Wild Child (32 page)

What was strange, however, was that he didn’t look up, though certainly he must have been aware of the alien presence in the room and even of the credulous faces pressed to the windows.

The Commissioner was dumbstruck. This child—this thing—was scarred, hunched, filthy, and it gave off a stench of the barnyard, as wild and forlorn as the first upright creature created by God in His own image, the man Adam who was given dominion over the animals and named them in turn. But this was an animal, a kind of ape, the sort of degraded thing Linnaeus must have had in mind when he placed men and apes in the same order of being. And if there was any doubt, there was the fresh coil of its dung, gleaming on the rough planks of the floor.

The fire snapped and hissed. There was a murmur from the crowd pressed up against the windows. “Good God,” he exclaimed under his breath, and then, turning to the dyer, he put to him the only question he could manage, “Is it dangerous?”

Vidal, his house a shambles so that he was embarrassed in front of the Commissioner, merely shrugged. “He’s just a child, Citizen Commissioner, a poor abandoned child, flesh and blood, just like anyone else. But he’s unschooled. He doesn’t know porridge, doesn’t know a bowl, a cup, a spoon, doesn’t know what to do with them—”

Constans-Saint-Estève was in his early forties and dressed in the fashion of Paris as it was before the Revolution. He had a fleshy face and the pouting lips of an epicene. His back still pressed to the door, his eyes locked on the child, he whispered, “Does he speak?”

“Only cries and whimpers. He may be—I think he’s a deaf-mute.”

Overcoming his initial shock, the Commissioner crossed the room and stood over the boy a moment, murmuring blandishments.

His scientific curiosity had been re-aroused—this was a rare opportunity. A wonder, really. “Hello,” he said finally, bending at the knees and bringing his bland face into the child’s line of vision, “I am Jean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, Commissioner for Saint-Sernin. And who might you be? What is your name?”

The child stared through him, as if he were insubstantial.

“Do you have a name?”

Nothing.

“Do you understand me? Do you understand French? Or perhaps some other language?” Judging from the coloration of the child’s skin, he might have been Basque, Spanish, Italian. The Commissioner tried out a greeting on him in the languages of these regions, and then, frustrated, clapped his hands together as loudly as he could, right in front of the child’s nose. There was no reaction whatever. The Commissioner looked to Vidal and the pale buds of the faces hung as if on a branch at the near window and pronounced, “Sourd-muet.”

It was then that the villagers could stand it no longer and began to push into the room, one at a time, until the place was crowded to the walls, people trampling the dried leaves and roots scattered across the floor, examining everything—trying, Vidal thought, to discover his secret methods and receipts, which made him uneasy in the extreme, made him suspicious and angry—and it was then that the child came to life and made a bolt for the open door. A cry went up and people leapt back as if a mad dog were amongst them; in a trice the child was out in the yard, in the rain, galloping on all fours for the curtain of trees at the edge of the field. And he would have made it, would have escaped again back into nature, but for two of the strongest men in the village, men in their twenties, great runners, who brought him to ground and wrestled him back to the open door of the dyer’s cottage. The child writhed in their grip, making a repetitive sound that rattled in his windpipe—uh-uh-uh-uh

—and snaking his head round to bite.

It was fully dark now, the light of the fire and a single candle falling through the open door to illuminate the scene. The Commissioner stood there in the doorway, looking down at the child for a long moment, and then he began to stroke the child’s face, pushing the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes so that everyone could see that he was a human child and no dog or ape or demon, and the stroking had the effect it would have on any sentient thing: the child’s breathing slowed and his eyes went distant. “All right,” the Commissioner said, “let him go,” and the men loosened their grip on his limbs and stepped back. For a moment the child just slumped there on the doorstep, glistening with wet and mud, his limbs thin as a cow’s shins, and then he took hold of the hand the Commissioner held out to him and rose quietly to his feet.

It was as if some switch had been turned off in the enfant’s inner apparatus—he came docilely, holding on to the Commissioner’s hand like a novice on the way to church, while the village followed in solemn processional. Along the way, the rain still lashing down and the streets a soup of mud, people tried to get close enough to touch the child, and they shouted out that he fed only on nuts and roots in the woods—and what would he eat now, a blanquette de veau? Boeuf bourguignon? Langouste? The Commissioner didn’t bother to answer, but he was determined to make his own experiment. First he would clothe the boy’s nakedness and then he would offer him an array of foods to see what he would take and in the process he would try to learn something of this prodigy that would benefit society and the understanding of mankind.

Once home, he shut the door on the villagers and instructed his servant to find a garment for the child, and then, while he ordered up his own dinner, he installed the child in the room he used as his study and offices. A fire was laid and the boy went directly to it. In the room were several chairs, a desk, shelves of legal volumes and volumes of natural history and philosophy, the Commissioner’s papers, a freestanding globe and a birdcage of wrought iron. Inside the cage was a gray parrot his late father had brought back from a voyage to Gambia thirty years earlier; her name was Philomene and she could ask, in penetrating tones, for grapes, cherries and nuts, comment on the weather and the state of inebriation of dinner guests and whistle the opening figure of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor. Excited by the prospect of examining the boy at his leisure, the Commissioner stepped out of the room only long enough to mollify his wife and give orders to have various foodstuffs brought to him; when he returned, the boy’s face was pressed against the bars of the cage and Philomene was vainly serenading him with the Mozart.

He took the boy gently by the hand and led him to the desk, where a servant had laid out a selection of foods, both raw and cooked. There was meat, rye and wheat bread, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, potatoes, parsnips and a solitary orange.

Of all this, the child seemed only to recognize the acorns and potatoes, the latter of which he immediately threw into the fire, while cracking the acorns between his teeth and sucking the pulp from them. The potatoes he devoured almost instantly, though they were as hot as the coals themselves; bread meant nothing to him.

Again, and for many patient hours, the Commissioner tried speaking to the child, first aloud and then in dumbshow, but nothing would rouse him; he seemed no more aware than a dog or cat.

And no noise, not even the beating of a drum, affected him. Finally, after making sure the windows were secure and the doors latched, the Commissioner left the child in the room, snuffed the candles and went off to bed. Where his wife scolded him—what was he thinking bringing that savage thing into their house? What if he arose in the night and murdered them all?—and his two sons, Guillaume and Gérard, four and six respectively, informed him that they were too frightened to sleep in their own beds and would have to share his.

In the morning, he approached his study on silent feet, though he kept telling himself there was no need because the child was almost certainly deaf. He lifted the latch and peered into the room, not knowing what to expect. The first thing he saw was the child’s garment, a shift of gray cloth that had been forced over his head the previous night; it lay on the carpet in the center of the room beside a shining loop of excrement. The next thing was the child himself, standing in the far corner, staring at the wall and rocking back and forth on his feet and moaning as if he’d been wounded in some vital place. Then the Commissioner noticed several of his volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière lying facedown on the floor, their leaves scattered to the wind. And then, finally, he noticed Philomene, or what was left of her.

That afternoon the wild child was sent to the orphanage at Saint-Affrique.

He was brought to Saint-Affrique in a fiacre, the jolting and swaying of which caused him a great deal of discomfort. Four times during the journey he became sick on the floor of the carriage and the servant Constans-Saint-Estève had sent along to accompany him did little to relieve his distress, other than daubing at the mess with a rag. The child was dressed in his gray shift, which was knotted tightly at the waist to prevent his removing it, he was barefooted and he’d been provided with a small sack of potatoes and turnips for his sustenance. The horses seemed to terrify him. He rocked on the seat and moaned the whole way. On arriving at the orphanage, he made a bolt for the woods, down on all fours and squealing like a rodent, but his guardian was too quick for him.

Inside the walls, it was apparent that he was no ordinary child.

The director of the orphanage—Citizen R. Nougairoles—observed that he had no notion of sitting at table or of relieving himself in the pot or even the latrine, that he tore at his garment as if the very touch of the cloth seared his skin and that he refused to sleep in the bed provided for him, instead curling up in a pile of refuse in the corner. When threatened, he used his teeth. The other children, curious at first, soon learned to give him his distance. Still, in the short time he was there, a mere two weeks, he did become acculturated to the degree that he seemed to appreciate the comforts of a fire on a bitter day and he extended his dietary range to include pease soup improved with hunks of dark bread. On the other hand, he displayed no interest whatever in the other orphans (or in anyone, for that matter, unless they were in immediate possession of the simple foods he liked to eat). People might as well have been trees for all he responded to them—except when they got too close, of course—and he had no conception either of work or recreation.

When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he crouched over his knees, rocking and vocalizing in a curious inarticulate way, but every moment he looked for his chance to escape and twice had to be chased down and forcibly restrained. Finally, and this was the one thing Nougairoles found most disturbing, he showed no familiarity with the forms and objects of holy devotion. The Director concluded that he was no imposter, but the real thing—Linnaeus’ Homo ferus in the flesh—and that the orphanage could hardly be expected to contain him.

In the meanwhile, both he and Constans-Saint-Estève wrote up their observations of the child and posted them to the Journal des débats, and from there the other Parisian periodicals took hold of the story. Soon the entire nation was mad for news of this prodigy from Aveyron, the wild child, the animal in human form.

Speculation galloped through the streets and echoed down the alleys. Was he Rousseau’s Noble Savage or just another aborigine? Or perhaps—thrilling conjecture—the loup-garou, or werewolf, of legend? Or was he more closely related to the orangutan, the great orange ape of the Far East, an example of which, it had been proposed, should be mated to a prostitute in order to discover its issue?

Two prominent and competing naturalists—Abbé Roche-Ambroise Sicard, of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, and Abbé Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, professor of natural history at the Central School for Aveyron, located in Rodez—applied to take possession of the child in order to observe and record his behavior before it was further tainted by contact with society. Bonnaterre, being closer at hand, won out, at least in the short term, and he personally took charge of the boy at Saint-Affrique and transferred him to the school at Rodez. For the child, bewildered and aching only to get free of it all, it meant another fiacre, another assault of horses, another unfamiliar face. He was sick on the floor. He clutched the sack of turnips and potatoes to his side and would not let it out of his sight.

For the next several months, at least until the Minister of the Interior acted decisively in Sicard’s favor, Bonnaterre had the boy to himself. He assigned a servant to see to the boy’s corporal needs and then set about staging various experiments to gauge the child’s reactions and store of knowledge. Since it had been assumed that the child was deaf, all contact with him thus far had been in dumbshow, but Bonnaterre laid out a number of instruments, from the triangle to the drum to the bass viol, and led the child to them, playing on each one in succession as best he could. Beyond the windows it was a clear, bright, winter’s day. Bonnaterre’s servant—his gardener, to whom the boy had seemed at least minimally to relate, perhaps because of the smell of the earth about him—was stationed by the door to prevent the child’s escape and to discipline him if he should act out (and he did defeat all notions of modesty, pulling his smock up to the cincture at the waist in order to warm himself at the fire, for instance, and playing with his penis as if it were a toy soldier).

At any rate, Bonnaterre—a stern and imposing man with a face as flagrant as a ham against the pure white curls of his periwig—persisted for some time, beating at the drum, drawing the bow across the strings of the bass viol, clapping, shouting and singing till the gardener began to suspect he’d lost his mind. The child never reacted, never winced or smiled or turned his head at one plangent sound or another. But then the gardener, in his idleness, reached for a walnut from the bowl of them set on a sideboard at the rear of the room, out of sight of the boy, and applied the nut cracker to it with a sound barely discernible in the general racket fomented by his master, and—it was like a miracle—the boy’s head jerked round. In an instant, he was at the gardener’s side, snatching at the nuts; in the next, he was atop the sideboard, pounding the shells against the gleaming mahogany surface with the nearest thing that came to hand, a silver candlestick, as it turned out.

Despite the damage to the furniture, Bonnaterre was encouraged. The child was not deaf, not deaf at all, but rather his senses had been so attuned to the sounds of nature that any noise of human agency, no matter how strident or articulate, failed to impress him: there were no human voices in the wild, nor bass viols either. Creeping about the woods in an eternal search for food, he listened only for the fall of the apple or chestnut or the cry of the squirrel, or even, perhaps, on some miraculous level, for the minute vibrations sent out by the escargot as it rides along its avenue of slime. But if food was the child’s exclusive focus throughout his feral life, then how would he react now that food was abundant and his for the asking? Would he begin to develop an interior life—a prepositional life—rather than being exclusively fixated on exterior objects?

Bonnaterre pondered these questions, even as he observed the boy day by day and watched as he acquired rudimentary signs to make his desires understood, pointing to the water jug, for instance, when he was thirsty or taking his caretaker by the hand and leading him to the kitchen when he was hungry, there to point at one object or another. If he wasn’t immediately gratified he went to the floor, moving rapidly on hands and feet and dragging his posterior across the finished boards, at the same time setting up a withering deep-throated sort of howl that peaked and fell and rose again from nothing.

When he was given what he wanted—potatoes, walnuts, broad beans, which he shelled with amazing swiftness and dexterity—he ate until it seemed he would have to burst, ate more than any five of the other children could consume at a sitting, and then gathered up the leftovers in his gown and stole away to the courtyard, where he buried them for future reference, no different from a dog with a bone. And when he was fed with others he displayed no sense of courtesy or fairness, but took all the food to himself, whether by a bold snatch or the furtive gesture, with no thought for his fellows.

During the third week of observation he began to accept meat when it was offered, raw at first, and then cooked, and eventually he came to relish potatoes browned in oil in the pan—when the mood struck him he would go to the kitchen, take up the knife and the pan and point to the cabinet in which the potatoes and cooking oil were kept.

It was a rude life, focused on one thing only—on food—and Bonnaterre was able to recognize in him the origins of uncivilized humanity, untouched by culture, by awareness, by human feeling.

“How could he possibly be expected to have known the existence of God?” Bonnaterre wrote. “Let him be shown the heavens, the green fields, the vast expanse of the earth, the works of Nature, he does not see anything in all that if there is nothing there to eat.”

For the boy’s part, he began, very gradually, to adjust. His food came to him not from a hole in the earth or a chance encounter with carrion or the wild thing that was slower than he, but from these animals that had captured him, strange animals with heavy faces and snouts, with their odd white pelage and the hairless smooth second skin of their legs. He was with the one in charge of him at some point, the one all the others deferred to, and on an impulse he snatched at the man’s pelt, the whiteness there, the gleam of it, and was startled to see it detached from the man’s head and dangling from his own fingers. The man—the big flushed face, the veins like earthworms crawling up his neck—leapt from his seat with a cry and made to snatch the thing back, but the child was too quick for him, darting round the room and hooting over this thing, this hide that smelled of musk and the friable white substance that gave it its color.

Gabbling, the man came after him, and, terrified now, the child ran, ran to a kind of stone that was transparent and gave a view of the outdoors and the courtyard. This was glass, though he had no way of knowing it, and it was an essential component of the walls that imprisoned him. The man shouted. He ran. And the stone shattered, biting into his forearm with its teeth.

They put a bandage of cloth on his wound, but he used his own teeth to tear it off. Blood was a thing he knew, and pain, and he knew to avoid brambles, the hives of the wasps, the scaled stone of the ridges that shifted underfoot and cut at his ankles with mindless ferocity, but this was different, a new phenomenon: glass. A wound of glass. It puzzled him and he took up a shard of it when no one was looking and ran it over his finger till the pain came again and the blood showed there and he squeezed and squeezed at the slit of his skin to see the brightness of it, vivid with hurt. That night, just before supper, he tugged at the other man’s hand, the one who smelled of manure and mold, till the man took him out into the courtyard; the instant the door was opened he made a run for the wall and scaled it in two desperate bounds and then he was down on the far side and running, running.

They caught him again, at the foot of the woods, and he fought them with his teeth and his claws but they were bigger, stronger, and they carried him back as they always had and always would because there was no freedom, not anymore. Now he was a creature of the walls and the rooms and a slave to the food they gave him. And that night they gave him nothing, neither food nor water, and locked him in the place where he was used to sleeping at night, though he did not want to sleep, he wanted to eat. He chewed at the crack of the door till his lips bled and his gums tightened round the pain. He was wild no more.

When they took him to Paris, when the Minister of the Interior finally intervened on behalf of Sicard and gave instructions that the child should be brought north to the City of Light, he traveled through the alien countryside with Bonnaterre and the gardener who had acted as his caretaker all the while he was in Rodez. At first, he wouldn’t enter the fiacre—as soon as he was led out of the gates and saw it standing there flanked by the three massive and stinking draft horses with their stupendous legs and staring eyes, he tried to bolt—but Bonnaterre had foreseen the event and placed a cornucopia of potatoes, turnips and small, hard loaves on the seat, and his weakness led him to scramble up the step and retreat inside.

As a precaution against any further mischance, Bonnaterre had the gardener affix a lead to the cord round the child’s waist, a simple braid of rope, the other end of which was held loosely in the abbé’s hand as the public coach made its appointed stops and took on the odd passenger along the way. Was this a leash, such as might be used on a dog? It was an interesting question, one with pointed philosophical and humanitarian implications—certainly Bonnaterre didn’t want to call it a leash, nor did the gardener—and as the boy rocked on the seat and made sick on the floor, the abbé kept hold of it with the lightest touch. The coach heaved on its springs, the gardener made himself small, Bonnaterre looked straight ahead.

And when a blanched, imposing lady and her maid boarded the fiacre in a market town along the way, he went out of his way to assure them that the child was no threat at all and that the lead was solely for his own protection.

Nonetheless, when they stopped that evening at an inn along the way, the child (he was taller now and he’d put on weight, hardly a child any longer) did manage to create a scene. As the coachman held the door for the lady, the child gave a sly, sudden jerk at the lead, tearing it from the abbé’s hand; in the next moment, using the lady’s skirts as a baffle, he bounded down from the coach and lit out up the road in his curious, loping, lopsided gait, the leash trailing behind him. The lady, thinking she was being attacked, let out with a shriek that startled the horses into motion even while Bonnaterre and his servant clambered down to give chase and the hostler fought the reins. As can be imagined, the abbé was in no condition to be running footraces along the rutted dirt byways of a country lane, and he hadn’t gone twenty feet before he was bent double and gasping for air.

This time, however, and to everyone’s relief, the child apparently wasn’t attempting an escape, but instead stopped of his own accord no more than a hundred yards off, where a ditch of stagnant water ran along the road. Before they could prevent him, he threw himself down on his stomach and began to drink. The surface of the water was discolored with duckweed, strands of algae, roadside offal.