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

His only relief was in the privacy of his room, and even that was denied him more often than not because members of the scientific community continued to haunt the corridors of the Institute, one philosopher or naturalist after the other poking his head in the door or following him as he trotted the halls in his freakish sidelong gait or climbed up into the branches of the nearest tree to get away from the crush of people, people all around him where before there had been none. He took his food privately, in his room, hoarding it, and if he were to get wet — in a rainstorm or in the ornamental pond, where the other children delighted in cornering him — he had the disconcerting habit of drying himself with ashes from the hearth so that he looked like a ghoul haunting the halls. He tore the straw from his bed, refused to bathe, defecated beside the chamberpot as if in defiance. Twice, lashing out at mild Monsieur Guérin, the old man employed to maintain the grounds, he inflicted bite wounds. Sicard and all his staff gave him up for hopeless. There was even talk of sending him to the Bicêtre, where he would be locked away with the retarded and the insane, and it might have happened if it weren’t for the fact that it would have reflected so poorly on Sicard, who had, after all, insisted on bringing the child to Paris. By the fall of 1800, things stood at an impasse.

It was then that a newly fledged doctor from the Val-de-Grâce Hospital came to work as medical officer at the Institute. His name was Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, he was twenty-five years old and he’d been schooled in Marseilles prior to his internship in Paris; he was given an apartment in the main building and a modest — very modest — salary amounting to sixty-six francs per annum. The first time he encountered the wild child was after he’d bandaged a bite wound on the forearm of one of the female students and learned that the boy who’d inflicted it was even then crouched in the denuded crown of the big elm that dominated the grounds, refusing to come down. Itard had, of course, heard rumor of the child — everyone in Paris had, and Sicard had mentioned him in passing as a failed experiment — but now, angry and disturbed, he marched out of the building and into the naked wind to confront him.

The grounds were deserted; the light was fading from the sky. A cold spell had settled over the city, slops freezing in the streets, citizens wrapping up in greatcoats and scarves even as their breath steamed around them. In his haste, Itard had forgotten his own coat — he was in his jacket only — and almost immediately a chill ran through him. He hurried across the brittle grass to where the elm stood silhouetted against the faint red streaks of the sky. At first he couldn’t see anything in the maze of slick black branches rattling composedly in the wind, but then a pigeon shot from the tree in a helter-skelter of wings and there was the boy, a white glow clinging like a fungus to the upper reaches of the trunk. He moved closer, his eyes fixed on the tree, until he stumbled over something, a shadow at his feet. When he bent to examine it, he saw that it was a simple shift of gray cloth, the boy’s garment, flung down like an afterthought.

So he was naked, the Savage was naked, up in the tree, and he’d bitten a girl. Itard almost turned his back on him — Let him freeze, he was thinking, the animal. If that’s what he wants, let him freeze. But then his eyes went to the tree again and he saw with a sudden clarity, saw the boy’s neutral wedge of a face, the dark vacancy of his eyes, his pale splayed limbs, and he rode up out of his own body for a moment and inhabited the boy’s. What must it have been like to be abandoned, to have your throat cut, to be captured and imprisoned and without defense except to sink your teeth into the slowest and weakest of your tormentors? To throw off your clothes, indifferent to the cold? To cower and hide and hunger? Very slowly, very deliberately, Itard lifted himself up and began to climb.

—

The first thing Itard did was arrange for the groundskeeper’s wife, Madame Guérin, to take charge of the boy’s needs, to provide a woman’s touch, to mother him. Henceforth, the boy would take his meals in her apartments, along with Monsieur Guérin, whose attitude, Itard was sure, would soften toward the boy over time. Madame Guérin was then in her forties. She was a squat, uncomplaining woman, formerly of the peasantry but now, like all members of the Republic, a citizen; she was broad of bosom and hip and wore her abundant, graying hair tied up in a knot on the crown of her head. Her own children — three daughters — lived with her sister in a cottage in Chaillot and she saw them when she could.

Itard himself — unmarried, utterly devoted to his deaf-mute charges and yet ambitious and eager to prove himself — saw something in the boy the others failed to notice. High in the branches of the elm, the city spread out beneath him and the flights of birds intersecting over the rooftops, he held out his hand against the wind, murmuring blandishments, coaxing, until the boy took it. He didn’t attempt to pull the child to him or to apply any force or pressure — it was far too dangerous; any sudden movement could precipitate a fall — but he just held the hand offered to him, communicating his warmth to the boy in the most elemental way. After a while, the boy’s eyes settled on him, and he saw a whole world there, shuttered and excluded perhaps, but there nonetheless. He saw intelligence and need. And more: a kind of bargain in the making, a trust that sprang up automatically because they both knew that there was no one, not even the most agile of the deaf-mutes, who would have followed the Savage into that tree. When he finally let go of the boy’s hand, gesturing to the ground below, the boy seemed to understand him and followed him down the trunk of the tree, each movement, each hand- and foothold synchronized to his. At the base of the tree Itard held out his hand again and the boy clasped it and allowed himself to be led back into the big stone building and up the steps to his room and the fire Itard laid there. The two of them knelt on the rough planks of the floor for a long while, warming their hands as the wind lashed at the window and night came down like an axe.

Sicard gave his permission for Itard to work with the child. What else could he do? If the neophyte failed to civilize the Savage, failed to teach him to speak and behave himself in society — and Sicard was certain he would fail — it was nothing to him. In fact, it was something of a relief, as he himself was no longer responsible, and yet if the Savage did somehow manage miraculously to acquire speech, it would reflect well on the whole enterprise; Sicard could even fleetingly envision the child, dressed in a proper suit of clothes, standing beside Massieu in an auditorium and wittily reflecting on his former life, speaking of raw tubers as la nourriture des animaux et des Belges or some such thing. But no, that would never happen. And it was best to lay the blame on someone else’s shoulders. Still, he did manage to extract an annual stipend of five hundred francs from the government for the child’s care and education and the unique experiment Itard was prepared to carry out to put to the test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rasa, unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?

For the next five years Itard would devote himself seven days a week to finding out.

—

The boy took to the regime warily. On the one hand, he basked in the protection Madame Guérin and Itard gave him against the mob of deaf-mutes clamoring for his destruction and he relished the unending supply of food in the Guérins’ cabinet, and yet, on the other, he resisted with all his heart the doctor’s attempts to control him. He’d put on weight, grown softer, paler (once he’d come in from the woods and the burning effect of the sun, his skin was seen to be as fair as any other child’s), and he wanted only to crouch in a corner of his room and rock back and forth or sit by the edge of the pond and watch the light play over the water. And now, suddenly, here was this man with his insistent eyes and prodding nose haunting his every waking moment, pursuing him to his room to attack him there and even sitting down at table with him to interfere as he hoarded his food, the sausages he’d come to love and the potatoes fried in oil and the beans, the broad beans stewed into a pottage, the bread hot from the oven.