When Tonio returns, we are having coffee — in the bedroom, where the television is temporarily housed for the duration of the renovations. He looks seriously at his parents’ faces. When he’s got something earnest to say, he drops his voice an octave. Like now.
‘So did you guys call a truce?’
21
When Tonio was still small, two conflicting thoughts sometimes hit me simultaneously: the awareness of my parental negligence, juxtaposed against realising how bravely, and unreproachfully, he faced every situation that spotlighted his father’s shortcomings.
This clash of concepts could leave me completely paralysed. Like a naughty schoolchild, I would drag myself off to a corner of my workroom, where I would intensely whisper the words ‘my brave little boy’ a few times.
That helped — until the next exhibition of my inadequacy, which Tonio once again ungrudgingly withstood.
Now that I had failed to prevent a fatal accident, and for once he didn’t manage to salvage himself, my private profession of love, which was never meant for him to hear, poured forth without end. ‘My darling, brave boy. My little hero.’
‘When I think back on it,’ I said, ‘Tonio never upbraided us. To our face, at least. Maybe he swore at us later, out of earshot. But really read us the riot act, you or me … no. Never.’
‘I was always careful,’ Miriam said, ‘no matter how cross I was, never to bad-mouth you to Tonio. I didn’t want him to ever be able to use it against you. And I know you did the same thing. When I hear from Rietje the kind of vitriol Bram dares to hurl at her … the most unbelievable vulgarity … of course, he picked it up from his father.’
‘It’s not thanks to us,’ I said. ‘It’s all Tonio’s own doing. Whenever I looked at that honest face of his, it never occurred to me to complain to him about you. Even if I had to hold back … I’ll be truthful about that. He stayed neutral until he was actually forced to stick up for one or the other of us. Remember that time the three of us were crammed into that one hotel room in Jarnac? I was there to write a piece. The people who gave me the commission had promised the best hotel in the area. Well, if that wasn’t a wet blanket. I lay there on that too-small bed, bitching about how uncomfortable it was. You had made the arrangements by phone. Tonio listened intently to our discussion. Once he realised the organisers had shafted us from a safe distance, he cried out with all the indignation he had in him: “But Adri, there’s nothing Mama can do about it!” He was five, almost six. It was in a restaurant there … a few days later, I think … where Tonio made that double portrait of us.’ I pointed behind me with my thumb toward the wall above the head of the bed. ‘Little red hearts circling around our heads … Lovey-dovey parents. He so wanted it to be okay between us.’
‘Without being sappy about it,’ said Miriam, ‘it’s pretty safe to say he was more of an example to us than we were to him.’
22
Miriam and Tonio were witnesses to the fact that I’ve always tried to protect them. Of course, I failed now and again, more than I’d have liked,.
What I still bitterly regret, now more than ever, is the reckless hospitality I cultivated in the second half of the 1980s. Everyone was welcome — my open-door policy was indiscriminate. Once, when I was a newcomer in the Dutch literary world (a terrain that, in those days, still seemed rather clearly delineated), I walked into the art-society club Arti with a small group of acquaintances I’d bumped into along the way. I happened upon an older colleague, who nodded condescendingly at my table and asked: ‘Are those your friends?’
He answered his own question with a scrunch of the nose. The fellow knew exactly which illustrious, important, and influential people he should surround himself with. At that age, though, someone like that hasn’t any friends left, only an assortment of ‘big cheeses’ gone mouldy.
Having the right friends — nothing could be further from my goal. I took ’em as they came. As a result, all and sundry wafted in and out, not all of them with good intentions. The one sniffed around my marriage, the other my business affairs, yet another my work in progress. You never knew, of course, what information could come in handy, or when. And indeed, nearly twenty years after I started to keep my distance from people, certain colleagues from back then still find it necessary in interviews to comment on what went on at my parties, or that more than once I had to be helped (heaven forbid), drunk, into a taxi.
I grant everyone his contribution to the petite histoire of Dutch literature, even though it still won’t protect it from extinction, but they do have to keep their mitts off my family. There is a passage in Advocaat van de hanen informing the reader that the main character Quispel is in the habit of giving his wife a wallop — one of his many flaws. Aha! thought one of the sniffers who was posing as a friend. Gotcha!, he’s as much as admitted it himself. The rest was simply a matter of perseverance in spreading it around, complete with authentic-sounding details, because you didn’t hang around at this kind of pig’s house for nothing.
This feat of mine has wafted my way numerous times over the years, sometimes in the form of a question, but usually as a statement of fact. It wasn’t Quispel who hit his wife; no, it was me. The pushiest interviewers even opened with the declaration: ‘People say you beat your wife … tell me about that.’
My first reaction was to throw the bum out. (A colleague who I discussed the matter with later, said the interviewer had missed a golden opportunity. ‘He should have asked: “Do you still beat your wife?” Try getting out of that one.’) But on second thoughts it seemed to me a good chance to set the record straight: how a rumour like this, its origins in literary fiction, can make its way into the world, and the kind of damage it can cause its subjects. The interviewer listened patiently, as did my voice recorder, but in the printed version of the interview I could find no trace of my argument. What did I expect? The public wants drama, scandal. They want to watch a marriage disintegrate, and are hungry for all the gory details.
Friends — the real ones — have often asked why I take this kind of gossip to heart. But only these friends — the rest just go with the flow. I have a wonderful relationship with Miriam, and I want people to know that, and not have them think just the opposite — that is my childishly naïve wish.
The worst thing about the scuttlebutt was that made its rounds while Tonio was still in school, and I was worried he’d get flak about it. He never mentioned it, but he was the kind of child to keep this kind of business to himself in order to spare his parents. He knew enough children from broken homes, but was never afraid that his own parents would get divorced.
Miriam and I have been together for thirty-one years, twenty-three of them as a married couple. We skipped the first ‘seven-year itch’, but thereafter we had our share of crises, like the Leidsegracht one. And yes, we’ve lost our temper plenty of times, and there have been blows, from both sides. (Never in front of Tonio.) Back in the Loenen days, I once had to stay indoors for two weeks after Miriam (that sweet Minchen) had given my face such a thorough makeover with her nails that it resembled a currant bun with those bits of red dried peel. And I deserved it, too.
More importantly, we never just sank into silent lethargy, like those couples you see in the breakfast room in Parisian hotels with nothing to say to each other. Miriam and I have always kept the communication channels open — strongly worded, if necessary. I consider myself lucky that Tonio knew his parents like this: talking, bickering if need be, but seldom in icy silence.
‘So did you guys call a truce?’
It wouldn’t have been terribly surprising if Tonio’s crushing death had put the lid on our communication once and for all. Fortunately, we manage, even in pain, to continue our never-ending conversation, even if we have to freely admit now and again that for certain ancillary horrors, there are no words.
I love you, Minchen.
23
Mi
riam brought the second round of coffee into the bedroom. Another novelty of the past week: she bangs against everything with the tray, even against cupboard doors that do not stand directly in her path. In addition to her memory, it seems that the nerve centre of her motor skills has taken a knock.
‘If you don’t concentrate on it …’ she said. ‘I mean, if it only simmers at the back of your mind, then it’s as though it’s only temporary. Awful but passing. And then … it just happened to me down there in the kitchen … then it hits you, all of a sudden, just like that … that it’s permanent. He, Tonio, was temporary. And now he’s gone for good.’
Miriam sat down on the edge of the bed. Maybe her hand was feeling for mine, but because she wasn’t really looking, her gaze on the open balcony doors and beyond, her fist landed with a sharp crackle on the newspaper laying across my lap.
‘Yeah, temporary,’ I said. ‘That’s the dirty trick your dozing subconscious plays with you. All of a sudden you bolt awake, pricked by the stinger of … remember those monster wasps in the Dordogne? We were so afraid our little Tonio would get stung. If you chopped one in half, the two halves just kept on going.
‘The stinger of the truth, you mean …’
‘Something like that.’
‘I think the subconscious dozes most of the time,’ Miriam said. ‘Out of self-preservation. More than the occasional jolt of the truth … of this kind of truth, anyway … no one can take that, surely?’
I took her hand from the dent it had made in the newspaper.
‘Sooner or later,’ I said, ‘we’re going to have to put a stone on his grave.’
‘I’d rather not think about it. Not now.’
‘Just this, then I’ll drop the subject. Maybe it’s a good opportunity to … hmm, never mind. Another time.’
24
It’s been a week now. I wade through a murky anguish, from which I’m not sure I’ll ever emerge, but the fact that I managed to endure Tonio’s death last Sunday without dropping dead on the spot myself, and without hurling myself from God knows what floor of the AMC, still amazes me, or, better put: amazes me every day a bit more.
How did I get through that day at all, in fact, with the piling up of ever-more-dreaded news? Me, who tends to leave envelopes unopened that just might contain unpleasant tidings.
The announcement that morning that Tonio was ‘in a critical condition’, and at that very moment was lying on the operating table, resulted in an unprecedented shock, but for the duration of the afternoon there was still room for the ‘no longer life-threatening’ sign. Once we’d been crammed into that sauna next to the ICU, a dialectic unfolded (between hope and fear, life and death, Miriam and me, the surgeon and us) that prepared us, step by step, in a pitching motion not unlike a ship, for what is called The Inevitable. There was a kind of numbing logic to the whole process — a logic that kept one step ahead of lunacy, and made the result only just bearable.
The appearance of the neurosurgeon, straight from the OR and still wearing her blue shower cap, did not immediately signify a pitch-black antithesis for our last hopeful expectations, but a consistent synthesis of the undulation between hope and fear, just as we had experienced it the entire day. She shook her head, making the plastic cap creep higher up on her head. Tonio had not yet died, but had no chance of survival. He drifted, as they say, between life and death.
After the unfathomableness of what had taken place deep in the previous night, by daylight the subsequent steps seemed almost too logical, without the hospital at all striving for such logic. Be that as it may, calm dialectic and unemphatic logic made it possible for us to survive Tonio’s deathbed in that improvised tent in the ICU.
It did not prevent each of us, in our own way, once we left the hospital, from being drawn into a chaotic vortex of conflicting feelings that were not only unassuagable but intolerant of any form of logical collating.
You would think that since last week I’d be able to open every letter without trepidation, and that bad news or overdrafts wouldn’t even make me bat an eye. Surely the worst possible news — Tonio’s death — should have immunised me?
Nothing is further from the truth.
For a good part of the day I undergo internal nervous trembling, as though it wants to tell me: the worst is yet to come. As if Tonio’s death was only a prelude to that ‘worst’. This notion is destined to become the refrain of this requiem.
I do not want to know the Very Worst. That letter, I leave unopened. The nervous quivering goes on unabated. But what in God’s name could be worse than Tonio’s death?
This: the reality of his death. That it, one of these days, will really dawn on us. My nerves are steeling themselves for that moment, for me, but also on Miriam’s behalf.
We had to figure out where the best survival plan was lurking: resisting the pain, or surrendering to it.
We had a bit of leeway in our options, but the most essential freedom of choice had been relinquished: Tonio was irrevocably dead, and now irrevocably buried, too. Whatever we did with those doses of pain, this fact remained incontrovertible. We could neither deny nor avoid it. We were in its grip.
25
With the funeral reception winding up, my brother had gone downstairs to Miriam’s workroom to call a taxi, and in the process had spilled a glass of red wine over her keyboard — the first in a chain of computer incidents in which we believed we saw the hand of Tonio at work. He had always been on call whenever we had a computer problem; now it seemed that he was bent on sabotage.
After ringing for the taxi, Frans left his wallet lying next to the phone, which resulted in him giving the driver his watch as collateral when he ran inside to borrow some cash from his wife, who had gone home earlier to relieve the babysitter. He, Mariska, and the baby came by for an hour on Sunday, giving him the chance to not only pick up his wallet but chip some dried wine from between the keys on Miriam’s computer. (The mouse, too, had been drowned in the accident.)
I had not seen Daniel, the only child to whom I could claim unclehood, since 7 March, his first birthday. He’d grown, of course, his little face taking on the look of an individual. With his wispy, white-blond baby hair, he resembled Tonio at that age, as I remember him from Marsalès, although Tonio had more sumptuous curls. I also recognised Daniel’s attempts at walking, the recalcitrant coordination. While Tonio used his stroller as a support (regularly pulling it over on top of him), Daniel navigated our living room without any ambulatory aids, accepting in return a few more falls to the bum, his nappy letting out a puff of air with each fall.
When I got upstairs, I found him sitting on the rug. Maybe because I had snuck up from behind and suddenly crouched down beside him, he started wailing at full volume. Nothing out of the ordinary, but for me it was just that, once again, I had the feeling that as the father of a newly buried son, I gave off a hearty scent of death, which fresh-faced toddlers would have nothing to do with.
His bout of tears was brief, and once I was seated on the sofa, Daniel made an attempt at rapprochement. He kept sliding his half-full drinking cup toward me over the end table, which I was then expected to take. Later, he repeatedly did his best to get my foot, resting firmly on the rug, to budge. He screeched with drooly delight when the shoe snapped back to its original position, the toes still wiggling themselves to rest.
What would have been more natural than to feel envy? My brother had a son, and I no longer did. No, I wasn’t envious — not even a tad. I had been as pleased with Frans’s belated fatherhood as he himself was. It was just that … in Daniel I was reliving Tonio’s efforts and progress. Growing from your birth to first birthday, then learning to walk and talk — that was hard work, a full-time job, a hundred-hour workweek. And thus had Tonio, growing and learning, completed twenty-one years of his life, without being able to cash in on all that hard work.
In the euph
oria surrounding his birth, I had appointed myself Daniel’s mentor. I looked into his blue eyes, so full of self-evident confidence in a bright future. I silently gave him my best wishes. He was back on the rug, irreparably breaking my foot. Danny, I wish you a life five times longer than your unfortunate cousin. For the time being, kiddo, we’ve got statistics on our side.
Frans mentioned that he’d come across an online obituary of Tonio, written by Serge van Duijnhoven, complete with a variety of portraits. The feeling that these past few days were an absurd parody suddenly reared its head again. We’d been friends with Serge since before Tonio was born, as a 16-year-old gymnasium student and doomed poet, who sometimes dropped by with his bosom buddy Joris Abeling (killed in a car accident in ’98). They wanted to hear from me how they could conquer the world from their provincial hometown of Oss. They had already stood at Boudewijn Büch’s Keizersgracht doorstep, but he chased them off. (Büch didn’t even have to open the door; he came up from behind on his way back from the bakery, holding half a loaf of brown bread, sliced: for the two barnstormers, a fatal detail.) Incidentally, Serge wasn’t so doomed after all, for he paid a visit shortly after Tonio was born to bring him an inscribed silver spoon. And now he had written Tonio’s obituary … proof that nothing in the world made sense anymore.
26
Later that evening, long back at home, my brother rang.
‘That website, the one with Tonio’s obit … a woman left a message … wait a sec, I’ve just clicked it off by mistake … a French-sounding surname. Tell Miriam to have a look. She wrote a short message in English, seems Tonio recently photographed her daughter. Let’s see if …’ (I heard the tap of his nails on the keys.) ‘No, she doesn’t mention the daughter’s name. The mother’s called Françoise Boulanger. Doesn’t give her daughter’s surname either. Might be something else, keep that in mind.’
Tonio Page 25