‘No, I didn’t, you did.’
Hector and Clara carried on bickering and went to bed without speaking to each other or kissing each other good night. Which just goes to show that love isn’t easy, even for psychiatrists.
During the night, Hector woke up. In the dark, he found his luminous pen, which allowed him to write at night without waking Clara up. He noted: Perfect love would be never having arguments.
He thought about it. He wasn’t sure.
He didn’t feel he could call his statement a ‘lesson’. Wanting to give lessons on love seemed a bit ridiculous. He thought of ‘reflection’, but it was too serious for such a simple phrase. It was only a tiny thought, like a seedling that has just sprouted and nobody knows what it will be yet. There, he’d found it. It was a seedling. He wrote:
Seedling no. 1: Perfect love would be never having arguments.
He thought for a little bit longer, but it was difficult as his eyelids kept closing. He looked at Clara who was sleeping.
Seedling no. 2: Sometimes we argue most with the people we love the most.
HECTOR AND CLARA GO TO THE BEACH
ONE place on the island’s beach seemed to belong to a large family of little pink crabs that were constantly mounting or fighting each other. Hector watched them, and he very quickly understood that when they mounted each other it was the males mounting the females and when they fought it was the males fighting amongst themselves. And why were they fighting? To be able to mount the females, of course. Even for crabs, love seemed like quite a difficult thing, especially for the males that lost a pincer during a fight. It reminded Hector of something one of his patients had said to him about a woman he was very much in love with: ‘I would have done better to cut my arm off than meet her.’ He was exaggerating of course, especially as, unlike with crabs, an arm doesn’t grow back.
‘You like your little friends the crabs, don’t you?’
It was Clara, who had arrived wearing a pretty white bathing suit. She had started to tan a little and to Hector she looked as appetising as a freshly picked apricot.
‘You’re crazy, be careful, people can see us! And so can the crabs!’
Exactly! It was watching the crabs that had given Hector ideas, but he had also just noticed that the people from the company were looking in their direction. They were having a drink on the veranda of the hotel’s biggest bungalow, which was built on stilts. The sunset was magnificent, the waves breaking on the beach made a gentle murmur, Clara looked all golden in the setting sun and Hector thought: This is a moment of happiness. He had learnt that you mustn’t waste any of these.
It gets dark very quickly in that part of the world, and everybody met for dinner in the big bungalow. And what was for starters? Crab!
‘We’re delighted you could all be here,’ said the very important man from the company, whose name was Gunther. He had a slight accent and broad shoulders. He was very tall, but came from a very small, very rich country specialising in chocolate bars and big pharmaceutical companies.
‘Yes, indeed!’ said his colleague, Marie-Claire, a tall redhead with a dazzling smile and magnificent sparkling rings.
Hector had noticed she and Clara didn’t like each other very much.
The old psychiatrist who had been invited didn’t respond; he was concentrating on his crab. He wasn’t wearing his bow tie and the strange thing was that in a polo shirt he looked even older. There’s a good piece of advice, thought Hector. When you get very old, always wear a bow tie. He began thinking about what to advise very old ladies. To wear a hat?
‘I’ve been here before,’ said Ethel, the woman who was an expert in love, ‘and I adored it.’
And she mentioned the name of another big pharmaceutical company that had invited her to that same island, and Hector saw a touch of annoyance in Gunther’s and Marie-Claire’s smiles.
But Ethel didn’t notice a thing. As previously mentioned, she was a jolly little woman who was always cheerful, which must have done the people who went to see her a lot of good.
‘Did you know the redness in crabs is sexual?’ she asked. ‘In proportion to their size, they are extremely well endowed!’
And she gave her jolly laugh again. Hector noticed that the maître d’hôtel, a tall, Asian-looking fellow, had been listening and had given a faint smile.
At either end of the table, there was a group of young men and women also employed by the company, and you could tell that some of the young men, and, of course, some of the young women, would one day be bosses.
And it was one of the girls who smiled at Hector and said to him, ‘I really liked your last article. What you say is so true!’
This was an article Hector had written for a magazine explaining why so many people needed to see psychiatrists.
Hector said he was glad but, at the same time, he saw that Clara wasn’t altogether happy about his little chat with the young woman.
Later, Clara whispered in his ear, ‘She’s always showing off, that girl.’
The old psychiatrist had finished shelling his crab, and he began delicately eating the tiny pile of meat he had collected in the middle of his plate.
‘As methodical as ever, my dear,’ Ethel said to him, chuckling. ‘No pleasure without a struggle!’
The old psychiatrist replied without looking up from his plate, ‘As you well know, my dear, at my age everything is a struggle, alas.’
And everybody laughed because he was the type of old-school psychiatrist who had a dry wit.
His name was François, and Hector liked him very much.
At the end of the meal, Gunther wished them all a very good night since tomorrow they were going to get up early for the meeting, and he added in Hector’s language, ‘The best advice is found on the pillow,’ apparently very pleased at having learnt this expression because Hector’s language was not Gunther’s mother tongue; in the small country he came from they spoke several languages.
Much later, when Hector looked back on this whole affair and remembered ‘The best advice is found on the pillow’, he felt like laughing and crying at the same time.
‘WELL,’ said Gunther, ‘we are all here this morning because we need to pick your brains. Our company is working on the drugs of the future. But we are well aware that we will only maintain our dominant position in the market if our drugs are really useful to patients, and who is better placed to know about patients than you?’
He talked a bit more about what wonderful people Hector, François – the old psychiatrist, and Ethel – the expert in love, were. Everybody had gathered, like at dinner the previous evening, in a big room made entirely of wood overlooking the beach.
Hector looked out of the huge glassless windows. The sea was grey that morning under a cloudy sky, giving the palm trees a melancholy air. He had realised the day before that if you went from the beach across the sea in a straight line, in a few days you would reach China. And, as previously mentioned, Hector had once met a pretty Chinese girl, and sometimes he still thought about her. But of course it was Clara he loved.
Actually, it was Clara who was talking now and projecting pretty pictures with a little computer.
‘This