Mademoiselle Dargère was extremely pretty, and the children loved her, but a constant worry had settled between her eyebrows in the shape of vertical wrinkles that somewhat spoiled her beauty. Her nights were plagued by insomnia, and during those wakeful hours she would hear a chorus of dreams, wraithlike, arising from the sleeping children in their white nightgowns in the dormitories, each with twenty beds, where she would deposit a daily kiss on every brow.

Mornings were diaphanous on the coast. The children all went out in swimsuits far too big for them that got tangled in the waves. The swimsuits weren’t the culprit, Mademoiselle Dargère thought as she leaned against the balustrade on the terrace; it would have taken custom-made suits for these children not to look ridiculous. They had a dark-skinned swimming instructor who mortified them every day by making them take a painful plunge into the waves, which he was careful never to take himself. She couldn’t bear to listen to the children’s cries; they evoked the agony of her own childhood swimming lessons that had given her lifelong nightmares about tidal waves. In the late afternoon she would go for a swim with the water up to her knees, when the beach was deserted. She sometimes brought a book that she never read as she stretched out on the sand after her swim; it was the only time of day she could rest. She was the mother of 150 children who were pale despite the sun, skinny despite a diet recommended by doctors, and hysterical despite the healthy lives they led. Mademoiselle Dargère showered them with the privilege of her beauty. Being near her reassured them and fattened them up more than the nutritional meals prescribed by the best doctors, but the head of the man in flames reappeared in the window every night until it became a horrible necessity to make sure it wasn’t behind the curtains.

One night she didn’t sleep a wink, but there was no head to be found. She looked for it behind the curtains, and what kept her up was precisely the possibility of a good night’s sleep. The head seemed to have left for good.

The next morning in the dormitories, a strange vexation had the children on the verge of tears. Their mouths were filled with pent-up cries. Mademoiselle Dargère thought she saw a parade of senior citizens from a nursing home march by in navy blue bathing suits on their way to the beach. Carolina, her favorite, the only one with a body strong enough to fill out her swimsuit, escaped the grasp of her arms.

The beach that morning was awash with mysterious cries trapped inside the waves.

Mademoiselle Dargère leaned her heavy melancholy against the balustrade, as if bidding farewell to beauty, before running up to the mirror in her room. The head of the man in flames appeared to her from the other side. From that close she could see a face covered in smallpox that had the power to arouse the same emotion as a well-baked flan. Mademoiselle Dargère attributed the fury of his face to those sunburns that spill like boiling liquids over thin skin. She applied limestone oil compresses but the image of the head in flames had made its home in the mirror.