Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  In charming Twents-Italian, where the words would unexpectedly pile up onto one another, he told me about his youth, about his crackpot parents who had drummed the magnificence of Benito Mussolini into Ennio and his brothers. Since Il Duce’s death, everything in Italy had gone to the corrupt, half-assed, democratic dogs, according to Ennio’s father, a tormented windbag who confused a difference of opinion with a blood vendetta and sold newspapers at Forlì Station from a sun-bleached kiosk that gradually became silted up with fascist diatribes, Duce hagiographies, and cardboard devotional cards depicting the intrepid leader on horseback. Every Sunday the family piled into their tomato-red Fiat and drove, fresh roses on the rear shelf, to Mussolini’s birthplace, not coincidentally a stone’s throw from Forlì, their excursion culminating at the family tomb where Ennio’s father, chin jutting forward, would recite one of Il Duce’s orations.

  Some two years into his scuola media a history teacher laid the hard truth about Mussolini on Ennio. It took him a couple of weeks, but he finally realized, for good, that his parents worshipped a depraved, destructive, clownish megalomaniac, and that his father was not only stupid but probably evil himself. So he left. One night, while his younger brother lay sleeping behind him, he wrote a farewell note—I could just see it, a twenty-five-year-younger Ennio writing the letter, his letter of resignation, by candlelight. The next morning he hitchhiked to the harbor in Ravenna and boarded a cargo ship bound for India.

  In exchange for such open-heartedness I told him, amid the jars of marmalade and stacks of felt-lined picnic baskets, about my own background, a story that paled next to his—back then, at least. Like everyone else, he asked if I still saw my real father, and when I told him I felt no need to, he reacted differently than I had expected. He told me I was stupid, slack, even heartless. That’s what he said. Cold. He, of all people! The man who for years had given Italy a wide berth, who had fathered, with a gym teacher from Boekelo, a spidery little daughter who didn’t even know she had Italian grandparents, a man who had even gone so far as to take his wife’s last name. “My father, he play fascist in Italian parliament,” he said. “That is because of the reason, Joni. Iffa you don’ have good reason to abandon family, then don’ do it.”

  I liked him. For a year we chatted, we slid past each other, until one afternoon I threw my arms around that skinny torso of his. I pressed my breasts against his body, a body corseted by self-determination, by obstinacy, by wanderlust and the yearning for authenticity and independence (or so I thought in my love-smitten, puerile teenage head), by a principled unfetteredness, I thought too, because I assumed impermanence and itchy feet made that hard, sinewy exterior all syrupy on the inside. A man without roots. He lifted me up and kissed me. He wants me, I thought, all I need to do is ask and he’ll put this lousy little shop up for sale and whisk me away to New York or Rio de Janeiro.

  He just laughed at me. No way! Didn’t I understand how much he loved that gym coach of his? And his daughter? “But,” he said, “if you promise not getting in love, we close-a the shop on Wednesday afternoons.” It was after six, I was already tallying up the cash register. “You think about it.” Well, thinking was the last thing I needed to do: the following Wednesday I raced to the bodega like a burning fuse. For a good two years we spent the weekly afternoon break on his black-velvet IKEA love seat back in the storeroom, a red-hot hour right in the middle of the week that rose like a bead of oil in a glass of water, and even once I hitched up with Aaron it floated there like a bubble on the surface of my daily existence. I still filled in there a few times a year, and every time he locked the front door at twelve o’clock sharp.

  In the laundry room, eye to eye with my mother, I had no idea how badly hurt Ennio was, but the thought that his smooth, caramel-colored skin, his slightly sunken chest, his fine legs, even, God help me, his stern face, might be damaged by brute force, by flying shrapnel, by extreme heat, was unbearable. “But how?” I sobbed to my mother. “What in God’s name was he doing in Roombeek?”

  “I know a lot of things, darling,” she said, “but I don’t know everything.”

  The rest of the day at Coldwater passed in a haze that darkened by the hour. I lost myself in memories of Enschede, of Aaron, Ennio, my father, of all those Twents bridges I’d burned behind me. And although I had my hands full with organizing the closing—phone calls to the lawyer, to Sotomayor’s people, whether or not in L.A. (for a moment it looked like Dallas again after all), with or without Sotomayor in person, and especially: when—Enschede kept rearing its ugly head, wove its way through the lunchtime conversations with colleagues out in the crumbling gazebo. After lunch I made two attempts at answering Aaron’s e-mail, immediately trashing both. What was the point? My hesitation may have been tangible on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, because at eleven minutes past three I received a second message.

  4

  “If you must know,” Aaron said gruffly, “my father passed away. Quite suddenly.”

  The woman, who announced herself as the headmistress of De Klimop and nothing more, so that he spent the entire telephone conversation trying to remember her name, was taken aback by his lie. For a moment the line hummed with her awareness of mortality. Death, now that scared people. Aaron had been confronted by her abrasive voice on his answering machine three times, each message sharper and chillier than the last, and although he acknowledged she was entirely within her rights—of course he had not held up his end of the bargain, the photos should have been delivered long ago—he dreaded that righteous anger.

  “I’m terribly sorry for you, Mr. Bever,” she said, suddenly calm. “My condolences.” Again she fell silent, a grudging respect that he milked for as long as possible. She cleared her throat. “Why didn’t you inform the school? You should have phoned me.”

  She sounded about his age, even a bit younger. She was the head of a good-sized primary school with mostly immigrant pupils, a typical ghetto school in a run-down part of Sint-Jansmolenbeek. Right from their first meeting, on picture day itself, he tagged her as one of those no-nonsense idealistic types, he’d seen enough of those. As the classes of somber, raucous, and unruly African schoolchildren passed in front of his camera, his admiration for her courage and sense of responsibility grew. Everyone he spoke to at the smaller village schools had an opinion about the Brussels ghetto schools, but this woman, he had to hand it to her, she stood with both feet firmly in the muck. Still, who she was irked him no end. Her milk-white pageboy haircut, her large asexual face, footwear with Velcro fasteners, a sign she was slipping away from the adult world. She e-nun-ci-a-ted exaggeratedly, repeated everything she knew better at least three times, to him and undoubtedly at parent-teacher evenings as well.

  He said: “The past two weeks have been extremely painful and hectic. My father was my business partner. I had to close shop temporarily.”

  He’d rather not think about the impression he made of himself. He had photographed the children the morning after his chance encounter with Tineke, and even then his mind had already begun to unravel. At least, he guessed as much from a disturbing panic–e-mail he’d discovered in his Sent box that he’d apparently written to Joni Sigerius. If he understood his own message correctly, upon finishing the photo session at De Klimop he’d gone on a mad ramble through Brussels, a story Joni fortunately hadn’t responded to—if she’d even received it. Just to be sure, yesterday evening he plunged a brief apology e-mail into the black hole, and consequently had been sitting at his computer the entire afternoon waiting for a reply that might never come.

  “But yes, you’re right. I should have phoned.”

  She audibly drew a breath. Her principal’s office smelled like crayons and was full of children’s books. She read children’s books, only children’s books, which is why her jaw and skull kept growing. She ruined her mind with kiddie books, like you could ruin your eyes by reading with too little light, or your ears with the volume too soft.

  “Why’d you phone Juliett
e Jalabert’s parents?”

  “Excuse me?” Her question surprised him. That little girl, he recalled, had featured in his e-mail to Joni. Had he been pestering strangers? What was she talking about?

  “You heard me. Juliette’s father came by. He says you’ve called three times to pester them with bizarre questions.”

  He began to dig through his memory, like a police dog searching for something dead. Juliette Jalabert’s father … He drew a blank. He suspected that he’d been out of it for at least a few days, not so unusual after an attack. Since the BMW carrying Tineke Sigerius drove out of his life, his brain was like a war zone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, think about it then,” she said. “And forget the order. Consider it canceled.”

  “But—”

  “And I’m only going to say this once: no photos of our pupils on your website.”

  He set the receiver down with a groan and kicked himself away from his desk. His chair rolled backward into the room. He lit a cigarette. On the screen of his iMac was one of the class photos from that damn Klimop he’d started working on this morning. At the bottom of each group photo he had spelt out, in gold block letters, the name of the school, class number, and year; on the individual portraits, the child’s name in florid italics. No sign yet of a Juliette Jalabert. He shut the program without saving his changes and bit his lower lip.

  Feeling numb after his extraordinary encounter with Joni’s mother, he had transferred to a local train to Linkebeek, where he fell prey to a mixture of anguish and indignation. The news of Sigerius’s death, as stale as it was, hit him hard; the entire way home his legs felt heavy and his chest strangely empty. What had happened? God damn it, why didn’t anybody tell him?

  As he led a relatively anger-free life, he did not immediately associate the swelling irritation with his disease; instead of running upstairs and grabbing a strip of Seroquel from the medicine chest, he went into the kitchen and warmed up a can of Chinese tomato soup on the induction stove. Big mistake. After that he climbed the two sets of spiral stairs, his teeth chattering in rage, up to the attic and flopped onto his unmade bed. How could the guy be dead for seven years without him knowing about it? He tossed and turned the whole night, in the darkest hours gazing into the mitre of trusses above his overheated head. Sigerius had been cold in his grave since the start of 2001, Tineke had said. Ah, now he got it: Sigerius must have died during those three weeks when he himself was off in outer space. From the end of December 2000 until sometime in June 2001 he had been locked up in the secure unit of the Twentse Tulip, a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Enschede—more than six months in all, the first three weeks in solitary confinement. So just then, at the absolute nadir of his own life, the news of Sigerius’s demise must have spread through the Netherlands.

  As soon as he was admitted to the Tulip, they let him cool down in a concrete “separette,” as they dared to call those hayless stalls. It was furnished with a bare gray plastic mattress and a stainless-steel toilet. On one of the cold, soundproofed walls was a blackboard with white chalk. Nothing came in and nothing went out. Dressed in a burlap shirt and paper underpants, he’d screamed his lungs out—and meanwhile they had buried Sigerius?

  The irony of it all was that there in his cell, deprived of news, of weather forecasts, of himself, he saw himself as a clairvoyant. The myriad air bubbles in the cinder blocks of his cell enveloped him like a cosmic mist. When he lay on his plastic slab and breathed deeply, the space constricted and the stars jabbed his skin like needles. The universe was his lung, he commanded space and time, he fathomed everything, in every dimension and on every scale. He knew, down to the picosecond, exactly when and at which latitude and longitude his parents had conceived him, and he also understood the precise causality of that evil deed, the billion-plus-year chain of events that were inextricably riveted to the Big Bang. He knew everything.

  And yet, nothing. Even after he was released from his cube of insanity, they left him in the dark. Why?

  The late-afternoon sun fell across the American pine flooring that spanned his workroom like an unswept ice rink. The window above his desk was open; a puff of breeze lifted an envelope from the tax office. It was sunny but brisk. He tried to read a book, lay on the floor listening to a Monk record but dozed off. When he woke up, broken and dopey, he went to his computer and checked his e-mail for the umpteenth time. A pair of snow-white doves fluttered through his room: she had written back. Her name in bold black letters on the monitor—it was an electrifying sensation. His fingers trembling, he opened the message.

  Yes, Aaron, it sure has been a while. I hope you don’t remember me as someone who’s easily shocked. But I have to admit I was pretty surprised by your first e-mail. You can imagine that sometimes I still worry about your health. Hopefully it was a temporary setback?

  You’ll also appreciate that it’s hard for me to be sure whether or not you really did bump into my mother. All I can say is, I haven’t had any contact with her in years. And no, I don’t live in Brussels; I’ve been in Los Angeles for about five years now. I work for a company that makes Frisbees and surfboards. And I’m not married either (although I did live in San Francisco with Boudewijn Stol for a while, maybe you still remember him).

  Yeah, if you look at it like that, the fireworks accident did set all kinds of things in motion. For you, for me, and for my father. But Aaron, because I know how sensitive you are: don’t forget that to commit suicide—the term says it all—is a conscious choice. Don’t ask me why, but Siem wanted it that way.

  I hardly ever think about it. Preferably never.

  Take care,

  Joni

  He smoked two cigarettes. Stiff from all that sitting, he walked to the middle of the living room, looked up at the rosettes and ornamental borders on the ceiling—not a single dove to be seen. Suicide? The overwhelming joy he had felt had completely evaporated. He reached into the top drawer of the dresser, pulled out a box of oxazepam, and took it to the bathroom. He popped three pills in his mouth and swallowed them with half a glass of chalky water. Whaddya know.

  Evening fell. Behind the drawn curtains he worked feverishly on fresh reconstructions, brief variations on the idea that he didn’t miss just Sigerius’s death, but a major tragedy. A disaster. A conspiratorial “they”—individuals, organizations, parties, syndicates, secret services?—had pulled the wool over his eyes, lied to him, deceived him. The bastards had held back pertinent information. Siem Sigerius, at that time the brand-new Minister of Education, his ex-girlfriend’s goddamn father, commits suicide, and nobody tells him? He wondered all sorts of things, too much, too quickly, too deeply. Was the Twentse Tulip in on it? Who had gagged the few visitors he had? Was it even legal, ethical? Secret meetings where psychiatrists connived to keep the truth from patient Bever? Weren’t they being paid to help him come to terms with it? He could just hear them, the white coats, colluding: mum’s the word around mad old Aaron, keep newspapers out of sight, no TV for the cue ball.

  For a few hours he sat motionless in one of the red-leather armchairs in his living room and succumbed, eyes closed, to the new reality into which Joni’s e-mail had plunged him, trying with all his might to fend off all-too-inflamed reasoning, anything to keep him from being swallowed up again by the Psychotic Ocean. As the hours passed, he calmed down slightly, the self-centered conspiracy theories stabilized, the whirlpool of thoughts widened and slowed. Just try to be realistic for once, he told himself. An entire loony bin putting on a masquerade just to protect Aaron Bever from some bad news? There must be more plausible scenarios.

  What to make of Elisabeth Haitink. His confidante, the conductress of his convalescence, the therapist who had piloted him through his insanity. From the very first session he had put her on a pedestal. Pretty tight-lipped, she was. In the Twentse Tulip she was the only one he completely trusted, maybe because she unfailingly treated him like th
e perfectly normal, intelligent young man he—against all evidence to the contrary—thought he was, unlike the dim-witted orderlies who drew his blood or brought him his food, and in whose eyes he saw himself reflected as Vasalis’s idiot in his bath.

  Spring 2001—Haitink was pushing sixty, he figured. She’d probably quit working by now; the image of a retired Elisabeth Haitink, finally liberated from the Tulip and its nutcases and invalids, gave him a sense of sympathetic relief. Trim, fragile, femininely accentuated in virgin-wool deux-pièces and respectable chiffon and satin dresses. She deserved something more cheery than specimens like himself—directorship of a glossy fashion mag on an Amsterdam canal, for example—but she wouldn’t hear of it. She enjoyed and was dedicated to her work.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday morning she fetched him from his bedroom that looked out onto the static acacias and elms on the institution’s grounds—cultivated, phony, demonstrative nature, there to highlight the chaos in his head, to encourage him to be more like the garden, although he knew full well that nature was, in fact, a termite mound gone berserk, with the snout of an anteater sticking out of it—and he tagged after her like a poodle, trotting along the gallery behind her delicate figure, past the communal living room painted with enormous tulips, to the kitchenette, where she poured them each a mug of decaf and, stirring in the powdered creamer, followed him up the stairs to the staff rooms, where at the end of a bare corridor they arrived at her tidy treatment room. For some fifty intensive hours she grilled him under an immobile copper ceiling fan; she managed to raise precarious questions as though she were helping him through ice-cold breakers, and in retrospect, most of their conversations centered on Sigerius. With the one not insignificant difference that he was talking about a living person and she about a dead one.