Jean-Marcel turned round to show Not and Vayla the map and ask them where they were, but judging from the panic on their faces, it was obvious they didn’t know how to read a map, and in this they were no different from Clara, thought Hector. Still, Jean-Marcel could understand a bit of Khmer.
‘Not and Vayla say the problem with these villages is they sometimes move around.’
‘Why?’
‘These people practise slash-and-burn farming. So some years they have to move to a different area. Otherwise their paddy fields become barren. Or it brings bad luck and they have to please the gods. Or the tigers — ’
‘But if there are paddy fields, the villages can’t be far away.’
Jean-Marcel shrugged as if to say, you never know here, and it was sort of true, because they didn’t even know what country they were in. This area was on the border between three different countries which had once been colonised by Hector’s country, and when his fellow countrymen had left (with a bit of persuasion, it has to be said), they took with them the layouts showing the exact position of the frontiers in the mountains, and as there weren’t any real landmarks — no high peaks or wide rivers, just a few villages that moved around – the three countries weren’t too sure where their borders were, and for that matter they didn’t try too hard to find out.
An hour earlier, they had bumped into a small patrol of soldiers from one of the countries, who had asked to see their papers, and Hector had noticed that Jean-Marcel’s passport looked thicker than usual when he handed it to them, and thin again when they handed it back, and they had driven off without a problem, watching the soldiers in the rear-view mirror jumping for joy. Jean-Marcel had said this technique worked very well with soldiers from one of the three countries, and not at all with those from one of the other two, but for that country he had brought along some official documents. That was the good thing about his business – he knew quite a lot of people.
All these little incidents distracted Hector and kept him from thinking about the fourth and fifth components of heartache, which occurred to him every time he imagined spending the rest of his life without Clara. It kept happening, but he managed to dispel the thoughts by glancing at Vayla, who had fallen asleep leaning against Not, who was also asleep. He had never met a woman who had such a calming effect on him when he looked at her, no doubt an effect of Professor Cormorant’s modified oxytocin molecule. Maybe taking another dose would cure him of Clara. But that would mean making a commitment to Vayla. Commitment, there was a word Professor Cormorant never talked about in relation to love.
They saw three figures walking along the track and, what a surprise, it was three little girls, almost young ladies, who stopped to watch them as they approached. They were dressed in tunics embroidered with delicately coloured flowers, and bright-red little headdresses that were magnificent above their charming faces. They were walking barefoot in the dust, but looked as elegant as if they were in a fashion parade. They had an impressive calm about them, and yet you could see how astonished they were at the arrival of this carload of strangers. The sight of the young girls sent Not and Vayla into paroxysms of delight. Jean-Marcel stopped the car to allow them to ask their young fellow countrywomen the way. In fact, they weren’t exactly fellow countrywomen because it was clear they didn’t speak the same language. Hector had read in a guidebook the day before that the Gna-Doas, the tribe to which these three little mountain fairies obviously belonged, spoke a language only they knew, which came from Upper Tibet, the country they had left long ago, driven out by the cold and by other less friendly tribes.
In the end, Vayla and Not invited the three little mountain fairies to climb into the back of the car with them and, once they had sat down, they bubbled over with girlish joy, laughing and chattering like delightful multicoloured birds.
Another moment of happiness, thought Hector.
Then the eldest began directing Jean-Marcel, giving him little taps on the shoulder. She wasn’t very old, but she already had a sense of authority.
‘If my wife really does leave me,’ said Jean-Marcel, ‘I’ll settle down here, start a transport business, set up a health clinic and marry a local girl. No more problems.’
Hector understood. Being there in the middle of those mountains made them feel very removed from their own world, a bit like when you go to the countryside but multiplied by a thousand. But Hector knew this sort of emotion can be deceptive, and you end up missing what you are used to, and building a lasting relationship with a local girl would be different but no easier than with a woman from his own country, because it was still about people and that mysterious alchemy of love. Unless of course you had some of Professor Cormorant’s drugs, which was a very tempting solution.
At a bend in the track, houses on stilts appeared on a hillside, in the middle of a clearing. Hector glimpsed young people pounding rice in large bowls, and old men sitting on the doorsteps of their houses smoking pipes. A few pigs and chickens wandered about. At the sound of the car engine, everybody looked up to watch them arrive.
‘Kormoh!’ cried Not.
Professor Cormorant, dressed in a long flowery tunic, rushed over, smiling, to greet them.
HECTOR WRITES IN THE DARK
LATE in the evening, stretched out on a mat in a Gna-Doa house on stilts, Hector was writing in the dark, with the computer screen as his only light. Vayla was asleep, her body pressed against his, out of love and a desire for warmth. Outside was silence, the immense silence of the mountain regions.
The Fourth Component of Heartache
The fourth component of heartache is loss of self-esteem. The departure of the loved one is a huge blow to your self-esteem, because does it not show that once people get to know you, you lose your attractiveness? After a few weeks or months or years with you it was inevitable that the loved one, an exceptional being, would end up discovering and being revolted by your mediocrity, which you only managed to disguise long enough to seduce them, and which only their inexperience prevented them from detecting. Now that you find yourself without them, all your old inadequacies – physical, moral, intellectual and social – which you were able to forget or to put into perspective, now seem like insurmountable weaknesses.
Hector stopped writing. He couldn’t help thinking of Gunther, and the differences between him and a big businessman like Gunther appeared to him as so many personal failings. He had observed the same response in everyone who was jilted, with a slight variation: women were often obsessed by their rival’s physique (even when there was nothing better about her) and men by the social status or the showiness of the one who had stolen their beloved (even when there was nothing better about him). His training as a psychiatrist reminded him that he could, however, look at the flip side: he, too, had attracted women who were no longer in love with their Gunthers and he, too, might have seemed like an exciting Gunther who had come along and disrupted a boring relationship. But the intensity of what he was experiencing in the moment prevailed over reason. And he couldn’t boost his self-esteem by thinking of Vayla, because he knew their love, although genuine, had been sparked off by a modified molecule. He went on writing.
Evidently, such shortcomings condemn you to a life of perpetual solitude, or to accepting second best and mourning the loved one forever. (At this point in your reflections, beware of being assailed by the first and second components.) The love you experienced with the loved one was a stroke of luck that you didn’t deserve and that you were unable to make last anyway, a paradise you were only granted access to because the loved one was overly generous towards you. You enjoyed a smug sense of superiority so long as you didn’t leave your mediocre world, like a big fish in a small pond, but your pursuit of the loved one led you out into the open sea of sentiment, where only the very best can hope to survive. The unbearable pain you feel now is only just atonement for your inadequacy combined with your vanity.
Well, now he was exaggerating a bit – he didn’t feel quite that inadequate. He began to f
all asleep, comforted by the soothing sound of Vayla’s breathing.
Hector was suddenly all ears. The house they had been allotted was at the edge of the village. Would the stilts stop a tiger from getting in?
He felt the bamboo floor shake beneath him, he heard a commotion in the darkness and was about to throw his computer at it (would the tiger be scared off by this attack with an unknown weapon?) when someone lit a paraffin lamp and Jean-Marcel appeared, looking half asleep, his hair dishevelled.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Yes.’
They listened and heard the murmur of human voices coming from the neighbouring houses.
‘Apparently, during the hunting season tigers don’t come into the villages,’ Jean-Marcel said. ‘Or if they do they only attack the buffaloes.’
Further away, they could hear the buffaloes lowing softly in their dark stable.
Jean-Marcel crouched in the doorway, which was open to the night, and Hector saw he was carrying a Gna-Doa rifle, an old gun made at the village forge. He had a contented air about him.
Hector opened his computer again. He wrote:
Seedling no. 24: Nothing eases the pain of love better than focusing on a task.
HECTOR MEETS HIS COUSINS
OUUUU-OUUUU.
It was a plaintive, almost human cry that emanated from the forest in front of them, and thrilled Professor Cormorant.
‘They’re there! They’re there!’ he whispered excitedly.
They were walking in single file along a little pathway that disappeared into the undergrowth in places. Leading the way was Aang-long-arms, a strapping lad from the village who, it seemed, was always happy to go off on an expedition, followed by Professor Cormorant, Hector and Jean-Marcel, who still had his rifle from the night before.
They had left just after dawn, which, apparently, reduced the risk of a tiger attack, and anyway tigers rarely attack a group of adults. A fine mist still clung to the mountainsides, pierced occasionally by golden rays of morning sunlight.
Finally, Aang gestured to them not to make a noise, and they moved forward very slowly, half crouching.
Through a screen of trees, Hector glimpsed a mass of orange fur, then clearly made out an enormous ape, idly scratching its armpits. He recognised the hairless face, the thoughtful, calm expression, the muscular torso and arms, and the little bent legs of an orang-utan.
‘That’s the female,’ breathed Professor Cormorant. ‘I call her Mélisande.’
Just then, another orang-utan dropped out of the trees, landing deftly beside Mélisande, who paid no attention to him as he looked around uneasily. He was slightly bigger and perhaps a bit more muscular than her.
‘That’s Pelléas, the male.’
Pelléas moved closer to Mélisande and began sniffing her muzzle, but she turned away and went on scratching herself with sullen indifference. Pelléas changed tactics and began scratching her back. Mélisande’s face lit up instantly and she turned her head towards Pelléas, over her shoulder, and they gave each other a little – er – kiss.
‘You’ll notice Pelléas is only marginally bigger than Mélisande,’ whispered the professor, ‘as in all monogamous species. The bigger the male in proportion to the female the more polygamous the species!’
Aang gestured to him to be quiet, but slightly too late. Pelléas and Mélisande had broken off their tender exchanges and were looking towards them with angry little eyes.
‘Aou-ou?’ Pelléas bellowed.
Without further ado, Mélisande shot off into the trees, Pelléas stood up roaring and beat his chest with his enormous fists, then, all of a sudden, in two bounds and three movements of his arms, he vanished into the foliage after Mélisande.
‘We scared them away,’ said Jean-Marcel.
Aang-long-arms made a gesture signalling a rapid retreat, then said, laughing, ‘Khrar!’ It was the only Gna-Doa word that had immediately stuck in Hector’s mind and it meant ‘tiger’.
‘Tigers hunt them, so they’re on their guard.’
‘There you see the future!’ Professor Cormorant resumed. ‘An animal closely related to us – you know the old cliché, ninety-eight per cent of genes in common with humans – and at the same time completely monogamous. Orang-utans mate for life! Good God, they are the only Catholic ape!’ he declared, bursting out laughing.
Aang-long-arms laughed too, everybody found Professor Cormorant very funny, even people who couldn’t speak his language.
‘You see,’ said Professor Cormorant, ‘the little pills, fiddling with hormones, that’s all child’s play. The real future is in gene therapy. Discovering the genes that determine the structures in the orang-utan’s brain – I mean the ones responsible for this lasting attachment, not the ones that make him go ou-ou!’
‘And what if you find those genes?’
‘Well, I shall incorporate them into our genetic heritage and we will become a monogamous, faithful species, as will our children. What do you say to that, eh?’
‘It’s very interesting,’ said Jean-Marcel. ‘And are there people working on it?’
‘In any case, it’s a good place to start,’ said Professor Cormorant.
‘I thought Sumatra had the most orang-utans,’ said Hector.
‘Yes, but they also have government agencies, inspectors, the State – in short, problems. Here, it’s a sort of no-man’s land, or rather a place where there are only intelligent, hospitable people like good old Aang and his fellow countrymen. I am going to send for equipment and — ’
Suddenly, Aang motioned with his hand and began very carefully scanning the forest. Everybody was quiet.
Aang and Jean-Marcel raised their rifles.
A few yards away, the undergrowth was moving slightly. A large creature appeared to be coming towards them through the vegetation. Then the movements of the branches separated; there must be two smaller animals, one following the other. Then they heard a faint cry of pain, unmistakably human this time.
‘Who goes there?’ demanded Jean-Marcel.
Aang repeated the same thing in his language.
The branches stopped moving, there was another rustle of foliage and Miko and Chizourou appeared dressed in rain hats and camouflage gear, looking very embarrassed.
HECTOR IS AN ETHNOLOGIST
‘It doesn’t look very alcoholic,’ said Hector.
‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Jean-Marcel.
Hector thanked the village chief, Gnar, a wizened little man who had just plunged a bowl into an earthenware jar of fermented rice wine and was handing it to him with a smile.
‘À vot’santé,’ he said, because he knew a few expressions in Hector’s language, passed down to him by his grandfather, who had apparently been somewhat on the side of Hector’s fellow countrymen back in the days when they occupied the countries in that region. In honour of the occasion, Gnar had put on an old white cap, which gave him a very majestic air.
Besides this, he had an intelligent look in his eyes, a wife his own age and another younger than him – his deceased brother’s wife, so Hector had gathered – and a very loud voice when he got annoyed with the young people for doing stupid things. He and the professor seemed very friendly and kept clinking bowls. The professor whispered to Hector that he had given Chief Gnar some of his compound A drugs.
Everyone was sitting on the bamboo floor of a large communal house on stilts, around some earthenware jars people had brought. The women, all wearing embroidered tunics, sat at a slight distance talking amongst themselves, like a big bouquet of flowery fabric. They drank noticeably less than the men and seemed very intrigued by Vayla and Not, who had been given traditional costumes to wear. As evening was setting in, the children were also inside, playing at the far end of the long room.
Gnar had gathered Hector, Jean-Marcel and Professor Cormorant, the honoured guests, around him, and even Miko and Chizourou, who in turn also had to drink fermented rice wine. Outside, you could see the sun setting
over the mountains in a symphony of delicate golden tints and hazy blues.
Miko and Chizourou looked a little uneasy amidst all those men; even so they smiled as they said ‘Haong-zaotu’, which for the Gna-Doas meant Happy New Year, let the harvest be plentiful, let the tigers stay away and let there be no war.
Aang-long-arms suddenly stood up and began singing a song, which was received with cries of joy, including from the children.
Professor Cormorant leaned over to Hector. ‘Isn’t life here wonderful?’
‘How do they cope with love?’
‘They have very complex laws. I can’t remember exactly, hang on.’
He leaned over to Chief Gnar and asked him a question. Gnar smiled and gave quite a lengthy reply.
‘That’s right, here everyone calls everyone else brother and sister if they share a maternal ancestor, and as a rule they aren’t allowed to intermarry, unless some of their biological uncles have already married their fathers’ nieces or, at a stretch, their cousins’ mother-in-laws’ children. You see, it’s not simple.’
‘No. They need a good memory.’
‘But, other than that, they can make love with anyone they like, provided they don’t get caught!’
And he burst out laughing.
‘And if they do get caught?’
‘In those cases, the guilty party is forced to borrow money to buy a buffalo, which is sacrificed to prevent the village from being cursed. But the gods will only curse the village if you get caught – that’s what I like about Gna-Doa law!’
‘Do couples stay together?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s their secret?’
‘Unlike other tribes, they no longer have forced marriages, a source of much unhappiness. Here the man makes his request through the chief, who acts as an intermediary with the girl’s family. The family may accept the man’s request or not, but the girl has the right to refuse. And then they have a very interesting custom: between the acceptance of the request and the marriage ceremony, the betrothed couple are allowed to spend a night together, after which the girl may still refuse. The Gna-Doas understand the importance of physical love, especially during the early stages of a relationship . . .’
Hector and the Secrets of Love Page 14
