Tonio (37 page)

So from September '64 onwards I rode to Eindhoven every morning with my Geldrop townsmen, Wil and Hans. As we approached the city limits, we passed Augustinianum on the right, and a bit further up swerved left across the busy road toward St. Joris: all in all, the permanent decor of my mother's nightmare.

She was right, insofar as, particularly at that hour, I was a sluggish sleepyhead, lost in thought on my bike behind my animated friends. Maybe it would have been more effective if she had actually
discouraged
me from going to Augustinianum, for instance because of the demanding courses or work load. My stubbornness ushered in a lifetime of regret for having chosen the wrong school. The most unpopular goody-two-shoes of my old school was safely out of sight at the gymnasium, but then all of my old schoolmates vanished from St. Joris after the very first Christmas break, only to resurface at the less-demanding Geldrop middle school, leaving me completely on my own.

It happened during the first week of school — almost. I lagged behind Wil and Hans, as usual. They had just taken the dodgy turnoff, standing high on their pedals. In my haste to catch up with them, I didn't bother to look back over my shoulder as I turned.

More than the screeching tyres, I felt the whoosh of air as the car passed me. It had grazed me, no more than that. I'd nearly been hit by a convertible sports car. It stopped. The driver lifted himself halfway out of his seat and turned around. There I stood, trembling, bike between my legs. It was not the first time an enormous shock affected my sense of perception; even now. I only have to close my eyes to see the man, a guy of about twenty-five, wearing light-brown leather gloves and green-tinted sunglasses.

‘Hey kid, you got a death wish or something?'

He shouted it with a kind of arrogant swagger, but not unkindly.

‘No-oo,' I replied sullenly, maybe a little whiny, as though I was obliged to answer. ‘Course not.'

The man slid back behind the wheel. Without looking back. he stuck an arm in the air as a sort of farewell. The stench of burning rubber wafted off the asphalt. The skid marks from where he'd braked were short, angry smears. I waited to cross until all the cars had passed, walking my bike, weaving and trembling on jointless legs. My friends greeted me with jeers. As I cycled further — this time keeping up with them — I noticed that my front wheel had been bent out of kilter. The driver of the sports car hadn't even got out to see if his finish had been scratched.

No, I do not walk around the livelong day chastising Tonio for his recklessness. I do torment myself with questions like: why was I granted that split-second advantage back in 1964, that Tonio, forty-five years later, was not? Without that elbow room, it would have been my own parents who had been immersed in grief, and no Tonio would ever have existed, no life and thus no death.

Through what Miriam and I have gone through, I can almost tangibly imagine my parents as they might have grieved for me. I can hear their voices.

‘Just a boy, not even thirteen. He'd just started his new school. Terrible waste.'

‘Sports car. A speed demon, of course. One of those damn spoiled rich kids … No condolence card, no flowers, nothing.'

My mother could not much have enjoyed having been proved right: I should have chosen Augustinianum after all. She would be more prone to curse
all
schools. Institutes whose only purpose was to pump knowledge into innocent young lives, at their peril.

I torment myself further with that split-second. The question, born of desperation, takes on grotesque proportions. Such as: why was my split-second of good fortune not anchored firmly enough in my genes so that a half-century later, Tonio might profit from it?

4

It's starting to look a lot like an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I continually scan the course of Tonio's life in search of individual moments that, without turning his existence into a topsy-turvy mess, might be stretched or shortened just enough so that years later, on Whit Sunday 2010, Tonio's bike and the unknown vehicle would have just
grazed
each other.

I find plenty of such moments, but their recollection alone does not suffice. You need the sensation of a time machine: I have to have the visionary perception that I am truly
back
in a certain episode in Tonio's past. I tinker with that fraction of time (at most a couple of seconds) so subtly and vigilantly that nothing in his life noticeably changes. His subsequent, known existence is in no way affected or thrown out of balance.

I am back in the incessant ‘Why?' stage. Eventually, the ‘why?' rolls off Tonio's child-tongue so automatically, about everything and nothing, that it takes on a blasé tone. ‘But why … how come? Why?'

If it's already inquisitiveness, it is not yet urgent enough for it to interrupt his playing. ‘Why, Adri, why?' He asks this while focusing all his attention on separating two Lego blocks with his pliable fingernails. His facial muscles quiver from the effort. By clamping his jaw tight, and curling out his lower lip, the pacifier shoots loose and dangles on the plastic chain against his chest. What did I say to provoke that ‘Why?'

‘Mama needs to cut your nails.'

‘But why? … why?'

Because otherwise you'll tear them on your Lego
— but I don't say this, having been driven up the wall enough today from explaining things. Tonio prises the Lego pieces apart, and tries to repair a damaged nail with his baby teeth. He spits a sliver out, a white splinter, and then repeats his question: ‘Why?'

Plenty of spare moments passed between those last two whys. So it's here that I tie a small knot in his lifeline. Two, three seconds, and even then I've held a good margin over. Tonio doesn't notice a thing: I've only shortened my own silence, simultaneous with his, by a couple of seconds.

‘Have a look at your torn fingernail,' I say, ‘and then you'll know why.'

A few seconds before real time allows, he runs to the bathroom to get the small nail-clipper out of the top drawer, which he can just reach, and bring it to his mother in the kitchen. From now on, everything in his life will take place an imperceptible fraction of time sooner.

Maybe one day, long past middle age, he will discover the ruse. I might still be alive as the elderly grandfather of Tonio's children. Scientific progress will allow him to recalibrate the amputated moments of his life, just as measurements taken from an atomic clock in an aeroplane high above the earth have to add a second to normal ground-time, otherwise the calendar will fall behind.

All right then, make my illegally activated leap-seconds public — they will have saved Tonio's life.

5

And so it went. In my memories of Tonio, I kept looking for situations tangible enough to picture myself, in time and space, back to where they occurred. Sometimes I would delete a few seconds from the timeline; another time, I would add three or four. It was a game — obsessive, but it remained a game. In the end, it did not accomplish anything, except that the neurosis only strengthened its grip on me. I would do better to return to what actually happened in the early hours of Whit Sunday, without the facts taking any notice of my cut-and-paste in Tonio's life.

6

Before Tonio's fatal accident, I had always been surprised that people who, once visited by Fate, insisted on questioning it over and over. Instead of accepting the irrevocable, they became, in my eyes, whining children who kept asking the questions that had already been answered. Or for which there
was
no answer. ‘How in God's name could this happen?'

‘In God's name, why? Why?
Why?
'

‘Tell me again what that third witness said.'

‘If he had first … instead of just … then …'

Now I understood. I wanted to know
everything
about the accident. And not only that. I needed to know every detail of his last days and hours — everything since I had last seen and spoken to him.

There was no getting around bad news. But I always gave the
details
of bad news a wide berth. I did not want to hear them. It was painful enough if someone ended our friendship, but the inevitable letter spelling out the reasons, I left unopened.

Now I longed with frantic eagerness for every detail of what had happened to Tonio between his departure from our house on Thursday afternoon and his departure from … life … three days later. The only one we had sounded out until now was Jim, but he wasn't there that Saturday night. Jim said Tonio had mentioned a girl. Something about a photo shoot for a modelling portfolio; but more than that, Jim didn't know. He had not met her, did not even know her name. All he could tell us was that Tonio had gone out that Saturday evening. And, oh yes, that Tonio had promised to be home by four, so that Jim had someone to chat with. Maybe they'd watch a film together.

What role had that model played in Tonio's last days? That was the question that came roaring back at me, ad nauseum.

About two years ago, I recall, Tonio worried about girls. With all my might, I had wished him a steady girlfriend, or a whole slew of casual ones, as long as he was happy. Now one appeared to have presented herself. I knew nothing of their relationship aside from that it must have been pretty fresh, and yet I felt, as it were with my whole fatherly heart, that something special had been brewing between them.

‘We've always been solution people,' Miriam had said a few days after the accident. It had become almost a mantra for her (and me). ‘Now we've been saddled with a problem which by definition has no solution. That frightens me. We have a whole insoluble future ahead of us.'

Perhaps that is why we set out to reconstruct, as exhaustively as possible, Tonio's last days: we were looking for a parallel solution. By laying out all the facts, right down to the last piece of the puzzle, it was as though Tonio might be recouped — even if not alive and well. Maybe tidying up all the open-ended questions would give us a sense of solace. Another reason could be that we felt obliged to round off the story of his brief life. I could rebuild his nearly twenty-two years from photographs, impressions, and memories, but the final stage — not yet.

7

‘You've got an email address now,' I said to Miriam. ‘You could write and ask for her mobile-phone number. Include your own number, so she has the choice: call you or let you call her.'

‘I'd suggest — now don't get angry — that we first figure out how serious it was. Right now, I can't bear the thought of yet another dashed illusion. I want to know if that photo session was purely professional. And I want to find out just what went on with those two on Saturday night.'

‘Go on.'

‘Jim thought Tonio was out with Dennis on Saturday. A mutual friend.'

‘Do we know him?'

‘He's been here before. Nice boy. Tall, compared to Tonio. I'll ring Dennis first. Maybe he went to Paradiso with Tonio and that photo girl. Dennis might be able to tell us more about her.'

The best thing was not to force anything, and first try to come up with a solution here at home, even though we called it a ‘parallel' solution — which was just a word anyway. We decided to invite the friends who had been with Tonio in his last days to come around. Jim had been here already. The Paradiso girl, if we could track her down, could wait until we'd found the photos. According to Jim, Tonio had definitely gone out with Dennis that last night. So Dennis could tell us if that girl had joined them — and if not, why not.

Jim gave us email addresses of some of Tonio's friends, and in a few cases their home address and mobile-phone number. Dennis and his sister's particulars were there, too: they lived with their father in a house on the Govert Flinkstraat.

8

What all this digging around in Tonio's last week might unearth remained to be seen, but in the process we discovered that actively searching for a way to come to grips with the loss only exacerbated the pain. To passively endure the loss and drag ourselves as stoically as possible from one day to the next seemed the best medicine for now. We awaited Dennis's visit, and meanwhile I answered the condolence letters. Miriam took care of the administrative side of Tonio's death — cancelling his college courses, his subscriptions, his bank accounts. To put it bluntly: deconstructing his identity. The details of his extensive operation, even though it had not led to his recovery, had to be processed with the health-insurance company. The unused portion of his insurance premium was reimbursed: yet another piece of hard evidence of Tonio's demise.

Excising a person from the world is no easy task. Certain administrations simply would not let him go.

Miriam re-examined the dental check-up card we had found in his wallet. She glanced at her watch: today, an hour from now, he had an appointment. Miriam rang the dentist, who was ours as well. She had missed the death announcement, and was just wondering, she admitted, if this time Tonio would actually show up for his appointment.

‘He was such a sweet boy,' she said. ‘Someone you could never get angry with. Well, just once. He'd done a sloppy brushing job, and I gave him hell. The next time, two months later, he came back with a spic-and-span set of teeth.'