My beloved’s apartment is divided into two parts. One part is covered with bamboo parquet, and the other is covered with large ceramic tiles in chessboard pattern. The first part includes several rooms connected by large doors, while the second includes the bathroom, the kitchen, the pantry, and the loggia, as well as a corridor connecting all the auxiliary spaces. Anthracite and beige in color, the tiles are placed at the diagonal with respect to the walls. As I walk around the tiled part of the apartment, I often see faces staring at me. Made of four tiles at the forty-five-degree angle, the eyes are anthracite and the skin is beige in color. The eyes are huge, but there are no mouths or ears. Immobile and impassive, the faces strike me as Martian. Extraterrestrial, that is. Is this how we all see Martian faces, though? Do their well-known features hail from chessboard patterns that are so often used on floors? Having seen no Martians, how else would we recognize their faces if not through chessboard patterns so familiar to us all? And our brains are “creative” to boot. They make faces out of anything on offer, anyway.