‘Well done, you were great,’ said Trevor.
‘Oh yes!’ said Katharine. ‘You know, we’ve never really asked ourselves that question: is it better to fight against time . . . ?’
Trevor and Katharine sang the song of time perfectly. And yet they had never wondered about it. Hector was determined to understand why.
HECTOR SINGS ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN
TREVOR, Katharine and Hector met up again in a little café not far from the top of the mountain. Hector was very happy because he was sure they would teach him something about the passage of time. He was careful, though, not to ask them questions which were too direct, like, ‘And how does it make you feel having no more than a dog, or even half a dog, left to live?’
In any case, he didn’t need to ask any questions, because Trevor and Katharine wanted to share their experiences with Hector, whom they had taken to straight away.
‘Actually,’ said Trevor, ‘Katharine and I don’t see things in the same way. She has faith, but I haven’t.’
‘And to think that after forty-six years of marriage he hasn’t changed!’ said Katharine.
Hector thought back to all the people he’d met who truly believed in the good Lord. He’d noticed that this helped a lot of them cope with growing old and even dying, since if you believed in the good Lord then you believed that the world you were born into wasn’t the most important, but that there was another more important one after (and perhaps before, for that matter).
Trevor, on the other hand, managed to cope with growing old without believing in the good Lord. Hector really wanted to know how he did it.
‘Well now,’ said Trevor, ‘in order to cope with time passing, you need luck – and a little philosophy.’
‘Luck?’ asked Hector.
He could hardly see himself saying to his patients: ‘All you need is a bit of luck and then everything will get better!’
‘Yes,’ said Trevor, ‘to be lucky enough to stop wanting to do things at the same time as you stop being able to do them. For instance, I loved playing tennis . . .’
‘He was a great player,’ said Katharine, ‘and it even annoyed me a little, because all the women in the club would hang around him.’
‘But,’ said Trevor, ‘with the tiredness and the pains in my knees, I stopped wanting to play. I’m happy with my memories, but I have no regrets. And I feel that, in my life, everything has always turned out pretty much like that – you stop wanting to and you don’t regret anything.’
Trevor said that when the end came he hoped he’d have the same luck: to be tired of life when it was time for his to stop.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it also helps to be fairly happy with the life you’ve lived.’
‘And also to see your children happy,’ said Katharine.
‘That’s also luck,’ said Trevor.
‘That’s going too far – surely we’ve got something to do with it if our children are happy!’
‘That’s true,’ said Trevor, ‘especially you, my love.’
Trevor said that he hadn’t read that much philosophy, but one saying had stayed with him and helped him a lot in his life: ‘Do your best to change the things that can be changed, accept the things that cannot be changed and know the difference between them.’
Trevor explained that it was supposed to be a Roman emperor who had come up with this, because, as well as being a general who won battles, he was a philosopher. Hector thought this was such a wonderful saying that he resolved to use it in one of his little exercises.
‘And also reading poetry,’ said Katharine.
‘Oh yes, that’s true,’ said Trevor. ‘Listen.
‘Time passes swift, my love, ah! swift it flies!
Yet no – Time passes not, but we – we pass,
And soon shall lie outstretched beneath a stone.
And for this love we talk of – Death replies
Forever not one word of it, alas! . . .
Then love me, while thou art fair, ere we are gone!’
And as he said the final line, Trevor took Katharine’s hand and kissed it.
She seemed very moved, so Hector took over, softly singing:
‘When it’s time to sing of cherry season,
And cheerful nightingales and mocking blackbirds
Will all celebrate,
Beautiful girls will lose their reason,
And lovers will have hearts full of sun,
But how short it is, the cherry season,
When you go in twos, to pick as you’re dreaming
Of pairs of drop earrings . . .
Cherries of love, of the same bud
Fall ’neath the leaves in drops of blood . . .
But how short it is, the cherry season,
Coral-pink earrings you pick as you’re dreaming! . . .’
Katharine and Trevor clapped, and then Katharine began to sing in a suddenly very young voice:
‘As time goes by . . .
It’s still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.
Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by . . .’
This time, it was Trevor who seemed moved.
Later, on the way back on the little train, Hector wrote:
Time Exercise No. 17: Put together a collection of beautiful poems about time going by. Learn them by heart and recite them to friends who are older and younger than you.
But he hadn’t forgotten Trevor and the Roman general’s philosophy.
Time Exercise No. 18: Do you spend time trying to change the things that can be changed? Do you try to accept the things that can’t? Do you know the difference between them? Make sure you can answer ‘yes’ to these three questions.
In any case, thought Hector, if ever there was one thing you couldn’t change, it was the passing of time. So, best not to think about it too often!
HECTOR AND TIME REGAINED
NOW, all of this had kept Hector busy, but he knew perfectly well that he was going to end up calling the nice Chinese girl he had met a long time ago, Ying Li.
They had only spent two evenings and two nights together, and then life had taken them in different directions, but Hector still felt moved when he remembered Ying Li. He remembered she had been a little intimidated on the first night when he’d asked her to dinner, but so happy singing to herself in the bathroom in the morning, then so sad crying in his arms in a taxi at night.
He decided to arrange to meet her in a café which was on the top floor of one of the city’s museums. That way he thought it wouldn’t bring back too many memories for either of them since they’d always met at night, in the kind of places where people only go very late in the evening.
Hector and Ying Li had had what they call an impossible love, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t left Hector with some lasting memories, and perhaps Ying Li too, he thought. Still, he knew she was married to a nice boy from the same country as Hector, and that she’d just had her second baby. Édouard was the godfather to the first. And Hector, of course, loved Clara! So it was an even more impossible love than at the beginning, since Hector and Ying Li were both happy.
But when he saw her appear in the big café where he was waiting, he went weak at the knees.
From a distance, she was exactly the same Ying Li as he remembered, just as beautiful and dainty and charming. When she smiled at him, he saw that she seemed moved. As she sat down, she lowered her eyes shyly exactly like the first time and her cheeks were all pink, and Hector could feel that his were too.
Then Hector saw that time hadn’t stood still for Ying Li either, tha
t she had filled out a little, and that those famous wrinkles had begun to appear if you really looked for them. Ying Li must have seen his first few grey hairs and his own little wrinkles.
Hector wanted to tell Ying Li that she was still as beautiful as ever, because he thought so, but, at the same time, he told himself that perhaps this wasn’t something you said to a married woman. But in the end he said it anyway, and he saw it made Ying Li happy, especially as she must have already seen in his eyes that he thought she was still as beautiful as ever, despite the time that had passed, which just goes to show that Hector still felt love for Ying Li and not just desire for her fleeting beauty.
Then they began to talk.
But what did they say to each other? Very simple things, which people who still love each other say, even if both of them also love another person who loves them back, and both are going to stay with that other person. They caught up with each other’s lives. Hector wanted to know how Ying Li’s baby was, and she was very well (because it was a little girl).
Ying Li wanted to know if Hector had married Clara, and he said soon, probably. And Ying Li smiled again and told him that was what she wished for him, because, after all, happiness was getting married and having children, as she now knew, and she would have liked Hector to know that too. Hector asked after her son, who must have been nearly six by now, Hector reckoned. As it happened, Ying Li said that he was visiting the museum downstairs with one of Ying Li’s sisters and they were going to come up and see them.
And indeed a young lady who looked quite like Ying Li, but less stunning, was coming towards them holding a little boy by the hand.
The little boy looked a little bit Chinese, but not entirely, and this was to be expected since his father was from the same country as Hector. Hector remembered that he was called Eduardo, after his godfather, Édouard.
Ying Li told Eduardo to say hello to Hector, and the little boy looked at him with surprise as he shook his hand.
‘You’re already a big little boy,’ said Hector, who thought Eduardo was very big for his age.
Eduardo looked as if he was thinking about this, then he said, ‘Could you also say that I’m already a little big boy?’
‘Yes, you could,’ said Hector. ‘And soon you’ll be a big boy, full stop.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll like that,’ said Eduardo.
‘Why not?’
‘Because, after, I’ll soon be a man, and then one day an old man, like Grandpa.’
Little Eduardo didn’t think like Little Hector at all! He’d rather have slowed time down. Hector knew that this meant he was very happy with his mummy and daddy, and that he wanted it to last for ever.
Ying Li said that Eduardo was always asking questions and thought about things a lot, but that he was almost always happy. Ying Li’s sister just smiled because she didn’t speak any English at all.
Hector and Ying Li carried on talking to each other for a while. Ying Li had also gone to see the old monk with Édouard, but, since then, she hadn’t heard anything either. Hector told her that he was going to try to find him. Ying Li said that she would like it if Hector called her again if he was staying a little while longer in the city, or the next time he came back. Hector said yes, of course, but at the same time he thought it was better if he and Ying Li didn’t see each other too often, and he knew that, in her heart of hearts, Ying Li thought that too.
Then they said goodbye, and Little Eduardo shook Hector’s hand again and said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Hector.’ And Hector watched the three of them walk away, and Ying Li gave him a last smile and a little wave, and Hector was alone.
He ordered a glass of red wine, he thought about things for a bit and then he took out his little notebook and wrote:
Time Exercise No. 19: Meet the children of the women you love loved when you were younger.
HECTOR AND THE MAN WHO LOOKED AT THE STARS
HECTOR thought that perhaps he would go home, because there was no sign of the old monk, and there wasn’t much point in waiting around for him. Then he remembered that Hubert, the man who looked at the stars, was staying somewhere around here . . . that’s to say, if you kept going towards the Chinese mountains, you’d come across higher and higher ones, and at the top of one of them was a huge telescope which was so expensive that it took several countries to buy it, a little like when all the children club together to get their mother a present for Mother’s Day.
From the city he was in, you could go straight to almost anywhere in the world. Hector found himself back on a plane with Chinese characters written on it, where this time the air hostess offered him rice with prawns or noodles with duck, but also some kind of steamed buns. There weren’t many people on the plane because, in the region where he was going, the birds had a tendency to catch a rather nasty cold, and so tourists preferred to go to other places in the world where there were diseases which were much more dangerous to people, but which Jennifer didn’t talk about on the television every day.
The airport he landed at was very basic: it only had one runway and a concrete building that reminded him of the ones they built when he was little. The wind was fierce, and all the men and women who looked Chinese were wearing fur hats; Hector promised himself he’d buy one.
He was very glad to see Hubert arriving in a car that also reminded him of his childhood.
‘It’s nice to have a visitor,’ said Hubert. ‘Only seeing colleagues gets tedious after a while.’
And Hector understood what Hubert meant, because it was the same for him; after two days at a psychiatric conference, all he wanted to do was leave. Even if, individually, he liked some of his colleagues, as a group, they were a little like an enormous plate of pasta that you can’t finish.
You might be wondering if it was all right for a psychiatrist to visit his patient outside the office. Certainly, that’s debatable. But Hector wasn’t seeing Hubert for the kind of therapy which lasts for years, where the psychiatrist has to stay very quiet and mysterious. Instead, Hector was helping Hubert get through a difficult time. It was more like the relationship between an ordinary doctor and his patient. So it wasn’t going to be a problem down the line that Hector had come to see Hubert.
The car got out of town quite quickly. It was easy as the city wasn’t very big and there weren’t many people on the roads either because of the cold and the wind. They started going uphill, up a little road. The countryside was beautiful, but Hector was having trouble appreciating it because, from time to time, they would meet lorries as big as houses tearing down the road in the opposite direction without seeming to take much notice of Hubert’s car. Every so often, at the bottom of a ravine, Hector caught sight of the wreckage of a lorry with its wheels in the air.
‘You get used to it,’ said Hubert. ‘Here, people don’t have the same sense of danger as back home.’
He explained that a very long time ago the ancestors of the people driving the lorries had conquered half the world on their little hairy horses. So it was quite natural that their descendants would be rather fearless. Finally, they arrived at the bottom of a cable car, and then there they were, in a little cabin that was swinging around a bit too much for Hector’s liking.
‘The telescope gobbled up so much funding,’ said Hubert, ‘that they were a little short of money for the cable car.’
Hector said to himself that people imagined that astronomers led very quiet lives watching the stars. In fact, being an astronomer could be almost as dangerous as being an astronaut, except you fell from less high up, but still high enough to hurt yourself really badly. At the top, it reminded Hector of Éléonore and Hilton’s camp: little prefab buildings, and then, in a kind of very large bubble, the huge telescope which looked at the sky through an enormous slot. And lots of antennas around it, like very big TV satellite dishes that were there to listen to the murmuring of the stars.
Hector looked into the distance at the vast landscape of mountaintops and the infinite sky above them, and wondered what anyone could possibly be in a rush for at the top of this mountain.
Hubert explained that every team of astronomers in the world had booked some time on the telescope to carry out their observations. Another team was waiting to come and have their turn on the mountain. It was a little like the patients who made an appointment with Hector. You couldn’t run late, otherwise everyone would be behind and the stars wouldn’t be in the right place to be looked at any more.
‘Then you have to rush to submit your paper before the next world conference. You spend nights in front of your computer . . .’
Hector understood a little better why Hubert’s wife had upped and left one day.
He also thought that, truly, the Inuit and some of the world’s other peoples didn’t know how lucky they were never to be in a rush.
HECTOR AND THE JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE
‘SO,’ said Hector, ‘does looking at the stars teach us anything about time?’
‘It should perhaps teach us inner peace,’ said Hubert, ‘but, as you know, it doesn’t really.’
They went for a walk along a little path not far from the huge telescope, under a magnificent starry sky which could put you in mind of God. Hector remembered that the philosopher he liked, Pascal, when faced with these same infinitely far-off stars, had said: ‘The silence of these eternal spaces terrifies me.’ And yet Pascal believed in God.
Hubert explained different things to Hector. For a start, everything in the universe was so far away that even at the speed of light it would take for ever and a day to go from one place to another.
Hector and the Search for Lost Time Page 9