Hector and the Secrets of Love (8 page)

‘The worst thing is their friends’ advice.’

‘They always want to control us, and once they’ve succeeded they lose interest.’

Finally, after the second bottle, they decided to go out on the town and ordered a tuk-tuk, which is a local type of rickshaw, except that instead of a bicycle it is a scooter pulling two fat white people while a less fat less white person drives.

It was quite pleasant driving through the night air after the heat of the day. The streets were fairly quiet, with just a few cars and some dogs, although you could see several bars lit up and some massage parlours with flashing neon signs. Apparently, the people in that town needed round to the temples. But Hector remembered what the hotel manager had said and he realised they weren’t only giving ordinary massages.

Finally the tuk-tuk dropped them at a bar where a few young Western men were drinking and chatting with some young women who were unmistakably Asian.

Two of the women immediately came over to talk to them. They wanted Hector and Jean-Marcel to buy them a drink, and in return they seemed willing to keep repeating how handsome they were and trying to find out the name of their hotel. They smiled, showing all their pretty teeth, but in their eyes Hector glimpsed less happy things. Younger brothers and sisters who needed food. A drug dealer who was owed money. Medicines that had to be paid for.

Hector and Jean-Marcel looked at one another.

‘I’m not in the mood,’ said Jean-Marcel.

‘Neither am I,’ said Hector.

They climbed back into the tuk-tuk and Jean-Marcel was clearly quite drunk because he couldn’t get in on his first attempt.

‘Kerls, kerls!’
said the driver.

Hector didn’t understand Khmer; he just said ‘hotel’ and dozed off a little while making sure Jean-Marcel didn’t fall over the side.

Finally, the tuk-tuk dropped them at another place, a rather dimly lit sort of shed, where a few local men were waiting around in armchairs. Hector and Jean-Marcel were glad of the armchairs, which were a lot more comfortable than the hard seats in the tuk-tuk. The first thing Hector noticed was that they were the only white men there, and then that some young girls were sitting opposite them on plastic chairs under a bright light. They looked like schoolgirls; they wore jeans and brand-name T-shirts, like in Hector’s country, and high-heeled sandals that showed their pretty toes, and some were using their mobiles while others talked or stared into space with bored expressions. Hector wondered why all the young girls were sitting on one side and the men on the other, and why the lights were so bright that some of them were blinking in the glare, and then suddenly he understood.

He saw that some of the girls stared at him and flashed him little smiles, while others, on the contrary, looked scared and hid their faces as soon as he looked at them. They seemed so young; already women, but still young enough to be at school or watch the pop charts on television. In Hector’s country, they would have been studying or working as shop assistants or trainees. Some of them reminded him of his friends’ daughters, or some of his young patients. They talked among themselves just like girls their age anywhere.

Hector saw Jean-Marcel was watching them, too. He remembered Jean-Marcel telling him his daughter was sixteen.

Hector and Jean-Marcel looked at each other again, stood up and walked back to the tuk-tuk.

‘Kerls? Kerls? . . . Poys?’
screeched the driver.

‘Hotel! Hotel! Hotel!’ Jean-Marcel said, a little too loudly, Hector thought.

The driver also had a family to feed and commissions to earn from the clients he brought.

Later, in his room, looking through his notebook, Hector reread:
which he had decided wasn’t true for everybody, nor at all times.

He thought of the girls sitting under the lights and he wrote:

Hector thought of the local men sitting next to him, who took their time before choosing, or only fantasised because they didn’t have enough money to pay for half an hour of a young girl’s beauty, and of all the frustrated men in his own country who might have dreamt of being in a place like that, and of himself (because who knows what might have happened if he had gone there on a different night having drunk a bit less or a bit more or without Clara on his mind?), and it made him think again of old François’s words. What if somebody found a way of suppressing sexual desire? Wouldn’t life be nicer and more decent?

J
UST as Hector was dropping off to sleep, there was a knock at his door. He turned on his bedside light and walked barefoot across the smooth, varnished acaciawood floor, and opened the door. The young waitress with the complicated name was standing there, as pretty as ever in her sarong, and once again she gave him a graceful oriental bow. She looked nervous. Hector gestured to her to come in.

He was very surprised. He hadn’t rung for anything, and, besides, it was only in novels that enchanting young women came to knock on your bedroom door at night. As she walked past him, the pretty waitress handed him an envelope. Hector invited her to sit down in one of the armchairs, which she did, crossing her legs underneath her. In the light of the bedside lamp, her face had a beautiful amber glow and her supple figure and her smile gave the impression that one of the stone dancers had stepped off the temple wall under cover of darkness and come all the way to his room. She looked at him without saying anything and he felt a bit uneasy.

He opened the envelope. As he had suspected, it was a letter from Professor Cormorant.

Hector folded the letter and found Vayla gazing up at him, and he saw in her eyes a look of expectation and trust that he had rarely seen in a human being. Still sitting cross-legged, she was holding in her palm two small cylindrical phials, each about the size of a pen top.

Hector was in torment. He felt a bit like Snowy when he has to choose between carrying a vital message in his mouth or dropping it in order to seize the delicious bone he has just dug up, and his conscience struggles with a miniature Snowy-devil on one side and a miniature Snowy-angel on the other, each doing their best to win him over. In Hector’s case, the message he had to hold on to was his love for Clara, and the wonderfully tempting bone was Vayla, willing to give herself up to him and to the raptures her friend had described.

But suddenly the letter he was holding reminded him of the one Clara had written to him.

He took the twin phials from Vayla’s hand. She smiled at him and hugged him tenderly round the legs.

L
ATER, when he was almost asleep, Hector was thinking that Professor Cormorant had made a fitting choice in quoting verses from the Song of Songs in his messages. That poem expressed so perfectly what he felt with Vayla and what the professor must have experienced with his new friend.

In the course of a few hours, Hector had experienced with Vayla a range of emotions he hadn’t often felt for the same person: intense sexual excitement, it has to be said, accompanied by a rush of tenderness and affection towards her. And when she wanted him to be more forceful than gentle or at other moments more gentle than forceful, Hector sensed it, all the while feeling this surge of tenderness towards her that was as powerful as his desire. When Vayla stared deep into his eyes, he saw she was experiencing the same intense emotions. As they soared together, borne aloft by the mounting current of their love, Hector could not help asking himself questions. What would it be like when they came down? (Don’t forget that Hector is a psychiatrist, and he has a tendency to analyse his and other people’s feelings, even in the thick of things.)

What memories, what emotional impressions would he and Vayla have of these moments?

Luckily, the professor had come up with an antidote that would allow them to dissolve the bond that now bound them together, like melting a chain link that has been forged in a furnace.

Hector looked at Vayla, lying naked, her eyes closed, a smile on her gently pouting lips. With her arms half raised either side of her head, her legs turned outward and resting flat on the bed, she was like a living replica of one of the stone dancers –
apsara
, as he had been told they were called – decorating the temple walls. No doubt one of her ancestors had posed as a model and, since in that country nobody travelled much, that harmony had been passed on through the generations only to end up next to him on that bed. Psychiatry is interesting, but travelling isn’t bad either, thought Hector.

Vayla opened her eyes, smiled and stretched her arms out towards him. Hector knew immediately what he had to do, but he would probably have known that even without the professor’s drug.

Later, dawn came. The jungle around the hotel was alive with the squawks of countless birds, and even the odd plaintive
ou-ou-ou
which seemed to suggest the presence of monkeys.

Hector and Vayla had a few more spells of waking and sleeping, and soon it was midday, the sun was high in the sky and the jungle had gone quiet.

The phone rang. It was Jean-Marcel.

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.

Hector looked at Vayla’s profile as she slept.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said.

Even so, he was afraid; he felt a deep desire to protect Vayla for the rest of her life, to be near her always, to make love to her until his dying breath. He felt swept away by a flood he was powerless to resist.

‘Shall we have lunch?’ Jean-Marcel said.

‘Sure.’

He must wake up completely and take the antidote quickly and make Vayla take it with him. He felt her arms on his shoulders.

He turned round and immersed himself in her eyes and her smile, at once delighted and terrified by the emotion he felt, which he sensed she was experiencing at the exact same moment, a look of wonder in her eyes, her heart pounding against his chest.

They mustn’t delay in taking the antidote. He couldn’t tie her to him nor could he be tied to her.

But when Hector asked her, using gestures, about the professor’s promised antidote, Vayla looked puzzled. She appeared not to understand.

Hector picked up the hotel biro and notepad and drew two small phials, and next to them an oval-shaped pill. Vayla gazed at his drawing intently, like a young fawn seeing a rabbit for the first time. Hector drew a round pill. Vayla blushed slightly. She looked at Hector and then showed him her slender fingers.