Lisabetta turned off the gas under the frying pan, checked to see how the lentils were doing and started laying the table. 11.57 a.m. Perfect.

‘Not many words were exchanged after that. Four sentences, no more, all shrieked by Palma. Four sentences that sounded normal at the time, four sentences that we expected, perhaps what we’d even hoped for. It was afterwards, after the accident, when we recalled them again, like an endless tape … it was afterwards that they assumed such weight.’

‘What did my mother say, Mamy?’

‘She said four things, and with each phrase she took one step further into the darkness that was falling over the mountain.’

‘“Go to your concert, go with her!”

‘A step.

‘“I’ll make way for her, because that’s what you want, what you all want!”

‘A step, and this time she turned round.

‘“But I warn you, don’t take the children with you.”

‘One last step, before leaving the yard.

‘“You hear me, off you go with her. But don’t take the children in the car. Leave them out of all this.”

‘My poor darling, I have thought so often about those last words. I’ve often told myself that here, in the yard, faced with us, faced with the clan, you were all your mother could cling to, that if Corsica took back her husband, she would never agree to it taking her children. Her only battle would be to keep you by her side. Even if that girl took her place, stole everything from her, she would never touch her children. That’s what I thought, probably because I’m a mother and that’s how I would have reacted myself. I think that’s why Palma was so insistent that your father and Salomé didn’t take you to the polyphonic concert.’

Behind her, Speranza banged a pile of plates down violently on the table. Clotilde didn’t turn around. Lisabetta went on.

‘But neither Cassanu, nor Speranza, nor anyone else to my knowledge thought as I did. Your mother ran off down the path, straight down the hill to where the car was parked. As soon as she was out of sight, Salomé pushed her chair back, went over to Paul to kiss him and slide her hand down his back, as if nothing had happened during the last fifteen years, only a simple parenthesis that she was closing again. She stayed like that for a long time, and then, at a leisurely pace, she went down towards the Fuego and sat down in the passenger seat. She had won!’

Speranza banged down every glass, every fork, every knife at her disposal.