When Marie-Agnès had left, Hector looked at himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece just as she had … and he noticed, no two ways about it, that for the first time in his life he had a few grey hairs, which you couldn’t miss, just above his ears.
So he wasn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more.
In the end, just like all the other times when he had something important on his mind, Hector wanted to talk to his girlfriend Clara about it.
But he took the time to write:
Time Exercise No. 5: Imagine your life as a big roll of fabric, from which you have made all the clothes you have worn since you were little. Imagine the set of clothes you could make with the rest of the roll.
HECTOR LOVES CLARA; CLARA LOVES HECTOR
HECTOR and Clara … well, it was a long story, even though they were both still quite young. We’ll try to explain it to you, but, as with all love affairs, it’s not always easy to understand, even for those involved.
Clara and Hector first met at a big conference for psychiatrists organised by a big company which made medicines and which Clara worked too hard for. Hector had gone up to ask Clara some serious questions about the medicines. Clara had answered him seriously. Then, just after that, Hector had made her laugh; then after that he’d phoned her; then some time after that they’d realised that they were both in love.
And now Clara and Hector were living together.
Clara and Hector sometimes thought about getting married and having a baby, but they hardly ever thought about it at the same time. Sometimes, Hector went off travelling, and when he’d been away, it must be confessed, he’d got up to mischief. And for a while he hadn’t really been too sure what he wanted. For her part, Clara had wondered if Hector and she would ever get married. And at times she hadn’t really been too sure any more what she wanted either.
But, at this point in their story, Clara and Hector were living together and were starting (once again) to think about getting married and having a baby.
Will they get there eventually? You’ll have to keep reading to the end of this book to find out!
One day, Hector talked to Clara about what he’d noticed: that almost nobody was happy with time. And he also told her about this feeling he had, from some of the comments his patients had made, that he wasn’t exactly a young psychiatrist any more.
So Clara said to him, ‘Oh, you men! You’re always a bit slow!’
And she explained to Hector that, for women, the feeling of not exactly being young any more came much earlier than for men.
‘How do women notice?’ asked Hector.
‘The competition appears,’ said Clara.
At first, Hector didn’t understand what Clara meant, which just goes to show that psychiatrists aren’t always that clever after all.
Clara went on: ‘And we women are much more aware of the years going by. For a long time, when you’re young, you think your life will really get going a bit later, and then one day you realise that this “later” has already been and gone. Usually, this is the point when you begin to see little wrinkles appearing on your face that other people don’t notice. Sometimes, I tell myself that if I keep thinking “later”, one day I’ll realise it’s “too late”. To have a baby, for example.’
And Clara looked at Hector, and Hector looked at Clara.
All of this showed that, even though Clara seemed to be quite an optimistic girl, there were still times when she thought quite deeply about things. Of course, Hector already knew that, and it was one of the reasons he loved Clara.
Once again, Hector told himself that, even if no one talks about the passage of time, everyone thinks about it.
Apart from babies, perhaps. But, then again, who knows?
THE following night, Hector had a dream.
He was in a compartment of a train, just like the ones he remembered from his childhood, with a big corridor and windows you could open with a handle. He himself was a grown-up like the Hector we know now. He was alone and felt a little uneasy. Outside, the countryside rolled by, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, but it was strange because the countryside was like it used to be when he was a child. You could still see cornflowers and poppies in the fields, big hedges with blackberries and raspberries where birds and rabbits hid, ponds where children fished on their way home from school, their bicycles lying in the grass, and, along country paths, cows and sheep being brought in for the night. Even the sky looked different – it was a softer blue, and the clouds were a purer shade of white. Hector was touched by this sight, and he wanted to share it with someone – perhaps one of his friends was sitting on the train. He went out into the corridor, but there was no one there, and all the other compartments in the carriage were empty.
Feeling a little uneasy, he went through to the next carriage, but there was no one there either. He continued walking up the train, thinking to himself all the while that there had to be someone on it.
While he was walking, Hector noticed something odd: the faster he walked up the corridor, the more the train slowed down, and the slower the countryside rolled by. He even had time to catch a glimpse of a pretty farm girl rounding up some nice sheep in the setting sun. If Hector stopped walking altogether to get a better view, the train would speed up, which was a little annoying. So he started running to make the train slow down even more. He ran so fast that eventually the train stopped altogether. But that wasn’t such a good thing, since Hector noticed that the landscape outside had become a snowy, icy wilderness, as if the train had arrived at the North Pole. He stopped running so that the train would move off again and get away from this icy and desolate place.
But the train didn’t move.
Ice began to creep up all the windows.
Very far away, at the other end of the train, Hector heard a door bang and realised that someone or something had just boarded the train. Footsteps … very heavy, very slow … were approaching the carriage he was in.
Hector desperately wanted to get off the train, but, the thing was, he couldn’t find a door that led outside! He wanted to open one of the windows in the carriage, but all the ones he tried were frozen solid by the ice outside.
In his dream, Hector started wishing he would wake up right away as the footsteps slowly approached his carriage.
Eventually, the train began to move off again, and then went faster and faster, and the nice countryside appeared again. This time, Hector didn’t see anyone at all, as if everyone, cows and sheep included, had gone in for the night at the same time as the sun. The only thing he saw was a happy-looking husky bounding along a path.
Hector carried on gazing at the countryside in the setting sun. Suddenly, he wasn’t afraid of the footsteps approaching his carriage any more.
The carriage door opened and Hector saw a young monk appear. Now, it wasn’t a monk from Hector’s country as you might think, but a monk like the ones from China, with a shaved head and wearing a sort of long orange robe which only covered one of his shoulders.
The monk was young, but it was strange because Hector knew that he was actually a very old monk he’d already met in real life. Yet, in his dream, it seemed perfectly normal to him that the monk was very young.
‘So,’ said the old-monk-who-was-very-young, ‘how are things with you?’
Then Hector woke up.
Clara