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

Next, it was the words. Itard went back to the original four objects, set them on their hooks, printed the signifiers for each in clear block letters — LA CLÉ, LE MARTEAU, LA CUILLER, LE SOULIER — and removed the drawings. Nothing. It was just as before — Victor made no connection whatever between what must have seemed to him random markings and the tangible things on the hooks. He was able only to arrange the items from memory, and no amount of study, no number of repetitions, could enlighten him. Weeks passed. Victor began to balk at the drills. Itard persisted. Nothing happened. Puzzled, he went to Sicard.

“The boy is congenitally infirm,” the abbé said, sitting behind his great mahogany desk and stroking one of the cats that roamed the Institute’s grounds. “He is, I am sorry to say, an idiot — and not an idiot because he was abandoned but a true idiot, a cretin, and it was his idiocy that was the cause of his abandonment.”

“He’s no idiot, I can testify to that. He’s making progress. I see it in his eyes.”

“Yes, and imagine the parents, ignorant peasants, a succession of squalling and filthy children clinging to their knees and little or nothing in the pot and they have this child — this Victor, as you call him — who cannot speak or respond normally. Of course they abandon him. It’s a sad fact of life, and I’ve seen it time and again with my deaf-mutes.”

“With all due respect, Abbé, he is no idiot. And I’ll prove it. Just give me time.”

Sicard leaned down to release the cat, a spoiled fat thing which was the brother or uncle or perhaps even the father (no one could remember) of the nearly identical one Madame Guérin kept in her apartments. When he sat back up again, he leveled his eyes on Itard and observed, in a quiet voice, “Just as you did at Madame Récamier’s, I suppose?”

“Well, I—” This was a low blow, and Itard wasn’t prepared for it. “That was unfortunate, I admit, but—”

“Unfortunate?” The abbé tented his hands before him. “The boy is an embarrassment — to you, to me, to the Institute and all we’ve accomplished here. Worse: he’s an insult.” He lowered his voice to a whisper: “Give it up, Itard. Give it up while you can — it will destroy you, can’t you see that?”

But Itard wouldn’t give up. Instead, he abandoned Sicard’s method and went all the way back to the beginning. As he saw it, Victor’s problem was one of perception — and it went deeper, far deeper, than in any of the Institute’s deaf-mutes, whose visual acuity had been honed as an adaptation to their disability so that the thing and its representation in symbols was readily apparent to them. They had little difficulty in discerning the fine gradations in contour that separate one letter from another, a printed b from an h, an l from a t, and once they recognized the system they were able to appreciate it in all its variations. Victor, on the other hand, simply did not see the letters of the words because he couldn’t distinguish simple shapes. And so, Itard came up with the idea of training Victor to recognize basic figures — cardboard triangles, circles, squares, parallelograms — and to match them to the spaces from which they’d been cut. At first, Victor took the new regime as a kind of game, and he was easily able to fit the pieces back in the holes, but then Itard, excited by the boy’s progress, made the drills increasingly complicated, varying the shapes, colors and sequences of the pieces until finally, predictably, Victor revolted.

Imagine him. Imagine the wild child in his suit of clothes with his new name and his newly acquired love of comfort, with the mother-figure Madame Guérin had come to represent there to comfort and caress him and the demanding father, Itard, filling his every waking moment with impossible, frustrating tasks as in some tale out of the Brothers Grimm, and it’s no surprise that he broke down, that his initial spirit, his free spirit, his wild spirit, reasserted itself. He wanted only to roam in some uncontained place, to sleep in the sun, to put his head in Madame Guérin’s lap and sit at the table and eat till he burst, and yet every time he looked up, there was Itard, the taskmaster, with his fierce eyes and disapproving nose. And more, and worse: there were changes coming over his body, the hormonal rush of puberty, coarse hair sprouting under his arms and between his legs, his testes descending, his appendage stiffening of its own accord, morning and night. He grew confused. Anxious. Angry.

The blowup came on a fine spring afternoon, all of Paris redolent with the perfume of lilac and lily, the southern breeze as soft and warm as a hand laid against a cheek, the pond on the Institute’s grounds giving rise spontaneously to ducklings, whole fleets of them, even as the deaf-mutes capered over the lawns, squealing and whinnying in their high, strained, unnatural voices. Itard had devised an especially complex configuration of shapes and cutouts, posters nailed up on the walls and three-dimensional figures spread across the table, and he could see that Victor was growing frustrated. He was feeling frustrated himself — this morning, like a hundred others before it, offering up hope in such niggardly increments that it seemed as if the glaciers of the Alps and Pyrenees would meet before Victor could learn to perform a task any four-year-old would have mastered in a minute.

The shapes wouldn’t cohere. Victor backed away, flung himself sullenly on the bed. Itard took him by the arm and forced him to stand and confront the problem, just as he’d done over and over again all morning long, the grip of his iron fingers on the yielding flesh of the boy’s upper arm as familiar to both of them as breathing in and breathing out. But this time, Victor had had enough. With a violence that startled them both, he snatched his arm away and for one suspended moment made as if to attack his teacher, his teeth bared, fists raised in anger, until he turned on the hated objects — the spheres, pyramids and flat geometric figures — and tore them to pieces. He raged round the room, ducking away from his teacher with the animal dexterity that had yet to abandon him despite the weight he was putting on, heaving the scraps out the open window, then rushing to the fireplace to fling ashes round the room and ripping at the sheets of the bed with his teeth until they were shredded, and all the while Itard trying to wrestle him down. Finally, ululating in a new oppressive voice that might have been the call of some carrion bird, Victor threw himself on the floor and fell into convulsions.

The convulsions were authentic — the eyes sunk back in the boy’s head, his teeth gnashing, tongue bloodied — but they were self-generated for all that, and Itard, who’d witnessed this scene innumerable times in the past, lost control himself. In a flash, he was on the boy, jerking him up off the floor and dragging him to the open window — shock treatment, that was what he needed, a force that was greater than he, implacable, irresistible, a single act of violence that would tame him forever. And here it was, ready to hand. Clutching him by the ankles, Itard thrust the boy through the frame of the open window and dangled him there, five long stories from the ground. Victor went rigid as a board, the convulsions dissolved in the terror of the moment. What must he have thought? That after all the kindness and blandishments, all the food, warmth and shelter, his captors — and this man, this man in particular who had always forced these strange, useless labors on him — had finally shown their true colors. That his teacher was in league with Madame Guérin, that they’d softened him in order to destroy him as surely as the deaf-mutes would have done if they’d had their way, and before them the merciless boys of the villages at the edge of the forest. He’d been betrayed. The ground would rush to meet him.