And the Stones Cry Out

by Clara Dupont-Monod

Genres: Siblings; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"True in the way only great fiction can be . . . Every word matters. Read it" CLARE OSHETSKY

"Clara's sentences are tender and illuminating, they carefully guided me along a complex family story, like stones skimming on water . . . I'm so thankful this book exists" SZILVIA MOLNAR

This is the story of a child with black eyes that float in and out of focus, a child soft and round, with translucent, blue-veined legs unable to hold his weight. This is the story of his place in the Cévennes house where he was born, overlooked by swaying trees and craggy mountains.

This is the story of his siblings: the eldest who spends his days cheek-to-cheek with his baby brother, attuned to the rushing, buzzing, whistling sounds that connect him to the outside world; the sister who rejects him and resents him for consuming the attention of her parents and brother, for turning her family upside down; and the youngest, whose life unfolds in the shadow of what his brother's might have been.

This is the story of the ancient stones embedded in the courtyard walls, devoted witnesses to the children's lives, who watch over them and tell their tale.

A fable for our time, And the Stones Cry Out delicately paints the portrait of a family adapting to their circumstances, to each other, and to a world not built for difference.


Translated from the French by Ben Faccini

Release date: April 11, 2024

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 176

Sample

ONCE UPON A TIME, A MALADAPTED BOY WAS BORN into a family. “Maladapted” is an ugly, demeaning word, but it captures the reality of his limp body and empty, wandering eyes. Terms like “damaged” or “incomplete”, which imply an object beyond use, fit for the scrap heap, are too strong. “Maladapted” rightly suggests that this boy lived outside any form of functionality – his hands couldn’t grasp and his legs couldn’t move – but he existed, all the same, on the edge of other people’s lives. True, he was not fully part of them, but he was present, like a shadow in the corner of a painting: disconcerting, yet deliberately placed there by the artist.

*

The family didn’t notice a problem at first. In fact, the baby was rather beautiful. Visitors from the surrounding villages came to see the mother. They slammed their car doors and stretched before taking a few tentative steps; getting to the hamlet required driving on tiny, winding roads, stomachs turned inside out. Some friends came from nearby mountains – though “nearby” didn’t mean much where the family lived. To get anywhere you either had to go uphill or downhill. There was no escaping the steep, rolling slopes. Sometimes, in the hamlet’s courtyard, you felt as if you were hemmed in by towering waves waiting to break, their green froth sparkling. When the wind picked up and shook the trees, there was even an ocean-like rumbling. The hamlet then resembled an island sheltered from the storms.

The door into the courtyard was thick, rectangular and studded with black nails. A medieval door, the experts said, which had probably been made centuries earlier by the family’s ancestors around the time they settled in the Cévennes. The hamlet’s two main houses had been built before the porch, bread oven and woodshed – and the mill on the other side of the river. You could hear the sighs of relief from inside visitors’ cars when the narrow road tapered into a small bridge and the terrace of the first house by the river came into view. Behind it stood the second house where the boy had been born. The mother opened the medieval door to greet her friends and family. She offered them chestnut wine in the shade of the courtyard. Everyone spoke quietly so as not to frighten the well-behaved infant snug in his cot. He smelled of orange blossom, and looked cheerful and placid. He had round pale cheeks, dark hair and big black eyes. He was a typical child of the region, an intrinsic part of it. The mountains watched over his cot like matriarchs, their feet steeped in rivers, their flanks clothed in a mantle of wind. The boy belonged in that landscape like any other. Babies up there had black eyes and the old were thin and wizened. Everything was how it should have been.

*

Three months went by before anyone noticed the boy didn’t babble. He remained silent most of the time, apart from the odd cry. Sometimes a smile appeared, or a frown, or a sigh after he finished a bottle of milk. Occasionally, he got startled when a door slammed. That was it: a few cries and smiles, a frown, the odd sigh or a twitch. Nothing else. He didn’t wriggle. He stayed calm. He was “inert”, his parents thought without admitting it out loud. The baby showed no interest in faces, in dangling mobiles or rattles. Above all, his shadowy eyes didn’t settle on anything. They seemed to rove from side to side, while his pupils reeled and turned, as if following the dance of an invisible insect, latching on to nothing in particular. The boy couldn’t see the bridge, the two houses, or the courtyard separated from the road by an old wall of reddish stones. The wall had been there since time immemorial, demolished a thousand times by storms and passing convoys, and rebuilt a thousand times, too. The boy couldn’t see the mountains with their flayed skin and slopes thick with trees, streaked by torrents. His eyes swept over landscapes and people without lingering.

*

One day, when the boy was in his rocker chair, the mother knelt down beside him. She was holding an orange and she moved it gently from side to side in front of his face. His big black eyes didn’t lock onto the fruit. They were staring elsewhere. Looking at what exactly, it was hard to say. The mother moved the orange back and forth again several times. She had proof the boy couldn’t see properly, or at all.

No-one will ever know what feelings swept through her heart at that precise moment. We, the red stones in the courtyard, who are narrating this story, are devoted to children. We carry their stories deep within us, and it is their tale we wish to tell. We see people’s lives from our position embedded in the wall. We’ve always been witnesses. For the most part, children are the forgotten ones in any story. They are herded around like sheep, ignored more than they’re protected. But children are the only ones who play with stones. They name us. They cover us with bright stripes. They scribble over us, paint us, decorate us with eyes and mouths, give us grass for hair, and stack us one on top of the other to create dens. They send us ricocheting and make goalposts and train tracks out of us. While adults use us, children distract us. That’s why we care for them. It’s a matter of gratitude. Adults forget that they’re indebted to the children they once were. We owe it to children to tell this tale. Indeed, we were looking in their direction when the father summoned them into the courtyard.

*

Plastic chairs were dragged into place by a firstborn boy and his younger sister. Both were dark with black eyes, of course. The firstborn, a mere nine years old, sat bolt upright, his chest puffed out. He had the thin, tough legs of a mountain child, covered in scabs and bruises, legs used to climbing and scrambling over slopes bristling with spiky branches of broom. He instinctively put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. He often appeared aloof, but this aloofness stemmed from exalted, romantic ideals. He valued endurance above all else, and this stopped him from coming across as conceited. He kept an eye out for his sister and imposed his fair rules on his cousins. He demanded courage and loyalty from his friends. Those who took no risks, who couldn’t meet his standards of fearlessness, were worthy of his contempt, for ever. No-one could tell where such assertiveness came from. Unless, of course, it was the mountains that had instilled a toughness in him. We’d often observed it: people are, first and foremost, born to a place and that place is a parent to them too.

That evening in the courtyard, the eldest son sat upright, chin quivering, as he listened to his father. He tried to call upon the knightly codes of valour deep inside him, but he had no need to clench his fists in readiness for a fight. The father explained that their little brother was probably blind. Medical appointments had been made: the family would know what they were dealing with in the next couple of months. They had to consider this blindness as an opportunity; the firstborn and his sister would be the only ones at school to know how to use braille playing cards.

The veil of worry that had fallen over the children quickly lifted at the prospect of this newfound fame. Presented in such a way, the ordeal had some appeal. Who cared if the boy was blind? They’d be the king and queen of the playground. There was a logic to this in the firstborn’s mind. He already had a reputation for being a leader who was sure of his looks and poise, and his brooding remoteness only heightened his aura. He therefore spent the whole of dinner bargaining with his sister to be the first to show the playing cards to his class. The father tried to get them to agree, joining in the charade he’d initiated. No-one had fully understood yet that a fault line had appeared. Soon the parents would view these days as the last untroubled period of their life. Freedom from worry is a perverse notion. It can only be savoured once it is lost, once it has become a memory.

*

The parents quickly realised the baby wasn’t able-bodied either. His head fell forward like that of a newborn. He needed another person’s hand to hold his neck from behind. His arms and legs dangled loose, devoid of strength. If spoken to, the boy didn’t reach out, reply or attempt to communicate. His brother and sister jingled little bells and waved toys of all colours, but still the baby didn’t notice. His eyes remained elsewhere.

“It’s like he’s passed out with his eyes open,” the firstborn told his sister.

“You mean he’s dead,” she said, despite being only seven years old.

*

The paediatrician didn’t think any of this boded well. He advised them to get a brain scan and consult a renowned specialist. They had to make another appointment and leave the valley to reach the hospital. We lost trace of them at that point as there are no stones like us in town. But we imagined them parking the car and carefully wiping their feet on the mat beyond the automatic doors.

They stood in a room, swaying on the grey rubber linoleum floor, waiting for the consultant. He called them into his office. He had the scan results in his hand. He invited them to sit down. His voice was surprisingly quiet as he delivered his irrefutable verdict. Their child would grow, for sure, but he’d remain blind. He wouldn’t walk either. He wouldn’t ever speak. His limbs wouldn’t react to any command as his brain was not transmitting what was required. He would cry and express his discomfort, as well as his satisfaction, but no more than that. He’d remain an infant for ever. Well, not for ever. The consultant then explained, in an even softer tone, that the life expectancy of such children rarely went beyond three years.

*

The parents glanced back over their existence and understood that, from that point on, everything in the future would make them suffer. Everything they’d lived in the past, too; nostalgia for a formerly untroubled time can certainly turn people insane. A rift between a bygone era and a devastating future opened up beneath their feet. Both sides were loaded with pain.

The parents made do with the little courage they had left, though they felt a part of themselves was dying already. In the deepest recesses of their adult souls, a light was dimming. They sat on the bridge, above the river, their hands intertwined, alone and together at the same time, their legs dangling into the void. They wrapped themselves in the noises of the night, like one might wrap oneself in a cape, to keep warm or disappear. They were afraid. “Why us?” they asked themselves. “Why our little boy? Why him?” And, of course: “How will we cope?” The mountains and their valleys made their presence felt in the burbling of waterfalls, in the humming of dragonflies and in the wind.

The slopes around them were made of schist, a stone so brittle it couldn’t be carved. Rockslides were what it did best. The locals yearned for the unbreakable granite or basalt found further north, or even the poro. . .