Au crépuscule de sa vie, Clara Ignorante raconte avec nostalgie l’histoire de ses grands-parents siciliens arrivés en Tunisie pour fuir la misère. Sur cette terre que tous se sont appropriée – colons français, migrants italiens, occupants allemands – sa famille connaîtra la prospérité puis la déchéance. Et de cette terre seront exhumés les os de son père devenus noirs, preuve d’un empoisonnement. Vengeance, trahison ou malédiction ? La narratrice qui écoute Clara tente de démêler les fils de sa mémoire, quitte à en exhumer aussi les secrets. Dans ce premier roman envoûtant et documenté, Agnès Jésupret recolle les morceaux d’un destin fracturé par les aléas de l’Histoire.

Clara settles in a leather armchair to recount her Tunisian childhood to her interlocutor, an anonymous biographer. The latter seeks to put down in black and white the history of this family that left Sicily at the start of the 20th century to conquer their own little share of comfort on the other side of the Mediterranean. Clara’s father, Pietro Ignorante - thereafter known as Pierre - works in Tunis and manages to carve out a respectable position in this society where all communities peacefully coexist without ever mixing. He buys a small villa for his family, a bicycle for Clara, and even a car. But it takes only six months for this prosperity to come under threat. In November 1942, the Germans occupy the country, enclose the Jews in camps, and stoke the underlying tensions between French, Italians, and Arabs. At the liberation, Pierre Ignorante is thrown in prison for collaboration and dies there in dubious circumstances. Years later, his blackened bones are found when his remains are dug up. For Clara, there’s no doubt, her family is the victim of a curse. She goes back over the course of her memories as the narrator listens, trying to unravel the threads of these remembrances, to the point of digging up secrets as well.