Hector and the Search for Happiness (5 page)

He took Hector into his office, where Hector expected he’d have to kneel on little mats because there’d be no chairs. But it wasn’t like that at all. The monk’s office looked similar to Hector’s, with a proper desk, chairs, a lot of books, a computer, two telephones, statuettes — but Chinese ones — and a splendid view of the mountains.

The old monk explained that in his youth, long before Hector was born, he had spent a few years in Hector’s country. He’d been a student, and had earned money washing dishes at a big restaurant where Hector would sometimes have lunch. He asked Hector a lot of questions in order to find out how much things had changed in his country these days, and he seemed very pleased with everything Hector told him.

Hector explained the reason for his trip. More and more of his patients were unhappy without any apparent reason, and he wanted to find out why.

The old monk listened very attentively to Hector, and Hector told himself that he, too, was genuinely interested in people.

Hector asked him whether he had anything interesting to say about happiness.

The old monk said, ‘The basic mistake people make is to think that happiness is the goal!’ And he began to laugh.

Hector would have liked him to explain this a bit better, but the old monk liked to say things without explaining too much.

And yet, in Hector’s country more and more people were turning to the old monk’s religion (which wasn’t really a religion but it’s a bit difficult to explain that here). They thought it would make them happier.

The old monk said that was true, but often people from countries like Hector’s didn’t really understand his religion, which they adapted to suit themselves — rather like the Chinese restaurants in Hector’s city which didn’t serve real Chinese food. But the old monk felt that, although in some ways it was a pity, it didn’t really matter because it could still help people to be less worried and kinder to others. On the other hand, he wondered why people from Hector’s country were so interested in his religion when they had many old and perfectly good religions of their own. Perhaps they’d have been better off taking more of an interest in them; they’d have had a better chance of understanding them properly.

Hector said that it was very complicated, that perhaps people preferred the old monk’s religion because there were no bad memories attached to it and therefore it offered hope: people believed that his religion was the one that would really work.

In any event, it seemed to work for the old monk, because Hector had never seen such a contented person who laughed so much, but not in a mocking way. And yet he was very old, and his life couldn’t always have been much fun.

Hector remembered that there had been a time when the people who ruled the largest part of China had decided that monks were not useful people, and then some terrible things had happened, things too terrible even to mention. And the old monk came from that part of China, and must have experienced all that, and yet it didn’t seem to have stopped him from being happy.

Hector would have very much liked the old monk to reveal the secret of his happiness.

The old monk looked at him, laughing, and said, ‘Your journey is a very good idea. When you’ve reached the end of it, come back and see me.’

T
HAT evening, Hector went to wait for Édouard at his office before going out to dinner. It was Sunday, but Édouard was at the office because he had to finish a piece of work for the following day. He was going to show a very important man how to carry out a merger, and he wanted to do this ahead of another Édouard from another bank who wanted to show the same very important man how to do the same thing. And this very important man in turn wanted to carry out the merger ahead of another very important man who wanted to do the same thing. Hector had understood that in business everything was always a bit of a race whereas in psychiatry it wasn’t really like that, you just had to be careful not to let your patients talk too much, otherwise you’d be late for the next ones, and they wouldn’t like it.

Hector searched for Édouard’s building among the huge modern towers stretching all the way down to the sea. There wasn’t a beach, only quaysides where huge ships were moored, or building sites where new towers were going up.

The cars drove underneath, which was convenient as Hector was able to walk between the tall towers without any risk of being run over. He arrived at Édouard’s very beautiful, shiny tower. It looked like a giant razor blade. As he was a little early, he decided to have another coffee, and he was lucky because there was another big modern glass-walled café.

This time the waitresses weren’t very pretty, and Hector was relieved because too much beauty can be exhausting. Indeed, Hector considered being so sensitive to female beauty something of a handicap. And although he knew he wasn’t the only one who suffered from it, he hoped that one day he’d get over it. But, as you can see, he hadn’t got off to a very good start.

He rang Édouard, who seemed pleased to hear from him, but he hadn’t finished working yet. He told Hector to continue waiting for him in the café and he’d meet him there.

Hector began sipping his large coffee and watching the entrance to the tower.

And he saw something he’d seen several times before when he came to this neighbourhood: a group of Chinese women had spread an oilcloth out on the ground and were sitting on it in a circle, like schoolchildren having a picnic. On closer inspection, Hector noticed that they weren’t exactly like Chinese women; they were in general slightly shorter, and quite slender and dark-skinned. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, continually chatting and laughing. He’d seen several groups like that when he came to this neighbourhood, with their oilcloths spread out beside the entrance to the towers, under the footbridges or anywhere that gave shelter from the rain, but always outside the buildings.

Hector wondered whether they got together like that in order to practise some new religion. He would have liked to know what it was, perhaps the same one the old monk practised, because, like him, they laughed a lot.

While he was looking out for Édouard, he studied the people coming out of the tower. They were mostly Chinese, but dressed like Édouard at the weekend, in smart polo shirts and deck shoes, and Hector could tell simply from the way they walked that they’d been to the same schools as Édouard, the ones where you learn how to become rich. (Don’t forget that Hector is a psychiatrist; he only has to look at people to know where they went to school and whether their grandfather collected butterflies.) There were also westerners like Édouard, and Hector tried to guess where they came from just from the way they looked. No doubt he got it wrong a few times, but since he couldn’t check he didn’t know, and it amused him, and from time to time he laughed to himself.

Édouard’s colleagues didn’t look amused at all as they left the towers, they looked tired, and some of them were staring at the ground as if weighed down by worries. When a group of them emerged, talking amongst themselves, they looked very serious and sometimes it seemed as if they were cross with one another. Some looked so preoccupied, so caught up in their own thoughts that Hector almost felt like going up and prescribing pills for them. This café would have been a perfect place to establish himself as a psychiatrist if he had been planning to stay longer.

Finally, he saw Édouard, and he felt glad, because it’s always more heartening to see a friend in a foreign country than simply to come across him at home, even if you are slightly annoyed with him. Édouard looked very pleased to see Hector, and he immediately ordered a beer to celebrate.

Hector told Édouard that he looked a lot more cheerful than all his colleagues whom he’d seen coming out of the tower.

Édouard explained that this was because he was pleased to see Hector, and that Hector should see his face some evenings . . .

‘You’d put me straight into hospital!’ he said. And he started laughing.

And then he explained that for the past few weeks the markets hadn’t been very good and this was why his colleagues weren’t very happy.

‘So they might lose all their money?’ Hector asked.

‘No, but they might only get a small bonus, or lose their jobs if the bank downsizes. But at this level you can always find work. You just have to be prepared to go where the jobs are.’

Hector understood that where the jobs were meant other cities with towers that looked like giant razor blades and hotels like those used for conferences.

He asked Édouard who the groups of women were that he’d seen everywhere sitting on their oilcloths. Édouard explained that they were cleaners, and that they all came from the same country, a group of small, very poor islands quite a long way from China. They worked in this city (and other cities in the world) so that they could send money to their families, who’d stayed behind.

‘But why do they gather here on those oilcloths?’ asked Hector.

‘Because they’ve nowhere else to go,’ replied Édouard. ‘Today is Sunday, their day off, so they can’t stay at work and they don’t have enough money to sit in cafés, so they meet here and sit on the ground.’

Édouard also explained that as their country was made up of many small islands, women from particular islands or villages often sat together, and it was almost as if all their oilcloths formed a map of their impoverished archipelago in the midst of these very wealthy towers.

Hector watched the women who had nowhere else to go and who were laughing, he watched Édouard’s colleagues coming out of the tower looking very serious and he told himself that the world was a very wonderful or a very terrible place — it was difficult to say which.

 

 

When they left the café, Hector wanted to go over and speak to these women, because he felt that it was very important for his investigation. He walked towards a group of them, and as they saw him approach they all stopped talking and smiling. It occurred to Hector that they might think he was going to ask them to move along. But people usually quickly sensed that Hector meant well, and when they heard him speak in English they began laughing again. He told them that he’d been watching them for a while and that they seemed very happy. He wanted to know why.

They looked at one another, chuckling, and then one of them said, ‘Because it’s our day off!’

And another added, ‘Because we’re with our friends.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ the others said, ‘it’s because we’re with our friends.’ And even with their families, because some of them were cousins.

Hector asked them what their religion was, and it turned out that it was the same as Hector’s! This dated back to the time, long ago, when people of Hector’s religion had occupied their islands, because at that time they tended to think that everything belonged to them.

But they didn’t seem to hold it against Hector because they all said goodbye to him smiling and waving.

H
ECTOR reread what he’d written in his notebook. Some of it was interesting, he felt, but even so he wasn’t very satisfied. It didn’t resemble a proper theory of happiness. (A theory is a story that grown-ups tell each other to explain how things work. People believe it is true until somebody comes up with another theory that explains things better.) In fact, this had given him an idea: at the end of his trip, he would show his list to a famous professor of Happiness Studies.

He had a friend who lived in the country where there are more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world, and she knew a professor like that.

 

 

Hector was in an Italian restaurant with checked tablecloths and candles on the tables, whose owners, a husband and wife, looked like real Italians. (Actually they’d told Hector that they were Chilean, because even when he was at a restaurant, Hector’s apparent interest in people meant that those who came to take his order would first tell him their life story when sometimes all Hector wanted was to order.) It was in the part of the city that was on a hill, where there were still cobbled streets and old houses, and he felt happy to be there.

You must be wondering where Édouard was, but it’ll soon become clear.

Hector remembered his visit to the old monk. He wrote:

He wasn’t sure whether he’d really understood this lesson, but he thought it was very interesting, and he told himself that at the end of his journey he would go back and see the old monk.

He remembered the women laughing on their oilcloths.

When he wrote this, his heart started to beat a little faster.

Hector began doodling again.

Because, of course, as you’ve guessed, Hector was waiting for Ying Li.

 

 

When he’d explained to Édouard that he wanted to see Ying Li again, Édouard told him it wouldn’t be possible because on Sundays the place full of pretty Chinese girls where they’d met her was closed. But Hector said he didn’t want to see Ying Li while she was working. He wanted to invite her to dinner, and since she’d left him her telephone number that was exactly what he was going to do.