HECTOR GOES TO TALK TO OLD FRANÇOIS
HECTOR wanted to talk to someone about his dream so that he could understand what it meant a bit better. The first person he thought of was Clara, who sometimes had very good ideas, but he knew his dream was a little strange and might have worried her. Besides, since their last conversation, he thought Clara seemed quite sad. From time to time, she looked at herself in the mirror and seemed even sadder.
He’d noticed a very pretty little blue and white jar on the bathroom shelf. On the top, it said ‘anti-ageing cream’. He’d told Clara that he thought she was very young to be using anti-ageing cream, but Clara had told him to mind his own business. So perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to tell her his dream, because he knew that it was about the passage of time.
Then he thought of an old psychiatrist colleague called François, who was almost as old as his grandfather and always wore a bow tie. Hector thought that François must have listened to lots of people telling him their dreams in his years as a psychiatrist. He would probably have some good ideas about Hector’s.
Old François worked in a big room which looked like an old-fashioned drawing room full of antique furniture and paintings. Even François looked old-fashioned in his bow tie, but Hector knew that he had some quite modern ideas.
So he told him his dream. And he asked him what he made of it.
Old François thought about it. Then he said, ‘The problem with dreams is that you never know if it’s just the brain jumbling up any old rubbish with snippets of memories to give itself something to do, or if, in fact, it’s trying to concoct a story which actually means something.’
Hector was astonished – he remembered that old François had learnt psychiatry at a time when psychiatrists considered dreams to be very important.
Old François saw that Hector was a little disappointed. So he said, ‘Of course, at one time, people used to think that a train in a dream symbolised sex … wanting to have sexual relations, or being afraid of having them, that sort of thing. But then this idea dates back to a time when having sexual relations was frowned upon in any case. Whereas now it’s the opposite …’
Old François didn’t look as if he had much faith in these old ideas about sexual relations.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘your dream reminds me of what I learnt at school … about time. When you’re on a train and you throw a ball, someone who’s at rest in a meadow sees it travelling much faster than you do, since for him the train’s speed is added to the speed of the ball. It’s the same with light: if you send a flash of light along a train. But since light always travels at the same speed wherever you see it from, it means that speed … no, time … is not the same for you … no, for him … Oh, blast! I can’t really remember now. In the end, it all comes down to a question of relativity – you know, Einstein’s thing about time being different depending on the speed at which you’re travelling.’
Hector vaguely remembered this too. This reminded him of what they say about a teacher and his pupils: the pupils hear half of what the teacher says, they understand half of what they hear, they remember half of what they understand, and they use half of what they remember, which is to say not much, as it turns out. Hector often saw teachers, both men and women, in his office, and often they were sad because they thought they weren’t doing any good. Hector tried to get them to change their minds by themselves. So he said to himself that he wouldn’t tell them what he and old François had managed to remember about relativity.
But old François went on, ‘If you ask me, your dream is about time. Or, to be more precise, about fighting against the passage of time. The train is time, which no one can get away from, or slow down … Sadly, we know all too well what’s at the end of the line.’
Old François was silent, and Hector got the feeling that he was thinking about it … the end of the line.
‘And the old-monk-who-was-very-young?’ asked Hector, just to stop old François thinking about the end of the line.
‘I don’t know,’ said old François. ‘We might say that he’s a reassuring presence for you. But he’s someone you’ve met, isn’t he?’
It was true that one day when Hector had gone for a walk just to get away from it all in the beautiful green mountains over in China, he’d stumbled upon a Chinese monastery with a lovely curled rooftop and tiny square windows. That was where the old monk lived, surrounded by other younger monks, all of whom wore an orange robe over one shoulder, and nothing over the other. (It was almost as if they were practising not catching cold!) Hector hit it off straight away with the old monk, who was always in a good mood and could help people understand things without explaining them. The old monk had travelled a lot in his life – he’d even been to Hector’s country when he was just a boy, and had done the washing up in a restaurant where Hector still went to have lunch with his father from time to time. From the very first moment they met, Hector and the old monk had enjoyed talking to each other. The old monk had helped Hector understand two or three things about life (without explaining them, of course), and Hector had used this to help his patients. Since then, the old monk and Hector had stayed friends, even if they didn’t see each other very often.
Anyway, Hector agreed with old François: his dream did have something to do with time going by. And in his dream he’d tried to stop it, like Marie-Agnès or Clara, but that hadn’t turned out very well. Then he’d tried to run away from it by getting off the train, but he couldn’t.
Of course, the best thing would have been to go and tell the old monk his dream, but for a while now, whenever Hector sent him a message over the internet, there had been no reply. He thought that perhaps the old monk had reached the end of the line, and that made him sad.
But he tried not to feel sad, because that in itself was one of the things the old monk had tried to help him understand: feeling sad meant that you hadn’t really understood life properly.
IT was around this time that Hector noticed that quite a few of his colleagues didn’t have any grey hair at all, even those who were clearly older than him. He wondered if this was a big secret he’d just found out – psychiatrists never get old! But right after making this extraordinary discovery he heard one nurse say to another, ‘The new consultant should change hairdressers – it’s far too obvious he dyes his hair.’ Hector remembered a time when he was a little boy when men who dyed their hair were rather frowned upon. People thought they were men who loved men – at that time, people poked a lot of fun at that sort of love, and pretty nastily at that – or else, irresponsible men who still wanted to whisper sweet nothings at an age when they’d have been better off looking after their family and celebrating the birth of their grandchildren. But Hector said to himself that those days were well and truly over. Nowadays, fine upstanding men, even psychiatrists, and that says it all, dyed their hair to cover up the first snowfalls that had begun to turn their peaks white. (If you like this kind of poetic imagery, we’ll try to come up with some more for you.) He knew that these same colleagues also did everything they could to stay looking young, like Marie-Agnès: regular workouts, plenty of fruit and vegetables, watching their weight, and taking supplements and supplements of other supplements. But most of them didn’t use face cream yet, at least not any particular type.
On the other hand, old François kept his dazzling white hair just as it was. Hector told him what he had noticed about his colleagues’ hair. That meant that even psychiatrists had a problem with the passing of time!
Old François smiled.
‘They’re still at the fighting stage,’ he said. ‘I’ve given up …’
And