She waited for Cassanu to react.

Not a word. He was waiting.

OK, Papé, if you really want me to deliver a good kick to our family secrets …

‘I’m not a little girl any more, Cassanu. I know my father cheated on my mother. Everyone knew about it, the locals all made jokes about it. So why be angry with Natale and Palma?’

At last the old man reacted.

‘The problem lies elsewhere, Clotilde. It started long before all that, long before you were born. The problem is that your father never should have married your mother.’

And there we were. Twenty-seven years later, there we were.

‘Because she wasn’t Corsican?’

‘No, because your father was already promised to another girl. Before he met your mother, before he fell in love with her, before he gave up everything for her.’

‘A Corsican girl, I suppose?’

‘Her name was Salomé. She was part of our clan, almost part of our family. She was faithful to him, and would have remained faithful. And Paul would have remained faithful to his island. Your mother wasn’t the kind of woman he needed. There it is, Clotilde, there’s the fatal flaw. Your mother wasn’t the woman you thought she was.’

The words floated in the silence, the wind seemed to have carried them there so that they clung to this isolated mountain peak. Speranza’s words in the Marcone cemetery:

Believe me, women are capable of that. Your mother cast a spell on your father, she took him away, caught in her net, far away from all those who loved him …

They mixed with the laughter of the men at the Euproctes bar, when she was fifteen and learned of her father’s infidelity.

Paul should have lived here, if your mother hadn’t killed him. He should have lived here, do you hear me? Lived here. Not come back here to die.

Cassanu coughed, noisily, like cannon-shots scattering the voices of the past.

‘It’s as simple as that, dear girl, your father shouldn’t have married your mother. He regretted it. We all knew he would. But by then it was too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

He stared regretfully at Clotilde.

‘You were born. You and Nicolas.’

‘And?’

He closed his eyes for several seconds, as if hesitating to say any more, then he seemed to make up his mind.

‘And … Palma had joined the scene, like a worm in an apple. After that no one could avert the tragedy.’

‘The tragedy?’

Was Papé talking about the accident?

First of all they had accused her brother, now it was her mother’s turn?

‘Don’t try to find out any more,’ Cassanu added. ‘I’m sorry, Clotilde, despite our shared blood, despite the land that you will inherit, you will never be part of our clan. For that, you have to live here. There are things you can’t understand, things you can’t learn.’