Tonio (22 page)

Tonio looked at me briefly, not unobligingly, and said: ‘Oh, great.' And off he ran.

On his eighteenth birthday, the day that coincided with his exam results, I did not have the promised folder, or book, ready to give him. Nor did he ask for it. Of course he didn't: his life did not need to be written down; it had to be
lived
. Certainly from that moment on.

‘
Oh, great
.' Writing out the original, telegram-style scribbles in longhand gives me the feeling that I'm making good on an old promise, not so long after his eighteenth birthday. The hideous part is that it's not enough to provide a record of his birth and the ensuing childhood years. I cannot avoid an account of his last day. What I had wanted to give him was a book with an open end. Now, it runs the danger of becoming over-complete.

19

The graduation ceremony was, thanks to the summery weather, held outdoors. The abundant sunlight made the glassy sand particles in the schoolyard's paving stones glisten.

The Ignatius. Unlike Miriam, I had not come here often. All those PTA evenings — what right did I have, actually, to leave them to her? Yes, that one time with the combustion engine, I was there then. Perhaps it was the presence of his father that made Tonio, initially paralysed with nerves, grow in his role so quickly. In his determination to explain
everything
, he came across as a bit pedantic, but endearingly so.

I thought of William Faulkner, hammering away at a typewriter in his study,
Rhapsody in Blue
on the record player, whisky within reach, and his daughter in the doorway, begging her father to come to the school's PTA family evening. No, honey, out of the question. Daddy has to catch up with Shakespeare, and he's got a long way to go yet. Another time, sweetheart.

I was so damned chuffed, there in that schoolyard, that Tonio had graduated from the gymnasium. It was not the shadow of my own body that lay at my feet — no, it was pure pride, sharply outlined against the grey paving stones. I was too high from the whole thing to consider whether I really deserved that pride.

Each graduate was called forward and got a personal word of congratulations from his mentor. It went in alphabetical order. Although Tonio wasn't at the end of the alphabet, he became restless. At first he had laughed out loud at the various form teachers' wisecracks, but now even his smile had started to fade. Finally it was his turn to be handed his diploma. Miriam and I pushed our way up front.

Tonio's mentor (his biology teacher) had, in his speeches, assigned an animal to each of his charges. He handed Tonio a framed photo collage that included a portrait of Tonio in 2000, his first year in the class (short hair and glasses); a portrait of him in 2006, shortly before his exams (long hair, no glasses); and in between them, a photo of a giant panda.

‘… Tonio, ladies and gentlemen, has the good-naturedness and cuddle factor of a panda. Inversely, he also shares the panda's defencelessness and vulnerability, making him a bit of a pushover …'

Fortunately, I will never forget it, because with the sun's help it was burned into my memory: how Tonio, slightly dizzy, meandered toward us through the tightly packed crowd, his diploma and the panda under his arm. We embraced him again, this time more ceremoniously. He pulled a face that seemed to say:
Was that everything
? It was already behind him. I recalled my own post-graduation lustrelessness of 1 June 1969.

Miriam asked him how he liked the speech. Tonio wiggled his hands: so-so. Pushing it. He didn't fancy being branded as good-natured and defenceless — no way, that wasn't him at all.

‘Cuddle factor, okay,' he said with a grimace. ‘You can always shake it off.'

His eyes wandered restlessly toward a couple of ex-classmates, who beckoned him. He handed us the diploma and panda collage for safekeeping. ‘I was going to hit a few parties with the guys.'

‘Been invited?'

‘Don't have to be.'

‘D'you remember when you gave that party three years ago, you and your friends kicked out a few party crashers? There was a police car at the door when Miriam and I got home.'

‘And we didn't even need them by then,' he said. ‘Who says I'm defenceless?'*

[* Author's note: After having written this paragraph yesterday, this morning's paper (25 August 2010) sported two front-page photos of a newborn giant panda. The first photo, taken from a CCTV image, showed mother Yang Yang with the cub in her mouth. It is so tiny that at first glance you think of a premature foetus. The second picture shows Yang Yang, with her front paw, cradling the resting minuscule creature. Caption: ‘Giant pandas are seldom born in captivity in Europe.' The mother, her sad eyes sunk in pools of runny mascara, looks up at the camera.]

20

So as not to rub Tonio the wrong way, Miriam did not add ‘the three pandas' to the portrait gallery right away, but from the very first day the collage did hang on the landing, months later, it seemed (to me, at least) that the biology teacher's ‘defenceless' pronouncement has started to seep onto the adjacent photos. It wasn't like I wanted to admonish Tonio not to ‘let them walk all over you' every time I left the toilet. It went deeper than that. What I saw in passing, or thought I saw, even out of the corner of my eye, was a glimpse of a vulnerable life.

I also had this with snapshots of murdered children, like those shown in missing-person programmes on TV. Rowena Rickers, the Nulde girl who had been chopped in pieces … The sisters from Zoetermeer, whose father smothered them with a pillow … Despite the trust with which they looked into the camera, I believed I read a premonition of the inevitable, their gruesome deaths, in their laughing eyes. Of course, you could label it as 20/20 hindsight. But maybe a projection, like a magnifying glass or an X-ray, makes visible something that has previously gone unnoticed.

So what was it about that unmistakable vulnerability I observed — over so many different periods! — on Tonio's face? I noticed it as much under the impudent brim of the cap between Merel and Iris as behind the nerdy Dorus glasses. How could my original fondness for those photos have been transformed into permanent anxiety?

Late last year, I caught myself opting more and more for the upstairs toilet, in the bathroom, rather than the small downstairs WC. The alternative route was also lined with photos, but less unnerving ones (even though the one of Sailor Vos* in Café Zwart, preparing to fly at a friend of mine from Berlin, was certainly not exactly comforting). The odd time I did use the downstairs WC, I always found an excuse to allow my gaze to glide over the photos without really looking at them.

[* A pet name of a local celebrity.]

Now
. As I stood looking over the balustrade, I forced myself to turn with a jerk and face the wall of photographs. What had I expected? Now that Tonio had today shown his most vulnerable side, the spine-chilling defencelessness was still fully visible in his photographed face, no longer as a premonition or potential danger, but as a
confirmation
— and that changed in one fell swoop the aspect of the entire portrait gallery. He was dead.

21

Tonio was four when we moved. In the fall he'd start school at the Schreuder Institute. Holding back time (or, for me, the contrived attempts at it) was a thing of the past. We had now found the ideal fortress from which we could give Tonio the freedom, little by little, to educate himself for future — a fortress we could drag him back into at any given moment.

The movers had left. Horsehair blankets still covered the furniture, and everywhere low walls had been erected out of moving boxes: almost a familiar sight, considering that some of them had remained unpacked during the two Leidsegracht years.

I was dead beat, as was Miriam. She had managed to improvise a bed for Tonio in the corner of what was to be his room. (It was due for renovation, as the parquet floor had been stomped to splinters by the destructive children of the former owner, H.P. Lolkema, nicknamed Mr Horsepower.) I went in to check on him. He had lain half uncovered, surrounded by his various security blankets arranged in top-secret order, and in the middle of it all swam a rubber ducky. The dummy had tumbled out of his mouth, and lay on the pillowcase, still stuck to his lower lip.

I had done a decent job of steering him through stormy waters to this bastion of security. He was safe, and apparently was not visited by nightmares. Once things were unpacked and more or less in place, we would tackle Tonio's room. Order a bunk bed next week, for starters, for the slumber parties he was so looking forward to organising.

‘Night, kiddo,' I whispered. ‘Don't let the alien walls give you a fright in the morning.'

I went back to the balcony at the rear of the same storey. Miriam was flopped in a folding chair, with Cypri on her lap, who, after an initial reconnaissance of the house, also had to give in to fatigue.

‘He's asleep,' I said. ‘So peaceful.'

22

Mr Horsepower hadn't bequeathed us just any old ‘ding-dong' doorbell. It was a complete carillon, with tubes of various lengths that sent its message soaring up to the furthest reaches of the house. The violence of the chimes hadn't been so noticeable before, but now, in the stillness of the move, we jumped out of our skin. Someone must be holding his finger on the button, because it sounded like the Munt Tower on the hour, only without a melody. We both sprang to our feet.

‘We're getting rid of that doorbell,' Miriam said. ‘It gives Tonio the “fries of his life”, as he puts it.'

When the chiming subsided, we both pricked up our ears to hear if Tonio had woken up. No, not a peep. To prevent another round of bells, I ran to the intercom. ‘Hello?' It was Mr Rat, whose crackly voice announced that he'd come ‘to consecrate the new house'.

Trouble already.

My patience with people had already started to wane before we went to live in the Veluwe. In retrospect, I was surprised by how, ten years before, I'd blindly trusted pretty much everyone. If that trust got breached, I'd take it from there. I kept an open house, but I learned the hard way. Time and again, I would allow dubious characters to come nosing about, and then knead their findings into the kind of story they felt worth relaying to others. I was naïve enough to be flabbergasted by the versions that eventually reached my own ears.

I had bought the house on the Johannes Verhulststraat from a retired porn boss. The basement was his warehouse; the shelves left behind by the wine wholesaler Leuchtmann came in handy. The neighbours sighed with relief to see the end of the delivery vans with tinted windows. Once the papers had been signed, I set off for my regular café, where the news had already been making the rounds that ‘Adri had taken over a chic brothel in Zuid'. I kind of liked this sort of grotesque gossip, as opposed to the systematic bad-mouthing that had no other aim than to injure the subject.

The moving boxes weren't even unpacked yet, but Mr Rat, accompanied by his fiancée, a Miss Piggy lookalike, were of the opinion that any further delay in sniffing out the new premises would be irresponsible. Maybe they had picked up some of that ‘chic brothel' chitchat.

‘We've come to inaugurate the house,' he said, handing Miriam a bottle of white wine, which had been thoughtfully wrapped in aluminium foil to keep it cold. ‘God, Adri, you look beat.'

Well, yes, I hadn't got much shuteye the previous night, as so much still needed to be packed. But my hospitality got the better of my sleepiness. We sat out on the balcony, and I opened the bottle.

Whether it was the summer evening chill or the white wine, Mr Rat kept excusing himself to go to the toilet. Every storey had one, but with each absence I heard a different flush. And each interval lasted a little longer. Mr Rat was having a good sniff around the place.

‘Now I know why your face looks so worn out,' he announced after the umpteenth inspection. ‘You're medicated up to the gills.'

‘Beg pardon?' Miriam and I looked at one another.

‘Yeah, the door to your study was open, and there were all these boxes of sleeping tablets. Zero-3. They say it's heavy-duty stuff. Enough to floor a horse.'

After that remark, I should have floored him, and with a less innocent means than Zero-3.

‘Those are weight-loss tablets, Rat. Three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — you starve yourself. Instead of eating, you swallow a couple of Zero-3 capsules every two hours. They expand in your stomach, so you think you're full. I can hardly recommend it.'

A shadow of irritation glided over Mr Rat's face. Considering his own addictive tendencies, to yet a different menu of substances, he was not about to be denied this discovery. He shook his head. ‘It's a well-known fact that Zero-3 is a potent sleeping pill. My regular doorman on the Reguliersdwarsstraat sells them, too. No need to be secretive about it.'

‘Next time you need to pee,' I said, ‘open one of the boxes and read the leaflet.'

Mr Rat somehow didn't need to pee after that. Seen enough, mission accomplished. As I was tied up for the next few weeks with readying the house, it was a full month before I heard, along the grapevine, of my addiction to downers.