“Now, don’t start panicking all over again! I swear there aren’t any more Russian Cossacks,” said Amélia. “Not even in Sunny Isles. I don’t know why they suddenly popped into my head.”
“Cutting off the hands of little children caught stealing bread…”
“Okay, okay,” said Amélia. “I didn’t mean to come up with such an extreme comparison… but you know what I mean…”
Just as Magdalena was about to say something, a chill ran through her body. She wondered if Amélia could tell she was trembling.
Toward evening, Nestor and Ghislaine were in the Korolyov Museum of Art studiously inspecting a painting about three feet high and two feet wide… A caption on the wall said, “Wassily Kandinsky, Suprematist Composition XXIII, 1919.”
::::::What the hell is that supposed to be?:::::: Nestor wondered.
There was a big aquamarine brushstroke down here near the bottom and a smaller brushstroke up there in red… but a red dull as a brick. The two had nothing to do with each other, and in between them… a huge batch of narrow black lines, long, short, straight, bent, sickly, crippled, running over one another in promiscuous tangles but veering away from the occasional congestion of dots and dabs of every color you could imagine, so long as it clashed. ::::::Is this supposed to be a joke on a lot of serious people who think this is a great thing the public-spirited oligarch Sergei Korolyov has done for Miami?:::::: It was so crazy, Nestor couldn’t help but lean close to Ghislaine and say… in the kind of hushed house voice:
“That’s great, huh? Looks like an explosion in a sanitation dumpster!”
Ghislaine said nothing at first. Then she leaned close to Nestor and said in a pious tone, “Well, I don’t think it’s here because they hope you’ll like it or you won’t like it. It’s more because it’s a sort of milestone.”
“A milestone?” said Nestor. “What kind of milestone?”
“A milestone in art history,” she said. “I took a class last semester in early-twentieth-century art. Kandinsky and Malevich were the first two artists to do abstract paintings and nothing but abstract paintings.”
That was a jolt. Nestor could tell that in her own mild, sweet way, without wanting to hurt his feelings, Ghislaine had rebuked him. Yeah! He hadn’t figured out exactly how, in so many words, but she had rebuked him… in a hushed tone. What was it with all these reverent voices?… as if the Korolyov Museum were a church or a chapel. There must have been sixty or seventy people in the two rooms. They huddled reverently before this painting and that painting, the faithful did, and they communed… communed with what?… Wassily Kadinsky’s ascendant soul?… or with Art itself, Art the All-in-One?… It beat Nestor… These people treated art like a religion. The difference was that you could get away with joking about religion… You only had to think of all the ways people played with the Lord, the Savior, Heaven, Hell, the Outer Darkness, Satan, the Choir of Angels, Purgatory, the Messiah, Creeping Jesus… for humorous effect… In fact, there were plenty of people who wouldn’t feel comfortable using them seriously… whereas with Art you didn’t dare make fun of it… it was serious stuff… if you went around making would-be funny remarks… obviously you were a palurdo… a simpleton… a meathead unable to detect the self-demeaning clumsiness of your sacrilege… So that was it! That was why treating Kandinsky’s Suprematist Composition XXIII as a big solemn joke was so unfunny, puerile, excruciatingly embarrassing… that was why Ghislaine couldn’t just go along with it and emit a harmless little chuckle to lighten the load of his insensitivity and move on to some other subject… That, in turn, made him terribly aware of his lack of education.
It wasn’t that people with college degrees were any smarter than other people. He knew so many retards with BAs after their names, he could publish a reference book called Who’s a Loser. But along the way they picked up all this… stuff you needed for conversations. Magdalena used to call it “all that museum stuff,” and that was his problem now. He didn’t have—but he broke off that train of thought because he just couldn’t have Magdalena on his mind. All he could think of now was that Ghislaine had rebuked him… in the mildest way she could think of, but she had rebuked him, and he was damned if he was just going to stand here in front of this piece-a-shit painting as the