Hector and the Search for Happiness (12 page)

And so they exchanged telephone numbers in order to keep in touch and Hector left. He looked back one last time at Djamila sitting very upright in her wheelchair between the two nurses; she smiled and gave him a last little wave goodbye.

Hector had arrived in a huge city by the sea, in a place where the weather was always good and there were even palm trees growing in the gardens. The city was as big as some countries. It was criss-crossed by motorways, which you could see from the sky. Gazing out of the window in the plane, Hector had thought that it looked as if somebody had tossed spaghetti onto the very elaborate carpet that was the city, with its glittering blue gemstones: the swimming pools. For there were a great many swimming pools.

Hector described his trip to Agnès, who had come to pick him up at the airport, and was now driving a big car along one of the motorways he’d seen from the plane. The sky was blue and the air shimmered with heat, but not in the car because Agnès had put the air conditioning on full. Hector remembered that unlike many girls she didn’t feel the cold at all.

Agnès had been Hector’s girlfriend, but one day they had separated. Actually, Hector had left Agnès, because he was very young at the time and didn’t know enough to recognise a really nice girl when he saw one, because he hadn’t met any others. And so he had left Agnès to go and meet other girls who were not nearly as well suited to him, but he didn’t know that then and only realised it much later. But by then Agnès had already left for the big country of More, and she’d married a boy from there and even had three children by him. But Agnès and Hector had stayed friends, because they liked each other, even without doing the things people do when they’re in love.

When Hector told her about Djamila, Agnès was alarmed.

‘You don’t realise what an incredible risk you took! People here sue doctors all the time and their lawyers claim huge amounts of compensation. And on that plane it’s the same as if you’d been here. What’s more, your insurance wouldn’t have covered you. It’s lucky that everything went well!’

Hector explained that in any event Djamila was a nice person, and not the type who would sue a doctor, but at the same time now he understood why he’d been the only doctor the air hostesses could find on the plane; the others must have been worried about prospective meetings with lawyers. They’d looked away, like when you don’t want to be asked to go to the blackboard.

Hector knew a few lawyers, and they didn’t scare him; he just found them a little tiresome when they talked too much at dinner parties. But Agnès explained that, over here, they were truly fearsome and that they earned as much money as Édouard. (Agnès also knew Édouard, who’d been a little bit in love with her when they were very young, but Agnès had been in love with Hector at the time — love is complicated.)

Agnès lived in a very nice house with a big lawn, palm trees, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Agnès’s husband wasn’t bad either; for Hector it was a bit like having a brother who always came first in games. His name was Alan and he was very kind to Hector, except that every evening he asked him if he’d like to go jogging with him the next morning, because Alan began every day with a three-mile run. Since he did this at six thirty in the morning, Hector didn’t really want to go running; he preferred to stay in bed dreaming, because dreams are very important to psychiatrists.

While Alan went running and Agnès made breakfast for the children before taking them to school, Hector dreamt about Ying Li, although sometimes he muddled everything up: instead of Djamila having a headache on the plane it was Ying Li and he tried to save her by squeezing her hands very hard. Later, it was Hector who was sitting in the wheelchair, and Clara was pushing him down the aisle between the seats. And the pilot who came to see him was the old Chinese monk, who was still dressed like a monk but with a pilot’s cap, and who kept looking at him and laughing, because Hector was back in his seat on the plane again, but he was stark naked, and he didn’t dare get up out of his seat for fear the other passengers and the air hostesses would notice. The person sitting next to him put a hand on his arm to comfort him, and it was Ying Li, but also Clara and Marie-Louise’s cousin and Djamila, all of them one woman who loved him and was smiling at him, and this was happiness, but then he woke up.

He reached for his notebook and wrote:

The problem, of course, was that women wouldn’t agree.

He crossed out the sentence and then did lots of little squiggles on it, because he was a bit afraid that Clara might one day find his notebook and read it.

A
LAN and Agnès’s house was in one of the most attractive parts of this city that was as big as a small country, right near the sea. And so one morning Hector walked down the street lined with trees and pretty wooden houses, some of them quite old (in this city old meant the same age as an old person). Then he went down some steps cut into the cliff, walked below the roaring traffic, and came out onto a huge white sandy beach, which he crossed to go and wade in the sea, which was quite cold. When his feet were in the water, he looked at the vast blue horizon and told himself that this sea stretched all the way to China. This little wave lapping at his ankles might have come from the very city where he’d met Ying Li.

The funny thing was that there weren’t many people on this magnificent beach, and hardly anybody like Hector, Agnès or Alan. There were mostly poor people with rather a lot of children, or black people who were generally quite young. Hector understood that in this country rich people were either too busy to go to the beach because they worked a lot, like Alan and Agnès, or they preferred the nice clean water in their swimming pools or Jacuzzis, or they weren’t too keen on mixing with poor people, but this of course was true in all countries.

In fact, there were other beaches further north of the city, where rich people and even film stars lived. But in places like that you didn’t have the right to go on the beach unless you lived there, because in this country you could even buy a beach if you had enough money.

So, the poor people had this huge beach all to themselves, free of charge, and they had fun playing volleyball, drinking beer, picking up girls, and they seemed quite happy, because here on the beach they could forget about the people who were richer than them, who had nice cars, nice houses and expensive lawyers.

Hector put on his sunglasses and wrote:

And he told himself that if one day he became really poor, he would seek refuge in a sunny city by the sea and in a poor country so that he would feel less poor. (Remember lesson no. 1:
Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.
)

He looked at his list of lessons and felt that he was gradually coming to the end. More and more now, when something that happened on his trip made him think about happiness, he realised that it corresponded to one of the lessons he’d already written down. This meant that either he’d learnt almost all there was to learn or that he was going round in circles and it was time to show his list to somebody else. (For the moment, the only person who’d read the whole thing was the boss of the gang, but he hadn’t told Hector what he thought.)

 

 

That evening, Hector had dinner with Alan, Agnès and the children. He was glad to be in a proper family with a father, a mother, two little boys and a little girl, because it seemed to him like a good place to find happiness. The problem was that the children didn’t stay at the table very long; they went out to play in the garden, came back to have cake or went up to their rooms to watch TV or play computer games.

This annoyed Agnès, who wanted them to stay longer at the table, but Alan didn’t seem too concerned, and he talked to Hector about his job. Alan wasn’t only good at games, he was equally good at maths, and he calculated very complicated things. In fact he calculated calculations of calculations, and then other people who weren’t as good at maths used his calculations to make their computers work or decipher the genetic code. (We won’t go into what that is here, it would take too long, you’d be better looking it up in a dictionary.) Since Alan liked maths a lot, in his spare time he made up maths puzzles for an important newspaper, the type you can never work out and which make you feel like a complete moron.

‘You should tell the children to stay at the table!’ said Agnès.

‘They don’t want to,’ Alan replied.

‘Of course they won’t want to it if they know that’s okay with you.’

‘It’s not particularly okay with me, but I don’t want to fight with the children while I’m having my dinner.’

‘ “My dinner”, exactly! Well, I’d like it to be “our dinner”, a family dinner.’

‘They’re kids. They get bored at the table. I was the same.’

‘That’s not what your mother says. She had proper dinners, sitting with her children.’

‘Yes, well, I don’t have very happy memories of them. Listening to my mother moaning every evening.’

Then Agnès looked upset.

‘Are you saying that that’s what I’m doing? Boring you with my moaning?’

‘No, but it’s true that we keep having this same conversation.’

‘Is it? Well, we wouldn’t have to have it at all if you had a little more authority over the children!’

‘They’re not misbehaving, they’re just enjoying themselves.’

‘They’re watching stupid TV series! Instead of talking with their parents.’

‘There are other times besides dinner.’

‘When? You work all day. I’m the one who spends the most time with them.’

‘Well, that means they converse with their mother.’

‘Parents means both a father and a mother in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Not always. My father cleared off when I was still quite young.’

‘And look at the result: you weren’t set an example of how to look after your children!’

‘No, but I had the example of a guy who ended up clearing off because his wife never stopped complaining!’

Hector felt very uncomfortable; it reminded him of when he was in his consulting room and a man and a woman argued in front of him, except that this was different because they were his friends, and it was happening in their nice kitchen.

Alan and Agnès suddenly realised that Hector was feeling uncomfortable, and they said, ‘Sorry,’ and everybody tried to have a normal conversation. Hector explained the aim of his trip and the lessons he’d already learnt.

This made Alan think: he pointed out that maybe it was possible to calculate happiness.

‘Calculate happiness?’ Agnès and Hector asked.

‘Yes. If happiness depends on various factors — for example, health, friends, having a job you like — we could gather all these elements together into a formula. Each factor would have a different coefficient and in the end we’d have a result, a happiness ratio . . . Or a happiness quotient, yes, an HQ!’

Hector took out his notebook and showed it to Alan and Agnès. (He was very glad that he’d crossed out lesson no. 18, because Agnès certainly wouldn’t have liked it much either.) Together they tried to think up corresponding words for each of the lessons.

In some cases this was simple. For example, lesson no. 8:
Happiness is being with the people you love
could be ‘love/ friendship’ and 8b would be ‘loneliness/isolation’ — giving it a negative coefficient (don’t worry if you don’t know what that means, Alan knows). For lesson no. 4:
Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money
you could put ‘social status’ or ‘money’.

But you try finding words for lessons like no. 5:
Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story
or no. 7:
It’s a mistake to think that happiness is the goal,
and you’ll see that it’s like Alan’s puzzles in the newspaper: you can’t come up with the right answer.

Eventually they produced a list:

In the end, they couldn’t think of any other words. And then Alan looked at Agnès and said, ‘Being married.’ And for a moment Agnès had tears in her eyes.

T
HE next day, Hector woke up quite early so that Agnès could take him in to work with her. This time they didn’t go on the motorway because there was rather a lot of traffic at that time of day. So Hector was able to get a better idea of what the city looked like, and it didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen. There were avenues of beautiful houses, some whitewashed in the Spanish style, some made of red brick with small windows in the English style, some made of teak beach-house style, some Austrian chalet style, or modern and made entirely of glass, and there were many more styles besides, as if the architects had been having fun by trying out all the different themes. And Hector saw other areas, with supermarkets, garages, parking lots, and petrol stations, like in a big suburb. And neighbourhoods full of modern buildings and people wearing suits despite the sky that was always blue and the heat. And areas in the middle of the city with oil wells and vacant lots where young black boys played basketball.

In the car, of course, Hector asked Agnès if she was happy.

‘I knew you’d ask me that and so I thought about it last night. I think I’m happy. I have a job I love, a husband I love, and children who are happy. In fact, all I want is for things to stay as they are. The only shadow on my happiness is when I tell myself sometimes that as it’s all going well, it can’t last, that one day things won’t be so good.’