T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

by T. C. Boyle

  The boy was unmoved. He simply stood there, rocking, fascinated by the fire, and the two of them might have stayed in position all day long if it weren’t for an inspiration that suddenly came to the old man. Perhaps there were simpler, ruder foods, he reasoned, foods of the forest and fields, that the child would take without prejudice, nuts and the like. He looked round him—he had no nuts. Nuts were out of season. But in a basket against the far wall there was a small quantity of potatoes he’d brought up from the root cellar to fry in lard with his evening meal. Very slowly, communicating with his body and his hands so as not to alarm the child, he got to his feet, and slowly—so slowly he might have been a child himself playing a game of statues—crossed the room to the basket. He lifted the straw lid, and still pantomiming, held up the basket to display its contents.

  That was all it took. In an instant the child was there, inches away, the wild odor rising from him like musk, his hands scrabbling in the basket till he was clutching every last potato in his arms—a dozen or more—and then he was at the fire, throwing them into the flames in a single motion. His face was animated, his eyes leaping. Short, blunted, inarticulate cries escaped his lips. Within seconds, in the space of time it took Vidal to move to the door and pull it closed, the boy had reached into the coals to extract one of the uncooked potatoes, burning his fingers in the process. Immediately, as if he had no concept of what cookery involved, he began gnawing at it. When it was gone, he reached for another and then another and the same sequence of events played out, only now the potatoes were blackened on the outside and hard within and his fingers visibly scarred.

  Appalled, Vidal tried to instruct him, showing him the use of the fire irons, but the boy ignored him—or worse, stared right through him as if he didn’t exist. The dyer offered him cheese, bread, wine, but the child showed no interest, and it was only when he thought to pour him a cup of water from the pitcher on the table that the child responded. He tried at first to lap the water from the cup, but then he understood and held it to his lips until it was drained and he wanted more, which Vidal, as fascinated as if a fox had got up on two legs and come to join him at table, kept pouring until he was sated. After which, naked and filthy, the child pulled his limbs to his chest and fell into a deep sleep on the stones of the hearth.

  For a long while, the dyer merely sat there, contemplating this apparition that had blundered into his life. He got up from time to time to feed the fire or light his pipe, but he didn’t attempt to do any work, not that day. All he could think of was his half-sister, Marie-Thérèse, an undersized child with a powerfully expressive face—she could say more with her face alone than most people with their tongues. She was the product of his father’s first marriage to a woman who had died of puerperal fever after bearing only this one damaged child, and his mother never accepted her. She was always last to be fed and first to receive the slap to the face or the back of the head when things went wrong, and she took to wandering off by herself, away from the other siblings, until one night she didn’t come back. He was eight or nine at the time, and so she must have been twelve or so. They found her body at the bottom of a ravine. People said she must have lost her way in the dark and fallen, but even then, even as a child, he knew better.

  Just then Rousa bellowed and he started. What was he thinking, leaving her to burst like that? He got up quickly, slipped into his coat and went out to her. When he returned, the child was pinned against the far wall, huddled and afraid, staring at him as if they’d never encountered one another before. Things were out of place, the table overturned, candlesticks on the floor, all his painstakingly gathered and hoarded plants torn down from the rafters and scattered like drift. He tried to calm the boy, speaking with his hands, but it did no good—every movement he made was matched by a corresponding movement, the child keeping his back to the wall and maintaining the distance between them, rocking on his feet, ready to leap for the door if only he knew what the door was. And his jaws, his jaws seemed to be working. What was it? What was he eating, another potato? It was then that the dyer saw the naked tail of the thing dangling like a string of saliva from the corner of the boy’s mouth, and the boy’s yellowed teeth, chewing round the dun wad of fur.

  If he’d felt sympathy, if he’d felt kinship and pity, now all the dyer felt was disgust. He was an old man, fifty-four years on this earth, and Marie-Thérèse had been dead nearly half a century. This was none of his affair. None of it. Cautiously, warily, all his senses on alert as if he’d found himself locked in a cage with a ravening beast, he backed toward the door, slipped outside and pulled it shut behind him.

  —

  Late that afternoon, as a cold rain pelted the streets of Saint-Sernin and fell hard over the countryside, the wild child was given up to science, and through science, to celebrity. After having rolled one of his big cast-iron dye pots across the yard and up against the door to secure it, Vidal had gone directly to Jean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, the government commissioner for Saint-Sernin, to make a report and give over responsibility for the creature immured in his cottage. The Commissioner, a man who traveled widely about the district, had heard the rumors from Lacaune and elsewhere, and he was eager to see this phenomenon with his own eyes. Here was a chance, he reasoned—if this creature wasn’t just some bugbear or an African ape escaped from a private menagerie—to put Rousseau’s notion of the Noble Savage to the test. What innate ideas did he have? Did he know of God and Creation? What was his language—the ur-language that gave rise to all the languages of the world, the language all men brought with them from Heaven? Or was it the gabble of the birds and the beasts? He could barely restrain himself. The light was fading from the sky and he’d had no dinner, but dinner was nothing compared to what this opportunity meant. He took Vidal by the arm. “Lead me to him,” he said.

  By the time the Commissioner had concluded his audience with Vidal and hurried with him out into the rain to see this prodigy for himself, he was surprised to see people in the street, heading in the same direction as he. “Is it true, Citizen Commissioner?” people asked. “They’ve captured the wild child?”

  “I hear,” someone else said, and there was a mob of them now, men, women and children, plodding through the rain to Vidal’s cottage, “that he has six fingers on each hand—”

  “And toes,” another chimed in. “And he has claws like a cat to climb straight up a wall.”

  “He leaps fifty meters in a bound.”

  “Blood, he lives on blood that he sucks from the sheep at midnight.”

  “Nonsense, nonsense”—one of the village women, Catherine Thibodeaux, appeared at his shoulder, hooded against the storm—“it’s only an abandoned child. Where’s the curé? Call out the curé.”

  When they approached the yard, the Commissioner swung round furiously to hush them—“Stay back,” he hissed, “you’ll frighten him”—but the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy of fear and wonderment and they pressed forward like a flock heading to pasture. Everyone crowded round the door, pressing their faces to the windows, and if it weren’t for the impediment of the dye kettle they would have rushed into the room without thinking. Now they hesitated, their voices dropping to a whisper, while Vidal and the Commissioner shifted the kettle aside and stepped into the room, pulling the door fast behind them. The child was there, crouched before the fire, no different from how Vidal had left him, though he didn’t seem to be masticating anything at the moment. Thankfully. What was strange, however, was that he didn’t look up, though certainly he must have been aware of the alien presence in the room and even of the credulous faces pressed to the windows.

  The Commissioner was dumbstruck. This child—this thing—was scarred, hunched, filthy, and it gave off a stench of the barnyard, as wild and forlorn as the first upright creature created by God in His own image, the man Adam who was given dominion over the animals and named them in turn. But this was an animal, a kind of ape, the sort of
degraded thing Linnaeus must have had in mind when he placed men and apes in the same order of being. And if there was any doubt, there was the fresh coil of its dung, gleaming on the rough planks of the floor.

  The fire snapped and hissed. There was a murmur from the crowd pressed up against the windows. “Good God,” he exclaimed under his breath, and then, turning to the dyer, he put to him the only question he could manage, “Is it dangerous?”

  Vidal, his house a shambles so that he was embarrassed in front of the Commissioner, merely shrugged. “He’s just a child, Citizen Commissioner, a poor abandoned child, flesh and blood, just like anyone else. But he’s unschooled. He doesn’t know porridge, doesn’t know a bowl, a cup, a spoon, doesn’t know what to do with them—”

  Constans-Saint-Estève was in his early forties and dressed in the fashion of Paris as it was before the Revolution. He had a fleshy face and the pouting lips of an epicene. His back still pressed to the door, his eyes locked on the child, he whispered, “Does he speak?”

  “Only cries and whimpers. He may be—I think he’s a deaf-mute.”

  Overcoming his initial shock, the Commissioner crossed the room and stood over the boy a moment, murmuring blandishments. His scientific curiosity had been re-aroused—this was a rare opportunity. A wonder, really. “Hello,” he said finally, bending at the knees and bringing his bland face into the child’s line of vision, “I am Jean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, Commissioner for Saint-Sernin. And who might you be? What is your name?”

  The child stared through him, as if he were insubstantial.

  “Do you have a name?”

  Nothing.

  “Do you understand me? Do you understand French? Or perhaps some other language?” Judging from the coloration of the child’s skin, he might have been Basque, Spanish, Italian. The Commissioner tried out a greeting on him in the languages of these regions, and then, frustrated, clapped his hands together as loudly as he could, right in front of the child’s nose. There was no reaction whatever. The Commissioner looked to Vidal and the pale buds of the faces hung as if on a branch at the near window and pronounced, “Sourd-muet.”

  It was then that the villagers could stand it no longer and began to push into the room, one at a time, until the place was crowded to the walls, people trampling the dried leaves and roots scattered across the floor, examining everything—trying, Vidal thought, to discover his secret methods and receipts, which made him uneasy in the extreme, made him suspicious and angry—and it was then that the child came to life and made a bolt for the open door. A cry went up and people leapt back as if a mad dog were among them; in a trice the child was out in the yard, in the rain, galloping on all fours for the curtain of trees at the edge of the field. And he would have made it, would have escaped again back into nature, but for two of the strongest men in the village, men in their twenties, great runners, who brought him to ground and wrestled him back to the open door of the dyer’s cottage. The child writhed in their grip, making a repetitive sound that rattled in his windpipe—uh-uh-uh-uh—and snaking his head round to bite.

  It was fully dark now, the light of the fire and a single candle falling through the open door to illuminate the scene. The Commissioner stood there in the doorway, looking down at the child for a long moment, and then he began to stroke the child’s face, pushing the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes so that everyone could see that he was a human child and no dog or ape or demon, and the stroking had the effect it would have on any sentient thing: the child’s breathing slowed and his eyes went distant. “All right,” the Commissioner said, “let him go,” and the men loosened their grip on his limbs and stepped back. For a moment the child just slumped there on the doorstep, glistening with wet and mud, his limbs thin as a cow’s shins, and then he took hold of the hand the Commissioner held out to him and rose quietly to his feet.

  —

  It was as if some switch had been turned off in the enfant’s inner apparatus—he came docilely, holding on to the Commissioner’s hand like a novice on the way to church, while the village followed in solemn processional. Along the way, the rain still lashing down and the streets a soup of mud, people tried to get close enough to touch the child, and they shouted out that he fed only on nuts and roots in the woods—and what would he eat now, a blanquette de veau? Boeuf bourguignon? Langouste? The Commissioner didn’t bother to answer, but he was determined to make his own experiment. First he would clothe the boy’s nakedness and then he would offer him an array of foods to see what he would take and in the process he would try to learn something of this prodigy that would benefit society and the understanding of mankind.

  Once home, he shut the door on the villagers and instructed his servant to find a garment for the child, and then, while he ordered up his own dinner, he installed the child in the room he used as his study and offices. A fire was laid and the boy went directly to it. In the room were several chairs, a desk, shelves of legal volumes and volumes of natural history and philosophy, the Commissioner’s papers, a freestanding globe and a birdcage of wrought iron. Inside the cage was a gray parrot his late father had brought back from a voyage to Gambia thirty years earlier; her name was Philomène and she could ask, in penetrating tones, for grapes, cherries and nuts, comment on the weather and the state of inebriation of dinner guests and whistle the opening figure of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor. Excited by the prospect of examining the boy at his leisure, the Commissioner stepped out of the room only long enough to mollify his wife and give orders to have various foodstuffs brought to him; when he returned, the boy’s face was pressed against the bars of the cage and Philomène was vainly serenading him with the Mozart.

  He took the boy gently by the hand and led him to the desk, where a servant had laid out a selection of foods, both raw and cooked. There was meat, rye and wheat bread, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, potatoes, parsnips and a solitary orange. Of all this, the child seemed only to recognize the acorns and potatoes, the latter of which he immediately threw into the fire, while cracking the acorns between his teeth and sucking the pulp from them. The potatoes he devoured almost instantly, though they were as hot as the coals themselves; bread meant nothing to him. Again, and for many patient hours, the Commissioner tried speaking to the child, first aloud and then in dumbshow, but nothing would rouse him; he seemed no more aware than a dog or cat. And no noise, not even the beating of a drum, affected him. Finally, after making sure the windows were secure and the doors latched, the Commissioner left the child in the room, snuffed the candles and went off to bed. Where his wife scolded him—what was he thinking bringing that savage thing into their house? What if he arose in the night and murdered them all?—and his two sons, Guillaume and Gérard, four and six respectively, informed him that they were too frightened to sleep in their own beds and would have to share his.

  In the morning, he approached his study on silent feet, though he kept telling himself there was no need because the child was almost certainly deaf. He lifted the latch and peered into the room, not knowing what to expect. The first thing he saw was the child’s garment, a shift of gray cloth that had been forced over his head the previous night; it lay on the carpet in the center of the room beside a shining loop of excrement. The next thing was the child himself, standing in the far corner, staring at the wall and rocking back and forth on his feet and moaning as if he’d been wounded in some vital place. Then the Commissioner noticed several of his volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière lying facedown on the floor, their leaves scattered to the wind. And then, finally, he noticed Philomène, or what was left of her.

  That afternoon the wild child was sent to the orphanage at Saint-Affrique.

  4

  He was brought to Saint-Affrique in a fiacre, the jolting and swaying of which caused him a great deal of discomfort. Four times during the journey he became sick on the floor of the carriage and the ser
vant Constans-Saint-Estève had sent along to accompany him did little to relieve his distress, other than daubing at the mess with a rag. The child was dressed in his gray shift, which was knotted tightly at the waist to prevent his removing it, he was barefooted and he’d been provided with a small sack of potatoes and turnips for his sustenance. The horses seemed to terrify him. He rocked on the seat and moaned the whole way. On arriving at the orphanage, he made a bolt for the woods, down on all fours and squealing like a rodent, but his guardian was too quick for him.

  Inside the walls, it was apparent that he was no ordinary child. The director of the orphanage—Citizen R. Nougairoles—observed that he had no notion of sitting at table or of relieving himself in the pot or even the latrine, that he tore at his garment as if the very touch of the cloth seared his skin and that he refused to sleep in the bed provided for him, instead curling up in a pile of refuse in the corner. When threatened, he used his teeth. The other children, curious at first, soon learned to give him his distance. Still, in the short time he was there, a mere two weeks, he did become acculturated to the degree that he seemed to appreciate the comforts of a fire on a bitter day and he extended his dietary range to include pease soup improved with hunks of dark bread. On the other hand, he displayed no interest whatever in the other orphans (or in anyone, for that matter, unless they were in immediate possession of the simple foods he liked to eat). People might as well have been trees for all he responded to them—except when they got too close, of course—and he had no conception either of work or recreation. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he crouched over his knees, rocking and vocalizing in a curious inarticulate way, but every moment he looked for his chance to escape and twice had to be chased down and forcibly restrained. Finally, and this was the one thing Nougairoles found most disturbing, he showed no familiarity with the forms and objects of holy devotion. The Director concluded that he was no impostor, but the real thing—Linnaeus’ Homo ferus in the flesh—and that the orphanage could hardly be expected to contain him.