For a tart. To impress a girl he didn’t even love. To hold a pair of breasts in his hands. To stuff his penis into a vagina that was being withheld from others but perhaps not from him. Because Nicolas, brainy Nicolas, was just a little animal, like all other men, and all of his principles, the whole of his education, all his reading and all his knowledge, meant nothing when faced with those tanned curves, those two panther eyes gazing into his, those lips imparting mute promises. Yes, it was as ridiculous as that. Nicolas had killed her father and her mother, he had killed himself, he had sentenced Clotilde to a life sentence, all in order to possess a girl for the first time, a girl who didn’t deserve him, and not even a girl, just her body, an object, a doll at best.

She saw again the frightened expression on Maria-Chjara’s face as she stood in the door of her dressing room, the evening when Clotilde had said Nicolas’s name and mentioned the accident. Her silence. Her denial. Her flight. She understood, she understood now how great a burden that secret must have been for Maria-Chjara. She, who hadn’t asked for any of it; yet who had provoked it all. She, who had done nothing but throw aside the stub of her cigarette. What fault of hers was it if the sun shone, if the wind blew on the dry grass, and the dead wood?

Arsonist and innocent, all at the same time.

You can’t condemn an object, not even a doll.

‘Promise me, Natale. Promise me that not all men are like that. Promise me that …’

Their lips stopped a few centimetres apart.

‘Excuse me.’

The old woman’s watering can left behind her a trail of droplets that disappeared as if by magic a few seconds later into the ochre clay path. It was then that Clotilde recognised her face, framed by a black veil the same colour as her dress.

Speranza. The witch from Arcanu. Orsu’s grandmother. Lisabetta and Cassanu’s daily helper.

Without deigning to glance at them. Speranza emptied the water from one of the five vases placed on the grave, delicately removed the flowers one by one, filled the vase with fresh water, then rearranged the flowers, pulling off a few leaves and cutting withered stems with a pair of secateurs that she took from the depths of her pocket. She then moved slowly on to the second bouquet.

Suddenly, as if her precise, mechanical gestures had masked an intense hesitation, she turned around.

Her words rattled the silence.

‘You shouldn’t be here!’

Clotilde shivered.

Speranza was looking solely at her, as if Natale didn’t exist. She put down the watering can, and slowly ran her fingers over the letters carved on the mausoleum.

Palma Idrissi (1947–1989)

‘Nor should she.’