Tonio (58 page)

‘That's putting it pretty bluntly,' Miriam said.

‘I was the same way at his age,' I said. ‘In the noise of the disco, with the distraction of everybody dancing and all, I thought I'd have a better chance with a girl I didn't know so well. I've never seen
more
of myself in Tonio than these past two months.'

‘We didn't argue or anything,' Jenny continued. ‘It's just that … we didn't see eye to eye about how to spend that Saturday night. So we just left it, and decided we'd get back in touch after the holiday weekend. Also to talk about the photos.' She leaned forward, her forearms resting on her knees, no longer looking at us but at the glass on the coffee table. ‘The thing is … I wasn't part of Tonio's circle of friends. None of them knows me. I didn't hear anything. Whit Monday and the Tuesday after that … Tonio didn't answer his phone. Wednesday, still nothing. I saw that his Facebook page had been dormant for days. Not a single visit. I had a funny feeling about it. On top of it, my mother was in Morocco the whole week. I was home alone. I was sick, couldn't keep anything in. Everything I ate came back out, and not just “up”. I did talk to my mother on the phone, but I couldn't make it clear to her exactly what was wrong. I didn't know myself. When she got back a week later, and saw the state I was in, she went straight to Google. She found a site where someone had put pictures of Tonio. With an obituary. Then we knew for sure.'

She did not cry, but when I looked more closely I could see her lower eyelashes glisten — as though the moisture belonged there, as part of her make-up. So that was it: the digital quarrel on Facebook had unhinged the plans — and how. So fate, too, made use of social media these days.

20

Jenny sucked down the last drops of her drink and stood up. ‘I've overstayed my welcome. I really should be going.'

‘But you haven't seen the photos yet,' Miriam said.

‘Can it wait till next time?' she said, almost begging. ‘Right now it would be too much for me.'

Miriam stood there, holding a large cardboard envelop, bulging almost to the point of bursting. ‘You can just take them with you …'

‘Can I leave them here? If you don't mind, we'll make another appointment. I might be able to handle it then.'

‘Of course,' Miriam said, ‘The modelling agencies can wait …'

‘Oh, that.' Again that dismissive gesture. She took a few tentative steps toward the living-room door, and hesitantly turned to us. ‘Would you mind if … I'd really like to go up to Tonio's room.'

21

‘That stupid dilemma I kept talking about,' I said to Miriam. ‘Now I know it wasn't a dilemma at all. Whether or not there was something going on between Tonio and this Jenny … for me, it was bad news either way. Actually, I didn't want to hear either version. I almost didn't show my face this afternoon. Now I know, more from what Jenny
didn't
say than what she
did
, that it did indeed go deeper than just that photo stuff. It's just
that
, I now realise, it was exactly
that
version I didn't want to hear. There
was
no dilemma. If Jenny had told us that as far as she was concerned, it was nothing more than a professional transaction … something between a model and a photographer … then I might have felt at most, on Tonio's behalf, slightly snubbed. No last hurrah just before his last farewell. That in itself would have been lonely enough. But
this
… a potential opening nipped in the bud … it's more than I can take.'

Miriam, next to me on the sofa, only nodded. After Jenny left, Miriam refilled our glasses, but we didn't touch the drinks. A few days ago, after Jenny had phoned, I still harboured a secret hope that, contrary to all the dark thoughts, my heart could leap at the news that at least some amorous feelings were at play, mutual ones. I sure missed the mark there: the soft, modest voice of a girl had just formulated our worst nightmare.

The nightmare of what might have been, and what will never be.

‘This is one of those moments,' Miriam whispered, ‘when it
really
hits me that he's gone. We've lost him.'

22

The morning after Jenny's visit, I went up to my workroom, now looking at it though the eyes of Tonio and Jenny, in the spring light of the twenty-first of May.

‘We'll do one last shoot up on the roof,' he might have said. ‘You'll have to climb a ladder to get there, though.'

She was rather excited by the idea. He led the way up the stairs. ‘This is where my father works.'

Jenny had, so she said, nosed around a bit. The long table was full of newspaper clippings and manuscripts-in-progress. She had asked Tonio about the maps of Amsterdam and Amstelveen and Valkenburg, which lay unfolded in a row on the table. ‘What have these got to do with his work?'

I could imagine their voices in complete clarity.

‘All I know,' Tonio replied, ‘is that he's working on a novel about the murder of a police officer. True story — it happened a couple of years ago in Amstelveen. I guess he's plotting out routes on those maps or something … See, here's the ladder.'

He showed Jenny an aluminium ladder attached to the side wall of the balcony, and leading to the flat roof.

‘I'll have to raise the awning first.'

After Tonio flipped the electric switch, to the left of the balcony doors, the awning hummed upward. ‘Funny.' He nodded at a pile of wooden planks against the balcony railing. ‘Pieces of my old bunk bed.'

‘You slept in a moss-covered bunk bed?' Jenny asked.

‘When I took it apart, because I decided it was time to sleep in a real bed, the slats were still natural wood. And varnished. Just look at 'em now. Gone all green from the rain. Dunno why my father leaves them … Okay, now we can go up. You first?'

‘No, you go ahead. Those rungs are pretty far apart.'

Laden with equipment, Tonio climbed the ladder.

The photos he had taken up on the roof were the only ones he was dissatisfied with. Jenny said the surrounding rooftops, with the occasional terrace, didn't offer much of a backdrop. Soon enough, they went back down — to Tonio's old room, where the bunk bed had once stood, at times with Merel in it.

23

I couldn't stop myself. Just as on Whit Monday (but now better informed), I kept retracing Tonio and Jenny's route through the house. From the backyard to the living room on the first floor, and from there to his old room on the second — and then another flight up to my workroom.

The styrofoam light reflector, still propped in the corner of the living room, indicated where Tonio had photographed her: right next to the glass display case with his rock collection. No matter how hard I sniffed, the used-ashtray smell had disappeared. The first time I nosed around, that Thursday after we got back from the Amsterdamse Bos, I had concluded to Miriam: ‘She's a smoker.'

Now I knew it was Tonio. Again I regretted not encouraging him to come clean about his smoking habit. There had been a nicotine smell in his old room that afternoon as well.

For the umpteenth time, I circled my long sorting table, repeating Jenny's questions and Tonio's answers.

‘I don't see a computer.'

‘Don't get me started … my father's so stubborn. He's got, like, three antique electric typewriters. See that empty desk there? Twice there was a beaut of an Apple … all the bells and whistles … never used it. The first one, it was when I was still living at home, I slowly but surely smuggled it to my room. The second one's now in my mother's study. You see that thing? An old-fashioned photocopier. If he's not satisfied with the order of a text on a sheet of paper, he snips it into strips. Then he lays them in another order on the glass plate, and … how inefficient is
that
? I've explained to him, I don't know how many times, that it's so much easier on a computer … without scissors and copy machine. I'd offer to teach him. He paid me — twice! — for the computer-lesson fees we'd agreed on. And every time he gave up after a few pointers. “I'm attached to my old stuff,” he'd say. “Just let me tinker.” An impossible man.'

‘And the lesson money?'

‘I kept it, of course,' Tonio said. ‘
I
wasn't the one who dropped out.'

The balcony doors. I turned on the electric motor that lowers the awning, for the sole reason of raising it once again and thus freeing up the aluminium ladder.

The dismantled bunk bed. I assumed its mystery remained in his mind for a few days. (He did not ask about it that afternoon — undoubtedly to cover up the fact that he'd been in my workroom.) A moss-covered child-sized bunk bed. Here he rose, via a fire ladder, above his earliest youth, with a pretty girl following him. He was going to take photos of her on the roof. Through various camera eyes, he could examine her with impunity.

Even though my dodgy back really couldn't take it, I climbed up the too-widely spaced rungs. I imagined that, while Jenny was on her way up, emitting feigned squeals of trepidation, Tonio was studying the surroundings with the eye of a professional. Near him, the glass-enclosed stairwell belonging to neighbour Kluun, leading to a future roof terrace. No, that had to stay out of view. He wanted the expanse of the urban horizon as a backdrop to Jenny.

Tonio walked to the edge of the roof, as close as he dared. The Obrechtkerk with its twin spires, like a slightly stumpy cathedral, might be an interesting decor. But he couldn't get her to stand close enough to the edge.

‘I've got vertigo.' For the first time that afternoon, her voice had a slight squeak to it.

Tonio looked out over the jagged stone labyrinth, the grooves filled in, here and there, with cloudlike greenery. He could still see the Rijksmuseum, with its red façade, as simply a backdrop for a photo shoot. For me, the building was now a beacon that announced:
Here, in my shadow, at my feet, a few days after that photo session, Tonio perished
.

24

I went back down the fire ladder and closed the balcony doors, but instead of going downstairs I stayed in my room, shuffling aimlessly about. The material for the work-in-progress was bundled neatly in Leitz ring-binders on top of the filing cabinets. I pulled one or two out at random and thumbed through them. Everything I read crumbled before my eyes. Even the act of putting the thing back in place was in fact no longer worth the effort.

When we moved into this house, the third floor had been divided into three rooms: two boys' rooms (one with corner bar) and a cork-padded maid's room. In '97, I had everything torn out, leaving behind a large L-shaped room. Once the builders had left, I stood speechless on the gleaming parquet floor, while Tonio, letting out little bursts of cheerful laughter, wove around me, his arms spread into aeroplane wings. I had always dreamt of having a workroom like this, and he knew it.

I inspected the dozens of locks on the filing cabinets and drawers. A key stuck out of each lock, its duplicate dangling from the ring threaded through its eye, swaying gently in the breeze that Tonio had created.

‘How am I going to tell all these keys apart?' I said more or less to myself.

‘I know,' Tonio cried. He ran down two flights of stairs, and then all went quiet. I stood out on the landing, listening. From the kitchen came the sudden sound of clinking bottles. Then the fridge door closed. Tonio came charging back up the stairs carrying several sheets of self-adhesive mini-stickers in various colours — the kind you stick on freezer food items, with the date. Like lightning he began sticking labels on the keys, spares, and locks to the filing cabinets, after notating a numeric code per lock. Yellow, green, red, blue … He carried out his operation laughing, with a vague undertone of scorn, because his father hadn't come up with the idea.

‘There, Adri. See?' He was already finished. ‘Easy-peasy.'

Now, thirteen years later, the freezer stickers, numbered in his handwriting, were still attached to those locks and keys. I made good use of them, especially when I was travelling — no one, after all, needed access to those cabinets during my absence. I walked along the cabinets, flicked the dangling spare keys with my index finger, and chided myself grimly that Tonio's labelling of the locks was the only meaningful work that had been carried out on this floor since its renovation.

25

In Louis van Gasteren's documentary film
Hans, het leven voor de dood
, there is a scene with Hans van Sweeden's mother. When she received the news of her son's suicide, her first reaction, she said, was: ‘My child is dead … now no flowers will ever bloom again.'

I recognise that expression of heartbreak. But in my case, this deathliness refers to the past as well. Wherever I look on the life that lies behind me, I see only failure and futility. Every attempt to achieve anything, no matter what, can in retrospect count on my disdain and disgust. Everything, every action, was, after all, a direct or indirect rehearsal for my greatest failure ever: the accidental death of my son, which I was unable to prevent.

I look back on my past, and what I perceive is not the necessary passage of time; no, I see only a needless waste of time. A pointless botching of days and months and years.