She’s less than ten metres away from Nicolas now, then suddenly Maria-Chjara stops.

Yellow …

Perhaps she has sensed eyes upon her.

Maria-Chjara moves away from the lights, her dress now lit only by moonlight.

White.

It’s the last thing I expected. Maria-Chjara has turned her back on my brother and is presenting her bare arms, her clammy breasts, her wet waist that a boy’s two hands could wrap around … to Hermann.

The cyclops can’t believe his eyes.

12

14 August 2016, 6 p.m.

Tomorrow, when you visit Arcanu Farm to see Cassanu and Lisabetta, please go and stand for a few minutes beneath the holm oak, before night falls, so that I can see you.

Those few words, written in a hand so like her mother’s, were going round and round Clotilde’s head in a loop.

Faster and faster.

Tomorrow … so that I can see you …

She struggled against two contradictory feelings, impatience and fear, like the feeling a lover gets, both electrifying and petrifying, the night before a first tryst.

Tomorrow … the message said.

So in less than two hours now. They were invited that evening to Arcanu Farm, to have dinner with the grandparents. Who would be there waiting for them? Who would see them?

Clotilde hesitated by the mirror in the shower block. Should she let her long black hair hang loose over her shoulders, or put it up in a tight chignon? She didn’t dare consider the third option, of ruffling it up into a witch-like hedgehog the way she did when she was fifteen. Everything seemed muddled inside her head. She tried to concentrate and remember the details of her grandparents’ farm, the dust of the big sunny yard, the giant holm oak that would surely still cast its shade, the sea hidden behind the baked-clay buildings on the slope … but the next words of the letter were superimposed on these scraps of memory.

I will recognise you, I hope.

I would like your daughter to be there too.

Clotilde had asked Valou to make an effort, to put on a long skirt and a top that wasn’t too low cut, to tie up her hair, and avoid chewing-gum and Ray-Bans. She had agreed grudgingly, without even trying to dispute the reason why she had to drop her tourist outfit to go and visit an eighty-nine-year-old great-grandfather and a great-grandmother of eighty-six.

The shower block was deserted but for Orsu, who was going around it with a mop. He moved slowly, picking up the huge bucket with his good arm each time he went to clean the next shower. Clotilde had noticed that he cleaned each block every three hours, the same rhythm with which he approached the other tasks he was charged with: watering the flowerbeds, sweeping, weeding, lighting. It was slavery!