Tonio (18 page)

It had been years since I'd had this reaction. The sight of Tonio, as a child, banging into something, his head bashing against the corner of a table, always sent shivers over my scrotum. I never did look into whether this was a natural reaction, meant to protect the sperm for the eventuality of a replacement heir, but in any case the bottom of my scrotum scrunched up so that the testicles were tangibly pulled upwards. The last time this had happened was not when I'd witnessed Tonio injure himself, but afterward, upon seeing his wounds. A friend of ours on the Apollolaan had seen Tonio's schoolbag, dangling from the handlebars, get caught in the spokes of the front wheel on his way home from school. Tonio had done a complete frontward somersault. I found him later that day in the living room, covered in scratches, scrapes, and bruises.

‘Oh, Tonio … what happened to you?'

In '95 he considered his broken wrist a sign of machismo, but only because he had got it on the slick floor of the bumper-cars arena. Now, with the Apollolaan bike incident, he looked mostly abashed, as though he'd damaged something costly belonging to
me
. He related the accident, embarrassed and reluctantly, in as few words as possible. (Nor did it become a standard macho story in his repertoire later, when the wounds had long started to heal and itch. Perhaps he realised how vulnerable a cyclist could be in city traffic.)

The sight of Tonio in the hospital bed brought about the same reaction: a scrotum made of tanned gooseflesh, which had permanently lost its elasticity.

Of course, we had been warned about his swollen torso, the result of internal bleeding (they had given him one futile transfusion after the other). Nurses had draped the blanket loosely enough around his upper body so that the swollen trunk was less obvious, but once you knew, you saw it anyway.

They had snipped off his clothing, undoubtedly in the ambulance first thing this morning. His naked shoulders stuck out above the sheet. We shared the same body-hair type. Contrary to the fashion of the day, he did not go in for depilation. (He and his friends sometimes self-mockingly called themselves ‘a bunch of old-fashioned hippies'.) I caressed his collarbone: the pattern of soft hair felt reassuringly familiar.

His beautiful face was more or less unscathed. We had to make do with the right side — didn't get to walking around to the other side of the bed. The proud profile. Strong nose and chin. The full lips, which were so good at combining a grin with a smirk. The eyebrows that tended to meet in the middle. The closed eyes, which would never again open and reveal their gold-flecked brown irises.

How often had I stood watching Tonio as he slept … But this was different. It wasn't fake-sleep. He wasn't sleeping, nor had he woken from the dream that was life.

The mouthpiece of the ventilator device was an innocent light-blue, like a piece of a child's toy. The regular murmur of the artificial breath, with a hint of a slurping sound, had something comforting about it, like someone in a peaceful slumber. It also reminded me of how he lay sucking on his bottle of watered-down chocolate milk, as in a trance, taking deep breaths through his nose, the inward-looking expression serene and tranquil — just like now.

Judging from his stubble, Tonio hadn't shaved since Thursday, when he photographed that girl. A double black-red dotted line of dried blood traced a path straight through the whiskers; it climbed from the neck up over the chin, crossed the mouth, and ended on the upper lip — as meticulously parallel as the stylised rail tracks on a road map. The wound stripe looked rather gentle, in fact, like a benign scratch a daredevil gets when he takes a spill. Oops. Slip-up.

When he was at that age when children still garble many words, he'd mix up ‘scheren' (shave) with ‘schreeuwen' (scream). I often gave Tonio a raspy stubble-kiss just before shaving. He would rub his offended cheek, vexed, and retort, quasi-angry: ‘You have to
schreeuw
, y'know … you have to
schreeuw
.'

Because the homo duplex now pulled out multiple stops at once, I was reminded of a line of poetry by Gerrit Kouwenaar: ‘
men moet zijn winter nog sneeuwen
' (‘there is still a winter to snow'). Nearly twenty years ago, Tonio handed me a parallel line.

Men moet zijn kaken nog schreeuwen
. There is still a chin to scream.

Yes, my son, I still had to scream. It was a wonder that I did not stand here bellowing at the top of my lungs. I leant over to his face and gave him a manly stubble-kiss. The scream, that would come later.

Had I expected — feared — that Miriam would scream out in agony? Sniffling softly, she kept repeating: ‘Tonio, that sweet boy … just look at him, Adri.'

Miriam also kissed his cheek. She pulled her head back, and shook it, No. ‘He doesn't smell like himself. There's this intense medicinal odour about him … do you smell it?'

I had already smelled it.

‘When I'd bring around his clean laundry,' she said, ‘and he had just got up, he had that delicious boy-sweat smell about him.' She caressed his face with the back of her hand. ‘That's gone now.'

As a young mother, Miriam claimed to be able to smell when Tonio was coming down with something. ‘Take the dummy out of your mouth … and now breathe out hard.' She'd sniff his breath. ‘You see? Acetone-breath. I hope you're not coming down with flu.'

Then the little fellow would run excitedly to his father and repeat the operation, giving me a blast of his damp breath in my face. ‘I've got acetone-breath,' he'd announce proudly. ‘I might get sick'.

I never smelled anything other the scent of fresh apples. Soon thereafter he'd be poised theatrically in bed on his knees, his bum up in the air ready to accept the thermometer.

‘They've shaved him,' I said.

To mask the incisions, they had draped a small towel loosely over his head, like a sheik's headdress but without the diadem. I only now realised they had shaved his head. If he were to wake up, it would have grown perhaps a millimetre or so. I would greet him with: ‘Been to the barber?' followed immediately by: ‘So now you call an ambulance to take you to your exams …'

To which he would reply: ‘Jeez. Good day at the typewriter, I see', which was his standard retort (once coined by his mother) to my bad jokes.

A small red plastic tower, a kind of chess piece, stuck out of his forehead (or a bit higher; the lack of a hairline made it hard to tell): the drain that had been screwed into his skull to tap fluid from the swollen brain. It made me think of his wrecked brain, which wouldn't even be able to take in the blandest joke, should he even come out of his coma.

A youth of sound body and mind. Before he went off to live on his own, Tonio was examined from head to toe: entirely healthy, not the least medical smudge. In the last twenty-four hours of his life, he couldn't have been more handicapped, both physically and mentally. He could no longer even breathe on his own. Both sides of his brain were irreparably damaged. In God's name, what had been the point and the purpose of Miriam and me having had such a beautiful boy in our midst for a good twenty-one years, a child whose lust for life kept us in good health and spirits, only to now have to say goodbye to the most critically handicapped creature imaginable, with a life expectancy of nil and whose mental capacity had been reduced to nil?

All those years of being proud of that handsome and clever individual we two had brought into the world … In the end, it was this terminal wreck I had sired and she had borne for us.

Time to go. It hit me hard, the thought of having to take this image of Tonio, the way he lay there, with me for the rest of my life. Does one's final impression make an exclusive claim to legitimacy? I had to fight, on behalf of both Miriam and Tonio, to give the unspoiled version of my son its credibility back.

I looked around me. Aside from the three of us, there was no one in the yellow tent, but beyond the nylon I could feel the presence of the staff. ‘Minchen, we should go. They're going to turn off the ventilator.'

I was shocked by the irreversibility in my words. Turn off meant: until death arrived. Put it off.
Now
. My brother Frans, Tonio's only uncle, was still in Spain. He couldn't get a flight back to Amsterdam any sooner than tomorrow morning. I remember having heard that, in exceptional cases, like when a close relative had to travel far in order to say farewell, they would extend the life-support for an additional twenty-four hours. Longer than that was irresponsible and inhumane. Frans did not require more than that amount of time for a night's sleep (or sleeplessness), the flight to Schiphol, and a taxi to the
AMC
. Meanwhile, Tonio would have the chance to … to what? Snap out of his coma and return to the land of the living?

‘Our sweet Tonio,' Miriam said, weeping gently. ‘He was always so nice to everyone.'

She planted another kiss on his ashen cheek, which only dented under her lips, its elasticity having ebbed away. With one last kiss, on his forehead, her chin grazed the drain.

It was as though I were now in a hurry. I took Miriam by the shoulders from behind and pushed her gently toward the opening in the curtain, back into the corridor.

3

Clutching onto Miriam and weak at the knees, I drifted through the corridors of the
ICU
. It felt as though I had just quarrelled with someone, had lashed out at him, and now, leaving the place of the argument, my knees wobbled as I walked off, in the creeping realisation that I was wrong and might just as well have gotten a clobbering myself.

We passed the niche with the Hindustani family surrounding the comatose patient, where it appeared that not an elbow had been moved, not a lock of hair shifted. Instead of going to the left we kept on walking, losing our way. It was as though I was pushing that last image of Tonio out in front with my forehead. At the next junction, where I thought we had to turn left, I froze. I dug my fingers into Miriam's upper arm.

‘Minchen, when they turn off the life support … that's really when we should be at his side. We can't let him die alone … it feels like betrayal …'

I spoke agitatedly. We hurried back, past the Hindustani niche, all the way down the hall, and finally found the yellow curtain. Tonio was still connected to the ventilator. At the foot of the bed, monitoring the apparatus, was a nurse. She did not look up when we approached. She was focused on the blue digital lights on the instrument panel, which registered Tonio's vital functions — as yet still in order. She may have been the one instructed to turn off the ventilator, and our return had taken her by surprise.

Miriam, not about to be put off by Tonio's chemical smell, resumed her caressing and kissing his face, whispering things I could not make out. I directed my attention to Tonio's right hand, which lay inert on the edge of the bed, the fingers curled indifferently between straightened and bent — just a thing that had been put there. The nails were nicked, and with a dark outline of dirt.

When I first knew Miriam, I used to tease her about her ‘filthy fingers' — a matter of pigmentation, whereby her fingers got darker as they approached the tips. Only now did I see that Tonio had inherited his mother's natural colouring, but on closer inspection it was simply that his fingertips were just plain dirty. I pointed it out to Miriam.

‘Look, the dirt under his nails. He obviously skidded across the asphalt.'

‘His nails were always dirty. How many times did I tell him …'

She said it almost straightforwardly, like a belated remark on child-rearing. The nurse was still standing at the foot of the bed, without looking up at us, as though she hadn't even noticed our presence. She carried out vague procedures on or around the blinking apparatus, but out of the corner of my eye I couldn't make out
exactly
what she was doing.

I took Tonio's hand, which felt limp and heavy. The fingers were swollen, reminding me of his limbs when he was hurled, fresh from his mother's womb, like a bundle of sausages onto my lap. He was still unwashed. There was not much life yet in the puffy, purply arms and legs. All the available nursing hands were needed to combat the perceived complications with the mother, which turned out to be less urgent than all that, but meanwhile there I sat with that sticky creature glued to my jeans. (I wore them for several weeks longer, without washing out the dried placard of blood and slime, like a proud Indian with bear blood on his vest.) Bawling, that it did, but without the body joining in. To check whether it was alive I poked my finger against the tiny hand. Immediately the minuscule fingers closed around it. Mission accomplished.

I laid Tonio's hand down and put my thumb underneath it, lightly stroking the palm of his hand. There was no movement; the skin felt lukewarm. Normally you'd say: his hand felt pleasantly dry and cool. Now, I knew this was a temperature between life and death.

I continued rubbing my thumb against his palm in a regular rhythm — until the machine at the foot of the bed suddenly began beeping impatiently, and, startled, I jerked my hand back. The sound, in its electronic chilliness, had something agitated about it, like a mother bird's alarm calls when her nest is under threat (in our backyard ivy). Miriam got a fright and started trembling. Nothing had visibly changed in Tonio's inert state. I looked over at the nurse, who kept her eyes glued to the monitor, and did not seem fazed.