The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.
They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio's Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden—pinched and emaciated.
"Good afternoon," said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.
It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.
"American?" asked the Frenchman.
"English."
The word came out wrong—barked, indignant—a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.
He looked at the man's perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted runoff.
He realized he was staring only when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, "Yes . . . ?"
Adam gestured to the frescoes. "Las pinturas son muy hermosas," he said in his best Spanish.
As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio's genius, he wondered whether his antagonism toward them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.