Jambi.
Toto had become frightened by the crowd and did not come out. It was during that presentation that the director asked the public if we liked the name Toto for the newborn.
And we all said yes.
2026.
Related Work: Site Reconnaissance