The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life

ROCHA, JUAN REFUGIO (b. 1957). Zookeeper, animal trainer. Place of birth: Antigua, Guatemala. Very little is known about the 1979 Fuego del Zoológico Público, only that the grounds caught fire in the early morning of October 18, 1979, that the fire consumed the entire grounds and all its structures by daybreak, and that, in the fire, only four animals perished — one howler monkey, one chimpanzee, and two gorillas, one male and one female. The man who freed the animals from their cages and herded them out of their habitats was Juan Refugio Rocha, a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan who had been working at the zoo for six months, during which time he had been trying to teach the gorillas to speak.

As a child, Rocha had been adept at communicating with animals through clicks, whistles, taps, nudges, snaps, and squeezes. His father had owned donkeys, which Rocha had cared for and which the family had used to earn money for food and clothing, renting the beasts out as transportation and pack animals. Rocha had trained each animal, and in all his years as keeper of the donkeys, no one was thrown, no packs were lost.

In 1974, Rocha left his parents’ house and moved to Mexico City. From there, he moved to the state of Chihuahua, where he worked intermittently for carnival acts, training dogs and elephants and jungle cats. In the late spring of 1979, he got word of a public zoo in need of a keeper whose duties also involved light veterinarian work. By May, Rocha had taken the position, and in a few days found himself obsessed with the gorillas.

Rocha, having never seen a gorilla before, knew little of their behaviors and nothing about their habitats. Through study of their personalities and through close observation of their physical characteristics, Rocha determined that the zoo owned one male western lowland gorilla and one female western lowland gorilla. He spent his days at the zoo caring for the animals, and the nights he spent in his room or at the library, studying their behavior. He went to great lengths to acquire the bamboo shoots, thistles, wild celery, and tubers that they ate. He constructed a realistic environment similar to the western African lowlands in design and humidity and greenery, and he gave them grasses and branches with which to build nests.

Once the two gorillas were settled, he made his first steps toward establishing a line of communication. Witnesses reported that when Rocha entered the habitat screeching and hooting and clicking to get the animals’ attention, the gorillas began to squawk and let out a high piercing keen. The animals charged at him, running on their hind legs, “like people,” with surprising dexterity and swiftness. They worked as a team, flanking and herding Rocha into a corner, and once he was trapped between the two, they began to kick and punch him in the back and in the head. Three men, groundskeepers who had been standing by to watch the animal trainer, finally managed to pull him out of the habitat, by which time Rocha had suffered a minor concussion and two broken ribs.

Rocha did not give up. Over the next six months, he entered the gorilla habitat no fewer than ten times, and the animals continued to greet him with the same volatility and aggression. The gorillas took the food he offered them, lived in the habitat he created for them, and in that habitat they were peaceful. Once he entered their world, however, as if they had been trained for it, the gorillas circled him, trapped him, ignored him as he spoke, and then beat him. After five or ten minutes, Rocha needed to be pulled from the cage, with a broken arm, broken fingers, broken ribs, badly bruised skin, cuts, contusions, abrasions, or minor concussions.

When the fire started, Rocha was with the gorillas, standing outside their habitat talking to them, as he often did, from a safe distance. He hooted and chirped and howled at them for a full fifteen minutes before leaving to attend to the other animals in the park. By the time help had arrived and the other animals had been freed from their cages and environments, the fire raged out of control, burning until dawn, when the last embers snuffed out and all that was left — the zoo, the howler monkey, the chimp, and the gorillas — was ash.