‘How interesting. And who might you be?’
‘My name is Chester G. Cormorant, Ph.D., and this is my great friend Dr Hector – he’s a psychiatrist. We both specialise in love.’
The young Asian woman seemed about to go into raptures – she had been looking for two English-speaking onlookers in a crowd of Chinese people, and who should she stumble upon but two experts!
‘But is there some explanation as to why this is happening to these two pandas now?’ she asked.
Just then, Vayla and Not came over, intrigued by the presence of the camera. They stood on either side of Hector and the professor, beaming into the lens.
‘Do you know them?’ asked the journalist.
‘They are our research assistants,’ said Professor Cormorant.
‘From Benteasaryaramay University,’ Hector added.
Professor Cormorant embarked on a lengthy explanation: the ingredients necessary for love were present in the brains of all mammals, a bit like musical instruments kept in a cupboard; all they needed was a conductor to make them work together.
The journalist seemed very interested, like most girls when you spoke to them about love, thought Hector.
Suddenly, he caught sight of Jean-Marcel on the other side of the crowd of Chinese people. He seemed to be looking for someone. Hector turned to Professor Cormorant to tell him but he and Not had vanished.
‘A last word to sum up?’ said the journalist.
‘
Sabay!
’ exclaimed Vayla.
Hector understood; it meant ‘All is well’ in Khmer. But Hector was becoming less and less sure about that.
HECTOR ISN’T THERE
T
HE report about Hi and Ha was shown on television channels all over the world – well, the part where they kissed each other’s muzzles, not where Hi got behind Ha, because the strange thing about news programmes is that they can show you people being shot or hacked to pieces, but not two pandas making love. A few seconds of Professor Cormorant’s impassioned declaration followed the panda images, and his words about love and musical instruments were repeated and translated into a lot of different languages, while next to him you could see Hector nodding in agreement, and the fresh, smiling faces of Vayla and Not.
Clara was watching CNN, as she often did to keep up her English, when she stumbled on the coverage. The first thing she noticed was how happy Hector looked. And then she thought she saw that Vayla, standing right next to him, had put her arm around his back.
Clara felt as if a jolt of electricity had passed through her body.
‘What a jerk!’ said Gunther.
Gunther was sitting next to her on the sofa because, there we are, sadly enough, Clara and Gunther were having an affair, and now you understand why Clara felt so sad back on the island.
You might have a low opinion of Clara – a girl sleeping with her boss in order to get promoted. Only that wasn’t true at all. Clara already had a very successful career before she fell in love with Gunther so she didn’t need to do that. Well, all right, you’ll say, but she still fell for the alpha male – how typical. Wrong again. Clara had never been impressed by Gunther’s role as the big boss, and anyway, if you think about it, Clara fell in love with Hector first, and psychiatrists are hardly ever big bosses; on the contrary, psychiatry is a profession where you don’t have to obey or give orders, which was one of the things Hector liked about it, as a matter of fact.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Gunther, ‘he was there and they missed him by a few seconds. What’s wrong? Are you crying?’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Clara, quickly getting up.
Clara went off to the bathroom and Gunther was upset. Because Gunther was very much in love with Clara, he wanted to start a new life with her, and, once again, he realised he still had a long way to go. He had vaguely hoped that sending Hector off on the trail of Professor Cormorant would help bring him and Clara closer, but he only had to see Clara’s reaction to Hector in the company of that pretty Asian woman to realise it was not going to be easy.
In the bathroom, Clara dried her eyes and called herself a bloody fool. After all, she was the one being unfaithful to Hector – she had almost told him the truth on the island, and then she had lost her nerve – so why did she feel so bad seeing him with another woman? And given that she hadn’t told him the truth because she didn’t want to make him unhappy, why should she find it so unbearable to see him looking happy now?
Did this mean she still loved Hector? Or was it simply jealousy? Was jealousy a demonstration of love? Or was it that seeing those images had suddenly made her realise she was in danger of losing Hector forever? She’d known that when she started having an affair with Gunther, but, as previously mentioned, there’s a big difference between knowing and feeling, and feeling is what counts most.
She had a terrible urge to speak to Hector, there and then. There was a knock on the door.
‘Clara? I’ve made a cocktail for you.’
The big oaf, thought Clara, and at the same time she told herself she was being unfair, because she knew Gunther was crazy about her. She hadn’t realised it right away, but now she was sure of it: he was completely bowled over by her. And suddenly she felt less in love with him. Oh dear, love can be so complicated, can’t it!
HECTOR MEETS UP WITH A GOOD FRIEND
‘T
HIS city is a bit crazy,’ said Jean-Marcel.
He was having lunch with Hector and Vayla at the top of a tower shaped like a rocket in a revolving restaurant that turned very slowly so you could see the whole view several times over during lunch; it felt like being up in a plane or a balloon. The city stretched into the distance and everywhere skyscrapers were springing up like giant trees, and below them the river carried barges loaded with building materials, as the Chinese were putting up more and more buildings while having fewer and fewer children.
Vayla had never left her small town where the tallest building was the post office that had been built a long time ago by Hector’s countrymen, and she seemed fascinated by this new city that Jean-Marcel thought was a bit crazy.
Hector was very pleased to meet up with Jean-Marcel again. Following their trip to the unsafe region and the temple recently cleared of mines, they had become real friends.
‘What brings you to Shanghai?’ asked Hector.
‘Business, as always,’ said Jean-Marcel. ‘With all these towers they’re building, they need signalling equipment and lots of other stuff to improve mobile telephone communication, and my company is the supplier.’
‘How lucky that we bumped into each other like that,’ said Hector.
‘Oh, this morning the whole town was talking about those pandas – it was on all the Chinese channels – and as I had no meetings I thought I’d go and take a look. Oh man! She’s got our order completely wrong!’
Hector and Jean-Marcel had asked for two beers and the waitress had brought two large tankards. Vayla frowned; she didn’t like Hector drinking too much, he’d noticed, and he told himself this was a further sign of love. Vayla didn’t drink alcohol because after only half a glass of wine her cheeks turned bright pink and she practically fell asleep on the spot. Hector remembered it had something to do with an enzyme deficiency common in Asian people. As a result, alcohol had a strong effect on them, but this didn’t worry some of them, like the Japanese people behind them who were bravely defying their enzyme deficiency by downing tankards of beer as if it were going out of fashion.
Hector was still worrying. He hadn’t been able to take the antidote yet, assuming there even was one, and he sensed that the longer he and Vayla left it, the less effect the antidote would have, because all these happy moments spent together would inevitably leave an indelible mark. Just then, Vayla smiled at him, and once again he felt waves of happiness flow through him.
‘Your friend is very lovely,’ said Jean-Marcel. ‘Does she speak any English?’
‘Not a word,’ said Hector.
‘And you speak no Khmer?’
‘None at all.’
This reply left Jean-Marcel looking thoughtful because you can see what a relationship between a man and a woman who can’t say three words to each other immediately makes you think of, and it has to be said you wouldn’t be far wrong.
‘And how are things between you and your wife?’ asked Hector.
‘Oh, not so good.’
Jean-Marcel explained they had been speaking on the phone. His wife blamed him for neglecting her over the past few years, for having been too engrossed in his job, and now it was over: she didn’t love him any more. Later, she had rung Jean-Marcel back to see how he was; she was worried about how he was spending his evenings, whether he was going out with friends or staying at his hotel on his own.
‘And how do you feel?’ asked Hector.
‘Terrible. When she says she doesn’t love me any more, I feel abandoned, in a panic, and I want to see her right away. Then I feel angry with myself for neglecting her. I can’t stop thinking about it. I tell myself that I’ve been a bit of a bastard. And then . . .’
‘And then you feel angry with her because, after all, you’ve been a good husband to her, a good father to your children, and she’s leaving you.’
Jean-Marcel looked surprised.
‘Exactly! In fact, the other evening, I’d had too much to drink and I phoned her to tell her what a bitch she was, total madness. I felt pathetic, but obviously she realised I was in a bad way and I don’t think she was too cross with me. And then at other times . . .’
‘You tell yourself that if you separate you’ll never love anyone as you’ve loved her. You’re afraid life will be dull. Of course you’ll have affairs, but nobody will make you feel like she did.’
‘Good God! That’s exactly it. You’re very good, aren’t you!’
‘Oh, not really,’ said Hector. ‘It’s just that I’ve been through . . .’
And it was true; before the affair with Vayla, Hector had experienced all those feelings about Clara. It was interesting to see how two men like Hector and Jean-Marcel, who weren’t so alike, felt the same emotions. And, remembering some of his female patients, he said to himself that many women had been through very similar emotional upheavals. Strangely, he had the impression that none of his colleagues had ever really studied the psychology of heartache; it didn’t seem a serious enough subject, yet obviously it was terribly serious, judging from the amount of suffering it caused.
Vayla touched his arm. ‘
Sabay
?’ she asked.
‘
Sabay
!’ said Hector.
‘
Sabay
!’ said Jean-Marcel, raising his tankard, and they made a toast, smiling like happy-looking people in a Chinese beer advertisement, except that Vayla was drinking iced green tea.
HECTOR REMEMBERS
H
ECTOR watched Vayla as she slept. Suddenly he was reminded of these words:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me,
The entirely beautiful.
A poet, long ago, had experienced what Hector was feeling that night as he watched Vayla sleeping.
He remembered this poet was known to have preferred men. These verses had no doubt been written to a male companion.
Further proof that the feeling of love was universal, as Professor Cormorant would have said.
HECTOR IS NEEDY
L
ATER, while Vayla was watching television in her bathrobe, Hector went back to making notes, while noticing she had discovered the joys of channel-hopping. Vayla tended to stay on the music channels where very handsome young Asian men sang earnestly of their love against a background of beaches, mountains and windswept landscapes, while their sweetheart’s delicate face appeared in the clouds, or else beautiful, very pale-faced Asian girls sang melancholy songs about a handsome young man with whom they couldn’t get along, as shown in the flashbacks of them quarrelling and turning their backs on each other.
And yet Vayla couldn’t speak Chinese or Japanese or Korean, so what she was sensitive to were not the lyrics themselves, but the pure emotions transmitted by the song’s melody and by the faces, which were enough to tell that eternal tale: we love each other but we can’t manage to stay together. He wrote:
Seedling no. 14: Women always like to dream of love even when they are already in love with someone.
And what about men? Men could still be interested in watching porn movies even when they were in love. It was all the fault of the slightly different wiring in their brains, but this type of explanation wasn’t enough to reassure women.
But it shouldn’t be forgotten that men were also capable of experiencing higher emotions. Suddenly, remembering the emotions he and Jean-Marcel had felt and all the unhappy lovers he had listened to in his consulting room, Hector picked up his notebook and began writing:
The Components of Heartache
It was a rather ambitious title, but Hector told himself he was well placed to write about it since he had helped so many victims of love, men and women of all ages, who had come to sob in his consulting room.
The first component of heartache: neediness. ‘I need to see him (or her), to talk to him (or her), right now.’ The drug addict in need of a fix. The child separated from its mother.
This neediness was what made him and Jean-Marcel keep wanting to telephone their respective partners and stopped them concentrating on anything except the loved one. A bit like a baby screaming until its mother comes back, a built-in alarm system meant to make her come back, in fact. It was conceivable that the same areas of the brain were affected in the abandoned baby and the rejected lover. That would make an interesting research subject for Professor Cormorant, if he could be persuaded to return home, as well as to his senses. Hector felt inspired:
Of all the components, neediness is the one we experience most acutely on a physical level, not dissimilar to the withdrawal symptoms described by drug addicts deprived of their addictive substance. The area of neediness that concerns us refers to the temporary or permanent absence of the loved one whether physically or emotionally. This absence can lead to insomnia, anguish, changes in eating habits, loss of concentration – even in situations where full attention is essential (an important meeting, piloting a plane) – and on a more general level it prevents us from experiencing any pleasure, even from activities we previously considered enjoyable. These dreadful effects of neediness can be momentarily alleviated by taking a range of substances (distilled or fermented alcohols, nicotine, tranquillisers, narcotics) or even by engaging in absorbing activities (prolonged hard work, television, physical exercise, sexual relations with a new partner or with an ex-partner), but the more we push neediness away, the more violently it comes back, like a wild animal retreating only to charge with greater force.
Conversely, particular places, people and encounters that evoke memories of the loved one can intensify these attacks of neediness: the park where we walked together, the restaurant we used to meet at, the friend who witnessed our love for one another, the sweet melody the loved one enjoyed humming when he or she was feeling happy. We can experience even stronger emotions when we come across an object that the loved one has left behind. A bottle of make-up remover in the bathroom or a pair of old slippers at the back of a cupboard can move us to greater heights of suffering and emotion than any great symphony, work of art or poem.
Neediness sometimes reaches peaks of suffering the intensity of which makes us fearful of the hours to come (‘How will I survive today? Tomorrow? The rest of my life?’). It also causes moments of abstraction when we are with other people, even people we like. It is generally accepted that confiding our feelings to a close friend or professional can bring real relief, although this is generally short-lived.