Speranza wiped the corners of her eyes with her apron, then threw away the onion and tomato peelings.

‘Salomé was pregnant. It was too late for her to have an abortion, she was too far gone. The baby was born on 5 May 1989. He came into the world without a cry, with one arm, one leg and half of his face already paralysed. So Salomé adopted another strategy, that of the young mother who has nothing left to lose, let alone her honour, but who will risk everything to save that of her son. That summer, for the first time, Salomé stopped hiding. She started showing herself at the beach, she set down her towel a metre from your mother’s, she undid her top on the pretext of breastfeeding her son; she strolled around the market in Port de Stareso in a flimsy dress, she even rolled her pram over Palma’s feet. Of course your mother knew it was Salomé. Of course she knew who the baby’s father was. Yes, that summer, even though you couldn’t have known at the age of fifteen, Salomé took your mother to the brink. And it worked – probably beyond all her dreams.’

11.36 a.m.

Lisabetta added the figatelli to the frying pan, scattered it with thyme and dropped in half a bay leaf.

‘Your mother took a lover …’

Clotilde was about to protest, no, Mamy, that’s not what happened, nothing happened between Natale Angeli and my mother, but her grandmother knocked the stewpot against the gas with a sound like a gong, and Clotilde imagined it was to make her stay quiet.

‘Salomé confronted your father, reminded him of his responsibilities. She carried little Orsu around in a scarf, wrapped against her breasts. Now it was child versus child, woman versus woman, Corsica versus Continent. Your mother’s name was Idrissi, seven letters at the bottom of a register in the town hall, but everything else, everything that the name Idrissi represented, belonged to Salomé.

A thought darted into Clotilde’s mind. That her father, in that summer of ’89, might have thought about abandoning them, letting them go back home with Maman while he stayed there, in Arcanu, to bring up another child, to establish another family.

Lisabetta uncorked a bottle of wine, Clos Columbu, 2007.

‘Everything came crashing down on 23 August 1968 – the day when Palma put up her tent on La Revellata. That day would be played out over and over again.’

She tasted the wine and pulled a face before going on.