Tonio (4 page)

I heard Miriam's hurried footsteps on the landing and, right away, further up the stairs. The gait added a nasty cadence to her high-pitched wailing. I tugged on the faded sweatpants that I'd laid out for the long session at my desk.

Socks. Shoes. Oh God, let him pull through. Not for me. For Miriam. For Tonio himself. And yes, for me, too, even though I didn't deserve it.

A knock at the door. I was just tying the laces of my shabby house-shoes, which I normally wouldn't dare wear in public. The policeman again. ‘Sir, are you about ready? Your wife wants you to hurry.'

His young, academy-trained voice, with just that whiff of compassion.

‘Coming.' A touch of irritation. I was being forced to get dressed, unshowered, in the rattiest possible clothes, and this kid was hustling me along on top of it. Damn it all, what did they expect? That we'd be standing by the front door, spiffed up and passport in hand, impatiently anticipating this long-awaited bad news? What if we had been out on the town until three or four in the morning, as in past Whitsun weekends, and were still sleeping off our grogginess? Did that ever occur to them?

As I charged toward the door, my eye fell upon a coloured-pencil drawing above the bed. Tonio's double portrait, from 1994, of his parents. He was five, nearly six, and had drawn it in just a few minutes, lying on the floor of a French restaurant while his pasta went cold. Since the man in the drawing wore a hat, which I never did, I asked Tonio who those people were, just to be sure.

‘You and Mama.'

‘There's a bunch of red hearts flying around our heads.'

‘Yeah,' he laughed, ‘you're in love, aren't you?'

It had finally happened. I had imagined this a hundred times, ad nauseum. How the police would arrive at the door to bring us the worst news imaginable.
Your son
… And then we were people capable of regarding our overanxious sacrifice to Fear as a cleansing, forestalling ritual. As though imagining an accident down to the most minute detail would stave it off.

Last summer, for instance, when we had given Tonio money for a trip to Ibiza, I immersed myself in repeated nocturnal fantasies, torturing myself with the most gruesome possible scenarios. The
guardia civil
had found the lifeless body of a young man in a rock crevice. No passport on him, but the night porter at a hotel in Ibiza City recognised him … could we come identify the body …

Miriam and I picked him up at Schiphol Airport. I had expected to see a sun-tanned Tonio strut into the arrivals hall, but he was paler than when he'd left, thanks to holiday nightlife and daytime sleep. But it was him, and he was alive. You see? It worked: the perils of reality were no match for the even more perilous power of the imagination.

6

Downstairs in the front hall, I found Miriam, trembling and in tears, in the care of the policeman. The cats, recovered from their initial panic, sat side by side in the hallway, restlessly sweeping the floor with their puffed-up tails. They remained anxiously in the neighbourhood of the open door to the pantry, where their baskets and food were kept and through which, in case of emergency, they could escape through the cat flap into the backyard. Sometimes, if the doorbell rang particularly long and loud, Tygo, the more skittish of the two, would flee into the golden-rain tree — so high he couldn't get himself back down and Miriam had to rescue him with the library ladder.

Under normal circumstances, we would certainly have locked Tygo and Tasha in the kitchen. But now, just clicking the glass door had to suffice, so that they wouldn't follow us.

Although the front of the house was still in the shade, we were nevertheless ambushed by the low, brilliant sunlight that bathed the junction with the Banstraat, and the white police van parked on the corner, in a flood of light. A young female officer who had been waiting at the vehicle approached us with a concerned, almost distressed look on her face, and introduced herself.

‘My colleague and I are going to take you to the
AMC
,' she said. And, pointing: ‘There's the van.'

Apparently anticipating a warm day, she, too, wore a short-sleeved shirt, a dark-blue scarf tucked in the open neck. Even now I made a mental note of such details, thinking with almost ulterior motives of
Kwaadschiks
, which featured female police officers. (Note: cleavage covered by scarf. Even when on a mission of mercy, a police officer carries handcuffs on her belt, next to a holstered can of pepper spray.) The van, its sliding door already open, was painted in the familiar red and blue stripes, perhaps intended to suggest speed. As one could read in my manuscript.

‘It's best if you get in back,' said the woman.

I turned to her colleague: ‘Do you know what happened?'

‘Sir, as far as we know your son was hit by a car at approximately four-thirty this morning on the Stadhouderskade. Somewhere near Max Euweplein. We've been told he's in the Intensive Care unit at the
AMC
. They're operating on him at the moment. That's all we know. The driver of the car is being questioned at the Koninginneweg bureau. We've just come from there.'

‘He must have just left Paradiso,' I said, mainly to myself. And then to him: ‘Could he have taken that footbridge over the canal, towards the Stadhouderskade?'

‘We don't have any details, sir. Only that the driver of the car remained at the scene of the accident. He phoned the police immediately.'

‘Adri, just get
in
, will you,' Miriam said. She was already sitting on the back seat. ‘Before it's too late.'

I got in next to her.

‘We'll get you there as fast as possible,' the policewoman said before slamming the sliding door shut. ‘It's still early, the A10 won't be too busy. Although … with the holiday weekend …'

She got in next to her colleague, who had taken his place at the wheel. I pulled the sobbing Miriam up close to me. She was now crying uncontrollably.

‘Our sweet Tonio … he might be
dead
already.'

7

H&NE
. For more than thirty years, this was my secret code for the woman — even she didn't know about it — whom I held tight on the back seat of the police van.

‘How'd that rice get into the pasta?'

Miriam's question, on a warm summer evening in '79, had set everything in motion. ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down wherever he wants,' writes Cees Nooteboom. In this case, it cannot have been purely dog-like that there on the back seat, with this shuddering body in my arms, I thought back on the first time I met her. The two police officers up front had more or less dragged us out of bed because Tonio was badly injured — the son that, nine years after that rice in the pasta, we had made together. The child whose life was now in danger. The boy who we were following a terrible, careening path to be with.

The official story that I had foisted on the world began at her birthday party, 23 November 1979, three days after she turned twenty. Not many people know that she had already come into my viewfinder six months earlier.

I wanted to have a short novel finished by the end of the summer, having started it that spring in Perugia. I had hoped to catch up with a young woman, Mara, whom I'd met the previous year in Sicily. I didn't have her address, but did have a phone number, although I didn't dare ring her — and so it happened that I just bumped into her on a Perugia street. A hasty and sloppy romance ensued, which was at the very least detrimental to my book. I fled to a tiny island in Lake Trasimeno, with 99 or 102 inhabitants, and set to work. I stayed there until the end of July. On Sundays, Mara came over by ferry. It was a good arrangement, until she started to insist that I join her and a small group of friends on Sardinia for the remainder of the summer holidays. I had nothing against Sardinia, but didn't much relish six weeks of enforced loafing, especially while the publisher at home was waiting for his text.

So I took the train back to Amsterdam and my stuffy third-floor walk-up in De Pijp. It was a hot summer. In the evening, I'd sit working at my desk in front of the open balcony doors until dusk, not wanting to turn on lights because of the mosquitoes. I was lucky with late-afternoon sunlight: where, according to the architectural logic of the neighbourhood, one would expect a parallel cross-street between the Van Ostadestraat, where I lived, and the houses on Sarphatipark, there was only an expanse of low-rise sheds belonging to an assortment of shops and small businesses. Two doors further along, behind a squatted building, one such shed had been torn down and a sort of wild garden had sprouted up among all the rusty scrap metal and rotting wood. The squatters barbecued there on warm summer evenings. One of them was Hinde, whom I knew because one day she brought me a huge bunch of pink tea-roses as thanks for having let her tap into my water main. I knew she had a younger sister who also hoped to move into the squat, but until then only visited once in a while.

On one of those never-ending summer evenings, Hinde and her housemates organised another barbecue and invited me along. ‘My sister'll be there, too,' she said, but I wasn't sure if it was intended as a fix-up. I politely turned down the invitation. I hadn't come back from Italy to go to parties: shit, if I wanted to party I could have spent the summer with Mara and Ivana and the rest of them on Sardinia. But my work didn't amount to much that evening. The barbecue, a rusty three-legged thing, billowed smoke. My balcony, with its open doors, acted like a fireplace flue, so that I spent most of the evening looking at my papers through watering eyes.

‘A rat!' cried one of the fellows. ‘I just saw a rat. There, by those crates!'

‘Onto the barbecue with him.' Hinde's voice, I recognised it already. Laughter from down below.

‘How'd that rice get into the pasta?' A distant voice that resembled Hinde's: that had to be the sister.

‘From the salt shaker,' Hinde called back. ‘The cap came unscrewed.'

The wind was apparently blowing my way, so the sausages and drumsticks on the grill made my mouth water, but it was above all the voices cutting clearly through the fading light that made me regret not being down there, too, where it was alive with rats and girls, and where I would have relished spooning up a mouthful of macaroni-and-rice. I sat there, not doing much myself, listening to their talk and laughter, to the tinkle of clinking glasses, until the bats began to circle above the sheds, and it became altogether too dark to put another letter on paper.

It could have been the swerving of the police van that made me feel slightly queasy, but more likely it was the memory of the desires sparked by that summer evening. Later, that desire got itself a future: Miriam and me … me, Miriam, and Tonio … But this, too, was part of that future: us on our way to the hospital to be told just how critical our boy's condition was. If he stood a chance. If he was still alive.

8

H&NE
. In the late summer or early fall of '79, one of the backyard barbecue voices got a face.

The squatters' pad, Van Ostadestraat 205, was next door to a primary school with a playground at the back and a widened sidewalk out front where mothers waited to pick up their brood. This is where I saw her, kick-coasting her granny bike, manoeuvring between clusters of chatting women, some of whom cast her a disapproving glance while stepping demonstratively off to one side. With her left foot resting on the pedal and propelling the bike along with her right foot, she caused just as much inconvenience as regular cycling, except this way the police couldn't give her a fine.

I had just closed the door to no. 209, where I lived, behind me. I can't remember if there was a threat or forecast of rain, but the kick-coasting girl wore a raincoat several sizes too big. The garment, in a men's cut, must have been beige once, but was now shockingly filthy — it was an eye-catcher even in this neighbourhood of dilapidated squats and rusted-through bikes lying half in the gutter. The front was particularly grubby, full of random smudges, while the fabric around the buttons was pretty much black, as though the coat had once done service as a coalman's apron.

I would have just shrugged it off, were it not for the very pretty head that stuck out of the equally grimy collar, shiny with grease and buttoned up to the chin. Loose, dark hair framed a lightly tanned face that nevertheless gave the impression of paleness, perhaps because of the dark eyes that weren't even made up (which would have been rather incongruous alongside a coat like that). The oversized garment concealed her figure, but a certain roundness in the chin, neck, and jaw suggested the girl was on the chubby side.

Although there wasn't an obvious resemblance to Hinde, I could tell right away that they must be sisters; this one, the younger of the two, I guessed about eighteen.

When she noticed me, no more than a vague shadow of recognition passed over her face. Maybe she couldn't place me any better than I could her, and she only
thought
she should know who I was because I lived in the house that provided her sister's squat with running water. Her ‘hello' was diffident and distant in equal measure; its slightly questioning tone did not tally with the broad, carefree smile (a kind of gentle grin) with which she returned my greeting. It seemed to me that in passing she looked at me just a tad too long (which means I did the same), causing her to overshoot the bike rack, so she ended up propping her bike against the front of no. 207.