He sits down beside me like Robinson Crusoe. I love that cool way he has of hunching himself up. I see a mixture of strength and childishness, a man who is sure of himself and still a little boy in each of his gestures.

There’s only one person like him on this planet and I’ve found him. Except that I was born ten years too late.

‘Let’s just say that your mother, well … as a daughter-in-law she isn’t exactly loved. How can I put it? The fact that she isn’t Corsican is already a handicap. A surmountable one, I grant you. But to make things worse, she’s the one who dragged your father over to the mainland, and not to Aix or Marseille, but to the far north, way above Paris. In the eyes of the Idrissis who stayed here, she stole your dad.’

‘I live north of Paris too.’

‘Yes, but you have Corsican blood. You’re an Idrissi, a direct descendant. You might inherit all this one day, the eighty hectares. Perhaps that will be enough to persuade your Papé …’

*

To tell you the truth, if you haven’t worked it out already, I was truly falling in love. Experiencing that feeling of wanting to give everything to a man, to sacrifice everything, all your values, all your honour, all those promises you’ve made yourself – sworn them, spat them out – to be a free woman. My understanding of this was all over the place, and yet like some female Darwinian reflex, I hardened; as if the women who had survived over the millennia were the most cautious, and all the impulsive, naïve and spontaneous ones had been liquidated. As if, at the end of the evolutionary chain, caution had become almost second nature, a means of survival.

‘Why would I help you, Natale? You adore my mother. I’m sure you’ve done the whole dolphin thing with her, you’ve gone sailing with her, let her dive far from the shore, brought her back to this beach. Why would I help you when you prefer her and you don’t give a damn about me?’

Natale gave me a look that I registered, without knowing how to decode it; but I already knew that that was the way I would like men to look at me for the rest of my life. An astonished look, a look of intrigue, both uneasy and fascinated. The look of a poker-player wondering what his opponent has in his hand, one who keeps on betting just to see …

At last he replied.