‘Everything came crashing down in the summer of ’68,’ Lisabetta went on softly, apparently having calculated the duration of her story with the same precision as that of her cooking. ‘And none of us suspected a thing. To tell the truth, when your father started flirting with that young Franco-Hungarian tourist camping in the field that was about to become the Euproctes campsite, we weren’t particularly worried. The Corsicans here hunt the Corsican swallow in the winter and the continental swallow in the summer. Palma would leave at the end of the season like all the other girls. Paul would shed some tears by the ferry, but then get over it a week later. What I believed was the same as everyone believed. But they wrote to each other. If you knew my darling, how much I wanted to take those letters with the Paris postmarks that the postman brought up here to Arcanu and throw them in the fire … If I had done that, my love, you wouldn’t be here listening to me, of course. It’s odd, saying all this to you, but so many tragedies and so many deaths would have been avoided. If you only knew, my poor darling, how many times I have cursed myself for not burning them.’

She abandoned the lentils she was sorting for a moment and gently took her granddaughter’s hand. ‘Paul joined Palma in Paris for the first time at Christmas in 1969, and then again at Easter, then for Ascension, then he stayed up there and we didn’t see him all summer. He spent that summer in the Cyclades, he sent us cards from Naxos, from Sifnos and Santorini, as if he wanted to make our island jealous, perhaps he thought we weren’t jealous enough already. And it was all over, we understood that. Everyone but Salomé. Poor thing, we were all aware that she would never forget Paul. And even if she tried, her childhood sweetheart came back every summer; first with his wife, then with his wife and son, from the summer of ’71, then with his wife, your brother and you from the summer of ’74, and all the summers after that. We welcomed you in Arcanu, we kept up appearances, I even taught your mother to make figatelli, fiadone, and boar stew. Speranza went with her to pick herbs: oregano, mint and angelica. We welcomed her because she was family, even if she had stolen our son, even if we were angry with her, even if basically, just for that reason, we never loved her.’

She was worried about the time, 11.32 a.m., and let go of Clotilde’s hand, then added the lentils to a pot of boiling water. Speranza peeled the onions, not betraying the least emotion.