Читать книгу Hector and the Search for Happiness - Francois Lelord - Страница 12

HECTOR felt very out of sorts that morning. He left his hotel and decided to go and have coffee. He found a huge, very modern café where all they served was coffee, lots of different kinds of coffee. He’d already come across places like that with the same name in almost all the world’s big cities where he’d been to conferences, and so he knew how to order in that sort of café, except that this one was full of Chinese men and women talking or reading newspapers, and the waiters and waitresses were also Chinese.

He sat near the window so that he could look out at the street (full of Chinese passers-by, as you’ve already guessed).

He felt rather unhappy.

But, in reality, being unhappy might also teach him something about happiness. At least it would prove useful for his trip. He began to think: why was he unhappy?

Firstly because he had a headache due to all the wine Édouard had ordered. Hector wasn’t used to drinking so much.

Secondly, he was unhappy because of Ying Li.

Ying Li was a simple name, but the reasons why Hector was unhappy were quite complex. He didn’t really want to think about it, perhaps because those reasons weren’t so easy to accept. It even made him feel a little afraid. He knew this fear only too well, it was what stopped his patients from being able to really think about their problems, and it was his job to help them overcome this fear and really understand what was happening to them.

Just then, the waitress came to ask if he wanted more coffee. She was young and quite pretty; she reminded him of Ying Li and he felt a pang.

Hector opened his notebook and began to draw doodles. This helped him to think. (He would sometimes doodle when his patients kept him on the telephone for too long.)

He was also unhappy because he felt bad when he thought of Clara. Of course she would never know what had happened with Ying Li, but even so he felt bad. On the other hand, if Clara had come with him to China, he would never have met Ying Li. When he was with Clara, Hector always behaved himself, and so he wouldn’t have got up to any mischief with Édouard, and so all this was partly Clara’s fault. After thinking that, he felt slightly less unhappy.

But there was more. Hector was also unhappy because he hadn’t understood what was going on at all. He had thought that Ying Li had approached him because she’d found him interesting with his little notebook, and that later on she’d gone with him to the hotel because she’d found him more and more interesting. But of course that wasn’t the reason at all. Ying Li was doing her job, which she probably thought was less tedious than spending her life working like her sisters in one of Charles’s factories. When they were still at the bar and Ying Li was telling Hector about herself (of course now he realised that she hadn’t told him everything), she’d told him how much her sisters earned in a month: he’d worked out that it was half the price of the bottle of white wine Édouard had ordered, sparkling next to them in its ice bucket.

Hector wasn’t sad because he’d discovered how Ying Li earned her living (in fact it did make him a little sad), but because the evening before he’d understood nothing. Or rather, he was sad because that morning he’d understood that he’d understood nothing, because while he still understood nothing he wasn’t sad at all, but now that he’d understood that he’d understood nothing he felt sad, if you follow. Realising that one has understood nothing is never pleasant, but for a psychiatrist it’s even worse.

The pretty Chinese waitress came back and asked if he wanted more coffee, and when she saw what he was doodling in his notebook she laughed. Hector looked: without knowing it he’d been drawing lots of little hearts.

The waitress went away again and he saw her talking about him to the other waitresses, and they all seemed very amused.

Hector still wasn’t in a very good mood, so he paid and left the café.

Outside, he nearly got run over trying to cross the road because he’d forgotten that cars drove on the left in this city. There’s no point in looking before crossing the road if you don’t look in the right direction.

He wondered what to do with himself. He couldn’t see Édouard because he wasn’t on holiday; he was working all day at his office. They’d arranged to have dinner again that evening, but Hector wasn’t sure he really felt like it any more.

Basically Hector was a little annoyed with Édouard. He knew that Édouard had only wanted to make him happy, but the fact was that this morning Hector was unhappy. Édouard liked drinking a lot, and so Hector had drunk a lot, too. Édouard liked meeting Chinese women whose job it was to make men like him happy, and so Hector had met Ying Li.

Hector told himself that really Édouard was a bit like those friends who are excellent skiers. One day they take you to the top of a very steep ski slope and tell you you’ll have great fun if you just follow them. In fact they’ve only taken you up there because they are excellent skiers and love skiing down very steep slopes. And you don’t enjoy yourself at all trying to keep up with them, you’re scared, you fall over and you wish it would end, but you have to get down the slope anyway and you have a miserable time while those morons, your friends, fly over the moguls shrieking with joy.

While he was walking, Hector came upon a tiny station with a single track. It wasn’t for the usual kind of train but for one of those trains you find in the mountains, because, if you remember, this city was built at the foot of a mountain. And the little train went all the way up to the top of the mountain.

Hector thought that it would do him good to get up into the mountains and so he bought a ticket from an old Chinese man wearing a cap, and he sat down in a tiny wooden carriage.

While he was waiting for the train to move, he began thinking, and he thought about Ying Li again. He could still see her when she’d walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, looking happy; and when she’d stopped smiling because she’d understood that Hector had understood. Afterwards, she’d looked sad and they hadn’t known what to say to one another.

The little train moved off and began to climb past the buildings and very soon it reached the trees and then the clouds, because the weather wasn’t good at all, but then the sky turned blue and Hector could see magnificent green mountains all around and, down below, the sea dotted with boats.

It was very beautiful but Hector was still unhappy.