‘The land that belongs to us, Clotilde. Nothing ever really belongs to only one person. What would they do with it? Just imagine, the richest man in the history of the world – who would that be? The one who had got rid of all the others? Living alone on the planet, with all the wealth that had ever been produced? He would be the richest man who had ever walked the earth, but the poorest as well, because no one on earth would own less than he did. To talk about wealth, there needs to be at least two of you, like the settlers in westerns, a couple who set up home in the desert in the middle of nowhere, who build themselves a shelter to live in, to have a child there. Wealth grows with a family, with other children, grandchildren, so that the land, the house, the memories, can be passed on. And so, in an absolute sense, wealth should belong to the tribe, to all those people who have helped each other. It belongs to an island, to a country, to the whole country, if humanity were capable of the same solidarity that unites a couple, a family or a tribe.’ And here Papé looks me straight in the eye. ‘But it isn’t so. It will never be so, we have to defend what belongs to us. We have to be the guardians of the balance between the selfishness of the individual and the madness of the world. So to answer your question, my dear girl, this is what belongs to us.’

He points along the Revellata Peninsula all the way to the lighthouse, to the Euproctes campsite, to Alga beach. His finger stops at the edge of Calvi in the north, and by the rocks of Petra Coda in the south, and then he explains that hundreds of square metres belong to the Coastal Conservation department, or the scientists in the Port de Stareso. Strangely, he does not mention the area of Punta Rossa left by his father to Natale’s, nor the heights above Oscelluccia beach on which the Roc e Mare marina was blown up.

My Geode-head turns again.

A hundred and ninety degrees. A full view of the Monte Cinto range, the highest in Corsica. 2706 metres. Apparently if you add on the hundreds of metres of the marine trench under the Mediterranean, the one from which the favoured food of the dolphins rises, it’s a total of over 3500 metres, as high as the peaks of the Alps!

I turn towards my grandfather.

‘I love you, Papé. When you talk like that, it sounds as if you’ve stepped straight out of a film. You know, those films about godfathers defending their clan.’

‘I love you too, Clotilde. You’ll do something with your life, something good. You have ambition, you have convictions. But …’

‘But what?’