Tonio (35 page)

26

Later that evening, long back at home, my brother rang.

‘That website, the one with Tonio's obit … a woman left a message … wait a sec, I've just clicked it off by mistake … a French-sounding surname. Tell Miriam to have a look. She wrote a short message in English, seems Tonio recently photographed her daughter. Let's see if …' (I heard the tap of his nails on the keys.) ‘No, she doesn't mention the daughter's name. The mother's called Françoise Boulanger. Doesn't give her daughter's surname either. Might be something else, keep that in mind.'

The mother did not leave an email address. Miriam phoned Tonio's friend Jonas to see if he could find something out. Jonas would get right on to it.

27

Last night I was up at 3.00 a.m., and didn't get back to sleep. I had a drink of water, which sent my guts into paroxysms. Gurgles, little eruptions, snaps like bursting bubble-gum. It reminded me of what I heard when I laid one ear on Miriam's pregnant belly (the other ear plugged up with my pinkie) in early 1988. This was Tonio inside me. Gargling, buzzing, snoring. Maybe, in the shadowy depths of his switched-off consciousness, he could hear his own guts going mad while the surgeons worked on him.

At about half past eight I open the bedroom curtains. At the sight of the light-blue sky, my stomach contracts even more violently, from bilious revulsion. My son is dead, and will never return. Once again, I experience the terrible loneliness of his end. Rotating blue lights sweep like splatters of disco lights over his motionless body on the asphalt. (Please tell me he's not groaning in pain.)

The defeat of having lost him. We'll see if I survive my all-consuming sympathy for Miriam. The fear of losing control — over her life, and over mine. The fear of the fury that is still fighting to get out, which until now has more or less kept its cool.

And so begins a fine spring day in early June 2010, the month when Tonio would turn 22. It would take some getting used to, exchanging the active ‘birthday' for the passive ‘birth date'.

Miriam joins me a quarter of an hour later. A pattern is emerging: she's less miserable in the morning. The truly paralysing dejection sets in around late afternoon. Then she takes (like I did the day of the funeral) a valium-like pill, which isn't strong enough to hold back the sudden fits of tears. She doesn't want it to, because ‘when I cry I'm closer to Tonio'.

We eat side-by-side in bed. For me, a crust of bread just to have something in my stomach, and espresso with hot soy milk. My recipe was always: two shots of espresso, watered down slightly. Since Whit Sunday, my stomach will only tolerate a single. Evening liquor does not pose a problem, but maybe it leaches the lining of my stomach to the point that by morning I'm yearning for warm milk.

‘I've got to go pick up the reprints,' Miriam says.

‘How many did you order? Fifty?'

‘A hundred.'

‘Don't forget envelopes. The cardboard ones.'

Every day, staring in shock into the emptiness anew. This kind of irrevocable loss makes you obdurate. Every time, that same disbelief. Can it
really
be true, is he really gone, for good?

28

Thursday: I last saw him alive (not counting his artificially life-supported, brain-dead presence in the
AMC
) two weeks ago. In
De Volkskrant
a bereavement notice from his old school, the St. Ignatius Gymnasium, where he studied from 2000 to 2006. He was firm in his decision to enrol there, having attended orientation evenings at various Amsterdam high schools. Ignatius and nowhere else. I was so proud of him. Now, four years after his graduation, I read in the newspaper a stanza of Auden that Tonio's former teachers picked out.

The stars are not wanted now
put out every one,
Pack up the moon and
dismantle the sun

Among the messages of condolence posted to our house are heart-rending letters, which in tone and wording far exceed the requisite courtesy. Apparently, the seriousness of this abides little pretence. And yet, everyone turns inevitably and swiftly to business as usual. ‘Life goes on,' the adage goes, and so it does. Tonio's classmates are in the middle of their exams; soon, summer vacation will be upon them.

A few friends remain on call, without being pushy. Others keep a welcome distance. The form letter we sent out on May 25 explicitly stated that ‘for the time being we are not able to receive visitors at home'. So in fact, we were avoiding them, rather than they us. Loss and grief damage a person. It's as though it's contagious: you could infect others with it, and you don't want to be the source of it all. At least Miriam still has her shopping rounds, now and then with a neighbour's helping hand, but I act like a leper swinging his rattle as he avoids healthy folk.

So I see almost no one, but if someone should happen to ask: ‘What does something like this do to you?', I waver between ‘My life is ruined' and ‘My life is over.'

My life is just as ruined as Tonio's body, as it was wrenched open by the surgeons at the
AMC
.

My life is over, and serves solely as an enclosure for his amputated existence.

Café or restaurant: I can't bear the thought of it, with the exception of the café at the Amsterdamse Bos goat farm, where I am inclined to go drink coffee because I'm fairly certain no one I know goes there. We go by car, via Buitenveldert, a route that almost passes the cemetery.

Yesterday, yellow traffic signs indicated that the Bosbaan, the rowing lake, was closed due to sculling competitions. This meant we had to take a significant detour through a nondescript bit of Amstelveen, cutting through the southern end of the park. Being a regular competition venue, we had, through the years, been sent this way often enough; but despite the adequate signposting, Miriam kept taking wrong turns.

‘I'm telling you, my mind's shot,' she said, stopping the car. ‘Since May 23, my memory's like a sieve. Even the simplest names … I just draw a blank.'

During the first week after Tonio's accident, entire days just vaporised. She often finds herself standing in a shop and not for the life of her able to remember what she is there for. Moreover, she expresses herself badly, at times groping awkwardly for words. If she says anything directly related to the death of her son, she tends to interrupt herself with: ‘There it is again. As if I hear myself reciting a line from a script. As if I'm in a play.'

‘Don't forget,' I said, ‘that your brain's taken quite a drubbing. You've been walloped with the worst imaginable news: Tonio in a critical condition, Tonio dead … your mind has never had to tackle something like this. It's not equipped for it. Remember that driver who had rammed into a tram? He sat there at the wheel, dead as a doornail, but without a scratch, without a drop of blood. Turns out he died from his internal injuries. I imagine the brain going through something like that, being knocked senseless by the whack of bad news. Your noggin's black and blue, and your brain's underneath.'

‘Well, what about you?' We were driving again. ‘I never hear you fumbling for a name.'

‘Somewhere else in me has taken the beating. Think of what we're doing right now. I only dare to go to the goat farm, because I'm terrified of bumping into someone I know.'

We drove into the park. Splashes of light danced through the car's interior.

‘Are you embarrassed?'

‘Yes, I'm ashamed of having lost my son. I'm ashamed, in front of you and the whole world, that I couldn't prevent his death. I've failed. I'm ashamed of my defeat.'

Over the past twenty-plus years, my goal of piloting Tonio unharmed through life had taken a few knocks in the form of misgivings and cock-ups. But even those, we eventually got over, conquered.

And yet, each year we were forced to release him more and more into the world. Walking to school on his own, sleepovers with friends, camping with friends' families … school trips, his first time alone in the tram, with buddies to the squatters' den ‘Vrankrijk' … the occasional puff on a joint with the guys on Museumplein … to the Photo Academy after graduating high school … the pop festival in Budapest … his move to De Baarsjes … that nocturnal holiday on Ibiza …

And then, in the middle of the night on Whit Sunday: the Paradiso nightclub.

How much right did I have to my pride at having brought up my boy so diligently, having prepared him so thoroughly and turned him over to the world? Didn't his accident negate all that, underscore my failure as a father? Not only at the end, but in complete retrospect as well?

Miriam tried to reassure me, but was unable to undo that overwhelming perception of guilt, shame, and defeat.

29

A diminished consciousness: Miriam is not the only one to suffer from it since the accident. If my thoughts start to go all murky, I catch myself harbouring only negative notions about Tonio's imaginary future. Smoking, drinking, which both get out of hand. Poor grades: in the end, no college diploma. Women trouble. Loneliness. Letting himself go to pot. Aches and pains. Premature ageing. Oblivion. An ugly death.

Only a confused mind can worry about a future that's never going to happen. But why such
black
thoughts? If I really want to daydream about an impossible future, then why not wish Tonio a rich, successful and triumphant one?

I try to imagine him the day before Whit Sunday. Saturday 22 May 2010. He's in love, or on the way. He won't repeat past mistakes. He stands at the mirror, looks himself in the eye, and lisps the slogan he's seen so often on T-shirts, posters, and beach towels:

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

His future would begin today. Well, his future, ‘the rest of his life', got off to a pretty sorry start. The deed was
so
self-destructive that it even colours my notion of his non-existence black.

So many things whose effect on his life I'll never know. I'd even be curious what the less attractive aspects of my character eventually did to him. The knowledge of his possible rejection of me, because of events I'd long forgotten, would now be something sacred for me, because then he'd at least have had a future.

30

As we walk along a narrow wooded path from the car park to the goat farm, we bump into the girlfriend of a colleague. She is visibly startled, and passes us with a stammered, embarrassed greeting. Much too late, I realise I should have gone after her — to say I understand completely that we haven't heard anything from her, because there are no words for it, and that the embarrassment is entirely mine.

‘See? That's what I mean,' I say to Miriam.

The early-summer weather, which kicked in a few days before Tonio's death, pursues us relentlessly with ‘what could have been'. In the shade, it's still matutinally cool. Shadows, streaks of light … Tonio is everywhere. His absence has nestled itself in all that one sees. Everything is occupied by our loss.

All is still quiet at the goat farm. The children are at school. Miriam orders sandwiches inside. When she returns, I dump the plastic bag of condolence letters onto the table. Using a jam knife, I slit open envelope upon envelope. I read the letter or card, and then pass it to Miriam. It strikes me that she skims the words more and more fleetingly, and then folds the paper shut. Her face retains its impassive, resigned expression, and does not appear to react to the message or the person who wrote it. After God knows how many letters, she shoves the pile away from her.

‘You read them. I can't take it anymore.'

It really is absurd: a couple sitting in the divine spring sunshine, reading condolences for their recently deceased son. Here, amid the smell of goat manure, where as a child he would dart to and fro with a dripping ice-cream cone. I sweep the letters back into the plastic bag. When I look up, Miriam's face glistens in the sun — from snot and tears.

I ring my father-in-law. He spends as much time as he can watching tennis on a special sports channel in the semi-darkness of his downstairs flat. ‘I try to let that ballet distract me,' he says. ‘And otherwise I've got all the time in the world to babble to myself, about Tonio.'

31

Miriam points to two couples with children. The one man is demonstrating an iPad-like apparatus to the other.

‘Ugh,' she says. ‘Those men with their toys. No hint of a conversation with their wives, just this one-upmanship with their latest gadgets. Why don't they just go and have a peeing contest over at the creek?'

We don't talk much today either, but that's because we're both sitting here thinking of our son, who would not reach his twenty-second birthday. Which is in itself a kind of conversation. A goat stands on one end of the seesaw in the small playground; a boy of about six on the other. The animal is completely unfazed by being lifted up into the air and then being let back down again.

‘You know what's exhausting?' Miriam says suddenly ‘That every day the pain takes on a different guise. Yesterday I fretted about our future, yours and mine … how we're supposed to move on … and today it's the fact that Tonio wasn't able to round off his life that eats me up. Tomorrow …'