Wild Child and Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Itard could never be sure if it was his own antagonism and harshness in those days following his disappointment that prompted the first major crisis in Victor’s sojourn at the Institute, but when he came up the five flights of stairs in the morning to find the boy’s bed empty, he blamed himself. Victor was not at the Guérins’, not in Sicard’s offices or mooning over the pond, and a search of the deaf-mutes’ dormitories and of the grounds, extending even to the farthest walls, proved futile. Once again, as if he’d been a figment of the collective imagination, the wild child had vanished.

  7

  Outside in the dark, beyond the gates of the Institute, Victor was adrift. There was too much noise. There were too many people. Nothing seemed familiar, nothing seemed real. The sky was jagged, unrecognizable, the city a flower carved of stone, blooming under a moonless spring night, its petals radiating out in a thousand alleys and turnings and dead ends. Something had driven him out of his bed, down the flights of stairs and then across the grounds and up through the gates and into the streets, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Some slight, some injury, the continuing and immitigable frustration of trying to please this man with his fierce grip and seething eyes—yes, and something else too, something he couldn’t take hold of because it was inside of him, beating with the pulse of his blood.

  Earlier, just after dinner, one of the deaf-mutes (not like him, a she, a new inmate arrived that morning with hair that hung down her back and a screen of heavy folded cloth concealing her legs and the other thing that was there, the potent physical mystery he could divine in the way he could sense the presence of an animal in a silent glen or sniff out the sodden secret pocket of earth that gave up the gift of a mole or truffle) had come to him in the hallway outside his room and held out her hand. She was offering him something, a sweet thing, small and sweet from the oven, and he didn’t like such things and slapped it from her hand. There it was, on the floor, between them. She drew in her breath. Her face changed. And suddenly her eyes sprang at him, her arms jerking and her elbows knifing as her fingers bent and flexed and contorted themselves in some mad show, and he backed away from her. But when she reached down to retrieve the sweet, he came at her from behind and put his hands there, in the place where her limbs joined beneath the cloth, and he didn’t know what he was doing or why he did it.

  And yet there were repercussions. The she jumped as if she’d been stung, whirling round at the same time to rake her nails across his face, and he didn’t understand and struck back at her and suddenly she was making the noise of an animal, a rising complaint that echoed down the hallway till the man appeared, his jacket askew and his face rigid with the expression Victor knew to be dangerous, and so he shrank away even as the man took hold of him roughly and made his voice harsh and ugly till it too rang out from the stone. This booming, this racket, and what was it? The teeth clenched, the parceled sounds flung out, each syllable a blow, and why, why? There was the physical pain of that enraged grip, and any creature would have felt it, any dog grabbed by the collar, but that was as nothing to the deeper pain—this was the man who demanded everything of him and who hugged him and petted him and gave him good things to eat when he complied, and to see him transformed was a shock. Victor remembered the window—and the closet into which he’d been thrust whenever he balked in those first months of his training—and he let himself go limp even as the man dragged him through the door, across the floor of his room and into the closet. And so, when it was time for bed, when the man’s footsteps approached and the key turned in the lock and the closet door was pulled open, Victor would not make it up with him, would not hold his arms out for a hug as he’d done so many times before, and when the night came he hid by the gates till he heard the stamp and shudder of the horses and the chime of the wheels and the gates swung open to release him.

  At first, in the freedom of the night, he’d felt supercharged with excitement, and he stole away from the walls with a sense of urgency, something in the smell of the air, polluted as it was, bringing him back to his old life when everything was untainted and equally divided between the kingdoms of pleasure and pain. He kept to the shadows instinctively, the noise of the carriages like thunder, people everywhere, emerging from the mist like specters, shouting, crying, their clogs beating at the stones, and dogs—how he hated them—making their racket in the alleys and snarling behind the fences. This new energy, this new feeling, drove him on. He walked till his shoes nagged at his feet and then he walked out of them and left them standing there in an alley behind him, two neat leather shoes, one set in front of the other in mid-step as if he’d been carried off by some great winged thing. A light rain began to fall. He turned one way to avoid a group of men bawling in their rumbling, low, terrible voices, and then he was running and he turned another way and was lost. The rain quickened. He huddled beneath a bush and began to shiver. All the urgency had gone out of him.

  When he woke, the night had gone silent but for the hiss of the rain in the trees along the street and the trill of it in the gutters. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t know who he was, and if someone had stooped down under the bush and called him Victor—if Madame Guérin in her apron had appeared at that moment with her soft face and pleading hands and called him to her—he wouldn’t have recognized his name. He was cold, friendless, hungry. Just as he’d been before, in the woods of La Bassine and the high cold plain of Roquecézière, but it was different now because now he felt a hunger that wasn’t for food alone. He shifted position, tried to draw his wet clothes around him as best he could. One side of his face was smeared with filth where he’d lain in the mud. The soles of both feet were nicked and bleeding. He shivered till his ribs ached.

  At first light, a man in uniform saw him curled beneath the bush and prodded him with the glistening toe of a boot. He’d been somewhere else, dislocated in his dreams, and he sprang up in a panic. The man—the gendarme—spoke something, the quick, harsh words like a drumbeat, and when he made a snatch for Victor’s arm, he was just half a beat too slow. Suddenly Victor was running, the paving stones tearing at his feet, and the gendarme ran too, till the rain and the mist intervened and Victor found himself sitting beneath a tree overlooking the rush and chop of the moving river. Somewhere else, not half a mile distant, Itard and the Guérins roamed the streets, stopping pedestrians to inquire of him—Had anyone seen him, a boy of fifteen, his sharp nose, clipped hair the color of earth, in blue shirt and jacket, the wild boy, the Savage escaped from the Institute for Deaf-Mutes? People just stared. Itard turned away from them, calling “Victor, Victor!” with a ringing insistence, even as Madame Guérin’s voice grew increasingly plaintive and hollow.

  The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed. Victor sat there in the rain, running his hands over his body, over the stiffening thing between his legs and the heavy roll of flesh round his midsection, the miracle of it, and then he pushed himself up and followed his nose across the street to where an open doorway gave onto a courtyard blossoming with the scent of meat in a pan. The rain slackened here, caught and held fast by the eaves. There was pavement underfoot. He could see a woman moving behind a window that was cracked an inch or two to let in the air, and he went to the window and stood watching her as she tended the meat and the pan and the odor of it rose up to communicate with him. It took a moment before she saw him there, his face smeared with mud, his hair wet and hanging, his black eyes fixed on her hands that spoke to the pan on the stove and the licking of the fire and the rhythm of the long two-pronged fork. She said something then, her face flaring in anger, her voice growling out, and in the next moment she vanished, only to reappear at a door he hadn’t seen. There were more words flung out into the rain, and then there was the dog, all teeth and clattering nails, and Victor was running again.

  But four legs outrun two, and just as he made the street the animal’s jaws closed on him, on his right leg, in the
place where the buttock tapers into the long muscle beneath it. The animal held on, raging in its own language, and he knew he had to stay upright, knew he had to fight it from the vantage of his height and not give in and fall beneath its teeth. They jerked there, back and forth, the animal releasing its grip only to attack again and again, the blood bright on the black ball of its snout, and he beat at the anvil of its head with both fists until something fell away inside him and his own teeth came into play, clamping down on the thing’s ear. Then the snarls turned to pleas, to a high, piping, bewildered protest that was no domesticated sound at all, and he held tight to the furious jerking anvil till the ear was his and the dog was gone. He tasted hair, tasted tissue, blood. People stared. A man came running. Someone called out to God as his witness, a common-enough phrase, but Victor knew nothing of God or of witness either. For the first time in a long buried while, he chewed without a thought for anything else but that, and he was chewing still as he turned on his heel and trotted up the street in his torn pants, his own blood hot on the back of his thigh.

  He thought nothing. He didn’t think of Madame Guérin or the food locker or of Itard or the she who’d offered him the sweet thing in the bleak familiar hallway outside the door of his room, and he didn’t think of the room or the fire or his bed. Walking, he felt the pain in his feet and this new fire burning in the flesh of his thigh, and he limped and shuffled and stayed as close to the walls as he could. Everything that had come before this moment had been erased. He kept walking round the same block, over and over, his head down, shoulders slumped, in search of nothing.

  Itard had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep when one of the deaf-mutes who’d been sent out to scour the neighborhood came to him with a pair of scuffed leather shoes in hand. The boy—he was Victor’s age, lean, clear-eyed, his hair cut too close to the scalp by the Institute’s incompetent barber—was fluent in the manual language of the deaf-mutes and was able to tell Itard where he’d found the shoes and to lead him there and even demonstrate in which direction they’d been pointed. Itard felt stricken. He felt sick. The shoes—he turned them over in his hand—were worn unevenly along the inside seam where Victor’s lurching, pigeon-toed gait punished the leather. There was no doubt. These shoes, these artifacts, were as familiar to him as his own boots.

  It was raining, the cobblestones glistening as if they’d been polished. Pigeons huddled on the windowsills and under the eaves. Itard bent to touch the spot the boy indicated and then looked off down the dripping alley to where the walls seemed to draw together in the distance. He was afraid suddenly. The experiment was over. Victor was gone for good.

  Even as he got to his feet and hurried down the alley, the deaf-mute at his side, he pictured Victor passing swiftly through the city, guided by his nose and ears, throwing off his suit of clothes like a yoke, working his way up along the bank of the Seine till the fields opened around him and the trees went dense in the ravines. He didn’t stop to think what the boy would eat or that he was dependent now and grown heavy with surfeit and luxury, but thought only of Victor’s eyes and teeth and how he would stoop to snatch up a frog or snail and crush it between his jaws—yes, and how well had all the eternal hours of exercises, of matching shapes and letters and forming vowels deep in the larynx prepared him for that? It was nothing. Life was nothing. He—Itard—for all his grand conception of himself and his power and his immutable will, was a failure.

  A moment later they emerged from the alley and were back out on a wet, twisting street crowded with people and the baggage they hauled and carried and pressed to their bodies as if each loaf or sausage or block of paraffin was as vital as life itself, no chance of finding him here, no chance, and he thought of Victor’s room, empty, and in the same moment that he was struck by the pang of his loss he felt a clean swift stroke of liberation slice through him. The experiment was over. Done. Finished. No more eternal hours, no more exercises, no more failure and frustration and battling the inevitable—he could begin to live the rest of his life again. But no. No. Victor’s face rose up before him, the trembling chin and retreating eyes, the narrowed shoulders and the look of pride he wore when he matched one shape to another, and he felt ashamed of himself. He could barely lift his feet as he made his way back to the Institute through the bleak, unsettled streets.

  It was Madame Guérin who wouldn’t give up. She searched the streets, the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens where she took Victor for his walks, the cafés and wineshops and the alleys out back of the grocer’s and the baker’s. She quizzed everyone she met and displayed a crude charcoal sketch she’d made of him one night as he sat rocking by the fire, tending his potatoes, and she alerted her daughters and sent old Monsieur Guérin out to limp along the river and look for the inadmissible in the slow, lethal slip of the current. Finally, on the third day after he’d gone missing, one of the women who sold produce to the Institute’s kitchens came to her and said she’d seen him—or a boy like him—across the river, begging in the marketplace at Les Halles.

  She set out immediately, the woman at her side, her feet chopping so swiftly she was out of breath by the time she reached the bridge, but she went on, her blood clamoring and the color come into her face. The day was warm and close, puddles in the streets, the river a flat, stony gray. She was sweating, her blouse and undergarments soaked through by the time they reached the marketplace, and then, of course, the boy was nowhere to be found. “There,” the woman shouted suddenly, “over there by the flower stall, there he is!” Madame Guérin felt her heart leap up. There, sitting on the pavement beneath a wagon and gnawing at something clenched in his two fists, was a boy with a dark thatch of hair and shoulders narrowed like a mannequin’s, and she hurried to him, his name on her lips. She was right there, right at his side, bent over him, when she saw her mistake—this was a wasted scrap of a boy, starved and fleshless and staring up hostilely out of eyes that were not Victor’s. Her legs felt unaccountably heavy all of a sudden and she had to sit on a stool and take a glass of water before she could think to offer the woman her thanks and start back for the Institute.

  She was walking slowly, deliberately, her eyes on the pavement so as to avoid stepping into a puddle and ruining her shoes, and in her mind she was trying to get hold of her loss and fight down her sense of desolation—he would turn up, she knew he would, and if he didn’t, she had her daughters and her husband and her cat, and who was he anyway but a poor, hopeless, wild boy who couldn’t pronounce two words to save his life—when she glanced up to avoid a skittish man with a cane and locked eyes with Victor. He was on the far side of the street, carriages rattling by, the humped shoulders and floating heads of pedestrians intervening, all of Paris moving in concerted motion as if to frustrate her, as if to take him away again, and when she stepped into the road to go to him she didn’t bother to look right or left and she ignored the curses of the ham-fisted man in his wagon and the stutter of his horses’ hooves, because nothing mattered now, nothing but Victor.

  For one uncertain moment, he didn’t react. He just stood there, pressed against the wall of the building that loomed behind him, his face small and frightened and his eyes losing their focus. She saw how he’d suffered, saw the mud layered in his hair, the torn clothes, the blood at the seat of his pants. “Victor!” she called, sharply, angrily. What was he thinking? What was he doing? “Victor!”

  It was as if those two syllables had become palpable and hard, fastened to a stone that hurtled out of the sky and struck him down. He fell to his knees and sobbed aloud. He tried to speak, tried to say her name, but there was nothing there. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” he said, his voice ragged with emotion, “uh-uh-uh-uh,” and he crawled the last few penitential steps to her and took hold of her skirts and wouldn’t let go.

  While that scene in the streets was unfolding, Itard was back in his rooms, working with a mute boy who was functionally deaf but had retained some measure of hearing. This boy—his name was Gaspard and he was Victor’s age, fair-haired,
well-made, with a quick smile and tractable disposition—had progressed rapidly since coming to the Institute from a remote village in Brittany the preceding year. He could communicate readily by means of signs and he quickly mastered the exercises designed to allow him to associate an object and its graphic representation and then the object and the written word assigned it. For the past month, Itard had been drilling him in the shaping of the sounds of these words with the palate, lips, tongue and teeth, and the boy was beginning to string together discrete bits of sound in a comprehensible way, something Victor had been unable to do, though two years had gone by since he’d first come to the Institute—and Victor had the advantage of normal hearing. It was a conundrum, since Itard refused to believe that Victor was mentally deficient—he’d spent too much time with him, looked too deeply into his eyes, to believe that. At any rate, he was putting Gaspard through his drills and thinking of Victor, of Victor lost and wandering somewhere out there in the city, at the mercy of common criminals and sexual inverts, when Monsieur Guérin knocked at the door with the news that he’d been found.

  Itard jumped up from the desk, knocking over the lamp in his excitement, and if it weren’t for Gaspard’s quick thinking and active feet, the whole room might have gone up in flames. “Where?” Itard demanded. “Where is he?”

  “With Madame.”

  A moment later, with the reek of lamp oil in his nostrils and permeating his clothes, Itard was downstairs in the Guérins’ apartment, where he found Victor lying rigid in the bath while Madame Guérin tended to him with soap and washcloth. Victor wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t so much as lift his eyes. “The poor child,” Madame Guérin said, swiveling her neck to gaze up at him. “He’s been bitten by some animal and lying in filth.” Steam rose from the bath. Two vast pots of water were heating on the stove.