Tonio (33 page)

Miriam reminded me of my initial reservations. ‘You've had a drink now,' she said, ‘but yesterday you wanted to just let it be. We wondered whether we really wanted it, you know, her identity and all. Say we find out they had something together … or could have … Do we want to torture ourselves for the rest of our lives with … yeah, with what? A love affair for Tonio? Maybe our future daughter-in-law? The mother of our grandchildren? … I don't know if I want to have those kind of thoughts. I never used to have them when I saw Tonio with a girl. It doesn't get us anywhere. Yeah, where
all
roads lead. To Tonio's grave.'

The remaining guests sat motionless, silent.

‘Miriam,' I said, ‘we also have to think of Tonio. I remember how proud he was when he showed me those snapshots … his grin, when I commented what a good looker she was. He said she'd invited him to Paradiso. That's not something he'd tell me otherwise, don't you think? There was obviously something there.
Of course
he wanted us to meet her. I'll bet he was disappointed she was already gone when we got back from the Bos. Minchen, we owe it to Tonio to find her. If he can't introduce us to her anymore, then we have to track her down ourselves.'

‘I think,' said Miriam, ‘it's only going to cause us more pain.'

‘And what if
I
think we shouldn't steer clear of that pain?'

19

Whenever Miriam enters the room, I'm pleased to see the familiar presence. Still, after all these years, I feel that pleasant, mild shock: there she is. Since Whit Sunday it's as though I'm seeing double. It is my wife who steps through the doorway, and at the same time, like a not-quite-lined-up superimposed image, it is a mother who has been robbed of her child. The second figure refuses to stay within the outline of the first one, no matter how much I blink.

Saturday morning. More than the queasiness of the hangover, it was the stomach-turning realisation:
Yesterday I buried my son
. The previous day, I had watched the coffin containing the body of my son being lowered into a hole in the ground, and I did not cry, and after that I drank myself into a common stupor. I couldn't even remember how the afternoon ended, let alone the evening.

Right after I had pulled open the curtain, swearing at the bright sunlight, the double vision of Miriam entered the room: the mother of my child, and the now-childless mother. Closing one eye to blot out the double vision did not help. Her expression was one of heartache, fear, insecurity. I went over to her, placed my hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it?'

‘You exploded at me last night.'

‘I can't remember a thing.' That's what you get with vodka, a drink that not only prevented a headache, but, just to be on the safe side, also disengaged one's short-term memory, perhaps to erase recollections that might bring on a headache after all. ‘What was it about?'

‘Everyone was gone, and I wanted to go to bed. You didn't. You wanted to talk. I didn't. I was all talked out. And then you started in … angry … that I only thought of myself.'

‘Oh, Minchen.' I pulled her close to me. ‘I was angry, but not at you. At what happened. At everything this dirty trick has brought us.'

This appeared to reassure her. ‘You were already angry in the afternoon,' she said, ‘when the papers were delivered. Having to see Tonio's name in bold letters on the obituary page … you were fuming. You hurled the papers through the living room.'

Miriam made breakfast. She returned to the bedroom with the tray, the newspaper, and a large stack of condolence letters. More bereavement ads, but this time Tonio's boldface-printed name did not elicit anger; the various messages surrounding it were too implausible for that, too absurd — although there was nothing to laugh about either.

Side by side in bed, propped up against the pillows, reading all those shocked condolence letters together … It was a bad piece of theatre. A cheesy sequel to
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, with George and Martha in the marital bed, passing messages of sympathy back and forth after the fatal accident of their made-up twenty-year-old son.

I had asked Miriam for toast with jam, but couldn't even manage that. Weak coffee with lots of milk was all my stomach would tolerate. The only organs where the terrible truth could permeate were my intestines. The diarrhoea that began on Whit Sunday had gone on for a week.

20

What feeds the gut-wrenchingness of Tonio's death the most is the razor-sharp recollection of all our senseless bickering in his presence. Lead-in, build-up, climax, cool-off, reconciliation — it's all forgotten, leaked away into the folds of time. At the moment itself, our disagreement and each one's highly personal sense of rightness were a matter of life or death — for the innocent bystander, Tonio, as well, at age three, five, eight, eleven, thirteen. With the exception of certain recurring arguments and their variants (the ‘classics'), none of it has stuck — and as far as Tonio is concerned, it's anybody's guess what effect it all had on him.

The idiotic quarrelling that's supposedly inherent to every marriage, not even the bad ones. The contorted arguments. Being right just for the sake of being right, like a sort of
l'art pour l'art
. The raised voices, with or without sprays of spittle. The ‘did-so-did-not' level of the school playground.

(Diary entry, Tuesday 8 April 1997)

08:00 woken by familiar sounds coming from bathroom. Intimate murmuring between mother and son. Sleep draws me back down, deep into the old, fragile mattress (which really needs replacing), but I decide to regard the time of awakening as a sign: the recently implemented eating regimen requires me to have breakfast between eight and nine.

I open the bathroom door: M. is sitting on the closed toilet-seat lid combing Tonio's hair. He looks up at me, startled but smiling. (‘You've broken your own record,' he said recently, the last time I got up that early.)

I say: ‘Keep your snappy comments about broken records to yourself today, okay?'

He pulls a puckered lemon-face, as though he feels he's been put firmly in his place, but his bright, brown eyes sparkle with mockery. Downstairs I pick up the morning paper from the doormat and take it with me back to bed. A work crew, armed with an electric apparatus, has begun sanding the living-room floor. (In May they will attack my office.) The entire house is gradually covered in a thin layer of snot-green powder, a mixture of old paint and the underlying wood.

Before M. takes Tonio to school, I am given a sober breakfast of wholegrain bread and sugar-free jam (no butter), plus the recommended ration of cappuccino. When M. returns, I give her the tips I'd promised for the ‘ur-book' issue of
Maatstaf
(Mallarmé, Proust, Genet, Mulisch, Reve, etc.)*

[*
Maatstaf
was a Dutch literary magazine (1953–1999). The December 1997 issue was devoted to ‘ur-books' by twelve well-known Dutch authors (including Van Der Heijden): excerpts from early or unpublished manuscripts that would form a first, or ‘ur', version of later writings. Miriam Rotenstreich was one of the magazine's five editors at the time.]

Home renovation has its benefits. I spend half my days in espresso bars throughout the city, reading and scribbling to my heart's content.

[ … ]

15:30 tram 24 back to Zuid. Alight Beethovenstraat, walk home via Apollo, Hilton, Christie's. At our front door I bump into Ronald Sales, who is delivering the portrait he did of me some years ago. We bring it inside, and decide to celebrate my purchase in the Vondelpark. Tonio asks if he can go with us, and straps on his new roller skates (which he wheedled out of me with the Golden Owl prize money.* Until now, I have neglected to pen here a report of the award ceremony, which I simply watched on television at home. Tonio went berserk: how was it possible, his father being awarded a prize on TV while he sat there next to him on the couch.? When it came time to answer questions posed by the presenter over the phone, I could barely understand her over Tonio's whooping and hollering as he bolted jubilantly through the room. ‘This is the best night of our lives … !')

[* Belgian prize for Dutch-language fiction. Van der Heijden won the fiction category in 1997 for
Het Hof van Barmhartigheid
and
Onder het Plaveisel het Moeras
.]

He skates ahead of us, the wheels grating against the asphalt, via Corn. Schuytstraat and Willemsparkweg toward the park, every so often looking over his shoulder to make sure we lag appropriately behind. Forbidden beer at the Film Museum's outdoor café. Tonio nearly runs over publisher and restaurant tycoon Bas L. [ … ]

18:00 back home. Tonio is pleased that I'm eating in tonight — which, let's just say because of the renovation chaos, has gone by the board of late. When I confess to M., who is in the kitchen preparing dinner, that I've been hitting the beer with R., her mood nosedives. ‘What about your diet? Not to mention that this diet of yours is the reason you didn't want to go out with me Friday night.'

She's right, of course, but that doesn't stop me from going on the defensive. The quarrel, which branches off into endless hair-splitting, makes the delicious chicken dish lose some, if not all, of its taste. I notice that Tonio is put off by our squabbling and wrangling. When M. starts to cry, his lower lip quivers in unison with her sobs.

‘May I please be excused?' (I still don't know where he picked up that snippet of etiquette.)

‘To do what?'

‘Ask Camiel if he can come out to play.'

He leaves his chicken untouched, and charges down the stairs to his friend, two houses further on. You always read that an athlete's brain produces a chemical that enhances their performance and stamina, allowing them to push themselves beyond the normal limits. I'll bet a similar kind of chemical, of a slightly different compound, is also produced in the brain of bickering people: they wear each other out with fallacious arguments and just keep on going, far beyond the boundaries of dignity.

When Tonio returns, we are having coffee — in the bedroom, where the television is temporarily housed for the duration of the renovations. He looks seriously at his parents' faces. When he's got something earnest to say, he drops his voice an octave. Like now.

‘So did you guys call a truce?'

21

When Tonio was still small, two conflicting thoughts sometimes hit me simultaneously: the awareness of my parental negligence, juxtaposed against realising how bravely, and unreproachfully, he faced every situation that spotlighted his father's shortcomings.

This clash of concepts could leave me completely paralysed. Like a naughty schoolchild, I would drag myself off to a corner of my workroom, where I would intensely whisper the words ‘my brave little boy' a few times.

That helped — until the next exhibition of my inadequacy, which Tonio once again ungrudgingly withstood.

Now that I had failed to prevent a fatal accident, and for once he
didn't
manage to salvage himself, my private profession of love, which was never meant for him to hear, poured forth without end. ‘My darling, brave boy. My little hero.'

‘When I think back on it,' I said, ‘Tonio never upbraided us. To our face, at least. Maybe he swore at us later, out of earshot. But really read us the riot act, you or me … no. Never.'

‘I was always careful,' Miriam said, ‘no matter how cross I was, never to bad-mouth you to Tonio. I didn't want him to ever be able to use it against you. And I know you did the same thing. When I hear from Rietje the kind of vitriol Bram dares to hurl at her … the most unbelievable vulgarity … of course, he picked it up from his father.'

‘It's not thanks to us,' I said. ‘It's all Tonio's own doing. Whenever I looked at that honest face of his, it never occurred to me to complain to him about you. Even if I had to hold back … I'll be truthful about that. He stayed neutral until he was actually forced to stick up for one or the other of us. Remember that time the three of us were crammed into that one hotel room in Jarnac? I was there to write a piece. The people who gave me the commission had promised the best hotel in the area. Well, if
that
wasn't a wet blanket. I lay there on that too-small bed, bitching about how uncomfortable it was. You had made the arrangements by phone. Tonio listened intently to our discussion. Once he realised the organisers had shafted us from a safe distance, he cried out with all the indignation he had in him: “But Adri, there's nothing
Mama
can do about it!” He was five, almost six. It was in a restaurant there … a few days later, I think … where Tonio made that double portrait of us.' I pointed behind me with my thumb toward the wall above the head of the bed. ‘Little red hearts circling around our heads … Lovey-dovey parents. He so wanted it to be okay between us.'

‘Without being sappy about it,' said Miriam, ‘it's pretty safe to say he was more of an example to us than we were to him.'

22

Miriam and Tonio were witnesses to the fact that I've always tried to protect them. Of course, I failed now and again, more than I'd have liked,.

What I still bitterly regret, now more than ever, is the reckless hospitality I cultivated in the second half of the 1980s. Everyone was welcome — my open-door policy was indiscriminate. Once, when I was a newcomer in the Dutch literary world (a terrain that, in those days, still seemed rather clearly delineated), I walked into the art-society club Arti with a small group of acquaintances I'd bumped into along the way. I happened upon an older colleague, who nodded condescendingly at my table and asked: ‘Are
those
your friends?'