‘But, you won’t get annoyed, will you? You won’t leave me here and run all the way back down?

‘What is it, Papé?’

‘You’re not Corsican. You’re not a real Corsican, I mean. Here, the women wearing black don’t have skulls on their dresses. Here, women are discreet, they say nothing, here women rule over the household, but nothing else. I know what I’m saying will make you jump, my little rebel, but what do you expect, I’m used to things being as they are. I’m used to loving women like that. Everything you represent goes over my head, Clotilde, even though I too place freedom above everything else. If I’d been born forty years later, perhaps I’d have married a woman like you.’

‘That’s what Papa did!’

‘No, my dear. No. Palma isn’t like you.’ He remained silent for a long time. ‘So, come on, what did you want to ask me?’

Forty-five degrees. A bird’s-eye view of the Balagne. The panorama of the garden of Corsica runs from Calvi to L’Ile Rousse. With a little imagination you can even make out the desert of Agriates and the port of St-Florent at the foot of Cap Corse. I stare at the sea, as if taking a deep breath before diving, and then explain everything. The dolphins, Orophin, Idril and their babies, Natale who talks to them, the Aryon, a jetty to moor it to, then a bigger jetty to moor a bigger boat off, the off-shore sanctuary and, on the shore, a terrace, a bar … And I stop there. I don’t immediately mention the dolphin house, and certainly not the female architect that Natale has been speaking to.

Papé listens to me without saying a word.

Three hundred and twenty degrees. A direct view of La Revellata. From here the peninsula looks like a sleeping crocodile! The grey-green skin, with the Oscelluccia headland and Punta Rossa forming its big feet, and its mouth floating in the water at the end of the peninsula. A thousand white rocks lined up like teeth, and the lighthouse that looks like a pimple on its nose.

And then at last my Papé speaks. With a little smile curling the corners of his mouth.

‘What’s so extraordinary about a dolphin?’

That’s the last thing I was expecting.

So I try to explain what I felt on the Aryon, when I dived, when I swam with the cetaceans. He must be able to hear the emotion in my voice, my arms are trembling, I’m welling up just thinking about it. So I seize the moment, because I’m sincere and it’s obvious.

‘Please say yes, Papé, say yes. Say yes, just for the happiness of all those people who will be able to dive like I did. Natale just wants to share this treasure.’