I was surprised by the results. All this time I’d told myself, grudgingly, that Tonio must have been pretty drunk. After all, he and Dennis had been at a party in the Vondelpark that afternoon, and after that they’d had a few beers at Goscha’s place. At about midnight they rode off to Trouw, where, Goscha had said, the rounds ‘kept coming’. In recounting the evening, she regretted that Tonio was always a step ahead of her, picking up the entire tab. Dennis said that Tonio had had a shot of tequila between beers. So how could all that drinking result in a blood-alcohol content equivalent to just six beers?
‘Don’t forget,’ the lawyer reminded us, ‘that the accident occurred at 4.40 a.m. The alcohol from that afternoon and evening was long out of his system by then. And don’t overestimate the rounds at a club like Trouw. At that hour, the place is jam-packed — the bar, too — so buying rounds wouldn’t have been a speedy affair. If there had been six of them, and Tonio got them all, he’d have been awfully busy. Six times three is eighteen … work that out at nightclub prices. I do understand that Goscha felt guilty, and that at the end of the evening Tonio only had five euros on him. Let’s say that he’d long burned off the beer from that afternoon and evening, that he biked off into the night with five, six beers and a tequila in him. Then he’d have been a little tipsy at most, but certainly not drunk.’
Miriam went with the lawyer to the public prosecutor’s office on the Parnassusweg. They were told that it was up to us whether to sue the driver for involuntary manslaughter as a result of reckless driving. The man would certainly be fined for speeding — nearly twenty km above the speed limit. Miriam, speaking for both of us, did not want to prosecute. She did want to know, however, whether the police had dissuaded the driver from seeking contact with us, or whether he himself had taken the initiative (to do so or not).
As far as the cause of the accident was concerned, the prosecutor’s view was that both parties were guilty. Neither bicyclist nor driver was paying attention at the moment it happened. Tonio should have yielded to the car. The driver could have been chatting to his passenger and had perhaps glanced the other way. He was on his way home from a job at a café, but had not been drinking.
In the past weeks, I have often told myself that Tonio was a clumsy cyclist; that, when he was a youngster, I should have taught him better. This was my daily routine, day in day out: fattening up my guilty conscience. That notion of careless cycling was contradicted by the memory of Tonio on his bike, about two years ago (he had just gone to live in De Baarsjes). I was sitting outside at Café De Joffers, right near the intersection of Willemsparkweg and Cornelis Schuytstraat. Suddenly, I saw his orange granny bike swerve onto the Cornelis Schuyt from the Willemsparkweg. Leaning languidly back, pinkies on the handlebars, he meandered entirely at ease between the backed-up, honking cars — quite elegant, actually, as though city traffic were his natural habitat.
He cut up onto the sidewalk across the street from Joffers, raising his backside to take the curb. I’m sure I saw Tonio park his bike in front of Van Dam’s bistro and go inside. I paid hastily and rushed across the street to ‘catch’ him red-handed. In the bistro: no Tonio. In the bike rack: no orange bicycle.
Maybe there were no tables at Van Dam, and he had continued on to our house. Against our front walclass="underline" no orange bike, nor had Miriam seen him inside.
Had I imagined it all? No, when I spoke to him some time later, it seemed I had not. A reckless ride through the Cornelis Schuyt and among the idling cars? This and that day? Could be, but he hadn’t been inside Van Dam. ‘What on earth would I be doing at Van Dam?’ Oh yes, of course, he had nipped into Mulder’s bookshop, a couple of doors down from Van Dam, to buy a photography magazine, and in order to avoid the traffic jam he continued on his way via the sidewalk. His destination was not his parents’ house, but somewhere else — he couldn’t remember where or for what.
I drummed it into my head that whenever I thought of Tonio as a clumsy cyclist, I should try to see him as I did that day on the Cornelis Schuytstraat, with his elegantly reckless cycling style. And this is how he, in the wee hours, had shot out of the Hobbemastraat, heading for — yes, heading for what? For something that justified, at such a late hour, his purposefulness.
6
I do not believe in a soul that is released from a body after death, and subsequently lives on in some rarefied way. There are those who, after a significant loss, see the light, and convert to one religion or another. As much as I would like to believe in the presence, somewhere, of Tonio’s soul, it is not enough: I want evidence that his soul exists, so that my words do not fall on deaf ears. I would so very much like to inform him of my anger: that he has not been allowed to go on with his life.
‘To tell you the truth, Tonio, I’m pissed off at the whole world. For me, it’s been one huge conspiracy against your future. My anger is all-pervasive. Your mother’s rage is purer. She does not blame anybody in particular. She is just livid on your behalf, because you no longer have the means to express your indignation at the brazen theft of the years you still had ahead of you.’
Show me that his soul is still there somewhere, and I will lay bare my still-living heart to him: my shame for his death, my complicity therein, my shortcomings during his life.
His soul need not respond to my unburdenings, as long as I know it’s there, as a listening or otherwise registering substance, if need be as a cosmic black hole from which not even a faint echo of my confessions will ever return.
‘The few times anyone has had the nerve to ask me these past few weeks if I was working on something, I have answered: “A requiem about Tonio.” Should have been: “for Tonio.” I write it first and foremost for you. No, not for the serenity of your soul. I hope in fact to attract your soul’s attention. I want to rile it. Via your soul, I want to you to know that we have adopted the pain you endured for half a day. “Rest in peace”: nothing doing. We are united in that pain. You, Miriam, and me. And should souls exist — ours, too — then, when we die, we’ll be united for eternity.’
7
Come on, Tonio, be honest: didn’t it bother you that instead of cycling back the De Baarsjes with you, Goscha chose to stay behind and keep Dennis company? You didn’t have to leave alone. You were also invited to hang out at Dennis’s. You usually didn’t turn down an invitation to extend the festivities.
Or did you have the feeling that Dennis and Goscha would have preferred to be alone together, and insisted you stay only out of politeness? Maybe there had been signs earlier that night that something was brewing between them … Did you feel like a fifth wheel? Did you want to be discreet, and let Dennis and Goscha have the rest of the night to themselves?
Jim, who wasn’t in bed yet, said you had promised to be home by about four o’clock to keep him company. Dennis and Goscha told us something about you guys watching a movie, even at that late hour. Goscha, who was the most tipsy of the three of you, wasn’t sure: ‘Maybe he was just too tired, and wanted to go to bed. We did put away a lot that night.’
She told us that she’d fallen asleep ‘pretty much right away’ once inside Dennis’s house. She thought that Dennis, perhaps because of that, was angry with her afterward.
The three of you stood there for a bit, bikes between your legs, on the corner of Sarphatipark, just near the intersection of the Ceintuurbaan and Van der Helststraat. In the seven years that I lived on the Van Ostadestraat, I walked past this corner nearly every day, in total many hundreds of times. I imagine you standing at the spot where, before I had my own line, my regular phone-booth stood, where I took care of business and appointments. Here, one Saturday in the spring of ’78, I had desperately called every medical emergency service in the city, reaping only answering machines, while the first droplets of bright-red blood dripped out of my pant leg onto the granite floor of the phone booth: a case of an unstaunchably torn foreskin.