T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“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.”

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 the 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 Guérins, 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.