Tonio (38 page)

That evening, we combated the pain passively with alcohol.

9

At four o'clock, the exact time of his now-cancelled dentist's appointment, the doorbell rang — that blood-curdling screech that for the past two weeks had been the memorial melody of the absent Tonio. We still hadn't gotten around to having the electricians install a friendlier doorbell. A ding-dong, for instance. Miriam reminded me that we had moved in here eighteen years ago to an electronic chime, totally in keeping with the taste of the former owner, porn baron H.P. (‘Horsepower') Roukema, who, according to the estate agent, marketed ‘plastic products with a specific function', the profits from which were used to fill his house with kitsch. The chiming doorbell consisted of brass tubes of varying lengths and pitches. The painters had removed it in order to replaster the entrance hallway, irreparably damaging the bell's mechanics. The doorbell people had installed an electric bell that could be heard all the way up in the former maid's quarters in the attic, but that also, for eighteen long years, had grated on our nerves and tormented two generations of housecats.

‘How about a chime,' Miriam suggested. ‘You know, like when we moved in?'

I almost went along with her, but then remembered a scene from the film
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
just in time. When George comes home, you hear exactly the same chime that Horsepower Roukema had saddled us with. George associates it with church bells, because he's going to bring the news to his wife Martha that their son, on the way from boarding school to his twenty-first birthday party, has died in a car that crashed while swerving to avoid a hedgehog. The boy turns out to be a private invention of the childless couple. George feels he has the right to kill the son off because Martha, against their hard-and-fast rules, has discussed the boy with others. While Martha (‘You didn't have the right, George') is comforted by late-night guests, George mumbles (in Latin) a requiem mass at their living-room bar.

Thus a chime would remind me even more of Tonio than that ear-splitting chainsaw of a bell that was sounded by a policeman on Whit Sunday. And this was not the end of the
Who's Afraid
… associations. Tonio was, like other youngsters who had flown the nest, a creation of his parents, of their powers of imagination. In our conversations, his life was settled up in our presence, while physically he was elsewhere.

The big difference being that, in this game, there were no pre-agreed rules giving me any say about his life and his death.

10

Miriam enquired through the intercom who it was. (You never can be too careful: imagine a half-drunken idiot from the bar down the street, double Holland Gin-and-cola, intended as a token of comfort, under his jacket, like the priest who used to come around with a holy wafer for a sick person, in a powder box hidden between two buttons of his cassock.)

‘Dennis.'

‘I'll buzz you in,' Miriam said. ‘Shut the door tight behind you, okay?'

From where I was sitting, in my regular, sagging corner of the living-room sofa, I could hear the buzz of the front door. The visitor must have long legs, I thought, because he took the stairs three at a time. It was indeed a young man of considerable height; he entered, panting in a healthy way. Seventeenth-century blond curls danced on his shoulders, but his three-quarter-length cycling shorts and a pierced eyebrow bearing a silver ornament brought him straight back to the twenty-first century.

I vaguely recognised him, and suddenly recalled being introduced to him once, a few years ago, on the dimly lit landing in front of Tonio's old room. Tonio was proud and awkward in equal measure. Dennis must have shot up since then, because I didn't remember him being so tall. You could hardly imagine a greater contrast to Tonio, with his dark, straight hair and modest (1.73-metre) height. The way they moved, too. Tonio was hurried and jerky in his movement, his neck slightly bent; Dennis, on the other hand, was aware that, even in syrupy slowness, those stilts of his would get him from A to B fast enough.

Miriam, looking awfully small behind our visitor, offered him something to drink. I hoped he'd ask for something alcoholic, so I could join him. Dennis asked for tea. Miriam went off to the kitchen, and I offered Dennis Tonio's usual place on the corner sofa. He looked at me with his large, open, friendly face. Light, thickly lashed eyes. Dennis was one of Tonio's three best friends. The other two were Jonas and Jim.

Faced with this beanpole, I wondered if Tonio had ever suffered from his modest stature. He had never blamed us, his none-too-tall parents, for passing on our shortness genes — although, of course, I don't know what he said out of earshot of his father and mother. For three years, I cycled to school with a tall classmate who never failed to remind me that I, at 1.76m, was ‘way too small' for my age. The boy suggested that one's height had everything to do with attractiveness, especially in regard to ‘the women'. Compared to me, he was, in his own words, ‘sitting pretty'. If I looked over at him, at how he planted his heels on the pedals, feet pointing outward, I could hardly call him a shining example of manly elegance. He considered himself athletic, but was basically a brutish dunce who used to crib from my homework. The athlete graduated by the skin of his teeth, went to the Academy for Physical Fitness, and became a gym teacher. Over the years, I bumped into him now and again. I still couldn't offer much more than my (by now) 1.77m, while he had only become even more well-proportioned, glowing with vigour and virility. He was married, but there were no children, no way — because, you see, they were both obsessive travellers, which in turn had everything to do with their status as nature-lovers. During school holidays, they jetted to corners of globe where they could be closer to the rough country, where animals could still be observed in the wild. (They had, for instance, once spent a night in the Amazon on a wooden platform high up in a rain tree, where they were woken the next morning by a real-life monkey who had pissed on their sleeping bags — well, okay, a few drops anyway.) He belonged, in short, to that brand of man who calls himself a naturalist because he doesn't miss a single documentary about wildlife reserves, and spends his summers picking blackberries along railway lines.

Despite his yearning for the jungle, the gym teacher still lived in our hometown. Once, in the mid-nineties, having been sent there with an interviewer and photographer to make a mini-documentary about the depressing domain of my youth, I happened to bump into him. He was on a bike, dressed in a peacock-blue jogging suit, and had just come from the school where he taught children to do a bird's nest on the rings. The interviewer, who smelled a juicy anecdote ‘about the old days', invited him out for a drink. In the café, my old classmate grabbed his chance to show those Amsterdam journalists that even here in the provinces you had your share of drama, and that temptation slithered like a snake in the grass. How often hadn't it happened to him at school … the love notes stuffed into his coat pockets … ‘Goddammit, man, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old girls. It's no picnic.'

So I admit that the six-foot-two-eyes-of-blue was still reaping its benefits, despite the fading six-pack. Later, after reading the draft text, it took some serious doing to get certain of the gym teacher's inanities scrapped from the article — in his favour.

I noticed I was getting wound up again. Nobody —
nobody
, d'you hear — would denigrate Tonio on account of his appearance. There you had it again. Nothing attested more bluntly to the inconceivableness of his death than my anger over lesser creatures who
might
hurt him with their condescending remarks. But looking at Dennis made my indignation fade. I had to be on my guard, but not with the soft-spoken lad with the open face. Dennis spread his arms and said: ‘I still don't have words for it. Tonio was …'

‘Are you still studying?'

‘I'm still at … studying audio technology. I do the sound mixing for some pop groups.'

‘Weren't you a drummer, too?'

‘Not in a regular band anymore.'

11

I took advantage of Miriam's absence to ask Dennis if he had gone to Tonio's viewing at the funeral home last week. (What a question! — and I just … asked it.)

‘Yeah, sure I did.' He nodded with his entire upper body. ‘There were four or five of us. We biked over. There was a girl, too. She didn't want to join us at first, but then she did. Cool.'

‘Not that girl he'd been photographing?'

‘No, not her,' Dennis answered. ‘She wasn't part of our group of friends. At least, I never met her.'

‘I'll be up front,' I said. ‘Miriam and I didn't go see him. When we said our goodbyes at the
AMC
… just after they unplugged the life support, and he was in fact already dead … he still had his own face. The face we always knew. Just before that, it had been alive. That's how we want to remember him. We were afraid he'd look totally different once they'd laid him out for viewing.'

‘It was still totally him,' Dennis reassured me. ‘Totally Tonio. Just like we knew him.'

I knew he wasn't criticising our decision, but still a pang of guilt ripped through my heart. If what Dennis said was true, then we had let Tonio's body, entirely recognisable as his own, lie in that open coffin for days on end, alone and unseen. Only four or five friends had had the courage to cast one last glance on him. Maybe the betrayal I'd felt the whole week
wasn't
unjustified after all. Maybe I should have held a constant vigil, right up until the last moment, coping with his gradually drooping face — that sweet, beautiful face that was now shut off to the world by lid and earth, and could only be pieced together from photo-album snippets.

‘Dennis, tell me' — I tried to make my voice sound as natural as possible — ‘was Tonio wearing a red-and-white striped shirt in the coffin?'

‘Sure was,' he smiled, as though he were happy to please me. ‘His favourite shirt. His macho shirt. He was wearing it.'

‘Oh, so it fitted after all,' Miriam said as she came into the room with a tray. ‘We were wondering, because … he was so swollen from the internal bleeding.'

I considered — but kept it to myself — that they might have had to cut the shirt open at the back to get it to fit. I recall the woman from the funeral home asking if we wanted Tonio shaved. Yes, he should be clean-shaven, we'd said.

‘Should we have had them shave off his stubble, actually?' I asked, primarily to bring the discussion of the open coffin to a close. ‘I mean, it was his style.'

‘In the coffin, he had a heck of a five o'clock shadow,' Dennis insisted. ‘Like always.'

‘Maybe it was too difficult,' Miriam suggested, ‘because of the wound … they might not have wanted to tear it open.'

I closed my eyes, and saw the double-dotted line of clotted blood — almost geometrically parallel — that ran from his neck up over his chin and upper lip.

‘I didn't see any wound,' said Dennis. ‘His face was flawless.'

‘Touched up, of course,' I said. ‘Dennis, how
was
Tonio recently?'

12

According to Dennis, Tonio had been really at home with himself the past few months.

‘You could really
see
him grow. When I met him, about five years ago, he was a chubby teenager. He'd slimmed down recently. Everybody thought he was a handsome guy. It was like he grew in life, too. Tonio was just a great guy. He made friends more easily all the time. It was cool to be with him in a café or the disco. He'd talk to anybody and everybody. People gravitated toward him, just 'cause he gave off this air of: that guy, there's where it's at. Especially when he was taking pictures. He took pictures everywhere.'

Dennis paused to collect his thoughts, as though he was weighing up whether to tell us something or not. ‘He was happy.' Dennis nodded. ‘Tonio told me he was so happy these last weeks.' He nodded again, harder this time. ‘And you could tell.'

I wanted to ask him to describe his last night with Tonio, but I didn't know if Miriam could bear it. I cast a sidelong glance in her direction. She sat smiling agreeably at Dennis. She liked hearing that her son had been happy. It hadn't sunk in yet that this made the tragedy all the greater.

‘Dennis, we gathered from Jim that you and Tonio went out last Saturday night,' I started. ‘Paradiso, wasn't it?'

Dennis looked at me, startled. ‘Paradiso? Nah. We were in club Trouw, that new disco on the Wibautstraat. You know, what used to be the printing presses for
Trouw
and
de Volkskrant
. I heard that from my dad —he works in newspaper layout.'

‘The previous Thursday, he told me he'd be going to Paradiso on Saturday night. Some Italian theme, with oldie hits by Eros Ramazzotti and some others. A girl had invited him.'

‘Not Goscha?'

‘I can't remember him mentioning her name. I've seen Polaroid snaps of her. She was the one Tonio was photographing that Thursday afternoon. Here in the house.'

‘Oh,
that
girl … what was her name again … from the photo session, yeah, that's it. Tonio talked about her constantly, and now I can't come up with her name.' Dennis thought for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘That Italian show … wasn't it Friday night? Anyway, it fell through. Don't know why. Tonio and I spent all of Friday evening at Café Terzijde. Kerkstraat. He tried to contact that girl on Saturday, to ask her to go to Trouw with us. It was already pretty late, so it didn't work out.'