Chloe Aridjis: Asunder

A mechanical second step.

Satisfied, she returned to her post. I turned back to the painting but the spell had been broken. I moved on from Venus and pretended to study another Velazquez on her left but had no interest just then in Philip IV and decided it was time to leave.

With steps so slow I could hear the creaking leather of my boots, I made my way towards one of the exits and out of Room 30, then crossed the Sunley Room and the Central Hall, into the main vestibule across its mosaic floor and then down the stairs, past the shop on the right, and down one more flight and out into the cool wintry air of the portico where people stood with cigarettes taking in the view of the square. Once past the eight Corinthian columns I took a deep breath, released, forever, from the museum’s clench of hours, released, now and always, from both collections, and picking up speed I rushed headlong down the steps like a child, five, ten, fifteen steps in a new direction, and wasn’t bothered by the backs of statues below for they would no longer be my daily view, and I wondered which way to walk, whether home or to Soho.

While I tried to make up my mind, I stopped to watch a pavement artist, a young man who sometimes came and unfurled his copy of The Last Supper outside the Gallery and anchored it with four stones, touching up his canvas until the winter light withdrew, and he usually stayed on for a few more hours since I’d see him again after work, and that evening I stood and watched him kneeling beneath the glow of the street lamps as he counted out the change in his cap, people hurrying past in the evening chill, some stepping on the corners, even on the faces, of his work, which as far as I could tell was a very accomplished replica in oil paint of the original, but the young man didn’t seem to mind, even when a man in furs stepped right on Christ’s face with his large black shoe or when a pigeon began pecking at Judas Iscariot, and once he’d finished counting his coins he dropped them into a leather pouch which he tucked into his jacket and then placed his cap back on his head, and, still on his knees, lifted each stone from the corners of his scroll, piled them to one side, dusted off the painting’s surface with the back of his hand, and began to carefully roll it up, the long table and the apostles gradually disappearing into shadow. From a few feet away I continued to watch, not stirring until he had finished rolling his canvas into a large, heavy cylinder he then tucked under his arm though it seemed far too unwieldy, and, with confident steps, headed back into the tumult of the city.

Thank you first and foremost to Parisa Ebrahimi, my extraordinary editor at Chatto & Windus. And to Lauren Wein, Andrew Kidd, Anna Stein, Suzanne Dean, Poppy Hampson and Sally Riley.

Thank you to the following friends: Devorah Baum, Mathilde Bonnefoy, Michael Bucknell, Rubén Gallo, Astrid Gessert, Terence Gower, Phillipa Horan, Mary Horlock, Darian Leader, Wolfe Lenkiewicz, Neil Porter, Simon Preston, Sally Read, Lorna Scott Fox, Irene Skolnick, Josh Appignanesi.

And in memory of Malcolm Bowie.

Thank you to Ledig House, the MacDowell Colony and Santa Maddalena Foundation residencies.

Thank you to the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Thank you to Nicholas Donaldson at the National Gallery archives and to art conservator Christian Scheidemann for sharing his knowledge of craquelure.

Thank you to the kind guards at the National Gallery who patiently answered my questions.

And thank you, immensely and forever, to my parents and Eva.

I am particularly indebted to the following sources: George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England , Dario Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution , Knut Nicolaus’s The Restoration of Paintings , and Mary Richardson’s Laugh a Defiance .

CHLOE ARIDJIS was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows from Oxford, then lived in Berlin for five years. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in 2009. She now lives in London.