Tonio (28 page)

For me,
that
has been the image, for the past forty years, of a father who has lost his son: a man who leaves the front door ajar, and under the light of the streetlamp pricks up his ears for the putt-putt of a motorbike.

I am now that man.

10

While Miriam and Josie were at Buitenveldert Cemetery picking out a plot for Tonio, I sat in my workroom trying to compose a memorial note. We had told the funeral home I would write it myself, and that we would not have it typeset, but just duplicate it on my own home photocopy machine. Being computerless, this was my customary procedure with all my writing. No, they didn't have to post them for us either: I wanted to add a personal, handwritten note to each copy and enclose a photo of Tonio.

During his first (and only) year at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, Tonio had participated in a group project: a realistic remake of a portrait of Oscar Wilde. Part of the assignment was that they had to track down an original themselves. One afternoon he burst into my workroom, out of breath from running up the stairs.

‘Adri, d'you know anything about Oscar Wilde?'

‘Are you finally going to read a book?'

‘It's like this … we've got an assignment to recreate a portrait of Oscar Wilde. But we haven't been able to come up with a good photo of him. Only some vague junk online.'

‘You could have saved yourself the climb: down in the library I've got a few books about him, with photos.'

We went downstairs and I showed him some of the better portraits of the writer. He had to laugh: all I had to do was reach onto a bookshelf, and he was saved. With his usual eagle eye, he paged straight to the photo of a young Oscar Wilde that would eventually become the model for their project.

‘There are a few others of a somewhat riper Wilde.'

I paged through the book until landing at the familiar picture of a massive Oscar, bowler hat in hand, the fragile Bosie at his side, and also managed to find the remake of Gerrit Komrij as Oscar Wilde and Charles Hofman as Bosie. ‘See, here's how you should tackle it.'

‘I think the first one's better, with the walking stick. He's much younger there. See, one of us has to pose. None of us is over twenty.'

At the Waterlooplein flea market they found a cheap, threadbare fur coat, which, with the right lighting, could be made to look suitably chic. They neglected, however, to check the coat for living creatures — and as a result, after the photo session not only Tonio (who was still living at home) but Miriam and I both, thanks to the clumsy exchange of pillows, all ended up infested with nits. In a throwback to Tonio's primary school days, we got out the pediculicide and flea comb.

Tonio, having the right hairstyle and having not entirely shed his baby fat, was the most likely candidate for the role of Oscar Wilde. The group got perfect marks for their work. Miriam and I decided to include this photo with each memorial note, because it shows him at the focus of his greatest passion, photography — as both portraiteur and subject. Miriam and I had, for starters, 200 A5-size prints made at the photo shop.

11

Amsterdam, 25 May 2010

In the early morning of Sunday 23 May, our son Tonio

(born on 15 June 1988) was hit by a car while riding his bicycle.

The accident occurred on the corner of the Hobbemastraat and the

Stadhouderskade. From four-thirty in the morning until four-thirty

in the afternoon, surgeons at the
AMC
fought, together with Tonio,

for his life. He did not pull through. Tonio died shortly after leaving

the operating room, with us at his side. He was our only child.

As a student of Media & Culture, he had actively and ambitiously

taken life by the horns. He had recently informed us of his intention

of pursuing a Master's degree in Media Technology. It was not to be.

His passing leaves us devastated.

We hope you will appreciate that Tonio's burial

will be kept intimate,

and that for the time being we are not able

to receive visitors at home.

Miriam and Adri

Enclosed: Self-portrait of Tonio as Oscar Wilde (2006), taken

during his studies at the Amsterdam Photo Academy.

12

I feel him sitting next to me. I feel him standing before me. I feel the warmth of his breath in my neck — in short puffs, caused by his chuckling, for he is reading, half out loud, over my shoulder, like that time when I wrote to a publisher who had mistreated me. ‘ “Dear bookmonger” … good one!'

But mostly I feel him
in
me, as though I were a pregnant woman. I feel a hard kick in my gut, then a few lighter kicks for good measure. It feels like he's struggling to turn over.

In the spring of '94, he and Miriam came down to Angoulème, where I had gone a few weeks earlier to work on a story. Tonio was five, nearly six. The doors of the TGV opened, and he hurled himself straight from the top step into my arms. Without so much as grazing the platform tiles with the toe of his shoe, he suddenly dangled from my shoulders, laughing, kissing. I can call to mind, any time of the day or night, the affectionate force of his grip. I shall feel Tonio in my flesh for as long as I have living nerves.

Five years later, in Marsalès, I fetch him from a table-tennis tournament at the campground. I watch for a little while from the sidelines how he wields the paddle as twilight falls. He has taped little plastic tubes filled with yellow luminescent liquid to the back of his hands. Their purpose is to confuse and distract his opponent. A flick of the wrist, and the light stick traces a sort of Chinese character in the air. His ruse does not work. Tonio loses time and again. After the last set, I push him playfully in front as we walk home across the low dike that traverses the swimming hole. I press my fingertips into the sides of his nape, just under the ears. His skin is flushed and moist.

‘Hot neck you've got there.'

‘
Do-hon't
.' He makes the automatic defensive gesture with his elbows that goes with his age (eleven), but does not really try to shake loose from my hand. ‘Jeez, I didn't even win a single set. Those light sticks are worthless.'

My thumb glides upward, caressing the sweaty hairline on the back of his neck. The damp warmth will never evaporate from the heel of my hand.

In all phases of his life, Tonio left imprints of himself in me — from the time he literally fell into my lap, straight from the womb, until that last hug on the Staalstraat, when in my emotional absentmindedness I forgot to give him that last fifty.

13

Miriam came home in an artificial kind of high spirits, and with the almost cheery announcement that she and Josie had found ‘a pleasant, quiet spot for Tonio'. The papers made a note of the plot number: 1-376-B.

‘When you see it, you'll like it, too.'

‘I believe you. I'll see it Friday.'

Before I could become irritated with her cheerfulness, I reminded myself that it could, at any moment, make way for bottomless grief.

There was a postage-stamp-sized notice in that afternoon's
Het Parool
:

Cyclist killed in collision on Stadhouderskade

Amsterdam Zuid — A 21-year-old cyclist died Sunday afternoon in hospital from injuries sustained in a traffic accident on the Stadhouderskade. Early Sunday morning he collided with an automobile. The 23-year-old driver was given a breathalyser test, but had not been drinking.

‘There you have it,' I said to Miriam. ‘The story of our wonderful boy in a couple of lines. There are Dutch literary critics who think I might take an example from this kind of brevity.'

In the same column of
faits divers
was another postage stamp containing more upbeat news: the cost of a new driver's license in Amsterdam was to be lowered by a tenner, from 46 to 36 euros.

14

Jim sat dejectedly in the curve of the corner sofa, even paler than we'd gotten used to seeing him these last few years. The whiteness of his face, wreathed by hair as dark as Tonio's. Jim made erratic motions, as though he wanted to say something but couldn't find the words. His mother sat beside him, and continually rubbed her hand over his back — a firmer action than caressing or stroking. He allowed her to do it.

Tonio's bosom buddy. They had known each other since nursery school, and were like brothers. There was a brief estrangement at the time they each went off to a different school (Jim had a learning disability, possibly dyslexia). Once during that period, I bumped into his mother on the Van Baerlestraat, on the viaduct over the Vondelpark. We exchanged slightly awkward greetings as we passed: our sons, after all, weren't hanging out together anymore. When we were already several dozen metres apart, Jim's mother turned abruptly and shouted something along the lines of: ‘It'll work out between them, you'll see. They're made for each other.'

‘I'm sure it will,' I called back. ‘It's just a phase.'

And sure enough, not much later they rediscovered each other, the bosom buddies. Thereafter the friendship continued uninterrupted, but not without its hurdles. If Tonio came round on a Sunday evening and we'd inquire into Jim's chronic insomnia, he would shake his head dispiritedly, eyes cast downward, no matter how cheerful he was when he came in. Tonio didn't say it in so many words, but you could tell he saw the situation as fairly hopeless. Since we didn't like seeing Tonio go all glum, that hour or so that we had him all to ourselves, we didn't press it, and eventually stopped asking altogether. He did hint that once their lease on the Nepveustraat ran out, he would think about living on his own, or in a student flat.

I sat on the sofa next to Jim's father. As a staff member of a medical team, it seemed, he had been indirectly involved with the case of the murdered policewoman I would have been writing about now, were it not … I listened to him with more than the usual interest: notwithstanding his attempts at discretion, I was picking up plenty of nearly first-hand details, despite it being for a novel I was forced by circumstances to set aside and would probably never return to.

And yet my attention was distracted by Jim, who was talking to Miriam about Tonio. About how Tonio had made such a self-confident and go-getting impression recently, and had consequently seemed so content.

‘… yeah, he'd worked it all out himself,' I overheard. Jim was referring to the channels through which Tonio had hoped to get his master's degree in Media Technology — the plan he had filled us in on the previous week. Jim underscored his statements with a lot of silent nodding, and I could see on his taut features that he was fighting back the tears.

Even when I tried to resume the conversation with his father, I still kept more than half an ear attuned to Jim. Perhaps my waning attention became evident, for the father suddenly raised his voice a little to call over to Jim: ‘… then maybe he was taking a detour to pick up some cigarettes.'

I didn't hear Jim's answer clearly, but I assumed it was all about the mystery of why Tonio was at that intersection in the first place. Someone else in the living room said: ‘Wrong place, wrong time.'

Cigarettes
. I purposely did not get involved in the discussion, because it might mean I'd hear that Tonio smoked — not just ‘once in a while with the guys', to be cool, as he'd once told me himself, but systematically enough to find himself without in the middle of the night and go out of his way to buy a fresh pack.

Of course, Jim might have phoned him to ask if he'd pick up some smokes for him on the way. I didn't ask, because I did not want to know the truth.

So as to get off the subject one way or another I asked Jim about the Polaroid girl. Yes, he'd heard Tonio mention a photo shoot, but he didn't know any details. He couldn't even help us out with a name. He had never seen her.

‘Did you have the impression that Tonio talked about a particular girl … I mean, without mentioning her name?'

‘Well, he was pretty preoccupied with girls recently,' Jim said evasively. ‘He talked about it a lot — whether he was going about certain things the right way, and so on.'

15

‘… and he cursed his fate.' As a boy I had read this in countless books. There was something cosy about curling up next to the coal stove and reading about the hero who, defeated by dark and evil powers, clenched his fist and cursed his fate.

Now that I know myself how it feels to curse one's fate, all that cosiness is gone. I lament Tonio's fate. I curse mine.

CHAPTER TWO

The betrayal

there's a grave that needs digging for a butterfly

exchanging the moment for your father's old watch —

— Gerrit Kouwenaar, ‘there are still'

1

Miriam carried Tonio's mobile phone with her everywhere. It became something of an obsession. If she happened to leave the phone in the bathroom, for instance, she'd run back in a panic to fetch it.