Finally the crowd dispersed. Clotilde, after hugging Lisabetta for a long time, walked over towards a bench that overlooked the Mediterranean. Palma remained seated and silent. In spite of the heat, she had put a fine silk shawl around her shoulders: black with a pattern of wild roses. Valentine sat beside her, tapping on her mobile phone. Had her grandmother known, in her prison, that they’d invented a contraption that all teenage girls were addicted to?

There were so many things her mother didn’t know. There were so many things she didn’t know about her mother. Now they had all the time in the world to catch up. It wouldn’t be easy. Since regaining her freedom, Palma hadn’t talked much, hadn’t told many stories, most of the time she had remained silent. Listening.

She was sixty-eight years old, too much light made her tired, as did noise, agitation, questions, everything went too quickly for her, there was too much information to take in. Too many surnames, too many first names.

She got confused. When she saw Valentine, her granddaughter, she sometimes called her Clotilde, as if time had stopped during her captivity, and her fifteen-year-old daughter had been transformed.

Transformed into what she had hoped for. A daughter who looked like her.

Clotilde didn’t care. Today, she was at peace.

She stood beside the bench where her mother and her daughter were sitting, her eyes turned towards the sea.

‘He … he’s gone,’ said Palma.

Clotilde thought at first that her mother was talking about Cassanu, then she realised that she had been looking out beyond the Revellata lighthouse.

A boat was heading out to sea, and they both recognised it as the Aryon, Natale’s form bent over the wheel.

‘He’s gone,’ Palma repeated.

For the first time since her release, her mother tried to put a few more words together.

‘I’ve thought … of him a lot … I was about forty years old … when I went into … my dark room … I was still … a beautiful woman … I think … I had a mirror … I forced myself to forget Natale … My greatest fear … was that he would see me again … Time is cruel … unfair to women … a man in his fifties … doesn’t love a woman … of seventy …’

Clotilde didn’t reply.

What could she say?

She merely allowed herself to be swallowed up by the view, since she loved it so much, to let her eyes roam from the Austrian cross at the top of Capu di a Veta, to Calvi citadel, then further down to the Euproctes campsite, to Alga beach, to Oscelluccia, the ruins of the Roc e Mare marina, the Revellata lighthouse.

‘Look, Maman,’ said Valentine, who had finally unglued her eyes from her mobile phone.

‘What?’

‘Down there, out at sea, just past the lighthouse.’

She couldn’t see anything.

‘Towards the Aryon. Four black dots.’

Clotilde and Palma narrowed their eyes but couldn’t see anything.