Your whole childhood long, I regaled you with signs of attention, large and small; caring gestures; soothing words. These, however, do not hold up against the all-pervasive sensation, in retrospect, of guilt and negligence. If I wasn’t able to create for you a situation allowing for a safe nighttime cycle route from De Pijp to De Baarsjes, then I should at least have been there, halfway, to throw myself in front of the enemy vehicle and force it to stop. A persistently gurgling stomach on its own does not offer much resistance.
I acknowledge my defeat, which cannot be parried, not even into eternity.
16
Sundays are Miriam’s darkest days. The pain is at its worst — partly because the huge loss happened on Whit Sunday, of course, but also because if Tonio dropped by, he usually did so on that day. This afternoon, some three months after the accident, she rang me in a panic.
‘There’s a trauma helicopter above the Hobbemastraat.’
This morning, she got up at five and worked until nine-thirty, after which she fell into a deep sleep in bed with a book in her hand, until noon. Just now, she woke up from a pitch-black dream to the pulse of the rotors.
The telephone pressed to my ear, I opened the streetside window of my workroom. If I bent far enough outside, I could indeed see a yellow helicopter with red-blue stripes off to the north-east, hovering approximately above the Rijksmuseum, whose position was marked by the asymmetrical cross of a building crane. It did not rise or descend, did not circle; it just hovered motionlessly like a bird of prey. against the steely-blue sky — at most, swaying gently.
‘If you need some company …’ I said. A few seconds later, she was upstairs. I was still leaning out of the window. The helicopter swung in our direction now, slower than a police chopper, banked steeply to the west, and then returned to its initial position above the Rijksmuseum, staying there for a time, again like a bird of prey.
‘A stand-by, I reckon. He’s waiting for instructions. There’ll be an ambulance down at the scene.’
I comforted Miriam with the thought that even if it had been allowed to fly at night, a trauma helicopter wouldn’t have saved Tonio. ‘He was in good hands. An extra ambulance with a trauma team replaced the helicopter. The kid just didn’t stand a chance.’
No, that wasn’t it. The sound of the propellers had roused her, and then she saw the chopper hovering above The Spot, as though someone was trying to rub it in that the nightmare was for real, even after she’d woken up. ‘I’m okay now.’
Later, when I went downstairs, Miriam was sitting uncomfortably on the sofa, with one leg tucked up and her head leaning back. Red-rimmed eyes staring into nothingness. ‘I miss him so much,’ she kept repeating in a whisper. Her head rolled slowly back and forth over the back of the sofa, in a sort of resigned denial. ‘I miss him so terribly … it’s just inconceivable …’
At moments like these, I had no answer other than to hold her cold hand until it warmed up and she pulled it away because I squeezed it too tightly.
17
My self-recrimination is not limited to Tonio’s gruesome end. I have also brought this on Miriam. I robbed her of her youth on her twentieth birthday, a bottle of whisky under my arm. Later, I saddled her with a child, which put paid to her childhood once and for all.
I not only saddled her with a child, I also saddled her with death. I had sworn to her I would protect that child with my life, if need be with my dead body. I was not able to honour my promise. The boy slipped through my fingers.
Her life as a girl is finished, and her life as a mother is finished. It is a miracle that she wants to continue her life with me as my wife.
18
A Sinterklaas celebration at Arti. Finally — you were almost the last one — Santa called you up to the stage. You’d hardly made it there before launching into a little dance on the red carpeting, turning your back on the good saint as you skipped in a circle. Your dance was loony and stiff, hands flapping and rotating like miniature propellers. Your eyes sought me out. I was sitting at the bar.
‘Gotta poop,’ you called out to me. To salvage the situation as best you could, you made an idiotic face. Sinterklaas looked on, flabbergasted. I have seldom loved you as much as at that moment.
I asked Ria the bartender for the wooden stick with the key, and yanked you from the stage.
There is no doubt that I loved him, from the first to the last day. As often as I said it to my mother (‘I love that boy’), or silently to myself, it was mostly an unspoken, matter-of-fact love. No proof necessary. (I sometimes dreamt of a God who would command me to sacrifice my son to Him. I was prepared to believe in such a God, but only in order to make a fool of Him by sparing Tonio.)
The binding and convincing evidence of my love for Tonio was presented, unasked-for, by his death. The ice-cold black hole into which my life plunged, from the one moment to the next, proved how much I loved him.
Since Whit Sunday, Miriam and I talk about Tonio, surprisingly consistently, in the past-perfect and imperfect tense. Only, ‘I loved him’ is something I can’t get out of my mouth. Even my pen baulks. Of course, I can replace the wretched past tense with ‘… how much I love him’, but I am still tempted to add: ‘as he was’.
My love for him is still there, and more intensely than it used to be. Grammatically, it makes no sense at all. If, under duress, I say, ‘I love him’, then what him am I talking about? Tonio no longer exists as him. He existed (and how!) in what now is past tense. And yet I love him, like I used to love him.
My love is genuine and sincere, but it has to make do without an object. It is love desperately in search of an untraceable lover. A talk-show editor once warned his colleagues against inviting me as a guest: ‘Right away, he’ll open up a can of old Greeks.’ Well, now that the can is open anyway: the old Greeks at least had the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to hold on to. An exceptional miracle — by the grace of the gods. I have to make do with a love meandering in the present imperfect tense, forever cut off from the beloved in past imperfect.
Seeing that language is so uncooperative, how can we expect to keep Tonio alive in words?
19
To be abandoned by a lover, by the woman in your life — even that I’d braced myself for. ‘You never come out of it unscarred,’ a colleague once said. I was prepared for the shame of being dumped. All the love still left over for someone who just slammed the door behind them … the wastefulness of so much longing … well, all right, that passes. Time would do its work.
At most, I had braced myself for the death of my son by allowing my fear to make a pact with my imagination. That I might actually lose him never really entered my mind. I let my imagination, fed by fear, do the work — the work of warding it off.
Someone had abandoned me, my own son, without my love for him being able to pass. Time would show me what longing was. A lover who abandons you can transform your pain into hate. With the loss of a child, this was impossible. I moped around like an utterly betrayed lover whose love only grew and grew.
CHAPTER SEVEN. Pantonioism
1
His passion for rocks was sparked in Brussels. Miriam and Tonio were there in the mid-1980s, visiting her friend Lot. The boy immersed himself in a book belonging to Lot’s husband on minerals and semi-precious stones. Back home, he begged us for a subscription to a rock collectors’ magazine. In every city we visited, he managed to wheedle a handful of special collectors’ items out of us. Soon, stones had no more secrets from him; he developed an infallible memory for types, colours, names.