Hector had been surprised, because he knew that he was fairly kind, but he wondered what Ying Li meant by it. Then she had added, lowering her eyes, ‘I’m not used to it.’
And Hector had felt another pang.
They got up from the table and the waiters jostled one another to help Ying Li on with her coat.
They found themselves outside in the tiny cobbled street.
Hector, of course, very much wanted to take Ying Li back to his hotel, but he felt awkward because that was exactly what the men she worked with did. He sensed that Ying Li also felt awkward, even though she wanted to stay with him.
And so they entered a bar at random, and it was most bizarre in there; there weren’t many people, only some Chinese men who all seemed to know each other and were taking turns to get up on a stage and sing songs in Chinese, probably famous songs. Hector even recognised a Charles Trenet tune, but not the words. And the Chinese men were laughing and buying rounds of drinks. They seemed just like the people in Hector’s country, and he remembered what Charles had said on the plane: the Chinese aren’t really any different from us.
It even made Ying Li laugh, and Hector was glad to see her so cheerful. And when Ying Li laughed he could see how young she was, despite all the expensive things she was wearing that evening.
But it probably wasn’t a good idea to have gone into that bar because, as Hector and Ying Li were leaving, a big car pulled up beside them.
And the tall Chinese man from the other night, the one with the earpiece, stepped out, and in the back Hector could see a not very young Chinese lady looking angrily at Ying Li. The tall Chinese man didn’t even look at Hector, he spoke to Ying Li, and she answered him nervously. Hector couldn’t understand what they were saying because they were speaking Chinese, but he could see that the Chinese man was questioning Ying Li in an unfriendly voice, and that she was flustered. And so Hector put on the foolish air of a satisfied client who understands nothing, and asked the Chinese man in English, ‘Should I pay you?’
The tall Chinese man was a little taken aback but he calmed down. He even smiled at Ying Li, although it wasn’t a pleasant smile. He told Hector that there was no need, that he could just pay Ying Li. And he climbed back into his big car and put his foot flat on the accelerator and sped off. But Hector didn’t see that, because Ying Li was already crying in his arms.
Afterwards, it was easier to take her back to the hotel in a taxi, because a man consoling a woman who was crying didn’t have much to do with Ying Li’s work, it had more to do with Hector’s.
And then in the room, Ying Li stopped crying and they lay on the bed in the dark, although the room was lit up faintly by the city lights outside, and Ying Li remained motionless in Hector’s arms.
He was prepared to lie next to her all night if necessary, but Ying Li soon showed him that she wanted to do what people in love do.
It was different from the first night, it was less joyful, but far more intense.
The next morning when Hector woke up, Ying Li had gone without leaving a note or anything. Hector had wanted to give her money, because he was thinking about the Chinese man, but he realised that Ying Li must have preferred to arrange things herself.
Hector wanted to talk to Édouard immediately, and they met at the café at the bottom of the tower, and because it was Monday it was full of people. Édouard listened to Hector, very seriously, the way Hector listened to people when they told him their story. And then he said, ‘They won’t take it out on her, she’s too valuable. And anyway, I know the Chinese man. I’ll sort it all out. But as far as you two are concerned I don’t think it would be a very good idea for you to see each other again.’
Hector had thought the same, but it’s one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it, and Édouard said, ‘You poor thing . . .’
And now, on the plane, Hector couldn’t think of anything to write in his notebook.
The baby had been looking at him for a while, and stretching its arms out towards him. This made the nanny laugh — because of course you’ve guessed that she was the nanny — and the baby as well.
So Hector smiled at them and felt a little less sad.
Suddenly, a tall blonde lady came up and stood in the aisle near them. Hector understood that this was the mother, who was no doubt travelling with her husband in business class.
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked the nanny.
And then she left again. And the baby’s face crumpled and it began screaming.
Hector took his notebook and wrote down:
Lesson no. 8b: Unhappiness is being separated from the people you love.
HECTOR MEETS UP WITH A GOOD FRIEND
HECTOR was on yet another plane, but this one was rather different from all the others.
(Between this plane and the one before there’d been another, and then another, but these weren’t mentioned because, besides thinking about Ying Li and Clara, nothing much had happened to Hector.)
Firstly, this plane was full of African men and women. Hector was practically the only white person on the plane. Many of the men and women were smartly dressed, almost as if they came from another era, like Hector’s grandparents in the country, when they went to Mass. The women had on long flowery dresses and the men rather baggy suits. Another thing that reminded him of the country was their huge shopping bags, and some even had live chickens and ducks in cages! These animals were quite noisy, but that was just as well because they drowned out the noise of the plane, which also dated from another era. Hector remembered the patients who came to see him because they were afraid of flying, and he told himself that after this flight he’d understand them a lot better. On the other hand, if the plane was old, it was because it had never crashed, which was somewhat reassuring.
Sitting next to him was an African lady with her baby. This time it wasn’t a nanny, but the baby’s real mother. She rocked her child as she read. The baby looked at Hector, who was looking at the lady’s book. Lady isn’t really the right word because she was quite young, about Hector’s age. And you’ll never guess: the book she was reading was a book on psychiatry! The lady was a psychiatrist!
They both found it funny to be sitting next to a colleague, and the lady, whose name was Marie-Louise, explained that she was going back to her country on holiday, because in fact she worked in the country they had just taken off from, where there are more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world. Hector felt nervous about asking her why she hadn’t stayed in her own country (a little like when he asked Charles why he hadn’t built his factories in his own country, if you remember), but the lady was quick to explain why.
‘I want my children to live a normal life.’
She had two older children who had stayed at home, and Hector asked her what she called a normal life. (Even psychiatrists can ask each other questions.)
Marie-Louise replied, ‘I want them to be able to go to school without needing a driver and a bodyguard, for example.’
Hector agreed that indeed that wasn’t a normal life, even though, when he was a child, he would have been very proud to go to school with a driver and a bodyguard, but mothers don’t think like that, of course.
And then the plane began to tilt to one side and make a noise like the dive-bombers in documentaries about the war, and everybody went quiet, except for the chickens and ducks, which made more noise than ever.
Fortunately, this didn’t go on for very long and the plane finally landed quite normally, though with a lot of juddering.
Hector managed to let go of the armrests, and when all the passengers were standing in the aisle, Marie-Louise invited him to come and visit her and her family. She wrote down her address in his little notebook.
When he reached the door to the plane, Hector had exactly the same sensation as when you open the oven to see whether the roast beef is ready and the oven is very hot. This was slightly different though, because it was very bright outside and the sun was beating do
wn. The airport was surrounded by scorched-looking mountains, a bit like the colour of overdone roast beef as a matter of fact.
At customs, the customs officers were African (but we won’t repeat this all the time, like with the Chinese; in this country everybody is African, apart from a few exceptions, which we’ll point out). Families waited in the shade. The little girls were dressed in white ankle socks and ruffs and the little boys in shorts, well, long shorts actually, like the ones worn in Hector’s country a long time ago.
Hector couldn’t see the friend who was supposed to be meeting him. And so he walked out carrying his suitcase, and the sun kept beating down. A porter soon arrived — and then another and another — to help him carry his suitcase over to the taxi rank, which was a few yards away, and Hector thought they were going to start fighting, but fortunately he saw his friend Jean-Michel coming towards him, smiling.
Jean-Michel was an old friend of Hector’s, like Édouard, although they were quite different. Jean-Michel had studied medicine. He had specialised in the germs that make people sick in hot countries. And although they had plenty of these germs, unfortunately hot countries also had the fewest doctors. So Jean-Michel had quickly gone off to work in these countries. He was tall and strong, and looked a bit like a sailing or skiing instructor. Hector remembered that he’d been popular with the girls but that he’d never seemed very interested in them, and so they became even more interested in him and often came and asked Hector about Jean-Michel because they knew the two of them were friends.
Jean-Michel took Hector’s suitcase, and they walked towards the car park. This sounds simple, but in fact it was rather complicated because there were beggars in the car park. They’d immediately noticed Hector, just like the porters had before. And soon, all the beggars in the car park surrounded Hector, stretching out their hands and saying, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, monsieur . . .’
Hector could see that some of them were very ill, very thin, and some only had one eye. They seemed barely able to stand up, but they continued to surround him like ghosts, holding out their hands.
Jean-Michel strode ahead, and appeared not even to see the beggars. He carried on talking to Hector.
‘I’ve found you a good hotel . . . Well, it wasn’t difficult, there are only two.’
By the time they reached the car, Hector had already given away all his coins and even his bank notes, and it was only then that Jean-Michel noticed what was going on.
‘Ah yes, of course,’ he said, ‘it’s your first time here.’
Jean-Michel’s car was a big white four-wheel-drive vehicle with letters painted on it. Next to it, a young African man with a pump-action shotgun stood waiting for them.
‘This is Marcel,’ said Jean-Michel, ‘he’s our bodyguard.’
The car left the car park and took the road into the city. Through the window, Hector again saw the scorched mountains, the beggars who were watching them drive away, the sun beating on the potholed road and then, sitting in front of him, Marcel with his pump-action shotgun resting on his knees. He told himself that in this country he was perhaps going to reach a better understanding of happiness, but no doubt with quite a few lessons in unhappiness, too.
HECTOR DOES A GOOD TURN
THE hotel was very pretty. The grounds were large and full of flowering trees and small bungalows for the guests, and there was a big wiggly-shaped swimming pool, which even passed under a tiny wooden footbridge. But it felt a little different from the kind of hotel people go to on holiday. First of all, at the entrance there was a sign saying: ‘We kindly request our guests and their visitors not to bring weapons into the hotel. Please go to reception.’ And inside the hotel there were white men in uniforms (a funny-looking uniform with shorts) drinking at the bar. They belonged to a sort of small army, which all the countries in the world had formed to bring some order to this country. But since this country wasn’t very important, nobody had wanted to pay much money towards the small army, and so it was scarcely big enough to defend itself and didn’t manage to bring much order even though it tried.
A man at the bar explained all of this to Hector. He was white, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform; he wore the kind of clothes Édouard wore at the weekend: a nice, light-coloured shirt, well-pressed trousers and what looked like golf shoes, and a watch that must have cost as much as Ying Li’s. (These days, lots of things made Hector think of Ying Li.)
The man was a foreigner, but he spoke Hector’s language very well and only drank sparkling water. And funnily enough, he had almost the same name as Édouard; he was called Eduardo! Hector asked him what country he came from and Eduardo told him. It was a country that didn’t have a very good reputation, because almost everywhere there people grew a plant, which was made into a very harmful stimulant, which was illegal in Hector’s country, and in every country in the world for that matter. As a result, many people were prepared to pay a lot of money for it. Of course, it wasn’t Eduardo’s fault that he was born in that country, and so Hector did not think much of it. He asked Eduardo where he’d learnt to speak his language so well.
‘In your country! I spent several years there.’
Eduardo sounded as if he didn’t want to say any more about it. And so to change the subject, Hector asked him what he was doing here in this country. Eduardo looked at Hector, and because, as previously mentioned, people sensed that Hector meant well — particularly clever people like Eduardo — he replied with a chuckle, ‘Farming!’
Hector thought that this was interesting for his investigation. He asked Eduardo what made him happy in life. Eduardo reflected for a moment and said, ‘Seeing my family happy, knowing that my children won’t want for anything.’
Eduardo’s children were grown up, and he hoped to send them to study in the big country that had more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world. Hector asked him whether it bothered him to know that other families might be very unhappy because their children took the harmful stimulant Eduardo made (because, of course, you, like Hector, have worked it out by now).
This time Eduardo answered straight away.
‘If they take it, it’s because their family’s already messed up. Their parents don’t look after them properly, all they think about is making money, or getting laid. It’s normal for kids to go off the rails!’
‘Okay,’ said Hector.
He didn’t necessarily think that it was okay, but when a psychiatrist says ‘okay’, it just means ‘I understand what you’re saying.’ But he pointed out to Eduardo that lots of poor people also took this harmful drug and it made their lives even worse. Eduardo said that it was the same thing: their whole country was like a bad family which didn’t look after its children properly.
‘I don’t create demand,’ said Eduardo, ‘I simply respond to it.’
Hector said that he understood, but all the same he thought that Eduardo was building his and his family’s happiness on other people’s misery. But he told himself that Eduardo had also been born in a country that was like one big very bad family. And so naturally he had a strange way of looking at things.
For that matter, Hector’s questions might have annoyed Eduardo a bit, because he ordered a whisky from the African barman, who came over and served him. You might be thinking that not enough has been said about African people in a country where everybody is African, but the reason is that the only African people in the bar were the waiters, the barman and the receptionist, and they didn’t talk at all. The people talking were the white people, guests like Eduardo and Hector, and the men in shorts.
When Hector told Eduardo that he was a psychiatrist, he seemed very interested. He told him that his wife was always unhappy (and yet she didn’t want for anything). And so the doctor over in his country had tried prescribing various pills, but none of them had really worked. What did Hector think?
Hector asked for the names of the pills. Eduardo said that he had the names in his room, and he went to fetch them. In the mea
ntime, Hector drank his whisky (because Eduardo had ordered one for him as well) and began talking to the barman. His name was Isidore. Hector asked him what made him happy. Isidore smiled and said, ‘My family not wanting for anything.’
Hector asked if that was all.
Isidore thought about it, and then added, ‘Going to my second job from time to time!’
Hector understood that besides his job as a barman Isidore had another job, which he must really enjoy. What sort of job was it? Isidore started to laugh and was about to explain to Hector, but Eduardo came back with his wife’s prescription.
Hector studied it, and found that the prescription was not quite right. The psychiatrist over there had prescribed all three main types of medication psychiatrists prescribe, but none of them in the right dose, so they couldn’t have been helping Eduardo’s wife much. He asked Eduardo a few more questions in order to find out what sort of unhappiness his wife was suffering from, and he soon saw which type of pill would work best for her. He also remembered a good psychiatrist from Eduardo’s country whom he’d met at a conference. It was understandable that Eduardo hadn’t heard of him, because this psychiatrist worked at a hospital, and he wore socks with his sandals, whereas people like Eduardo tend to know doctors who wear the same type of shoes as they do. Hector gave Eduardo his name and also the name of the pill that his wife should try while she was waiting for an appointment. Eduardo wrote everything down with a nice gold pen (it might even have been solid gold).
Just then, Jean-Michel arrived and when he saw Hector talking to Eduardo, he pulled a face. Hector wanted to introduce Jean-Michel to Eduardo, but Jean-Michel seemed in a hurry and he whisked Hector away while Eduardo thanked him and said goodbye.
In the car, Jean-Michel asked Hector if he knew who he’d been speaking to.
Hector said he did, more or less.
And Jean-Michel said, ‘That’s the kind of guy who drags this country into the shit!’
Hector and the Search for Happiness Page 5