Hector and the Search for Happiness Read Online Free PDF

Chinese waitress came back and asked if he wanted more coffee, and when she saw what he was doodling in his notebook she laughed. Hector looked: without knowing it he’d been drawing lots of little hearts.
    The waitress went away again and he saw her talking about him to the other waitresses, and they all seemed very amused.
    Hector still wasn’t in a very good mood, so he paid and left the café.
    Outside, he nearly got run over trying to cross the road because he’d forgotten that cars drove on the left in this city. There’s no point in looking before crossing the road if you don’t look in the right direction.
    He wondered what to do with himself. He couldn’t see Édouard because he wasn’t on holiday; he was working all day at his office. They’d arranged to have dinner again that evening, but Hector wasn’t sure he really felt like it any more.
    Basically Hector was a little annoyed with Édouard. He knew that Édouard had only wanted to make him happy, but the fact was that this morning Hector was unhappy. Édouard liked drinking a lot, and so Hector had drunk a lot, too. Édouard liked meeting Chinese women whose job it was to make men like him happy, and so Hector had met Ying Li.
    Hector told himself that really Édouard was a bit like those friends who are excellent skiers. One day they take you to the top of a very steep ski slope and tell you you’ll have great fun if you just follow them. In fact they’ve only taken you up there because they are excellent skiers and love skiing down very steep slopes. And you don’t enjoy yourself at all trying to keep up with them, you’re scared, you fall over and you wish it would end, but you have to get down the slope anyway and you have a miserable time while those morons, your friends, fly over the moguls shrieking with joy.
    While he was walking, Hector came upon a tiny station with a single track. It wasn’t for the usual kind of train but for one of those trains you find in the mountains, because, if you remember, this city was built at the foot of a mountain. And the little train went all the way up to the top of the mountain.
    Hector thought that it would do him good to get up into the mountains and so he bought a ticket from an old Chinese man wearing a cap, and he sat down in a tiny wooden carriage.
    While he was waiting for the train to move, he began thinking, and he thought about Ying Li again. He could still see her when she’d walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, looking happy; and when she’d stopped smiling because she’d understood that Hector had understood. Afterwards, she’d looked sad and they hadn’t known what to say to one another.
    The little train moved off and began to climb past the buildings and very soon it reached the trees and then the clouds, because the weather wasn’t good at all, but then the sky turned blue and Hector could see magnificent green mountains all around and, down below, the sea dotted with boats.
    It was very beautiful but Hector was still unhappy.

HECTOR COMES CLOSE TO WISDOM
    T HE station at the top of the mountain was much bigger than the one at the bottom. It was a large concrete cube. Inside were restaurants, souvenir shops and even a wax museum with figures of Tony Blair and Sylvester Stallone. All this was even less like The Blue Lotus and this irritated Hector, who was already in quite a bad mood. He left the station and began walking along a road that took him further up the mountain.
    The higher he climbed the fewer people he saw. Finally, he was all alone on the road. The surrounding mountains were very beautiful, all green and with quite high peaks. They looked very Chinese. Hector was out of breath, but he felt a lot better.
    He stopped to write in his notebook:
    Lesson no. 6: Happiness is a long walk in the mountains.
    He thought about it then crossed out ‘in the mountains’ and replaced it with ‘in beautiful, unfamiliar mountains’.
    At the side of the road he saw a sign in