Wild Child and Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Victor, you’ve been bad, very bad,” Itard said, letting his intonation express everything he felt except relief, because he had to be stern, had to be like his own father, who would never let a child have his way in anything. Especially this. Running off as if he didn’t belong here, as if he hadn’t been treated with equanimity and even affection—and if he didn’t belong here, then where did he belong? “Victor!” He raised his voice. “Victor, look at me.”

  No response. The boy’s face was a wedge driven into the surface of the water, his hair a screen, his eyes focused on nothing.

  “Victor! Victor!” Itard had moved closer until he was leaning over the tub, both hands gripping the sides. He was angry suddenly, angry out of all proportion to the way he’d felt just a moment earlier when Monsieur Guérin had brought him the news. What had changed? What was wrong? He wanted to be acknowledged, that was all. Was that too much to ask? “Victor!”

  He couldn’t be sure, because of the bathwater and the influence of the steam, but the boy’s eyelids seemed to be wet. Was he crying? Was he movable too?

  Madame Guérin’s voice came at him out of the silence. “Please, Monsieur le Docteur—can’t you see that he’s upset?”

  In the morning, first thing, though it might have been perverse, though it might have been his overzealousness that had precipitated the crisis in the first place, Itard went back to work on Victor, redoubling his efforts. Some elementary principal had been re-established over that bath, a confirmation of the order of being, he the father and Victor the son, and he was determined to take advantage of it while he could. He’d seen the influence of his own and Sicard’s methods on Gaspard and some of the other deaf-mutes, and so he went back to drilling Victor on the simple objects and the words, written out on cardboard, that represented them. At first, Victor was as incapable of making the connection as he’d been at an earlier stage, but as the months progressed a kind of intellectual conversion gradually occurred so that Victor was finally able to command some thirty words—not orally, but in written form. Itard would hold up a card that read BOUTEILLE or LIVRE and Victor, making a game of it, would scramble out the door, mount the stairs to his room and unfailingly fetch the correct object. It was a breakthrough. And after endless repetitions, with several bottles and several books, papers, pens and shoes, he even began to generalize, understanding that the written word did not exclusively refer to the very specific thing in his room but to a whole class of similar objects. Now, Itard reasoned, he was ready for the final stage, the leap from the written word to the spoken that would engage all his faculties and make him fully human for the first time in his life.

  For the next year—an entire year, with its fleeing clouds and intermittent rains, its snows and blossomings and stirrings in the trees—Itard trained him in the way he’d trained Gaspard, staring at him face to face and working the cranio-facial muscles through their variety of expressive gestures, inserting his fingers into the boy’s mouth to manipulate his tongue and in turn having the boy touch his own and feel the movement of it as speech was formed. They drilled vowels, reached for consonants, for the simplest phones. It was slow going. “Fetch le livre, Victor,” Itard would say, and Victor would simply stare. Itard would then get up and cross the room to hold the book in his hand, simultaneously pointing to Victor. “Tell me, Victor. Tell me you want the book. The book, Victor. The book.”

  In the meanwhile, whenever a breeze would stir the curtains or the clouds would close over the grounds or lightning knife through the sky, Victor would go to the window, no matter what they were doing or to what crucial stage the lesson had attained, deaf to all remonstrance. He had put on weight. He was taller now, by two inches and a half. Stronger. More and more he had the bearing of a man—unnaturally short, yes, and with the unformed features of a boy, but an incipient man for all that. There was the evidence of the hair under his arms and radiating out from his pubes and even the faint translucent trace of a mustache above his upper lip. During this period he was more easily distracted and he seemed to go blank at times, staring, humming, rocking, just as he’d done when he first came out of the woods. Increasingly, he seemed agitated too, and as his body continued to change, he became more of a problem about the grounds.

  In addition to the incident with the deaf-mute girl, there was further cause for worry. While Itard couldn’t imagine Victor’s doing serious physical harm to anyone, male or female, the boy continually overstepped the bounds of propriety so that Sicard began to regard him as an immoral influence on the other children, and with good reason. There was no more sense of shame in him than in an arctic hare or an African ape that lived in its skin, and when the mood took him he would pull out his phallus and masturbate no matter the situation or the company (though thankfully, to this point, the abbé was unaware of it). He would rub up against people inappropriately, male and female alike. Increasingly, on awakening, he would dispense with his trousers and sometimes his undergarments too. No amount of discipline or punishment could make him feel shame or even modesty.

  Once, when Madame Guérin’s three daughters were present and they were all of them—the Guérins, Itard and Victor—having a picnic on the grounds of the Observatory in the Gardens, Victor made a fumbling amorous approach to Julie, his favorite of the three. He was used to seeing Julie, who often came to visit her mother—“Lee, Lee!” he would cry when she came into the room—and she seemed genuinely sympathetic toward him, not simply for her mother’s sake, but because she was good-hearted and compassionate. On this day, however, no sooner had they spread the blanket and opened the hamper, than Victor made a snatch at the lion’s share of the sandwiches and ran off with them to hide in a cluster of trees. This was his usual behavior—he had little sense, after all his training and humanizing, of anyone outside of himself, of pity or fellow-feeling or generosity—but this time there was a twist. A few moments later he came sidling back to the group, his face smeared with fish paste and mayonnaise, and began stroking the hair first of one sister, then another, his fingers visibly trembling as he touched them; then, with each in turn, he laid his head in her lap a moment until finally he got up and seized her by the back of the neck, his grip firm and yet gentle too. When they ignored him, he seemed hurt and pushed himself awkwardly away. The last was Julie, and she was more tolerant than her sisters. The same scenario played out, but then, showing a leap Itard felt he was incapable of, the boy took Julie firmly by the hand, pulled her to her feet and then led her across the grass to the clump of trees where he’d secreted the sandwiches.

  The sisters shared a glance and made a remark as suggestive as they could in the presence of their parents, and Madame Guérin gave out with a little laugh of embarrassment, while her husband, stoic, elderly, his considerable nose reddened by the sun, gave all his attention to the sandwich before him. “Our Savage has grown civilized under the spell of feminine charm, eh?” Itard observed. “And who could blame him?” All eyes, but for Monsieur Guérin’s, focused on the clump of trees and the pronounced sunstruck movement there. Intrigued, and with a lifted eyebrow for the party to show that he was amused and not at all concerned on a deeper level, though he was, of course, knowing Victor’s rudimentary conception of propriety, Itard went to investigate.

  Victor, his face bloodless and sober, was gently squeezing Julie’s knees as if they were balls of malleable wax he was trying to shape into something else altogether, and at the same time he kept gesturing to his cache of sandwiches. The sandwiches, four or five of them—all showing conspicuous marks of his teeth—lay in a bed of fresh-picked leaves. Julie tried her best to look bemused, though she was plainly uncomfortable, and after she let Victor stroke her hair and mold her knees for some minutes, she smiled brightly and said, “That’s enough, Victor. I want to go back to Maman now.”

  Victor’s face took on a defeated look as Julie rose in a fragrant swirl of skirts and began to retrace her steps back to the party. “Lee!” he cried piteously, patting the depression in th
e grass where she’d been sitting, “Lee! Lee!” And then, in a kind of desperation, he held up the remains of a half-eaten sandwich as the ultimate expression of his love.

  Itard was moved by this, of course—he was only human. But he couldn’t conceive of how to instruct his pupil in morals or decorum when he was unable to implant words in his head—Victor couldn’t formulate his own desires, let alone express them, and each day’s exercises seemed to take him further from the goal. Six months went by, then another year. Victor began to chafe under the regimen in a way that recalled the early days, and no matter how many times they worked their facial muscles and their tongues and drilled over the same words, Victor simply could not pronounce them. Itard himself, a man with the patience of the gods, came to dread their sessions, until finally, reluctantly, he had to face the truth—Victor was regressing. Gaspard came and went, working now as a shoe-maker’s apprentice, able to read, write and speak with some degree of fluency, and others appeared in his place and learned and developed and moved on too. Sicard was growing impatient, as was the Minister of the Interior, who had authorized the funds for Victor’s care and expected some sort of tangible return on the public investment. But there was some block here, some impediment Victor just couldn’t seem to overcome, and despite himself Itard was forced to admit that it was the irremediable result of those years of estrangement, those years of inhumanity and wandering without any human voice to speak to him. He began to give up hope.

  Then there came a day, a bright day of spring with a scent of renewal on the warm breeze blowing up out of the south, when Sicard appeared in the doorway to the doctor’s rooms. Itard had been expecting a student and had left the door ajar, and he looked up in surprise—never, in all his time at the Institute, had the abbé come to visit him in his rooms, and yet here he was, wrapped in his soutane, his features pinched round the tight disapprobation of his mouth. This was trouble, and no doubt about it.

  “The Savage,” Sicard spat, and he was so worked up he could barely get the words out.

  Itard got up from his desk in alarm and took up the water pitcher and the glass beside it. “Abbé,” he said, already pouring, “can I get you a glass of water? Would you—?”

  Sicard was in the room now, swiping one open palm across the other, his robe in a riot of motion. “That animal. That—God help me, but he’s incurable. That idiot. That self-polluter, that, that—”

  Itard gave him a stricken look. “What’s he done?”

  “What’s he done? He’s exposed himself in the flesh before the assembled female inmates and Sister Jean-Baptiste as well. And, and manipulated himself like one of the idiots in the Bicêtre—which is where he belongs. Either there or prison.” He glared at Itard. His breathing—the ratcheting of the air through his nostrils—was thunderous. His eyes looked as if they were about to dissolve.

  “But we can’t just abandon him.”

  “I will not allow him to corrupt this institution, to pollute the innocent minds of these children—our wards, doctor, our wards. And worse—what if he acts on his impulses? What then?”

  From outside the open window came the cries of the children at their games, the sound of a ball thumped and bodies colliding. Laughter. Shouts. Children at play, that was all it was. Only the sound of children at play, and yet it depressed him. Victor didn’t play. Victor had never played. And now he was a child no longer.

  Itard had tried everything, removing meat from the boy’s diet, as well as any other foods that might contribute to unnatural excitation, giving him long baths again in the hope of calming him, and when he was most worked up, bleeding him till the tension flagged. Only the bleeding seemed to work, and then only for a few hours at a time. He saw Victor’s face suddenly, rising before him in his consciousness, saw the pale descending slash of it in the corner of his room as he sat rocking over his feet and jerking at himself, saw the sheen of the eyes that pulled the whole world back into that primeval pit from which the first civilized man had crawled an eon ago. “He’s not like that,” he said lamely.

  “He’s incurable. Ineducable. He must be sent away.”

  There was a solution that had occurred to Itard, but it was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, certainly not the abbé or Madame Guérin. If Victor were able to express himself carnally, to experience the release every healthy male needs if he’s not to become mad, then maybe there was hope yet, because this regression of his, this inability to focus and absorb his lessons—to speak like a human being—was perhaps somehow tied to his natural needs. Itard thought of hiring a prostitute. For months he’d wrestled with the notion, but finally he saw that he couldn’t do it—it was one thing to rescue a child from savagery, hold him up to examination as a specimen, train his senses and his mind, and it was quite another to play God. No man had that right.

  “We can’t do that,” he insisted. “He’s a ward of the state. He’s our responsibility. We took him from the woods and civilized him and we can’t just throw up our hands and send him back—”

  “Civilized him?” Sicard had spread his feet apart as if he expected to crouch down and grapple over the issue. He’d refused a seat, refused the water. He wanted one thing and one thing only. “You have no more to say about it.”

  “What about the Minister of the Interior? My report to him?”

  “Your report will say that you’ve failed.” His expression softened. “But not for lack of trying. I appreciate the energy you’ve put into this, we all do—but I told you this years ago and I’ll tell you now: give it up. He’s an idiot. He’s filthy. An animal. He deserves only to be locked up.” He snatched up the glass of water as if to examine its clarity, then set it down again. “And more: he should be castrated.”

  “Castrated?”

  “Like a dog. Or a bull.”

  “And should we put a ring through his nose too?”

  The abbé was silent a long while. The breeze picked up and rustled the curtains. A shaft of sunlight, golden as butter, struck the floor at his feet. Finally—and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the cries of the children—he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t see why not. Truly, I don’t.”

  8

  The report, the final report Itard prepared for the Minister of the Interior, was a trial, a kind of crucifixion of the soul that made him want to cry out every time the quill touched the page. It was an admission that he’d wasted five years of his life—and of Victor’s—in assaying the impossible, and that for all his brashness and confidence, all his repeated assurances to the contrary, he had failed. Ultimately, he had come to understand that the delimiting factors of Victor’s abandonment were insurmountable—that he was, as Sicard insisted, ineducable. In the interest of science and in small measure to justify his own efforts, Itard listed these factors for the official record: “(1) Because he cannot hear the speech of others and learn to speak himself, Victor’s education is and will remain incomplete; (2) His ‘intellectual’ progress will never match that of children normally brought up in society; (3) His emotional development is blocked by profound egotism and by the impossibility of channeling his awakening sexual feeling toward any satisfactory goals.”

  As he wrote, the pen seemed to drag across the page as if it were made of lead, every moment of hope he’d experienced in his association with Victor—the boy’s rapid progress in those first few months, his first word, his naming, the leap he’d made in distinguishing written words—rising up before him and then vaporizing in despair. It took him several days and pot after pot of coffee before he began to understand that even in his failure there had been at least a muted success. Victor shouldn’t be compared to other children, he argued, but only to himself—he was no more sentient than a plant when he’d first come out of the woods, differing only from the vegetative state in that he could move and vocalize. He was then the Savage of Aveyron, an animal-man, and now he was Victor, a young man who despite his limitations had learned to make himself useful to society, or at least t
he society of his guardians, Monsieur and Madame Guérin, for whom he was not only able but eager to perform household tasks such as cutting wood for the fire and setting the table for meals, and in the course of his education he had developed some degree of moral sensibility.

  Some degree. He had no sense of shame, but then neither did Adam and Eve before the serpent came into the Garden, and how could he be blamed for that? Perhaps the most wrenching lessons Itard had felt compelled to give him were the ones designed to make him stretch beyond himself, to understand that other people had needs and emotions too, to feel pity and its corollary, compassion. Early on, when Victor was used to stealing and hoarding food in his room, Itard had tried to teach him a version of the Golden Rule in the most direct way he could think of—each time Victor filched some choice morsel from Itard’s plate or old Monsieur Guérin’s, Itard would wait his opportunity and swipe something back from Victor, even going so far as to slip into his room in his absence and remove his hoard of potatoes, apples and half-gnawed crusts of bread. Victor had reacted violently at first. The minute he turned his attention to his plate and saw that his pommes frites or broad beans were missing—that they were now on his teacher’s plate—he threw a tantrum, rolling on the floor and crying out in rage and pain. Madame Guérin made a face. Itard held firm. Over time, Victor eventually reformed—he no longer took food from others’ plates or misappropriated articles he coveted, a glittering shoe buckle or the translucent ball of glass Itard used as a paperweight—but the doctor could never be sure if it was because he’d developed a rudimentary sense of justice or, simply, that he feared reprisal in the way of the common criminal.

  That was what led the doctor, sometime during the third year of the boy’s education, to the most difficult lesson of all. It was on a day when they’d drilled with shapes for hours and Victor had been particularly tractable and looking forward to the usual blandishments and rewards Itard customarily gave him at the end of a trying session. The sun was sinking in the sky. Beyond the windows, the clamor of the deaf-mutes in the courtyard rose toward the release of dinnertime. The scent of stewing meat hung on the air. For several minutes now Victor had been looking up expectantly, awaiting the conclusion of the exercises and anticipating his reward. But instead of reward, Itard gave him punishment. He raised his voice, told Victor that he’d been bad, very bad, that he was clumsy and stupid and impossible to work with. For a long while he continued in this vein, then rose abruptly, seized the boy’s arm and led him to the closet where he’d been confined, as punishment, when he’d been particularly recalcitrant during the early days of his education.