It really was him. In that bed lay Tonio. Our son. So it had not been a misunderstanding when they came to tell us they were busy with him in the OR. Had I secretly hoped, deep down, that it would be a case of an identity mix-up amid the nighttime chaos? Forget it. This was Tonio. Our own, unmistakable Tonio.
I reached to the side, behind me, but my arm mowed through thin air. Miriam — where was Miriam? I looked back in the direction we came from. In the corner of the yellow tent, next to one of the pillars, Miriam sat on a low stool, supported by two nurses, as though they were forcing her down, to keep her from witnessing the terrible scene from close by. A dripping glass of water hung in the free hand of one of the nurses. Miriam, tears and trepidation in her eyes, made a move as if to stand up, to free herself from the grip of the caring hands. They let go.
We shuffled over to the bed. Miriam took my hand, squeezed it.
‘Just look at him, our sweet Tonio,’ she whispered, almost without crying. ‘Such a sweet boy … Adri, this can’t be happening.’
It had been years since I’d had this reaction. The sight of Tonio, as a child, banging into something, his head bashing against the corner of a table, always sent shivers over my scrotum. I never did look into whether this was a natural reaction, meant to protect the sperm for the eventuality of a replacement heir, but in any case the bottom of my scrotum scrunched up so that the testicles were tangibly pulled upwards. The last time this had happened was not when I’d witnessed Tonio injure himself, but afterward, upon seeing his wounds. A friend of ours on the Apollolaan had seen Tonio’s schoolbag, dangling from the handlebars, get caught in the spokes of the front wheel on his way home from school. Tonio had done a complete frontward somersault. I found him later that day in the living room, covered in scratches, scrapes, and bruises.
‘Oh, Tonio … what happened to you?’
In ’95 he considered his broken wrist a sign of machismo, but only because he had got it on the slick floor of the bumper-cars arena. Now, with the Apollolaan bike incident, he looked mostly abashed, as though he’d damaged something costly belonging to me. He related the accident, embarrassed and reluctantly, in as few words as possible. (Nor did it become a standard macho story in his repertoire later, when the wounds had long started to heal and itch. Perhaps he realised how vulnerable a cyclist could be in city traffic.)
The sight of Tonio in the hospital bed brought about the same reaction: a scrotum made of tanned gooseflesh, which had permanently lost its elasticity.
Of course, we had been warned about his swollen torso, the result of internal bleeding (they had given him one futile transfusion after the other). Nurses had draped the blanket loosely enough around his upper body so that the swollen trunk was less obvious, but once you knew, you saw it anyway.
They had snipped off his clothing, undoubtedly in the ambulance first thing this morning. His naked shoulders stuck out above the sheet. We shared the same body-hair type. Contrary to the fashion of the day, he did not go in for depilation. (He and his friends sometimes self-mockingly called themselves ‘a bunch of old-fashioned hippies’.) I caressed his collarbone: the pattern of soft hair felt reassuringly familiar.
His beautiful face was more or less unscathed. We had to make do with the right side — didn’t get to walking around to the other side of the bed. The proud profile. Strong nose and chin. The full lips, which were so good at combining a grin with a smirk. The eyebrows that tended to meet in the middle. The closed eyes, which would never again open and reveal their gold-flecked brown irises.
How often had I stood watching Tonio as he slept … But this was different. It wasn’t fake-sleep. He wasn’t sleeping, nor had he woken from the dream that was life.
The mouthpiece of the ventilator device was an innocent light-blue, like a piece of a child’s toy. The regular murmur of the artificial breath, with a hint of a slurping sound, had something comforting about it, like someone in a peaceful slumber. It also reminded me of how he lay sucking on his bottle of watered-down chocolate milk, as in a trance, taking deep breaths through his nose, the inward-looking expression serene and tranquil — just like now.
Judging from his stubble, Tonio hadn’t shaved since Thursday, when he photographed that girl. A double black-red dotted line of dried blood traced a path straight through the whiskers; it climbed from the neck up over the chin, crossed the mouth, and ended on the upper lip — as meticulously parallel as the stylised rail tracks on a road map. The wound stripe looked rather gentle, in fact, like a benign scratch a daredevil gets when he takes a spill. Oops. Slip-up.
When he was at that age when children still garble many words, he’d mix up ‘scheren’ (shave) with ‘schreeuwen’ (scream). I often gave Tonio a raspy stubble-kiss just before shaving. He would rub his offended cheek, vexed, and retort, quasi-angry: ‘You have to schreeuw, y’know … you have to schreeuw.’
Because the homo duplex now pulled out multiple stops at once, I was reminded of a line of poetry by Gerrit Kouwenaar: ‘men moet zijn winter nog sneeuwen’ (‘there is still a winter to snow’). Nearly twenty years ago, Tonio handed me a parallel line.
Men moet zijn kaken nog schreeuwen. There is still a chin to scream.
Yes, my son, I still had to scream. It was a wonder that I did not stand here bellowing at the top of my lungs. I leant over to his face and gave him a manly stubble-kiss. The scream, that would come later.
Had I expected — feared — that Miriam would scream out in agony? Sniffling softly, she kept repeating: ‘Tonio, that sweet boy … just look at him, Adri.’
Miriam also kissed his cheek. She pulled her head back, and shook it, No. ‘He doesn’t smell like himself. There’s this intense medicinal odour about him … do you smell it?’
I had already smelled it.
‘When I’d bring around his clean laundry,’ she said, ‘and he had just got up, he had that delicious boy-sweat smell about him.’ She caressed his face with the back of her hand. ‘That’s gone now.’
As a young mother, Miriam claimed to be able to smell when Tonio was coming down with something. ‘Take the dummy out of your mouth … and now breathe out hard.’ She’d sniff his breath. ‘You see? Acetone-breath. I hope you’re not coming down with flu.’
Then the little fellow would run excitedly to his father and repeat the operation, giving me a blast of his damp breath in my face. ‘I’ve got acetone-breath,’ he’d announce proudly. ‘I might get sick’.
I never smelled anything other the scent of fresh apples. Soon thereafter he’d be poised theatrically in bed on his knees, his bum up in the air ready to accept the thermometer.
‘They’ve shaved him,’ I said.
To mask the incisions, they had draped a small towel loosely over his head, like a sheik’s headdress but without the diadem. I only now realised they had shaved his head. If he were to wake up, it would have grown perhaps a millimetre or so. I would greet him with: ‘Been to the barber?’ followed immediately by: ‘So now you call an ambulance to take you to your exams …’
To which he would reply: ‘Jeez. Good day at the typewriter, I see’, which was his standard retort (once coined by his mother) to my bad jokes.