Halfway along one of the long brick walls stand two bandonion players, a third man with a bass, and a violinist with a guitar leaning against a closed suitcase at his side. The men’s white shirts glow in the light produced by the flames. Here, in this place where everyone appears to be alone, slowly, imperceptibly at first, time starts to breathe again.

The two bandonion players glance at each other. One of them has gleaming black hair and his biceps ripple darkly under the thin fabric of his tight white shirt. The other man, who has a moustache, stares at his colleague with such intensity that it seems as if he might dive into his eyes. They are intensely, erotically, almost furiously virile. The bassist and the violinist have their eyes closed. They have surrendered, and their abandon fills the room with an erotic charge.

The first bandonion player’s foot taps the rhythm, and the second falls in with the beat, soon joined by the bassist and the violinist, whose eyes are still closed. They are music incarnate. I’m addicted from the very first note.

A man in a suit steps out of the shadows into the flickering light. His eyes too are closed as his arms embrace an invisible woman. Thus he dances, but he is not alone.

Women detach themselves from the scattered sofas, pillars, and walls; men begin to stir. They resemble wild beasts circling each other in a cage or prowling under the open sky, and although I cannot figure out how it happens, the first couples come together, catch hold of each other for an instant, dance, and then release each other again. Their changeovers appear to symbolize my unrest in recent years as I hastened from one war to the next, from one person to the next, and then back to my solitude. Like the man still dancing on his own with his eyes closed, as if that is the only way he can visualize the woman in his embrace, I clasp at empty air and do not know who is in that space.

Eschewing grand gestures, the couples spin wordlessly across the concrete floor. They stride, they fuse, they continue on their twisting paths. Their eyes flash with menace and hope. One more step and you’re mine! Inhibition lurks just beneath a veneer of restraint.

The woman emerges from the depths of the darkness, as if she were surfacing from the waters of the night. I don’t know her, and yet I’ve seen her a thousand times before. I have no idea who she is, but I’ve been calling her name forever.

At first I cannot see how she does it. Does she grab the men as she passes? Does her hand say, Take me? Is her body emitting secret signals that you can only detect from up close?