Tretton

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

They left late this afternoon, Roz and Ted,  for New York City to spend a week, through Three Kings Day, with Roz's son, Bart, his significant other, Dominga, and her son, Alfredo, the pocket Junot Diaz.* I was invited but declined. So, I am staying home, but I will not be home alone: They have arranged for Nils Sundstrøm to stay with me while they are gone.
        What he gets in return, I don't know. My company?

Apparently, not only mine, for he has just asked me if he could have a friend over to spend the night New Year's Eve.

And I recall:

        One of my colleagues at Bretagne, a diminutive, always dandy Austrian with thick black hair, neatly trimmed Van Dyke, and, at the time, a young bride that no one ever saw. He taught both German and Spanish, having lived growing up six months with his father and his paramour in Vienna and six months with his mother and hers in Valencia. He also wrote pornographic novels under the pseudonym Guillaume Vibescu. I call them novels though, while the settings were lush, the sex scenes particularly graphic, every protuberance and every orifice in play and overflowing into heart-stopping orgasms, there was no plot. Not that plot was required, I suppose; but there was only a series of scenes coming to conclusion (apparently always) in a railway station.

Nils brings him, my former colleague to mind, for in the only of his many efforts, successes actually, I read, one of the characters is, like Nils, a failed Lutheran pastor though in Stockholm. The hero of the story, I suppose, seduced by one after another of fresh-faced, merrily amoral sisters and cousins (daughters and nieces of his landlady), a dozen in all, until both raw and chastened, he sets off penitent for a hermitage outside Boden in the far north. He is on his way, when a note from another of the girls' relations, Tretton ( Swedish for Thirteen, also the name of the novel), catches up with him (we have no idea how) at Centralstation, as he is about to embark. We leave him standing there, head bowed,  suitcase in right hand and note in left.
                                                         12/30/23
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* See here.