Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  Now that blind fate has evicted Tonio from that rock-solid triumvirate, Miriam and I are fastened only to each other. We stagger around on wobbly knees, groping about, crazed with fear. After a long, marvellous journey through Tonio’s developing life (that playfully rocking labyrinth), we are back together: thrown back to our own devices. Where are we to go now? Tonio’s absence is a fremdkörper in between us.

  It appears that, in our desperate attempts every evening to recall everything about him and hold it tight, we are reliving the journey of his life, complete with this requiem as a chronicle. But it is no more than a voyage through time with no foothold, a sentimental journey, a reconstruction, an empty rerun.

  28

  Miriam arranges the potted plants and flowers from the garden centre on the veranda, and waters them with the hose. ‘Wonder if they’ll make it this time,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what colour my thumb is, but it’s sure not green.’

  ‘Ice-blue,’ I say, ‘from mixing long drinks.’

  A while later we sit down to a perilous mix of Campari, vodka, and mineral water, with a lemon wedge and lots of ice. ‘We’ve got to quit drinking,’ Miriam says. ‘I don’t even like the taste anymore, you know that?

  ‘Bitter,’ I concur. ‘It’s medicine. That powdered aspirin we used to dissolve in water tasted just like this.’

  Nevertheless, the alcohol finds its way in, glass after glass. I tell Miriam about the intense anxiety that preys on me most of the day. ‘As though a SWAT team might appear at any moment to haul me in.’

  We drink. Ice cubes tinkle as they slide to the bottom of the empty glass. The Campari, under the golden rain, makes geishas of us: red-painted lips and a white face.

  ‘There’s another side to it,’ I say. ‘The anxiety I was just talking about … it’s not unlike being desperately in love.’

  ‘Gosh,’ says Miriam, ‘you’ve got that feeling pretty much at your fingertips.’

  ‘You’d almost think that there’s an unwelcome kinship between them … I mean, between grieving a loss and unrequited love.’

  ‘A really distant kinship then,’ Miriam says, who is put off by the subject. ‘Love can go unanswered as cruelly as you like, but you always get over it. Don’t you? We’ve got nothing to get over. There’s no getting over Tonio.’

  29

  Monday, 14 June 2010. I sit at the open balcony doors in my workroom, and return to the task of answering as many condolence letters as possible. In shaky handwriting, I express my thanks for the comforting words, and it becomes an activity that in some way or another offers a kind of self-soothing — and it even works if I kid myself into believing in it.

  From time to time, I prick up my ears, as I think I hear the shouting or honking (vuvuzelas) in the run-up to this afternoon’s Netherlands-Denmark match. I am mistaken: it is nothing but city noise.

  Later, Miriam comes into my workroom, beside herself. She had gone into town to pick up another batch of Tonio’s Wilde portraits, but felt so threatened by the traffic which roared by from all directions that she hurried home before the match began. She describes the violence of it, and I believe her, but lament the skittish vulnerability that she — a first — has experienced in busy traffic.

  It’s like — even though I hate the term — a kind of occupational therapy. As long as I keep diligently answering the condolence post, I’m able, if only just, to contain the despair. Cutting corners is not an option — leaving, for instance, a standard condolence card with only a name and address unanswered — because Tonio is always looking over my shoulder. I have to do this on his behalf. It is my duty.

  Most people have sufficient imagination to see what happened to us on Whitsun as ‘an absolute nightmare’. They understand that such a stifling, oppressive dream is impossible to just shake off, but it seems to be the intention that the horrible atmosphere gradually wears off … that you have to take the sting out of it yourself, somehow …

  The reality of the situation, however, is that on 23 May a seed was planted for a nightmare that would sprout in the ensuing weeks. The nightmare unfolds, unrolls, unpredictably, and will certainly do its best to devour or destroy us. The monster grows like a weed, and spreads its rootstalks randomly.

  While all these well-meaning people think we’ll have gradually defused the nightmare by now, the struggle against a continually burgeoning adversary is still in full swing. The outcome is uncertain: either we bite the dust, or the struggle will continue to rage until our dying day.

  30

  At about five o’clock, I give Miriam the stack of reinforced envelopes containing the answers and photos to post. When it was warm out (and when wasn’t it), I’d go out to the veranda with the afternoon papers, and she would join me later on. Every day, the same ritual. We would browse the various sections, hardly interested in the news, anticipating the moment when one of us would open the conversation. Curious, despite the certainty of the subject: Tonio, the loss, the pain.

  First, Miriam went inside to fix the drinks. For me, a Bombay Sapphire with Royal Club tonic; for her, a herb vodka with mineral water on the side.

  Our initially passive approach to the loss had done little except augment the pain. To sit around waiting to see what the grief would do to us — that was not Miriam’s and my style. Answering the condolence post started to get on my nerves. Too often, I read that ‘the feeling of loss will lessen over time’.

  ‘I don’t want to avoid the pain,’ I exclaimed one evening. ‘I claim it for myself. We’re not the types to sit back and act pathetic. I hear myself, way too often, blubbering about the blindness of fate … as though we’re supposed to just accept it and shut up. That fact that we’ll never get Tonio back shouldn’t mean we can’t fight back against a fate that’s got shit for eyes. I want to know exactly how fate, blind as it was, got his cruel hands on our Tonio.’

  31

  Today, 15 June 2010, Tonio would have turned twenty-two. He has now even been robbed of his birthday. From now on, we’ll only be able to talk about his ‘birth date’, and honour it every year. Strange to think that that date, 15 June 1988, will tumble ever further into the past, together with a Tonio who will never get any older. His life froze on 23 May 2010. Even his death-date, which henceforth will travel faithfully with the passing years, has more life to it than Tonio himself.

  He is so irretrievably petrified in his death that, even with all our trained creative ingenuity, we cannot make a single impression of what his life post-Whitsun 2010 would be like. It’s better to keep looking back at his life as we knew it, and fish out all the half-forgotten and unreclaimed moments. For starters, we have twenty-one birthdays to look back on and relive.

  So long as Tonio lived, my own actual age did not exert any terrifying effect on me. He had youth, and I borrowed from it. As long as I could exchange thoughts with him as to the goings-on in the world, I felt self-evidently young, or rather: ageless.

  When I revealed this thought to an interviewer two or three years ago, and she kept asking exactly how old I did feel then, at fifty-six, I answered quite truthfully: ‘Oh, about thirty-two.’

  That raised some hackles. Who did I think I was! Late one afternoon, in my regular café, I was having a conversation with a friend, and up walked a certain Laurens. The guy had already dumped on me before. He glowered at me and said: ‘Thirty-two, huh?’ He nodded gloatingly, and repeated, before disappearing behind the draught curtains: ‘Thirty-two …’

  But this Laurens looked different somehow. He seemed tired, with jaded eyes, and even in his condescending disdain was less strident than we knew him. Maybe Laurens thought he had a good reason for scorn. Long ago, he was allowed to carry Joop den Uyl’s bag — Den Uyl, the politician I recently criticised in Het Parool as being a cultureless vandal for planning to build a four-lane thoroughfare straight through Amsterdam’s old city centre.* In Joop’s ba
g was a clothes brush with which Laurens, like an exemplary paladin, discreetly swept the dandruff off Den Uyl’s shoulders.

  [* Joop den Uyl (1919–1987) was a Labour politician, and was prime minister from 1973 to 1977. The proposed thoroughfare was never built.]

  The next day we heard the news, in the very same café, that Laurens had had a heart attack in the middle of the Dam. The trauma helicopter couldn’t land on the busy square, and lost precious time. Laurens didn’t make it. Make no mistake: even when it happens to my self-professed enemies, an event of this kind does not give me the least satisfaction, and perhaps I should forgive him his condescension: he might have already felt under the weather at the moment he was expressing his contemptuous disbelief at my perceived age. I can’t rule out that he wanted to warn me. A man in his mid-fifties had better not crow that he feels thirty-two.

  I saw Tonio die close up. My own son, who, from just a few metres’ distance, I also watched being born. Has death therefore become less of a mystery to me? No. I have seen how easy it is to die, but that has not yet eliminated its mystery. On the contrary. The ease with which he died has only augmented the mystery. True, I have become more receptive to death. I know that when my time comes, I shall resist it less vigorously. The ease of doing it also applies to me.

  And what’s more, I no longer have to stay alive for him. He preceded me. So what’s stopping me? (Miriam, she’s stopping me.)

  Lola, age eleven, is acting in a play, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Miriam goes with Lola’s mother, Josie, to the premiere.

  ‘So there I sat,’ she said later, ‘among all those proud mothers. I suddenly felt my age. Fifty. Not because most of the parents were at least ten years younger, but … because I sat there as a childless mother. Everything I saw there, the pride, the dedication, I’d gone through myself. And what for, in the end?’

  After the performance, Lola could choose a Venetian mask from Miriam’s glass display-case. Her choice was from a commedia dell’arte series. The girl was timid in making her selection, well aware of the grief in this house, where she had always been a welcome guest in Tonio’s room.

  Shortly before the premiere, she and her mother had paid a visit, and Miriam succumbed to one of her unstaunchable crying fits. Quick as a squirrel, Lola darted across the sofa and up along Miriam’s limbs to help her mother comfort their friend.

  32

  I try to explain a condolence letter from our friend André to Miriam. He presents philosophers and physicists who regard space and time as illusory concepts.

  ‘Everyone is everywhere, always,’ concludes his letter. At first her face lights up: someone has taken the trouble to put the unutterable into words. She is grateful to the writer of the letter, but, when all is said and done, has no use for his message. The fact that ‘everyone is everywhere, always’ will not bring back her son. The boy will always be lost in Everywhere, Always.

  ‘Damn it, Minchen, I can’t offer you much comfort, and that drags me down. Comfort implies a promise: that a situation will improve sooner or later. Our situation will never improve. Never. Therefore I can’t promise it. And … so much for comforting.’

  ‘But you do comfort me,’ she says. ‘Just holding my hand when I cry is incredibly comforting … even if it doesn’t bring Tonio back.’

  Nice of her to say so, but it doesn’t alleviate my discomfort or powerlessness. If someone who is old and sick dies, the survivors can comfort one another with ‘It’s better this way. He’s been spared any more suffering.’

  Tonio had no ‘more suffering’ to be spared. He had worked up a vast appetite for what would have been the best part of his life. His last days, as far as we could judge, were like a starvation diet.

  33

  When Dennis was here, he dropped the name Goscha a few times: the girl who had gone out with Tonio and Dennis that Saturday night. He only mentioned her in passing, as though she was only an extra. He had danced with Tonio, and ‘dipped’ him. Goscha, in Dennis’s sketch, was not much more than a shadow. A girl who had waited at their table until the boys had finished dancing, and later cycled with them to Sarphati Park in De Pijp. And there her tracks vanished. Dennis said she had gone home with him, but there were likewise precious few details as to this afterparty — well, yes, actually: Goscha had fallen asleep pretty much right away.

  A few days after Dennis’s visit, we received a letter signed ‘Goscha Bourree’. It was written in pen in adult handwriting, which hardly reminded you of that girlish swirl that so many young women retain until long after their school years have passed.

  ‘Dear parents of Tonio …’

  She wrote that she did not know Tonio well, and had in fact only met him a couple of times, always together ‘with his good friend Dennis’. She explained when and where they had gotten acquainted (in early April at Club Trouw, Wibautstraat), and that right from the word go they all three felt completely at ease with one another. She shared Tonio’s love of cats and photography. ‘Tonio and I apparently had the same philosophy teacher at school.’

  Goscha briefly described the events of that night — 22–23 May — when the three of them went out ‘to paint the town red’, and closed with: ‘I hope this letter has been helpful in some way. I wanted you to know what a terrific evening it was. No one could know, of course, that it would be Tonio’s last. I’m glad I got to know him, and sad that it didn’t last long. I remember exactly what he was wearing. Fortunately I had the chance to tell him what a neat T-shirt he was wearing.’

  34

  The bell rang at five o’clock sharp. Miriam buzzed the door open. Goscha was a slightly built girl about Tonio’s height, maybe a bit shorter. She had a sweet face, with a shadow of fatigue — thanks to the student hours she undoubtedly kept. Dark-blonde curly hair. Dressed mostly in black, with lemon-yellow tights. Her movements were light-footed but angular as she crossed the room to Tonio’s spot on the sofa, where Dennis, too, had sat for some hours.

  Tears came to her eyes at the sight of Tygo and Tasha: Tonio had told her so much about his Norwegian forest cats. She tried to pet them, but perhaps because they smelled her own cats (a tabby and a tortoiseshell), they kept their distance. Indeed, what did you expect, with their fine lineage and northern nobility, that they would deign to consort with cat-shelter riff-raff?

  Goscha was keen to begin her account of Tonio’s last evening, but as Miriam was still in the kitchen preparing the drinks, I stalled, asking her to first to tell something about herself. Miriam mustn’t be allowed to miss even a word of Goscha’s version of Tonio’s last hours.

  After graduating from high school, she ‘travelled’ and learned Spanish (whether during, before, or after her travels was not entirely clear). Like Tonio, she was keen on photography, but she had let it slide until Tonio … that Saturday night in Trouw.

  ‘Goscha, could you save Tonio … for Miriam?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sure.’ She told me she was to start a new major in the fall. Linguistics. Fortunately Miriam appeared just then with the tray, because Goscha was eager to get on with her story.

  ‘We read your kind letter,’ I said. ‘Could you tell us more about your friendship with Tonio?’

  ‘We only saw each other a couple of times,’ she began, ‘and Dennis was always there, too. We hit it off, the three of us. It really clicked … like we’d known each other for a long time. I met them at the beginning of April. At Trouw. We danced all night, then went back to Dennis’s place. I was surprised we had so much in common … cats, photography … the same festivals. On Queen’s Day, I bumped into them at Trouw again. It was terrific … everybody letting their hair down … Afterwards we were still revved up, of course, so we partied some more at someone’s house. Well, “partied” … it ended pretty low-key. All of us tucked under a blanket, cups of tea, talking about cats. I lived a few blocks from Tonio, so I asked
if he would ride home with me. Dennis was totally crashed under his blanket, no way was he going to wake up. That’s when I saw what kind of a friend Tonio was. You don’t just leave your pal in the lurch at some stranger’s house. You wait until he wakes up, and see that he gets home safely. Tonio was watching over him. Whenever Dennis’s blanket slid off, Tonio would tuck it back in. So sweet … so … steadfast. Meanwhile he worried whether I’d get home okay. I said I’d be fine. Dennis was the defenceless one. I left, and couldn’t get that scene out of my head: Tonio carefully draping the blanket over Dennis. Really cute. He was such a sweet, caring guy.’

  Goscha went on to tell us about Tonio’s last evening and night — a more detailed version of what she had written. Her story more or less tallied with Dennis’s , except that now she played a more central role. The three of them had made another date. It was Whitsun weekend. Now they were really going to paint the town red.

  When Dennis and Tonio rang her doorbell, they had just come from a party in the Vondelpark, at Café Vertigo in the Filmmuseum. ‘They were earlier than we’d planned. That was because … well, they thought it was a bit of a flop, that party. They were glad to finally meet my cats, Sieb and Mulan. It was great. We made plans to go to Berlin in the summer. Those guys were just really fun to be with. So about midnight we went to Trouw. The next night, I saw all the empty beer cans in my garbage bin … so unreal to think that by then Tonio was already dead.’

  She fell silent, as though staring, dismayed, into that bin. (Cans upright on the bottom of the wastebasket, so the last splashes of beer wouldn’t leak out all over the scraps of paper, it makes such a sticky mess.)

  ‘We were all really up for it. Pity the music was kind of lame. The upside was that it gave us the chance to talk a lot. I finally dared to tell them about stuff I really want to do, but never get around to. Like photography. Being out of it for a while makes it even harder to pick up again. Tonio talked me back into it. And what do you know: after that weekend, I started taking pictures again. Tonio was really a super-nice guy. Thoughtful. He was a fantastic listener.’