Hector and the Secrets of Love (24 page)

‘But love is freedom!’ he said out loud.

And Hector threw the briefcase into the fast-moving stream.

T
HAT night, with Vayla’s breath on his neck, Hector had a dream.

He was standing at the top of a beautiful Chinese mountain, in the company of an old monk he had met on his last big trip. The monk was carefully reading a text on the five components of heartache that Hector had brought him. They were surrounded by sun and clouds, and by the wind that rustled the pages in the monk’s hands. When he had finished reading, he smiled.

‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘but here you only talk about the dark side of love.’

‘How do I talk about the bright side?’

‘They are the same!’ said the old monk. And he laughed.

And suddenly everything became clear to Hector. Five components versus five components.

Hector had experienced this feeling with Clara. And, it had to be said, with Vayla.

Hector remembered this was similar to one of the lessons he had learnt from the old monk during his first trip: happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love.

Hector remembered what Clara had said to him one day: ‘Thank you for existing.’ And he also remembered Vayla’s letter.

Hector thought of all the people he had helped, but he knew he had only been able to do it because someone else still loved them no matter what.

Hector was still too young to give much thought to this component, but watching the smiling old monk he remembered how important it was.

 

 

Later, he sent the five components of love to old François, thinking they would do him good, provided, of course, they didn’t make him even sadder.

A
ND how did the whole story end? you are going to ask.

Hector had thrown away all Professor Cormorant’s research and that can’t have made everyone happy. So what happened to him?

 

 

Of course, Gunther threatened to sue him for vast sums of money, but then Hector threatened to reveal the true story about Hi and Ha, and that put a stop to that. Gunther’s company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on publicity in order to give the impression of being an organisation with the best interests of health and the environment at heart. He didn’t want to become known as the man who had employed a mad genius who transformed a nice panda into a cannibalistic lover.

 

 

Professor Cormorant disappeared again with the gentle Not, and you can expect our dear eccentric to pull other marvels or horrors out of his hat one day. And if he doesn’t, others will, because plenty of people are interested in the mechanisms of love and they have no lack of funds, so begin rejoicing or worrying. Of course, the professor is very annoyed with Hector since the business with the briefcase, and it will be some time before they get in touch again, but you can be sure they will.

 

 

Jean-Marcel went back to live with his wife and children, carrying on his job as a businessman only and travelling much less. They are happy, and they also know they need to work at staying happy.

Of course, Jean-Marcel was also upset with Hector for throwing away the briefcase. What’s more, he didn’t speak to him on their way back from the Gna-Doa village. But when they arrived, and it was time to say goodbye at the airport, Jean-Marcel whispered to him, ‘I shouldn’t say this to you, but I probably would have done exactly the same as you.’

And they parted the best of friends.

 

 

Miko and Chizourou went back to Japan, which is only natural. And, incidentally, the marriage rate in Japan has begun to pick up again in the last few months, if you are following events. Miko and Chizourou still got to work with Professor Cormorant for a while, as Lee and Wu.

 

 

The Gna-Doas carried on living the way they have always lived, that is, quite happily when nobody wages war on them. If you go there, you will understand, especially when you hear their children laughing.

 

 

Pelléas and Mélisande are still around, and the professor was on the right track with his research, because Pelléas has never eaten Mélisande and they seem more attached to each other than ever.

 

 

Captain Lin Zaou of the People’s Liberation Army . . .

Hold on, you’re going to say, we couldn’t care less about her. We want to know what happened to Hector and Vayla, and to Clara and Gunther, that’s what we really want to know about!

Well, that’s the problem – we don’t really know.

Some people will tell you the whole story was a rumour and that Hector and Clara are still together, that they may have had problems, like every couple, but they were able to deal with them and are now thinking of having a baby, while Gunther continues to be a loving father and husband to his wife and daughter, who incidentally is doing better.

Other people will tell you this is not what happened at all and you are completely mistaken. Because they have it on good authority that Hector is living with Vayla over there in the mountains, in a house on stilts. And sometimes you see them together in the town with all the temples when they go to do their shopping, and Hector comes to collect money and medicines for the clinic he has set up in one of the Gna-Doa villages. Hector and Vayla are also thinking of having a baby. Hector and Clara still keep in touch over the internet because they will always love each other, even though they now feel a different kind of love for someone else, and both Vayla and Gunther understand that.

Stuff and nonsense, others will tell you. Hector was so exhausted after his latest adventures in Asia he decided to withdraw from the world and its temptations, and he has gone on a retreat for a while to a monastery in China, the same one where the old monk he met during his first trip lives.

So who are you to believe? You could always try to find out, but the problem is still more people will tell you all these stories are true, or at any rate they all happened, in the real world, or in some other world, no less real.

Because love is indeed complicated, difficult, sometimes painful, but it is also the only time that our dream becomes reality, as old François used to say.

I would like to thank the friends that accompanied Hector on his travels, and introduced him to new horizons. Of those I am able to mention, I would particularly like to thank: Nicolas Audier, Jean-Michel Caldagues, Peer De Jong, Patrick de Kouzmine Karavaieff and Olivia Chai, Perr De Jong, Franck Lafourcade, Lin Menuhin and Xia Qing, Jean-Jacques Muletier, Yves Nicolaï, Servane Rangheard and, of course, Étienne Aubert, for her talents as a crooner.

 

My thanks to Odile Jacob and Bernard Gotlieb, and to their respective teams for their renewed help and support throughout Hector’s second adventure.

 

Hector and other characters quoted extracts of the following works:
Phèdre
by Jean Racine, ‘Love’ by Nat King Cole, ‘Lullaby’ by W. H. Auden, ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ by Charles Baudelaire.

 

And thank you to Georges Condominas for his book
Nous avons mangé la forêt
(Mercure de France).

Excerpt from “L-O-V-E,” words and music by Milt Gabler and Bert Kaempfert. © 1964, Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc., London.

 

Excerpt from “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” words and music by Cathy Dennis and Robert Berkeley Davis. © Copyright 2001 EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and Universal / MCA Music Ltd. All rights for EMI Music Publishing in the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. All rights for Universal / MCA Music Ltd. controlled and administered in the United States and Canada by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Universal copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. © 2000, Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London.

 

Excerpt from “Lullaby” (1937) from
Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940, 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Copyright © 1976, 1991, The Estate of W. H. Auden. By permission of The Wylie Agency.

Read on for the opening chapters of François Lelord’s third novel about Hector

Coming from Penguin in 2012

 

T
HE first time Sabine came to see Hector it was because she was getting upset at work. Sabine worked in an office, and her boss wasn’t nice to her: he often made her cry. Of course, she always cried in private, but even so, it was terribly hard for her.

Little by little, Hector helped her realise that perhaps she deserved better than a boss who was not nice to her and Sabine built up enough self-confidence to find a new job. And these days, she was happier.

Gradually Hector had changed the way he worked. In the beginning, he mainly tried to help people to change their outlook. Now, he still did that, of course, but he also helped people to change their lives, to find a new life which would suit them better. Because, to put it another way, if you’re a cow, you’ll never become a horse, even with a good psychiatrist. It’s better to find a nice meadow where people need milk than to try to gallop around a racecourse. And, above all, it’s best to avoid entering a bullring, because that’s always a disaster.

Sabine would not have been happy being compared to a cow, even though cows are actually kind and gentle animals, Hector had always thought, and very good mothers too. It is true that she was also very clever, and sometimes this did not make her happy, because, as you might already have noticed, sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.

One day, Sabine said to Hector, ‘Sometimes, I think life is just a big con.’

Startled, Hector asked, ‘What do you mean?’ (That was what he always said when he hadn’t been listening properly the first time).

‘Well, you’re born, and before you know it, you have to rush about, going to school, then work, having children, and then your parents die and then . . . you get old and die too.’

‘This all takes a bit of time, though, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it goes by so quickly. Especially when there’s no time to stop. Take me, for example, work, children, husband . . . He’s the same, poor guy – he never stops either.’

Sabine had a nice husband (she had also had a nice father, which straight away improves the chances of finding a nice husband), who worked hard in an office too. And two young children, the eldest of whom had started school.

‘I always feel like I’m up against the clock,’ said Sabine. ‘In the morning, everything needs to be organised, we have to leave in time to take my eldest to school, and then dash to the office. There are meetings, which you have to be on time for, but while you’re there, the rest of your work piles up, and then you have to rush in the evenings too, to pick up your child from school, or get home in time for the nanny, and then dinner, and homework . . . Still, I’m lucky, my husband helps me. We hardly have time to speak to each other in the evening: we’re so tired, we both just fall asleep.’

Hector knew all this, and perhaps that was partly why he had spent a lot of time thinking about, considering, contemplating whether to give serious thought to marrying and having babies.