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

This time, however, and to everyone’s relief, the child apparently wasn’t attempting an escape, but instead stopped of his own accord no more than a hundred yards off, where a ditch of stagnant water ran along the road. Before they could prevent him, he threw himself down on his stomach and began to drink. The surface of the water was discolored with duckweed, strands of algae, roadside offal. Mosquitoes settled on the child’s exposed limbs. His garment was soiled in the muck. Both Bonnaterre and the gardener stood over him, remonstrating, but he paid them no mind: he was thirsty; he was drinking. When he’d done drinking, he rose and defecated on the spot (another curiosity: he defecated while standing and squatted to micturate), dirtying the skirts of his gown without a second thought. And then, as if this weren’t enough, he made a snatch for something in the reeds and had it in his mouth before they could intervene — a frog, as it turned out, mashed to pulp by the time the gardener was able to pry it from his jaws.

After that, he came docilely enough to the inn, where he settled himself in the far corner of the room provided for him, gurgling and clicking over his sack of roots and tubers, to all appearances content and wanting the society of no one. But before long the villagers got wind of his arrival and crowded the inn for the rest of the night, straining to get a look at him — people clamoring at the doorway and scuffling in the halls, dogs yammering, the whole neighborhood in an uproar. He shrank into his corner, his face to the wall, and still the furor persisted till long after dark. And, of course, the closer he and his guardians got to the capital, where the influence of the newspapers was strongest, the bigger and more insistent the crowds grew. Despite himself, and despite the Minister of the Interior’s strict injunction to bring the child to Paris without harm or impediment, Bonnaterre couldn’t help gratifying the people along the way with at least a glimpse of the prodigy. And no, he didn’t feel at all like a circus crier or a gypsy sword-swallower or anything of the kind — he was a scientist presenting the object of his study, and if the pride of possession gave him an internal glow of special privilege and authority, well, so be it.

It might have been the contact with all those people or the breathing of the night air or the miasma that hung over the roadside ditches where he liked to drink, but the child fell ill with smallpox along the way and had to be confined in the back room of an inn for a period of ten days while he broke out in spots and alternately shivered and burned with the fever. Blankets were brought, the local physician was consulted, there was talk of purging and bloodletting, and Bonnaterre was in a state — it was his head that was on the line here. Perhaps literally. The Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoléon, was an exacting man, and to present him with the mere corpse of a wild child would be like bringing him the hide of some rare creature from the African jungle, its anatomical features lost, its vibrant colors already faded. The abbé got down on his knees before the writhing, bundled, sweating form of the child, and prayed.

Drifting in and out of sleep, the child watched the walls fade away and the roof dissolve to present the stars and the moon and then he was capering through a meadow while the Midi shook the trees till they bent like individual blades of grass and he was laughing aloud and running, running. He saw back in time, saw the places where he’d gorged on berries, saw the vineyard and the grapes and the cellar where a farmer had stored his crop of potatoes, new-dug from the earth. Then there were the boys, the village boys, urchins, quick-legged animals, discovering him there in the forest and giving chase, pelting him with sticks and rocks and the hard sharp stabs of their cries, and then the men and the fire and the smoke. And this room, where the walls re-erected themselves and the roof came back to obliterate the sky. He felt hunger. Thirst. He sat up and threw off the bedclothes.

Three days later, he was in Paris, though he didn’t know it. All he knew was what he saw and heard and smelled. He saw confusion, heard chaos, and what he smelled was ranker than anything he’d come across in all his years of wandering the fields and forests of Aveyron, concentrated, pungent, the reek of civilization.

5

The Institute for Deaf-Mutes sprawled over several acres just across the boulevard Saint-Michel from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was formerly a Catholic seminary, which the revolutionary government had given over to Abbé Sicard for the training and advancement of the deaf and dumb. Employing a method of instruction in the language of signs he had adopted from his predecessor, De l’Epée, Sicard had become famous for the amazing transformations he’d wrought in several of his pupils, turning the all-but-hopeless into productive citizens who not only could articulate their needs and wants with perfect clarity but expound on philosophical issues as well. One of them, a well-made young man by the name of Massieu, was the cynosure of a number of Sicard’s public demonstrations of his pupils’ speaking and writing ability, in which the pupils answered questions written on cards by the audience, and he came to address a number of learned societies with confidence and dignity and in an accent not much worse than an educated foreigner’s. Even more astonishing, this young man, who’d come to the Institute as dumb as a stone, was eventually able to dine in company and entertain people with his own original bon mots, memorably defining gratitude as la mémoire du coeur and distinguishing between desire and hope by pronouncing that “Desire is a tree in leaf, hope is a tree in bloom, enjoyment is a tree with fruit.” And so, when the wild child was delivered up to Sicard by Bonnaterre, all of Paris awaited the result, the miracle that was sure to follow as the boy acquired the ability of language and the gift of civilization; it was hoped that one day he too would stand before an entranced audience and give shape to the thoughts and emotions he’d felt while living as an animal.

Unfortunately, things proved different.

After the initial flurry of excitement, after the crowds had dissipated and half the haut monde of Paris had trooped up the stairs of the Institute to observe him rocking in the corner of his room on the fifth floor, after he was brought to the chambers of the Minister of the Interior for a private interview (where he sat on his haunches in a corner and stared vacantly into the distance before relieving himself on the carpet), after the newspapers had recorded his every move and common citizens had gathered on street corners to debate his humanity, he was given over to neglect. Sicard, a man preoccupied with his more tractable pupils, the text of the book he was writing on the education of deaf-mutes and his duties as one of the founders of the Society of Observers of Man, examined the boy over the course of several days and pronounced him an incurable idiot — he wasn’t about to risk his reputation on a creature that recognized no signs whatever and hadn’t the sense or even the hygiene of a house cat. Thus, the child was abandoned again, but this time within the walls of the institution, where there was no one to look after him and where the other children made it their duty to chase, taunt and torment him.

He slunk about the corridors and grounds, moving from shadow to shadow as if afraid of the light, and whenever he heard the clamor of the deaf-mute students in the stairwell he ran in the opposite direction, ascending rapidly when they were below him, descending when they were above. Out of doors, he kept his back to the rough stone of the buildings, watchful and frightened, and when the others were released from their classes, he darted for the nearest tree. If he thought to escape during this period, he was frustrated not only by the fact that the keeper locked him in at night, but by the walls that delimited the grounds of the Institute — he could have scaled them in his efficient squirrel-like way, but what lay beyond the walls was the city, and he was a creature and prisoner of it now.