Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  We reminisced. Some of our memories caused us to fall silent, but not for long. We ironed out a few past misunderstandings. And the steak wasn’t bad at all. The fries, too, had the expected Flemish knottiness.

  After a longer silence, when melancholy got the upper hand, Miriam told Tonio that what she missed most since he’d left home was their Sunday shopping outings. Her eyes glistened. Tonio looked down at his plate. The upshot was that they agreed to go shopping, on a Sunday of course, for a watch he’d set his sights on, and whose price had already been approved at the time of his graduation.

  Miriam: ‘A week from Sunday?’

  Tonio: ‘Deal.’

  Miriam: ‘And afterwards, patat on the Voetboogstraat. Like the old days.’

  Tonio: ‘Deal.’

  At around midnight we called a taxi. Tonio said he wanted to check back at the Atrium café. Who knows, maybe he would bump into one of his classmates, who could fill him in on what went wrong. The taxi driver came in to let us know he was parked on the corner. Tonio refused to be dropped off at the Binnengasthuis: ‘Ridiculously close by.’

  On the way to the taxi, I thought Tonio might need some extra cash for a the rest of the evening: he still had all night ahead of him, and would probably miss the last tram. I’d spring for a taxi. I turned toward him. He needed to go the same way we did, but strangely enough lingered a bit in the doorway of the pub. I let Miriam go on ahead and hurried back to him, a fifty-euro note folded between my fingers. Instead of giving it to him I let it loose in the pocket of my raincoat, and threw my arms around him.

  I didn’t quite understand this unexpected gesture myself. He and I, we only really hugged on his or my birthday, with Miriam as the sole onlooker. I gave him three big kisses on his stubbly cheeks, and said: ‘I’m glad it worked out this way.’

  In order to spare him any more of my emotions, I hurried off. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his shy grin in reaction to my embrace.

  I slipped onto the back seat beside Miriam and the taxi headed down the Nieuwe Doelenstraat towards Muntplein. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my raincoat and felt the bill, folded into quarters. ‘Oh, damn, I still forgot to slip him something extra.’

  I looked back through the rear window, but Tonio was already out of sight.

  ‘He’ll manage,’ Miriam said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Our little boy’

  there’s a puddle of blood to show the photographer

  a typewriter ribbon to change, the house to shuck off

  — Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still’

  1

  Underneath the clock (five o’clock), the blonde woman appeared — the one who, during the course of the day, we had come to regard as our personal nurse.

  ‘Your son has been brought from the OR to the ICU,’ she said. ‘I can bring you to him now, if you want to say your goodbyes.’

  I pulled Miriam up by the arm. She took a few wobbly steps, as though drunk with sleep.

  ‘Is it okay if I don’t go with you?’ Hinde asked. She stood up, too, with panic in her eyes. ‘I can’t face it.’

  ‘All you have to do is wait for us here,’ I said.

  We followed the nurse into the corridor. Left turn. I held Miriam tight, my arm around her waist, so that we could only take small steps. Goodbyes. The day after our dinner at ’t Staaltje, she and Tonio exchanged text messages: sure enough, he had missed an email informing them of a change of venue for the student-parent dinner. Miriam texted back that it was a lucky thing, that misunderstanding, because we had had a terrific evening together. That much was ours forever.

  At the next junction in the corridor we took a right. It must have been busy in the ICU, because in a biggish niche there was a bed in which a woman lay motionless. Her jet-black hair was spread out loosely over the pillow, covering it almost entirely. An Indian (or, in any case, Hindustani: the women wore a dot on the forehead) family sat at the bedside. They sat stoically on stools, elbows on the bedcovers, never taking their eyes off the patient, who appeared to be in a coma.

  What kind of impulse was it that made me hug Tonio so emphatically last Friday, right there on a street corner? I could now claim I was saying my goodbyes, then and there, to the living Tonio, but that would mean I had had some kind of premonition, like louche stock-exchange traders acted on foreknowledge of imminent market fluctuations.

  The nurse walked with a calm tread, so that we, with our fused bodies, had no trouble keeping up with her. She turned to us as we walked, and said: ‘We’ve had to improvise a bit with the space, but … well, you’ll see him shortly. He’s still on the ventilator.’

  I pulled Miriam against me even harder, suddenly afraid that my common sense might fail me. I was worried that I’d grab the first doctor I saw and yell: ‘You and your fancy machines … Don’t stop now! Do whatever it takes! Keep him alive!’

  That I’d demand the number of one or another medical ethics committee … call up the chairman of the Society for Intensive Care: ‘He’s still alive! Don’t let them pull the plug!’

  That primitive instincts would get the better of me, like the mother gnu on National Geographic. She kept returning to her dead calf to fend off the pack of hyenas lingering nearby …

  The nurse stopped at a light-yellow nylon curtain strung between two pillars on opposite sides of the corridor. She pulled aside one of the flaps. ‘Here we are.’

  2

  There, somewhere, I must have let go of Miriam — perhaps because the opening was too narrow for both of us. I took a step forward, and another. All at once I was standing in the middle of a sort of peakless tent, draped on three sides with the same nylon fabric, like the kind of shower curtain that always stuck to your body. On the fourth side, a few metres behind the hospital bed, was a large window. The bed was positioned with its head on the left.

  It really was him. In that bed lay Tonio. Our son. So it had not been a misunderstanding when they came to tell us they were busy with him in the OR. Had I secretly hoped, deep down, that it would be a case of an identity mix-up amid the nighttime chaos? Forget it. This was Tonio. Our own, unmistakable Tonio.

  I reached to the side, behind me, but my arm mowed through thin air. Miriam — where was Miriam? I looked back in the direction we came from. In the corner of the yellow tent, next to one of the pillars, Miriam sat on a low stool, supported by two nurses, as though they were forcing her down, to keep her from witnessing the terrible scene from close by. A dripping glass of water hung in the free hand of one of the nurses. Miriam, tears and trepidation in her eyes, made a move as if to stand up, to free herself from the grip of the caring hands. They let go.

  We shuffled over to the bed. Miriam took my hand, squeezed it.

  ‘Just look at him, our sweet Tonio,’ she whispered, almost without crying. ‘Such a sweet boy … Adri, this can’t be happening.’

  It had been years since I’d had this reaction. The sight of Tonio, as a child, banging into something, his head bashing against the corner of a table, always sent shivers over my scrotum. I never did look into whether this was a natural reaction, meant to protect the sperm for the eventuality of a replacement heir, but in any case the bottom of my scrotum scrunched up so that the testicles were tangibly pulled upwards. The last time this had happened was not when I’d witnessed Tonio injure himself, but afterward, upon seeing his wounds. A friend of ours on the Apollolaan had seen Tonio’s schoolbag, dangling from the handlebars, get caught in the spokes of the front wheel on his way home from school. Tonio had done a complete frontward somersault. I found him later that day in the living room, covered in scratches, scrapes, and bruises.

  ‘Oh, Tonio … what happened to you?’

  In ’95 he considered his broken wrist a sign of machismo, but only because he had got it on the slick floor of the bumper-cars arena. Now
, with the Apollolaan bike incident, he looked mostly abashed, as though he’d damaged something costly belonging to me. He related the accident, embarrassed and reluctantly, in as few words as possible. (Nor did it become a standard macho story in his repertoire later, when the wounds had long started to heal and itch. Perhaps he realised how vulnerable a cyclist could be in city traffic.)

  The sight of Tonio in the hospital bed brought about the same reaction: a scrotum made of tanned gooseflesh, which had permanently lost its elasticity.

  Of course, we had been warned about his swollen torso, the result of internal bleeding (they had given him one futile transfusion after the other). Nurses had draped the blanket loosely enough around his upper body so that the swollen trunk was less obvious, but once you knew, you saw it anyway.

  They had snipped off his clothing, undoubtedly in the ambulance first thing this morning. His naked shoulders stuck out above the sheet. We shared the same body-hair type. Contrary to the fashion of the day, he did not go in for depilation. (He and his friends sometimes self-mockingly called themselves ‘a bunch of old-fashioned hippies’.) I caressed his collarbone: the pattern of soft hair felt reassuringly familiar.

  His beautiful face was more or less unscathed. We had to make do with the right side — didn’t get to walking around to the other side of the bed. The proud profile. Strong nose and chin. The full lips, which were so good at combining a grin with a smirk. The eyebrows that tended to meet in the middle. The closed eyes, which would never again open and reveal their gold-flecked brown irises.

  How often had I stood watching Tonio as he slept … But this was different. It wasn’t fake-sleep. He wasn’t sleeping, nor had he woken from the dream that was life.

  The mouthpiece of the ventilator device was an innocent light-blue, like a piece of a child’s toy. The regular murmur of the artificial breath, with a hint of a slurping sound, had something comforting about it, like someone in a peaceful slumber. It also reminded me of how he lay sucking on his bottle of watered-down chocolate milk, as in a trance, taking deep breaths through his nose, the inward-looking expression serene and tranquil — just like now.

  Judging from his stubble, Tonio hadn’t shaved since Thursday, when he photographed that girl. A double black-red dotted line of dried blood traced a path straight through the whiskers; it climbed from the neck up over the chin, crossed the mouth, and ended on the upper lip — as meticulously parallel as the stylised rail tracks on a road map. The wound stripe looked rather gentle, in fact, like a benign scratch a daredevil gets when he takes a spill. Oops. Slip-up.

  When he was at that age when children still garble many words, he’d mix up ‘scheren’ (shave) with ‘schreeuwen’ (scream). I often gave Tonio a raspy stubble-kiss just before shaving. He would rub his offended cheek, vexed, and retort, quasi-angry: ‘You have to schreeuw, y’know … you have to schreeuw.’

  Because the homo duplex now pulled out multiple stops at once, I was reminded of a line of poetry by Gerrit Kouwenaar: ‘men moet zijn winter nog sneeuwen’ (‘there is still a winter to snow’). Nearly twenty years ago, Tonio handed me a parallel line.

  Men moet zijn kaken nog schreeuwen. There is still a chin to scream.

  Yes, my son, I still had to scream. It was a wonder that I did not stand here bellowing at the top of my lungs. I leant over to his face and gave him a manly stubble-kiss. The scream, that would come later.

  Had I expected — feared — that Miriam would scream out in agony? Sniffling softly, she kept repeating: ‘Tonio, that sweet boy … just look at him, Adri.’

  Miriam also kissed his cheek. She pulled her head back, and shook it, No. ‘He doesn’t smell like himself. There’s this intense medicinal odour about him … do you smell it?’

  I had already smelled it.

  ‘When I’d bring around his clean laundry,’ she said, ‘and he had just got up, he had that delicious boy-sweat smell about him.’ She caressed his face with the back of her hand. ‘That’s gone now.’

  As a young mother, Miriam claimed to be able to smell when Tonio was coming down with something. ‘Take the dummy out of your mouth … and now breathe out hard.’ She’d sniff his breath. ‘You see? Acetone-breath. I hope you’re not coming down with flu.’

  Then the little fellow would run excitedly to his father and repeat the operation, giving me a blast of his damp breath in my face. ‘I’ve got acetone-breath,’ he’d announce proudly. ‘I might get sick’.

  I never smelled anything other the scent of fresh apples. Soon thereafter he’d be poised theatrically in bed on his knees, his bum up in the air ready to accept the thermometer.

  ‘They’ve shaved him,’ I said.

  To mask the incisions, they had draped a small towel loosely over his head, like a sheik’s headdress but without the diadem. I only now realised they had shaved his head. If he were to wake up, it would have grown perhaps a millimetre or so. I would greet him with: ‘Been to the barber?’ followed immediately by: ‘So now you call an ambulance to take you to your exams …’

  To which he would reply: ‘Jeez. Good day at the typewriter, I see’, which was his standard retort (once coined by his mother) to my bad jokes.

  A small red plastic tower, a kind of chess piece, stuck out of his forehead (or a bit higher; the lack of a hairline made it hard to tell): the drain that had been screwed into his skull to tap fluid from the swollen brain. It made me think of his wrecked brain, which wouldn’t even be able to take in the blandest joke, should he even come out of his coma.

  A youth of sound body and mind. Before he went off to live on his own, Tonio was examined from head to toe: entirely healthy, not the least medical smudge. In the last twenty-four hours of his life, he couldn’t have been more handicapped, both physically and mentally. He could no longer even breathe on his own. Both sides of his brain were irreparably damaged. In God’s name, what had been the point and the purpose of Miriam and me having had such a beautiful boy in our midst for a good twenty-one years, a child whose lust for life kept us in good health and spirits, only to now have to say goodbye to the most critically handicapped creature imaginable, with a life expectancy of nil and whose mental capacity had been reduced to nil?

  All those years of being proud of that handsome and clever individual we two had brought into the world … In the end, it was this terminal wreck I had sired and she had borne for us.

  Time to go. It hit me hard, the thought of having to take this image of Tonio, the way he lay there, with me for the rest of my life. Does one’s final impression make an exclusive claim to legitimacy? I had to fight, on behalf of both Miriam and Tonio, to give the unspoiled version of my son its credibility back.

  I looked around me. Aside from the three of us, there was no one in the yellow tent, but beyond the nylon I could feel the presence of the staff. ‘Minchen, we should go. They’re going to turn off the ventilator.’

  I was shocked by the irreversibility in my words. Turn off meant: until death arrived. Put it off. Now. My brother Frans, Tonio’s only uncle, was still in Spain. He couldn’t get a flight back to Amsterdam any sooner than tomorrow morning. I remember having heard that, in exceptional cases, like when a close relative had to travel far in order to say farewell, they would extend the life-support for an additional twenty-four hours. Longer than that was irresponsible and inhumane. Frans did not require more than that amount of time for a night’s sleep (or sleeplessness), the flight to Schiphol, and a taxi to the AMC. Meanwhile, Tonio would have the chance to … to what? Snap out of his coma and return to the land of the living?

  ‘Our sweet Tonio,’ Miriam said, weeping gently. ‘He was always so nice to everyone.’

  She planted another kiss on his ashen cheek, which only dented under her lips, its elasticity having ebbed away. With one last kiss, on his forehead, her chin grazed the drain.

  It was as though I were now in a hurr
y. I took Miriam by the shoulders from behind and pushed her gently toward the opening in the curtain, back into the corridor.

  3

  Clutching onto Miriam and weak at the knees, I drifted through the corridors of the ICU. It felt as though I had just quarrelled with someone, had lashed out at him, and now, leaving the place of the argument, my knees wobbled as I walked off, in the creeping realisation that I was wrong and might just as well have gotten a clobbering myself.

  We passed the niche with the Hindustani family surrounding the comatose patient, where it appeared that not an elbow had been moved, not a lock of hair shifted. Instead of going to the left we kept on walking, losing our way. It was as though I was pushing that last image of Tonio out in front with my forehead. At the next junction, where I thought we had to turn left, I froze. I dug my fingers into Miriam’s upper arm.

  ‘Minchen, when they turn off the life support … that’s really when we should be at his side. We can’t let him die alone … it feels like betrayal …’

  I spoke agitatedly. We hurried back, past the Hindustani niche, all the way down the hall, and finally found the yellow curtain. Tonio was still connected to the ventilator. At the foot of the bed, monitoring the apparatus, was a nurse. She did not look up when we approached. She was focused on the blue digital lights on the instrument panel, which registered Tonio’s vital functions — as yet still in order. She may have been the one instructed to turn off the ventilator, and our return had taken her by surprise.

  Miriam, not about to be put off by Tonio’s chemical smell, resumed her caressing and kissing his face, whispering things I could not make out. I directed my attention to Tonio’s right hand, which lay inert on the edge of the bed, the fingers curled indifferently between straightened and bent — just a thing that had been put there. The nails were nicked, and with a dark outline of dirt.