The Beauty of Humanity Movement (64 page)

He throws the paper down and walks along the corridor to Miss Maggie’s office. He finds her having breakfast—a cup of black coffee and a buttery French pastry—and adding red dots to her map. At her invitation, T
takes a seat. They visited five galleries yesterday, perhaps only a quarter of the locations she has marked on the map.

This morning she has made appointments to meet two artists at their studios. The first of these artists turns out to be one Miss Maggie represents in her gallery. He works in an old stilt house that has been lifted beam by beam from his mother’s village in the North and rebuilt in the middle of a housing block near West Lake. He has old-fashioned manners and no cellphone, or wife, but given the prices of his paintings T
wonders just how honest he is, because what the hell does he do with all that money?

T
leads Miss Maggie to the next atelier marked on her map, turning down one of the narrowest lanes in the Old Quarter. Miss Maggie has never met this artist, though she says he is very famous, which must mean famous in the ninety-eight per cent international sense because T
has never heard of him.

“Here’s what I want us to do,” she says. “Let’s pretend I’m your client and you’re taking me on a tour of various galleries and studios. I’m just trying to get a general overview of the contemporary art scene, I haven’t committed to buying anything yet.

“Oh,” she adds, “and I don’t speak a word of Vietnamese.”

T
repeats these instructions to himself as they pass through a set of iron gates. They’ve entered a garden full of Buddhas—two hundred or more Buddhas—laughing happy Buddhas, Buddhas with crumbling faces, bright orange, bronze and marble Buddhas, stone Buddhas covered in moss. This artist is certainly crazy for Buddhas. Or maybe he’s just plain crazy, thinks T
, because he appears in the garden wearing
a flowing silk robe, more like a lady’s
áo dài
than anything a normal man would wear.

“Wow,” Miss Maggie says. “He’s a real dandy.”

T
will look up the word
dandy
in his dictionary when he gets home. For the moment, he chooses to interpret this as “peacock.” The man is like a strutting peacock, displaying his colourful plume of feathers.

“Welcome! Welcome!” the artist bellows as Miss Maggie greets him in English. “Please”—he waves his arms—“Coffee?”

It would seem he has quickly exhausted all the English he knows. “How serious is she?” the artist asks T
quietly, still smiling.

“She has a serious interest in art,” T
replies.

“I mean as a buyer. How serious is she about buying?”

T
fears an honest answer would cause the bellowing man in women’s clothes to do something unpredictable, so he responds with what he knows in English to be called a white lie, even though for him white hardly seems an innocent adjective, symbolizing death as it does. “She takes buying very seriously,” T
says, nodding and matching the artist tooth for tooth with his New Dawn smile.

“Sit! Sit!” the artist says to Miss Maggie, once they have followed him up the stairs to his studio.

Miss Maggie sits down on a stool that swings 360 degrees, enabling her to view the art covering three walls of the rectangular room of this renovated tube house. At the far end of the room a team of workers are standing at a long table. Nine young men and women wearing splattered aprons are each working on a different painting. The last artist worked alone, but then, thinks T
, perhaps that is because he was not so famous.