Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  There was no solution, so perhaps his death was not, strictly speaking, a problem at all.

  So as not to fall to pieces ourselves after the initial shock, we found a parallel problem that might stand a chance of being solved. It was hardly original: a loved one dies unexpectedly, and the survivors want to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, as though the knowledge can somehow bring them a bit closer to the departed. The more mysterious or violent the circumstances of a loved one’s death, the more the thirst for details seems to become.

  For us, even without any sign of violence, that need could not have been greater.

  34

  We sit on the veranda, attempting to defer the first glass of the evening. A pitch-black sombreness puts a clamp on my mouth. I suggest that for God’s sake we go inside and turn on the eight o’clock news. Maybe there’s some news about Joran van der Sloot in Peru — as if that interests me.* We’re too late for the headline news, but we are treated to the despair of a prominent Dutch football player over a torn hamstring. A report on the upcoming elections gets filtered out of my consciousness entirely.

  [* Van der Sloot, a young Dutchman who lived in Aruba, became notorious for his involvement in the mysterious disappearance of an American tourist there in 2005. In 2010 he confessed to another murder in Peru, where he is presently serving a 28-year sentence. Both cases attracted widespread international media attention.]

  Of course, we should have stayed outside, in the shelter of the enclosed terrace. Miriam wants to watch an episode of Cold Case.

  ‘Minchen, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life watching that crappy American TV show with you.’

  She begins to whimper. ‘Just to sit half-knocked-out on the couch in front of the tube, so as not to have to think, that’s all I ask.’

  The TV gets switched off. After a smattering of peevishness from my end, we settle down in the gradually darkening living room, conciliatory and shamelessly grief-stricken. Miriam cries more than on previous evenings.

  ‘So awful … so awful that I’ll never see him again.’ Her words rustle almost inaudibly along with her breath. ‘That I’ll never be able to hold him again. All those normal, everyday things … gone, gone, gone. Pick up his washing, and that he just crawled out of bed, smelling of that delicious boy-sweat … I miss him so much.’

  We solemnly promise each other that we’ll pick up our lives, and move on: with work, and with trying to stay fit, because Tonio would have wanted it that way. From now on, Tonio would be the bottom line, so that we never forget him.

  ‘We’ll also stop drinking,’ Miriam says. ‘You know what? I don’t even like the taste anymore.

  I don’t much either tonight, but it doesn’t stop me from going at it full force. With each glass, I feel more clear-headed. After Miriam goes upstairs, I stay on the sofa, brooding, staring into the black hole that was once Tonio.

  35

  Sometimes I catch myself morosely thinking of a horrible imaginary accident that has overcome someone I know. A good friend. In my thoughts, I comfort them, but the catastrophe is too huge and too irrevocable for me to be of any real help. I give them my tears of impotence; more than that, I can’t do.

  And then, as I emerge from the daydream, it hits me that it is us, Miriam and me, to whom the irreparable has happened.

  I tell this to Miriam.

  ‘Might be an emotional detour,’ she says, ‘so that you can allow yourself a little bit of pity.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Chime bars

  1

  After his move to De Baarsjes, I sometimes didn’t think about Tonio for days. Not explicitly, at least — subconsciously, of course, he was still always puttering around somewhere. His normal life carried on outside my field of vision.

  Since his death, there isn’t a moment when he is not in my thoughts. Even when you can barely call it thinking, I feel the presence, the blackness, the gravity of his death.

  With a Sophist sleight of hand, I could make a plausible argument that he is more important to me dead than alive.

  Nothing doing. But … dead, he leans on me more than alive. As a young man in full swing, he possessed the means to escape my attention for brief or more extended periods of time. But the dead Tonio rests unavoidably heavily and immobile in the groaning hammock of my attention.

  If Tonio paid one of his usually unannounced visits, he would silently open the front door with his own key. He’d take the stairs up to the first floor without so much as a creak of a tread, abetted somewhat by the thick runner and his supple gait. He only had to give the living-room door, which did not close properly, the tiniest of shoves with his fingertip.

  And all of a sudden there he’d be, in the middle of the room. His broad smile told us it was intended as a surprise. Apparently, it never occurred to him that he might catch his parents in a compromising situation. At that hour, after all, we were usually on the sofa, glass in hand. He was always the mischievous kid playing hide and seek (‘Anyone seen Totò recently?’ ‘No, I guess he’s run away …’) and then, weak from giggling, he’d stagger out from his hiding place.

  The Norwegian forest cats, too, knew that the door was warped and didn’t stay closed. If they wanted to get in from the landing, they would stretch out full-length and pat it open with their big front paws. It made its own special click. Once I called out, crouched at the newspaper bin: ‘Tygo, shut the door behind you. It’s draughty in here.’

  That snicker. It was Tonio, followed by Tasha. His half-apologetic smile said: Fooled you, didn’t I?

  He would flop onto the sofa, Tasha cradled in his arms. She relished and revelled in the attention her stepdaddy lavished on her; but, unlike her brother, she had to be held down with a firm hand, otherwise out of pure flirtatiousness she would leap from his lap.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  ‘Yeah, a beer would be great.’

  Since Whitsun, I have often heard and seen the living-room door spring open under the light touch of Tonio’s fingers. The click does something to my heart. I see no hand appear in the crack, no arm following it. It is, in fact, one of the cats. Or a draught.

  ‘Minchen, for God’s sake … close the door all the way from now on, will you. I have a heart attack every time it swings open, ’cause I think it’s … Just push hard until it clicks shut.’

  It didn’t really help. Whenever she gave the door that extra shove, the tears welled up in (or poured out of) her eyes. It gave her the feeling, she said, that she was being forced to shut out even the memory of Tonio’s visits.

  2

  The new situation is ever-present, palpable even at those brief moments when you are granted a respite from it. This is for good. From now until the end of my days, Tonio’s death will never not be there. I saw him die in the hospital, and at that moment it nestled itself in me, divided equally between my head and my guts. My brain endlessly replays images from his life. It sits uncomfortably on my heart, squeezes the appetite out of my stomach, and causes burning cramps in my intestines.

  His brake shoes engulf my feet. He slows down everything.

  3

  I am in no position to accuse Tonio of recklessness.

  An all-round aptitude test given at Eindhoven high schools in 1964 indicated my suitability for gymnasium studies. It was a foregone conclusion that I would attend Augustinianum. My mother was pleased with the result, not because of the high-level education it would afford me (she had only a vague notion of what it entailed), but because Augustinianum was located on the ‘safe’ side of the Eindhovenseweg, so that I, with my morning absent-mindedness, wouldn’t have to turn left across a dangerous junction, as did my former schoolmates on their way to St. Joris College on the Elzentlaan. But I was determined to join my old pals, and even a thousand motherly admonitions wouldn’t stop me — including the argument that the S
t. Joris teaching system was about to be abandoned and was about to embark on a five-year rearguard struggle.

  So from September ’64 onwards I rode to Eindhoven every morning with my Geldrop townsmen, Wil and Hans. As we approached the city limits, we passed Augustinianum on the right, and a bit further up swerved left across the busy road toward St. Joris: all in all, the permanent decor of my mother’s nightmare.

  She was right, insofar as, particularly at that hour, I was a sluggish sleepyhead, lost in thought on my bike behind my animated friends. Maybe it would have been more effective if she had actually discouraged me from going to Augustinianum, for instance because of the demanding courses or work load. My stubbornness ushered in a lifetime of regret for having chosen the wrong school. The most unpopular goody-two-shoes of my old school was safely out of sight at the gymnasium, but then all of my old schoolmates vanished from St. Joris after the very first Christmas break, only to resurface at the less-demanding Geldrop middle school, leaving me completely on my own.

  It happened during the first week of school — almost. I lagged behind Wil and Hans, as usual. They had just taken the dodgy turnoff, standing high on their pedals. In my haste to catch up with them, I didn’t bother to look back over my shoulder as I turned.

  More than the screeching tyres, I felt the whoosh of air as the car passed me. It had grazed me, no more than that. I’d nearly been hit by a convertible sports car. It stopped. The driver lifted himself halfway out of his seat and turned around. There I stood, trembling, bike between my legs. It was not the first time an enormous shock affected my sense of perception; even now. I only have to close my eyes to see the man, a guy of about twenty-five, wearing light-brown leather gloves and green-tinted sunglasses.

  ‘Hey kid, you got a death wish or something?’

  He shouted it with a kind of arrogant swagger, but not unkindly.

  ‘No-oo,’ I replied sullenly, maybe a little whiny, as though I was obliged to answer. ‘Course not.’

  The man slid back behind the wheel. Without looking back. he stuck an arm in the air as a sort of farewell. The stench of burning rubber wafted off the asphalt. The skid marks from where he’d braked were short, angry smears. I waited to cross until all the cars had passed, walking my bike, weaving and trembling on jointless legs. My friends greeted me with jeers. As I cycled further — this time keeping up with them — I noticed that my front wheel had been bent out of kilter. The driver of the sports car hadn’t even got out to see if his finish had been scratched.

  No, I do not walk around the livelong day chastising Tonio for his recklessness. I do torment myself with questions like: why was I granted that split-second advantage back in 1964, that Tonio, forty-five years later, was not? Without that elbow room, it would have been my own parents who had been immersed in grief, and no Tonio would ever have existed, no life and thus no death.

  Through what Miriam and I have gone through, I can almost tangibly imagine my parents as they might have grieved for me. I can hear their voices.

  ‘Just a boy, not even thirteen. He’d just started his new school. Terrible waste.’

  ‘Sports car. A speed demon, of course. One of those damn spoiled rich kids … No condolence card, no flowers, nothing.’

  My mother could not much have enjoyed having been proved right: I should have chosen Augustinianum after all. She would be more prone to curse all schools. Institutes whose only purpose was to pump knowledge into innocent young lives, at their peril.

  I torment myself further with that split-second. The question, born of desperation, takes on grotesque proportions. Such as: why was my split-second of good fortune not anchored firmly enough in my genes so that a half-century later, Tonio might profit from it?

  4

  It’s starting to look a lot like an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I continually scan the course of Tonio’s life in search of individual moments that, without turning his existence into a topsy-turvy mess, might be stretched or shortened just enough so that years later, on Whit Sunday 2010, Tonio’s bike and the unknown vehicle would have just grazed each other.

  I find plenty of such moments, but their recollection alone does not suffice. You need the sensation of a time machine: I have to have the visionary perception that I am truly back in a certain episode in Tonio’s past. I tinker with that fraction of time (at most a couple of seconds) so subtly and vigilantly that nothing in his life noticeably changes. His subsequent, known existence is in no way affected or thrown out of balance.

  I am back in the incessant ‘Why?’ stage. Eventually, the ‘why?’ rolls off Tonio’s child-tongue so automatically, about everything and nothing, that it takes on a blasé tone. ‘But why … how come? Why?’

  If it’s already inquisitiveness, it is not yet urgent enough for it to interrupt his playing. ‘Why, Adri, why?’ He asks this while focusing all his attention on separating two Lego blocks with his pliable fingernails. His facial muscles quiver from the effort. By clamping his jaw tight, and curling out his lower lip, the pacifier shoots loose and dangles on the plastic chain against his chest. What did I say to provoke that ‘Why?’

  ‘Mama needs to cut your nails.’

  ‘But why? … why?’

  Because otherwise you’ll tear them on your Lego — but I don’t say this, having been driven up the wall enough today from explaining things. Tonio prises the Lego pieces apart, and tries to repair a damaged nail with his baby teeth. He spits a sliver out, a white splinter, and then repeats his question: ‘Why?’

  Plenty of spare moments passed between those last two whys. So it’s here that I tie a small knot in his lifeline. Two, three seconds, and even then I’ve held a good margin over. Tonio doesn’t notice a thing: I’ve only shortened my own silence, simultaneous with his, by a couple of seconds.

  ‘Have a look at your torn fingernail,’ I say, ‘and then you’ll know why.’

  A few seconds before real time allows, he runs to the bathroom to get the small nail-clipper out of the top drawer, which he can just reach, and bring it to his mother in the kitchen. From now on, everything in his life will take place an imperceptible fraction of time sooner.

  Maybe one day, long past middle age, he will discover the ruse. I might still be alive as the elderly grandfather of Tonio’s children. Scientific progress will allow him to recalibrate the amputated moments of his life, just as measurements taken from an atomic clock in an aeroplane high above the earth have to add a second to normal ground-time, otherwise the calendar will fall behind.

  All right then, make my illegally activated leap-seconds public — they will have saved Tonio’s life.

  5

  And so it went. In my memories of Tonio, I kept looking for situations tangible enough to picture myself, in time and space, back to where they occurred. Sometimes I would delete a few seconds from the timeline; another time, I would add three or four. It was a game — obsessive, but it remained a game. In the end, it did not accomplish anything, except that the neurosis only strengthened its grip on me. I would do better to return to what actually happened in the early hours of Whit Sunday, without the facts taking any notice of my cut-and-paste in Tonio’s life.

  6

  Before Tonio’s fatal accident, I had always been surprised that people who, once visited by Fate, insisted on questioning it over and over. Instead of accepting the irrevocable, they became, in my eyes, whining children who kept asking the questions that had already been answered. Or for which there was no answer. ‘How in God’s name could this happen?’

  ‘In God’s name, why? Why? Why?’

  ‘Tell me again what that third witness said.’

  ‘If he had first … instead of just … then …’

  Now I understood. I wanted to know everything about the accident. And not only that. I needed to know every detail of his last days and hours — everything since I had last seen a
nd spoken to him.

  There was no getting around bad news. But I always gave the details of bad news a wide berth. I did not want to hear them. It was painful enough if someone ended our friendship, but the inevitable letter spelling out the reasons, I left unopened.

  Now I longed with frantic eagerness for every detail of what had happened to Tonio between his departure from our house on Thursday afternoon and his departure from … life … three days later. The only one we had sounded out until now was Jim, but he wasn’t there that Saturday night. Jim said Tonio had mentioned a girl. Something about a photo shoot for a modelling portfolio; but more than that, Jim didn’t know. He had not met her, did not even know her name. All he could tell us was that Tonio had gone out that Saturday evening. And, oh yes, that Tonio had promised to be home by four, so that Jim had someone to chat with. Maybe they’d watch a film together.

  What role had that model played in Tonio’s last days? That was the question that came roaring back at me, ad nauseum.

  About two years ago, I recall, Tonio worried about girls. With all my might, I had wished him a steady girlfriend, or a whole slew of casual ones, as long as he was happy. Now one appeared to have presented herself. I knew nothing of their relationship aside from that it must have been pretty fresh, and yet I felt, as it were with my whole fatherly heart, that something special had been brewing between them.

  ‘We’ve always been solution people,’ Miriam had said a few days after the accident. It had become almost a mantra for her (and me). ‘Now we’ve been saddled with a problem which by definition has no solution. That frightens me. We have a whole insoluble future ahead of us.’

  Perhaps that is why we set out to reconstruct, as exhaustively as possible, Tonio’s last days: we were looking for a parallel solution. By laying out all the facts, right down to the last piece of the puzzle, it was as though Tonio might be recouped — even if not alive and well. Maybe tidying up all the open-ended questions would give us a sense of solace. Another reason could be that we felt obliged to round off the story of his brief life. I could rebuild his nearly twenty-two years from photographs, impressions, and memories, but the final stage — not yet.