Hector and the Search for Happiness (7 page)

Fortunately, this didn’t go on for very long and the plane finally landed quite normally, though with a lot of juddering.

Hector managed to let go of the armrests, and when all the passengers were standing in the aisle, Marie-Louise invited him to come and visit her and her family. She wrote down her address in his little notebook.

When he reached the door to the plane, Hector had exactly the same sensation as when you open the oven to see whether the roast beef is ready and the oven is very hot. This was slightly different though, because it was very bright outside and the sun was beating down. The airport was surrounded by scorched-looking mountains, a bit like the colour of overdone roast beef as a matter of fact.

At customs, the customs officers were African (but we won’t repeat this all the time, like with the Chinese; in this country everybody is African, apart from a few exceptions, which we’ll point out). Families waited in the shade. The little girls were dressed in white ankle socks and ruffs and the little boys in shorts, well, long shorts actually, like the ones worn in Hector’s country a long time ago.

Hector couldn’t see the friend who was supposed to be meeting him. And so he walked out carrying his suitcase, and the sun kept beating down. A porter soon arrived — and then another and another — to help him carry his suitcase over to the taxi rank, which was a few yards away, and Hector thought they were going to start fighting, but fortunately he saw his friend Jean-Michel coming towards him, smiling.

Jean-Michel was an old friend of Hector’s, like Édouard, although they were quite different. Jean-Michel had studied medicine. He had specialised in the germs that make people sick in hot countries. And although they had plenty of these germs, unfortunately hot countries also had the fewest doctors. So Jean-Michel had quickly gone off to work in these countries. He was tall and strong, and looked a bit like a sailing or skiing instructor. Hector remembered that he’d been popular with the girls but that he’d never seemed very interested in them, and so they became even more interested in him and often came and asked Hector about Jean-Michel because they knew the two of them were friends.

Jean-Michel took Hector’s suitcase, and they walked towards the car park. This sounds simple, but in fact it was rather complicated because there were beggars in the car park. They’d immediately noticed Hector, just like the porters had before. And soon, all the beggars in the car park surrounded Hector, stretching out their hands and saying, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, monsieur, monsieur . . .’

Hector could see that some of them were very ill, very thin, and some only had one eye. They seemed barely able to stand up, but they continued to surround him like ghosts, holding out their hands.

Jean-Michel strode ahead, and appeared not even to see the beggars. He carried on talking to Hector.

‘I’ve found you a good hotel . . . Well, it wasn’t difficult, there are only two.’

By the time they reached the car, Hector had already given away all his coins and even his bank notes, and it was only then that Jean-Michel noticed what was going on.

‘Ah yes, of course,’ he said, ‘it’s your first time here.’

Jean-Michel’s car was a big white four-wheel-drive vehicle with letters painted on it. Next to it, a young African man with a pump-action shotgun stood waiting for them.

‘This is Marcel,’ said Jean-Michel, ‘he’s our bodyguard.’

The car left the car park and took the road into the city. Through the window, Hector again saw the scorched mountains, the beggars who were watching them drive away, the sun beating on the potholed road and then, sitting in front of him, Marcel with his pump-action shotgun resting on his knees. He told himself that in this country he was perhaps going to reach a better understanding of happiness, but no doubt with quite a few lessons in unhappiness, too.

T
HE hotel was very pretty. The grounds were large and full of flowering trees and small bungalows for the guests, and there was a big wiggly-shaped swimming pool, which even passed under a tiny wooden footbridge. But it felt a little different from the kind of hotel people go to on holiday. First of all, at the entrance there was a sign saying: ‘We kindly request our guests and their visitors not to bring weapons into the hotel. Please go to reception.’ And inside the hotel there were white men in uniforms (a funny-looking uniform with shorts) drinking at the bar. They belonged to a sort of small army, which all the countries in the world had formed to bring some order to this country. But since this country wasn’t very important, nobody had wanted to pay much money towards the small army, and so it was scarcely big enough to defend itself and didn’t manage to bring much order even though it tried.

A man at the bar explained all of this to Hector. He was white, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform; he wore the kind of clothes Édouard wore at the weekend: a nice, light-coloured shirt, well-pressed trousers and what looked like golf shoes, and a watch that must have cost as much as Ying Li’s. (These days, lots of things made Hector think of Ying Li.)

The man was a foreigner, but he spoke Hector’s language very well and only drank sparkling water. And funnily enough, he had almost the same name as Édouard; he was called Eduardo! Hector asked him what country he came from and Eduardo told him. It was a country that didn’t have a very good reputation, because almost everywhere there people grew a plant, which was made into a very harmful stimulant, which was illegal in Hector’s country, and in every country in the world for that matter. As a result, many people were prepared to pay a lot of money for it. Of course, it wasn’t Eduardo’s fault that he was born in that country, and so Hector did not think much of it. He asked Eduardo where he’d learnt to speak his language so well.

‘In your country! I spent several years there.’

Eduardo sounded as if he didn’t want to say any more about it. And so to change the subject, Hector asked him what he was doing here in this country. Eduardo looked at Hector, and because, as previously mentioned, people sensed that Hector meant well — particularly clever people like Eduardo — he replied with a chuckle, ‘Farming!’

Hector thought that this was interesting for his investigation. He asked Eduardo what made him happy in life. Eduardo reflected for a moment and said, ‘Seeing my family happy, knowing that my children won’t want for anything.’

Eduardo’s children were grown up, and he hoped to send them to study in the big country that had more psychiatrists than anywhere else in the world. Hector asked him whether it bothered him to know that other families might be very unhappy because their children took the harmful stimulant Eduardo made (because, of course, you, like Hector, have worked it out by now).

This time Eduardo answered straight away.

‘If they take it, it’s because their family’s already messed up. Their parents don’t look after them properly, all they think about is making money, or getting laid. It’s normal for kids to go off the rails!’

‘Okay,’ said Hector.

He didn’t necessarily think that it was okay, but when a psychiatrist says ‘okay’, it just means ‘I understand what you’re saying.’ But he pointed out to Eduardo that lots of poor people also took this harmful drug and it made their lives even worse. Eduardo said that it was the same thing: their whole country was like a bad family which didn’t look after its children properly.

‘I don’t create demand,’ said Eduardo, ‘I simply respond to it.’

Hector said that he understood, but all the same he thought that Eduardo was building his and his family’s happiness on other people’s misery. But he told himself that Eduardo had also been born in a country that was like one big very bad family. And so naturally he had a strange way of looking at things.

For that matter, Hector’s questions might have annoyed Eduardo a bit, because he ordered a whisky from the African barman, who came over and served him. You might be thinking that not enough has been said about African people in a country where everybody is African, but the reason is that the only African people in the bar were the waiters, the barman and the receptionist, and they didn’t talk at all. The people talking were the white people, guests like Eduardo and Hector, and the men in shorts.

When Hector told Eduardo that he was a psychiatrist, he seemed very interested. He told him that his wife was always unhappy (and yet she didn’t want for anything). And so the doctor over in his country had tried prescribing various pills, but none of them had really worked. What did Hector think?

Hector asked for the names of the pills. Eduardo said that he had the names in his room, and he went to fetch them. In the meantime, Hector drank his whisky (because Eduardo had ordered one for him as well) and began talking to the barman. His name was Isidore. Hector asked him what made him happy. Isidore smiled and said, ‘My family not wanting for anything.’

Hector asked if that was all.

Isidore thought about it, and then added, ‘Going to my second job from time to time!’

Hector understood that besides his job as a barman Isidore had another job, which he must really enjoy. What sort of job was it? Isidore started to laugh and was about to explain to Hector, but Eduardo came back with his wife’s prescription.

Hector studied it, and found that the prescription was not quite right. The psychiatrist over there had prescribed all three main types of medication psychiatrists prescribe, but none of them in the right dose, so they couldn’t have been helping Eduardo’s wife much. He asked Eduardo a few more questions in order to find out what sort of unhappiness his wife was suffering from, and he soon saw which type of pill would work best for her. He also remembered a good psychiatrist from Eduardo’s country whom he’d met at a conference. It was understandable that Eduardo hadn’t heard of him, because this psychiatrist worked at a hospital, and he wore socks with his sandals, whereas people like Eduardo tend to know doctors who wear the same type of shoes as they do. Hector gave Eduardo his name and also the name of the pill that his wife should try while she was waiting for an appointment. Eduardo wrote everything down with a nice gold pen (it might even have been solid gold).

Just then, Jean-Michel arrived and when he saw Hector talking to Eduardo, he pulled a face. Hector wanted to introduce Jean-Michel to Eduardo, but Jean-Michel seemed in a hurry and he whisked Hector away while Eduardo thanked him and said goodbye.

In the car, Jean-Michel asked Hector if he knew who he’d been speaking to.

Hector said he did, more or less.

And Jean-Michel said, ‘That’s the kind of guy who drags this country into the shit!’

Marcel said nothing, but it was obvious he agreed.

Hector didn’t reply because he was busy writing in his notebook:

He explained to Jean-Michel that the barman at the hotel had a second job. This made Jean-Michel and Marcel laugh, and Marcel explained that here having a second job meant having a girlfriend as well as a wife!

This made Hector think about Ying Li and Clara, and he went very quiet for a while.

T
HERE were a lot of people walking along the dusty street, and some little children with no shoes on as well, and when the car got stuck in traffic, the children came up to beg. They’d spotted Hector even through the tinted windows, and they waved their little hands at him and smiled, showing all their little white teeth.

‘Don’t try to wind the window down,’ Jean-Michel said, ‘I’ve locked them.’

‘But why are they only making signs at me?’ Hector asked, as he watched a pretty little girl holding out her pretty little hands.

‘Because they can see that you’re new here. They already know us.’

The city did not look very well maintained. Hector could see tumbledown houses patched up with planks of wood or corrugated iron, or villas that must once have been very beautiful but were now mouldering. People were selling things on the pavement, but they were the sorts of things that, in Hector’s country, would just have been thrown away or put up in the attic. One place, however, was selling nice brightly coloured vegetables. Hector noticed that the people did not look very happy. The children smiled, but the grown-ups didn’t smile at all.

They were still stuck in traffic, and Hector couldn’t understand why there were so many cars in such a poor country.

‘There aren’t that many cars, it’s just that there are very few roads so they get congested quickly. And there’s only one set of traffic lights in the whole city!’

Finally, they managed to get out of the traffic jam and the car was soon speeding along the road. The road wasn’t very well maintained either; it had big boulders in the middle or else potholes the size of bathtubs, which nobody bothered to fill in, but Jean-Michel was used to it. This was just as well, because from time to time they went past trucks driving very fast the other way with lots of people clinging to the sides and even on the roof. Hector told himself that people here might not smile very much, but in any event they seemed to know no fear, because had any of those trucks had an accident they would have been very badly hurt. Hector noticed that the trucks were often painted different colours and had writing on them in big letters: ‘The Good Lord watches over us’ or ‘Long live Jesus who loves us always’ and he understood that the people here still put their trust in God, much more so than in Hector’s country where people relied on the Social Security to look after them.

He wondered whether belief in God was a lesson in happiness. No, he couldn’t make that a lesson because you don’t choose whether to believe in God or not.

The countryside wasn’t much better than it had been around the airport: big scorched hills and hardly any trees to provide shade.