Tonio (57 page)

‘I live with my mother in that part of town,' Jenny said. ‘She came home all excited. “I was at Dixons, and the nicest young man helped me,” she said. “So friendly and helpful. Good-looking, too. He explained everything so patiently … demonstrated cameras … without being at all pushy.” You should know my mother has an eye for young men. I don't know if she bought anything then, but she went back often. Usually she got the manager, a guy called Kantorovich.'

‘Kantorovich,' Miriam said. ‘Yeah, he was Tonio's tormentor at Dixons. The guy ringing Tonio at home when he'd overslept again, that was one thing. But he kept pestering him in the shop, calling him lazybones and sleepyhead. He really gave the poor kid a tough time.'

‘My mother always asked the manager if Tonio could assist her. And then she had another hundred questions for him, which he always answered patiently. “You should come with me sometime,” she said once, “then you'll see for yourself. He really is an awfully nice boy.” Of course, she was matchmaking. Okay, so one day I think: I'll go over to Dixons with her. And sure enough … Tonio. We chatted some. Me about college. Him about his passion, photography. I went back to the shop a couple of times after that. Without my mother. I think we, you know, kind of hit it off. But it never got as far as a date.'

You only heard a faint trace of English in Jenny's Dutch if you knew her mother was an English-speaking Canadian. I wanted to shout at Tonio: go on, ask her out, what are you waiting for … say that Kantorovich needs you, but that you'd like to pick up the conversation after you've closed up shop …

‘Why not, do you think?'

‘One day he'd disappeared,' Jenny answered. ‘Just like that. It was last fall. The boss told me Tonio had quit because he felt he couldn't combine the Dixons job with college. Of course, I knew he had started his Media & Culture course at the beginning of September, but … well, yeah, he kept working at Dixons. Until late autumn. And then … he just disappeared. My mother didn't know about it either. I had no phone number, no email address, didn't even know where he lived. The Dixons people couldn't help me either. So we lost touch.'

Damn that Tonio. He blew chances just like his father did at his age. (The sun-drenched St. Annastraat in Nijmegen. The blonde who cornered me with her bike. ‘Tea? You can see my new digs.' And me, doofus, who couldn't manage anything, except: ‘I was just on my way to the employment office across the street. I'm broke.')

Jenny drank her gin and tonic. She took too big a swig, which appeared to burn her throat; tears came to her eyes. She thumped her chest.

‘But not for good,' Miriam said. ‘Well, yes, now … for good, I mean … but not yet, then.'

‘This past spring,' Jenny said, swallowing continuously, ‘I found Tonio on Facebook. I was a second-year, had debts, needed to make some extra money. Yeah, I know it sounds horribly vain, but I toyed with the idea of modelling work, playing an extra in TV or film, something like that. What I needed was a portfolio with decent photos to take around to casting agencies. So when I saw that Tonio had a Facebook page, I remembered his enthusiasm for photography. I got in touch. Surprised him, of course. A photo shoot, he saw no reason why not. I offered to reimburse him for his materials, and pay him for his hours. The indignation! What a way to start, if I wanted him to photograph me … He wouldn't hear of it. It was up to me. Okay then, fine, of course. You know the rest. We had an appointment for the Thursday before that weekend. He would ask if he could do the shoot here in your house. He didn't seem to think it would be a problem. “It wouldn't surprise me,” he said, “if they cleared out for the day. That's how they are.” He was right.'

If I couldn't fend off her version of the truth, I had to ask Jenny if she hadn't actually used the portfolio as an excuse to get in touch with Tonio. I opened my mouth, but Miriam beat me to the punch. ‘So, Jenny, how'd that afternoon go?'

‘I think we pretty much hit all the rooms in the house,' Jenny said. ‘The living room, his old room, the library … out back, of course … Tonio even photographed me up on the roof. Those pictures were his least favourite; mine, too. Not much ambience up there. He wasn't able to do anything with the view.'

‘Wait a minute,' I said. ‘If you two were up on the roof … the only way up there is via the fire escape on the third floor. You'd have to have gone through my workroom.'

‘Shooting off my mouth again,' Jenny said. ‘I know he wasn't allowed to take pictures in there, with all those papers and such. Tonio kept up his end of the bargain. All we did was cut through on the way to the balcony. No, that's not entirely true. I did have a peek around. There were various maps spread out on that long table … maps of Amsterdam, Amstelveen, Valkenburg … Tonio told me they were for a novel you were writing. About the murder of an Amsterdam or, no, an Amstelveen police officer. Something like that. What Valkenburg was doing there, he couldn't say.'

‘Ah, now I know why the awning had been rolled shut,' I said to Miriam. ‘You can't get up the ladder if it's open.'

‘You've been racking your brain about that for weeks,' Miriam said.

‘Now that we're solving mysteries,' I said, turning back toward Jenny. ‘The father of the main character was a travelling vacuum-cleaner salesman in the sixties. Sometimes he brought his son with him. Once they went to Valkenburg. Hit the row houses with the latest model. The son has a sixth sense for which of the housewives his father has developed a special kind of rapport with. Beyond the “cup of coffee” stage, you might say. So there you are. On Thursday, Tonio gives you a summary of my new novel, and three days later the book, thanks to him, is destroyed, and he forces me to write a totally different one. The tyrant. A benevolent tyrant, I'll give him that.'

‘Tonio was suddenly in a hurry,' Jenny continued. ‘A rooftop shoot: waste of time. He insisted on photographing me out back, before the sun went down. I was still wearing white clothes. I also wanted a series in black. So I changed quickly in his old room. Neat, really, the place where he'd spent his whole youth … that gave it a special feeling …'

If she kept up such a light-hearted report of that afternoon's photo shoot, we'd be confronted with neither the one truth nor the other. Fine, then, the truth would be somewhere in the middle. That's actually what we wanted, wasn't it? Well, then again, not really. We'd still have to get to the bottom of it.

‘From age four until he left home at nineteen,' Miriam said.

‘And?' I asked. ‘Had you changed into your black quickly enough to take advantage of the light?'

Jenny turned her head toward the arbour again, this time less surreptitiously. ‘We even had enough time left to sit in the sun on that bench. Tonio brought some iced tea out from the fridge. Nice and cold, straight from the freezer. He said he hoped the beautiful weather would hold … all summer long … he kept repeating it. It was so nice sitting there, face to the sun, eyes shut. And Tonio saying: “I really hope it stays like this.”'

I thought back to that brisk spring evening in '69, after the party in Eindhoven, when I brought Marike A., who I had only known a few hours, to the designated spot where her father would fetch us in the car. He wasn't there yet. Shivering, we paced back and forth along the sidewalk, and I kept repeating (because I thought it was what one was supposed to do, and also because I kind of meant it): ‘Let's make a great summer of it.'

The girl looked up at me with a pale and frightened little face. She had those big light-grey eyes, really special, but terrified. Not really a stayer.

‘Agreed?'

Only then did she nod. Exactly ten years later, she put an end to her life, but that was another story entirely. My first requiem experience.

‘Apparently, Tonio didn't know you well enough to know what you like to drink,' Miriam said. ‘He'd jammed the fridge full of iced tea and fruit juice. Bottles of soft drinks, too. Stuff we never have in the house. Took us weeks to get through it.'

Jenny laughed. ‘Just iced tea would have been fine.'

18

As a teenager, I used to watch the television series
The Long Hot Summer
while doing my homework at the dining room table. My parents sat with their backs to me, unaware that I was closely following the plot, with all its forbidden content. Most of all, I sank into a reverie at the title itself. A
long hot summer
— this was my plan, too, once exams were over. Together with Marike A., who I was still seeing.

I recognised my daydream in the words of Tonio, via Jenny: how, even though it was still just May, he openly yearned for a real summer. I could just hear him say it.

Now I knew what kind of guise a long hot summer could assume: days of tropical temperatures helping you sweat out the grief. This
long hot summer
was mainly an emotionless one, a summer that shut Tonio out and refused to mirror our melancholy.

‘I've only seen two Polaroids,' I said, ‘but Tonio was satisfied most with the photos he took out here.'

‘It's hard to judge on such a tiny screen,' Jenny said. She turned her upper body to take a better look at the garden. Tonio had photographed her here for a whole afternoon. His concentrated gaze must still have been palpable everywhere she looked.

‘Would you like to see them?' Miriam asked her. ‘There's quite a lot. And of pretty uneven quality. I had them all printed, though, just to be sure. You can make your own selection.'

The girl became very uneasy. ‘Later, thanks,' she said.

Understandable, I thought. Although he was out of sight, Tonio was looking directly at her from each photo.

‘Later's fine,' Miriam said, undoubtedly thinking of all the trouble she had gone to in collecting the photos.

The conversation flagged. Jenny stared more or less constantly at the little arbour and its white bench. In her hand, she held the empty long drink glass, occasionally bringing it to her lips, but it couldn't have provided much more than a sour droplet from the lemon slice.

‘Another gin and tonic, Jenny?'

19

It had been a warm day, but it did not end in a sultry summer evening. As twilight fell, the temperature quickly dropped. Not that there was a breeze to speak of, but little puffs of chill began to rise from the backyard. We sat for a long time in relative silence. Tonio was with us, that was for sure, and each of us sat there grieving for him, but why in God's name didn't we
break down
? Why didn't we crumple onto the veranda floorboards, screaming as we slid off the chair? Wasn't what had happened enough for that? How Jenny dealt with all this, I couldn't rightly say, but Miriam and I — why, for whom or what, were we putting on a brave face?

‘Jenny, if you still want that G&T,' Miriam said, ‘then I suggest we go inside. It's getting chilly out here.'

‘Easy on the gin then,' Jenny answered. ‘I'm starting to feel it already.'

We went upstairs; Miriam disappeared into the kitchen. Jenny went into the living room and sat down (without prior knowledge) in Tonio's regular spot. I realised I now had to broach the subject of Paradiso: the date that didn't happen. Once again, I was forced to wonder whether I really wanted to know how fate had taken advantage of the U-turn.

‘After the photo session,' I began, when Miriam had returned with the tray, ‘Tonio told me he was going to go to a party at Paradiso on Saturday night. With you. That you'd invited him. I understand it was an Italian-themed affair. Italian hits from the eighties. Eros Ramazzotti and so on.'

‘Oh, that.' Jenny flicked her hand in a dismissive, somewhat embarrassed, gesture. She took a sip of her gin and tonic, which made the skin on her forehead rumple. I wasn't so sure Miriam had ‘gone easy' on the gin. I was well acquainted with her portions.

‘In the end,' I continued, ‘later that evening, around midnight, Tonio went to a disco called Trouw. With two friends, a boy and a girl. Dennis and Goscha. We've talked to them both. They were with him the whole time, Dennis since that afternoon. You don't figure in either of their stories. They hadn't met you, although, yes, Tonio had mentioned you. That much he did. But neither had heard anything about a date at Paradiso. If you don't want to talk about it, Jenny … that's perfectly okay. But we'd so very much like to know …'

‘Of course,' Jenny hastened to reply. ‘Although I'm still not quite sure why the date fell through. Tonio and I had chatted on Facebook that afternoon. He suggested going dancing at Trouw instead of at Paradiso. I'd heard of it, a new place in an old printing works. Techno. I told him I'd rather go to a quiet café, where you can at least hear each other. Without all that loud music. Tonio wrote back that he was still pretty beat from the previous night.
Beat
, that's the word he used. He'd been in Terzijde, on the Kerkstraat, with friends until really late, and he was still beat. I think he preferred to dance out his beatness at Trouw rather than go back to another café.'

‘I get the picture,' I said, more grimly than I'd intended. ‘A quiet café … He couldn't face having to rely only on conversation.'