Hector and the Secrets of Love (2 page)

Actually what Hector found most tiring was the question of love. Not in his own life, but in the lives of all the people who came to see him.

Because love, it seemed, was an endless source of suffering.

Some people complained of not having any at all.

‘Doctor, I’m bored with my life; I feel so unhappy. I’d really like to be in love, to feel loved. It seems as if love is only for other people, not for me.’

This was the sort of thing Anne-Marie would say, for example. When she had asked Hector what the Chinese expression meant, Hector had looked at her very carefully. Anne-Marie could have been pretty if only she’d stopped dressing like her mother and hadn’t focused all her energy on her work. Hector replied, ‘If you want to catch fish, you must go to the river.’

Soon afterwards, Anne-Marie joined a choir. She started wearing make-up and stopped dressing like her mother all the time.

Some people complained of too much love. Too much love was as bad for their health as too much cholesterol.

‘It’s terrible — I should stop; I know that it’s over, but I can’t help thinking about him all the time. Do you think I should write to him . . . or call him? Or should I wait outside his office to try to see him?’

This was Claire, who, as can often happen, had become involved with a man who wasn’t free, and to begin with it was fun because, as she told Hector, she wasn’t in love, but then she did fall in love, and so did he. Even so, they decided to stop seeing each other because the man’s wife was becoming suspicious and he didn’t want to leave her. And so Claire suffered a lot, and when she asked Hector what the words on the Chinese panel said, he had to think for a moment before coming up with a reply: ‘Do not build your home in a neighbour’s field’.

Claire had burst into tears and Hector hadn’t felt very pleased with himself.

He also saw men who suffered because of love, and these cases were even more serious: men only find the courage to go to a psychiatrist when they’re very, very unhappy or when they’ve exhausted all their friends with their problems and have begun drinking too much.

This was the case with Luc — a boy who was a bit too nice and suffered a lot when women left him, especially as he often chose women who were not very nice, probably because his mother hadn’t been very nice to him when he was little. Hector told him that the Chinese panel said: ‘If you are scared of the panther, hunt the antelope’. And then he wondered whether there were any antelopes in China. Luc replied, ‘That’s a rather bloodthirsty proverb. The Chinese are quite bloodthirsty, aren’t they?’

Hector realised that it wasn’t going to be easy.

Some people, very many actually, both men and women, complained that they used to be madly in love with someone (usually someone they were living with) but that they no longer felt the same way, even though they were still very fond of them.

‘I tell myself that maybe it’s natural after all these years. We still get on very well, but we haven’t made love for months . . . Together, I mean.’

For these people, Hector had a bit of trouble finding a suitable meaning for the Chinese panel, or else he’d come up with clichéd expressions like ‘The wise man sees the beauty of each season’, which meant nothing, even to him.

Some people complained of being in love, but with the wrong person.

‘Oh dear, I know he’ll end up being a disaster just like all the others. But I can’t help myself.’

This was Virginie. She went from love affair to love affair with men who were very attractive to women, which was very exciting to begin with, but rather painful in the end. For her, Hector came up with: ‘He who hunts must start again each day, while he who cultivates can watch his rice growing’.

Virginie said it was amazing how much the Chinese managed to say in just four characters, and Hector felt she was perhaps a little bit cleverer than him.

Other people had found love, but worried about it even so.

‘We love each other, of course. But is he the right person for me? Marriage isn’t to be taken lightly. When you marry, it’s for life. And, anyway, I want to enjoy my freedom a bit longer . . . ’

Hector generally asked these people to tell him about their mothers and fathers and how they got along.

Other people wondered whether they could ever hope to find love, whether perhaps it wasn’t too good for them.

‘I can’t imagine anybody finding me attractive. Deep down, I don’t think I’m a very interesting person. Even you seem bored, Doctor.’

At this point Hector woke up completely and said, no, not at all, and then kicked himself because the right thing to say would have been: ‘What makes you think that?’

So a lot of people came to explain to Hector that love or lack of love prevented them from sleeping, thinking, laughing and in some cases even from living. And with this last category Hector had to be very careful, because he knew that love can make people kill themselves, which is a very foolish thing to do, so don’t ever do it and if you have thoughts about doing it go to see someone like Hector immediately, or call a close friend.

Hector had been in love, and he remembered how much suffering love can cause: days and nights spent thinking about somebody who doesn’t want to see you any more, wondering whether it would be better to write, to call or to remain in silence, unable to sleep unless you drink everything in the mini-bar of the hotel room in the town you’ve come to in order to see her except that she doesn’t want to see you. Now, of course, this type of memory helped him to understand people who found themselves in the same situation. Hector also remembered the nice girls whom he had made suffer because of love and he wasn’t very proud of that. They had loved him and he had only liked them. Sometimes, he’d lived through both roles, victim and executioner, with the same girl, because love is complicated, and, what’s worse, it’s unpredictable.

This type of suffering was now a thing of the past for Hector. (Or so he thought at the beginning of this story, but just wait and see.) Because he had a good friend, Clara, whom he loved very much and she loved him, and they were even thinking of having a baby together and of getting married. Hector was happy because in the end love affairs are very tiring, so when you find somebody you love and who loves you, you really hope that it will be your last love affair.

The strange thing is that, at the same time, you wonder if it isn’t a bit sad to think that it will be your last love affair. You see how complicated love is!

O
NE evening Hector arrived home, preoccupied with all the painful stories about love he’d heard during the day: situations in which one person loved more than the other, or both people loved each other but they didn’t get on, or they no longer loved each other but couldn’t love anybody else, and other permutations besides, because whereas happiness in love offers a beautiful, relatively unchanging landscape, unhappiness comes in many and varied forms, as a great Russian author once put it slightly better.

Clara wasn’thomeyet, because she always had meetings that finished late. She worked for a big pharmaceutical company, which produced many best-selling drugs. The big company enjoyed swallowing up smaller companies, and one day it even tried to devour a company larger than itself, but the larger company fought it off.

Clara’s bosses were pleased with her because she was a very conscientious, hard-working girl, and they often asked her to stand in for them at meetings or sum up long reports for them, which they didn’t have time to read.

Hector was happy to know that Clara’s bosses had faith in her. On the other hand he didn’t like her coming home so late, often tired, and not always in a very good mood. Because, although her bosses depended on her a lot, they never took her along to the really important meetings with the real big shots; they went to those on their own, and made out that they were the ones who had done all the work or come up with all the good ideas.

What a surprise, then, when Clara arrived home with a big smile on her face.

‘Good day?’ asked Hector, pleased to see Clara looking so happy.

‘Oh, not great, too many meetings getting in the way of work. And everybody is in a panic because the patent on our leading drug has expired. So we can kiss our profits goodbye!’

‘But you look so happy.’

‘I’m happy to see you, my love.’

And she began to laugh. You see, this was Clara’s way of jesting about love. Luckily, Hector was used to it and he knew that Clara really loved him.

‘Well,’ said Clara, ‘it’s true, but I’m also happy because we’ve received an invitation.’

‘We?’

‘Yes, well, you’re the one invited, but I’m allowed to go with you.’ Clara took a letter out of her briefcase and gave it to Hector. ‘They should really have posted it to you, but they’re aware by now that we know each other.’

Hector read the letter. It was written by a man who was very high up in Clara’s company, one of the real big shots she didn’t meet very often. He said that he thought very highly of Hector (Hector remembered they’d shaken hands twice at conferences on psychiatry) and was relying on him to take part in a confidential meeting, where people from the company would ask his opinion on a very important matter. He hoped that Hector would agree to go, and repeated how much he appreciated his expertise.

Together with the letter was another piece of paper showing the place where the meeting would be held: a very pretty hotel made of wood overlooking a magnificent beach with palm trees. The hotel was on a faraway island surrounded by a very blue sea. Hector wondered why they had to take them so far. It was perfectly possible to think at home in an armchair, but he told himself that this was the company’s way of making him feel that he was important to them.

There was a third piece of paper telling Hector that in addition to the invitation he would of course be paid for giving his opinion. When he saw the amount, he thought he’d misread it and had added on an extra zero, but on rereading it he realised that he hadn’t, that it was right.

‘Hasn’t there been some mistake?’ Hector asked Clara.

‘No, that’s the correct amount. The others are getting the same – more or less what they asked for.’

‘The others?’

She gave Hector the names of his fellow psychiatrists who had also been invited.

Hector knew them. There was a very old psychiatrist with a bow tie who, as he grew older, had specialised in rich unhappy people (though he also occasionally saw poor people and didn’t charge them), and a jolly little woman who had specialised in people who had difficulty doing what people in love do, and were willing to pay crazy amounts of money in order to be able to do it.

‘Right, well, this will be a mini holiday for us,’ said Hector.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Clara. ‘I’ll be seeing the same old faces I see at every meeting.’

‘At least we’ll be going away somewhere together for a change,’ said Hector.

‘We went to Italy recently!’

‘That was only because you had a conference there afterwards. Your job always determines everything.’

‘Would you prefer me to be a good little housewife and stay at home?’

‘No, I’d prefer you to stop letting yourself be exploited, and come home at a reasonable time.’

‘I bring you a piece of good news and you immediately start complaining!’

‘You’re the one who started it.’

‘No, I didn’t, you did.’

Hector and Clara carried on bickering and went to bed without speaking to each other or kissing each other good night. Which just goes to show that love isn’t easy, even for psychiatrists.

 

 

During the night, Hector woke up. In the dark, he found his luminous pen, which allowed him to write at night without waking Clara up. He noted:
Perfect love would be never having arguments.

He thought about it. He wasn’t sure.

He didn’t feel he could call his statement a ‘lesson’. Wanting to give lessons on love seemed a bit ridiculous. He thought of ‘reflection’, but it was too serious for such a simple phrase. It was only a tiny thought, like a seedling that has just sprouted and nobody knows what it will be yet. There, he’d found it. It was a seedling. He wrote:

He thought for a little bit longer, but it was difficult as his eyelids kept closing. He looked at Clara who was sleeping.

O
NE place on the island’s beach seemed to belong to a large family of little pink crabs that were constantly mounting or fighting each other. Hector watched them, and he very quickly understood that when they mounted each other it was the males mounting the females and when they fought it was the males fighting amongst themselves. And why were they fighting? To be able to mount the females, of course. Even for crabs, love seemed like quite a difficult thing, especially for the males that lost a pincer during a fight. It reminded Hector of something one of his patients had said to him about a woman he was very much in love with: ‘I would have done better to cut my arm off than meet her.’ He was exaggerating of course, especially as, unlike with crabs, an arm doesn’t grow back.

‘You like your little friends the crabs, don’t you?’

It was Clara, who had arrived wearing a pretty white bathing suit. She had started to tan a little and to Hector she looked as appetising as a freshly picked apricot.

‘You’re crazy, be careful, people can see us! And so can the crabs!’

Exactly! It was watching the crabs that had given Hector ideas, but he had also just noticed that the people from the company were looking in their direction. They were having a drink on the veranda of the hotel’s biggest bungalow, which was built on stilts. The sunset was magnificent, the waves breaking on the beach made a gentle murmur, Clara looked all golden in the setting sun and Hector thought: This is a moment of happiness. He had learnt that you mustn’t waste any of these.