Hector and the Secrets of Love (12 page)

Vayla turned round to watch him writing, an anxious look on her face. He sensed she wanted to understand him, but Hector wouldn’t have wanted to sadden or worry her with this type of reflection on love. Suddenly, thinking of the happy atmosphere that existed between him and a young woman with whom he didn’t have more than a dozen words in common, Hector had another flash of inspiration:

Vayla turned back to the screen where an advert for fromage frais had just come on again, showing a choir of reindeer singing in the snow, a scene she found absolutely magical, coming as she did from a country where they didn’t have snow or ice.

Hector reread his notes on the first component of heartache and found them excellent. Was this one of the effects of Professor Cormorant’s drugs? Or was love such an inspiring subject? But, at the same time, his reflections weren’t so encouraging: if he didn’t find the antidote, and he and Vayla were separated by accident, would they each be condemned to suffer the torments of neediness for the rest of their lives?

Hector jumped; it was Vayla’s voice speaking English. She was watching a pop video of Madonna who was walking down a path made of rose petals singing in English. The words were subtitled in strange spaghetti characters, probably Thai, which was close enough to Vayla’s language for her to be able to understand what they meant.

Vayla repeated the English words perfectly, looking triumphantly at Hector.

‘I
WANT to go to Shanghai,’ said Clara.

Gunther sighed. He looked at Clara, so slight in her smart suit, and he had to remind himself that he had been a judo champion at university, had done his military service in the mountain regiment and had later restructured a whole lot of companies, at which point the business world had nicknamed him Gunther the Downsizer. He was currently head of the European and global divisions of a multinational pharmaceutical company, and here he was feeling weak and vulnerable in front of this creature named Clara who was half his size and apparently still in love with a guy who, according to what she told him, was incapable of telling a plumber what to do.

He remembered the old psychiatrist François’s speech, and he told himself the man was right: they should invent a vaccine against love and to hell with Professor Cormorant and his crazy pills!

But Gunther only thought about this for three and a half seconds before managing to focus again on his goal: finding Professor Cormorant. He even said to himself that Clara’s desire to go to Shanghai might help him attain it. You see, this is the strength of people like Gunther: they never confuse their emotions with their self-interest for very long, and that’s why, one day, it’s you who gets downsized and not them.

So, yes, why not send her to China, that diabolical little creature who brought light and darkness into his life and turned him into an unworthy husband and father.

At the same time, he knew that as soon as she had gone he would be anxious to know what she was doing every minute, but after all, thanks to the methods already being used to track Professor Cormorant and to check up on Hector, it wouldn’t be so difficult to follow Clara’s movements. Moreover, he could also go to China. His director of Asian operations had been asking him to come for ages; this would be an opportunity for him to go over there and tell him to pull his socks up.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘leave whenever you want. The sooner the better.’

And he could see that Clara was a bit taken aback and that he had scored a point. Fear of rejection, he thought, it worked every time, as he knew all too well.

‘You don’t mind me going?’ Clara asked, a little worried.

‘Not in the slightest. Why should I mind?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Only that I’m bound to see him.’

‘The way I look at it everyone has the right to experiment . . .’

‘But then they have to face up to the consequences,’ Clara concluded.

This was the phrase Gunther always used just before he fired someone. And he realised that a touch of anger had made him go too far and Clara might take the words he used on ordinary employees very much the wrong way.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sighing. ‘Of course, I’m a bit upset that you’re leaving. You know I like having you close by in the midst of all this stress. I always feel stronger when you’re near me.’

And he could see Clara was full of emotion again. In fact, that was sort of how their love had begun; he had let Clara glimpse the ten per cent of him that was weak as well as the ninety per cent of him that was strong. His strength alone would never have seduced her. And yet it had seduced his previous mistresses, with whom, moreover, he had never been in love. But his admission of weakness had moved Clara, all the more so because she knew she was the only one in the company who knew about it, and then, one evening, they had found themselves kissing.

Gunther’s hidden weakness was that he had a daughter who was deeply disturbed. From a young age she had started doing a lot of silly things, cutting her wrists, taking tranquillisers, associating with the wrong kind of people and worse besides. She was spending more and more time in the type of clinics rich people send their children to in Switzerland and other countries. She had already gone through quite a lot of psychiatrists for rich people, and even some psychiatrists for not so rich people on the occasions when she ended up in casualty. At one point, Gunther had thought of asking Hector to see her, but a sense of decency had held him back. His wife had also been depressed for years, and she’d been treated by various psychiatrists who didn’t really believe they could cure her any more, but who helped her to stay alive.

If Hector and old François had known about his family situation, they could have had quite an interesting psychiatric discussion about it. They might have conjectured whether Gunther’s wife had passed on to their daughter depressive genes which manifested themselves as borderline personality disorder. Or was it that being brought up by a depressive mother permanently disturbed the daughter? What if, on the contrary, bringing up a very difficult daughter had made the mother depressed? Perhaps it was no coincidence that the sort of strength Gunther possessed had attracted a woman with a tendency to depression who was desperately looking for someone able to protect her. Or could it be – and this question tormented Gunther – that his tendency to manipulate people, to make them do what he wanted, had disturbed both his wife and daughter? In any event, he had always sworn to himself he would never leave them, no matter how many extramarital affairs he had. And very often, after quite a gruelling day at work, he would go home to even more gruelling problems, despite always having round the-clock support, as is often the case with rich people. But all this suffering demoralised Gunther, because he wondered about his own responsibility for his daughter’s mental state and that of his wife, whom he still loved, and little by little he had opened his heart to Clara.

He would have liked to discuss all this with Hector. Did Clara love a man for his strength or for his weakness? But, of course, it would have been difficult for the two of them to broach it because it could quickly have awakened worries of the ‘Is he a better lover than me?’ sort, or possibly even more precise comparisons, because, you see, men worry a lot about these kinds of things.

H
ECTOR continued sightseeing with Vayla at Gunther’s expense while waiting for a sign from Professor Cormorant. And they often met up with Jean-Marcel because you couldn’t really leave a friend all on his own in a big city full of unknown Chinese people.

Well, not all of the Chinese people were unknown to Jean-Marcel; he had made a friend, Madame Li, who was his interpreter when he was doing business. Madame Li was a tall, very slim, rather bony woman. With her spectacles on, she looked a bit like a strict schoolmistress, but when she took them off, she looked much nicer, and Hector wondered whether she often took them off in front of Jean-Marcel. Li was married to a Chinese man who did a lot of business in various cities in China, and he wasn’t at home very often in the evenings, a bit like Jean-Marcel. She had a little girl and a little boy, who were adorable.

One day, the four of them had dinner at a wonderful restaurant. Outside, you walked through a huge park lit by candles, a bit like Tintin’s Château Moulinsart, and then you entered an enormous traditional Chinese house made entirely of wood, with several floors softly lit by lanterns so that only an occasional statue or painting stood out in the half-light. It was like being in a place of worship – the food was so good that the customers could easily have fallen to their knees in front of it. All the people having dinner looked beautiful in that light, so just imagine having dinner with Vayla and Li, who had taken her glasses off!

Hector noticed Jean-Marcel never swore in front of Li; he chose his words carefully and kept asking her if everything was to her liking. Of course, it is a good idea to be polite to your interpreter because they are very important for doing business in China.

Vayla and Li didn’t speak to each other, first of all because they didn’t speak the same language, but that was maybe not the only reason. Hector saw a little wrinkle of concern appear on Vayla’s smooth brow each time he spoke to Li, and Li’s smile froze slightly each time Vayla tried to talk a bit to Jean-Marcel, who knew a few words in Khmer. Hector could see why Vayla was worried that a more educated woman capable of communicating with Hector might be more attractive to him than a poor waitress like her, while Li must have been thinking that a woman capable of attracting Hector without even being able to talk to him might equally attract Jean-Marcel. But Vayla and Li should have realised that between true friends another man’s girlfriend is like a little sister, and you wouldn’t even dream of touching her, because if that isn’t sacred then nothing is. Of course you can argue over the definition of a true friend and that’s where the trouble starts.

And so it was Li’s slightly frozen smile when she saw Vayla laughing at Jean-Marcel’s grammatical mistakes in Khmer that made Hector realise that even if nothing had happened yet, Li and Jean-Marcel could be about to become more closely linked. And it became even clearer to him why Vayla liked the subtitled pop videos on the Asian music channels so much – she no longer wanted to be the only one who couldn’t talk to him.

It was another confirmation for Hector that with love comes jealousy. But what sort of love?

Professor Cormorant had mentioned two components of love: sexual desire and attachment. Hector apologised and took out his little notebook again.

And yet he remembered the shed with the young girls in Vayla’s country. The men who went there desired those young girls, but not one of them was jealous of the girls seeing several clients before or after him.

But Hector imagined settling in that town and going every day to the shed (his life is a mess, Clara has left him and so has Vayla, his patients have committed suicide, his parents are dead, he has received a huge tax reminder, grown very fat and his hair is falling out). He told himself he would probably end up preferring one of the young women to all the others, he would become attached to her and then no longer be able to tolerate the thought of her seeing other clients, to the point where he would be prepared to arrange things with the
mama-san
(the person in charge of human resources, in several different Asian languages) and the
mama-san
’s friends so that the young woman could give up that unhappy profession. And Hector was even more convinced things would take this course because something similar had happened to him during his first trip to China, the slight difference being that he had become attached to the young woman before realising what her unhappy profession was.

And so he wrote:

But that wasn’t right either. He had known couples who no longer desired one another but who still felt a strong bond and in those cases the one didn’t feel jealous when the other got laid – as Jean-Marcel put it. On the other hand, Hector remembered men who felt almost no affection for their wives, but who were driven crazy by the thought of her having a brief encounter with another man. So did that count as love? Maybe there were two types of jealousy: feeling jealous of the other desiring another, or feeling jealous of the other possibly becoming attached to another. Maybe there were as many components to jealousy as there were to love.

And maybe . . . Hector had a sudden eureka moment. Love must contain as many components as heartache!

‘Sabay!’
he cried.

‘Sabay!’
declared Vayla, overjoyed to see Hector so happy.

Jean-Marcel explained to Li what the Khmer word meant, and Li thought about it and said that in Shanghai Chinese you could have said ‘
Don Ting Hao De
’.

And they all said ‘
Don Ting Hao De
’ and Hector said to himself that this was another moment of happiness. But moments are fleeting things.

O
N the plane, Clara thought sadly about what had prompted her to love Hector less. As she was a methodical girl who was used to breaking things down into their constituent parts, she took a notebook from her bag, and felt a slight pang because it was a notebook she had taken from Hector, who bought them in packets of ten.

There was some truth in this: at the beginning of their relationship, Clara was very much in love; so was Hector, but he felt in no hurry to get married, that is, to commit. Hearing his parents say what a crucial thing marriage was and how terribly important it was to choose a wife well because, as far as disasters were concerned, divorce came third after nuclear war and the bubonic plague, Hector had grown a little apprehensive about marriage and its air of permanence. As a result he had disregarded Clara’s eagerness to marry, and now she was the one who no longer wanted to commit. At the same time, Clara didn’t hold his past failings against him, because she knew about life and, anyway, when you don’t want to marry someone any more, it is difficult to be upset with them for not having wanted to marry you in the past. But perhaps she was a little angry with him all the same for having spoilt the freshness and spontaneity of her love for him.