T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Despite the damage to the furniture, Bonnaterre was encouraged. The child was not deaf, not deaf at all, but rather his senses had been so attuned to the sounds of nature that any noise of human agency, no matter how strident or articulate, failed to impress him: there were no human voices in the wild, nor bass viols either. Creeping about the woods in an eternal search for food, he listened only for the fall of the apple or chestnut or the cry of the squirrel, or even, perhaps, on some miraculous level, for the minute vibrations sent out by the escargot as it rides along its avenue of slime. But if food was the child’s exclusive focus throughout his feral life, then how would he react now that food was abundant and his for the asking? Would he begin to develop an interior life — a propositional life — rather than being exclusively fixated on exterior objects?

Bonnaterre pondered these questions, even as he observed the boy day by day and watched as he acquired rudimentary signs to make his desires understood, pointing to the water jug, for instance, when he was thirsty or taking his caretaker by the hand and leading him to the kitchen when he was hungry, there to point at one object or another. If he wasn’t immediately gratified he went to the floor, moving rapidly on hands and feet and dragging his posterior across the finished boards, at the same time setting up a withering deep-throated sort of howl that peaked and fell and rose again from nothing.

When he was given what he wanted — potatoes, walnuts, broad beans, which he shelled with amazing swiftness and dexterity — he ate until it seemed he would have to burst, ate more than any five of the other children could consume at a sitting, and then gathered up the leftovers in his gown and stole away to the courtyard, where he buried them for future reference, no different from a dog with a bone. And when he was fed with others he displayed no sense of courtesy or fairness, but took all the food to himself, whether by a bold snatch or the furtive gesture, with no thought for his fellows. During the third week of observation he began to accept meat when it was offered, raw at first, and then cooked, and eventually he came to relish potatoes browned in oil in the pan — when the mood struck him he would go to the kitchen, take up the knife and the pan and point to the cabinet in which the potatoes and cooking oil were kept. It was a rude life, focused on one thing only — on food — and Bonnaterre was able to recognize in him the origins of uncivilized humanity, untouched by culture, by awareness, by human feeling. “How could he possibly be expected to have known the existence of God?” Bonnaterre wrote. “Let him be shown the heavens, the green fields, the vast expanse of the earth, the works of Nature, he does not see anything in all that if there is nothing there to eat.”

For the boy’s part, he began, very gradually, to adjust. His food came to him not from a hole in the earth or a chance encounter with carrion or the wild thing that was slower than he, but from these animals that had captured him, strange animals with heavy faces and snouts, with their odd white pelage and the hairless smooth second skin of their legs. He was with the one in charge of him at some point, the one all the others deferred to, and on an impulse he snatched at the man’s pelt, the whiteness there, the gleam of it, and was startled to see it detached from the man’s head and dangling from his own fingers. The man — the big flushed face, the veins like earthworms crawling up his neck — leapt from his seat with a cry and made to snatch the thing back, but the child was too quick for him, darting round the room and hooting over this thing, this hide that smelled of musk and the friable white substance that gave it its color. Gabbling, the man came after him, and, terrified now, the child ran, ran to a kind of stone that was transparent and gave a view of the outdoors and the courtyard. This was glass, though he had no way of knowing it, and it was an essential component of the walls that imprisoned him. The man shouted. He ran. And the stone shattered, biting into his forearm with its teeth.

They put a bandage of cloth on his wound, but he used his own teeth to tear it off. Blood was a thing he knew, and pain, and he knew to avoid brambles, the hives of the wasps, the scaled stone of the ridges that shifted underfoot and cut at his ankles with mindless ferocity, but this was different, a new phenomenon: glass. A wound of glass. It puzzled him and he took up a shard of it when no one was looking and ran it over his finger till the pain came again and the blood showed there and he squeezed and squeezed at the slit of his skin to see the brightness of it, vivid with hurt. That night, just before supper, he tugged at the other man’s hand, the one who smelled of manure and mold, till the man took him out into the courtyard; the instant the door was opened he made a run for the wall and scaled it in two desperate bounds and then he was down on the far side and running, running.

They caught him again, at the foot of the woods, and he fought them with his teeth and his claws but they were bigger, stronger, and they carried him back as they always had and always would because there was no freedom, not anymore. Now he was a creature of the walls and the rooms and a slave to the food they gave him. And that night they gave him nothing, neither food nor water, and locked him in the place where he was used to sleeping at night, though he did not want to sleep, he wanted to eat. He chewed at the crack of the door till his lips bled and his gums tightened round the pain. He was wild no more.

—

When they took him to Paris, when the Minister of the Interior finally intervened on behalf of Sicard and gave instructions that the child should be brought north to the City of Light, he traveled through the alien countryside with Bonnaterre and the gardener who had acted as his caretaker all the while he was in Rodez. At first, he wouldn’t enter the fiacre — as soon as he was led out of the gates and saw it standing there flanked by the three massive and stinking draft horses with their stupendous legs and staring eyes, he tried to bolt — but Bonnaterre had foreseen the event and placed a cornucopia of potatoes, turnips and small, hard loaves on the seat, and his weakness led him to scramble up the step and retreat inside. As a precaution against any further mischance, Bonnaterre had the gardener affix a lead to the cord round the child’s waist, a simple braid of rope, the other end of which was held loosely in the abbé’s hand as the public coach made its appointed stops and took on the odd passenger along the way. Was this a leash, such as might be used on a dog? It was an interesting question, one with pointed philosophical and humanitarian implications — certainly Bonnaterre didn’t want to call it a leash, nor did the gardener — and as the boy rocked on the seat and made sick on the floor, the abbé kept hold of it with the lightest touch. The coach heaved on its springs, the gardener made himself small, Bonnaterre looked straight ahead. And when a blanched, imposing lady and her maid boarded the fiacre in a market town along the way, he went out of his way to assure them that the child was no threat at all and that the lead was solely for his own protection.

Nonetheless, when they stopped that evening at an inn along the way, the child (he was taller now and he’d put on weight, hardly a child any longer) did manage to create a scene. As the coachman held the door for the lady, the child gave a sly, sudden jerk at the lead, tearing it from the abbé’s hand; in the next moment, using the lady’s skirts as a baffle, he bounded down from the coach and lit out up the road in his curious, loping, lopsided gait, the leash trailing behind him. The lady, thinking she was being attacked, let out with a shriek that startled the horses into motion even while Bonnaterre and his servant clambered down to give chase and the hostler fought the reins. As can be imagined, the abbé was in no condition to be running footraces along the rutted dirt byways of a country lane, and he hadn’t gone twenty feet before he was bent double and gasping for air.