Her mother was buried next to her father, in the Idrissi family crypt. After being freed, Palma had lived on her own, in a dark little flat in Vernon, barely ever leaving it, and Clotilde had been terrified that her mother might not wake up one morning and that no one would know. She had understood that Palma would allow herself to die once the work was completed, so she called her on the phone every day, placing no confidence in her reassuring words, and insisted that Valentine take up the baton during the holidays. Clotilde couldn’t disentangle her feelings, somewhere between sadness and relief, when one evening on her way back from court she found her mother at home on her bed, serene and peaceful, as if she had fallen asleep; she had died only a few hours before, the doctor had told her.

Palma had wanted to be buried in Corsica, next to her husband. Room was made. In the crypt there was already another woman sleeping in her bed. So the decision was made to move the body of Salomé Romani a few layers down, so she could rest beside her mother. Speranza had died one evening in May 2020, in the yard at Arcanu, under the shadow of the holm oak, with a basket of freshly picked mastic, angelica and marjoram resting by her side; Lisabetta had followed three months later, her heart giving in one morning without warning, as she pulled up the nettles that surrounded her orchids.

Clotilde set down her towel and walked towards the pool in her swimming costume, confidently displaying the figure of a young seventy-year-old. She still felt comfortable in her skin, and admired without envy the perfect bodies of the young tourists who were reading, sleeping or kissing on the deckchairs. A life, she reflected, came down to that: enjoying the beauty of the world. Its harmony. Its poetry. Contemplating it before it all disappeared. Basically, you don’t die, you go blind. You understand that it’s over when all the wonders around us fade away.

But today, they still shone! In the pool below them, the one directly overlooking the Mediterranean, Eöl, the younger dolphin, was undulating gracefully in front of Matteo, the fair-haired, muscular angel who fed him; the young man’s calm, precise gestures seemed to meld with the dolphin’s choreography. Matteo had the crystal laugh of a Little Prince, she had first heard it about ten years ago when she had encountered him on Alga beach, immersed in Harry Potter, and had confessed to him that in the old days his father was nicknamed Hagrid! No one today would have dared use that name for Orsu, the serious, authoritarian manager of the Euproctes campsite.