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

Itard jumped up from the desk, knocking over the lamp in his excitement, and if it weren’t for Gaspard’s quick thinking and active feet, the whole room might have gone up in flames. “Where?” Itard demanded. “Where is he?”

“With Madame.”

A moment later, with the reek of lamp oil in his nostrils and permeating his clothes, Itard was downstairs in the Guérins’ apartment, where he found Victor lying rigid in the bath while Madame Guérin tended to him with soap and washcloth. Victor wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t so much as lift his eyes. “The poor child,” Madame Guérin said, swiveling her neck to gaze up at him. “He’s been bitten by some animal and lying in filth.” Steam rose from the bath. Two vast pots of water were heating on the stove.

“Victor, you’ve been bad, very bad,” Itard said, letting his intonation express everything he felt except relief, because he had to be stern, had to be like his own father, who would never let a child have his way in anything. Especially this. Running off as if he didn’t belong here, as if he hadn’t been treated with equanimity and even affection — and if he didn’t belong here, then where did he belong? “Victor!” He raised his voice. “Victor, look at me.”

No response. The boy’s face was a wedge driven into the surface of the water, his hair a screen, his eyes focused on nothing.

“Victor! Victor!” Itard had moved closer until he was leaning over the tub, both hands gripping the sides. He was angry suddenly, angry out of all proportion to the way he’d felt just a moment earlier when Monsieur Guérin had brought him the news. What had changed? What was wrong? He wanted to be acknowledged, that was all. Was that too much to ask? “Victor!”

He couldn’t be sure, because of the bathwater and the influence of the steam, but the boy’s eyelids seemed to be wet. Was he crying? Was he movable too?

Madame Guérin’s voice came at him out of the silence. “Please, Monsieur le Docteur — can’t you see that he’s upset?”

—

In the morning, first thing, though it might have been perverse, though it might have been his overzealousness that had precipitated the crisis in the first place, Itard went back to work on Victor, redoubling his efforts. Some elementary principal had been re-established over that bath, a confirmation of the order of being, he the father and Victor the son, and he was determined to take advantage of it while he could. He’d seen the influence of his own and Sicard’s methods on Gaspard and some of the other deaf-mutes, and so he went back to drilling Victor on the simple objects and the words, written out on cardboard, that represented them. At first, Victor was as incapable of making the connection as he’d been at an earlier stage, but as the months progressed a kind of intellectual conversion gradually occurred so that Victor was finally able to command some thirty words — not orally, but in written form. Itard would hold up a card that read BOUTEILLE or LIVRE and Victor, making a game of it, would scramble out the door, mount the stairs to his room and unfailingly fetch the correct object. It was a breakthrough. And after endless repetitions, with several bottles and several books, papers, pens and shoes, he even began to generalize, understanding that the written word did not exclusively refer to the very specific thing in his room but to a whole class of similar objects. Now, Itard reasoned, he was ready for the final stage, the leap from the written word to the spoken that would engage all his faculties and make him fully human for the first time in his life.

For the next year — an entire year, with its fleeing clouds and intermittent rains, its snows and blossomings and stirrings in the trees — Itard trained him in the way he’d trained Gaspard, staring at him face to face and working the cranio-facial muscles through their variety of expressive gestures, inserting his fingers into the boy’s mouth to manipulate his tongue and in turn having the boy touch his own and feel the movement of it as speech was formed. They drilled vowels, reached for consonants, for the simplest phones. It was slow going. “Fetch le livre, Victor,” Itard would say, and Victor would simply stare. Itard would then get up and cross the room to hold the book in his hand, simultaneously pointing to Victor. “Tell me, Victor. Tell me you want the book. The book, Victor. The book.”

In the meanwhile, whenever a breeze would stir the curtains or the clouds would close over the grounds or lightning knife through the sky, Victor would go to the window, no matter what they were doing or to what crucial stage the lesson had attained, deaf to all remonstrance. He had put on weight. He was taller now, by two inches and a half. Stronger. More and more he had the bearing of a man — unnaturally short, yes, and with the unformed features of a boy, but an incipient man for all that. There was the evidence of the hair under his arms and radiating out from his pubes and even the faint translucent trace of a mustache above his upper lip. During this period he was more easily distracted and he seemed to go blank at times, staring, humming, rocking, just as he’d done when he first came out of the woods. Increasingly, he seemed agitated too, and as his body continued to change, he became more of a problem about the grounds.

In addition to the incident with the deaf-mute girl, there was further cause for worry. While Itard couldn’t imagine Victor’s doing serious physical harm to anyone, male or female, the boy continually overstepped the bounds of propriety so that Sicard began to regard him as an immoral influence on the other children, and with good reason. There was no more sense of shame in him than in an arctic hare or an African ape that lived in its skin, and when the mood took him he would pull out his phallus and masturbate no matter the situation or the company (though thankfully, to this point, the abbé was unaware of it). He would rub up against people inappropriately, male and female alike. Increasingly, on awakening, he would dispense with his trousers and sometimes his undergarments too. No amount of discipline or punishment could make him feel shame or even modesty.

Once, when Madame Guérin’s three daughters were present and they were all of them — the Guérins, Itard and Victor — having a picnic on the grounds of the Observatory in the Gardens, Victor made a fumbling amorous approach to Julie, his favorite of the three. He was used to seeing Julie, who often came to visit her mother—“Lee, Lee!” he would cry when she came into the room — and she seemed genuinely sympathetic toward him, not simply for her mother’s sake, but because she was good-hearted and compassionate. On this day, however, no sooner had they spread the blanket and opened the hamper, than Victor made a snatch at the lion’s share of the sandwiches and ran off with them to hide in a cluster of trees. This was his usual behavior — he had little sense, after all his training and humanizing, of anyone outside of himself, of pity or fellow-feeling or generosity — but this time there was a twist. A few moments later he came sidling back to the group, his face smeared with fish paste and mayonnaise, and began stroking the hair first of one sister, then another, his fingers visibly trembling as he touched them; then, with each in turn, he laid his head in her lap a moment until finally he got up and seized her by the back of the neck, his grip firm and yet gentle too. When they ignored him, he seemed hurt and pushed himself awkwardly away. The last was Julie, and she was more tolerant than her sisters. The same scenario played out, but then, showing a leap Itard felt he was incapable of, the boy took Julie firmly by the hand, pulled her to her feet and then led her across the grass to the clump of trees where he’d secreted the sandwiches.