Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  There was no avoiding this portrait gallery when you left the WC. I don’t remember exactly how it got started — it had been years earlier — but from a certain, indefinable moment, I could not look at these photos with the usual tenderness. I wondered if it was because of the panda that had hung there between two small portraits of Tonio ever since his graduation in 2006.

  16

  As I am about to step from the landing onto the top tread, I hear Tonio and Merel’s voices coming from the bathroom. The door is ajar. Involuntarily I stop and listen. The silence is broken by the tinkle of a child’s pee.

  ‘When I’m done,’ says Tonio, ‘then it’s your turn. I’m not going to flush first, ’cause that’s bad for the environment. We have to think of the environment. Now you, Merel.’

  The seat is lowered with a thwap. Again the sound of child’s pee, augmented with that special gurgle which is the sole domain of girls.

  ‘Two pees without flushing,’ says Tonio, ‘is better for the environment. When you’re finished, you can go ahead and flush. Then it’s still good for the environment. Right, Merel?’

  A little embarrassed, I continue downstairs. I have the impression that environmental concern is not the basis for Tonio and Merel being together in the bathroom, although it does certainly benefit from it.

  It must be around the same time, early spring, that Tonio presents his mother with a curious maths problem. Merel stands next to him, giggling.

  ‘Okay, Mum, if I got Merel pregnant, how long exactly would it take for the baby to come?’

  Miriam believes her sexual education has fallen short, and starts explaining: ‘Well, you have to consider roughly …’

  ‘No, we want to know exactly,’ Tonio interrupts impatiently, ‘because we want the baby to be born exactly on New Year’s Eve. Right, Merel?’

  Whenever Merel is bashful, and doesn’t dare laugh out loud, her cheeks puff up like a hamster’s. Her lips, already full, jut out even more, and she hooks her pinkies, as though to test their opposing strength. She nods vehemently. ‘Yes,’ she says, almost inaudibly and, for the occasion, with a low, boyish voice, ‘that’s what we’d like to know.’

  17

  We celebrated Tonio’s eighteenth birthday on 15 June 2006. By late afternoon — it was a sunny day — the guests started trickling in, one by one or in small groups. One of these days, maybe tomorrow, the Ignatius final exam results would be announced, but the party mood forced the butterflies about the test results to the background. Tonio no longer a minor … unbelievable. Each time he left the room, and Miriam called him back to open the next present, I fully expected to see the child I knew so much better than the adult he now was. His late baby fat hadn’t entirely disappeared yet, and although he still had that gawky posture he didn’t attack the gift-wrapping, like an excited puppy, the way he used to. Everything he now carefully unwrapped and held in his hands was greeted with a satisfied grin.

  The phone rang for the umpteenth time. Miriam answered.

  ‘Tonio, for you.’

  He put down the latest gift (a light meter, a notch up from his present one) with the rest of the presents on the mantelpiece and took the receiver. The company chatted away, but I kept one ear tuned in to Tonio’s call.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ he said. ‘How did you know it was my birthday?’ And a moment later: ‘Oh, that. Of course. I guess that slipped my mind today.’

  Something in his voice, a shrill exclamation, maybe, made the room fall silent. ‘Yes, thanks.’ He hung up and turned around. ‘My form teacher,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I thought he called to wish me a happy birthday. But … uh … it looks like I’ve passed my exams.’

  For the next half hour, the three of us forgot our guests entirely — no, they simply did not exist. Tonio and I sat on the sofa, arms around each other’s shoulders. Miriam knelt in front, her bosom resting on our knees, and her hands nearly reaching our backs.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ she kept saying, in tears. ‘We’ve done it, the three of us. How great, how great, oh how great. This, this moment, we have to hang onto it. Forever.’

  And I, wanker that I am, let it happen. I just sat there with a throat like a wrung-out dishrag, and let Miriam do all the talking. Tonio wavered, his face taut, between keeping a distance and giving in. Fighting back the tears, as they say. The way he looked at Miriam, awkwardly trying to read our feelings, he reminded me of the five-year-old kid who stood in front of me at the cremation of his grandfather, speechlessly observing the tears and uncontrolled twitches on my face, not sure whether he should try to comfort his father or cry, too.

  Forget it, today was his eighteenth birthday. The guests could all look the other way in courteous silence — but they wouldn’t see him snivel, no fucking way.

  Just as Tonio was exercising an old Dutch tradition by hanging his schoolbag on the flagpole out on the balcony, adorned with a kite-tail made from used notebooks, his old sweetheart Merel came cycling by. I couldn’t see her from the sofa, but recognised her voice.

  ‘Congratulations!’ she called out.

  ‘Yeah, thanks … thanks!’ he shouted back.

  That was all. He came back inside.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Miriam.

  ‘Oh … just Merel.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked her in?’

  Tonio shrugged his shoulders. Something in his expression, the corners of his eyes and mouth, betrayed a certain insecurity: yes, maybe he should have done. ‘Merel also did her final exams,’ he said evasively.

  God, Tonio, the love of your life all those years. Cruel children: cruel to each other, cruel to themselves.

  18

  If he played in my workroom, Tonio would often come stand behind me and peer over my shoulder, reading what I was writing or had just written. He sometimes asked what it all meant, but, as I explained it, his thoughts usually drifted back downstairs to his Warhammer armies and half-built K’Nex towers. Once he recognised his name, and his parents’, in a freshly written paragraph.

  ‘Is it about us?’

  I explained that it was a diary entry. (In those days, I kept a typed diary on loose sheets of paper.) He thought it was pretty weird. Later that day, I took him aside. ‘When you turn eighteen, Tonio, I’ll give you a book with the notes I made throughout your life. About your birth and all sorts of things you’ve forgotten, or never knew, or will remember once you’ve read them … I’ll make a really cracking book out of it.’

  Tonio looked at me briefly, not unobligingly, and said: ‘Oh, great.’ And off he ran.

  On his eighteenth birthday, the day that coincided with his exam results, I did not have the promised folder, or book, ready to give him. Nor did he ask for it. Of course he didn’t: his life did not need to be written down; it had to be lived. Certainly from that moment on.

  ‘Oh, great.’ Writing out the original, telegram-style scribbles in longhand gives me the feeling that I’m making good on an old promise, not so long after his eighteenth birthday. The hideous part is that it’s not enough to provide a record of his birth and the ensuing childhood years. I cannot avoid an account of his last day. What I had wanted to give him was a book with an open end. Now, it runs the danger of becoming over-complete.

  19

  The graduation ceremony was, thanks to the summery weather, held outdoors. The abundant sunlight made the glassy sand particles in the schoolyard’s paving stones glisten.

  The Ignatius. Unlike Miriam, I had not come here often. All those PTA evenings — what right did I have, actually, to leave them to her? Yes, that one time with the combustion engine, I was there then. Perhaps it was the presence of his father that made Tonio, initially paralysed with nerves, grow in his role so quickly. In his determination to explain everything, he came across as a bit pedantic, but endearingly so.

  I thought of William Fa
ulkner, hammering away at a typewriter in his study, Rhapsody in Blue on the record player, whisky within reach, and his daughter in the doorway, begging her father to come to the school’s PTA family evening. No, honey, out of the question. Daddy has to catch up with Shakespeare, and he’s got a long way to go yet. Another time, sweetheart.

  I was so damned chuffed, there in that schoolyard, that Tonio had graduated from the gymnasium. It was not the shadow of my own body that lay at my feet — no, it was pure pride, sharply outlined against the grey paving stones. I was too high from the whole thing to consider whether I really deserved that pride.

  Each graduate was called forward and got a personal word of congratulations from his mentor. It went in alphabetical order. Although Tonio wasn’t at the end of the alphabet, he became restless. At first he had laughed out loud at the various form teachers’ wisecracks, but now even his smile had started to fade. Finally it was his turn to be handed his diploma. Miriam and I pushed our way up front.

  Tonio’s mentor (his biology teacher) had, in his speeches, assigned an animal to each of his charges. He handed Tonio a framed photo collage that included a portrait of Tonio in 2000, his first year in the class (short hair and glasses); a portrait of him in 2006, shortly before his exams (long hair, no glasses); and in between them, a photo of a giant panda.

  ‘… Tonio, ladies and gentlemen, has the good-naturedness and cuddle factor of a panda. Inversely, he also shares the panda’s defencelessness and vulnerability, making him a bit of a pushover …’

  Fortunately, I will never forget it, because with the sun’s help it was burned into my memory: how Tonio, slightly dizzy, meandered toward us through the tightly packed crowd, his diploma and the panda under his arm. We embraced him again, this time more ceremoniously. He pulled a face that seemed to say: Was that everything? It was already behind him. I recalled my own post-graduation lustrelessness of 1 June 1969.

  Miriam asked him how he liked the speech. Tonio wiggled his hands: so-so. Pushing it. He didn’t fancy being branded as good-natured and defenceless — no way, that wasn’t him at all.

  ‘Cuddle factor, okay,’ he said with a grimace. ‘You can always shake it off.’

  His eyes wandered restlessly toward a couple of ex-classmates, who beckoned him. He handed us the diploma and panda collage for safekeeping. ‘I was going to hit a few parties with the guys.’

  ‘Been invited?’

  ‘Don’t have to be.’

  ‘D’you remember when you gave that party three years ago, you and your friends kicked out a few party crashers? There was a police car at the door when Miriam and I got home.’

  ‘And we didn’t even need them by then,’ he said. ‘Who says I’m defenceless?’*

  [* Author’s note: After having written this paragraph yesterday, this morning’s paper (25 August 2010) sported two front-page photos of a newborn giant panda. The first photo, taken from a CCTV image, showed mother Yang Yang with the cub in her mouth. It is so tiny that at first glance you think of a premature foetus. The second picture shows Yang Yang, with her front paw, cradling the resting minuscule creature. Caption: ‘Giant pandas are seldom born in captivity in Europe.’ The mother, her sad eyes sunk in pools of runny mascara, looks up at the camera.]

  20

  So as not to rub Tonio the wrong way, Miriam did not add ‘the three pandas’ to the portrait gallery right away, but from the very first day the collage did hang on the landing, months later, it seemed (to me, at least) that the biology teacher’s ‘defenceless’ pronouncement has started to seep onto the adjacent photos. It wasn’t like I wanted to admonish Tonio not to ‘let them walk all over you’ every time I left the toilet. It went deeper than that. What I saw in passing, or thought I saw, even out of the corner of my eye, was a glimpse of a vulnerable life.

  I also had this with snapshots of murdered children, like those shown in missing-person programmes on TV. Rowena Rickers, the Nulde girl who had been chopped in pieces … The sisters from Zoetermeer, whose father smothered them with a pillow … Despite the trust with which they looked into the camera, I believed I read a premonition of the inevitable, their gruesome deaths, in their laughing eyes. Of course, you could label it as 20/20 hindsight. But maybe a projection, like a magnifying glass or an X-ray, makes visible something that has previously gone unnoticed.

  So what was it about that unmistakable vulnerability I observed — over so many different periods! — on Tonio’s face? I noticed it as much under the impudent brim of the cap between Merel and Iris as behind the nerdy Dorus glasses. How could my original fondness for those photos have been transformed into permanent anxiety?

  Late last year, I caught myself opting more and more for the upstairs toilet, in the bathroom, rather than the small downstairs WC. The alternative route was also lined with photos, but less unnerving ones (even though the one of Sailor Vos* in Café Zwart, preparing to fly at a friend of mine from Berlin, was certainly not exactly comforting). The odd time I did use the downstairs WC, I always found an excuse to allow my gaze to glide over the photos without really looking at them.

  [* A pet name of a local celebrity.]

  Now. As I stood looking over the balustrade, I forced myself to turn with a jerk and face the wall of photographs. What had I expected? Now that Tonio had today shown his most vulnerable side, the spine-chilling defencelessness was still fully visible in his photographed face, no longer as a premonition or potential danger, but as a confirmation — and that changed in one fell swoop the aspect of the entire portrait gallery. He was dead.

  21

  Tonio was four when we moved. In the fall he’d start school at the Schreuder Institute. Holding back time (or, for me, the contrived attempts at it) was a thing of the past. We had now found the ideal fortress from which we could give Tonio the freedom, little by little, to educate himself for future — a fortress we could drag him back into at any given moment.

  The movers had left. Horsehair blankets still covered the furniture, and everywhere low walls had been erected out of moving boxes: almost a familiar sight, considering that some of them had remained unpacked during the two Leidsegracht years.

  I was dead beat, as was Miriam. She had managed to improvise a bed for Tonio in the corner of what was to be his room. (It was due for renovation, as the parquet floor had been stomped to splinters by the destructive children of the former owner, H.P. Lolkema, nicknamed Mr Horsepower.) I went in to check on him. He had lain half uncovered, surrounded by his various security blankets arranged in top-secret order, and in the middle of it all swam a rubber ducky. The dummy had tumbled out of his mouth, and lay on the pillowcase, still stuck to his lower lip.

  I had done a decent job of steering him through stormy waters to this bastion of security. He was safe, and apparently was not visited by nightmares. Once things were unpacked and more or less in place, we would tackle Tonio’s room. Order a bunk bed next week, for starters, for the slumber parties he was so looking forward to organising.

  ‘Night, kiddo,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t let the alien walls give you a fright in the morning.’

  I went back to the balcony at the rear of the same storey. Miriam was flopped in a folding chair, with Cypri on her lap, who, after an initial reconnaissance of the house, also had to give in to fatigue.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ I said. ‘So peaceful.’

  22

  Mr Horsepower hadn’t bequeathed us just any old ‘ding-dong’ doorbell. It was a complete carillon, with tubes of various lengths that sent its message soaring up to the furthest reaches of the house. The violence of the chimes hadn’t been so noticeable before, but now, in the stillness of the move, we jumped out of our skin. Someone must be holding his finger on the button, because it sounded like the Munt Tower on the hour, only without a melody. We both sprang to our feet.

  ‘We’re getting rid of that doorbell,’ Miriam said. ‘It g
ives Tonio the “fries of his life”, as he puts it.’

  When the chiming subsided, we both pricked up our ears to hear if Tonio had woken up. No, not a peep. To prevent another round of bells, I ran to the intercom. ‘Hello?’ It was Mr Rat, whose crackly voice announced that he’d come ‘to consecrate the new house’.

  Trouble already.

  My patience with people had already started to wane before we went to live in the Veluwe. In retrospect, I was surprised by how, ten years before, I’d blindly trusted pretty much everyone. If that trust got breached, I’d take it from there. I kept an open house, but I learned the hard way. Time and again, I would allow dubious characters to come nosing about, and then knead their findings into the kind of story they felt worth relaying to others. I was naïve enough to be flabbergasted by the versions that eventually reached my own ears.

  I had bought the house on the Johannes Verhulststraat from a retired porn boss. The basement was his warehouse; the shelves left behind by the wine wholesaler Leuchtmann came in handy. The neighbours sighed with relief to see the end of the delivery vans with tinted windows. Once the papers had been signed, I set off for my regular café, where the news had already been making the rounds that ‘Adri had taken over a chic brothel in Zuid’. I kind of liked this sort of grotesque gossip, as opposed to the systematic bad-mouthing that had no other aim than to injure the subject.

  The moving boxes weren’t even unpacked yet, but Mr Rat, accompanied by his fiancée, a Miss Piggy lookalike, were of the opinion that any further delay in sniffing out the new premises would be irresponsible. Maybe they had picked up some of that ‘chic brothel’ chitchat.

  ‘We’ve come to inaugurate the house,’ he said, handing Miriam a bottle of white wine, which had been thoughtfully wrapped in aluminium foil to keep it cold. ‘God, Adri, you look beat.’

  Well, yes, I hadn’t got much shuteye the previous night, as so much still needed to be packed. But my hospitality got the better of my sleepiness. We sat out on the balcony, and I opened the bottle.