My eyes swivel from one side of the peninsula to the other, and then they come rest on Cervone. I stare at him, with his two-bit sociology, incredulous. Still no trace of the Aryon.

And he’s got me.

‘Don’t believe me then, Clotilde. Don’t believe me. Find yourself a surfer, an explorer or a space man who promises you the stars and then we’ll talk again. But Recisa Bay is where I’m going to find a girl who’s better looking than me, who’s kinder, and hard-working, and affectionate.’

‘You really are hopeless!’

I shouldn’t have said that, I know, but it just came out like that. I immediately felt a bit like the representative of all the surfers’ wives, and before them the wives of the sailors, the lorry drivers, the soldiers, all those women who spent their lives waiting for their lovers to come home.

Cervone is clearly annoyed.

‘Bitch! What do you expect from that old man of yours? Stop scanning the horizon, he’s not coming back any time soon. You want me to tell you where the Aryon is? Where your Natale Angeli has gone? He’s taken a trip with your mother! Oh yes, my girl, the only thing those dolphins are going to get to eat is your mum’s bra and panties when your angel throws them in.’

I want him to shut up. I stare like an idiot at the white sails gliding gently on the horizon. Sailing boats, just sailing boats, no fishing boats. But Cervone is off again.

‘Don’t be sad, my darling. Don’t be cross with your mother. She’s pretty. She’s sexy. It would be wrong of her to deprive herself. And also she’s been delicate enough to go out and have Angeli screw her on the high seas. Not like your father …’

‘What about my father?’

And here that bastard Cervone has scored a point. He doesn’t add a word, he just stares at the Port of Stareso on his right, from where the Aryon set off, and gazes along the customs path, until his eye comes to rest on the Revellata lighthouse.

Then he says:

‘The lighthouse, like everything else around here, belongs to the Idrissis. I think your father must have the key.’

I left him.

I walked along the path, towards the lighthouse a hundred metres in front of me.

I pushed open the door, which wasn’t bolted.

I stepped forward, I heard muffled laughter.

I looked up.

I slowly climbed the spiral staircase, until I was seized by vertigo, not because of the spinning stairs, the heat, the height, the sheer drop you were aware of each time you passed a slit in the wall, but because, in my naivety, I expected that there would be two of them, dad and his mistress.

Only two.

*

*     *

It’s the big day, he said to himself again, closing the notebook.