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
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