Hector and the Search for Happiness (11 page)

He took out his little notebook and wrote:

To reward himself for having thought hard, Hector gestured to the air hostess, who came over, smiling, to fill his glass. He thought she was very pretty, but he knew that this might also be the effect of the champagne, and anyway life was complicated enough already with Clara, Ying Li and Marie-Louise’s cousin, who had told him that she occasionally went on holiday to his country.

He wondered why he wasn’t as in love with her as he was with Ying Li, but if you’ve been concentrating you’ll already have guessed: Hector had only shared enjoyment with Marie-Louise’s cousin (we won’t say her name in case you bump into her in Hector’s city). With Ying Li he’d shared everything, enjoyment and sorrow. With Clara, too, of course, but for some time now they’d shared too much frustration, boredom and fatigue.

He would have liked to discuss all this with somebody, but there was nobody next to him because he was in a part of the plane that was so expensive it was almost empty. Even if there had been somebody, he would have had to lean over a long way because the armrests were so wide. This was interesting because it meant that for rich people happiness was being able to feel on their own, at any rate when they were on a plane.

Whereas for poor people, like the women on their oilcloths, happiness was being surrounded by their friends. But it’s true that you never know on a plane whether the person next to you will be a friend, so it’s best to take precautions.

Just then, an air hostess came up from the lower deck where the seats were less expensive, and went to talk to her fellow air hostesses. They looked quite worried. Hector wondered whether it was because there was a problem with the plane, and he got ready to think about death again, though much more comfortably here than in the storeroom.

One of the hostesses came over and asked if there was a doctor among the passengers. Hector felt uncomfortable: as a psychiatrist you are a real doctor, but because of listening to people’s problems all the time, you often get out of the habit of treating ordinary illnesses. Also, he wondered whether the air hostess was asking for a doctor because there was a lady on the plane having a baby. He’d always been nervous about this when travelling by train or plane. When he was a student, he’d never gone into the wards where women had babies. Of course he’d studied the subject, but only very briefly the night before the exam, and he’d forgotten most of it, and in any case studying and reality are not the same things. And so he felt rather uncomfortable, but even so he signalled to the air hostess and he told her that he was a real doctor.

The air hostess was very glad, because she’d looked in the other sections of the plane and there were no doctors, or at any rate nobody who wanted to say that they were. (Hector understood why later, as will you.)

And so, Hector left his little paradise and followed the air hostess down into economy class. Everybody in the rows of seats looked up at him as he went by because they’d understood that he was a doctor, and this worried him slightly; what would he do if they all took it into their heads to demand a consultation?

The air hostess took him over to a lady who didn’t look very well.

Hector began speaking to her, but it was difficult because she had a very bad headache, and she didn’t speak Hector’s language. When she spoke in English, she had an accent which Hector and the air hostess found quite difficult to understand.

Her face was slightly swollen, like people who drink too much, but she didn’t look as if she’d been drinking. Finally, she took a piece of paper out of her bag and handed it to Hector. It was a medical report: this was much easier to understand for a doctor. Six months ago, the lady had had an operation inside her head because a small piece of her brain had begun to grow in a way it shouldn’t, and this bad growth had been removed. Then Hector noticed that her hair wasn’t her own, it was a wig. Since hair grows back in six months, Hector understood that the lady had been given medication that had made her face swell up and her hair fall out, and that the growth must have been very bad indeed. The lady studied him while he was reading the report of the surgery, as if she were trying to tell from his face what he made of it all. But Hector had been trained to have a reassuring look at all times and he said to her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m just going to ask you some questions.’

And he spoke to her like a doctor, in order to find out how long she’d had the headache, and whether it was a throbbing pain like a heart beat, or more like toothache, and which part of her head hurt most. He examined her eyes with a small torch the air hostess lent him. He asked the lady to squeeze his hands in hers, and other things you learn in order to become a doctor. And the lady seemed less anxious than when he’d arrived.

Asking those questions and doing those tests had taken Hector’s mind off the thought that this lady might die, but once he’d finished he was forced to think about it again.

Just then, the air hostess handed him the lady’s passport, and he saw in the photograph, which was less than a year old, a beautiful young woman who had the same eyes as the woman now looking at him, and he understood that the illness had also stolen her beauty.

He remembered lesson no. 14:
Happiness is to be loved for exactly who you are.

And so he smiled at her, because men’s smiles must be something she greatly missed.

H
ER name was Djamila, which happens to mean beautiful, and she came from an equally beautiful country, where people a little older than Hector would have gone on holiday when they were young, because you could smoke weed in the midst of magnificent mountains. The girls would have brought back beautiful fabrics, which they turned into dresses and curtains. (It was a time when dresses and curtains looked very similar.)

Since then, that country had always been at war, at first because it had been invaded by a large neighbouring country that had wanted to create a heaven on earth, except that the inhabitants of the beautiful country didn’t agree with their version of heaven. So the inhabitants had fought for years against the soldiers from the large neighbouring country and the war had become like a festering sore that made the big country very sick. After that, things went from bad to worse for everybody, countless mothers had shed countless tears, the big country had grown as weak as a small country, and Djamila’s country had gone on being at war because some people there also wanted to create heaven on earth. (Be very wary of people who declare that they’re going to create heaven on earth, they almost invariably create hell.) The beautiful country had grown poorer than when Hector was a child. It was getting better now; a large army made up of people from countries all over the world had gone to sort things out (but they didn’t wear shorts because it was too cold) and people had renewed hope.

 

 

Except Djamila, who can’t have had much hope, and who was trying to find reasons to have some by studying Hector’s face as he read her medical report written by another doctor, a medical report that, as you’ve guessed, wasn’t very hopeful.

Hector told her that he would look after her until the end of the flight.

He put on his doctorly air and told the air hostess that Djamila needed to be able to stretch out, that it would relieve her headache, and that they must take her to the seat next to his so that he could keep an eye on her. The air hostess called over a very kind steward. The three of them helped Djamila to get up and walk to the other section of the plane. When she stood up Djamila was tall, but she weighed very little.

When she was sitting next to Hector in a very comfortable seat that stretched out almost like a bed, she smiled for the first time, and Hector recognised the Djamila from the passport photograph. He asked her whether she still had a headache, and she said she had, but that being there made her feel better, and that Hector was too kind.

They continued talking. Hector thought that it might help her to forget about her headache, and as he spoke to her he looked at her pupils, the way doctors do.

They were both going to the big country where there were more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world. Notice that we say ‘more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world’ but we could just as well say more swimming pools, more Nobel prizewinners, more strategic bombers, more apple pies, more computers, more natural parks, more libraries, more cheer-leaders, more serial killers, more newspapers, more racoons, more of many more things, because it was the country of More, and had been for a long time. No doubt because the people who lived there had left their own countries precisely because they wanted more, especially more freedom. (The only people who hadn’t got more freedom were the natives who already lived there, but, as previously mentioned, that was in the days when people who came from countries like Hector’s tended to think that everything belonged to them.)

Djamila was going to visit her sister who had married a citizen of that country. She was going to stay with them for a while.

Hector explained that he was going there to meet a professor who was a specialist in Happiness Studies. He immediately regretted saying this, because he told himself that happiness probably wasn’t a very good subject to discuss with Djamila.

But she smiled at him, and explained that, for her, happiness was knowing that her country was going to be a better place, that her little brothers weren’t going to grow up to be killed in the war, and that her sister had a kind husband and children who could go to school, go on holiday and grow up to be doctors or lawyers or forest rangers or painters or whatever they wished.

Hector noticed that she didn’t speak of her own happiness, but that of others, of the people she loved.

And then Djamila said that her head had started hurting a bit more. Hector called the air hostess and told her that he wanted to speak to the captain. (You can do that if you’re a doctor.) After a while, the captain arrived in his fine uniform with his equally fine moustache. (Don’t worry, another pilot was in the cockpit flying the plane.) Hector explained the situation to him and the captain asked if it would help if he made the plane fly a little lower.

Hector said that they could always try. This is something that both pilots and doctors know: if something is causing pressure in your body, being high up, like at the top of a mountain or in an aeroplane, increases the pressure because the air around you has less pressure, even though the plane is pressurised. And so the captain rushed off to make the plane descend.

Djamila told Hector that she felt he was going to too much trouble, really, and he said that he wasn’t and that he liked talking to the captain and making the plane descend, and that next time he might even ask him to do a loop the loop to make Djamila’s headache better. This made her laugh and again he saw the Djamila in the passport photograph.

Then he asked the air hostess for some champagne, because it couldn’t do Djamila any harm.

They clinked glasses, and Djamila told him that this was the first time she’d drunk champagne, because in her country it had been banned for a long time, and all you could find was cheap vodka left behind by the defeated soldiers. She tasted the champagne, and said it was wonderful, and Hector said he couldn’t have agreed more.

Hector recalled the last lesson,
Happiness is knowing how to celebrate,
and he wanted Djamila to benefit from it.

After they had talked a little longer, her headache was better, and then she fell peacefully asleep.

The passengers around them were concerned. They could see through the windows that the plane was flying lower. And so the air hostesses explained why, and the passengers looked at Hector and Djamila and felt reassured.

Hector was thinking as he sat next to Djamila who was asleep.

Djamila must think about death often. He had thought about it for less than an hour in his storeroom. But for her, it was as if she’d been living in that storeroom for months. And yet she continued to smile.

And she had told him that she was pleased that her country and her family had a better chance of being happy.

He picked up his little notebook and wrote:

T
HE pilot with the fine moustache landed the plane very well, without a bump, and everybody clapped, perhaps because they’d felt a little worried when the plane wasn’t flying very high. And so a smooth landing made them happy, when normally it didn’t have much effect on them.

Another case of comparison, Hector told himself.

As the passengers left the aeroplane, throwing them quick glances, he waited with Djamila and the air hostess until the doctors whom the pilot had asked for over the radio arrived. Djamila had woken up, and fortunately her pupils were still the same and she was able to squeeze Hector’s hands equally hard with both her hands, though not very hard of course because she was a girl, and because she wasn’t very well.

Two big strapping men in white coats arrived with a wheelchair to take Djamila away, and Hector wanted to explain to them what was wrong with her. But they didn’t listen to him. First they asked Djamila whether she had any insurance. Before treating Djamila they wanted to know whether she could pay! And they weren’t even doctors, because in that country doctors don’t usually go out on call, they wait for patients to be brought to them. Hector became a little angry, but Djamila told him that it wasn’t worth it, that her sister had taken out all the necessary insurance, that in any case she’d be waiting for her here at the airport, and that her sister’s husband’s father was a doctor. She would be well taken care of and Hector could go.