T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“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.

“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.”