Tonio (73 page)

EPILOGUE

The solar eclipse

The more awayness stings,
the more despairingly its traces,
until what sometime needs completing,
become besotted with the missed.
Time and again the instant a shiver runs
along the blossom-twined stem
still keeping his tomahawk in check,
the little lunar disc behind his heart,
be it extremely briefly, still mists over,
at which any second every sleeper
attempts to pay off his blood-debt
in wrongly faltering mirror script.

— Hans Faverey, from
The Missed

1

August is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is the first of September, the beginning of meteorological autumn. This morning, the in-house philosopher at
de Volkskrant
wrote a piece about hope. I quote: ‘Hope is out, fear is in. Hope and fear are twin brothers, born of the unknowableness of the future. We hope for the best, but we fear the worst.'

Hope may be a form of self-deception, but we can't live without it, even though it means hoping against all odds. ‘Hope is a reflex.' But if it's true that the terminal patient keeps hoping for a cure, and the death-row inmate for a reprieve, what does that — reflex or no — leave Miriam and me to hope for? ‘A person cannot evade his hope any more than he can his fear.'

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 soon,' 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.