After a thought like that, Hector felt a little sad, and suddenly he really wanted a glass of champagne.
‘And what about you? What are you going to do with the time you have left?’ asked Éléonore.
Well, thought Hector, the future only exists in the present, when we live it or when we talk about it.
He thought of different answers, and then he plucked up his courage and said, ‘Maybe have a baby with the woman I love.’
Éléonore was quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘Actually, I don’t think I’m optimistic enough to have a baby. I think that life is too difficult, that the world might be worse in the future, and I don’t want to bring a child into this world if it’s going to have a life of suffering . . .’
This was another glass-half-full or glass-half-empty way of seeing life, thought Hector. He also said to himself that, for her to think that way, Éléonore must have already had quite a lot of half-empty glasses thrown in her face when she was a little girl.
HECTOR UNDERSTANDS THE PSYCHIATRISTS’ SECRET
HECTOR found his town the way he had left it, with its inhabitants who had a lot more things than the Inuit, but who worried a lot more than the Inuit about their future and about time going by.
Hector was still troubled by the idea that the old monk might be dead and that he would never see him again, and he regretted not having gone to see him more often.
To take his mind off it, he asked Clara about hair dye for men. In her opinion, was it good or bad?
‘I don’t like it,’ said Clara. ‘But on the other hand, if it’s done well, it’s true that it can make a man look younger. And to find a job these days it’s best not to look your age too much. You’re lucky that you’re your own boss. In your line of work, it’s the opposite, since grey hair makes it seem as if you’re wise and experienced.’
‘All right,’ said Hector, ‘but then why do some of my colleagues . . . ?’
‘It’s not for their patients, if you ask me,’ said Clara. ‘It’s to appeal to people younger than them. If I ever catch you dyeing your hair, I’ll break the bottle over your head!’
This remark made Hector happy, because it meant that Clara thought they would still be together when he had lots of grey hair! He remembered his dream of walking on the ice field with hair as white as old François’s. Perhaps the old Inuit had taken him travelling to one of his past lives.
To take his mind off things, Hector turned on his computer and checked to see if he had any messages.
And, yes, Édouard had sent him a message.
Dear Hector,
I have something quite difficult to tell you.
The Inuit shaman talks about you every day now. For him, you’re the Kablunak-who-travels. Here’s what he said to me yesterday.
The Kablunak-who-travels must go to the top of the mountain. He must find the not-Kablunak-but-not-Inuit-either-who-laughs-often. Otherwise, very bad lives for him and for someone he loves, later on.
What do you make of that?
Édouard
CLARA AND THE TICK-TOCK OF TIME
WHEN Hector told Clara that he wanted to go and see if the old monk was still in his monastery on top of the mountain over in China, and that they could both go there together, Clara looked uncomfortable.
‘I’d like to, but I’m tired,’ said Clara. ‘And if I take my holidays now it’ll be hell when I get back.’
Here’s me trying hard not to get up to mischief, thought Hector, and I’m really not getting any help!
But he saw that Clara didn’t seem worried that he was going all by himself. Perhaps because she could tell that he didn’t want to get up to mischief any more. Perhaps also because she thought that if he was going to see an old monk in a monastery he wouldn’t be in the mood to get up to any mischief. Which just goes to show that women are sometimes a little too optimistic.
Mind you, you have to be to decide to have children and look after them for years. That shows how wonderful nature is (but not always very nice, all the same).
In fact, Hector thought that Clara didn’t look worried, but sad.
‘Are you sad because I’m leaving?’
‘Yes . . . no . . . ’ said Clara.
‘Yes-no or no-yes?’ asked Hector with a very serious face, and he managed to make Clara laugh. But even her laugh was sad.
‘So?’ asked Hector.
In the end, Clara said that they loved each other, she was sure of that now, but she wondered whether they would ever get round to getting married and having a baby.
‘I feel as though the time for doing it without thinking too much about it has been and gone,’ said Clara.
Hector was a little taken aback, but Clara explained that she felt that the life of a relationship between two people was a bit like the life of a person.
‘You see, I think that a couple starting out together is like a child. At first, everything seems fresh and new; then it grows up, understands things better and becomes a grown-up; then it becomes middle-aged, then elderly and then an old person. The couple dies because one of the pair dies, or, more often nowadays, because they split up. I think a couple is like a human being which is born, grows old and then dies.’
‘And you don’t think ours is alive any more?’
‘No,’ said Clara, ‘that would be too easy. But I do think getting married and having a baby is easier when the couple is very young, and when they still don’t know each other that well. If they live together without deciding anything, the couple gets older and, after, it’s harder to make the effort to change. There’s no longer the enthusiasm there was at the start.’
‘So you don’t want to have a baby?’
With that, Clara began to cry.
‘I don’t think I’m at my best just now,’ she said, sniffing. ‘At the moment, I feel time’s ticking away, that my life will be over soon . . . that I haven’t done anything very interesting. Am I even interesting?’
Little warning lights went off in Hector’s head: negative view of the past, pessimism, low self-esteem. Every psychiatrist in the world knows that these ways of seeing things are signs that you might be deeply depressed. And Hector also remembered how sad Clara had been lately, even when she put on her anti-ageing cream before going to bed.
He took her in his arms. She let him, and continued to sob on his shoulder. Hector was filled with tenderness, and he was kicking himself for not having noticed before that Clara might have been depressed for quite a while.
But we all know that cobblers’ children have no shoes, and Hector had some colleagues who had only noticed there was a problem at home the night their daughter had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, or their wife had tried to hang herself with the curtains. When you’re a psychiatrist and you come home, it’s as if you take off your psychiatrist goggles and turn back into someone who’s not that much more observant than average . . . and, what’s more, since you’ve listened and talked to people non-stop all day, sometimes you’re so tired that you don’t even want to listen to the people you love, and that can make them unhappy.
Hector thought that Clara needed to go as soon as possible to see a psychiatrist he trusted – old François – because he would be able to tell if she was depressed or just feeling a little blue.
Meanwhile, he heard Clara sniffling on his shoulder, saying that she felt that time had gone by too quickly, that everything seemed to be over, and Hector wondered what was worse: not noticing time, or seeing it going by everywhere you looked.
HECTOR AND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
THE day before he left for China, Hector saw some patients in his office that he wanted to see before he went away.
He wanted to know whether they were doing well enough to cope with not seeing him for a while or whether he should quickly send them to one of his colle
agues, or even send them to have a rest in a quiet place with very nice men and women in white coats.
First, there was Roger.
Roger was a big strapping fellow who looked as if he could be difficult, but really he was quite harmless. The problem was that, for almost all his life, Roger had believed that God (and sometimes the devil) spoke to him personally. He even heard voices in his head, and he often answered out loud, and this surprised the people he came across in the street. Roger wasn’t a bad soul at all, but he could quickly fly off the handle when people made fun of him or, even worse, the good Lord. As a result, he’d spent quite a lot of time in a psychiatric hospital on enough medicine every day to knock out a horse, or several ponies, if you prefer.
But, for some years, Hector had managed to get Roger to keep his thoughts to himself, telling Roger that he could only talk about them with him and other people he liked. Roger was doing much better, or, at any rate, he was taking less medicine and didn’t really need to go into hospital any more.
‘So, you’re going away?’ said Roger.
‘Yes, but not for very long. Two or three weeks at the most.’
‘You never know,’ said Roger.
‘You never know what?’ asked Hector.
‘Ye know neither the day nor the hour . . . We are in the hands of the Almighty . . .’
Hector was a little worried, because when Roger got started like this it could go on for a long time, and he had lots of other people to see that afternoon. He had an idea.
‘Tell me, Roger, what do you think about time passing?’
Roger frowned, which was quite unnerving, but Hector knew that it was because he was thinking things over. Finally, he said, ‘Time doesn’t pass . . . we do.’
Hector thought that was a very good answer.
‘I read it,’ said Roger. ‘Or I heard it . . .’
Hector could see that Roger was beginning to listen to the voices in his head. So he asked him, ‘And knowing that we pass on, that we grow old, how does that make you feel?’
‘It brings us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven,’ said Roger. ‘Then time will end and eternity will begin!’
Roger looked very happy thinking about the Kingdom of Heaven.
‘So you’re not afraid of growing old? You don’t want to slow time down?’
Roger looked a little shocked by the idea of wanting to slow time down.
‘But time belongs to God alone!’ he said.
Hector said to himself that Roger might not have been all there, as they say, but on the other hand, he seemed a lot happier with time than most of the people Hector knew. If only Roger could have talked about all of this more calmly, thought Hector.
Later, he wrote in his notebook:
Time Exercise No. 14: Imagine that growing old will bring you closer to the Kingdom of Heaven (or the place in your religion).
Of course, some people might think that it brought them closer to hell, but they weren’t usually the people who would truly deserve it.
HECTOR IS A DOG PSYCHIATRIST
HECTOR’S secretary told him that someone had asked for an emergency appointment.
It was Fernand with his dog.
‘I have a problem,’ explained Fernand. ‘When I leave him at home on his own, he howls, he wees everywhere and he chews the legs of the sofa.’
He was such a calm and well-behaved dog that, to look at him, it seemed impossible to imagine him behaving so badly.
‘Do you think it’s to punish me for going out?’ asked Fernand.
‘No,’ said Hector. ‘It’s because when you go away and he’s left all on his own, he has no way of knowing that it’s not for good. It’s a panic response.’
Now, Hector might seem awfully clever to have understood Fernand’s dog so quickly, but it’s because he had met vets who specialised in dog psychology, and the more these people studied dogs, the more they found that they were like people or children.
‘Your dog can’t imagine the future,’ said Hector. ‘He only lives in the present, or in the very immediate future.’
‘That’s true,’ said Fernand. ‘When he hears me filling his bowl, he knows he’s going to get fed. Or when I go and get his lead, he wags his tail because he knows we’re going to go out.’
‘There you go,’ said Hector. ‘That’s the very immediate future. But he doesn’t think into the future. He lives in an eternal present.’
Fernand looked at his dog. Then he said, ‘At least he doesn’t measure his life in dogs . . .’
Hector prescribed a medicine for anxiety in people to Fernand’s dog. In fact, it was a medicine for depression, because actually that’s a bit how being abandoned feels. So the medicine also worked for abandonment anxiety.
Afterwards, this session got Hector thinking. Animals didn’t live in the future or the past. This saved them a lot of worrying, like thinking about how long their life would last. On the other hand, when the present was going badly, none of these fine animals could make it better with hopes of a brighter future or good memories of a happy past. The hell of the present seemed eternal, without beginning or end.
If we gave people the freedom to choose, would they rather live like animals? For that matter, all those people who said that you should always live in the moment, without worrying about the future or chewing over the past, weren’t they advising people to think like cows? And yet some of them called themselves philosophers, which, in case you’ve forgotten, means ‘those who love wisdom’.
The wisdom of cows? The carefree life of cows? Their Being-cows-in-the-world, as a philosopher with a little moustache would have put it, who was so difficult to understand that even people who wrote books about him didn’t agree on what he’d meant. More questions for old François.
Hector wrote down:
Time Exercise No. 15: Imagine you are a cow. You don’t remember that you were little. You don’t know that you’re going to die. Would you be happy? If you could choose, would you rather be a cow? Or maybe another animal? Which kind?
Hector remembered that another philosopher, this time one with an enormous moustache, had actually written that cows were very lucky to live in an eternal present without being burdened with memories. He thought that the only way to be truly strong or happy in life was to be capable of forgetting! What was strange and terrible was that later this philosopher died of an illness which took away his memory, and even the thoughts inside his head!
Hector was thinking about what kind of animal he’d like to be. A seagull? A dolphin? But his secretary told him that Marie-Agnès was waiting in the waiting room.
HECTOR AND LOST TIME
‘I’VE found someone even crazier than me!’ announced Marie-Agnès.
‘Crazier than you?’
‘Yep, definitely!’
And Marie-Agnès gave a little laugh which showed her very nice sparkling white teeth (she had them cleaned very often). She explained that she had found quite an important man who was madly in love with her.
It was rather good news.
‘He’s nearly twenty years older than me,’ said Marie-Agnès.
‘Oh really?’ said Hector.
‘Oh, he doesn’t look it at all! And for me that’s not a problem.’
‘So, what is the problem?’
Marie-Agnès had brought a photocopy of the man’s diary with her. All the pages were very full, with things like ‘Parliament’ or ‘Arrive in Munich’ or ‘Executive Committee’. Then, at the bottom of each day, there was a little note. Hector read: Time lost: 35 minutes. Time left: 7,456 days.
‘The thirty-five minutes, that’s the time he reckons he’s wasted that day. A good day for him is when he manages to make it less than ten minutes.’
‘And the 7,456 days?’
‘That’s the n
umber of days he thinks he has left to live.’
Marie-Agnès explained that the man – he was called Paul – had done some calculations: you could work out how much time you probably had left from the age your relatives were when they died, your blood pressure and some other things doctors know.
So Paul had come up with his own time exercises! Every day he was aware that his Being-in-the-world, as the philosopher with the little moustache would have put it, was soon going to end – in a word, that one day he was going to die. Hector would very much have liked to meet Paul to see if this thought really helped him.
‘I really wanted him to come with me to see you today and for us to talk together, but he didn’t have time!’
In any case, Hector didn’t have a lot of time either because he had to go to China. Going to China? you may ask. And leaving Clara all by herself when she was already so sad? Actually, he’d been thinking about delaying his journey for a while and waiting until she was better before he went. But when he’d told Clara that he was going to put his trip back a little, she’d said no, absolutely not, and that he had to go to China straight away, otherwise she would feel it was her fault if he didn’t find the old monk.
‘But still . . .’ said Hector.
Just then, Clara had a very good, and very clever, idea. (You can see why Hector loved her so much.) She told Hector that the old monk might be able to explain about time going by, and when Hector came back he could tell her and that might help her a lot. And that also reminded Hector about what the Inuit shaman had said.
So Hector left for China, thinking a lot about Clara.
HECTOR GETS SOME PERSPECTIVE
ON the plane, there was a little screen on the cabin wall, and Hector was able to read:
Current time at point of departure: 16:00
Hector and the Search for Lost Time Page 7