‘Congratulations!’ she called out.
‘Yeah, thanks … thanks!’ he shouted back.
That was all. He came back inside.
‘Who was that?’ asked Miriam.
‘Oh … just Merel.’
‘Couldn’t you have asked her in?’
Tonio shrugged his shoulders. Something in his expression, the corners of his eyes and mouth, betrayed a certain insecurity: yes, maybe he should have done. ‘Merel also did her final exams,’ he said evasively.
God, Tonio, the love of your life all those years. Cruel children: cruel to each other, cruel to themselves.
18
If he played in my workroom, Tonio would often come stand behind me and peer over my shoulder, reading what I was writing or had just written. He sometimes asked what it all meant, but, as I explained it, his thoughts usually drifted back downstairs to his Warhammer armies and half-built K’Nex towers. Once he recognised his name, and his parents’, in a freshly written paragraph.
‘Is it about us?’
I explained that it was a diary entry. (In those days, I kept a typed diary on loose sheets of paper.) He thought it was pretty weird. Later that day, I took him aside. ‘When you turn eighteen, Tonio, I’ll give you a book with the notes I made throughout your life. About your birth and all sorts of things you’ve forgotten, or never knew, or will remember once you’ve read them … I’ll make a really cracking book out of it.’
Tonio looked at me briefly, not unobligingly, and said: ‘Oh, great.’ And off he ran.
On his eighteenth birthday, the day that coincided with his exam results, I did not have the promised folder, or book, ready to give him. Nor did he ask for it. Of course he didn’t: his life did not need to be written down; it had to be lived. Certainly from that moment on.
‘Oh, great.’ Writing out the original, telegram-style scribbles in longhand gives me the feeling that I’m making good on an old promise, not so long after his eighteenth birthday. The hideous part is that it’s not enough to provide a record of his birth and the ensuing childhood years. I cannot avoid an account of his last day. What I had wanted to give him was a book with an open end. Now, it runs the danger of becoming over-complete.
19
The graduation ceremony was, thanks to the summery weather, held outdoors. The abundant sunlight made the glassy sand particles in the schoolyard’s paving stones glisten.
The Ignatius. Unlike Miriam, I had not come here often. All those PTA evenings — what right did I have, actually, to leave them to her? Yes, that one time with the combustion engine, I was there then. Perhaps it was the presence of his father that made Tonio, initially paralysed with nerves, grow in his role so quickly. In his determination to explain everything, he came across as a bit pedantic, but endearingly so.
I thought of William Faulkner, hammering away at a typewriter in his study, Rhapsody in Blue on the record player, whisky within reach, and his daughter in the doorway, begging her father to come to the school’s PTA family evening. No, honey, out of the question. Daddy has to catch up with Shakespeare, and he’s got a long way to go yet. Another time, sweetheart.
I was so damned chuffed, there in that schoolyard, that Tonio had graduated from the gymnasium. It was not the shadow of my own body that lay at my feet — no, it was pure pride, sharply outlined against the grey paving stones. I was too high from the whole thing to consider whether I really deserved that pride.
Each graduate was called forward and got a personal word of congratulations from his mentor. It went in alphabetical order. Although Tonio wasn’t at the end of the alphabet, he became restless. At first he had laughed out loud at the various form teachers’ wisecracks, but now even his smile had started to fade. Finally it was his turn to be handed his diploma. Miriam and I pushed our way up front.
Tonio’s mentor (his biology teacher) had, in his speeches, assigned an animal to each of his charges. He handed Tonio a framed photo collage that included a portrait of Tonio in 2000, his first year in the class (short hair and glasses); a portrait of him in 2006, shortly before his exams (long hair, no glasses); and in between them, a photo of a giant panda.
‘… Tonio, ladies and gentlemen, has the good-naturedness and cuddle factor of a panda. Inversely, he also shares the panda’s defencelessness and vulnerability, making him a bit of a pushover …’
Fortunately, I will never forget it, because with the sun’s help it was burned into my memory: how Tonio, slightly dizzy, meandered toward us through the tightly packed crowd, his diploma and the panda under his arm. We embraced him again, this time more ceremoniously. He pulled a face that seemed to say: Was that everything? It was already behind him. I recalled my own post-graduation lustrelessness of 1 June 1969.
Miriam asked him how he liked the speech. Tonio wiggled his hands: so-so. Pushing it. He didn’t fancy being branded as good-natured and defenceless — no way, that wasn’t him at all.
‘Cuddle factor, okay,’ he said with a grimace. ‘You can always shake it off.’
His eyes wandered restlessly toward a couple of ex-classmates, who beckoned him. He handed us the diploma and panda collage for safekeeping. ‘I was going to hit a few parties with the guys.’
‘Been invited?’
‘Don’t have to be.’
‘D’you remember when you gave that party three years ago, you and your friends kicked out a few party crashers? There was a police car at the door when Miriam and I got home.’
‘And we didn’t even need them by then,’ he said. ‘Who says I’m defenceless?’*
[* Author’s note: After having written this paragraph yesterday, this morning’s paper (25 August 2010) sported two front-page photos of a newborn giant panda. The first photo, taken from a CCTV image, showed mother Yang Yang with the cub in her mouth. It is so tiny that at first glance you think of a premature foetus. The second picture shows Yang Yang, with her front paw, cradling the resting minuscule creature. Caption: ‘Giant pandas are seldom born in captivity in Europe.’ The mother, her sad eyes sunk in pools of runny mascara, looks up at the camera.]
20
So as not to rub Tonio the wrong way, Miriam did not add ‘the three pandas’ to the portrait gallery right away, but from the very first day the collage did hang on the landing, months later, it seemed (to me, at least) that the biology teacher’s ‘defenceless’ pronouncement has started to seep onto the adjacent photos. It wasn’t like I wanted to admonish Tonio not to ‘let them walk all over you’ every time I left the toilet. It went deeper than that. What I saw in passing, or thought I saw, even out of the corner of my eye, was a glimpse of a vulnerable life.
I also had this with snapshots of murdered children, like those shown in missing-person programmes on TV. Rowena Rickers, the Nulde girl who had been chopped in pieces … The sisters from Zoetermeer, whose father smothered them with a pillow … Despite the trust with which they looked into the camera, I believed I read a premonition of the inevitable, their gruesome deaths, in their laughing eyes. Of course, you could label it as 20/20 hindsight. But maybe a projection, like a magnifying glass or an X-ray, makes visible something that has previously gone unnoticed.
So what was it about that unmistakable vulnerability I observed — over so many different periods! — on Tonio’s face? I noticed it as much under the impudent brim of the cap between Merel and Iris as behind the nerdy Dorus glasses. How could my original fondness for those photos have been transformed into permanent anxiety?