Tutelary Tales

By Villy Sørensen

It was then you began to read books on psychiatry - on hallucinations, to be precise. But you couldn´t find any examples of a hallucination being able to act as strangely as the young man in the Personnel Association had acted that first evening.
    You didn´t attend the Personnel Association meetings any more, even though you said so to your wife, who didn´t believe you. Whenever there was a meeting you sat in the restaurant opposite, trying to see who came out after the meeting, but it was impossible to see anything in the dark, and you went outside, terrified at the thought that your personnel might be able to see you - and he wasn´t among them. But although to start with you had not really known what he looked like, now - so long afterwards - you saw him so clearly in mind that you felt disgusted with yourself. He stared at you with large brown eyes and long lashes - and you went to the place where managing directors oughtnÆt to show themselves, and where young men stand with beseeching eyes, and you realized that it wasn´t that you wanted - and in your previous life, as you say, there was nothing really to indicate such a thing. Nevertheless, you remained standing there where you oughtn´t to be standing, possibly for hours on end, because you didn´t know where else to go - until suddenly he seemed to pop out of the ground in front of you, looking quite different from what you had remembered. Not particularly good-looking, although you didn´t remember him as particularly good-looking. Not particularly feminine, although you didn´t remember him as particularly feminine. Without his raincoat, without visible eyelashes, but of course still with eyes that kept on staring at you as if they were asking for something. And you managed to stammer, "What is it that you want?" And he contorted his left cheek into a humorous though mocking grin. And suddenly you stood there, having knocked him down ...
    Certainly it´s an unpleasant story, my dear Sir. But it´s not quite so strange as you yourself imagine.

From: Villy Sørensen: Tutelary Tales
Norvik Press, 1988

Translated by Paula Hostrup Jessen