After my escape to Paris at the age of thirteen, when my father lost it completely and gave me such a beating that if somebody hadn’t stopped him he would have killed me, all of a sudden I ceased to exist for him. Never a single question about what I was doing or where I was going, nothing. We ate in deathly silence and as soon as the meal was over he unfolded his copy of Ouest-France and started to read while Granny Soize and I watched television. The rest of the time, he avoided me, spending his days fishing, avenging his self-imposed muteness with me by engaging in expansive conversations with his sailing buddies. And when someone happened to drop in, he would pull the wool over their eyes with a laconic, indulgent comment along the lines of she’s such a sweet little thing, which just infuriated me all the more. I couldn’t stand him, but I never did anything about it. No, instead it was right about then that I started engaging in one idiotic act after another in an attempt to provoke him, the most flamboyant of all having been to leave the earth behind by flying off a cliff in a car.

You might have been forgiven for thinking that the day he gave me that thrashing he was just furious with me for having embarrassed him in front of the whole island. Sadly, it was much more damaging than that. After considering the question from every perspective, I arrived at the following conclusion: he was never able to love himself through me the way he had with my late mother, an exquisite trophy which he would exhibit, saying that’s my wife, have you seen how beautiful she is. Because that’s what my mother was, it seems, a very pretty holiday-maker. A young woman about thirty years his junior whom he had seduced with his tattoos and his sailor’s blather. I was born barely six and a half months after they met and I imagine he set sail again the day after I was conceived, because when the matricide happened he had been at sea for five months.

So it was on that infamous day when the gendarmes brought me back that he had kissed me goodbye. I had disappointed him, but the problem is that it all went back to the date of my first breath. My very existence was a disappointment.

Standing there waiting at the end of the jetty, leaning against the railing, taking my place in that long line of women from the island, also allowed me to go back and put myself in Corentine Malgorn’s shoes, Corentine, my great-grandmother, who had stood in precisely that spot a century and a half earlier.