Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

He had completed his first year at the Amsterdam Photo Academy, but wanted to switch to the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Around the time he moved to the De Baarsjes, he broke off his second course of study, grumbling about ‘changes’ that had been introduced out of the blue. I read him the riot act for his gross lack of ambition. As I said, this confrontation, too, was a dud. He swore he was brimming with ambition, but that he’d rather, after the summer, tackle a proper university major. Until then he was planning to get a job to make ends meet — well, almost … hopefully we would still take care of his rent …

He found work at Dixons, a computer and photography-accessories shop on the Kinkerstraat. We saw very little of him after that. If he came round for a visit, it was usually on Sunday evening, when we would get Surinamese takeaway. Sometimes he would give us advance notice, but more often he just appeared in the living room.

3

I was up on the third floor preparing my lectures, while one flight below Tonio dismantled his room — the room we’d had renovated and furnished for him only a couple of years earlier, far too late. Suddenly the alarming noise of falling objects rose straight through the ceiling. I raced down the stairs.

The space stripped quite bare by now, Tonio stood desperately propping up a set of connected wall cupboards in an attempt to keep them from crashing down for good: the anchors had come loose.

‘Stupid me — again,’ he moaned. I helped by adding my own clumsiness to his. Once the danger had been averted, I returned to my desk rather than help him finish the job. I made a feeble promise to come see his new place once he’d moved.

We had lived under the same roof with Tonio for nearly twenty years, the last sixteen of them in this house. Perfectly normal that now, two years after his final exams, he would leave the parental nest in order to live on his own. So normal that the drama of it all — for a drama it was — more or less escaped me.

It was during those two-plus years he lived in De Baarsjes that my life, I imagined, became busier than ever. A new book came out, and I started accepting speaking engagements again. And on top of that: a weekly column, the guest teaching, an essay assignment … not to mention the work already on my plate. After his holiday in Ibiza, summer 2009, we fetched him from Schiphol by car, and dropped him off at his house on the Nepveustraat: the only time I saw it, and then only from the outside. We didn’t get asked in. He was clearly in a hurry to share his adventures with Jim — the British girls he’d mentioned in passing on the way back. He’d nearly been thrown out of the hotel for letting them stay overnight in his room without checking in.

He left his bag of dirty laundry in the car. ‘I’ll come by on Sunday to pick it up.’

Nor did I ever write to him at his new address. In the past, if I was working at Château St. Gerlach, I did send him the occasional pep note around exam time. If I was so bent on working with ‘old stuff’, rather than computers and email, why not write an old-fashioned letter, handwritten and delivered by post?

My publisher asked me a while ago, perhaps not entirely selflessly, how many letters I thought I’d written in the past forty years. I came up with an estimate of ten thousand. Short and long, typed and handwritten, personal and business. During those two years that Tonio lived in De Baarsjes, the copies in my archive numbered a good four hundred — and not a single one of them to him.

It needn’t be too late. If Tonio survived his accident and operation, I would write to him every day of his convalescence. At first, if his mind had to recuperate, simple letters that a nurse could read out loud to him. Gradually, more elaborate ones. And once he was back on his feet, I would never stop — even if he didn’t write back.

4

‘We’ve lost him, Adri,’ came the high, singsong voice beside me. ‘I just feel it.’

When had I last seen and spoken to Tonio? Last week, twice in short succession — atypical since his move.

On Wednesday, I worked until four. I went downstairs, hoping to catch some sun out on the veranda: after a chilly first half of the month, the weather had turned the previous day. The French doors leading from the library to the terrace were open. I recognised Miriam’s voice; she was talking to someone, but since the curtains, billowing in the breeze, were still closed, I couldn’t see to whom. I stepped out onto the veranda. There sat Tonio. More relaxed and self-assured than I was used to seeing him. When he noticed me, a mildly mocking grin spread across his face.

‘So, up to your ten pages a day yet?’ he asked.

After an overconfident glass some time ago, I expressed this as my target for my current novel. He asked it teasingly, but I thought I also heard in it something of the old polite interest.

‘Five’s the minimum,’ I replied. ‘Six, seven is doable. Eight is a banner day. So cut me some slack.’

He had been to visit grandpa Natan, his ninety-seven-year-old grandfather who lived on the Lomanstraat, and since he ‘was in the neighbourhood anyway’ he took a short detour to drop in on his parents. I suspected there was more to it than that.

‘Grandpa Natan’s going to have a cataract operation,’ he said, suddenly serious.

‘Oh?’ Miriam and I knew nothing about it.

‘Yeah, crazy, actually … putting an old man through all that.’

‘I’m about to take him over to Beth Shalom,’ Miriam said, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ll bring it up with him in the car.’

I had the impression that it somehow did Tonio good to show his concern for his fragile grandfather. Since leaving home, he lived life to the hilt, and his youth, not exactly overflowing with close family anyway, was vanishing rapidly in his wake. No, this wasn’t just a casual social call.

‘Tonio, your master’s degree, that’s where we left off.’ Miriam got up; it was her turn to go to the Lomanstraat. ‘Don’t forget to tell Adri.’

After she left, Tonio explained to me that when the time came, he had decided to get his master’s in Media Technology.

‘How about just getting your bachelor’s in Media & Culture first? You’re hardly through your first year.’

He grinned. ‘Can’t hurt to think ahead, now and then.’

Maybe that was his way of erasing the words ‘lack of ambition’, which had been lingering ever since our first and only real clash. Tonio spelled out what Media Technology involved, and told me the course wasn’t offered by the University of Amsterdam. He found out he would have to alternate between Leiden and The Hague.

‘That’ll mean moving,’ I said.

‘That’ll mean the train,’ he said.

There was something different about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He dared to look deeper into his future, and there had to be a reason for it. More self-confidence, yes, but his shyness hadn’t vanished. Perhaps to avoid having to lower his eyes, he looked up at the laburnum, where the green clusters were starting to show yellow buds.

‘Late bloom this year,’ I said.

‘Yeah, what do you expect,’ Tonio replied, ‘with such a cold May.’

It dawned on me that we seldom, if ever, discussed nature. At the Ignatius Gymnasium open house, a number of older students who were showing him around gave him a stick insect in a glass jar from the biology lab to take home. The gift thrilled him so much that Vossius and Barlaeus were directly out of the running; Ignatius was his choice. He installed a small terrarium around the stick bug, but not long thereafter asked our permission to let the ghost grasshopper loose in the Vondelpark. This was the extent of his yen for nature. His passion lay with physics. I remember when, at school, he and a classmate gave a demonstration of the internal combustion engine, complete with computer simulation. It was grand to see him so in his element.