Two young women, staying at an isolated table, are intensively looking in each other’s eyes. On the sunny terrace, people are talking and laughing and gesticulating. Nobody seems to notice them. As motionless as a pair of statues, they just look in each other’s eyes.

The beautiful symmetry of their faces is vibrating oddly, almost rawly, in the thin air. Their thin shadows almost reached my table; as they are laying in the blinding white of stone slabs, they seem to touch each other. I suddenly turn my head.

They haven’t moved. I watch them: here we are, reunited in a magical triangle of invisible passions, in an alliance of silence against the stream of loquaciousness. I know that no word left their lips sealed by mystery and that any possible discourse was dissolved in the two shadows which mirror one another.

I’m hallucinating. Others’ words underline the extraordinary presence of this silence. When I read them – ages ago – I had the strange premonition that they were meant for me. They were nothing more than keys for me to understand the scene I see today.

When two girls were strongly desiring one another, a bright phenomenon was taking place in the Casino – a kind of a phosphorescent trace, which was going back and forth, between them.
(Marcel Proust)

People heard about the day when Moromete went into the vineyard and got thirsty, and went to a shed nearby, intending to ask for water, and what do you know? he came upon two girls – and nobody could figure out what were they doing there, as they were naked and one on top of the other.
(Marin Preda)

I also remember the proud Geraldine from Coleridge’s poem – devouring the blond, shy Christabel with her eyes (Ah! What a stricken look was hers!).

Are all these nothing more than unique moments, unprecedented bursts of instinct?

Lesbos, a land of warm exhaustions and delight,
Where the virgins watch with ringed eyes
Each others’ young and soft and wonderful bodies
Caressing and adoring their riped fruits;
Lesbos, a land of warm exhaustions and delight.
(Charles Baudelaire)

If I could only think of this passion as of a bodily exaltation, then what I see now would be only an absurd, unsubstantiate phantom. A phantom which could disappear like maya’s veil. Although…

My love for Tereza grew once more. I forced it to grow and I should have avoided it […] I had to tie my hands together. They wanted to write Tereza a letter, to let her know that I was still picturing myself with her. That cold shivers inside me were signs of an irrational love.
(Herta Muller)

I drive away such old memories and look again towards the isolated table. The two women have surrended to each other’s arms. I know that the slight trembling of their bodies is a sign of the deepest happiness in the world.