Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  Miriam sniffed, but it was not hysterical crying. ‘We’re too late, I can feel it.’

  ‘I forbid you to talk like that.’

  10

  H&NE: Her and No-one Else. All right, now that I had chosen this woman (this girl), I’d have to put my money where my mouth is. Make nice things for her: folding paper boxes filled with images and anecdotes, but I would also have to open real, existing worlds for her. The hedges surrounding the ivy-clad house. The chicken wire of the champagne cork. The salt edge around the pink sirloin.

  The boom gate of paradise.

  When I learnt from her parents that they had considered naming their second daughter ‘Minchen’ after her German grandmother, I tried it out on her, at first teasingly. Too often, perhaps, because at a certain point I couldn’t shake it off my tongue. She has remained Minchen to this day.

  Meanwhile … something was not right, something that could well backfire one day. Too young. Just turned twenty. She hadn’t, to put it officially, had time to sow her wild oats. One day she would realise that she’d spent her youth with only me … and that there were some secret things she had never been able to make the most of …

  I couldn’t just put the brakes on the restless life I’d been leading for all these years. Amsterdam meant loafing around, sleeping in, accomplishing little. The discomfort of travelling spurred me to labour. I wrote in night trains, in the cubbyhole of an illegal hostel, on draughty train platforms, seated between two pallets jam-packed with chicks: an uncommon late-evening serenade.

  In January 1980, I took a train to Naples, and from there a boat to Ischia. Arriving back at Amsterdam Central Station in February, I made the acquaintance of the paralysis that would overwhelm Miriam after a long absence (a repeat of the farewell-paralysis of a month earlier). It could have something to do with the fear of abandonment that permanently plagued her family, compliments of recent European history.

  In late March of that year, I left for Calabria. Starting in the toe of Italy’s boot, I travelled northwards along the coast, investigating every village until I found a enchantingly tiled hotel room in Positano, on the Amalfi coast. I thought: This is the place. Every telephone call to Miriam cost me ten thousand lire.

  ‘Minchen, I’ll come get you at the end of May. Then we’ll stay here for another month.’

  Was it only about working in seclusion? Or did I, even then, want to view my happiness from time to time from a distance, preferably through reversed binoculars? Whatever the case, it later became a routine.

  When I think back on myself in those days … Always busy with those massive manuscripts. All for her. The conceit and vanity did not end with the written and printed word. The young writer wanted to live better per book. He undertook a long march through the architecture of desirable locations, to the palazzo, the country estate, the Spanish castle. I pulled out all the stops for her, but apparently did something wrong. I went over the top. It flustered her, like the child who sees an oversized stuffed bear emerge from the wrapping paper.

  With her around, I could do anything. Miriam was a muse down to the smallest domestic detail. Without her contribution we would have never had a better house. She was a master key that opened all doors.

  She saw to it that I finished what I started, just by being there. (More than that wasn’t necessary.) But having a child — that was out of the question. I could plead and pray as much as I wanted.

  ‘I’m still young, aren’t I? How about letting me finish my degree first?’

  Although the doctors couldn’t find anything, I felt sick and exhausted and, like Mozart on his deathbed, ‘the taste of death was on my tongue’. Transferring life into a child gradually become an obsession. Sure, she commiserated, but even if I were to drop dead at her feet, she would not give in.

  11

  In the spring of 1982, strolling through Vondelpark, we occasionally came upon a young woman I knew by sight, and who apparently recognised me as well. She was pushing a pram and quite emphatically greeted me, not Miriam. Her name eluded me, but I concluded that I must have known her from my student days in Nijmegen. Maybe we had lived in the same block of student housing. It was the baby carriage that did it for me. At one of these chance meetings, seated next to Miriam on a park bench, I saw how the nameless acquaintance bent lovingly over the baby, which was hidden from our view, and stuck her hand under the canopy to rearrange something. I can’t rule out that she had intentionally stopped in front of our bench to strike up a conversation that didn’t materialise. She nodded at me, smiling, and went on her way, clearly on cloud nine.

  Once the woman was out of earshot, it all spilled out: what a wrung-out dishrag I felt the past year-and-a-half, much worse than I had dared admit up until now, and how an unbearable physical urge to become a father was growing in me. Despite my debilitating fatigue, the belief had arisen that a child would rejuvenate me.

  ‘If that’s really how you feel,’ said Miriam, ‘then it’s the worst possible reason to become a father.’

  I knew that. But I kept at it — until a year later, again in the spring, my health began to improve, and the dips into hellish exhaustion became ever more infrequent. After turning in a manuscript at the publisher on 1 September, I cycled past my house, towards the Amstel. I followed the river all the way to Ouderkerk, kept cycling, and allowed myself to stray into uncharted territory, somewhere where woods meets meadow. Suddenly I realised: I’m better. There wasn’t even a trace of the old tiredness in me.

  Still, it wasn’t until 1987, four years later, that I dared to pester Miriam again with what is called ‘wants children’ in newspaper personals.

  My yearning for progeny was as powerful as my fear of it. This was the kind of dilemma that makes for a good film or novel. My wanting a child was paralysingly on par with the fear of losing it.

  12

  In early May ’87, with summer in sight, I left for the Provence to work out a new idea for a novel (Advocaat van de Hanen). I still had the need to ‘view my happiness from a distance’ occasionally, but did make a deal with Miriam that she would join me a month later.

  On the train to Paris, I read a newspaper advertisement for a country house near Aix-en-Provence, available for rent during the summer months. I phoned the number immediately upon arriving in Paris. The woman who answered the phone turned out to be Dutch: Anneke, married to a French singer who specialised in Provençal folksong. Yes, I could rent part of the house. I took an option for June and July, and promised to ring her once I had arrived in the south.

  After a few days in Paris, I took the TGV to Arles. Miriam and I had been there the year before. One day, I escaped the blistering heat, taking refuge in the refreshingly cool and quiet old library in the centre of town. There, and nowhere else, would I spend the coming months transforming the documentation I’d dragged with me into a first version of the book.

  Every morning, I walked from my hotel at the foot of the amphitheatre to the library on the main square. I worked. I observed my happiness from a distance. I looked forward to Miriam’s arrival.

  In mid-May, I took the train via Aix to Marseille, where Anneke came to fetch me by car. The blonde woman in the light-blue pantsuit was young. Ten years earlier, still a teenager, she had met her folk singer, twenty years her senior, at the Avignon Festival, where he was performing his Provençal songs. By now they had two young sons.

  Their house, Villa Tagora, was situated in what was called the ‘green zone’, but which, under the southern springtime sun, had already lost much of its colour, and looked dusty, almost arid. The grounds surrounding Villa Tagora were overgrown, with tunnels formed by intertwining thornbush, like rolls of rusty barbed wire. But it also smelt vividly of lavender — a purple field full of white butterflies. The cicadas added to the silence just the sound that went with this heat. The two mouse-grey cats that stalked through the long grass wo
uld distract Miriam from the weeds. I paid Anneke the deposit for the apartment annex, which consisted of two rooms and a bathroom that also housed the fridge and gas cooker. June and July were guaranteed, but just to be on the safe side I took out an option for August as well.

  At the end of May, I went to Paris to meet up with Miriam. Gare du Nord. She stepped out of the drab train wearing a summer dress I did not recognise. A surge of infatuation — so that’s what studying your own happiness from a distance was good for. First to the hotel, then lunch on the steamy sidewalk of the Boulevard St. Germain, just outside the shadow of the awning.

  Two days later, the TGV to Arles. At the beginning of June we settled into Villa Tagora. Blissful weeks largely spent in the shade of the neglected garden. Talking, thinking. Reading, writing. When the afternoons became too sultry, we would retire to the bedroom for some languid love-making, ending in a siesta. The blue bedsheets, apparently not very colourfast, became batiked by all the sour sweat we produced in that heat.

  13

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Miriam said one of those afternoons, when I propped myself on one elbow in preparation to jack myself up to a vertical position.

  ‘Oh, nothing, just a little mind game. Tomorrow we’ll probably lie here like this again. Enjoy the tingling while it lasts. But just imagine a world in which a person was only allowed to perform this … mating act, as they call it in the nature films … just once. No second chance. That one time, it would have to embody everything. Love, tenderness. A whole human life in one discharge … Because of its intensity, weaker specimens wouldn’t stand a chance of survival. May I speak to the man of the house? No, I’m sorry, he can’t come to the telephone. You see, it’s like this … sir ejaculated yesterday, and is now confined to his bed for the next fortnight at least.’

  ‘Don’t forget fertilisation,’ said Miriam. ‘That’s also got to be bang on that one time, otherwise the poor little species will die out in no time.’

  I made a note of this mad notion, and then promptly forgot it. Coming across the sheet of paper later, I saw that the entire conversation had been summarised thus: ‘one-day world, one-day people.’

  In the morning, when it wasn’t so hot, we would occasionally walk down the lane to a suburb of Aix, where we caught the bus to the city centre to have lunch and do some shopping. On the way back we would stop at our favourite supermarket for gourmandises that Miriam would only have to heat up for dinner. That is how it went on 29 June, but the next day it was too hot to walk along the searing asphalt. Supplies needn’t be replenished, and there was still half a portion of boeuf à la Normande with pâtes fraiches from the previous evening (what a life). We stayed put in Villa Tagora.

  What does a historic day in the life of two lovers look like? Not sensationally remarkable, in this particular case. In my diary, I wrote that on Tuesday, 30 June 1987 we had taken breakfast in the garden at about a quarter after nine. ‘We watch the hornets and butterflies flit from one cone-shaped purple flower to the next. The (white) butterflies remind me of white-jacketed lab assistants going from flask to flask with a pointy pipette. At 9:30 I sit down to work at my small military-invalid table in the shadow of the terrace. Documentation folder Hans K. Notes for Advocaat …’

  At around midday, I took a walk in the surrounding open fields. Squatting down on a gently rolling, thicketed hillock under the murderous sun, the whole intrigue for the new novel fell into place. Without pen and paper, I simply had to stay sitting there, risking sunstroke, until the plot had been worked out in its entirety.

  Not that this point made the day such a historic one per se. I mentioned two lovers.

  Overcome by the heat, I walked back to the house, where I scribbled everything down, obstructed by a swarm of mouches volantes between my eyes and the paper. I then drank, out of euphoria or to reward myself, nearly a litre of wine at lunch, after which Miriam and I retired to the bedroom-sauna. We woke from a deep sleep only at half past five. Miriam had dreamt about sharks.

  Out in the shade, I wrote some letters until Gijs, or Gregory, came over to chat. Gijs was an actor and musician from Amsterdam, who, under the nom d’artiste Gregory, had built a career in France. Thanks to his coppery red hair (and his accent), he was cast as Vincent van Gogh in a television series on the painter’s life. He married a local politician, and accordingly wound up in Marseilles, where, having appeared on regional broadcasters, he was becoming something of a local celebrity. Additionally he served as the regular accompanist, on guitar and accordion, of Jean Nehr, the Provençal singer. He had come to Villa Tagora to rehearse with Jean for a series of performances. They were planning to record an album soon.

  Gregory, so he told me, missed Amsterdam. Whenever he got the chance to go back, no matter how briefly, he would make a beeline for the pool hall above the Hema on the Ferdinand Bolstraat, where he had played since his youth. He promised to bring me one of his LPs the next time he was in Amsterdam. ‘If I send one by post, there’s a good chance the package’ll sit in an overheated van in the sun and arrive at your door two days later as a warped liquorice pancake.’

  With that, he disappeared into an annex behind the house for his rehearsal. Soon we could hear a guitar being tuned. Since we had promised to pay the rent for the upcoming period on the last day of the month, I asked Miriam to take Anneke the money. She was gone for some time: Anneke would never pass up the chance of a chat in her mother tongue. I sat at the small table on the terrace, drinking Pays du Var wine from a cardboard carton, listening to Gregory’s melancholy accordion, which more or less drowned out Jean’s unamplified voice. Miriam’s absence made me impatient (I wanted to share with her my story of the novel’s plot that had come to me in a brainwave under the scorching midday sun), and at the same time I hoped she’d be away there a while (perhaps I was aware that there was something false and dangerous about my euphoria). The moon, melon-coloured and surreally large, appeared on the horizon. The music, the wine, the moon — what more could a person ask for?

  ‘Empty.’ Miriam shook the wine carton; there was nothing left to slosh about. ‘Where do you put it, for heaven’s sake?’

  More wine with dinner. The musicians must have opened a window or door, for Jean’s voice now reached us; even the words were clear. He sang, as far as I could tell, a doleful song about ill-fated love. Gregory accompanied him on the mandolin. The music was moving and extremely melancholic.

  I tried to relate the intrigue of my Advocaat to Miriam. Maybe the copper-headed punk, in teamwork with the plot, had rammed my head full of sunstroke: I couldn’t make a sensible yarn of it, but Miriam expressed her enthusiasm for my progress, even if it was hazardous to my health.

  The next number, with Gregory back on the accordion, was in a completely unintelligible Occitan dialect. Judging from the profoundly minor-key melody, the text described an even more tragic love than the previous one. During the coffee and cognac, I heard myself suddenly broach an old subject. It hadn’t been brought up in so long that it seemed to be weighed down by a heavy taboo.

  14

  A child. The child. Our child.

  ‘Minchen, I haven’t brought up you-know-what in ages. The hush-hush subject.’

  If — past difficulties on this issue at the back of my mind — I was trying to raise the subject a bit teasingly, cloak it in light-heartedness, then I apparently did not succeed. Perhaps I had been too ebulliant all evening for yet more banter.

  ‘Of course I want a child,’ Miriam said. ‘But I also want to achieve something. Do something.’

  Just like that, all of a sudden. She didn’t give in entirely, but this was the first time she openly acknowledged her own desire. I was buoyed. Now just stay the course.

  ‘I’d say … have the child first. Finish your studies during pregnancy, get on top of your writing and all … and once you’re past the breast-feeding period, get a job. I’ll look after
the little one during the day.’

  Aside from the moon, the only source of light was a candle on the small dining table. Although Miriam did her best to lean back, the flame still illuminated her tears. The candle stem was, for some reason, decorated with strawberries.

  ‘Of course I’d like it,’ she said. ‘But I’m so afraid … so afraid that everything, taking care of him, will end up on my shoulders. Especially when you’re stressed out by a new book or something. Just try to understand that.’

  Now she was crying for real. Between the wails I could hear Jean Nehr singing a cappella and nearly bursting out laughing in the process.

  ‘The cooking, Minchen, the washing up, I shamelessly leave that all to you when it suits me. But raising a child … that’s something else entirely. Responsibilities. Trust me.’

  ‘Adri, I don’t want my life to end once I’ve had a child. I have to achieve something. So …’ (with a comically pleading voice) ‘promise you’ll help out?’

  I gave her my word, in all sincerity, while at the same time my heart skipped a beat. Responsibilities. Miriam sat up next to me, rubbing her face with both hands. She sniffled a bit more and then said: ‘We could try as soon as the end of July.’

  ‘And if we waited another month? End of August?’ I can’t rule out that I was already backpedalling. ‘I want to get myself cleaned up a bit inside. Lot of poison been put through the ol’ system lately.’

  ‘Then I’ll quit smoking,’ Miriam said. ‘End of July, no, then it’ll be an April baby. That’s no good. Rather May or June.’

  We sat in silence for a while, hand in hand, each with our own thoughts, listening to the drawn-out sighs of Gregory’s accordion and Jean’s nasal vocals. The organisation of my life suddenly stretched out before me in a different, more rigid configuration than I was accustomed to up until now. Not unappealing, although something like nostalgia began to hum inside me as well. I would, for starters, finish all open projects during Miriam’s pregnancy. I would expel all the scoria and sluggishness from my blood, and restore my youth to its former glory, despite my impending fatherhood.