Wild Child and Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was then that a newly fledged doctor from the Val-de-Grâce Hospital came to work as medical officer at the Institute. His name was Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, he was twenty-five years old and he’d been schooled in Marseilles prior to his internship in Paris; he was given an apartment in the main building and a modest—very modest—salary amounting to sixty-six francs per annum. The first time he encountered the wild child was after he’d bandaged a bite wound on the forearm of one of the female students and learned that the boy who’d inflicted it was even then crouched in the denuded crown of the big elm that dominated the grounds, refusing to come down. Itard had, of course, heard rumor of the child—everyone in Paris had, and Sicard had mentioned him in passing as a failed experiment—but now, angry and disturbed, he marched out of the building and into the naked wind to confront him.

  The grounds were deserted; the light was fading from the sky. A cold spell had settled over the city, slops freezing in the streets, citizens wrapping up in greatcoats and scarves even as their breath steamed around them. In his haste, Itard had forgotten his own coat—he was in his jacket only—and almost immediately a chill ran through him. He hurried across the brittle grass to where the elm stood silhouetted against the faint red streaks of the sky. At first he couldn’t see anything in the maze of slick black branches rattling composedly in the wind, but then a pigeon shot from the tree in a helter-skelter of wings and there was the boy, a white glow clinging like a fungus to the upper reaches of the trunk. He moved closer, his eyes fixed on the tree, until he stumbled over something, a shadow at his feet. When he bent to examine it, he saw that it was a simple shift of gray cloth, the boy’s garment, flung down like an afterthought.

  So he was naked, the Savage was naked, up in the tree, and he’d bitten a girl. Itard almost turned his back on him—Let him freeze, he was thinking, the animal. If that’s what he wants, let him freeze. But then his eyes went to the tree again and he saw with a sudden clarity, saw the boy’s neutral wedge of a face, the dark vacancy of his eyes, his pale splayed limbs, and he rode up out of his own body for a moment and inhabited the boy’s. What must it have been like to be abandoned, to have your throat cut, to be captured and imprisoned and without defense except to sink your teeth into the slowest and weakest of your tormentors? To throw off your clothes, indifferent to the cold? To cower and hide and hunger? Very slowly, very deliberately, Itard lifted himself up and began to climb.

  The first thing Itard did was arrange for the groundskeeper’s wife, Madame Guérin, to take charge of the boy’s needs, to provide a woman’s touch, to mother him. Henceforth, the boy would take his meals in her apartments, along with Monsieur Guérin, whose attitude, Itard was sure, would soften toward the boy over time. Madame Guérin was then in her forties. She was a squat, uncomplaining woman, formerly of the peasantry but now, like all members of the Republic, a citizen; she was broad of bosom and hip and wore her abundant, graying hair tied up in a knot on the crown of her head. Her own children—three daughters—lived with her sister in a cottage in Chaillot and she saw them when she could.

  Itard himself—unmarried, utterly devoted to his deaf-mute charges and yet ambitious and eager to prove himself—saw something in the boy the others failed to notice. High in the branches of the elm, the city spread out beneath him and the flights of birds intersecting over the rooftops, he held out his hand against the wind, murmuring blandishments, coaxing, until the boy took it. He didn’t attempt to pull the child to him or to apply any force or pressure—it was far too dangerous; any sudden movement could precipitate a fall—but he just held the hand offered to him, communicating his warmth to the boy in the most elemental way. After a while, the boy’s eyes settled on him, and he saw a whole world there, shuttered and excluded perhaps, but there nonetheless. He saw intelligence and need. And more: a kind of bargain in the making, a trust that sprang up automatically because they both knew that there was no one, not even the most agile of the deaf-mutes, who would have followed the Savage into that tree. When he finally let go of the boy’s hand, gesturing to the ground below, the boy seemed to understand him and followed him down the trunk of the tree, each movement, each hand- and foothold synchronized to his. At the base of the tree Itard held out his hand again and the boy clasped it and allowed himself to be led back into the big stone building and up the steps to his room and the fire Itard laid there. The two of them knelt on the rough planks of the floor for a long while, warming their hands as the wind lashed at the window and night came down like an axe.

  Sicard gave his permission for Itard to work with the child. What else could he do? If the neophyte failed to civilize the Savage, failed to teach him to speak and behave himself in society—and Sicard was certain he would fail—it was nothing to him. In fact, it was something of a relief, as he himself was no longer responsible, and yet if the Savage did somehow manage miraculously to acquire speech, it would reflect well on the whole enterprise; Sicard could even fleetingly envision the child, dressed in a proper suit of clothes, standing beside Massieu in an auditorium and wittily reflecting on his former life, speaking of raw tubers as la nourriture des animaux et des Belges or some such thing. But no, that would never happen. And it was best to lay the blame on someone else’s shoulders. Still, he did manage to extract an annual stipend of five hundred francs from the government for the child’s care and education and the unique experiment Itard was prepared to carry out to put to the test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rasa, unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?

  For the next five years Itard would devote himself seven days a week to finding out.

  The boy took to the regime warily. On the one hand, he basked in the protection Madame Guérin and Itard gave him against the mob of deaf-mutes clamoring for his destruction and he relished the unending supply of food in the Guérins’ cabinet, and yet, on the other, he resisted with all his heart the doctor’s attempts to control him. He’d put on weight, grown softer, paler (once he’d come in from the woods and the burning effect of the sun, his skin was seen to be as fair as any other child’s), and he wanted only to crouch in a corner of his room and rock back and forth or sit by the edge of the pond and watch the light play over the water. And now, suddenly, here was this man with his insistent eyes and prodding nose haunting his every waking moment, pursuing him to his room to attack him there and even sitting down at table with him to interfere as he hoarded his food, the sausages he’d come to love and the potatoes fried in oil and the beans, the broad beans stewed into a pottage, the bread hot from the oven.

  Every day, without relief, he was made to perform. And this was especially hard because for the first few weeks Itard had let him do as he pleased, taking him for long ambles in the park, allowing him to eat what and when he wanted and to hunker in his corner or curl up to sleep at any time of day or night, and that was a kind of heaven to the child because he was the leader, his whims were Itard’s whims, and with Itard at his side he could defy the deaf-mutes, especially one lean, quick whipcord of a boy who was forever creeping up on him to administer wet blows with his open hands or to wrestle him to the floor and press his weight into him till he couldn’t breathe. Itard was there for him now, there to watch over him, but also, very slowly and subtly, to mold him to his will. On the morning of the first snowfall, when the whole institution was clothed in slumber and every sound damped by the steady, silent accumulation, the child woke with a frantic pounding joy and darted naked down the flights of stairs to the yard where he held his face to the sky and cried out at the descending swirl of pristine crystals and burrowed into the drifts, insensible to the cold, and no one attempted to stop him. The stone buildings loomed like cliffs calling down the storm out of the sky. Shapes formed and fragmented in the air, visions playing there in the courtyard for him and him alone. And then he loo
ked up, sensing something, a presence, and there the man was, Itard, wrapped in his greatcoat and scarf, the dark curls of his hair whitening, his lashes, his eyebrows, the sharp projection of his nose.

  The next day, the regime commenced and ever so gradually heaven receded.

  Itard began by taking hold of the boy immediately after breakfast and giving him a long hot bath, a bath that lasted three hours and more, Madame Guérin heating pot after pot of water, the boy frolicking, splashing, diving, spouting, at play like any other child bathed in sustaining warmth and free to express himself, but there was a purpose here, a civilizing purpose, and the fact that the child was made clean and free of offensive odors was merely the ancillary benefit. No, what Itard was doing—and these baths continued every day for the next month—was sensitizing the Savage, making him aware of his body, his self, in a way the life of the animal could never have done. After the bath each day, another hour would be spent in massage, as Itard and Madame Guérin took turns rubbing his limbs, the small of his back, soothing him, giving him pleasure, allowing him to appreciate an interaction he’d never before experienced: he was being touched by one of his fellow creatures, and there was no fear in it, no violence. Sure enough, within the month, he would fall into a tantrum if the water wasn’t hot enough or the hands of his masseur sufficiently firm, and he began dressing himself without prompting, because now he felt the cold like any other domesticated creature and there was no going back. So too with his food. The Savage who had subsisted on raw roots and tubers, who had plucked potatoes from the fire and devoured insects and torn rodents with his teeth, turned up his nose at a plate of food that contained something he didn’t care for or that was contaminated by a single shining example of Madame Guérin’s silvered, flowing hair.

  There were other things too that showed him coming awake in his senses. He learned to use a spoon to remove potatoes from a boiling pot, rather than simply thrusting in his oblivious fingers. He came to recognize himself in a hand mirror and to manipulate it so that it caught the light and tossed it from one corner of the room to the other. His fingers sought out the softness of Madame Guérin’s skirts and the delicious ripple of the corduroy of Itard’s suits. When he caught his first cold and sneezed, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was terrified and ran to his bed to bury himself beneath the counterpane, afraid that his own body was assaulting him. But then he sneezed again and again and before long, with Itard standing over him and murmuring reassurance, he came to anticipate the sneeze and ride its currents, exaggerating the sound of it, laughing, capering around the room as if propelled by an internal wind.

  The next step—and here the boy began to chafe under his teacher’s demands—was the commencement of the second stage of the regime, designed to focus his vision and sharpen his hearing in the way that his taste and tactile sensitivity had been stimulated. To this point he had engaged in a kind of selective hearing, registering only the sounds connected with eating, the rattle of spoon in bowl, the hiss of the flames under the pot, the cracking of a nut, but human speech—aside from inflection, as when either Itard or the Guérins lost patience with his tantrums or attempted to warn him away from things that might injure him—failed to register. Speech was a kind of background music, no different from the incomprehensible twitter of the birds of the forest or the lowing of the cow or bark of the dog. Itard set out to train him first by imitation, reasoning that this was how infants acquired language, miming what was said to them by their parents. He broke the language down into simple vowel and consonant sounds, and repeated them over and over, in the hope that the boy would echo him, and always he held up objects—a glass of milk, a shoe, a spoon, a bowl, a potato—and named them. The boy’s eyes dodged away from his. He made no connection whatever between these rude noises and their referents and after months of study he could produce no sounds other than a kind of dull moaning and the laughter that awakened in him at the oddest and most frustrating moments. Still, he did react to the blunted speech of his deaf-mute tormenters—running from the noise of them, as he would have run from any startling sound in nature, a clap of thunder or the crash of a cataract—and one evening, when Itard had just about given up hope, he finally managed his first articulate expression.

  It was in February, the sky stretched low and gray over the city, dinner stewing in a thousand pots, the eternal thumping and slamming and bellowing of the other students quietened both by the weather and the usual pre-prandial lull. Itard was seated in the kitchen of the Guérins’ apartment as Madame Guérin prepared the meal, quietly smoking and observing the boy, who was always at his most alert when food was the focus. It happened that while the boy was at the stove, overseeing the boiling of his potatoes, the Guérins, husband and wife, began an animated discussion of the recent death of one of their acquaintances in an accident involving a carriage. Madame Guérin claimed it was the fault of the coachman—that he was negligent, perhaps even drunk—while her husband defended him. Each time she made a claim, he said, “Oh, but that’s different,” and put in a counterclaim. It was that simple exclamation, that vowel sound, that “o” that caused the boy to turn his head, as if he could distinguish it from the rest. Later, when he was preparing for bed (and, incidentally, showing a marked preference for freshly laundered sheets and a feather-bed to the nest of sticks and refuse and the cold planks he’d formerly insisted upon), Itard came to him to say goodnight and drill him on his vowels, thinking that the agency of sleep might somehow help impress the sounds on the empty tablet of the boy’s mind.

  “Oh,” Itard said, pointing to the window. “Oh,” he said, pointing to the bed, to his own throat, to the round and supple sound hanging in the air.

  To his amazement, from deep in the boy’s throat, the same sound came back at him. The boy was in his nightgown, tugging at the blankets. There was no show of ablutions or pretense of prayers to a non-conceptualized God; when the child felt sleepy, he retired to his room and plunged into the bed. But now, as he lay there, he repeated the sound, as if struck by the novelty of it, and Itard, excited, bent over him, repeating “oh, oh, oh,” until the child feel asleep.

  It only seemed natural then, that in the morning, when the boy came to him, Itard called him by his new name, the one he’d suggested for himself, an august and venerable name borne proudly by any number of Frenchmen before and since, a name in which the accent fell heavily on the open second syllable: Victor. His name was Victor, and though he couldn’t pronounce the first part of it and perhaps didn’t even hear it and never would, he learned to respond to the second. He was Victor. Victor. After thirteen years on this earth, he was finally somebody.

  6

  It was around the time of his naming that Victor—or rather, Itard, on Victor’s behalf—received an invitation to attend the salon of Madame Récamier. This was a great opportunity, not only for Victor, whose cause could be promoted amongst the most powerful and influential people in France, but for Itard too, who, despite himself, had unrealistic social expectations, and like any other man, yearned for recognition. Madame Récamier was then twenty-four years old, a celebrated beauty and wit, wife of a wealthy banker three times her age and doyenne of a château in Clïchy-la-Garenne, just outside the city; anyone who was anyone came there to pay her homage and to be seen. Accordingly, Itard bought himself a new jacket and had Madame Guérin make Victor a suit of clothes replete with a high-collared shirt, waistcoat and cravat, so that he looked like a gentleman in miniature. For a full week before the date of the salon, Itard devised various games and stratagems to teach Victor how to bow in the presence of a lady, with mixed results.

  On the evening of the party they hired a carriage, Victor by now having lost his fear of horses to the extent that he stuck his head out the window and shrieked with glee the whole way, startling pedestrians, gendarmes and dogs alike, and proceeded through a cold rain to Clïchy-la-Garenne. At first things seemed to go well, the bon ton of Paris making way for the doctor and his charge, the former sa
vage who was now dressed and comporting himself like any other boy of thirteen, though Victor failed to bow to anyone, let alone his hostess, and persisted in trotting from one corner of the grand hall to the other, smearing his face with whatever foods he was able to find to his liking, the beaded eggs of fish presented on wafers of bread, fungus that had been stuffed, breaded and fried in hot oil, the remains of songbirds skewered nose-to-anus.

  Madame Récamier gave him the seat of honor beside herself and even fussed over Itard a bit, trying to draw him out for the benefit of her guests, hoping he might, like a circus trainer, persuade Victor to show off some trick or another. But Victor didn’t show off any tricks. Victor didn’t know any tricks. Victor was mute, unable—or unwilling—even to pronounce his own name, and he wasn’t in the least susceptible to Madame Récamier’s legendary beauty and celebrated eyes. After a while she turned to the guest seated on her other side and began to regale the table at large with an involved story concerning the painter who had recently done her portrait in oils, how he’d made her sit frozen in a single position and wouldn’t even allow one of the servants to read aloud to her for fear of breaking her concentration. The tedium she’d endured. The suffering. What a beast this painter was. And at a gesture from her everyone looked up and there it was, like a miracle, the very portrait of the inestimable Madame Récamier—couchant, her feet tantalizingly bare and her face wearing a dignified yet seductive look—displayed on the wall behind them. Itard was transported. And he was about to say something, searching for the right words, something charming and memorable that would rise above the self-satisfied gabble of his fellow diners, when a crash, as of priceless statuary upended, silenced the table.