‘Tonio, dearest … don’t we knock anymore?’
Last Thursday you shaved for that girl … come on, what’s her name … and a five o’clock shadow once again accentuates your grin. I greet you with a hand on your shoulder, it’s warm from cycling, as it should be. You’re panting slightly from running up the stairs, so that I feel your breath on my face from close by.
‘Where’s Mama?’
I can’t very well tell you she’s gone with Hinde to Grandpa Natan and then to Grandma Wies to tell them what happened early this morning to their grandson …
‘Gone to the Suri. You wanted chow-chow, right?’
‘It’s chow mein. A chow-chow is a Chinese dog. Jeez.’
Your staccato laugh, always with a hint of melancholy in its undertones (a matter of intelligence: only fools laugh outright cheerfully). As usual, you stink of cigarettes. Your clothes, which Miriam regularly washes, are saturated with the stench of rotten nicotine. Of course, your roommate has been a hardcore smoker since he was fourteen, and smokes pot besides. You guys are like farmers when it comes to airing out the place: never open the windows, lest the smell of manure get in. Last time I visited, I asked you point-blank: ‘You smoke, too, don’t you?’
‘Ah, sometimes I have one in a bar,’ you replied. ‘You know, to go along with the guys.’
Your answer put my mind at ease. But now I think you were skirting the issue. I’m going to ask you again tonight, and then I want a straight answer. Come on, Tonio, you’re going to be twenty-two in a few weeks. No more hide-and-seek. ‘Something to drink?’
‘I’ll wait for Miriam.’
It’s not just that no one mixes a meaner screwdriver than your mother — you don’t want to give the impression of being a glutton. Although I suspect you can put it away as well as the next guy. I noticed it, by the by, after the premiere of the film Het leven uit een dag. (I hope you didn’t cause that Marianne, your date, too much trouble.)
Tygo has followed you upstairs. He’s at your feet, waiting to be petted. You scoop the big tomcat from the carpet with both hands at once, and flop backwards onto the corner sofa: your regular spot. While you stroke him with great swipes, Tygo twists himself on his back over your thighs. Let me have a good look at you, Tonio. You are unarguably handsome, shaven or not. Too bad about that 1.73m — a few centimetres shorter than I. You’ll have to settle for it, I’m afraid, you’re full-grown now. You’ve got short parents and short grandparents. Miriam and I were never preoccupied with genetic details like height when planning a family. A person only feels small when he’s reminded of his stature by a taller person. It’s usually a dumb hulk, whose tallness only makes him dumber and hulkier, and which emboldens him to profess: ‘The tall always have a head start.’
A recent study even showed that tall men earn on average more than relatively shorter ones. See? — the tall guy’s intimidating appearance is going to be legitimised by job-search committees and accounting offices. Hell with ’em. Remember that nearly all geniuses were short. The brain can communicate quicker with the hand, it’s as simple as that. The argument that it’s some kind of subconscious sublimation of a physical handicap is just plain bullshit.
‘How far apart are we sitting now? A good four metres. I can still smell your smoky clothes. Tonio, there’s something I want to ask you … something that’s been eating me the past few days. Before that, too, but this week it cropped up again. Since the photo shoot with that girl, last Thursday, to be exact. You don’t have to answer me. I’m only asking because it bugged me way back when, too. From the time I was seventeen until I turned twenty. You take after me in so many things, and your life now, as a student, has so many parallels with mine at your age … so … if you’re embarrassed by this, then let’s just forget it. Tonio, are you still a virgin?’
26
At the annual Amsterdam cultural fair ‘Uitmarkt’ in 2003, fifteen and thus already too old to co-sign books with his father, Tonio hung around with me at Querido’s stall. As I chatted with passers-by who enquired about future, as-yet unpublished works, I was amused to listen in while Tonio joshed sheepishly with Isolde, my editor’s daughter. They were just two months apart in age, and had shared a playpen as babies. Later they attended each other’s birthday parties. They had played together at Arti. But instead of taking advantage of the longstanding familiarity, he kept the pretty thing at arm’s length with ribbing and raillery. She in turn, not to be outdone by Tonio’s repartee, gave as good as she got. You could say they dallied in tender derision.
Later, he returned the bag I had given him for safekeeping. ‘She and I are going to a do a round of the Uitmarkt,’ he shrugged, grinning almost apologetically. I watched the two of them as they walked off. He exhibited the same tick I had at his age when I walked alongside a girclass="underline" drawing his shoulders up unnecessarily high, giving yourself a sort of hunchback.
27
Tonio sat, in my imagination at least, across from me in his regular spot these past years, and I occupied the sagging sofa that by rights was once his. Even in my vision, I was unable to seduce an answer out of him.
Like he was fond of the morning intimacies with his mother …
Early one morning, shortly after the summer of the move, I awoke to someone tugging at my arm. It was Tonio. I lay on the living-room sofa, where I had passed out after a nighttime glass. Laughing and blurting out indignant yells, he hung on my arm. I could feel in his toddler’s body the force with which he tried to drag me to the floor. That sofa was his morning domain and was at this moment being desecrated by my massive dozing presence. I gave in and slid to the carpet, and rolled around a bit for good measure. He shrieked in triumph. But the victory was not yet complete: I was chased out of the room. I saw Miriam come out of the kitchen with a feeding bottle of watered-down chocolate milk. Before he took it from her he checked it, as he did every morning.
‘To the brim, and not too hot?’
‘Full as full can be, and not too warm. Feel for yourself.’
A bit later I peeked around the doorway. Tonio was sprawled on the sofa, leaning against his mother, sucking lazily on the bottle and blinking as he watched a video of his favourite cartoon duck, Alfred Jodocus Quack. He swung a swatch of polka-dotted fabric left and right, as though swatting at flies. Every now and then he removed the nipple from his mouth, held the bottle up to the light to check on his drinking progress, and to judge how much longer this paradisal interlude between sleep and school would last. It was his timepiece, his liquid hourglass.
28
Tonio had been dead for hours now, and I had not committed suicide yet. I had often pondered issues like cowardice, lack of solidarity, frozen feelings. If he had been kidnapped, or otherwise had gone missing, I would be out scouring the most unlikely places, out of breath, in search of him. But for his death, I had no answer.
As a boy, I entertained obsessive, morbid thoughts. Say I had to bring my mother the news that my little brother or sister had been killed in an accident. I placed my parents’ grief above my own. What’s more, I was dead scared of their grief. Better to kill myself than to be confronted with their despair. Dilemma: even though I didn’t have to be there to witness it, my suicide would augment their grief by 100 per cent.