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

The sisters shared a glance and made a remark as suggestive as they could in the presence of their parents, and Madame Guérin gave out with a little laugh of embarrassment, while her husband, stoic, elderly, his considerable nose reddened by the sun, gave all his attention to the sandwich before him. “Our Savage has grown civilized under the spell of feminine charm, eh?” Itard observed. “And who could blame him?” All eyes, but for Monsieur Guérin’s, focused on the clump of trees and the pronounced sunstruck movement there. Intrigued, and with a lifted eyebrow for the party to show that he was amused and not at all concerned on a deeper level, though he was, of course, knowing Victor’s rudimentary conception of propriety, Itard went to investigate.

Victor, his face bloodless and sober, was gently squeezing Julie’s knees as if they were balls of malleable wax he was trying to shape into something else altogether, and at the same time he kept gesturing to his cache of sandwiches. The sandwiches, four or five of them — all showing conspicuous marks of his teeth — lay in a bed of fresh-picked leaves. Julie tried her best to look bemused, though she was plainly uncomfortable, and after she let Victor stroke her hair and mold her knees for some minutes, she smiled brightly and said, “That’s enough, Victor. I want to go back to Maman now.”

Victor’s face took on a defeated look as Julie rose in a fragrant swirl of skirts and began to retrace her steps back to the party. “Lee!” he cried piteously, patting the depression in the grass where she’d been sitting, “Lee! Lee!” And then, in a kind of desperation, he held up the remains of a half-eaten sandwich as the ultimate expression of his love.

Itard was moved by this, of course — he was only human. But he couldn’t conceive of how to instruct his pupil in morals or decorum when he was unable to implant words in his head — Victor couldn’t formulate his own desires, let alone express them, and each day’s exercises seemed to take him further from the goal. Six months went by, then another year. Victor began to chafe under the regimen in a way that recalled the early days, and no matter how many times they worked their facial muscles and their tongues and drilled over the same words, Victor simply could not pronounce them. Itard himself, a man with the patience of the gods, came to dread their sessions, until finally, reluctantly, he had to face the truth — Victor was regressing. Gaspard came and went, working now as a shoemaker’s apprentice, able to read, write and speak with some degree of fluency, and others appeared in his place and learned and developed and moved on too. Sicard was growing impatient, as was the Minister of the Interior, who had authorized the funds for Victor’s care and expected some sort of tangible return on the public investment. But there was some block here, some impediment Victor just couldn’t seem to overcome, and despite himself Itard was forced to admit that it was the irremediable result of those years of estrangement, those years of inhumanity and wandering without any human voice to speak to him. He began to give up hope.

Then there came a day, a bright day of spring with a scent of renewal on the warm breeze blowing up out of the south, when Sicard appeared in the doorway to the doctor’s rooms. Itard had been expecting a student and had left the door ajar, and he looked up in surprise — never, in all his time at the Institute, had the abbé come to visit him in his rooms, and yet here he was, wrapped in his soutane, his features pinched round the tight disapprobation of his mouth. This was trouble, and no doubt about it.

“The Savage,” Sicard spat, and he was so worked up he could barely get the words out.

Itard got up from his desk in alarm and took up the water pitcher and the glass beside it. “Abbé,” he said, already pouring, “can I get you a glass of water? Would you—?”

Sicard was in the room now, swiping one open palm across the other, his robe in a riot of motion. “That animal. That — God help me, but he’s incurable. That idiot. That self-polluter, that, that—”

Itard gave him a stricken look. “What’s he done?”

“What’s he done? He’s exposed himself in the flesh before the assembled female inmates and Sister Jean-Baptiste as well. And, and manipulated himself like one of the idiots in the Bicêtre — which is where he belongs. Either there or prison.” He glared at Itard. His breathing — the ratcheting of the air through his nostrils — was thunderous. His eyes looked as if they were about to dissolve.

“But we can’t just abandon him.”

“I will not allow him to corrupt this institution, to pollute the innocent minds of these children — our wards, doctor, our wards. And worse — what if he acts on his impulses? What then?”

From outside the open window came the cries of the children at their games, the sound of a ball thumped and bodies colliding. Laughter. Shouts. Children at play, that was all it was. Only the sound of children at play, and yet it depressed him. Victor didn’t play. Victor had never played. And now he was a child no longer.

Itard had tried everything, removing meat from the boy’s diet, as well as any other foods that might contribute to unnatural excitation, giving him long baths again in the hope of calming him, and when he was most worked up, bleeding him till the tension flagged. Only the bleeding seemed to work, and then only for a few hours at a time. He saw Victor’s face suddenly, rising before him in his consciousness, saw the pale descending slash of it in the corner of his room as he sat rocking over his feet and jerking at himself, saw the sheen of the eyes that pulled the whole world back into that primeval pit from which the first civilized man had crawled an eon ago. “He’s not like that,” he said lamely.

“He’s incurable. Ineducable. He must be sent away.”

There was a solution that had occurred to Itard, but it was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, certainly not the abbé or Madame Guérin. If Victor were able to express himself carnally, to experience the release every healthy male needs if he’s not to become mad, then maybe there was hope yet, because this regression of his, this inability to focus and absorb his lessons — to speak like a human being — was perhaps somehow tied to his natural needs. Itard thought of hiring a prostitute. For months he’d wrestled with the notion, but finally he saw that he couldn’t do it — it was one thing to rescue a child from savagery, hold him up to examination as a specimen, train his senses and his mind, and it was quite another to play God. No man had that right.

“We can’t do that,” he insisted. “He’s a ward of the state. He’s our responsibility. We took him from the woods and civilized him and we can’t just throw up our hands and send him back—”

“Civilized him?” Sicard had spread his feet apart as if he expected to crouch down and grapple over the issue. He’d refused a seat, refused the water. He wanted one thing and one thing only. “You have no more to say about it.”

“What about the Minister of the Interior? My report to him?”

“Your report will say that you’ve failed.” His expression softened. “But not for lack of trying. I appreciate the energy you’ve put into this, we all do — but I told you this years ago and I’ll tell you now: give it up. He’s an idiot. He’s filthy. An animal. He deserves only to be locked up.” He snatched up the glass of water as if to examine its clarity, then set it down again. “And more: he should be castrated.”

“Castrated?”

“Like a dog. Or a bull.”

“And should we put a ring through his nose too?”

The abbé was silent a long while. The breeze picked up and rustled the curtains. A shaft of sunlight, golden as butter, struck the floor at his feet. Finally — and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the cries of the children — he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t see why not. Truly, I don’t.”