Tonio (59 page)

I suspect that I am doing opponents of my work no greater favour, but I confess that since Black Whitsun, no single book of mine (including this one) will enjoy a whit of mercy in my own eyes. I once defended my work with the ferocity of a lion. Now I throw it all to the lions. Whatever I have produced and undertaken is, in retrospect, besmirched by the loss that gapes at the end of it. Tonio was one of my foremost reasons for writing, even for the many years before his birth, because I already had more than a portent of him. I knew he would come, and what he would mean to me, and I prepared myself thoroughly for his coming.

He came, and then vanished, and now everything with which I aimed to give him a full-fledged life is tarnished and sullied. His untimely death is proof that I have gone about things the wrong way, with too little commitment, and that I overlooked important matters. For Harry Mulisch, if a writer is hit by a meteor as he stands waiting at a tram stop for line 2, that's proof he has no talent. I have allowed my son to be struck in the dead of night by a similar projectile — precisely what I had been trying, with all my written efforts, to prevent.

Ergo: no talent.

26

Tonio's father was a writer. As a youngster growing up, Tonio couldn't grasp the blatant revulsion, even hate, that this could evoke. Once, at a school party — he had proudly put on his best sports jacket for the affair — he was actively shunned. A few of the girls who he had bravely asked to dance said: ‘I'm not dancing with you, sicko.'

It looked as though it had been a deliberate plan. A small-scale conspiracy. When he got home, he put on a brave face: oh yeah, great party. But his friend Alexander spilled the beans: ‘It wasn't so great for Tonio. No one would dance with him. The girls called him a sicko.'

Then it all came out. I dare to use the cliché that my heart bled for him, at the thought of the smartly dressed Tonio, complete with burgundy bow tie, being rebuffed: ‘No, sicko, not with you.'

Further questioning revealed that it probably had something to do with the recent broadcast of a literary talk show, in which an intellectual lady, a Romanist, had spat out the words ‘intensely disgusting' to describe my latest work. I hadn't even followed the broadcast, but the ‘intensely disgusting' epithet that had adhered to Tonio's father had somehow made the rounds of the Dutch Notables and their brood at the Cornelis Free School.

A few years later, in late August 2000, Tonio sat next to me at a bookstall at the Uitmarkt, held that year along the Amstel. That fall he would start at the gymnasium, but he still liked the ritual of appending his own name to his father's signed books. He now wore lightweight glasses and had cut his hair short, so he looked younger and more vulnerable than a few months earlier at his graduation from the Cornelis Free. He appeared timidly aware of the significant leap forward that was expected of him — even with the lump behind his cheek from the lollipops the publisher had fed him at regular intervals.

At her request, I had set up my portion of the booth as though it were a corner of my workroom at home. With Tonio's help, I had even put together a few fake manuscripts, drawing on my supply of misleadingly yellowed counterfeiters' paper. We tied the bundles up with string, putting the titles of
Homo duplex
, a cyclical novel-in-process, on the flyleaves. Tonio enjoyed it more than I did. I completed the decor with old inkpots and other writing implements among the nonchalantly placed ‘manuscripts'. Those afternoon signing sessions at the Uitmarkt always terrified me: author on folding chair in a bookstall, waiting for that one client. Regardless of your demeanour, you always felt that it came across as slightly desperate.

On the sheets of yellowed paper, I wrote out aphorisms from the work-in-progress, and added to them mysterious Chinese stamps — well, you had to do
something
. Tonio, ever good-natured, smilingly helped me stamp and hand out material.

When, later that afternoon, things quieted down some, I noticed a small group of young men nearby. They had been loitering there for some time, but only now did I sense their hateful glances cast in my direction. There was clearly something that irked them. Finally, one of them approached the stall. He stuck his fingers under the string holding the blank manuscripts together, and started slamming the packs of paper onto the tabletop, without a word, but with a constant, fierce anger in his eyes. Tonio got such a shock that he recoiled, chair and all. It was most of all the loud bang of the ‘manuscripts' being slammed onto the wooden trestle table that was so intimidating, combined with the boy's silent rage.

Now I think: a band of aspiring writers wanting to unmask me. But still, Tonio was quaking in his boots.

‘Why'd he
do
that?'

It was probably the last time I'd seen his lower lip tremble. And the last time he joined me at a book signing — but that also had to do with school and age.

27

Tonio, because of you I've lost everything. My life. The thought of having you at my deathbed. Worldly goods were for your benefit. Since there is no longer any reason to strive for them, I shall lose them. (I will try to salvage this house, because your mother is so attached to it. She was, after all, born in this neighbourhood.)

My goals, my work, my attempts at maintaining something resembling a personality … my whole world has drained into your grave. Melted snow, and Tonio is the sun.

As a beginning writer, I pretended to live recklessly beyond my means, grazing the edge of bankruptcy, in order to force myself in to productivity.
Het bankroet dat mijn goudmijn
is
[
It broke my goldmine
] was the title of a bibliophilic booklet I later published. That bankruptcy has now arrived, with your demise, and now that it's here, it has proved hardly a goldmine: it is barren and infertile. I
was
rich. You were the capital of my existence. I hadn't even taken out life insurance on you, certain as I was it would never have to be cashed in. Or perhaps my superstition couldn't bear the monthly premiums …

All that I've gained from your disappearance is freedom — of a dubious kind, to be sure. I am now free of responsibility. No one has to remind me of old, unfulfilled promises. They were all made null and void on Black Whitsun. Ever since those two angels of disaster from the Amsterdam police appeared on my front stoop that twenty-third of May, I laugh at every summons-server.

I feel free to spend what is left of my life exactly as I please. If I do not succumb entirely to idleness and torpor, it's because I want to continue caring for your mother. It is the only responsibility I still accept, also on behalf of her son.

28

So, with Tonio's death, my life has demonstrated its uselessness. By dying, he has carelessly cast off his father like a cloak. The one thing I am still good for, by way of ritualistic and associative writing, is to preserve as much of his life as possible. I am almost obsessive in the composition of my requiem for him, about him. His brief, beautiful life must not simply sink into oblivion, just like his beautiful, broken body has sunk into the earth.

And after this? Tonio was, as I have said, my most compelling reason to write, even before he was born. A muse of the masculine sort. In recent years, I have noticed wanting to show him what I was worth, in the hope that he would want to show me what he
was
worth.

One of the last things he said to me, a few days before his death, was, with that endearing, slightly mocking smile: ‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?'

Less recently, he told me, recalling from when he was twelve and was about to begin high school, that I had predicted (or, rather, promised) I'd have
Homo duplex
finished before he graduated.

So I still have a lot to show him.

The next moment, I sweep aside these ambitions as redundant.

Now I am an orphan
and
childless. As that quarrel with Miriam confirmed, I am not the type — as many of my dissatisfied contemporaries are — to want to start on a second brood. I will have to die, when the time comes, without living descendants. And considering that literary works are unlikely to outlive their maker these days — the maker himself might even outlive
them
— one can conclude that when I reach the end of this journey, all I can expect to see is a gaping oblivion.

29

Tonio's demise has, more for Miriam than for me, brought a lot of life's issues into focus. Sometimes I notice in her an absoluteness that scares me.

Miriam was a daddy's girl. As I've said, as a youngster she frequently locked horns with her mother, but at that age possessed the gift of blissful withdrawal. The cramped quarters of her room were in no way an impediment: more than into her physical space, she retreated into herself.

Just
how
bad her relationship with her mother was, I only realised when I read an account, in novella form, that Miriam had written about her youth. Her mother had already suffered numerous nervous breakdowns and had threatened suicide, but only after she ended up in the Valerius Clinic did her younger daughter's rage erupt. Miriam was no longer able to be in the same room as her mother and remain calm. Going for a spin in the car with her became a risky undertaking, even for a confident driver like Miriam.

Now that, with Tonio's death, the family bonds are dissolving faster than ever, I tried to salvage whatever I could by phoning my mother-in-law at St. Vitus, the old-age home where she returned after her hospitalisation — even though I knew it would only depress me even more.

‘Will you two pull through … are you there for each other? No, will you
pull through
… I'm asking: will you
pull through
? Oh, as long as you're there for each other.'

I repeat, a second and a third time, that we will more or less pull through, and that we really are there for each other, but that we have to get through this strictly on our own. No third parties, for God's sake. Sooner or later, she brings up her own imminent death, or at least the yearning for it.

‘I don't want to live anymore. I hope the end is near. I want to go to Tonio … I want to be with Tonio.'

What she probably wants is for me to scold her, and say that we need her, now more than ever. I can't summon up the energy, and say: ‘Yes, Wies, I understand.'

‘They say here that I have keep on living for you two. I've already told them … no more medicine, no more food, no more water … but they won't, not without a reason. Even though I don't want to go on … I want to die. I want to go to Tonio, that sweet Tonio. He's here. I feel him. I talk to him.'

I feel genuinely sorry for her. I don't doubt the sincerity of her grief. But Wies, could you just — please! please! — take into consideration the period of mourning your daughter has to go through? Do you appreciate how unbearable this is for her, all your death announcements, while she's not even by a long shot worked through that one death announcement from Whit Sunday?

I'm too chicken and too broken to say that to her.

‘How is Miriam, anyway … Oh, I realise she doesn't want any contact with me right now. I really do understand. But I
so
hope to see the two of you again. Later … later.'

She asks me to pass on her greetings to her daughter, but that's just the problem. She assumes that I'm going to tell Miriam I've spoken to her, but then I have to relate all of her mother's death wishes, and, really, that's the last thing she wants to hear.

‘Could you give me your number?' Wies asks at the end of the conversation, not for the first time. ‘Only in case of an emergency. I won't abuse it.'

I promise her, also not for the first time, to send a card with the number, in the hope that my promise, and preferably her request as well, will have been forgotten by the next time I ring. I still remember her previous attacks of phonesickness, and that we had to change the number several times.

Well, just for emergencies — I believe her — all right already, it would be heartless to keep her emergency exit locked. After we hang up, I write my mobile-phone number on a card, addressed to St. Vitus.

Two days later, it starts. At first I don't recognise her number on the caller ID screen, so I don't answer; but, sure enough, it's my mother-in-law on the voicemail. It is a nearly literal repetition of all our earlier telephone conversations. More messages containing sighs, advice, and demands follow, all of them true to form. I don't return the calls, nor does she ask me to.

One Monday morning, just as I'm starting work, my mobile phone rings. It's the voicemail; Wies's voice, bossy as in her heyday: ‘Will you call me back …' No question mark. An order. It does not sound like an emergency, more like matter-of-fact abuse.

Miriam's voicemail, too, is overflowing with messages from her mother. Wies pursues her daughter by all possible means, via her mobile and her landline work number. Within a few days, we all — Miriam, Hinde and I — have new phone numbers. Peace and quiet.

30

I applied the pain management a bit too rigorously tonight. At two-thirty in the morning, I awoke on the living-room sofa, sitting upright, my hand tightly screwed to a whisky glass filled with vodka, and the ice all melted. Miriam had gone up hours earlier.