Читать книгу Hector and the Secrets of Love - Francois Lelord - Страница 16

Who are you to think you can tame love? Under the guise of relieving suffering you want to impose servitude. The control of feelings, that’s your aim. Well, Professor Cormorant isn’t going to help you. Professor Cormorant has a very different vision of the future that you cannot begin to imagine. All you can think about is stuffing people full of your little pills. Professor Cormorant pities you because he is a good man.

Professor Cormorant really had changed; he referred to himself in the third person in almost all the emails he had sent Gunther and Marie-Claire. An unexpected side effect of the new drugs he had taken with him perhaps?

Hector folded the letter and looked at the air hostess, who was bringing some champagne. This made him happy because he already knew the effect champagne had. In addition, the air hostess was wearing pretty oriental clothes, a dress with a slit up one side over silk trousers. And, you’ve guessed right, she was Asian, because Hector was on his way to a country very near China where they had most recently traced Professor Cormorant. Since that country had been occupied a long time ago by Hector’s country, he was hoping to find a lot of people there who spoke his language, because Hector was not very good at languages, and Asian languages aren’t the easiest ones to speak, let alone write.

But the air hostess only spoke English. She asked Hector if he was visiting her country as a tourist or on business and Hector said ‘tourist’, and wondered how the young woman would have responded if he had told her he was going in search of a mad professor.

Talking a little to the air hostess and drinking champagne did Hector good; it stopped him from thinking about Clara.

Before leaving on this mission, he and Clara had had a long talk. Or rather he had started off asking Clara a lot of questions to find out why she often looked sad. At first she had said no, it was nothing, she wasn’t sad, Hector was imagining things, and then she had finally told him she still loved him, but she wondered whether she was really in love with him. Hector hadn’t taken it too badly, because when you are a psychiatrist you are used to remaining calm while you listen to what people say, and people say very strange things sometimes, but even so, there on the plane he needed to drink champagne and talk to the air hostess in order to repress the urge to pick up the telephone fitted to his seat and call Clara at half-hourly intervals. Especially because he knew it wouldn’t have done much good and he would quickly have run up a phone bill that would have shocked even Gunther.

Love is universal – saying this might make us wonder whether we have made any progress at all, but of course we have, because it allows us to jettison all those silly cultural prejudices, hey presto. Regardless of race, culture or the regime imposed on us, love sets us all aquiver. Just take a look at all the world’s love poems throughout the ages and I guarantee you will find in them universal themes: the sorrow of being parted from the loved one, the joy of seeing him or her again, odes to his or her beauty and the promise of ecstasy it brings, the desire to see him or her triumph or escape from danger. Do it and you will see I am right and that will shut you up, you dimwits.

Before writing this message, it would seem Professor Cormorant had taken another type of pill. Hector had quivered slightly when he read the sorrow of being parted from the loved one, but he managed to focus again in order to read all the professor’s most recent emails since he had gone missing. There were about fifty of them and Hector thought that by examining them he might discover what was going on in the professor’s mind, understand what he wanted, and eventually find him.

Others at the company had tried this of course, but without any success; in their view, Professor Cormorant had gone mad, and that was that.

The only thing they could do was find out where the emails had been sent from, and this was very clever of them, because the professor had done some quite complicated things to prevent them from discovering which computer he had used. As a result, it took the people from the company several days to locate the computer and by the time they sent somebody there the professor had gone.

Hector had a map of the world recording the professor’s movements.

It was evident that all the most recent emails had been sent from Asia, so there was a chance they would find him there. But what Gunther was counting on most was the professor wanting to talk to Hector. Before leaving, Hector had sent the professor an email.

Dear Professor Cormorant,

Some people you know well want to find you. They are sending me after you in the hope that I will have a better chance of finding you than they do. It would give me great pleasure to talk to you anyway and to hear how you are getting on. You may reply to me at this address, which only I have access to.

Yours sincerely

Hector didn’t really know what he would do if he found Professor Cormorant. Of course, he was being paid by Gunther to find him and bring him back, but, as you have already guessed, Hector liked the professor more than he liked Gunther, and also he said to himself that the professor might have had very good reasons for disappearing.

The air hostess brought him more champagne with a smile, and Hector felt a sudden flash of love for her. Perhaps he could ask her for her number?

He told himself he was pathetic.

He opened his little notebook and wrote:

Seedling no. 4: True love is not wanting to be unfaithful.

He looked at the air hostess walking away in her pretty oriental outfit then he mused some more and wrote:

Seedling no. 5: True love is not being unfaithful (even when you want to be).