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

For those few minutes, Itard didn’t care what the boy was feeling. All the pain and humiliation of the scene at Madame Récamier’s came rushing back to him, all the endless wasted hours, the unceasing contest of wills, Sicard’s skepticism, the sharpened blade of the world’s ready judgment and failure waiting in the wings. Victor whimpered. He wet his trousers. A pigeon, disturbed on its roost, let out a soft flutter of concern. And then, after all the blood had rushed to Victor’s face, after the sky seemed to explode across the horizon and close back up on itself in a black ball and the deaf-mutes began to gather below, pointing and shouting, Itard tightened his grip and hauled the boy back into the room.

He didn’t lay him on the bed. Didn’t set him in the chair or back on the floor. He held him up until Victor’s muscles flexed and he was able to stand on his own. Then, very firmly and without hesitation, he made the boy gather up what scraps of cardboard remained, and recommenced the lesson.

—

After that excoriating afternoon, Victor seemed to come round. He still balked at his lessons, but not as often — or as violently — as before, and Itard had only to motion to the window to subjugate him completely. There were no more tantrums, no convulsions. Dutifully, his shoulders slumped and head bowed, Victor did as he was told and applied himself to his lessons, gradually acquiring a modicum of skill at matching the geometric shapes to their receptacles. At this point, Itard decided to move forward, attempting to teach him the alphabet through the agency of both his tactile sense and his burgeoning ability to make visual distinctions; to this end, he created a sort of board game in which there were twenty-four compartments, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, and twenty-four corresponding metal cutouts. The idea was for Victor to remove the cutouts from the compartments and then replace them properly, which he seemed able to do right from the beginning with relative ease. It was only by observing him closely, however, that Itard saw that Victor hadn’t learned the letters at all, but was instead painstakingly setting aside the cutouts and simply reversing the order in which he’d removed them. And so Itard complicated the game, as he’d done with the representational drawings, until Victor could no longer memorize the order of the letters but had to concentrate on matching the shapes. Which he finally did. Victoriously.

This led, shortly thereafter, to Victor’s pronouncing his first word aloud. It came about that one late afternoon, Madame Guérin had poured out a bowl of milk for Sultan, her pampered cat, and then a glass for Victor while the metal letters of the alphabet happened to be laid out on the table in her kitchen, and Itard, always looking for an opportunity of instruction, took up the glass before Victor could reach for it and manipulated four of the cutouts to spell the word for milk: l-a-i-t. Pronouncing it simultaneously—“Lait, lait”—he scrambled the letters and pushed them back across the table to Victor, who immediately arranged them to spell: t-i-a-l. “Good, Victor, very good,” he murmured, realizing his mistake — Victor had seen the word upside down — and quickly rearranging the letters. Again the exercise, and this time Victor spelled the word properly. “Lait, lait,” Itard repeated, and Madame Guérin, at the stove now, took it up too, a chant, a chorus, a panegyric to that simple and nourishing liquid, all the while pointing from the letters on the table to the milk in the glass and back again to his lips and tongue. Finally, with effort, because he’d come to relish milk as much as the cat did, Victor fumbled out the word. Very faintly, with his odd intonation, but clearly and distinctly, he echoed them: “Lait.”

Itard was overjoyed. Here it was, at long last, the key to unlock the boy’s mind and tongue. After praising him, after losing all control of himself and pulling Victor to him for a rib-rattling hug and pouring him a second and third glass of milk till his lips shone with a white halo, Itard ran off to the abbé’s office to report this coup de foudre, and Sicard, for all his dubiety, withheld judgment. He could have remarked that even cretins can pronounce a few simple words, that infants of eighteen months can mouth “mama” and “papa,” but instead he simply said, “Congratulations, mon frère. Keep up the good work.”

The doctor went to bed happy that night and the next night and the night after that, and he remained happy through his mornings and afternoons until he took his dinner with Victor and the Guérins on the third evening after his pupil’s triumph and Victor exclaimed “Lait!” when Madame Guérin poured him a glass of water, cried “Lait!” when she sliced him a piece of lamb, and “Lait, lait, lait!” when she set his potatoes, hot in their jackets, on the plate before him.

Was the doctor disappointed? Was he crushed, annihilated in the deepest fortress of his spirit? Was he rehearsing the abbé’s words—“Give it up; it will destroy you”—over and over again? Yes, of course he was — how could he not be? — and he showed it in his face, in his gestures, in his attitude toward his ward and pupil, angry at the sight of him, of his thin wrists and too-big head and the flab beginning to accrue at his waist and in his cheeks and breast and under his chin even as Victor matched the metal cutouts to their compartments, singing out “Lait!” every time he succeeded.

Itard could never be sure if it was his own antagonism and harshness in those days following his disappointment that prompted the first major crisis in Victor’s sojourn at the Institute, but when he came up the five flights of stairs in the morning to find the boy’s bed empty, he blamed himself. Victor was not at the Guérins’, not in Sicard’s offices or mooning over the pond, and a search of the deaf-mutes’ dormitories and of the grounds, extending even to the farthest walls, proved futile. Once again, as if he’d been a figment of the collective imagination, the wild child had vanished.

7

Outside in the dark, beyond the gates of the Institute, Victor was adrift. There was too much noise. There were too many people. Nothing seemed familiar, nothing seemed real. The sky was jagged, unrecognizable, the city a flower carved of stone, blooming under a moonless spring night, its petals radiating out in a thousand alleys and turnings and dead ends. Something had driven him out of his bed, down the flights of stairs and then across the grounds and up through the gates and into the streets, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Some slight, some injury, the continuing and immitigable frustration of trying to please this man with his fierce grip and seething eyes — yes, and something else too, something he couldn’t take hold of because it was inside of him, beating with the pulse of his blood.

Earlier, just after dinner, one of the deaf-mutes (not like him, a she, a new inmate arrived that morning with hair that hung down her back and a screen of heavy folded cloth concealing her legs and the other thing that was there, the potent physical mystery he could divine in the way he could sense the presence of an animal in a silent glen or sniff out the sodden secret pocket of earth that gave up the gift of a mole or truffle) had come to him in the hallway outside his room and held out her hand. She was offering him something, a sweet thing, small and sweet from the oven, and he didn’t like such things and slapped it from her hand. There it was, on the floor, between them. She drew in her breath. Her face changed. And suddenly her eyes sprang at him, her arms jerking and her elbows knifing as her fingers bent and flexed and contorted themselves in some mad show, and he backed away from her. But when she reached down to retrieve the sweet, he came at her from behind and put his hands there, in the place where her limbs joined beneath the cloth, and he didn’t know what he was doing or why he did it.