Only then did Clotilde speak. Natale sat next to her, holding her hand. Their bodies didn’t touch, only their fingers remained connected. Clotilde let everything come spilling out. Cesareu Garcia’s revelations about her parents’ car, her life which was nothing but a big dark room, the unravelling of her love for Franck, the daughter who was escaping her, who would never be like her, so much so that she found herself wondering whether she really did love her, and then the past as well, that past that was like a cannonball, the mother of whom she was so jealous, the father whom she worshipped, the guy who talked to dolphins, whom she had never forgotten (just after saying this she kissed him), and her big brother Nicolas, her big brother who had opened up a path through life for her, sweeping away the dust in front of her, carrying her on his back when the hill was too steep, teaching her shortcuts, her brother who had abandoned her there, at La Revellata, who had asked her to keep a secret, who hadn’t dared to speak, who had silently got into a car that was a death-trap, without being conscious of it. A lack of awareness, that was what it was, a lack of consciousness.

Clotilde poured out all her fears, all her resentments, as if they weighed a ton and it was only by expelling them that she could become light again, a balloon. And Natale’s hand held her the way you would hold a helium balloon, a little too tightly, the way you might hold a creature that was worryingly frail.

The Idrissi family plot was covered with flowers. A bunch of wild roses, lilies, orchids, most of them freshly cut. It was the most colourful site in the whole cemetery. Cassanu and Lisabetta were not the kind to let the Idrissi ghosts, from that distant admiral to their only son, catch the scent of faded flowers in brackish water. In front of them, in the blazing sun, the old woman with the watering can was approaching.

Clotilde kept wondering, as she twisted Natale’s fingers, her balloon body seeming to want to regain its freedom, why Nicolas hadn’t said anything. Sensible, well-behaved Nicolas, Nicolas the anvil who bore the blows of everyone and everything, Nicolas the model, Nicolas straight as an I and round as an O, Nicolas the handsome, the kind, Nicolas who had everything going for him. Why had Nicolas stolen the keys of the Fuego? Driven the car without a licence? Conceived that crazy plan to visit a nightclub?

The answer was simple, cruel, pitiful, contemptible, dirty.