The coffin set off first, carried by Orsu, Miguel, Simeone and Tonio, the most closely related cousins. One by one, like grains of sand in an hourglass, the members of the gathering followed, emerging from the farm in a dense procession and turning down the path that led to the coastal road, all the way to the Marcone cemetery. The endless black caterpillar crawled slowly along. The path was too narrow for the mourners to walk more than two abreast, or to space themselves out and breathe. It wasn’t until they reached the coastal path that a gentle breeze made the walk more bearable – the last kilometre of the three from the farm to the mausoleum. The procession stretched out along the entire distance, and by the time the coffin reached the Marcone cemetery, the last of the visitors still hadn’t left Arcanu Farm.

Among the crowd of anonymous faces, it might have been amusing to pick out a Prefect, four councillors, seven members of the Corsican Assembly, a president of the Upper Corsican Hunting Federation, a director of the Regional Natural Park … Yes, Cassanu’s Corsica was having its revenge. The higher the rank of the dignitaries, the more they were dressed up in tight shirts, buttoned-up waistcoats, and polished shoes, and so the more they suffered in the intense heat, envying the children in their shorts, the girls in their mini-skirts, the local guys wearing T-shirts to the cemetery as if this were a game of boules.

Like one last wink from Cassanu against the established order.

Most of the crowd were still at Arcanu.

The oak tree had been stripped bare.

Lisabetta had thought about it for years; every day, for hours, from her kitchen window, when she observed the huge holm oak in the middle of the courtyard, she imagined that the ceremony couldn’t be otherwise. She had asked Cassanu to write it into his will.

No flowers, no wreaths.

For everyone, for her, the Arcanu oak, the Revellata oak, that was Cassanu. And so, as Lisabetta had promised herself, every friend, every guest, every visitor who came to pay their final respects to her husband had been offered a branch from the holm oak to set down on his grave. There were more than a thousand stacked up around the trunk, which no longer offered the shade everyone dreamed of.

All of the branches of the three-hundred-year-old tree had been cut off.

The oak was bare, as if it were the depths of winter. A skeleton. A huge corpse stripped of its flesh.

That was what Lisabetta wanted. She didn’t care about how it affected these people, this great crowd. In the end, this tree alone would be dressed in mourning.

For a summer.