‘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.