Tonio (74 page)

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.'

‘Here in the south,' I say, ‘it won't be more than 80 per cent.'

‘Don't shout so,' Miriam whispers, so quietly that I almost can't make out what she said. ‘I want to hear this special calm.'

I didn't shout, didn't even raise my voice, but the atmosphere is now so fragile and intimate and lonely that
every
human noise sounds too loud. Through the eclipse glasses, one observes a starless night sky, with a waning moon.

‘This is what's great about an eclipse,' I whisper to Tonio, handing him back the glasses. ‘The sun masquerades as a crescent moon, just for the occasion. Welcome to the masked ball of the heavenly bodies. The carnival of the solar system.'

Tonio puts on his ‘what a bore' face and responds with the standard phrase he has plagiarised from his mother: ‘Good day at work, apparently.'

Except for a few thin cloud banks just above the horizon, the sky is clear, but it nevertheless does not look blue, more like colourless: a grainy light-grey, like ground ice covered with a thin layer of powdery snow. I wonder if the fresh lines of condensation, not far from the largely eclipsed sun, weren't put there in purpose at that hour by a pair of vain fighter-jet pilots. All of France is looking upward at this moment. While scratching your initials into an Egyptian pyramid stone might last longer, writing with smoke in the sky has more effect. Ever since I could throw back my head and gaze upward toward the sky as a child, I have been trying to decipher the script of vapour lines. Sometimes I convince myself that I've got the message. Today, I can't make heads or tails out of them, dulled by the overshadowed sun.

The hush is suddenly broken by an unseen car racing along the hardened dirt road that runs past our yard. Bits of gravel are thrown into the hedges, and rustle as they fall through the dry leaves.

‘Sheesh,' Miriam says. ‘Bet he promised to be home before dark.'

The eclipse approaches its French maximum of 80 per cent. In our yard, it's definitely dusk now, but without the backlight that makes the tree branches look like they were snipped out of black paper. Contrary to a normal Dordogne twilight, this one is deathly, soulless, devoid of ambience. Tonio hands me the cardboard glasses.

‘I think it's as far as it's going to get,' he says.

I put on the glasses. There is still a thick toenail of sun left. I look at it at length, hoping to see the arc of light get smaller. The process seems to be standing still. Tonio grabs the glasses from my nose and puts them on. He stands on the lawn chair.

‘It's over,' he says after a few seconds. ‘Here, keep 'em.' He nonchalantly tosses the glasses at me. ‘I've seen enough.'

He runs up the few stone steps to the front door, and disappears into the dark house.

‘What's with him?' Miriam asks. She is still lying there reading, but with the sunglasses on her forehead and the book close to her eyes.

‘He's had enough.'

Typical Tonio. Once he's figured out how something — whether it's a machine or a natural event — works, he loses interest in it. There is more going on in the world that needs his attention.

My diary tells what comes next. At the height of the eclipse, the birds go silent. As the light gradually returns, they start up again, one by one, now cautiously cheerful, like at dawn. It is a quarter past one. I haven't seen Tonio again. Little by little, the sky takes on a blue tint. If I raise my face toward the sun, I do not yet really feel its warmth. Miriam offers to warm up yesterday's two leftover quails for me.

If I put the eclipse glasses back on, it's only to check the progress of the Return of Light, as though, taking after Tonio, I want to it to be over and done with already.

‘He's sitting there reading, half in the dark,' Miriam says when she comes out of the kitchen with the food. ‘With a clip-on bedside lamp, the goofball.'

I enjoy my quails, but there is something disconcerting about eating a meal in such deadened light. I feel liberated when, at a quarter to two, the eclipse is over.

It's all there in black and white, an account of the rest of the day, too. But since Black Whitsun almost eleven years later, my recollection of the eclipse stalls at the point that Tonio called it quits. ‘I've seen enough.' In moments when the reality of his death
truly
hits me, and my heart constricts with cold and shock, that soulless image of the eclipse once again blankets the whole world, which, like back then, holds its breath, birdcalls and all. Everything else (the dawn, the burning sun in the cloudless blue sky, the twilight with its many contrasts) is illusion, a memory of how it might once have been. A shadow has fallen over it — not the vibrant shadow, which indicates the motility and vitality of the sun, but the perfidious, poisonous shadow of the eclipse, permeating and tainting everything.

7

After finishing the quails, I go back inside. There's so much bright sunlight outside again that in the semi-darkness of the house, the sun-flecks dance about in front of me. The door to Tonio's room is wide open. He is sitting cross-legged on the bottom mattress of the bunk bed (he sleeps on top). A magazine lies open across his thighs. The shutters are closed. Tonio is reading by the dim light of a pinecone-shaped lamp affixed to one leg of the bed. His eyes dart over the pages, one after the other. There is a huge stack of Donald Duck comic books on the floor; Miriam had bought out the entire stock of old issues at Lambiek on the Kerkstraat. Judging from the speed with which he turns the pages, you might conclude that he's only looking at the pictures, but when I once decided to test out my theory and quizzed him on one of the stories, it appeared he had not missed a single text balloon.

The occasional brief sniff: his way of laughing when he thinks he's not being watched; with us around, he guffaws with generous hilarity. Just a normal eleven-year-old boy, who devours a comic book as though it were a hamburger or a Mars bar. He has still not noticed my presence, or if he has, he hides it well. I observe him, and melt. When I think back on the scene, I count myself lucky that I did not know then what I do now: that there, eleven years old, he was already halfway through his allotment of years. A bit more than halfway.

8

Sometimes I want to hold him really tightly. The thought usually hits me when I'm in bed reading, and just happen to lay my book aside. Come, Tonio, I say soundlessly. Come, Tonio, climb under the blankets. I'll keep you warm.

His body is unresisting, limp, but not cold. It is the Tonio who lay on the asphalt after the collision, half a day before his death. The occupants of the red Suzuki Swift are standing outside the car, and do not dare go look at the body that's been chucked a ways further up. The police and ambulance sirens are not yet audible. The blue flicker of the rotating lights hasn't arrived yet. It is right then that I pick him up and carry him to my bed, and pull back the blanket.

Come. Come lie close to me. It'll keep you warm. They're coming, they'll be here soon, to make you better.

9

I think Miriam will agree with me if I allow Jenny to have the last word.

Jenny had asked, before going home, if she could have a look at Tonio's room. ‘Of course, go ahead.' I understood. That's where most of the photo shoot had taken place. Miriam offered to accompany her, but Jenny preferred to go up alone.

‘I know the way.'

We heard her gentle treads as she went up the stairs to the second floor — and then, silence. No creaking footsteps on the parquet floor above overhead, as we were accustomed to until two years ago. No, just a very present silence, nothing more.