Free Hector and the Secrets of Love by Francois Lelord Page A

which he sensed she was experiencing at the exact same moment, a look of wonder in her eyes, her heart pounding against his chest.
    They mustn’t delay in taking the antidote. He couldn’t tie her to him nor could he be tied to her.
    But when Hector asked her, using gestures, about the professor’s promised antidote, Vayla looked puzzled. She appeared not to understand.
    Hector picked up the hotel biro and notepad and drew two small phials, and next to them an oval-shaped pill. Vayla gazed at his drawing intently, like a young fawn seeing a rabbit for the first time. Hector drew a round pill. Vayla blushed slightly. She looked at Hector and then showed him her slender fingers.
    He understood: she thought he had drawn a wedding ring.
    Hector drew pills of every possible shape — triangular, rectangular, pear-shaped, heart-shaped, in the shape of a four-leafed clover – and even made one out of a piece of scrunched-up paper, but he only succeeded in making Vayla laugh – perhaps she thought he was doing it to amuse her. And Hector couldn’t help laughing when he saw her laugh, and at the same time he was thinking that the real joker was the professor.
    He hadn’t given Vayla the antidote. Or perhaps there was no antidote.
    Now he really had to find Professor Cormorant.

HECTOR HAS A REST
    ‘Y ou look great!’ said Jean-Marcel.
    I think this climate agrees with me.’
    Jean-Marcel started laughing. ‘You must be the first!’
    They had lunch in the shade of the bar, and waitresses who looked peculiarly like Vayla brought them salads or little sandwiches. In the swimming pool light-skinned children played with their darker-skinned nannies. Jean-Marcel kept his sunglasses on in the shade and looked rather pale despite his generally healthy appearance.
    Hector was thinking about Vayla. She had crept out of his room earlier. Hector hadn’t understood where she was going, but clearly she couldn’t be seen with a guest. He had a burning desire to see her again while at the same time thinking how crazy it all was. And what if there were no antidote? Must he spend the rest of his life beside these temples? Or take Vayla to his country?
    ‘Will you be visiting any other temples?’ asked Jean-Marcel.
    ‘No, I won’t actually,’ said Hector. ‘I’ve seen everything I wanted to see. How about you?’
    ‘I’m not sure. I’m thinking about it.’
    ‘In any case, I enjoyed our outing yesterday. And well done for that lesson in mine clearance!’
    ‘Oh,’ Jean-Marcel said, shrugging his shoulders, ‘that was nothing. The mine wasn’t even booby-trapped.’
    ‘Booby-trapped?’
    Jean-Marcel explained that sometimes they didn’t only lay a mine so that it exploded when you stepped on it, they also connected it by a wire to a second mine underneath so that when the bomb disposal expert lifted up the first mine, the second one exploded in his face, which was only a figure of speech since the moment it exploded he no longer had a face.
    It always depressed Hector a little hearing about all the things men were able to invent in order to harm others. He imagined the nice engineer going home every evening and tucking his children into bed while he read them a bedtime story, then discussing with his nice wife whether they should move so each child could have their own bedroom, and then, before going to bed, preparing a bit for the next day’s meeting where he had to make an impressive PowerPoint presentation of his new mine, containing just the right amount of explosive to blow someone’s foot off, because carrying a wounded soldier slowed down and demoralised a patrol far more than a dead soldier, not to mention his screams making them easier to locate. All that ingenuity and energy devoted to doing harm when, with Professor Cormorant’s drugs, people could, on the contrary, devote their energy to doing themselves and others good.
    Of course, a nation that had such drugs at its disposal would no longer really want to