Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  No, that wasn’t it. The sound of the propellers had roused her, and then she saw the chopper hovering above The Spot, as though someone was trying to rub it in that the nightmare was for real, even after she’d woken up. ‘I’m okay now.’

  Later, when I went downstairs, Miriam was sitting uncomfortably on the sofa, with one leg tucked up and her head leaning back. Red-rimmed eyes staring into nothingness. ‘I miss him so much,’ she kept repeating in a whisper. Her head rolled slowly back and forth over the back of the sofa, in a sort of resigned denial. ‘I miss him so terribly … it’s just inconceivable …’

  At moments like these, I had no answer other than to hold her cold hand until it warmed up and she pulled it away because I squeezed it too tightly.

  17

  My self-recrimination is not limited to Tonio’s gruesome end. I have also brought this on Miriam. I robbed her of her youth on her twentieth birthday, a bottle of whisky under my arm. Later, I saddled her with a child, which put paid to her childhood once and for all.

  I not only saddled her with a child, I also saddled her with death. I had sworn to her I would protect that child with my life, if need be with my dead body. I was not able to honour my promise. The boy slipped through my fingers.

  Her life as a girl is finished, and her life as a mother is finished. It is a miracle that she wants to continue her life with me as my wife.

  18

  A Sinterklaas celebration at Arti. Finally — you were almost the last one — Santa called you up to the stage. You’d hardly made it there before launching into a little dance on the red carpeting, turning your back on the good saint as you skipped in a circle. Your dance was loony and stiff, hands flapping and rotating like miniature propellers. Your eyes sought me out. I was sitting at the bar.

  ‘Gotta poop,’ you called out to me. To salvage the situation as best you could, you made an idiotic face. Sinterklaas looked on, flabbergasted. I have seldom loved you as much as at that moment.

  I asked Ria the bartender for the wooden stick with the key, and yanked you from the stage.

  There is no doubt that I loved him, from the first to the last day. As often as I said it to my mother (‘I love that boy’), or silently to myself, it was mostly an unspoken, matter-of-fact love. No proof necessary. (I sometimes dreamt of a God who would command me to sacrifice my son to Him. I was prepared to believe in such a God, but only in order to make a fool of Him by sparing Tonio.)

  The binding and convincing evidence of my love for Tonio was presented, unasked-for, by his death. The ice-cold black hole into which my life plunged, from the one moment to the next, proved how much I loved him.

  Since Whit Sunday, Miriam and I talk about Tonio, surprisingly consistently, in the past-perfect and imperfect tense. Only, ‘I loved him’ is something I can’t get out of my mouth. Even my pen baulks. Of course, I can replace the wretched past tense with ‘… how much I love him’, but I am still tempted to add: ‘as he was’.

  My love for him is still there, and more intensely than it used to be. Grammatically, it makes no sense at all. If, under duress, I say, ‘I love him’, then what him am I talking about? Tonio no longer exists as him. He existed (and how!) in what now is past tense. And yet I love him, like I used to love him.

  My love is genuine and sincere, but it has to make do without an object. It is love desperately in search of an untraceable lover. A talk-show editor once warned his colleagues against inviting me as a guest: ‘Right away, he’ll open up a can of old Greeks.’ Well, now that the can is open anyway: the old Greeks at least had the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to hold on to. An exceptional miracle — by the grace of the gods. I have to make do with a love meandering in the present imperfect tense, forever cut off from the beloved in past imperfect.

  Seeing that language is so uncooperative, how can we expect to keep Tonio alive in words?

  19

  To be abandoned by a lover, by the woman in your life — even that I’d braced myself for. ‘You never come out of it unscarred,’ a colleague once said. I was prepared for the shame of being dumped. All the love still left over for someone who just slammed the door behind them … the wastefulness of so much longing … well, all right, that passes. Time would do its work.

  At most, I had braced myself for the death of my son by allowing my fear to make a pact with my imagination. That I might actually lose him never really entered my mind. I let my imagination, fed by fear, do the work — the work of warding it off.

  Someone had abandoned me, my own son, without my love for him being able to pass. Time would show me what longing was. A lover who abandons you can transform your pain into hate. With the loss of a child, this was impossible. I moped around like an utterly betrayed lover whose love only grew and grew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Pantonioism

  1

  His passion for rocks was sparked in Brussels. Miriam and Tonio were there in the mid-1980s, visiting her friend Lot. The boy immersed himself in a book belonging to Lot’s husband on minerals and semi-precious stones. Back home, he begged us for a subscription to a rock collectors’ magazine. In every city we visited, he managed to wheedle a handful of special collectors’ items out of us. Soon, stones had no more secrets from him; he developed an infallible memory for types, colours, names.

  Once he heard me mention a forthcoming book-cover design to Miriam. I had decided that midnight blue would make a nice background, but couldn’t find the right colour swatches, either at the paint dealer or elsewhere. Tonio darted off to his room, and reappeared a little while later, opening his fist in front of me. ‘D’you mean this?’

  A stone of the most splendid shade of blue glistened at me. Maybe not exactly midnight blue, but more useable than what I was looking for. I took the stone in my hand.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Lapis lazuli,’ he exclaimed. ‘Lapis lazuli, of course. The real thing, lapis lazuli.’

  He accompanied the announcement with a triumphant little dance. He went with me to the publisher, where he unwrapped the lapis lazuli from its dustcloth. His face radiant, he observed the effect his magic stone had on the publisher and his staff.

  ‘Lapis lazuli,’ he cried gleefully. ‘For Adri’s book.’

  Unfortunately, it was not feasible to use this unique colour for the cover. With every proof I received, Tonio fetched his stone for comparison. It wasn’t even in the ballpark.

  ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘just take a whole bunch of colour photos of it, and snip out the lapis lazuli from each one … then you paste all those lapis lazulis together on the front of your book. Easy.’

  When we had the living room renovated in ’97, we had two glass display-cases built in on either side of the fireplace: one for Miriam’s collection of Venetian masks, the other for Tonio’s rocks. He kept his smaller specimens in foam-rubber powder puffs, which were in turn enclosed in transparent hard-plastic boxes. The larger minerals were placed among them on the glass shelves. Every visitor was brought to come see his cabinet.

  ‘That blueish stone there, Tonio, what’s it called?’

  ‘It only looks blue. Because of the light. It’s really grey. A labradorite.’

  And then he’d look over at Miriam or me and shake his head. How could people be so ignorant?

  In a town in Sicily, Tonio found a small, dusty, forgotten shop (he seemed to have a sort of rock-radar) where a little old lady dressed in black, and as wrinkled as a desiccated apple, had a glass case full of minerals and petrified seahorses. While we drank ice-cold, nearly red rosé in the shade of a nearby café, Tonio nosed around that shop. When he came to show us his purchase, he put on his most pathetic face: ‘They’ve also got an agate. Not even that expensive.’

  When I gave him the money, he howled with a sort of mocking triumph. He regarded every gift as a victory over his parents’ did
actic restraint. The other café patrons got a kick out the way he instructed us to guard his newly acquired booty, returning post-haste to the shop with a fistful of freshly wheedled money, as though he were afraid that other buyers, who of course didn’t know the first thing about rocks, would snap up his prize.

  Ten minutes later, he was back. The old woman had packed up his agate, complete with a blue ribbon, like the Sicilian bakers did a tart. Tonio tore open the paper with nimble fingers. ‘Just look at how nicely the manganese left its mark …’ He spoke like an article out of his collectors’ journal, in a deep voice. ‘That grain … and this here, that’s a dendrite print. Just like a Christmas tree, huh Mum?’ And after a brief pause, looking at me in desperation: ‘The lady also showed me a few pieces of jasper. They’re her last ones. Red and green. I don’t think they’re very cheap.’

  ‘The money’s run out.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but …’

  Today, Miriam and I are going shopping for a stone for Tonio. The last of his collection, with an inscription.

  2

  Two p.m. Continuous alternation between sunlight and wind-driven cloud cover has always made me nervous (it was the same weather the Saturday that my father drove his motorcycle into a ditch and was brought home by ambulance, unrecognisable through the mask of clotted blood), but today it’s worse than ever. We’ve got an appointment at the stonecutter’s at five. I draw the curtains against the intensely raking light, then whip them back open at every interlude of darkness.

  Work is out of the question. At three, I decide to go ahead and shave and shower, meticulously and at my leisure, so I’ll be in tip-top shape when Miriam comes to get me. Seeing my bed on the way to the bathroom reminds me how tired I am. To regain my strength, I lie down with the first bit of reading material I find on the headboard: a booklet on Shakespeare. It informs me that the bard’s work contains some sixteen thousand question marks. As I lie there half asleep, my finger between the pages, wondering whether that’s a lot or a little, sixteen thousand spread over forty-some plays, Miriam peeks around the door.

  ‘I’d like to leave at four-fifteen at the latest, okay?’ she says, slightly harried. ‘Friday-afternoon traffic, you never know.’

  Shave, shower, wash hair — the thought of it puts me off entirely. I lie there on my bed until four, not even reading, and without resolving the issue of the sixteen thousand question marks. If I get up now, there’ll be just enough time to get myself more or less dressed. Every day, I still wear what I pulled on the morning of Whit Sunday: jogging pants and a flannel lumberjack shirt. Well, not always the exact same ones, because things do have to go in the wash once in a while. The raking light has definitively made way for a slowly passing cloud cover, for the strong winds have subsided.

  Crossing the street to the car, I realise the gout in my left foot has returned. I walk so little, and not at all outside the house, that I hadn’t really noticed the pain until now. The conventional wisdom that foot gout can be caused by eating red meat and drinking red port was recently debunked in the science section of the newspaper. I don’t care for red meat or red port, but do enjoy clear alcohol, which indeed appears to play a role in the formation of painful crystals around one’s joints. I finally dare to leave the house after all these weeks, and the whole neighbourhood gets to see me stagger to the car.

  ‘You’re limping,’ Miriam says from behind the wheel.

  ‘I’m forgetting how to walk, that’ll be it.’

  Cornelis Schuytstraat. Willemsparkweg. Koninginneweg … the streets are indeed crowded with Friday-afternoon traffic, but it never comes to a standstill. Only at the main intersection with the Amstelveenseweg does traffic move so slowly that we have to let four green lights pass.

  The Zeilstraat drawbridge is open. There is such a confusion of gulls flying every which way above our heads that it’s as though they’ve just escaped from a great big box, of which one flap is propped open. It is a long while before the bridge begins to swing shut.

  ‘I’m curious how far they’ve got,’ Miriam says. ‘I asked them to wait with the lettering. It looked good on the computer, but we have to see it with our own eyes first.’

  ‘Did you remember about the hyphen?’

  ‘There wasn’t supposed to be a hyphen …’

  ‘That’s what I mean, no hyphen. But did you check?’

  ‘Now that you mention it … My mind is such a chaotic mess. I wonder if it’ll ever get better.’

  ‘You can go.’

  The barrier arm jerks upward. We cross the Schinkel canal, heading toward Hoofddorpplein. When we cross under the motorway, entering Slotervaart, Miriam says: ‘This is the same route we took the day Tonio was born, in the midwife’s little Fiat. Keep an eye out … there, off to the left, Slotervaart Hospital. That’s where he was born.’

  I have not been back since 15 June 1988, but I recognise the building at once. Miriam was so caught up in her contractions that morning that she only realised we were at the wrong hospital once we got to reception. Tonio never tired of hearing this story.

  ‘Sorry, honey, sorry,’ the midwife kept repeating. ‘My fault. Stupid of me. Sorry.’

  It was clear, Tonio, that there was no way we were going to turn around and go to the VU, where you were supposed to be born. The midwife pushed the wheelchair with a groaning Miriam down the hall to the lift. Your father wobbled alongside, one hand on your mother’s neck. The wrong hospital. Miriam a wrung-out wreck in a wheelchair. This couldn’t possibly end well.

  ‘But it did!’ he’d exclaim. ‘Just look at me!’

  3

  From Plesmanlaan, we turn right into the bland monotony of Osdorp.

  ‘Jan Rebelstraat,’ Miriam says. ‘Have a look at the map. I was here once with Nelleke, but that was sleepwalking. It’s close to Westgaarde.’

  In a north-west corner of Osdorp, I locate the Jan Rebelstraat, indeed not far from the cemetery.

  ‘Turn left here.’ This autumnal summer sky makes me just as nervous as this afternoon’s uneasy grazing sunlight did. ‘There it is.’

  Miriam drives past what looks like a normal shop window. LIEFTINK BROS. STONECUTTERS - SINCE 1913.

  ‘Just a sec.’ Miriam turns off the engine, closes her eyes. ‘Help me muster up some courage.’

  I undo her seatbelt and pull her close. ‘Think of last time, Minchen, when you were here with Nelleke. You pretended it was a garden centre … shopping for a little something for our back terrace. A bargain from the sale section.’

  ‘That was then,’ she whispers. ‘It’s harder now.’

  The door, complete with jangling bell, makes me think of one of those old-fashioned general stores. The left side of the shop has been made into a life-size imitation graveyard, like on a film set. What doesn’t tally is all that marble, flamed pink and striped pearl-grey, so glossy and unweathered. Nowhere is there a patch of moss or a sprig of grass between the stone chips that fill up the plots.

  Grass markers. Slants. Uprights. Combinations of these. I wonder if the names inscribed on them, some of them with gilded letters, have been made up. If so, what about the portraits sunk into the marble — or are they computer composites? The novelist’s ideal playroom.

  To the right, a display of pink marble hearts, and toy animals (teddy bears, bunny rabbits) carved out of light-grey marble. Behind that, two desks with computer equipment. On the wall, large boards with typeface examples.

  A man of around forty gets up from one of the desks. Miriam apologises that we’re early. Handshakes all round, which we don’t normally do at the garden centre. We assume he recognises our names from the gravestone.

  ‘No problem,’ the man says.

  Early. He leads us to the workshop behind the showroom, where a second man is at work in a hazy cloud of dust. Maybe they’re brothers, but not the 1913 ones. Suddenly,
before we’ve prepared ourselves for it, we are looking down on a gravestone, lying flat on its back and supported by wooden trestles — with our surnames on it.

  ‘I’ll just go get the paperwork,’ says the man who received us. He goes back to the front room.

  TONIO

  ROTENSTREICH –

  VAN DER HEIJDEN

  I point out the hyphen to Miriam. ‘You see how these things take on a life of their own? It’s as though Tonio, maiden name Van der Heijden, was married to a Mr. Rotenstreich. One little hyphen, and he’s lying in his grave with another identity. With a different gender, even.’

  ‘Stuff for a thriller,’ Miriam says. ‘Alfred Kossmann coined the term “identity fraud” — that’s where it all started, right? Without my thesis on him, we wouldn’t have come up with the name Tonio.’

  ‘All right, the thriller opens with an exhumation,’ I say. ‘Reason: an erroneously chiselled hyphen, giving the buried person a mistaken identity. I’ll leave the rest up to you. After all, it’s your last name that …’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘That doesn’t belong there.’

  ‘You can still have them take it off.’

  ‘Not on your life. Not now that I can finally make good on an old promise.’

  The three names, and Tonio’s dates, are printed on a sheet of paper, which is taped to the stone. Everything can still be amended, shifted. The man returns with the paperwork. ‘Check along with me, if you will … The headstone is made of Belgian bluestone … one hundred centimetres high, eighty wide, and eight thick. How do you want the photograph?’

  The rectangular plaque with Tonio’s self-portrait as Oscar Wilde etched onto it is, I see only now, is lying loosely on the stone. ‘What are the choices?’ I ask.

  ‘Anything you like,’ says the man. ‘From medallion to recessed. My personal advice would be: half-sunken into the headstone, so it’s still in mid-relief.’