In that brief suspension between the blank state of sleep and full consciousness, I was free, just a normal man wakening on an ordinary day. And I would feel hope, the eternally renewed hope with which human beings rise each morning to engage life. But then I would hear a distant cry from the darkness and smell the smoke, and memory would come. And like a condemned man I would rise to face my prison and the eternity of my sentence. At first today was no different. Then I remembered the boy. I opened the shutters of my room onto the sky and the green landscape and the blue ocean. At breakfast, as I was drinking my bowl of café au lait, I noticed a hand-painted map of the island hanging on the wall of the dining room. I placed my finger on the Hôtel des Îles, then moved it to the priest’s house, and then traced the route back to the woods and the cliffs where I’d fallen. The trees on the map had been painted in daintily with a dark green, and the word Précipice marked in red where the woods met the cliff.
