Tonio (56 page)

[* ‘Nearer to Thee' (Gerard Reve, 1966).]

Tonio looked at his likeness for a few seconds, his little face scrunched in earnestness, and then burst into uncontrolled wailing. I hurriedly removed the pacifier from the paper, and tried to give it back to him. He wouldn't take it. I tried to wedge it between his lips, but he kept intentionally letting it fall out of his mouth. For the rest of the journey, he was inconsolable.

I still wonder what had upset him so much. Was the pacifier, incorporated into the drawing, too realistic a detail, whereby the little boy in the picture seemed to have made off with
his
privilege? When Tonio was about fifteen, sixteen, I related this anecdote to him. I asked if he had any idea what exactly had caused such intense dismay. The tricky part was that at this age he seemed to regard every query from me as an exam question.

‘Really, I don't remember
anything
from when I was little,' he said, attempting to balance a small stack of coins on his jiggling knee. ‘Maybe I just thought the drawing wasn't much
good
.'

15

On the cupboard in the hallway lay a small stack of post, which from halfway up the stairs I could already see were condolence letters. Even in the most killing of circumstances, a person was apparently still capable of learning new things, even if it was to distinguish between envelopes containing sympathy and those containing a demand for payment.

I carried the post out to the veranda, stopping in the library on the way to pick up a letter opener. Miriam had already put the cushions on the garden chairs. There was a fresh tablecloth, fastened with clips, on the round table. Of course: Jenny needn't see how, every night, to wash down a morsel of food, we sloshed and spattered our rosé and red wine.

Ten past four. I still had almost an hour to myself. What I'd like the most is to have the rest of my life to myself — myself and Miriam. Finish my work, for what it was worth, and talk to Miriam about Tonio, until my last breath — or hers. This would be sufficient.

Children's voices from three, four houses up wafted over the backyards. Harmony. I opened the first envelope. Two female friends, teachers, recalled a talk I gave at Rhoon Castle in the early nineties. They enclosed a photo of Tonio, smiling shyly, as he scribbled his name in one of my books. He had his dark, smooth hair (just a few years earlier they were tight, light-coloured curls) in a pageboy cut, the fringe touching his eyebrows. Seeing that five-year-old while the twenty-one-year-old was still alive would have tested even the strongest heart. Now I held a photo in my hand of a boy who, you could say, was doubly gone.

I read letter after letter, looked at card upon card. Kind, impotent words of comfort. Mothers of Tonio's primary-school classmates recalled playground anecdotes, where they so often stood waiting in clusters until the kids had finished playing. Many colleagues or journalists with whom I had locked horns in the past stepped over the vague border of the dispute to offer words of support. Now that the stream of sympathy had continued unabated for all these weeks, I began to realise that there hadn't been a word from the television world. The producers and hosts of literary talk shows were the first ones, of course, to be your best friend and go into raptures over your indispensability for this very item — at least, as long as you hadn't yet committed to an appearance. But even after the show they were not too averse to having a drink together, and, in passing, to praise your contribution.

And then the son of the esteemed guest dies, and … not a word. Perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on the TV folks. The guests on their shows are no more than light rays in motion. There might be a person of flesh and blood at the table, but what matters is their presence in the living room: the image recreated in light, which the broadcasting company hopes and prays the house tyrant on the couch does not surf away from. Mutatis mutandis, this also applies for the talk show host: he, too, thanks his existence to the rays given off by a television. As the interviewer of a guest, he is not a person of flesh and blood, and therefore does not have to act outside the show like a real person with compassion.

16

The doorbell. We still hadn't gotten around to having the Brom people install a friendlier jingle. This bell still sounded just as it did on Whit Sunday, bypassing your ears and going straight for the nerves.

That must be Jenny. Five o'clock already? I did not have a watch or clock at hand, but my instinct told me that not even a half-hour had passed since I'd started going through the post. I pricked up my ears to hear if Miriam was going to open the door: she could easily have been back from Beth Shalom for twenty minutes already.

The bell echoed in the empty marble hallway. When Miriam answered the door you could hear the rattle of the glass inner doors, shut to keep the cats from escaping, but that, too, was absent.

The bell rang for the second time. If Miriam hadn't returned from the seniors' canteen by five, when she was expecting a visitor at home, something must have happened on the way. As I walked through the library to the hall, I tried to quell visions of Miriam and her father, strapped into their seatbelts, their necks snapped and their heads flopped against one another. The cats stood in angry expectation on the stairway landing, their fur already critically on end.

On the stoop stood the girl I recognised from Tonio's Polaroids.

‘I'm really sorry,' she said. ‘I'm way too early. Stupid of me.' She extended me her hand. ‘Jenny.'

As I took Jenny's hand (small, dainty), I saw Miriam behind her, in the row of parking spaces, get out of her car. ‘Was I mistaken about the time?' she exclaimed, half-panicky. ‘It's a quarter to five. I thought it was at five o'clock. Oh, this head of mine … a mess.'

While I led the way to the terrace, behind me the women apologised profusely back and forth for their negligence. I offered Jenny a chair, but she stayed standing for a moment with her hands on the railing, looking into the garden: for the first time since 20 May, she saw the place where Tonio had photographed her. Even when she finally sat down at the round table, she regularly cast oblique, almost furtive, glances at the small arbour with the white bench.

Miriam asked what we wanted to drink. Jenny first asked for mineral water, but upon hearing I was having gin and tonic, changed her mind: she'd have that, too, ‘but not too much gin'. Miriam went to take care of the drinks.

We sat slightly awkwardly opposite each other.
A real Tonio girl
. Those were the exact words that came to mind, even though I had never pegged anyone as ‘a real Tonio girl', let alone knew what characteristics a Tonio girl was supposed to possess.

‘Were you nervous about coming over?'

‘Yeah, a bit. But at the same time, no. On the way, I kept thinking:
Oh gosh, I won't know what to say … and then?
'

Was it my despair that so wanted to see that this Jenny was … would have been … a match for Tonio? (Verb tenses, too, played their game of life and death.) Across from me sat a frail girl with a delicate face, whose expression altered continually under a painful nervousness, which had also taken hold of her arms and shoulders. She cast another quick sideways glance at the wooden loveseat up against the pink-stuccoed wall. She was exactly the kind of girl I would have wanted, when I was twenty, to defend, cherish, caress. She wore lightweight clothes, which allowed her body heat to penetrate fully: perfect for Tonio while dancing. Or was the ‘Tonio girl' my own invention?

Come on, I'd
seen
, hadn't I, that Tonio felt the same way. The bashful pride with which he showed me those Polaroids … His downplaying remark that I shouldn't just go on these practice snapshots. He would soon show me the proper prints.

Miriam was gone for quite a while. I could hear her puttering about in the kitchen up on the first floor, where the windows were open. Fixing some snacks, no doubt. I'd have to say something now, it didn't matter what, otherwise the poor girl would die of nerves.

‘Of course, I've got all sorts of things I want to ask you,' I said, ‘but I suggest we wait for Miriam. She wants to hear everything, too.'

‘Fine.'

Yes, she was pretty, but didn't have the refined beauty of a model — I had suggested as much to Tonio, to his slight irritation. It was, after all, just a way for a student to make some extra money via a modelling agency.

‘So what are you studying?'

‘Art history. I'm in my second year.'

It's been like this for weeks now: every time I saw anything attractive, I tried to see it through Tonio's eyes, since his retina has permanently
gone black
, to use TV jargon. But my attempts to share with him the beauty of whatever it is I'm looking at are starting to backfire. Each thing, each image that I believed would have met with his approval, reduced, in equal measure, my
own
enjoyment of it. Instead of enjoying something doubly, ‘for the two of us', the eye-catchingness that Tonio was now eternally deprived of became lessened in my own aesthetic experience.

To put it another way: I could keep on enjoying something until I fully realised that Tonio
would have
enjoyed it just as much. The profit-and-loss sum of my visual enjoyment thus came out to exactly zero. As regards Jenny's attractiveness, this afternoon was no different.

Relief: Miriam arrived with the tray.

‘Have I missed much?' she asked, placing the glasses on cork coasters. ‘Here's the one without much gin.'

On the middle of the table she put a platter with prepared Melba toasts: salmon, sardines, meat salad.

‘We haven't gotten any further than Jenny's bike ride over here,' I said. ‘She was afraid of being tongue-tied.'

We raised our glasses. ‘To our absent friend, then,' Miriam said. We each took a gulp.

‘It was so weird,' Jenny said, ‘to stand out there on your doorstep. And on as beautiful a day as back in May. For a moment, everything seemed the same … and still it was all different, because … well, yeah, of course I knew he … Tonio … wouldn't answer the door. In May, he appeared at the door wearing a really smart shirt … something with red stripes … and that broad smile of his.'

She shook her head and quickly brought the glass to her mouth. I was reminded of my blind date with Marike A., organised by her sister in the spring of '69. How I stood at the mirror practising the right smile, followed by a snappy opener: ‘Who'd have thought it would be something so charming …' (‘Something', was that okay? Or did it make her sound too much like an object? And then ‘charming' … would a fifteen-year-old girl want to be called ‘charming' these days? After an endless round of corrections, I could only come up with ‘such a charming something' — and I think I even said that. The rehearsed smile had long dissolved into a grimace.)

‘His favourite shirt,' Miriam said. ‘He pretty much forced me to wash and iron it beforehand. Not what you'd really call work clothes. He must have had a good reason to want to wear it. Now he's got it on in …'

She shook her head, smiling, without finishing her sentence, as though pointing out that Tonio had been buried in that shirt might detract from the compliment he had made Jenny by wearing it for the photo session.

Now was the moment to ask Jenny about Tonio — how they'd met, how the photo shoot went, why the date at Paradiso didn't go through. Weeks ago, when we had begun putting together something like a reconstruction of Tonio's last days, I had admonished myself not to overlook a single detail. Otherwise there would be no point in it all. I was surprised at how cold-bloodedly, through all my despair, I dared to look the facts straight in the eye. Strange: now that the missing link, the reluctant Jenny, was sitting opposite me, my old fear of the truth grabbed the chance to rear its ugly head. The man who left the post unopened because it might contain bad news (or otherwise unwelcome tidings) was back with a vengeance, when I needed him least of all.

The problem that I identified right after Tonio's death: Jenny could impart one of two possible truths, neither of which I wanted to hear. First truth: Jenny had chosen Tonio as the photographer for her portfolio, making the session no more than a business transaction, with perhaps a friendly lining at most. Second truth: an unspoken mutual attraction had, via request or offer, taken the form of a lengthy photo shoot, whence a budding romance had unfolded or was about to unfold.

Truth No. 1 meant that Tonio had to say farewell to life without one last romance, which gave his death an inhospitable starkness.

Truth No. 2 would always torment us with the thought of ‘what might have been'.

Neither truth deserved to be preferred over the other. The impossibility of a choice made it all the more painful. I did not want to hear it.

‘Jenny, would you mind telling us,' I asked, ‘how you and Tonio met?'

‘It's no secret,' she said, with a brief chuckle.

17

One day in the summer of 2009, Jenny's mother went into the Dixons computer shop on the Kinkerstraat to inquire about new photographic equipment. She was assisted by a courteous young man who switched effortlessly to English when he realised his customer was Canadian.