Stuff and nonsense, others will tell you. Hector was so exhausted after his latest adventures in Asia he decided to withdraw from the world and its temptations, and he has gone on a retreat for a while to a monastery in China, the same one where the old monk he met during his first trip lives.
So who are you to believe? You could always try to find out, but the problem is still more people will tell you all these stories are true, or at any rate they all happened, in the real world, or in some other world, no less real.
Because love is indeed complicated, difficult, sometimes painful, but it is also the only time that our dream becomes reality, as old François used to say.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the friends that accompanied Hector on his travels, and introduced him to new horizons. Of those I am able to mention, I would particularly like to thank: Nicolas Audier, Jean-Michel Caldagues, Peer De Jong, Patrick de Kouzmine Karavaieff and Olivia Chai, Perr De Jong, Franck Lafourcade, Lin Menuhin and Xia Qing, Jean-Jacques Muletier, Yves Nicolaï, Servane Rangheard and, of course, Étienne Aubert, for her talents as a crooner.
My thanks to Odile Jacob and Bernard Gotlieb, and to their respective teams for their renewed help and support throughout Hector’s second adventure.
Hector and other characters quoted extracts of the following works: Phèdre by Jean Racine, ‘Love’ by Nat King Cole, ‘Lullaby’ by W. H. Auden, ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ by Charles Baudelaire.
And thank you to Georges Condominas for his book Nous avons mangé la forêt (Mercure de France).
Excerpt from “L-O-V-E,” words and music by Milt Gabler and Bert Kaempfert. © 1964, Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc., London.
Excerpt from “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” words and music by Cathy Dennis and Robert Berkeley Davis. © Copyright 2001 EMI Music Publishing Ltd. and Universal / MCA Music Ltd. All rights for EMI Music Publishing in the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. All rights for Universal / MCA Music Ltd. controlled and administered in the United States and Canada by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Universal copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. © 2000, Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London.
Excerpt from “Lullaby” (1937) from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright 1940, 1968 by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Copyright © 1976, 1991, The Estate of W. H. Auden. By permission of The Wylie Agency.
Read on for the opening chapters of François Lelord’s third novel about Hector
Hector and the Search for Lost Time
Coming from Penguin in 2012
THE first time Sabine came to see Hector it was because she was getting upset at work. Sabine worked in an office, and her boss wasn’t nice to her: he often made her cry. Of course, she always cried in private, but even so, it was terribly hard for her.
Little by little, Hector helped her realise that perhaps she deserved better than a boss who was not nice to her and Sabine built up enough self-confidence to find a new job. And these days, she was happier.
Gradually Hector had changed the way he worked. In the beginning, he mainly tried to help people to change their outlook. Now, he still did that, of course, but he also helped people to change their lives, to find a new life which would suit them better. Because, to put it another way, if you’re a cow, you’ll never become a horse, even with a good psychiatrist. It’s better to find a nice meadow where people need milk than to try to gallop around a racecourse. And, above all, it’s best to avoid entering a bullring, because that’s always a disaster.
Sabine would not have been happy being compared to a cow, even though cows are actually kind and gentle animals, Hector had always thought, and very good mothers too. It is true that she was also very clever, and sometimes this did not make her happy, because, as you might already have noticed, sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.
One day, Sabine said to Hector, ‘Sometimes, I think life is just a big con.’
Startled, Hector asked, ‘What do you mean?’ (That was what he always said when he hadn’t been listening properly the first time).
‘Well, you’re born, and before you know it, you have to rush about, going to school, then work, having children, and then your parents die and then . . . you get old and die too.’
‘This all takes a bit of time, though, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, but it goes by so quickly. Especially when there’s no time to stop. Take me, for example, work, children, husband . . . He’s the same, poor guy – he never stops either.’
Sabine had a nice husband (she had also had a nice father, which straight away improves the chances of finding a nice husband), who worked hard in an office too. And two young children, the eldest of whom had started school.
‘I always feel like I’m up against the clock,’ said Sabine. ‘In the morning, everything needs to be organised, we have to leave in time to take my eldest to school, and then dash to the office. There are meetings, which you have to be on time for, but while you’re there, the rest of your work piles up, and then you have to rush in the evenings too, to pick up your child from school, or get home in time for the nanny, and then dinner, and homework . . . Still, I’m lucky, my husband helps me. We hardly have time to speak to each other in the evening: we’re so tired, we both just fall asleep.’
Hector knew all this, and perhaps that was partly why he had spent a lot of time thinking about, considering, contemplating whether to give serious thought to marrying and having babies.
‘I’d like time to slow down,’ said Sabine. ‘I’d like to have time to enjoy life. I’d like some time for myself, to do whatever I want.’
‘What about holidays?’ asked Hector.
Sabine smiled.
‘You don’t have children, do you, Doctor?’
Hector admitted that he did not, not yet.
‘Actually,’ said Sabine, ‘I think that’s also why I come to see you. This session is the only point in my week when time stops, when my time is completely my own.’
Hector understood precisely what Sabine meant. Especially since he, too, over the course of his day, often felt that he was up against the clock, like all of his colleagues. When you are a psychiatrist, you always have to pay attention to the time, because if you allow your patient to talk to you for too long, the next patient will become impatient in the waiting room. Then all your appointments will run late that day. (Sometimes, this was very difficult for Hector – for example, when three minutes before the end of a session, just as he began to shift in his armchair to signal that time was almost up, the patient with him would suddenly say, ‘Deep down, Doctor, I think my mother never loved me,’ and start to cry.)
Being up against the clock was a real problem for so many people, especially for mums, thought Hector. What could he possibly do to help them?
HECTOR AND THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS
HECTOR had another patient, a man called Fernand, who was not particularly remarkable, except for the fact that he had no friends. And he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend either. Was it because he had a very monotonous voice, or because he looked a little like a heron? Hector didn’t know, but he thought it very unfair that Fernand didn’t have any friends, since he was nice and said things that were very interesting (although slightly odd, it has to be admitted).
One day, out of the blue, Fernand said to Hector, ‘Anyway, Doctor, at my age, I’ve got no more than two and a half dogs left.’
‘Sorry?’ said Hector.
He remembered that Fernand had a dog (one day, Fernand had brought one with him, a very well-behaved dog that had slept throughout their session), but not two, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what half a dog might be.
‘Well,’ said Fernand, ‘a dog lives for fourteen or fifteen years, doesn’t it?’
Hector then realised that Fernand was measuring the time he had left in the number of dogs he
would have over the rest of his life. As a result, Hector set about measuring the rest of his life in dog lives (that is, which he probably had left, for ye know neither the day nor the hour, as somebody who died quite young once said), and he wasn’t sure if it would be three or four. Of course, he thought to himself, this number could change if science made incredible advances to make you live longer, but perhaps on the other hand it wouldn’t, since scientists would no doubt make dogs live longer too, which, you can be sure, no one would ask their opinion about.
Hector spoke to his friends about this method of measuring your life in dogs, and they were absolutely horrified.
‘How awful!’
‘Not only that, thinking of your dog dying . . . it’s too sad for words.’
‘Exactly. That’s why I just couldn’t have another, because when our little Darius died, it was far too upsetting.’
‘You really do see some complete loonies!’
‘Measuring time in dogs?! And why not in cats or parrots?’
‘And if he had a cow, would he measure it in cows?’
Listening to all his friends talking about Fernand’s idea, it dawned on Hector that what they did not like about it at all was this: measuring your life in dogs makes it seem shorter. Two, three, four dogs, even five, doesn’t make it sound as if you’re here for very long!
He understood better why Fernand unnerved people a bit with his way of seeing things. If Fernand had measured his life in canaries or goldfish, would he have had more friends?
In his own lonely and odd little way, Fernand had put his finger on a real problem with time. For that matter, lots of poets had been talking about it forever, and Sabine had too.
They said . . . the years fly by, time is fleeting, and time goes by too quickly.
HECTOR AND THE LITTLE BOY WHO WANTED TO SPEED UP TIME
EVERY so often children also came to see Hector, and when they did, of course it was their parents who had decided to send them.
The children who came to see Hector weren’t really ill – it was more that their parents found them difficult to understand, or else they were children who were too sad, too fearful or too worked-up. One day, he talked to a little boy who, funnily enough, was called Hector, just like him. Little Hector was very bored at school, and time seemed to go by too slowly for him. So he didn’t listen, and he ended up with bad marks.
Grown-up Hector asked Little Hector, ‘Right now, what do you wish for most in the world?’
Little Hector didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘To become a grown-up straight away!’
Hector was surprised. He had expected Little Hector’s answer to be: ‘For my parents to get back together’, or ‘To get better marks at school’, or ‘To go on a school ski trip with my friends’.
So he asked Little Hector why he wanted to become a grown-up straight away.
‘To decide things!’ said Little Hector.
If he became a grown-up straight away, explained Little Hector, he could decide for himself what time to go to bed, when to wake up, and where he could spend his holidays. He could see the friends he wanted, have fun doing what he wanted, and not see grown-ups he didn’t want to see (like his dad’s new girlfriend). He would also have a real job, because going to school wasn’t a real job. Besides, you don’t choose to go to school, and then you spend hours, days, years watching time going by slowly and getting bored.
Hector thought that Little Hector had let his imagination run away with him about life as a grown-up: after all, grown-ups still had to do things they didn’t like doing, and see people they didn’t like seeing. But he didn’t tell Little Hector that, because he thought that, for the moment, it was a good thing that Little Hector was dreaming of a happy future, since his present was decidedly less so.
So he asked Little Hector, ‘But if you became a grown-up straight away, it would mean that you would already have lived for a good few years, and then you’d have fewer left to live. Wouldn’t that bother you?’
Little Hector thought it over. ‘Okay, it’s a bit like a video game when you lose an extra life. It’s annoying, but it doesn’t stop you having fun!’
Then he looked at Hector. ‘What about you? Would it bother you to have already lost one or two lives?’
Grown-up Hector thought that Little Hector might become a psychiatrist himself one day.
HECTOR THINKS THINGS OVER
AT the end of each day, Hector thought about all the people he’d listened to who were worried about time.
He thought about Sabine, who wanted to slow time down.
He thought about Fernand, who measured his life in dogs.
He thought about Little Hector, who wanted to speed time up.
And many others . . .
Hector spent more and more time thinking about time.
Hector and the Secrets of Love Page 19
