And so it was that they, each with their dreams still unresolved within them, arrived at the Louvre on a blessed day in September. They were all quieter than normal and were subdued the way people are when enrapt within a puzzle.
There was gaiety outside the Louvre. Lovers sat on the edge of the glass pyramid, and on the margin of the flowing waters, with the sunlight casting a lovely spell on the world.
The charmed open spaces and the sunlight on the splendid palace ought to have lifted the spirits of the crew. But each was enfolded, in-turned, uncommunicative. They each did the work they were meant to do, but without inspiration.
They were met by museum officials and led in through the back way, past the security checks. They were led down polished stone stairs and complicated corridors with Egyptian statues and sphinxes and walls with hieroglyphs; they passed through long rooms with prehistoric moulds and monoliths, with Iberian sculptings, African figures, ibexes in stone, idols in bronze.
Through many corridors and crypts were they led, through what seemed like underground routes and tunnels, through darkened places, emerging again within halls, ascending in lifts.
They journeyed through a universe of paintings, and were regarded by figures on walls in open-eyed dreams, who stared at them the way people do in a room when a stranger enters and disrupts a conversation.
For the first time Lao became conscious that paintings are living things. He became aware that figures within great paintings live and breathe and bustle and carry on their normal busy comic or tragic transactions away from human gaze. But when humans appear they stop and freeze, as if in a game, trying to behave as though they weren’t real.
Lao and Mistletoe exchanged a glance. They knew at once that paintings can be intruded upon. That paintings have a secret life. That they have a secret world of dramas. That paintings contemplate themselves and that the crew was interrupting their contemplation, their activities, and their dreams.
Mistletoe could sense the figures in the paintings waiting for the crew to pass on, to leave them alone. And as the crew entered each room they could feel this unbroken breathing, this sudden stopping of all activity, like children who are up to some mischief ceasing their suspicious play when their parents suddenly appear in the doorway.
It was Tuesday, and the museum was closed to the public, and the air was pristine and fresh with the breathing of paintings, with the breathing of angels and villains, of heroes and gods, of beautiful women and goddesses.
The sunlight of fresher worlds, distant worlds, was present and alive and shining forth its radiance into the stillness of the rooms, filling the spaces with other times, sending the passing film crew into other time zones, making other time realms present, removing them from a day in September to a timeless space where dreams are more real than things.
And they journeyed forth, led by the museum guide, into the great labyrinth of the Louvre. They wandered through dreams materialised in the air, troubled by the gaze of horses, or a murder witnessed, or a suicide enacted, in silence, alone. They were perturbed by glimpses of ravished women, amazed by an intense Napoleon on his wild horse, and astonished by the serenity of a betrayed Christ.
On and on through the swirling spaces they went, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the tranquillity of paintings, silent so as not to alarm the settled dew of stillness.