Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  I crouched at the bow of the boat. I looked back at Miriam, who, seated alongside our friends on the thwart, was holding on tightly to the gunwale. Her face was wet, but it could just as well have come from the spray sent up by a passing boat. On the other hand … in this open expanse of light, surrounded by bobbing boats all hurrying in the same direction, it was impossible not to think of Tonio. She knew, as I did: we were heading, via an enormous detour, for the spot we haven’t dared visit since Whit Sunday, the day we stood at his deathbed, kissing him goodbye for eternity. But a confrontation with the crossroads where he had lost consciousness for good early that morning, we hadn’t been able to face. We’d still have to wait and see if it would happen today.

  We bobbed to the left of the players’ boat. There was a gap in the water police’s cordon, which a floating camera crew from the popular show RTL Boulevard took advantage of by cruising right up alongside, so close they could almost touch. The TV glamour-programme crew did its work until Wesley Snijder recognised the presenter’s mug and dumped the contents of a ten-litre beer stein over him. There: payback for the tendentious reporting on Wesley’s fiancée.

  The armada sailed past one of the harbour islands.

  27

  When I woke up that morning, I realised I was wearing my apnea mask. Usually, if I went to bed tanked up — as was certainly the case after that visit to the cemetery — I’d neglect to put it on, sometimes out of forgetfulness, more often because I fell into a deep sleep the minute I lay down. Last night, even though my mind was a blank, I apparently did think of it.

  I dreamt of Tonio. As I lay there half asleep, listening to the quiet murmur of the CPAP device, I tried to recall the dream. Tonio cried at the end — no, he was still crying. You could barely hear it above the sound of the machine, but it was unmistakable. He did not cry like a young adult man, no, but like the two-, three-year-old he once was. He cried, quietly and inconsolably sad, as he occasionally did on Thursday evenings in our Leidsegracht days, when Miriam had her regular night out with a girlfriend. I would babysit Tonio, and if he woke up, perhaps because he knew (or felt) that his mother was not there, he cried. If I went to have a look, he would stand up in his crib, which only just fitted in the nook of the roof. Upon seeing his father, he said, with a sniff and a wobbly voice: ‘I want Mummy.’

  I couldn’t offer him Mummy, because she was sitting in a restaurant with Lot, or they were having a last drink at Café Schiller. ‘I want Mummy.’ His singsong weeping made me all the more nervous, because on Thursday nights we usually received a couple of anonymous calls. If I answered, it was silent on the other end of the line. Sometimes I thought I heard vague pub noises in the background. I have to admit that at first I suspected it was Miriam: checking whether I was at really at home with the little one. Our relationship was not at its best in those days (even though Our Man in Africa was not yet in the picture). When I brought it up with her, she hit the roof. Never, never would she do such a thing. Didn’t I remember that back when we lived in De Pijp, ten years before, she had been the victim of anonymous telephone terrorism? Whenever she answered, the caller played a German march, or the Horst Wessel. Later, we discovered that the caller was a neo-Nazi in the neighbourhood, a civics teacher at the high school where my sister taught English. A nostalgic anti-Semite.

  We assumed that the Thursday-evening caller was a Schiller regular, who wanted to let me know he’d spotted my wife, or wanted to suggest that he himself was in her company — in short, that he had me in his grip. But this suspicion did nothing to relax me in my duties as babysitter, and Tonio was well aware of it, so that he kept on whimpering, almost apologetically softly — a full-out sob session just wasn’t his style. ‘I want Mu-u-u-ummy.’

  Meanwhile, that morning, the thirteenth of July, he went on wailing as a continuation of my long-forgotten dream, as only the very occasionally inconsolable Tonio could. For a moment, I thought it was the neighbour’s youngest child, whose early-morning cries I heard from time to time through the open windows. But no, the neighbours were on holiday. And besides, it was unmistakably the weeping of the three-year-old Tonio — so real, so near, that it frightened me. The sound was dampened by the hum of the CPAP machine. I wanted to hear Tonio cry in all his unadulterated misery, so that I’d know what he needed …

  I tore off the apnea mask without undoing the plastic hooks. I yanked the elastic bands over my head and hurled the thing, tube and all, onto the floor. The apparatus lay there for a few seconds, making that slurping and sucking sound, and then … silence. The child’s hushed crying had vanished.

  In its drowsy state, my brain must have converted the singsong hum of the CPAP into Tonio’s long-ago disquiet. I wanted it back. I wanted to be able to listen to it for hours on end. I groped in the dark next to the bed, found the tube, and pulled the elastic bands back over my head. The apparatus resumed automatically, softly pumping air into the mask, guarding its wearer against suspended breathing. The puffs of air sounded the same as before, but the weeping was gone. I’d driven it off.

  All day I tried to call to mind that real-life crying. I am not a great believer in supernatural incidents, but I could not avoid the notion that Tonio, via my apnea machine, was trying to tell me something. Perhaps the terrible, unutterable truth about his end. The suffering he must have endured after being thrown to the asphalt, or later, in the ambulance or on the operating table. Or, declared brain-dead, on his deathbed, when all he was given was air through a breathing tube. Maybe there he felt his parents’ presence, their kisses and caresses, and heard their choked words of farewell. This morning, Tonio tried to say something back. But not comforting. Only how awful it was. The pain. The farewell. And in doing so, he used his most anguished child’s voice. Its melancholy, wordless melody.

  28

  Much as the police in their bumper-boats tried to keep the pursuing fans’ fleet at bay, our motorised punt remained in the front ranks. We jounced our way into the labyrinth of the city. The very first bridges were already thronged with hysterically bleating supporter-sheep. Compared to June ’88, when the blandness of everyday duds still dotted the red-white-blue, the fans were now far more exuberantly decked out in the colour of their religion. Many of the supporters wore shapeless, bright orange angel-hair wigs, some of them a good half-metre across. The costume director of the film Amadeus would have been jealous.

  Seen from a distance, the frizzy offshoots of the wigs bled seamlessly into a powder-like orange mist produced by spray cans. As it hissed out of the valve, the smoke was still a clear day-glo orange; but as it wafted out across the water, the mist quickly took on a grubby tint. It made me think of the crayon I used as a child to colour in a pencil-outlined rooftop. The crayon always dragged some pencil graphite with it, smudging the orange into a dirty grey-red — quite realistic, you could say, but today it only made me sad.

  As we turned onto the Brouwersgracht, I felt Miriam poke me in the back. I was being beckoned by the host, who sat at the stern, manning the rudder. He shouted that he wanted to bypass the Herengracht and try to approach Museumplein via Prinsengracht and Spiegelgracht. That would give us a head start.

  I nodded, and wondered if I could get to the Hobbemastraat/Stadhouderskade intersection without running into a barricade. We hadn’t told our friends that, for us, that spot was the actual objective of this trip.

  The Melkmeisjesbrug was, in all its slenderness, a living triumphal arch, rising up out of a dense, unearthly orange mist. The red-white-blue mass that swarmed over it had a thousand legs and waving tentacles, and it screamed wordlessly from a thousand throats.

  The players’ boat, followed by that of the officials, turned left onto the Herengracht directly after passing under the Milkmaids’ Bridge. Our captain picked up speed. The bow of the punt lifted slightly and cleaved the water of the Brouwersgracht. Straight ahead. I glanced to the left. The Herengracht was, for as far as the eye c
ould see, a tunnel formed by a canopy of trees and a mass of writhing arms, all waving flags, banners, and pennants.

  If you didn’t know better, you might mistake the monotonous hollering for a mass lament. The bridges over the Herengracht appeared to be covered in a rusty orange sort of teeming moss, kept in undulating motion by maggots. And then there was that layer of red-brown mist lying low over the water of the canal, like the vapours emitted by heavily polluted wastewater from a chemical factory. The team boat would soon be out of sight.

  I thought back on the idyllic Loenen in the Veluwe, where the manure was brought out in thick winter mist. As the morning progressed, the low-lying haze took on a filthy yellow colour, like London smog above an industrial zone. Poor Tonio, who I had brought to the unspoilt countryside to protect him from urban grime. The windows in his room had to be hermetically sealed against the stench of the liquid fertiliser, which, absorbed by the ground mist, could only escape horizontally … across the road … through the yards and into the houses …

  We cruised past the West Indies House, situated on the Herenmarkt on the right bank of the Brouwersgracht. That’s where we were married on 24 December 1987, while Tonio was already taking shape inside Miriam’s belly. Here, on that frigid winter morning, my father nearly fell into the water from a sudden attack of dyspnea. After the marriage ceremony, he wobbled, hacking and gasping for air, over to the water’s edge to hoick a gob of bloody saliva into the canal. I saw, in the nick of time, from the way his eyes rolled back into his head, that he was having a dizzy spell, and just managed to prevent him from teetering into the canal. Pulmonary emphysema. He was just sixty-two, but half of those years had been spent chain-smoking. He never did quit. Secret chemical substances in each cigarette insured that his lungs, overgrown with glasslike slime, would open up — until the next cigarette.

  We were planning to go to the Sonesta Hotel, next to the Koepelkerk, for champagne, but the upshot of the palaver was that I went to the reception desk to cancel the reservation while the rest of my family helped my half-dead father into a taxi. I did not want to write him off as a bad fairy in drag, but it was clear that the ceremony, intended to legitimise the foetus, had been jinxed.

  29

  The new gravestone had not provided closure. More than any single day between 23 May and now, today, the 13th of July, was one of pantonioism. This was, of course, also because we hadn’t left the house just for a trip to the goat farm or Buitenveldert Cemetery, and were back in the city proper for the first time since that dinner on the Staalstraat. Tonio was everywhere. Everything exuded Tonio. Even the most insignificant objects, the most unimportant occurrences, revealed a trace of his soul.

  30

  ‘If he keeps on like this,’ Miriam shouted into my ear, ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  The punt hardly slowed in the frothing turn that took us onto the Prinsengracht, lurching sideways without interrupting its Japanese bows. Miriam grabbed onto me and said: ‘I’m really gonna throw up.’

  When we had passed under the bridge and straightened our course, I turned halfway toward our friend at the rudder and motioned to him to slow down. Maybe he only understood my signal when he saw Miriam retching.

  July 1994. The boat trip from our village on the Ibiza coast to Ibiza Town was scheduled to take an hour. En route, said the brochure, we could enjoy views of the rocky coast as we sailed past. A mirror-smooth, deep-blue sea … white lassoos of sea foam around the megaliths jutting out of the calm waves … cold drinks on board included in the price …

  The Spanish skipper tore to Ibiza Town in less than half an hour, while the man who was supposed to provide the drinks had already positioned himself with the fire hose, ready to rinse away the gall of passengers who had gotten seasick within the first ten minutes. The bow slammed against the water surface with a force that a whale’s fin couldn’t have matched. Miriam was the first one to throw up, immediately followed by Tonio (out of solidarity with his mother). Grinning, and adopting a fiendish routine, the steward stood there, legs spread, hosing down the deck. The boat lurched so violently that Miriam and Tonio were unable to aim their puke, and consequently sullied themselves.

  Later, as we walked along the quay (still sick to our stomachs), we saw the crew lounging on coils of rope, thoroughly enjoying a leisurely lunch thanks to the extra half-hour they had robbed from the tourist riff-raff.

  The six-year-old Tonio was so horrified at having to witness his own mother vomit that he went into a panic at the thought of the return voyage.

  ‘I don’t want Mama to throw up.’

  In the end, we took a taxi back to the bungalow — an hour-and-a-half trek, including inexplicable traffic jams, over winding inland roads. At first, the driver only sniffed with distaste, but later he launched into an all-out rant against his sour-smelling passengers.

  Once home, the hardships were soon forgotten. Before dinnertime, Tonio and I thought up a new chapter for our book Reis in een boom. The boy had climbed into the chestnut tree behind his house and refused to come down, despite the pleas of his father and mother. Yes, at night, when his parents were asleep, he did climb down — to fetch tools and planks with which to build himself a treehouse. He carried out the construction during the day, doing his best to imitate a woodpecker with his hammer and nails.

  ‘… to mislead his parents.’

  ‘What’s a woodpecker?’

  ‘You know. Woody Woodpecker.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘When the treehouse is finished … a kind of cabin … then he can start his travels.’

  ‘Yeah, but Adri … a tree … how can you travel in it? A tree doesn’t have wheels. It has roots … way deep in the ground.’

  ‘And that is the secret of our story. A secret only you and I know. Omigosh, just imagine, if everyone knew the secret … then every Tom, Dick, and Harry could write a story like this. Uh-uh, this is our story. Yours and mine.’

  ‘Will my name be on the book, too?’

  ‘Of course — the author’s name is always on the front cover. And the title page. So there’ll be two names. Yours and mine.’

  If I were worth my salt as a writer, I would be able to describe Tonio’s expression at the realisation that he might write his own book. With me. His face darkened a bit, perhaps as he realised the hurdles of such an undertaking.

  ‘Yeah, but Adri … I don’t even know the tree’s secret. Does he turn it into a ship?’

  ‘No, the tree stays put, with its roots anchored firmly in the ground. And the boy still travels.’

  ‘So what’s the secret?’

  ‘When you get onto a train or a boat, and you go travelling on it, what’s the first thing you notice?’

  ‘That you’re moving … or sailing.’

  ‘Exactly. You move forward, and that means your surroundings change. First the train chugs past the houses, then fields and meadows. The secret of our tree is that it never leaves its spot, but that it keeps getting new surroundings. So it’s as though that boy in his tree travels all over the world. With a constantly changing view from his treehouse.’

  31

  What was I doing here, in the middle of all this mass hysteria? Wanting to finish off what I started on 26 June 1988, when I made an about-face because I didn’t dare abandon the newborn any longer?

  My intuition had not deceived me. I got home and found Miriam in panic. The maternity-support worker had given Tonio his bath, whereby a plaster on her finger came loose. She showed Miriam the cut, which had opened up again in the warm water and was bleeding profusely. The silly woman had mentioned in passing that she had also been nursing a terminal AIDS patient for several months. After my phone call to the clinic, she was recalled from our employ and fired on the spot. We were told that the nurse was a chronic fantasist, and that she never should have been placed with us, but this only augmented Mi
riam’s (and my) disquiet. I should never have gone to the football homecoming that afternoon.

  32

  Grasping the gunwale, I crouch-walked to the stern. I had to step over two cross thwarts along the way. The host-captain made a beckoning gesture at the handle of the rudder, assuming, apparently, that I wanted to take over from him.

  ‘The Pulitzer’s mooring is just up ahead,’ I said. ‘Could you let us off there? Miriam and I want to go into town on foot.’

  He looked disappointed, but nodded, ticking his finger against the brim of his cap. At the Pulitzer Hotel, I helped Miriam out of the boat. We thanked them for the enjoyable cruise, and watched as the punt cut its way, razor-sharp, through the khaki-coloured water.

  Via two side streets and the bridge over the Keizersgracht, we approached the Herengracht as quickly as the unflagging stream of thronging supporters allowed. We needn’t have hurried, as the Museum Boat still had a couple of hundred metres to go before reaching the jam-packed bridge, where we tried to find a spot. The place was swarming with silver-white wigs, spray-painted to look like cloudish versions of the Dutch flag. Under the wigs, faces were caked with orange gunk, with mini-flags in red, white, white, and blue on their cheeks and foreheads.

  The Revolt of the Clowns. They hung in clusters on lampposts. Something tickled my face: an orange wig, generously adorned with the kind of sticks you get at the herring vendor: a toothpick with a little Dutch flag at the end. The players’ boat appeared under the next bridge. The animalistic braying, which you thought couldn’t get any louder, only increased in volume. Again I noticed the lack of anything triumphant in the sound of the cheering. You only had to shake your head and it sounded like a mass yell for help, a crowd crushing itself to death.

  The boat had now emerged from under the low bridge, and the blue training outfits all stood back upright, bottle or glass in their raised hand. The police force’s motorised waterbikes hastened to resecure the cordon. People jumped, or fell, into the canal, reminiscent of old black-and-white cinema newsreels of The Beatles on their canal tour through Amsterdam. Then, too, it seemed to me as though people were screaming in protest, because there was a fake Beatle, complete with signature haircut, cruising along as a stowaway.*