T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

The doctor went to bed happy that night and the next night and the night after that, and he remained happy through his mornings and afternoons until he took his dinner with Victor and the Guérins on the third evening after his pupil’s triumph and Victor exclaimed

“Lait!” when Madame Guérin poured him a glass of water, cried

“Lait!” when she sliced him a piece of lamb, and “Lait, lait, lait!”

when she set his potatoes, hot in their jackets, on the plate before him.

Was the doctor disappointed? Was he crushed, annihilated in the deepest fortress of his spirit? Was he rehearsing the abbé’s words—“Give it up; it will destroy you”—over and over again? Yes, of course he was — how could he not be? — and he showed it in his face, in his gestures, in his attitude toward his ward and pupil, angry at the sight of him, of his thin wrists and too-big head and the flab beginning to accrue at his waist and in his cheeks and breast and under his chin even as Victor matched the metal cutouts to their compartments, singing out “Lait!” every time he succeeded.

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.

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.