Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  [* Drummer Jimmy Nicol replaced Ringo Starr, who had taken ill with tonsillitis, on the group’s June 1964 tour.]

  The trio of young men who jumped into the water right in front of us wore orange life vests, ruling out a joint suicide born of desperate adulation. The boat drew nearer, and the cheering got even more deafening. Orange gorged itself on Orange, but the screaming suggested insatiability.

  I held Miriam tightly, with her back pressed against me. We were now looking straight at the boat, insofar as the frizzy orange wigs allowed. Van Bommel’s goofy hat. A black player, whose name I didn’t know, wore a gold-coloured Roman victory helmet, I suppose in order to dispel any residual doubts. Another player was being interviewed on camera.

  The spray-can orange mist thickened as the boat approached. Now, showers of orange confetti rained down upon the deck.

  ‘Heads down!’ cried the MC. The players crouched obligingly, just to be on the safe side — a pity, because after their scandalous performance against Spain, I thought they all, down to the last man, deserved a good head-butt. The boat glided under the bridge. I took Miriam by the hand and pulled her behind me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she called out.

  ‘They’ll be going down Leidsegracht next.’

  Despite colliding constantly with other spectators, we managed to keep ahead of the team’s boat. On the Leidsegracht, we found a surprisingly uncrowded spot across from number 22, where we had lived from November 1990 to July 1992. As if I hadn’t stopped here on purpose, Miriam pointed to the house across the canal, her finger singling out the second floor. I looked at her. It was the first time today I’d seen tears in her eyes.

  Hysterical cheering along the canal wall broke the relative quiet. Through the arch of the bridge, led by two police boats, sailed our national pride.

  33

  With every tourist boat that turned the corner from Herengracht into Leidsegracht, we heard the loud honk of a ship’s horn. In time, it drove Miriam and me completely crazy, but Tonio ran excitedly to the window with each new blast.

  ‘Boat … boat!’

  And then he watched contentedly as the flat, glass-topped vessel passed through the canal below, and the passengers’ heads turned from left to right on cue from the tour guide.

  One pleasant spring day during our first year at that address, I knelt at the low windowsill and looked out the open windows to see if Miriam and Tonio were yet on their way back from nursery school. There they stood, on the stone steps leading to the front door. A rare sight: Tonio in tears. He kicked the lowest stair angrily while Miriam spoke soothing words.

  ‘No … I want to go to Bibelebons!’

  He wasn’t faking it for effect. His crying seemed heartrendingly sincere in the serernity of that spring afternoon. ‘I want to go back to Bibelebons. Bibelebons! Not home.’

  He plonked himself down at the bottom step and refused to go inside. Eventually she sat down next to him, an arm around his shoulder. I couldn’t make out the words, but the snivelling continued, softer now.

  Sweet poppet. He was the only one of us who missed the Veluwe. A tour boat tooted its horn. Tonio wasn’t interested. He shook his head vehemently. Bibelebons — his beloved Veluwe nursery school. And we had just yanked him out of there, without asking his permission.

  34

  Tonio called me by my first name from the moment he could speak. If he wanted to indicate our familial relationship, he’d say: ‘This is my Adri. My Adri.’

  And with it, he’d tug at my sleeve.

  I sit in the small living room at Leidsegracht 22, with the glass door open to the short hallway and the stairs leading to the dining room. Reading on the sofa, I watch Tonio scuffle past, bearing a large bale of blankies. The entire house is laid with the same soft, thick, grey carpeting, including the stairs — it is Tonio’s greatest pleasure to climb up the stairs on his bare knees. From behind the pacifier comes a combination of humming, mumbling, and gentle groaning as he conquers the stairway. When he reaches the curve and is nearly out of sight, the ruffle of his limbs against the treads stops, as do the noises from his nose and mouth. I turn a page of my book, and observe out of the corner of my eye how he hangs motionlessly on the stairs, the pacifier now in his free hand. He is looking at me. I focus on the page, but have stopped reading. Each of us as stock-still as a grasshopper, we eye one another: he, straight at me; me, indirectly.

  I can’t hold my pose any longer, and turn to him, looking straight into his wide-open eyes, which glisten teasingly.

  ‘Adri, you’re my fa-a-a-a-a-ather, right?’

  ‘Whether you like it or not, yes, I am your father.’

  Before I’ve even finished my sentence, he sticks the pacifier back into his mouth and continues lumbering up the stairs. His panting laugh has something triumphant about it: as though he’s unmasked me, or at least has coerced a confession out of me.

  I stare motionlessly at my book awhile, without reading.

  35

  When the homecoming boat had passed and the players crouched once again for the next arched bridge, we stood looking at the gable of our former home. All the way at the top, at the back, was Tonio’s attic room, which he proudly showed to every first-time visitor. ‘This is my house.’

  I pointed at the wide canal-green door, which shone like a mirror. Next to the door was a lantern that would have gone down well at a brothel. ‘You think that lock is still the same?’

  Miriam didn’t know what I was getting at.

  ‘Remember, that time you locked me out … and were hiding inside with Our Man in Africa?’

  ‘Oh, that. I’d lost my keys. I only wanted to keep thieves out.’

  ‘Maybe I was the thief.’

  Having had enough of the noxious orange fumes, I suggested to Miriam that we take a short cut through Leidsestraat to the Leidsebosje, and wait for the parade there. We took a left onto the Keizersgracht. Leidsestraat and Leidseplein were less packed than otherwise on a warm summer afternoon. As we approached the square, I caught myself peering down side streets in search of the shawarma joint that Tonio might have been heading for that night, in order to put some solid food in his beer-ravaged stomach.

  By the time we got to the Korte Leidsedwarsstraat, I could no longer contain myself. I walked over to the door of a Turkish snack bar, and examined the colour photos of the various dishes. Sure enough, they did a döner kebab, Tonio’s favourite late-night snack. Was this the image he had in mind, and for which he allowed himself to be lured into a detour — off the Van Baerle, to Jan Luyken and, finally, Hobbemastraat?

  Yes, a person can meet his end as unheroically as this. I recently came across an old postcard, sent in the summer of 1978 by Jolanda, who was vacationing on the island of Terschelling with a girlfriend. ‘I miss you + shawarma sandwich’. I had spent a few intense weeks with her, both of us so in love that we forgot to eat, but not to drink. Late at night — I lived in De Pijp — we would end up at the shawarma joint on the Ferdinand Bolplein. The streets were just as deserted as now in the early morning. I never considered those nocturnal meals life-threatening.

  36

  We passed the Hotel Americain’s new fountain. From the sudden cheering around the corner, we reckoned the players’ boat had reached the Singel. For those on the bridge, the boat still had to take another curve, so here the howling only started a few moments later. Miriam and I found a spot at the far end of the bridge railing. The sunlight shone on the deck and on the players, a few of whom were being interviewed. The TV helicopter hovered above Leidseplein, taking the bird’s-eye footage we would soon be watching at home.

  No sooner had the boat nipped under the wide bridge than the entire herd of supporters rushed across the tram tracks to the other side — in order to see their heroes reappear. The stampede looked just like thirty years before: the giddy panic with
which hordes of squatters and their supporters were scattered by riot police. The tear gas was now orange, and the tears were not chemically induced, but brought on by the confused mix of triumph and defeat.

  Miriam and I cut straight through to the Leidsebosje. We were approaching The Spot, but were in no hurry to reach it. We preferred to be pushed or washed there by the hordes of clowns that were now heading our way. Hundreds of them swarmed further up along the raked wall of the Singel canal, in order to get as close as possible to the boat, which was just emerging from under the bridge. It cruised down the short stretch of Leidsekade where Harry Mulisch lived. From where I stood, I couldn’t see if he was watching from his workroom: there was too much reflection in the window. He might well have been there. Usually, he’d have retreated to his favourite hotel on the Lido in Venice right now, but it was closed for renovations. The day after the accident he had walked over to The Spot, and was shocked by the bright yellow lines and symbols that illustrated the brute force of the drama, as yet unaware of who it had happened to.

  I recognised the player now being interviewed as Robin van Persie. I pointed it out to Miriam, who nodded sadly. Without having to say it out loud, we both pictured the six-year-old Robin leaning up against the wall of our rented schoolhouse in Marsalès, watching sullenly as his sisters taught the one-year-old Tonio to walk. Even the flat-bottomed flagship of Dutch football could not escape from pantonioism today.

  The pedestrian bridge linking the Max Euweplein to the Stadhouderskade (the bridge I had once believed had played such a crucial role in Tonio’s unhappy end), too, was chock-a-block with screaming fans who were already wastefully dumping fistfuls of orange confetti into the canal while the boat was still no further than the old Lido. My eyes glided along the front façade of the Holland Casino, trying to locate the security cameras that had registered Tonio’s last deed in this world. I wasn’t able to find them. Of course, being a system designed to foil burglars, they wouldn’t make them overly conspicuous.

  On the other corner of the entrance to the Max Euweplein was the grand café where, not even a year ago, Tonio had first met his future classmates. The small delegation that had brought us flowers at the beginning of June explained how it had gone. August 2009: because Tonio was still working at Dixons, he missed the beginning of intro week. When he finally made a date with his ‘group’, he showed up much too late. Trying to kill time while waiting for him, his classmates — who had never met Tonio or even seen a photo of him — tried to picture what he was like, based solely on his name and date of birth. The game got more and more serious. Based on just those two bits of information, they put together a profile, a sort of intuitive composite sketch. Theories on his personal attributes like hairstyle and weight were posited and dismissed. A small majority came to the conclusion that he was 1.75m at most. Another small majority saw him with long, dark hair and thick eyebrows that grew toward each other a bit just above the bridge of his nose. Finally, they all more or less agreed: this, and only this, was how the newcomer looked.

  Just then Tonio walked in, certain of his anonymity. He scanned the tables in the full café for what could be his group. How on earth was he to recognise them? All at once there were ten arms waving in the air, and ten voices calling out as one: ‘Yoo-hoo, Tonio! Over here!’

  They had democratically conceived just the right picture of him. If I try to imagine his surprise at that moment — his shy grin (that started somewhere between his shoulder blades) — I could just cry. Just nine months later — a stone’s throw from that very same café, on the other side of the canal — he would be dashed to the pavement by a car.

  I imagined him walking over to his classmates’ table. ‘Jeez, what the … you guys …’

  Laughing, with jerky gestures, he would make a round of handshakes. ‘Shit, how’d you know …?’

  37

  The team’s boat approached The Spot, where the Singel canal curves to the left toward the Rijksmuseum. Supporters still slid down the sloped, overgrown canal wall, either on their back or in a crouch walk, toward the water’s edge, as though they were prepared to wade out to the boat, up to their neck in brown muck if need be.

  ‘Come with me.’ I pulled Miriam past the undulating wall of orange backs and wigs. The Hobbemakade/Stadhouderskade junction was deserted. High above, a helicopter hovered, but not to guard The Spot. The crowd faced away from the intersection, cheering hysterically. No more yellow outlines, which the desk officers had warned us about, were to to be seen — worn away by cars that hadn’t suddenly found a cyclist on their front bumper.

  I pointed to the place. ‘Right about there.’

  Here he had been slammed out of life. Life itself not yet entirely out of him, but what ensued was mostly just a last-ditch attempt to save what, in the end, couldn’t be saved.

  The boats, accompanied by whoops and roars, followed the curve. Vuvuzelas bellowed their heavy tones. Entire hordes advanced en masse toward the Rijksmuseum, so as to enjoy, for another few moments, a view of the players, or to be at Museumplein on time for the actual tribute.

  Miriam shook her head, crying inaudibly. ‘Just like that …’ I thought I heard her say. ‘In the middle of the road …’

  What struck me all the more was the loneliness of what had occurred here. After a bike ride on his own … blind fate grabbing him by the horns … being flung into the air and smacked against the asphalt. How long did he lie there like that? Did he groan, or were his lungs already too wrecked to provide sufficient air to cry out?

  I studied the area carefully. The curve in the Stadhouderskade, the mouth of the Hobbemakade, the crosswalk from the Park Hotel to the Singel … indeed, it really did look, as Dick had said, open and orderly. Blindfolded and all, fate had had quite a chore bringing together a cyclist and a car right here. Exacting work in the early-morning darkness.

  In my imagination these past weeks, The Spot had gradually shrunk — until it became a narrow, indistinct, one-way tunnel in which a bike and a Suzuki simply had to have a fatal encounter.

  38

  Tonio, the finest thing you gave me is the sense of self-esteem. Before you made your entrance, I always had to act out a form of confidence, such was the low self-regard I secretly harboured. As I watched you develop, so too grew my sense of pride — in you, of course, but also in myself. I was, for a not-inconsequential part, in you. Whoever could have a hand in producing such a magnificent creature, must certainly be worth something.

  Now that I’m forced to release you so abruptly, my self-esteem is in a sorry state, as though it was not only created out of you, but has vanished along with you. I begat you, but was unable to preserve you. I’m not worth crap anymore.

  39

  It is a night

  you normally only see in films

  Night was apparently a thing, an object, which could usually only be made visible cinematographically, but also occurred once in a blue moon — in the form, for instance, of the Brabant balladeer Guus Meeuwis. He was on stage at the far end of Museumplein, rounding off his act for the rapturous mob. After this, the national team would be given its official tribute; the players were now just about stepping off the boat at the pier across from the Rijksmuseum, in order to be reunited with their loved ones.

  On the floor there’s an empty bottle of wine

  and clothes that could be either yours or mine

  My Dutch grammar teacher would probably take more umbrage at that ‘empty bottle of wine’ than ‘there’s clothes’. Gerard van der Vleuten is no longer with us in this life, but through the years I often hear his undaunted voice: ‘A bottle of wine, Guus, is a bottle full of wine. If the bottle is empty, Guus, the wine is finished, leaving us with an empty wine bottle. An “empty bottle of wine”, Guus, is like “the corner of a round table”: a contradictio in terminis. Got it? Guus …?’

  Meeuwis closed with the stupidest number
to ever emerge from the history of Dutch song: ‘Kedeng, kedeng’, the title offering an onomatopoeic depiction of a train chugging along the rails. The audience hollered the refrain in over-the-top ecstasy, enriching it with an improvised arrangement for a thousand vuvuzelas. Here a loser lifted up the hearts of the losers — and necessary it was, too.

  The players were now allowed to take the stage. Van Bronckhorst, the captain, announced each of his men one by one, all twenty-two of them. The cheering from below elevated the athletes ever further above their flop. The vox populi had the last word.

  40

  The neighbour who had recorded the live broadcast for us warned me that the video and sound quality was ‘godawful’, with pixelated block faces and wrung-out heads.

  Filmed from the air, the fans looked even more like a herd of cattle at round-up time. If they got squashed hard enough against the bridge railings, their fervour would get squeezed out by itself. This mass display of rapture about absolutely nothing — this can’t be what life, civilisation, Tonio’s death, was all about. It was not so much that people sought out emptiness — they sought out echoing emptiness, so they’d feel less alone. Nothingness had to be an echo chamber. You tossed in a bass, and got back an ass, without having to do any more than scream at the top of your lungs.

  The boats disappeared under the Marnixstraat’s wide bridge at the end of the Leidsegracht, and stayed under it for so long that one might think they had just evaporated into the darkness. The helicopter’s camera could only film the fans who desperately raced from one side of the bridge to the other, in disbelief that their heroes might be gone for good.

  And yet the team boat re-emerged into the full sunlight, and turned left onto the Singel toward Leidseplein and the Hotel Americain. Before the vessel once again vanished into the darkness of the bridge alongside the hotel, you could see Robin van Persie being manoeuvred into an advantageous position for his turn as interviewee. Again the helicopter filmed as the herd galloped from one side of the bridge to the other. I knew that we, too, had crossed the road — not to the railings on the opposite side, but to the Leidsebosje, but I wasn’t able to make us out: it was filmed from too high up.