SEEING THE MOON through the rafters, Madeleine remembers other moons, the same moon: a grey coin dim in the window above her siblings' bed; a golden balloon snagging upon the spires of a city; the sliver that curved away from her as she tumbled off a caravan's slick roof.
What moon, she wonders, is looking down upon the hospital at Maréville? Why, a moon as round and mild as her own face, with eyes set far apart, the forehead high. Shedding light as she once shed droplets of water, her face emerging from the basin. A half-smile, a pox scar, a pair of eyebrows pale as wheat. Madeleine is moon-faced, her mother would say as she handed her the towel, and from that fact deduce a hundred other things, among them a guileless nature, a love of cream. But did she know this luminous face would wake inmates in the asylum, make women bleed, open night-blooming vines, pull everything irresistibly towards it?
Inside the hospital at Maréville, the photographer turns the flatulent man to the window and says, Look.