During that afternoon in Paris, at the Pompidou Center, I had just seen a major André Breton show, in fact a pretext for a display of surrealist imagery rarely captured under one roof. I went in the company of the friends I was staying with, a young couple, mixed in more than one sense, since it blended two races, two religions and two arts, but more specifically two sets of extremely contrasting features. She, I would look at her face reflection in the Delvaux glass and she seemed to have always been there, surrounded naturally by blond naked women waiting (for whom?) in a deserted train station. She was just like them, except the crudely cut hair on her neck. And, of course, her clothing, like the famous men’s black shirt, which I had seen her wearing most of the times during the week I stayed with them. No idea how this Romanian woman from Sibiu had met the Algerian she was living with. My connection had been of course, she, through a mutual friend, also a musician. He was a Berber proud of his own origin, marked by the purple hued velvet hat with blue silk top which he never seemed to part with. This way, just like her, he was, funny, nonchalant, rather lazy… Hard to tell how he made a living. I doubted it was acting, as he (not even) pretended: I don’t think Othello– the only part I could imagine him play – would run too often in Paris during those days... One single painting stuck with me of the entire show . I think I am crazy: sometimes I fall so madly in love with a painting, I feel like literally breaking into the museum and snatching it. This time it was Magritte’s „Le soir qui tombe”: a shattered window, long glass shards standing underneath and setting sun covering them with its reflection at myriad angles...

From „Seara care cade”, a short story by Mircea Cărtărescu. „De ce iubim femeile”, Humanitas Publishing House, 2004.