Wild Child (33 page)
Mosquitoes settled on the child’s exposed limbs. His garment was soiled in the muck. Both Bonnaterre and the gardener stood over him, remonstrating, but he paid them no mind: he was thirsty; he was drinking. When he’d done drinking, he rose and defecated on the spot (another curiosity: he defecated while standing and squatted to micturate), dirtying the skirts of his gown without a second thought. And then, as if this weren’t enough, he made a snatch for something in the reeds and had it in his mouth before they could intervene—a frog, as it turned out, mashed to pulp by the time the gardener was able to pry it from his jaws.
After that, he came docilely enough to the inn, where he settled himself in the far corner of the room provided for him, gurgling and clicking over his sack of roots and tubers, to all appearances content and wanting the society of no one. But before long the villagers got wind of his arrival and crowded the inn for the rest of the night, straining to get a look at him—people clamoring at the doorway and scuffling in the halls, dogs yammering, the whole neighborhood in an uproar. He shrank into his corner, his face to the wall, and still the furor persisted till long after dark. And, of course, the closer he and his guardians got to the capital, where the influence of the newspapers was strongest, the bigger and more insistent the crowds grew. Despite himself, and despite the Minister of the Interior’s strict injunction to bring the child to Paris without harm or impediment, Bonnaterre couldn’t help gratifying the people along the way with at least a glimpse of the prodigy. And no, he didn’t feel at all like a circus crier or a gypsy sword-swallower or anything of the kind—he was a scientist presenting the object of his study, and if the pride of possession gave him an internal glow of special privilege and authority, well, so be it.
It might have been the contact with all those people or the breathing of the night air or the miasma that hung over the roadside ditches where he liked to drink, but the child fell ill with smallpox along the way and had to be confined in the back room of an inn for a period of ten days while he broke out in spots and alternately shivered and burned with the fever. Blankets were brought, the local physician was consulted, there was talk of purging and bloodletting, and Bonnaterre was in a state—it was his head that was on the line here. Perhaps literally. The Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, was an exacting man, and to present him with the mere corpse of a wild child would be like bringing him the hide of some rare creature from the African jungle, its anatomical features lost, its vibrant colors already faded. The abbé got down on his knees before the writhing, bundled, sweating form of the child, and prayed.
Drifting in and out of sleep, the child watched the walls fade away and the roof dissolve to present the stars and the moon and then he was capering through a meadow while the Midi shook the trees till they bent like individual blades of grass and he was laughing aloud and running, running. He saw back in time, saw the places where he’d gorged on berries, saw the vineyard and the grapes and the cellar where a farmer had stored his crop of potatoes, new-dug from the earth. Then there were the boys, the village boys, urchins, quick-legged animals, discovering him there in the forest and giving chase, pelting him with sticks and rocks and the hard sharp stabs of their cries, and then the men and the fire and the smoke. And this room, where the walls re-erected themselves and the roof came back to obliterate the sky. He felt hunger. Thirst. He sat up and threw off the bedclothes.
Three days later, he was in Paris, though he didn’t know it. All he knew was what he saw and heard and smelled. He saw confusion, heard chaos, and what he smelled was ranker than anything he’d come across in all his years of wandering the fields and forests of Aveyron, concentrated, pungent, the reek of civilization.
The Institute for Deaf-Mutes sprawled over several acres just across the boulevard Saint-Michel from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was formerly a Catholic seminary, which the revolutionary government had given over to Abbé Sicard for the training and advancement of the deaf and dumb. Employing a method of instruction in the language of signs he had adopted from his predecessor, De l’Epée, Sicard had become famous for the amazing transformations he’d wrought in several of his pupils, turning the all-but-hopeless into productive citizens who not only could articulate their needs and wants with perfect clarity but expound on philosophical issues as well. One of them, a well-made young man by the name of Massieu, was the cynosure of a number of Sicard’s public demonstrations of his pupils’ speaking and writing ability, in which the pupils answered questions written on cards by the audience, and he came to address a number of learned societies with confidence and dignity and in an accent not much worse than an educated foreigner’s. Even more astonishing, this young man, who’d come to the Institute as dumb as a stone, was eventually able to dine in company and entertain people with his own original bon mots, memorably defining gratitude as la mémoire du coeur and distinguishing between desire and hope by pronouncing that “Desire is a tree in leaf, hope is a tree in bloom, enjoyment is a tree with fruit.” And so, when the wild child was delivered up to Sicard by Bonnaterre, all of Paris awaited the result, the miracle that was sure to follow as the boy acquired the ability of language and the gift of civilization; it was hoped that one day he too would stand before an entranced audience and give shape to the thoughts and emotions he’d felt while living as an animal.
Unfortunately, things proved different.
After the initial flurry of excitement, after the crowds had dissipated and half the haut monde of Paris had trooped up the stairs of the Institute to observe him rocking in the corner of his room on the fifth floor, after he was brought to the chambers of the Minister of the Interior for a private interview (where he sat on his haunches in a corner and stared vacantly into the distance before relieving himself on the carpet), after the newspapers had recorded his every move and common citizens had gathered on street corners to debate his humanity, he was given over to neglect. Sicard, a man preoccupied with his more tractable pupils, the text of the book he was writing on the education of deaf-mutes and his duties as one of the founders of the Society of Observers of Man, examined the boy over the course of several days and pronounced him an incurable idiot—he wasn’t about to risk his reputation on a creature that recognized no signs whatever and hadn’t the sense or even the hygiene of a house cat. Thus, the child was abandoned again, but this time within the walls of the institution, where there was no one to look after him and where the other children made it their duty to chase, taunt and torment him.
He slunk about the corridors and grounds, moving from shadow to shadow as if afraid of the light, and whenever he heard the clamor of the deaf-mute students in the stairwell he ran in the opposite direction, ascending rapidly when they were below him, descending when they were above. Out of doors, he kept his back to the rough stone of the buildings, watchful and frightened, and when the others were released from their classes, he darted for the nearest tree. If he thought to escape during this period, he was frustrated not only by the fact that the keeper locked him in at night, but by the walls that delimited the grounds of the Institute—he could have scaled them in his efficient squirrel-like way, but what lay beyond the walls was the city, and he was a creature and prisoner of it now.
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 Bicetre, 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-Grace 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.
Every day, without relief, he was made to perform. And this was especially hard because for the first few weeks Itard had let him do as he pleased, taking him for long ambles in the park, allowing him to eat what and when he wanted and to hunker in his corner or curl up to sleep at any time of day or night, and that was a kind of heaven to the child because he was the leader, his whims were Itard’s whims, and with Itard at his side he could defy the deaf-mutes, especially one lean, quick whipcord of a boy who was forever creeping up on him to administer wet blows with his open hands or to wrestle him to the floor and press his weight into him till he couldn’t breathe.
Itard was there for him now, there to watch over him, but also, very slowly and subtly, to mold him to his will. On the morning of the first snowfall, when the whole institution was clothed in slumber and every sound damped by the steady, silent accumulation, the child woke with a frantic pounding joy and darted naked down the flights of stairs to the yard where he held his face to the sky and cried out at the descending swirl of pristine crystals and burrowed into the drifts, insensible to the cold, and no one attempted to stop him. The stone buildings loomed like cliffs calling down the storm out of the sky. Shapes formed and fragmented in the air, visions playing there in the courtyard for him and him alone. And then he looked up, sensing something, a presence, and there the man was, Itard, wrapped in his greatcoat and scarf, the dark curls of his hair whitening, his lashes, his eyebrows, the sharp projection of his nose.
The next day, the regime commenced and ever so gradually heaven receded.
Itard began by taking hold of the boy immediately after breakfast and giving him a long hot bath, a bath that lasted three hours and more, Madame Guérin heating pot after pot of water, the boy frolicking, splashing, diving, spouting, at play like any other child bathed in sustaining warmth and free to express himself, but there was a purpose here, a civilizing purpose, and the fact that the child was made clean and free of offensive odors was merely the ancillary benefit. No, what Itard was doing—and these baths continued every day for the next month—was sensitizing the Savage, making him aware of his body, his self, in a way the life of the animal could never have done. After the bath each day, another hour would be spent in massage, as Itard and Madame Guérin took turns rubbing his limbs, the small of his back, soothing him, giving him pleasure, allowing him to appreciate an interaction he’d never before experienced: he was being touched by one of his fellow creatures, and there was no fear in it, no violence. Sure enough, within the month, he would fall into a tantrum if the water wasn’t hot enough or the hands of his masseur sufficiently firm, and he began dressing himself without prompting, because now he felt the cold like any other domesticated creature and there was no going back. So too with his food. The Savage who had subsisted on raw roots and tubers, who had plucked potatoes from the fire and devoured insects and torn rodents with his teeth, turned up his nose at a plate of food that contained something he didn’t care for or that was contaminated by a single shining example of Madame Guérin’s silvered, flowing hair.