Tonio

by Jonathan Reeder

  The hope that Tonio might one day return to us has been obliterated. The fear that this icy truth will pierce us, deeper and more obscenely than before, only augments. What should we hope for? That sooner or later the sense of loss will fade? That is an idle hope, for the loss will be there, with a lifetime guarantee, forever.

  2

  It is as though we have landed in a dimension of reality where different laws of nature apply to us than to others. If I can go by all the well-meant predictions, most people see the date of the fatal accident as a point in time from which we move forward, marking various calendric milestones (a month now; three months already, soon four; before you know it, six), while loss and grief undergo an organic process of erosion.

  Miriam and I (varying somewhat on each other’s perception) experience the situation much differently. Whenever, having just managed to catch our breath, we glance back, we see the events of 23 May racing toward us at an unpredictable (and incalculable) speed. Instead of standing still, and thus falling further behind us, the date and what it represents keeps nipping at our heels — without actually nabbing us. We are like fugitives on the run, being chased by a hyena or some other predator. With every glance over our shoulder, the pursuer appears to be catching up, but it holds back, bides its time — its shadow, moreover, adding to the illusion.

  We will be relentlessly pursued for the rest of our days by a nightmare in the flesh — Tonio’s dead flesh. Nothing doing, the waning of pain and grief. The only thing that wanes is not what is behind us, but that which lies ahead: what’s left of our lives.

  3

  In a half-hearted attempt to do something about my physical condition, I mounted the exercise bike for the first time since Whit Sunday. I lugged it from a dark corner of the bedroom to a spot near the balcony doors, so that I could read the paper by daylight while pedalling. The machine is set to its maximum resistance. The last time I used it, in May, this setting felt easy. Now the pedals are sluggish and heavy. Now it’s my joints that, after months of sedentary brooding, are threatening to seize up.

  I drape the newspaper over the handlebars so as not to have to watch the odometer. I concentrate on my unwilling legs. Each rotation of the pedals is another step in my recovery. Soon we’ll initiate Prohibition. My brain has long since become immune to the pain-killing effect of alcohol. Booze is back to what it always was: simply a way to get blotto. With the difference that it now augments the pain, rather than numbing it. The grief-variant of a bad trip.

  As far as the physical boundaries of Prohibition go, there’s not much area to patrol: the two large seat cushions on the sagging living-room sofa, and the 40x40 centimetres of cocktail table, which, thanks to its special construction, can be slid back to divide the sofa into two parts. If I quit, it is primarily to no longer drag Miriam down with me. She regularly complains of a burning sensation in her throat after drinking her favourite herb vodka. Diluting it with orange juice works for the first two glasses, but after that even the sweetest fruit juice has a bitter edge. Neat, then, either straight up or with an ice cube.

  That little table, by the way, as handy as it seemed when we bought it, is beginning to get on my nerves. The veneer, which once gave it the impression of being made of solid wood, has started to peel and chip under the rings of sloshed alcohol; but the worst is that, in its function of sliding in a C-shaped embrace around the sofa seat, it forms an annoying barrier between Miriam’s grief and my comforting, and between my grief and her comforting. Every time we nevertheless reach out with an impotent gesture of support to the other, we risk knocking over a glass or bottle in the process.

  So away with that wheelless ServeBoy trolley, that clinking witness of our most intimate death-disgust — and all those bottles along with it.

  A muscle pain soon develops in my legs that seems more appropriate to hours of daily jogging than a few minutes on an exercise bike. What’s more, the image of Tonio on this same apparatus keeps forcing its way in, to the point of paralysing me. He has deposited a bag full of dirty laundry downstairs, and wants to take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy a decent shower. (The shower in de Nepveustraat does not produce much more than ‘a weak dribble’.) Looking for his parents, he goes around opening doors. Miriam isn’t home, and he eventually finds me in bed, reading. He is cheerful, full of energy.

  ‘Hi. Taking the day off? You gonna shower?’

  ‘In a bit.’

  ‘Mind if I go first?’

  ‘Learn once and for all not to toss the wet washcloth over the edge of the tub, okay? I really don’t feel like wringing out your used washrags.’

  He chuckles and climbs onto the exercycle. I don’t know how the conversation turns to the Coen brothers, his favourite directorial duo, but as he loosely pedals he gives me a brief lecture on Coen cinema. ‘So tricky.’ He’s just seen their latest, Burn After Reading, and groans as he recalls the roles played by Pitt and Clooney. ‘A pitiful pair, those two.’

  Brad Pitt, I understand, plays a babytalking personal trainer at a gym. And Clooney … too pathetic for words: ‘What a sucker.’

  ‘In the roles they’re playing, d’you mean, or the actors themselves?’

  ‘Both. That’s exactly the Coen brothers’ mean streak. By giving them those roles, they’re totally typecasting them. Really sneaky.’

  ‘Forgive me, Tonio, but you kind of remind me of a gullible theatregoer from the old days. Someone who waits at the stage door for the bad guy in the play, to punch him in the nose for the evil stuff he did on stage.’

  Tonio quit pedalling and looked at me, shaking his head. As usual, I just didn’t get it. ‘Why do you think the Coen brothers ask superstars like that to act in their movies?’

  With an expression that said ‘Just think about it’, he dismounted the exercise bike. He took a towel and washcloth from the linen cupboard and disappeared into the bathroom, where I would later find — not on the edge of the tub, but on the washbasin countertop — the washcloth, unwrung, and saturated with frothy shower gel. I lay in bed pondering whether from now on I should regard every Coen brothers movie as a sort of garbage grinder or paper shredder for disposing of mainstream celebrity reputations.

  This morning I had already taken Tonio’s imaginary place on the exercycle when Miriam came into the bedroom. It was clear she’d been crying — not dramatically, not for a long time, but nonetheless noticeably, even though I couldn’t put my finger on what made it so. I’d been with her for more than thirty years, and in those three decades we’d had our share of crying behind closed doors, me less than her, but never more than these past three months. By now I could put together an encyclopedia of the many categories of crying, complete with gradations in intensity, that the death of a child can lead to. My internal weeping, too, could be itemised, at the very least into the trickle and the gush.

  ‘I just thought of something,’ she said, and her eyes started glistening again. ‘My father is ninety-seven; I’m fifty. I take after him. Say I also live to be ninety-seven, or even older … that means I’ve got another forty-seven years to live without Tonio. A half a century. Isn’t that an unbearable thought?’

  My legs had come to a stop, but I stayed sitting on the machine. I laid a hand against the side of her face. ‘Minchen, what did we decide? Not to resist the grief. More than that: we’d keep the nerve open and raw, preferably let the pain get even worse, because that’s our last link to Tonio. If we can keep him alive via that searing pain, then we have to do our best to live to a ripe old age. We can’t let death cut us off from our pain too early — that won’t do Tonio’s survival any good. Dying deadens the pain, you know, for good. Regard that pain as the eternal flame on Tonio’s grave. It’ll go out one day, that’s for sure. Half a century from now, that’s soon enough. Deal?’

  Miriam nodded, smiled, wiped her face dry.

  ‘Then we have to quit boozing, and s
oon,’ she said. ‘What d’you say to an official last glass tonight? Really, that when we go to bed we can say … uh … finito, over and out, enough is enough. Y’know, I don’t really even like the taste of it anymore.’

  ‘All right, one last toast … to our longevity.’

  ‘To the longevity of all three of us.’

  4

  (Diary entry, Wednesday 19 May 1999)

  8.00 p.m. Tonio home. Observe him surreptitiously as he plays, kneeling on the floor, wearing his drab olive outfit: the picture of health. 8:30: he goes up to the third floor with me and sits on my chaise longue reading something. Later he gets up quietly so as not to disturb me. Out of the corner of my eye I see him walk around the long sorting table. He inspects the manuscripts, arranged by chapter in small stacks. Here and there he reads the summary on the top sheet.

  ‘It says here: “Movo in the Burn Centre.” Why is Movo in the burn centre?’

  ‘He stuck his head in a deep fryer full of scalding-hot fat.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘To punish himself.’

  ‘Oh. What for?’

  ‘The terrible things he had done.’

  ‘Yeah, but here it says he got twelve years in prison.’ (Laughs.) ‘Then you don’t have to go and punish yourself …’

  ‘It’s for other things than the judge punished him for.’

  ‘Oh. Why does he get to go free after eight years? It says so here.’

  ‘That’s how it is in this country. If you behave, you only have to do two-thirds of your sentence.’

  ‘Oh.’ He gives me three big kisses, and goes off the bed. ‘Work hard, okay?’

  5

  I have long searched for a memory of Tonio with which I might close this requiem.

  In a work of fiction, a few recollections of the lead character’s past, provided they are well chosen, are sufficient to recall his entire youth. This document dedicated to Tonio would only be complete if I could include in it all my cherished and less pleasurable memories of him, plus all those gleaned from third parties. Loss makes one insatiable. In order to combat the unattainable yearning for completeness, I have let my memory take its own associative course. I have worked the material so gathered into a structure similar to that of a novel, in the hope that Tonio, despite the gaps, will emerge as multifaceted as possible.

  I stumbled on my diary notes from the summer of ’99, when the three of us vacationed in Marsalès for the third time (for Miriam and Tonio, it was their fourth visit). The date: Wednesday 11 August 1999. I do not quote the diary entry verbatim here, but fill it out so as to get to the heart of the situation.

  The previous weekend we had visited the publisher Dick Gubbels and his wife Elly in the Corrèze, and our return to Marsalès marked the last week of our holiday. On the morning of the 11th, the three of us are sitting in the yard of the rented house, which we use only for sleeping, and occasionally to take refuge in from the fearsome Dordogne thunderstorms. The yard is surrounded by a tall hedge, but the sun has already long risen above it. Miriam and Tonio recline in plastic lawn chairs, while I sit at the metal office table the landlord put there especially for me: a frame in peeling army-green and a desktop of grey linoleum, which has been scratched by so many penknives that if one were to smear it with ink and press a large sheet of paper onto it, the result would undoubtedly be a Baroque linocut.

  I write using a portable electric typewriter, which is powered by way of a long, rodent-safe, heavy-duty cable leading to the house. Since my compulsive nature is in no way put on hold during vacations, I make notes for one of my works-in-progress. The main character, Movo, is being treated at the Beverwijk Burn Centre, where he has been taken after immersing his face in a pan of hot oil, in an act of self-mutilation. There, too, it is the morning of 11 August 1999, and it’s getting on to 11.00 a.m. Movo is sitting in the hospital garden, guarded by a nurse, awaiting the solar eclipse. Around him are the victims of a recent fire that burned down the Roxy discotheque in Amsterdam. An indoor fireworks display following the funeral of the fireworks artist Peter Giele had set the disco ablaze. Movo, who has undergone a series of plastic-surgery efforts in Beverwijk since the end of April, recalls the tumultuous arrival of the ambulances from Amsterdam.

  My worktable is in the shadow of a densely crowned tree. Miriam and Tonio’s deck chairs are in the full sunlight, which now, at almost eleven o’clock, is still just bearable. Miriam is reading a book by Patricia Highsmith. I can’t see the cover from here, but I think it’s from the Ripley series. Tonio sits stock-still, his knees tucked up, against the back of his chaise longue. Now and again he puts on the cardboard eclipse glasses he bought at the campground store. The lenses are made of green mica, or of ordinary plastic. He looks briefly at the sun, and removes them again. His face does not betray any impatience; rather, stoicism.

  The Roxy victims around Movo are all wearing protective eclipse glasses. Some of them have the earpiece stuck in the gauze bandage in which their head is swathed. The nurse asks Movo if she shouldn’t go buy a pair for him, too, from the kiosk in the lobby:

  What’s to protect? I’m as good as blind. Well, okay, three-quarters. All the better to see the solar eclipse with, and no need for those dumb glasses.

  From the timetable printed in the 6 August edition of de Volkskrant (also for sale in the campground store), I note that the eclipse will be visible in the Netherlands, depending on the location, somewhere around ten past eleven. I can’t remember what that means for the south of France. It’s not yet eleven. Tonio can be quite stealthy: suddenly he’s standing beside me.

  ‘Adri, have you ever seen a total solar eclipse?’

  ‘I don’t know if it was total or not, but it was in the early sixties … I was as old as you are now … there was a big fuss about it. The world would come to an end, I think it was. The only thing I can remember is the sun with a nibble taken out of it.’

  ‘Did you have eclipse glasses back then?’

  ‘We had to make do with the lid to a hagelslag jar. It was made of dark-brown hard plastic. If I didn’t go blind, it was thanks to the points you could save up to get yourself one of those jars.’

  ‘I’m gonna go look.’

  Movo is trying, quite deliberately, to mislead the nurse. His dive into the deep-fry oil was intended to blind him completely. That did not entirely succeed. Now he will try again. Twelve seconds of looking directly at the eclipsed sunlight will damage the cornea sufficiently to finish off the job. What the nurse does not know is that Movo’s stitched-on eyelids still show little-to-no capacity for reaction …

  It’s how it is, and always has been: I ruin every idyll by grinding it up into material for fiction. May I, for that reason, burn in a hell too far away to convey me in an ambulance to Beverwijk.

  ‘It’s starting,’ Tonio calls from his lawn chair. He even sits up extra straight.

  I look at the watch next to my typewriter. Just past eleven.

  ‘So soon?’ asks Miriam. She raises her sunglasses and looks at Tonio, but not at the sun (fortunately).

  ‘See for yourself.’ Tonio brings his mother the eclipse glasses.

  ‘A nibble,’ she says. Tonio yanks the glasses back off her nose, casts a quick glance through them, and then brings them over to me. A small but unmistakable nibble.

  6

  When Tonio returns to the lawn chair wearing the cardboard glasses, I’m barely able to continue working. My eyes are repeatedly drawn to my beautiful boy, who sits there with such diligence, following with his tense little body this exceptional occurrence he so clearly explained to me the previous day. In turn, I wowed him with the report (which I’d got out of the newspaper) that the next total solar eclipse, in the Netherlands at least, won’t be until 7 October 2135.

  ‘136 years from now,’ I said. ‘I won’t be here for that one.’


  ‘Will I be?’ He asked it with a laugh.

  ‘The scientists claim that, in the not-too-distant future, people could easily live to be a hundred and fifty. You’re eleven now.’

  ‘I’ll make it!’ he cheered. ‘With three years to spare!’

  ‘So you’ll have those three extra years to reminisce about that eclipse on 7 October … and the one from 136 years earlier, when you were on vacation with your parents in France.’

  He beamed at me, wanting to say something, but I could tell he was completely occupied with the thoughts and images somersaulting over one another in his mind.

  There is certainly something comfortable about it, Movo thinks: being able to look straight at the sun, which always used to make you lower your eyes the moment you looked at it.

  Every now and then, I get up and go crouch next to Tonio. He hands me the eclipse glasses without being asked. The black bite the moon has taken out of the sun keeps on growing. Occasionally, Tonio brings the glasses over to his mother. ‘You watch for me, honey,’ she says.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ says Tonio. ‘The next one is in a hundred and thirty-six years and two months.’

  ‘You can watch for me then, too.’

  By around noon, it’s clear that the premature dusk has spread an exanimate light over everything. The sun, or what’s left of it, casts a velvety shadow, but it no longer warms one’s exposed body parts. A hush falls over the surrounding land, disrupted only by barking dogs at a nearby farm and the tinny voices of children at the campground. Then the birds begin to chirp, at first hesitantly, questioningly, a few hours after the early heat has silenced them. They sing like they do at twilight — melancholy and resigned, less shrill than at sunrise.

  ‘In a minute, honey,’ Miriam says as Tonio offers her the glasses again. ‘I’d rather wait until it’s totally eclipsed.’