I continue along the road that leads to the top bordering the reef, where it would only take getting out of the car and looking out over the edge of the cliff to find oneself standing high above a rough, black sea. Here the mist clears and I can see them beyond the last curve, laid on the slope, caressed by the sun, with freshly cut grass and a new fence to enclose the area. Hundreds of graves, large and small, scattered seemingly at random at the foot of the lighthouse fortress, all that remains of a Jewish community that was one of the most thriving in the Mediterranean. Some of them are slabs on the ground, others are cippi or columns, or else simple chiselled stones that emerge just a few centimetres from the ground, all of them sculpted in the local white stone, the same that served to build the temples of the acropolis on the facing hill, twenty-five centuries ago. When you get closer to read, here’s the revelation: words, their names, their trades are written in their own language. Fingers trace with curiosity and devotion those impenetrable words and little by little, one’s eyes learn to accept the inability to read. Letting themselves slide along the rounded contours of that alphabet, life and death, for an instant, become cabbala and the endless number of names that these ancient merchants gave to God all become possible at the same time, as if ignorance of that language were a blessing, and as if I were there precisely to perform that slow delicate deed, honouring someone who is no more.

This is a wonderful place to be buried, I think, while I start walking back towards the lighthouse and I turn round to look at them so white in the grass.