Hector and the Search for Happiness

by Francois Lelord

  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:Lesson no. 17: Happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love.

  HECTOR HAS A DREAM

  THE 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.

  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 th
e 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:Lesson no. 18: Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at the same time.

  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.

  HECTOR GOES TO THE BEACH AND DOES SOME MATHS

  ALAN 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:Lesson no. 19: The sun and the sea make everybody happy.

  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: Being loved Money Feeling useful

  Friendship Health Social status Work you enjoy

  Celebration Happiness of those you love Peace of mind

  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.

  HECTOR LEARNS ABOUT FAMILY LIFE

  THE 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.