It was a big fat white worm, not very appetising, it has to be said, and Hector thought it wasn’t a very good idea to show it just before dinner.
‘Normally, this type of worm lives for three months,’ said the biologist. Hector felt a little shiver run down his spine, sensing what was coming next.
‘But we’ve been working on the telomeres of its chromosomes, which are much simpler than ours.’
The biologist paused for a moment and then he said, ‘That worm has been alive for a year.’
Everyone went ‘Oooh’. Hector wondered what the old monk would have made of all this, and, besides, where was he anyway, and why had the shaman wanted him to come to this island?
‘Right, let’s go and have dinner,’ said Marie-Agnès. ‘You’ll see, the menu’s great.’
And Hector was sure that there would only be good fats on the menu. It made him happy to think of all those cows, all those sheep and all those pigs that could keep enjoying their Being-in-the-world, carefree.
HECTOR REALISES THAT DIET ISN’T EVERYTHING IN LIFE
THAT night, Hector didn’t have any dreams.
But he woke up very early in the morning and decided to go for a walk round the village and see the fishing boats before the sun started beating down too fiercely.
On the way, he bumped into the biologist, who must have had the same idea.
‘I’m curious to know what you’re going to be talking about tomorrow at the conference,’ said the biologist.
‘Me too,’ said Hector.
And the biologist laughed, thinking this was a good joke. But it was true: Hector still didn’t really know what he was going to say, but he told himself that he had almost two days to think about it, so why rush? When it came down to it, it was important-but-not-yet-urgent; he just had to think about it from time to time. Important for whom, anyway? The biologist, who was called Olivier, was a tall thin man with hollow cheeks, and he also seemed quite young, even though Hector guessed that he was at least one dog older than him. Hector wondered if, in the evenings, at home, Olivier did experiments on his telomeres to stay young.
‘Do you know why this island is special?’ asked Olivier, as they reached the village square.
A little market had been set up, with people who had come over from the mainland to sell things you couldn’t make on the island – lamps, sewing machines, coffee, even print dresses, Hector noticed.
‘No, I don’t,’ said Hector.
‘It’s one of the places in the world with the highest number of people older than a hundred.’
Hector looked around him. In the shade of the plane trees, you could see some very old men and very old ladies sitting on their benches – among them, most likely some centenarians – while, at the quayside, fishermen were talking near their nets and their crates full of fish. A little further off, some women were going to the market. And everywhere children had begun playing and chasing after each other because it was Sunday and there was no school.
The church clock very softly chimed seven o’clock.
Hector and Olivier decided to go and have a coffee at a little pavement café, which also served as a grocer’s-cum-tobacconist’s-tackle shop-bike rental shop.
The lady who ran the café (who, surprisingly, looked a little like Ying Li’s mother in Hector’s dream) asked them if they’d like something to eat, and they said yes.
As well as coffee, they got some slices of very tasty quite dark bread, a little dish of olive oil, two or three fresh tomatoes and a little jar of pickled herrings.
‘And there’s the secret!’ exclaimed Olivier. ‘Their diet! Vegetables, fish, nuts. Only good fats!’
Hector remembered that this type of diet was called a Mediterranean diet. Not surprising really, since this island was in the middle of the sea called the Mediterranean!
‘And another thing: they don’t eat much – less than we do. If you underfeed rats a little, they live longer.’
Looking at Olivier’s hollow cheeks, Hector thought that he, too, must have been trying not to eat too much.
‘If everyone from our country began to eat less, it would add at least ten years to our lives,’ said Olivier, swallowing a pickled herring.
That’s as may be, thought Hector, but to live in hunger?
Hector kept looking around him at the children playing, the men unloading a crate of fish every now and then when the conversation died down, the women talking amongst themselves about the right sewing machine to buy, and the old men and old ladies sitting not far away on their benches. Some of them were probably watching their great-great-grandchildren.
Hector also remembered that a long time ago on this and all the other neighbouring islands, before the arrival of Hector’s religion, people used to think that life began again after death, and that the whole world even began again from time to time, like the sun, which came up every morning.
An island where the Kablunaks live like the Inuit.
Hector understood that the Mediterranean diet was certainly very good for you, but that there were other explanations for the number of centenarians on this island. This was going to give him some good ideas for what he was going to say at the conference.
HECTOR HAS A REST
WHEN he got back to his room, since he still didn’t know why he was there, Hector decided to make some phone calls. (Actually, he did know why: because Paul and Marie-Agnès had asked him to come, but rather like a conversation which is really secretly about something else, he thought there was another reason hidden behind this reason, and the shaman must have known what it was. It reminded him of the question asked by a philosopher, whom the philosopher at the conference had talked about, in fact: why is there a universe rather than nothing at all?)
First of all, he called Clara.
She told him she was feeling better and that she missed him. Hector was so happy he felt tears well up in his eyes, but he pulled himself together, because men don’t cry, except at their friends’ funerals. He told Clara that he missed her lots too, and that he was hoping to come home very soon. They sent kisses over the phone and, once again, Hector felt huge waves of love flowing between them at the speed of light, as if time had never existed, and they were back at the beginning of their relationship.
Then he tried to call Édouard, which wasn’t very easy, as you can imagine. In the end, Édouard called back a few minutes later.
‘I’m back at the camp,’ he said.
Hector pictured him in the big tent where he’d had breakfast with Hilton and Éléonore, near the devices that let people talk to each other anywhere in the world, and which the time expert loved so much.
‘What about the shaman?’ asked Hector.
‘He gave us a real fright,’ said Édouard.
He explained that the shaman had not only drunk too much lichen beer, but also some vodka that the Inuit had got from another Inuit village. Now he was lying motionless on a bed in the Kablunak camp infirmary with quite a lot of machines blinking all around him to make sure that he didn’t go to sleep for good.
‘The doctor says he’ll pull through.’
This turn of events proved that shamans – a little like psychiatrists, for that matter – could be very clever when it came to others, but not so clever when it came to themselves.
So there was no new message from the shaman and Hector wasn’t much further forward.
Then he called old François.
‘I’ve hitched my wagon again to a little train that I love so much. And, for the time being, I’m not thinking about the end of the line at all any more! Heidegger would give me a bad mark!’
Hector wondered what the new little locomotive looked like that could make such an old carriage so happy.
Without wanting to say much because of doctor–patient confidentiality, old François told Hector t
hat Clara was doing better.
She wouldn’t be needing any little pills, but it would be a good idea for Hector to come back fairly soon to see her.
‘As you know, dear friend, in love timing is everything!’
Hector thought this was very well said and vowed to make a note of it in his notebook.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, everything was fine, and, as Hector had got up quite early for a psychiatrist, he thought he’d lie down for five minutes on his bed and have a little rest before going to the conference to listen to the first speaker: a monk from his religion, then later on the racing driver.
But he fell asleep, which was a bit of a shame, because those people were bound to have had some interesting things to say
HECTOR AND THE TWO CENTENARIANS
HECTOR was lying on a bed, a little tube up his nose, another bigger one down his throat, and little wires stuck all over his body to monitor his heartbeat and his breathing. Machines were blinking all around him.
The hardest thing was that he couldn’t move at all, or speak. And yet he felt wide awake, and he could even hear the wind of the ice field outside. He saw a young woman coming towards him; it was an Inuit nurse with a little white cap, and without warning she shone a little torch right into his eye, then into his other eye, and it was very unpleasant, but he couldn’t say anything to her. She disappeared from view, but since he couldn’t move his head she might still have been very close by for all he knew.
It was really very hard to lie awake without being able to move, with just the beep-beep of the machines all around him.
The only way to escape would have been by dreaming, but how do you dream without sleeping?
Hector concentrated hard, and then it worked, and he was back at the village square, right by the church, and he could see Olivier walking away, swallowing pickled herrings, which he tossed up into the air ahead of him as he went, which made the children who were running around him laugh a lot.
On a bench in the shade of a plane tree, he saw two old men from the village watching him. He decided to go and talk to them.
They were smiling as they watched him coming towards them. They looked very old, so old that even their wrinkles had faded away a little. Their eyes were cloudy, but they seemed pleased to see Hector all the same. He said to himself they had to be centenarians.
‘You’ve come a fair distance, eh?’ said the centenarian who was wearing a cap.
‘I like travelling.’
‘Us too,’ said the one with the beret, the same kind of beret people used to wear a long time ago in Hector’s country.
Hector and the two centenarians spoke the same language, even though it was difficult to tell which one.
‘Come out of the sun and sit down or you’ll get heatstroke,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
Hector was happy to sit in the shade, because the fox furs were beginning to make him hot.
And they kept watching the children who were playing in the square and the boats which kept coming in on the deep-blue sea.
‘I wonder if they’ll live as long as us,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
‘They’ll have better medicine,’ said the one wearing the beret.
‘But they won’t have the same life either . . . they’ll always be in a rush.’
‘And maybe they won’t eat properly. And they might also end up more alone.’
‘And then, one day, they’ll go into an old people’s home.’
Then they didn’t say anything at all for a moment. You got the feeling that the idea of an old people’s home made them quite sad.
‘Maybe they’ll get used to it in the end,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
‘Maybe, but only seeing old people all day . . .’
‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration – there’s the staff too.’
‘Yes, but can you imagine being stuck in a room, instead of having all this?’ said the centenarian with the beret, sweeping his hand across the blue sky, the square, the boats, the sea and the children.
And he took off his beret, uncovering a very handsome shock of white hair. Hector also noticed that he was wearing a bow tie.
‘I have a question for you,’ said Hector.
‘A question?’ said the centenarian with the bow tie. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been asked one of those.’
‘I enjoy questions . . . it’s the answers that tire me out,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
‘All right then,’ said Hector. ‘In your opinion, what is a very full life?’
The two centenarians looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was a pleasure to watch, but Hector wasn’t much further forward.
Finally, the centenarian with the bow tie stopped laughing and said very seriously, ‘This idea of a very full life is dangerous. Because you can’t ever fill it as much as you’d like to. And you also fill it with mistakes, inevitably. What counts is sometimes feeling your life is full. Or, rather, living some moments to the full, if you like.’
‘And, what’s more, to live fully in the present, you have to empty your mind often,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
Hector understood what he meant. He knew that to enjoy the moment you had to let yourself be fully immersed in it, and not worry about other things.
‘Life isn’t like a bottle you can fill,’ said the centenarian with the bow tie, ‘but more like a piece of music, with some less successful or boring moments, and others which are more intense. Music is a very good way of thinking about time. A note only moves you because you remember the one before, and you’re waiting for the next . . . Each one only means something wrapped in a bit of the past and the future.’
The centenarian with the bow tie started to whistle, and straight away the centenarian with the cap joined in.
Hector recognised a tune composed by a great musician who wore a wig and who must have felt that he’d had a very full life: he’d invented hundreds of pieces of music and, at the same time, he’d been father to twenty children!
He didn’t have his notebook with him, but he resolved to write:
Time Exercise No. 25: Listen to some music and tell yourself that it’s the same thing as time. Compare it with your life.
HECTOR AND HISTORY, WHICH KEEPS REPEATING ITSELF
AT that point, the lady who ran the little café came out of it and walked towards them.
‘Whistling is all very well, but perhaps it’s time to think about lunch,’ she told them.
‘Oh, we’ve got plenty of time,’ said the centenarian with the bow tie.
‘You should rustle some up for our friend too,’ said the centenarian with the cap, pointing at Hector.
‘I have,’ said the woman.
And she walked away.
‘Trust her to try and rush us!’ said the centenarian with the bow tie.
‘She means well . . . she’s just a little like her mother. And like her grandmother too, as I remember.’
‘How can you remember, since you’re not from around here?’ said the centenarian with the bow tie.
‘You aren’t either,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
‘Oh yes, that’s true . . .’
And they both looked at Hector.
‘Are you going to be leaving again soon?’ asked the centenarian with the bow tie.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hector. ‘I’m happy to be here, but I don’t know why I came.’
‘I don’t think you’ll be staying for long,’ said the centenarian with the cap, giving a little sigh.
Just then, Hector realised that his cap was a station master’s cap, which was strange because there weren’t any trains on the island.
‘Are you a station master?’ asked Hector.
‘Te
mporarily,’ said the centenarian with the station master’s cap.
‘He’s still working,’ said the centenarian with the bow tie.
‘But not for much longer,’ said the centenarian with the cap.
‘And what if I wanted to take the train from your station?’ asked Hector.
‘Then you’d better be quick, because, you know, I won’t be around for very much longer,’ said the centenarian with the cap, giving a little laugh.
And, just then, Hector recognised him.
One of the machines around him in the room started making a noise and he expected to see the nurse coming. But, no, it was the telephone.
Hector answered it.
‘What happened to you?’ asked Marie-Agnès. ‘You missed the monk.’
‘Was it interesting?’
‘Oh yes, I learnt the difference between eternity, sempiternity and aeviternity.’
‘You can tell me about it,’ said Hector. ‘I’m on my way.’
But first he called Trevor and Katharine. It was Trevor who answered.
‘Have you been back on the little train that goes up to the monastery?’ asked Hector.
‘I haven’t, but yesterday Katharine went up there again with some friends.’
‘Is the old man who hands out the tickets still there?’
Trevor called Katharine over to the phone.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Katharine. ‘It was a young man. He told me that the old Chinese man was too tired.’
‘I’m on my way,’ said Hector.
He realised that Paul and Marie-Agnès wouldn’t be over the moon, but they’d understand. And perhaps old François would have time to get here by tomorrow with his new little locomotive, who would no doubt be delighted to find herself on such a beautiful island, and look on admiringly as old François said intelligent things. He was sure that old François would go and talk to a centenarian on a village bench.
And, if that wasn’t possible, it would no doubt give the time expert the chance to say ‘instantaneity’ and put old François up on a big TV screen in the middle of the amphitheatre. Before that, the girl who struggled over the stony path in her heels would come and see Paul again on his bench in the morning with a pile of freshly printed new programmes, which proved that perhaps history kept repeating itself without ever getting any better, and you needed to be very brave to cope with this eternal return, as the philosopher with the enormous moustache once said.
Hector and the Search for Lost Time Page 12