Tonio (40 page)

I sat there with Tonio on my lap for some time before pulling a fresh pair of pants over his clean nappy and lifting him into the child's bike seat. He smiled so gaily at me, as though to express his gratitude for this divine day, which we had managed to contrive just for ourselves in the midst of an increasingly complicated world. We cycled further, and Tonio kept greeting the bales of hay on the hillside with ‘owww … owww!'

But once I saw Marsalès signposted, my heart sank with the thought of my gradually worsening relationship with Miriam. Maybe, if she saw us return like this, father and son, high from an adventurous day … relaxed, tanned … then …

Miriam and I wanted to remember Tonio as we'd left him, still warm, in the Intensive Care of the
AMC
, and not deformed by the rigor mortis that would soon take hold of his facial muscles. After we'd left, his body had been photographed for legal purposes and then brought to the mortuary in the basement. There, it was claimed by the undertakers of our choice, to be laid out for viewing at a funeral home. In the days between his death and his burial, we had not set eyes on him. Nor could I form an impression of how he lay there in his open coffin.

Last night, after what Dennis said about his visit to the funeral home, I had a powerful vision of how it must have been: the strange arms that picked him up and moved him. After lowering him into the coffin, his head wobbled a bit from side to side, with a faint smile. God, he had beautiful, full lips, a sharply drawn mouth.

We had given strange hands permission to wash, shave, dress, and make him up in our absence. We did not witness any of this ritual, one that always struck me as sacred. As unbearable as it was, I
had
to imagine how those unfamiliar hands had to bend and force his stiff leg to get it into the leg of his jeans.

Later, after the viewing, the owners of those hands would peel off their latex gloves and throw them into a garbage can with a sky-blue bin liner, like a whore in her brothel disposes of used condoms. Next customer. New latex.

Had we turned his body to strange hands too soon, that Black Whitsun?

18

Thanks to the digital efforts of Jonas, the Paradiso girl suddenly had a name — Jenny — and an email address. And so she took her place on our list — as yet unseen. Tonio could no longer introduce her to his parents. Now
we
would have to make contact with her, invite her around, and, on behalf of Tonio, hand her the photos he had promised her.

One stumbling block was that the SD cards and film rolls from that session still hadn't turned up. Jim and Dennis had promised that in the course of putting together a selection of pictures taken by their dead friend, they would check around the flat.

A few days after Dennis's visit, Miriam shoved me from the landing into Tonio's old room. A white reflector screen still leaned against the wall. She pointed to a large plastic supermarket bag.

‘I thought our old video cassettes were in there,' she said. ‘Have a look.'

In the bag were seven cameras, mostly digital ones. His Hasselblad was there, too.

‘Maybe he was planning to bring them back home that Sunday,' I suggested, ‘if he'd eaten here as planned.'

‘I'm more tempted to think,' she said, ‘that he was counting on me bringing them in the car when I returned his clean washing after the weekend.'

‘But what's strange is that the film rolls and SD cards from the pictures he took of that girl … of Jenny … would have sat here all weekend. That's not like him.'

‘Maybe he took them out.'

‘But Dennis didn't find them among Tonio's stuff. Could be that he brought it all to the photo place to have it developed.'

‘Open up one of the cameras then.'

I didn't dare, layman that I was, for fear that I'd expose the film and ruin the whole lot.

‘Okay,' Miriam said, ‘then we'll ask Jim. He's bound to know how to open those things.'

19

I cry very little on the outside. Rarely do I emit tears and sobs and the gestures that go with them. I suffer from a sort of internal keening.
It
cries in me. I can lie motionless on my back in bed, and listen to
something
wailing uncontrollably inside me. I do not have the inclination to comfort that something, or to try to bring it under control. I prefer to encourage it: go on, let it all out, it's never enough.

20

A random day, a few weeks after Tonio's accident. Woke up much too early. The previous evening, I hadn't even bothered putting on the breathing mask — by not doing so, depriving myself of the artificial sleep of the righteous. All that's left is the alcoholic sleep of the besotted, cruelly interrupted by regular bouts of respiratory arrest.

Eight o'clock, curtains open: again, another perfect summer day in the making. The blue sky, the mild morning temperature, they all gang up to make the loss tangible, hand-wringingly kneadable. Miriam, already up, appears with breakfast.

‘It's like my days are chopped in two,' she says. ‘In the morning, I can usually face it. But by afternoon … after two it gets difficult. And only gets harder after that. Evenings are still the worst. If I didn't have that pill …'

‘And at night? Do you still sleep okay?'

‘Yes, thanks to that pill.'

By half past ten we are already fleeing to the Amsterdamse Bos. Everything is Tonio — the car, too, where he sat in back during all those trips to the Dordogne, for hours on end, amusing himself with a gameboy, a headset, a stack of old
Donald Duck
comics. Weeks before we left, I was continually nauseous with anxiety: about what could happen to us on the freeway, especially the little boy on the back seat, whose life depended on our vigilance. The minute I stepped into the car on departure day, all the anxiety and nausea disappeared. It was mostly thanks to Tonio himself, who radiated such sincere faith in his parents that I was transformed into an immortal child myself, who would come to no harm as long as father and mother were close by. Golden boy: he enchanted the world's worrisome side, and lightened it, in both senses of the word.

21

Of course, I've thought about it a lot over the years: what it means to be alive, to breathe, to move. About the consciousness that was planted in me,
me
of all people. About the miracle of inspiration.

But that same incorrigible ruminator as a rule regards life as something to be taken for granted. You can't mull over every breath you take, for otherwise you will choke.

Since Tonio's death, I miss taking my life functions for granted. Not continuously, but if I ‘catch' myself experiencing the kind of wellbeing associated with an hour without grief, I have the tendency to recall the pain as quickly as possible. I give myself a telling-off: I have, after all, forfeited the right to a normally functioning existence.

What else is your child but an external enclave of your own flesh and blood? Through my own recklessness (others might speak of ‘fate' here), I allowed that enclave to be forsaken. A part of me has been amputated, so how will I ever be able to say I feel at home with my body?

The road to the Bosbaan is closed yet again because of a rowing competition. To get to the goat farm, we have to follow the signposts marked with a ‘1', weaving through the monotonous offshoots of Amstelveen.

The streets are bathed in brilliant sunlight, which doesn't give a damn about the boy it will never again be able to warm. Miriam speaks (for those familiar with the undertone) rather excitedly. I am more reticent, resentful of the summer day that the sun-worshipper Tonio has been denied.

‘It's weird,' she says, rounding off a monologue I've only half followed. ‘Every once in a while, it's like I almost feel satisfied.'

‘I know what you mean,' I said. ‘It's really fragile. Then, all of a sudden, there's the fear, or a pang of guilt again … anxiety or intense bitterness … What sneaks up on me most of all is that impotent rage. I'm angry on Tonio's behalf. Because he won't be able to complete his life. Because his short time here was taken up with school and studies that will never come to fruition. All that top-notch groundwork … cut short.'

‘Do you also dare to just be angry … you know, for yourself?' Miriam asked. ‘I mean, simply because you don't have a son anymore?'

‘Very occasionally, I permit myself a tiny bit of self-pity. A pathetic little voice in my head starts whining. Look at me … I've been at it for nearly sixty years, not building my own future, but Tonio's. I took a course, too … in fatherhood. And just to be sure, grandfatherhood. All for nothing. Waste of time and effort. Everything told me Tonio wanted to show me what he was worth. But I also wanted to show
him
what
I
was worth. “Up to your ten pages a day yet?” he asked a few days before the accident. Kind of teasingly, of course, he had every right, but there was always something sincere and attentive in his curiosity. I wanted to buy him an apartment, so I could say: “Here you are, Tonio: those ten pages a day.” If a writer can have his own son as a muse, then I've simply lost my muse. When I mentioned that to Mensje recently, she remembered that once, in a bar, I said I was in love with Tonio. He was knee-high to a grasshopper.'

22

At the goat farm, we find a table in the sun. Under the round overhang, a sort of miniature bandstand, a children's party is underway. Miriam goes to fetch coffee and water.

Suddenly, there's tumult. A young man, a foreigner, is yelling something in more or less unintelligible English at an older man, who, taking refuge under the brim of a too-youthful skipper's cap, is seated at the next table. He ignores the shouting, even when the young man advances in his ire. When the manager comes to intervene, we realise at once what the problem is. The man with the cap had seen the foreigner's two-year-old son run after a chicken: the kid was probably trying to nab the animal. I must have been somewhere else with my thoughts, because I didn't see the older man get up to scold the boy, and in doing so grab the child and (claims the father) poke him in the eye.

Major hubbub.

Meanwhile, the wife of the man in the cap has returned from the toilet. She sits down next to him. Surrounding their table are the manager, the parents of the little boy, who is shrieking and whose one eye is clearly redder than the other, and a few bystanders who have come forth as witnesses to the drama. A guy with a beard calls the older man a ‘trouble-maker'. From under the brim of his cap, which shields his eyes, he defends his behaviour in superlatively arrogant terms. I feel an uncontrollable anger well up in me, and shout at the man that he's an arsehole. I raise my voice, rubbing his nose in his arseholeness, even though I did not witness the incident directly. Miriam and the manager tell me to calm down, but I am unable to halt my tirade. A seething anger has to get out. The man with the cap, in his made-up dignity, gets up, collects the dogs from under his table, and stalks off the terrace with his wife on his arm. Only then do I manage to pull myself together, albeit with choked-back sniffs of disgruntlement and indignation.

The father of the little boy comes over to thank me — for my solidarity, I guess. He tries to offer me a reconstruction of the incident, but because of his poor English most of his testimony eludes me. I do not tell him that my solidarity was false and that I was only using the unfriendly man in the cap as an excuse to vent an anger that came from an entirely different source.

23

Miriam comes out of the goat shed with a taut face. ‘I can't go in there anymore without thinking of Tonio, how he used to be … He was so crazy about the animals, could squat there forever next to the piglets. He thought they were so sweet.'

‘There's something defenceless about them,' I say. ‘That'll be it. Now we know what he recognised in them.'

‘Seems like there are fewer goats than there used to be,' Miriam says, ‘so I asked the attendant. And I was right. They've cut back on the goats. They've had fewer visitors. Because of Q fever.'

‘People are complete idiots,' I say, still trembling with residual anger. ‘Always afraid of the wrong things. They just have to see one spray-painted goat on the news, and they're convinced they've seen the devil.'

We head back to the parking lot. Out of habit, we make a left turn toward the Bosbaan. Two racing bikes ride ostentatiously in front of us without making any effort to let us pass. Then Miriam remembers that the Bosbaan is closed, a golden opportunity for cyclists on this bit of road. It is no trouble, a pleasure in fact, to turn around and drive back through the sun-pricked treetops — until the revulsion returns, because this light-green speckled budding of the woods simply goes on without Tonio.

We drive through Amstelveen. I say: ‘I can't believe I chose this nondescript polder-padding as the scene for a novel.'

‘I was going to drive you around a few key spots, wasn't I,' Miriam says. ‘The police station … the neighbourhood where the murder took place … Café 1890.'

‘No need to now. That novel's been scrapped. I'm writing a book about Tonio, and that'll be that.'