Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  5

  Life is all about economy. Supply and demand. Work and pay. Give and take. Barter. Market forces.

  A sharp line separates the world of economy from the realm of fate. There is no point in standing on the economic side of the line, shouting: ‘Tonio is dead! What did I do to deserve this? I invested so much in him … from a warm nest to corn flakes!’

  Each side of the line is governed by entirely different laws. Today, on Whit Monday, it is all about economy. What happened on the other side of the line, in fate’s wasteland, is for now of no consequence, except that a dead body has been transported from that side to this one. The body must be washed, retouched, clothed, boxed, carried, and buried. There is a price list, complete with colour photos.

  The funeral home sent an elegantly dressed woman, in no way your gloomy female mortician. She appeared to be touched by a grief we did not even exhibit openly. We sat down with her in the library, the French windows open, awning unfurled. No, not a cremation — a burial.

  ‘I need a place where I can go occasionally,’ said Miriam. ‘Cremation is so absolute.’

  The woman asked what kind of funeral we had in mind.

  ‘As intimate as possible,’ I said. ‘A crowded affair with music and speakers, we couldn’t handle that now. And there’s something else …’

  I related my last conversation with Tonio, last Thursday, when I had complained of the number of funerals that week that I thought I shouldn’t miss.

  ‘So who’s the third?’

  Same old mistake: counting myself into the total. As the eldest of three children, I used to keep an eye on my brother and sister at busy carnival fairgrounds so they didn’t wander off. I would count … one, two … one, two. Sooner or later, panic would set in. Weren’t there three of us? Where was the third? Oh yes, of course, that was me.

  Tonio and I had a good laugh about it last Thursday, over that third mourner. Now, just a few days later, the memory of that blithe conversation was instrumental in the decision to limit the funeral list to immediate family and his two best friends.

  The woman was entirely amenable. She made no effort to talk us into other, more luxurious, options. Miriam had set her sights on a red-brown coffin, a colour she felt suited Tonio. But aside from that, our order was minimal. Book the usual number of pallbearers. No memorial cards. We would write up and send the obituary to the newspapers ourselves. Everyone can organise their own transportation to the cemetery and back to our house, where we would arrange for coffee and sandwiches.

  Miriam had searched the Internet for a small, quiet cemetery, and came up with Begraafplaats Buitenveldert. The woman would inquire into available plots, and would let us know as soon as possible. She didn’t think it would be a problem.

  ‘We’d appreciate it,’ I said, ‘if the location could be kept quiet for now. The obituaries will only appear after the funeral. I might not be quite as big a celebrity as some, but you never know, there might well be a few paparazzi who come up with the idea of shooting a few grief pics.’

  The woman swore secrecy. Considering our sober choices thus far, it was with a certain hesitance that she handed us a photo brochure with the flower arrangements. Miriam chose a Biedermeier composition, if only not to have the coffin entirely bare.

  ‘Maybe some evergreen?’ she asked. ‘People are often taken aback by that gaping hole the coffin has to go in. The pine branches are laid out so that when the coffin is lowered, they bend with it and tend to make the hole less cavernous …’

  Coincidentally or not, I had recently reread Harry Mulisch’s account of the first funeral he attended, from ‘Anecdotes on Death’, which for some forty years I’d considered one of his best pieces of writing. The author was eleven, and was made to wear his Cub Scout uniform to the ceremony, to give it some panache. Mulisch describes how the brother of the dead boy (an accidental death), after the coffin had been lowered, steps too far forward with his handful of sand and sinks through the pine branches into the grave. Crack goes the coffin. The branches spring back. The boy’s father then steps into the grave. He helps his son back out.

  6

  It was just like sitting here with the accountant, discussing our financial situation — perhaps the only difference being that the accountant usually looked more worried than this undertaker. What on earth were we doing? With every provision we agreed to, with every one of her notes, we bought more and more into the slapdash suggestion that Tonio might actually be dead. The show of thoughtfully picking out a cemetery plot, a coffin, six pallbearers, a flower arrangement — we were betraying Tonio at every turn. A duplicity that started the minute we let her in the door. I suddenly had the feeling Tonio was standing behind me, shaking his head — smiling, as though he didn’t know what to make of this deadly serious piece of chamber theatre. We had to put a stop to this, quit embarrassing him. The joke with the long faces had gone far enough.

  We couldn’t allow the woman to leave. Once the door closed behind her, she would set the whole machinery of her company in motion. With each turn of a cog, Tonio’s death would inch closer, and eventually, if we didn’t watch out, would even be a fact.

  7

  ‘Evergreen around the grave,’ I said, ‘is only going to make me think of that Mulisch anecdote. The thought that he would be the next one, in his cub scout uniform, to step into that hole … No, no springy pine branches, thanks.’

  ‘Understood.’ The woman smiled. ‘And will you want to make use of the chapel … for music, a eulogy?’

  ‘I’m planning to say a brief word at the grave,’ I answered. ‘That’s all. We want to keep it short and sober. Maybe that’s most in keeping with the spirit of the deceased. Even though we never really talked about it. Whenever we discussed his future, it looked a whole lot different.’

  ‘Then we should talk about the viewing,’ the woman said. ‘At the moment, Tonio is at the AMC mortuary. You’re now authorising us to bring him to one of our funeral homes, where he’ll be available for viewing. Probably the one in Amsterdam-Oost, I’ll have to check. Do you want to see him there?’

  ‘We’ve already decided,’ Miriam said, ‘that we prefer to remember Tonio as we saw him just after he died. He still looked just like the Tonio we knew … and loved so much. We don’t want any other images to overshadow that.’

  ‘But do you want a viewing?’ the woman asked. ‘I mean, for other visitors.’

  ‘Yes, but he has to look good,’ I said. ‘There’ll be a few friends who want to see him.’

  The woman asked what clothes we wanted Tonio to be dressed in. Miriam went upstairs to get his going-out jacket, which he had worn to the Book Ball and to the premiere of Het leven uit een dag. When she got back, Tonio’s favourite shirt was draped over her arm, the one he had on just before the photo shoot last Thursday. These were not ‘work clothes’: he wanted to look good for the girl. Just like having shaved. After the photo session, his model departed, Tonio pulled on a T-shirt, leaving the dress shirt behind — not knowing it would come in handy for the coffin.

  Miriam also had a pair of his jeans. ‘I’ll wash and iron them today.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the woman. ‘When can we pick them up?’

  ‘This evening, if you like.’

  ‘I should mention,’ I added, ‘that his torso swelled up considerably from the internal bleeding. I’m not sure the shirt will still fit …’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, getting up. ‘We have experience with this kind of thing.’

  I didn’t ask any further, but suspected that Tonio’s proud dress shirt, meant to impress the photo model, would have to be snipped open at the back to make room.

  The undertaker’s visit concluded with a recap of Tonio’s interment scenario. Once she was gone, we flopped, suddenly exhausted, on the terrace, awaiting my brother. Frans and Mariska must have landed at Schiphol
by now. Maybe they were giving instructions to her parents, who would babysit Daniel, or else they were on their way to our place, either by tram or taxi.

  In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke tells of the scene in his mother’s family home after her brothers (it was 1942) were killed: they ‘dared not look at one another, not knowing what state they were in.’ That’s how Miriam and I looked away from one another that afternoon, ‘not knowing what state we were in’. It was as though we were ashamed of ourselves, because just now, in a process of horse-trading, we had willingly turned Tonio over to a corpse-processing factory.

  8

  People are always said, somewhat reproachfully, to be ‘so ill-prepared for death’. I can confirm that this is true, and that it also applied to us. What we were also poorly prepared for: condolence calls. If an etiquette guide to this existed, I had never seen it.

  For years, our friends Josie and Arie had visited us with their little daughter, Lola. The first thing Lola would do was ask for Tonio, who was usually holed up with friends in his room, whose door sported a large poster: GENIUS AT WORK. She was always welcome. Tonio had the courtesy to come downstairs and fetch her, and when she got bored among the ‘big boys’, bring her back.

  Lola grew in spurts — by now she was already eleven, nearly twelve — and her absence was awkward, the sole advantage being that I couldn’t make the mistake of reminding her that Tonio lived on his own now. (‘Lola, I’ll make sure he comes around next time you visit.’)

  I went out onto the veranda with Arie, where my brother and his wife had already installed themselves. Josie busied herself deeper in the house with an uncontrollably weeping Miriam. There was, in fact, nothing in the house except the wet, snorting grief of Tonio’s mother. We sat there a bit clumsily amid the anguish, and did not know ‘what state we were in’.

  ‘Nice, the golden rain,’ Frans said. ‘But I’d get that ivy trimmed if I were you. Look there, it’s like a metre thick in some places. Great for the birds, but imagine how much weight is clinging to that wall.’

  ‘It’s not my main priority right now,’ I said. ‘Here, under the ivy and the golden rain, Tonio did a photo shoot last Thursday with a girl … we don’t even know her name … I’m not trimming away any memories for the time being.’

  ‘Adri,’ said Frans, ‘if it’s too painful to talk about, then don’t, but … what exactly happened yesterday morning?’

  ‘I don’t know much more than the police told us. They’re keeping mum until their investigation’s been rounded off. The driver who hit Tonio was being questioned at the same time they came around here. That girl from the photo shoot, the one I just mentioned … Tonio told me a few days ago she’d invited him to Paradiso on Saturday night … for an Italian night, eighties blockbusters, whatever. I assume Tonio left Paradiso at about four-thirty. He crossed Max Euweplein on his bike, and probably took that footbridge next to the casino, the one that slopes down to the Stadhouderskade. I guess he was going to cut through the Vondelpark on his way home. To De Baarsjes. I don’t know if he went cruising across the road at full speed … it’s a pretty steep slope … anyway, it was there, just near the traffic lights, that the car hit him. The traffic lights were turned off, or flashing, the police weren’t really sure.’

  Having to tell all this to my younger brother was humiliating. His son, his only child, born when he was fifty-three, had just had his first birthday two months ago. All those years that Tonio was here, Frans had hesitated to start a family. I’d always let him know what a blessing a son was for me. And yet he still had his reservations. Now I had to explain, in so many words, how vulnerable a child could be, even when it was past the age of twenty. I gave him a full account of my defeat.

  ‘And the driver … do they know if he was speeding?’

  ‘No, I only heard that it wasn’t a hit-and-run, he reported it right away.’

  It struck me that the two women present sensed exactly when they had to follow Miriam into the kitchen — and not to help her refill the glasses. ‘I just can’t believe he’s gone for good,’ you could hear through the open window.

  I had the impression that I, more than anyone, was polluting the almost summery spring evening with banal chitchat. Sure, it was mostly about Tonio and the past two days, but I did not manage to get through to the crux of what had really happened. I even caught myself making a few bitter comments having nothing whatsoever to do with the accident. They just came blurting out, as though wanting to prove, entirely on their own, that even without Tonio, life, in all its facets, no matter how vulgar, simply goes on.

  9

  It’s just how these things go: you see your visitors out, and before each one goes on his way, you stand there on the front steps confirming each other’s remarks — about the waste of a life, about the incomprehensibility of loss.

  ‘That something like this can just happen,’ Josie repeats, her eyes glistening in the light of the streetlamps. ‘Run over like that on the street …’

  Once everyone has gone I take a few steps out onto the sidewalk. I look up: whether the sky is as aloofly clear as it was the night that Tonio … The sodium-vapour light of the streetlamps obscures my view of the stars.

  I realise that, for as long as I can remember, I regarded it as something sacred, something mysterious, rather than as a major stroke of ill fortune: a parent who loses a child, and has to go on living with it. A neighbour of ours lost her beautiful daughter to leukaemia. Well-mannered lad that I was, I was expected to go into the living room, where the girl was laid out for viewing. She was no longer pretty. Her cheeks lay sagged and blubbery, either from the medication or from the illness itself, on the pillow. Her mother, smiling, led me to the bier, but suddenly was overcome with grief. She threw her arms up in the air and cried, in a cramped sob, ‘Just open your wee eyes one more time.’

  It has stuck in my memory in dialect, whose pronunciation of ‘wee eyes’ — ‘eugskes’ — made it sound all the more heart-rending.

  What the child was asked to do in return for all that grief was minimal, but she still did not comply. The eugskes remained shut.

  My sister once had a friend with light-blonde hair and chubby, pale legs. Antoinette. They called her The White Elephant, but at the same time she was treated with a certain respect, because her older brother had been killed in a motorbike crash when he was seventeen. The story went that the boy’s father ‘still, every night’, before going to bed, would take a few steps out the front door to the edge of the sidewalk and peer up and down the street, as though his son might come home any minute.

  For me, that has been the image, for the past forty years, of a father who has lost his son: a man who leaves the front door ajar, and under the light of the streetlamp pricks up his ears for the putt-putt of a motorbike.

  I am now that man.

  10

  While Miriam and Josie were at Buitenveldert Cemetery picking out a plot for Tonio, I sat in my workroom trying to compose a memorial note. We had told the funeral home I would write it myself, and that we would not have it typeset, but just duplicate it on my own home photocopy machine. Being computerless, this was my customary procedure with all my writing. No, they didn’t have to post them for us either: I wanted to add a personal, handwritten note to each copy and enclose a photo of Tonio.

  During his first (and only) year at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, Tonio had participated in a group project: a realistic remake of a portrait of Oscar Wilde. Part of the assignment was that they had to track down an original themselves. One afternoon he burst into my workroom, out of breath from running up the stairs.

  ‘Adri, d’you know anything about Oscar Wilde?’

  ‘Are you finally going to read a book?’

  ‘It’s like this … we’ve got an assignment to recreate a portrait of Oscar Wilde. But we haven’t been able to come up with a good photo of him. Only some
vague junk online.’

  ‘You could have saved yourself the climb: down in the library I’ve got a few books about him, with photos.’

  We went downstairs and I showed him some of the better portraits of the writer. He had to laugh: all I had to do was reach onto a bookshelf, and he was saved. With his usual eagle eye, he paged straight to the photo of a young Oscar Wilde that would eventually become the model for their project.

  ‘There are a few others of a somewhat riper Wilde.’

  I paged through the book until landing at the familiar picture of a massive Oscar, bowler hat in hand, the fragile Bosie at his side, and also managed to find the remake of Gerrit Komrij as Oscar Wilde and Charles Hofman as Bosie. ‘See, here’s how you should tackle it.’

  ‘I think the first one’s better, with the walking stick. He’s much younger there. See, one of us has to pose. None of us is over twenty.’

  At the Waterlooplein flea market they found a cheap, threadbare fur coat, which, with the right lighting, could be made to look suitably chic. They neglected, however, to check the coat for living creatures — and as a result, after the photo session not only Tonio (who was still living at home) but Miriam and I both, thanks to the clumsy exchange of pillows, all ended up infested with nits. In a throwback to Tonio’s primary school days, we got out the pediculicide and flea comb.

  Tonio, having the right hairstyle and having not entirely shed his baby fat, was the most likely candidate for the role of Oscar Wilde. The group got perfect marks for their work. Miriam and I decided to include this photo with each memorial note, because it shows him at the focus of his greatest passion, photography — as both portraiteur and subject. Miriam and I had, for starters, 200 A5-size prints made at the photo shop.