HECTOR SINGS IN THE SNOW
THEY went back to the Inuit camp by snowmobile. Édouard thought that Hector might have drunk too much lichen beer the day before, that he wasn’t used to it, and that the Inuit might have a cure. Hector let himself be talked into it, but he was a little worried: what if the cure was worse than the ailment?
While the wind from the ride was starting to freeze a little bit of his cheek left exposed between the edge of his goggles and his scarf, Hector noticed a change in the landscape: there was a band of clear sky on the horizon, as if the sun was about to come up.
Hector noticed the Inuit near their igloo: they were on their knees facing the glow of light on the horizon. Édouard turned off the snowmobile so as not to make any noise.
‘They’ve started praying,’ he said.
It was the time of year when the Inuit prayed every day that the sun would finally appear.
‘They have an advantage over us,’ said Édouard. ‘They only expect out of life the best of what it’s already given them . . . like spring. At least, they were like that until they met the white man. Now they want snowmobiles and, soon, TVs.’
An old Eskimo noticed them and came to meet them. As he got closer, Hector recognised the shaman, but he seemed much smaller than the day before, and he was simply dressed in bearskins, like the others.
Édouard began talking to him in Eskimo. The shaman replied, smiling.
‘He says that you’re a great traveller, for a Kablunak,’ said Édouard. ‘He says he can take you travelling again.’
‘Ask him if he took me into my future.’
Édouard started to translate again.
‘He says he doesn’t know. Maybe into one of your past lives or one of your future lives – he can’t tell.’
This answer reminded Hector of what Madame Irina had said to him about her clients, and he thought that she, too, was a bit of a shaman.
‘He thinks I have many lives?’
‘For them, time is cyclical,’ said Édouard. ‘Everything comes around again like the seasons, like the sun disappearing, then coming back. We die, like the sun, and then we come back.’
Hector thought to himself that if he went travelling again with the shaman he wouldn’t really like to find out all the mischief he’d got up to in his past lives - only the bits he could avoid repeating in his future lives.
‘And how do they measure time?’ asked Hector.
‘Nowadays, some of them have watches.’
‘Yes, but before?’
‘They had a sense of time, and they’d also watch the sky changing. Here you have to get back to camp before nightfall.’
Hector remembered having read in a journal for psychiatrists that most people were able to judge time without a watch without being too far off, except when they were asleep, and sometimes even then. But, with watches and clocks everywhere you looked, everyone had got out of the habit.
He resolved to write:
Time Exercise No. 11: Hide your watch. From time to time, make a note of what time you think it is. Then compare it with the time on your watch.
The old shaman listened to Hector and Édouard talking to each other, and he didn’t look as if he was getting impatient. All of a sudden, Hector thought of all the people he had met in his country who were pressed for time. Up against the clock.
‘Can you ask him if they are ever in a rush?’
‘It’s a bit difficult to translate,’ said Édouard.
He started talking to the shaman again, who thought it over a little before he answered.
‘He says that sometimes they are pressed for time, yes.’
‘But when?’
The shaman began to sing in such a deep voice that it sounded like rocks rubbing against other rocks.
Édouard listened and began to translate, trying to sing it the same way.
‘The wind is getting up; we have to build an igloo fast . . . Nanook the bear is running on the snow; we have to chase after him and urge our dogs on . . . the ice floe is beginning to crack, and we have to get across it fast on our sled . . . My sweetheart is back at the village; I have to go home before she chooses another hunter . . .’
The chief started singing his song again, but this time with a little laugh. Édouard laughed too.
‘The Kablunak-who-counts-fast is coming back to the camp; we must count our pelts. And become the Inuit-who-go-fast . . .’
Hector thought to himself that, before, Eskimos were never rushed by anybody else! They just had to go faster from time to time to catch the daylight which was running out, animals that were being hunted or their sweetheart who was distant. Then, even if you messed up and found yourself one night with your sled on an ice floe which was cracking, it wasn’t so bad, since your life would begin again. This was the kind of time all men had lived by for a very long time, in fact almost ever since men and women had existed.
All of a sudden, Hector wanted to sing, and it came to him out of the blue. So, with his feet in the snow, he sang:
Chase, chase the snow,
Chase the daylight,
Or chase your sweetheart,
Chase after bears,
Chase the ice,
But don’t chase time,
No, never spend too much time
Chasing the white man’s time.
HECTOR HAS A TICKET
‘I don’t think you should stay around here for too long,’ said Édouard.
‘But why? I’m really enjoying myself. And, also, Inuit time is very interesting.’
‘That’s as may be, but I think you’re becoming . . . strange.’
‘No, it’s just that I’ve loosened up a little,’ said Hector, even though he was clinging on to the seat of the snowmobile for dear life because they had just gone over a very big bump.
Far behind them, all the Inuit as one started singing a new song, and it was Hector’s song with Inuit words, thanks to Édouard’s translation. As they were leaving, the shaman had given Hector a bear tooth.
‘If we stay, they’re going to offer you a woman,’ Édouard had said.
So they’d left on their snowmobile, and Hector was delighted that he hadn’t got up to any mischief this time. He thought that he deserved a pat on the back, since he’d noticed how much the Inuit women had appreciated his talents (undiscovered until then) as a singer-songwriter. During the very long nights of winter, it’s always nice to have a singer at home for entertainment.
They arrived at the foot of a glacier that they could make out quite clearly because, on the horizon, it was almost daylight, even though the sun hadn’t appeared yet. The rest of the night sky had turned light blue. (A glacier is like an enormous ice cream that somebody has dropped, which is beginning to run very slowly while staying frozen.) For some years, this glacier had hardly been moving forward at all, and, instead, it had just melted a little every summer. Perhaps that was why Hilton and his team of bubble hunters had set up their equipment on it: they had to make the most of the glacier while it was still there.
Éléonore was there too, and Hector noticed her little red plane sitting a little further away on the ice. Édouard stopped the snowmobile near a big three-legged drilling machine which was going to look for bubbles very deep in the ice. Some warmly wrapped-up people were operating it, while Hilton and Éléonore were talking a little further away. They looked glad to see Hector and Édouard coming.
‘Feeling better?’ Éléonore asked Hector.
‘Never felt better,’ said Hector.
Hilton asked Édouard if he thought that the Inuit might help them move his equipment to another pocket of bubbles.
‘No problem,’ said Édouard. ‘They like the idea of going back in time thanks to the little bubbles in the ice. In fact, it’s like their way of
life: managing to do a lot with very little.’
Hector remembered that before the arrival of the first white men’s boats, the Inuit had never seen wood. They made their sleds out of bone and the hides of animals they hunted. And they used the fat of the animals to make fires.
Hector asked Hilton and Éléonore if they would be staying long in this part of the world.
‘I love flying,’ said Éléonore, ‘and here’s no worse than anywhere else. Actually, no, it is worse than other places, but that’s what makes it interesting. And the scenery is so wonderful in spring.’
Hector asked Éléonore where she usually lived. She said that she left her things in a hotel room in the last white town before you reached Inuit country.
Hector realised then that Éléonore had neither a man nor a home in her life. She seemed to have nothing to tie her down, just like when she flew off over the ice field. He wondered if she thought about time passing (Hector had noticed the little wrinkles Clara had talked about at the corners of Éléonore’s eyes) and about the time she had left to have a baby.
‘In fact, living this life,’ said Éléonore, ‘makes you forget that you’re a grown-up. You forget that time is passing.’
Saying this, she smiled and glanced over at her little red plane, which, from a distance, looked like a pretty toy sitting on the ice.
‘You might forget it,’ said Hilton, ‘but we are grown-ups, and time is going by, faster and faster.’
And, again, Hector could guess what this conversation was actually secretly about.
‘A very long time from now,’ said Éléonore, ‘I too might be a mass of little bubbles in the ice, because one day I’ll crash my plane. And people like you will be trying to find out what was in the blood of a twenty-first-century woman.’
She let out a charming little giggle. Hector thought that he had already met young women who were quite difficult to tie down, but Éléonore couldn’t have been far off the world record, as he could see from Hilton’s miserable expression.
‘Anyway,’ Éléonore said, turning to Hector, ‘a shrink like you would say that charging headlong into the future is a way of running away from something! I know all about these kinds of things . . .’
She looked as if she was gently making fun of what psychiatrists say.
‘The problem,’ said Hector, ‘is not being able to run away from wanting to run away from time, which is running away from you.’
‘Running away from wanting to run away from time, which is running away from you?’ asked Éléonore.
‘Yes, always wanting to run away from time is like a prison. The bars are invisible, but we carry them with us.’
He thought about his dream, about his fellow psychiatrists’ hair, about Marie-Agnès and her supplements of other supplements, about Clara and her anti-ageing cream, about François’s love affairs, and then also about Éléonore who didn’t want to live like a grown-up.
‘Of course,’ Hector continued, ‘getting out of this prison may be even more difficult than flying over the ice field at night in a blizzard.’
Éléonore looked at Hector, Hector looked at Éléonore, and Hector thought to himself that Édouard was right . . . the lichen beer made him say things he would have kept to himself before.
And he also thought that he’d better not stay around here for too long . . .
HECTOR AND THE PRESENTISTS
HECTOR was drinking very hot coffee and reading old François’s reply on Édouard’s computer.
My dear friend,
The funny thing about reading philosophy is that you realise we are all philosophers without knowing it.
Anyway, the philosopher who thought that we could predict the future if we knew all of the past and present was Laplace, an astronomer living at the time of the French Revolution who knew that we could predict the motion of the planets. Since he realised that we would never be able to know all of the past and present, he thought that to predict the future we’d have to get around this with probability calculations. So he invented them, these calculations – there’s even a law of probability named after him. I’m talking about a time when some philosophers were also very good at maths.
The past which doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist any longer, ditto for the future because it doesn’t exist yet, and the present which doesn’t exist because straight away it’s in the past – you’ll find all that in St Augustine! According to him, time only exists within us, because at every moment we perceive the past, the present and the future in what he called ‘an extension of the mind’.
The business of parallel universes makes me think of another big debate in philosophy. Some think that the past, present and future are really not the same thing. We remember the past, we imagine the future, etc. We live in the present in a three-dimensional world, and that world only exists in the present.
Others say that the past, present, future, it all comes to the same thing. It just depends on the point in time you happen to be in. Every object has three dimensions, as well as a fourth: time.
In fact, the first lot are called eternalists, the second presentists. Your clairvoyant patient is a presentist!
But I’m going to stop there, since I realise that up at the North Pole you must be very cold, and you shouldn’t stay still for too long.
HECTOR AND THE HALF-EMPTY GLASSES
HECTOR took off his gloves and opened his little notebook. He thought about Inuit time, and time in his childhood in the countryside. It gave him an idea:
Time Exercise No. 12: Thinking about your past, try to predict your future (at least, your most probable future).
He thought to himself that this was an exercise that you sometimes did for other people: predicting whether their marriage would last, whether they’d be successful in their job or whether their children would be happy. But you almost never did this exercise for yourself! He too would have liked to predict the future and find out where all of these exercises were going to take him. More than anything, he hoped that he would find the old monk and show him his list.
‘Right, that’s us, the engine’s warmed up!’
It was Édouard coming to tell him that the plane was ready to take off. They said goodbye and promised that they would see each other again soon.
Hector found himself on the plane with Éléonore and an Inuit mother who was taking her baby to see a doctor down south, because the baby wasn’t putting on any weight, even though she was feeding a lot. Despite the noise of the engine, the baby was very quiet, and was feeding away with a very intent look on her face.
So as not to disturb them, Hector sat beside Éléonore. She was very busy looking at quite a lot of gauges of every colour, and pushing and pulling even more little levers. Then off they went, sliding faster and faster along the ice, and suddenly the engine made a terrible high-pitched noise like the howl of a mortally wounded animal, and then they were up in the air, climbing higher and higher.
The baby had kept sucking away after she’d closed her eyes, and her Inuit mother was watching her anxiously. Hector thought that an old Englishman’s idea had been proved right yet again: no matter what colour someone’s skin was, or what part of the world they lived in, the same feelings made them laugh, cry or worry. In the old bearded Englishman’s time, his idea hadn’t gone down very well with people in his country, because they were the sort who thought they were much better than everyone else, especially when it came to people of a different colour. And then the old Englishman, even though he was a very nice man, had annoyed them even more by announcing that all men (and women too, don’t forget) were descended from apes, including people who drank tea with their little finger sticking out while saying ‘Hmm’.
Hector also hoped that the baby wasn’t too ill.
‘So,’ said Éléonore, ‘did you like it?’
‘Yes,’ said Hector. ‘It’s like time travel. They live a little like we did a very long time ago.’
‘Not for much longer,’ said Éléonore.
‘Yes, because of us.’
‘That’s true,’ said Éléonore. ‘On the other hand, now their babies can get proper medical care. Before, a lot of them died.’
Hector thought that that was at least one good thing you could say about the civilisation he and Éléonore came from: babies had a better chance, and so did the women giving birth. On the whole, people nowadays lived a lot longer than the Inuit did in the old days.
‘Mind you,’ said Éléonore, ‘when you see what we do with our extra time, you wonder if it’s a good thing. Old people’s homes? Not for me, thanks.’
Hector remembered that this was another of his great civilisation’s new inventions: old people’s homes. Were they really something to be proud of?
Hector thought to himself that, what with landing and taking off on the ice and flying through blizzards all the time, Éléonore stood quite a good chance of avoiding an old people’s home.
On the other hand, by not being in a hurry to have lots of babies who would later become nice children who would look after her when she was old, as they did in all the other civilisations in the world, Éléonore ran a greater risk of landing up in the ‘Forget-Me-Not’ room with someone saying to her: ‘Now, dear, would we like some stewed prunes today?’ This person wouldn’t necessarily see in Éléonore the young woman she had once been.
That gave him an idea for old people’s homes, and for all elderly patients in hospital: they should always have some photos of themselves when they were young up on the wall in their room, so that people could properly understand who they really were. Because, even though the past didn’t exist any longer, remembering it was still helpful in understanding someone. Hector wrote:
Time Exercise No. 13: Whenever you meet an elderly person, always imagine what they were like when they were young.
Hector and the Search for Lost Time Page 6