Adri van der Heijden - Tonio - a requiem memoir

11

In the spring of 1982, strolling through Vondelpark, we occasionally came upon a young woman I knew by sight, and who apparently recognised me as well. She was pushing a pram and quite emphatically greeted me, not Miriam. Her name eluded me, but I concluded that I must have known her from my student days in Nijmegen. Maybe we had lived in the same block of student housing. It was the baby carriage that did it for me. At one of these chance meetings, seated next to Miriam on a park bench, I saw how the nameless acquaintance bent lovingly over the baby, which was hidden from our view, and stuck her hand under the canopy to rearrange something. I can’t rule out that she had intentionally stopped in front of our bench to strike up a conversation that didn’t materialise. She nodded at me, smiling, and went on her way, clearly on cloud nine.

Once the woman was out of earshot, it all spilled out: what a wrung-out dishrag I felt the past year-and-a-half, much worse than I had dared admit up until now, and how an unbearable physical urge to become a father was growing in me. Despite my debilitating fatigue, the belief had arisen that a child would rejuvenate me.

‘If that’s really how you feel,’ said Miriam, ‘then it’s the worst possible reason to become a father.’

I knew that. But I kept at it — until a year later, again in the spring, my health began to improve, and the dips into hellish exhaustion became ever more infrequent. After turning in a manuscript at the publisher on 1 September, I cycled past my house, towards the Amstel. I followed the river all the way to Ouderkerk, kept cycling, and allowed myself to stray into uncharted territory, somewhere where woods meets meadow. Suddenly I realised: I’m better. There wasn’t even a trace of the old tiredness in me.

Still, it wasn’t until 1987, four years later, that I dared to pester Miriam again with what is called ‘wants children’ in newspaper personals.

My yearning for progeny was as powerful as my fear of it. This was the kind of dilemma that makes for a good film or novel. My wanting a child was paralysingly on par with the fear of losing it.

12

In early May ’87, with summer in sight, I left for the Provence to work out a new idea for a novel ( Advocaat van de Hanen ). I still had the need to ‘view my happiness from a distance’ occasionally, but did make a deal with Miriam that she would join me a month later.

On the train to Paris, I read a newspaper advertisement for a country house near Aix-en-Provence, available for rent during the summer months. I phoned the number immediately upon arriving in Paris. The woman who answered the phone turned out to be Dutch: Anneke, married to a French singer who specialised in Provençal folksong. Yes, I could rent part of the house. I took an option for June and July, and promised to ring her once I had arrived in the south.

After a few days in Paris, I took the TGV to Arles. Miriam and I had been there the year before. One day, I escaped the blistering heat, taking refuge in the refreshingly cool and quiet old library in the centre of town. There, and nowhere else, would I spend the coming months transforming the documentation I’d dragged with me into a first version of the book.

Every morning, I walked from my hotel at the foot of the amphitheatre to the library on the main square. I worked. I observed my happiness from a distance. I looked forward to Miriam’s arrival.

In mid-May, I took the train via Aix to Marseille, where Anneke came to fetch me by car. The blonde woman in the light-blue pantsuit was young. Ten years earlier, still a teenager, she had met her folk singer, twenty years her senior, at the Avignon Festival, where he was performing his Provençal songs. By now they had two young sons.

Their house, Villa Tagora, was situated in what was called the ‘green zone’, but which, under the southern springtime sun, had already lost much of its colour, and looked dusty, almost arid. The grounds surrounding Villa Tagora were overgrown, with tunnels formed by intertwining thornbush, like rolls of rusty barbed wire. But it also smelt vividly of lavender — a purple field full of white butterflies. The cicadas added to the silence just the sound that went with this heat. The two mouse-grey cats that stalked through the long grass would distract Miriam from the weeds. I paid Anneke the deposit for the apartment annex, which consisted of two rooms and a bathroom that also housed the fridge and gas cooker. June and July were guaranteed, but just to be on the safe side I took out an option for August as well.

At the end of May, I went to Paris to meet up with Miriam. Gare du Nord. She stepped out of the drab train wearing a summer dress I did not recognise. A surge of infatuation — so that’s what studying your own happiness from a distance was good for. First to the hotel, then lunch on the steamy sidewalk of the Boulevard St. Germain, just outside the shadow of the awning.

Two days later, the TGV to Arles. At the beginning of June we settled into Villa Tagora. Blissful weeks largely spent in the shade of the neglected garden. Talking, thinking. Reading, writing. When the afternoons became too sultry, we would retire to the bedroom for some languid love-making, ending in a siesta. The blue bedsheets, apparently not very colourfast, became batiked by all the sour sweat we produced in that heat.

13

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Miriam said one of those afternoons, when I propped myself on one elbow in preparation to jack myself up to a vertical position.

‘Oh, nothing, just a little mind game. Tomorrow we’ll probably lie here like this again. Enjoy the tingling while it lasts. But just imagine a world in which a person was only allowed to perform this … mating act, as they call it in the nature films … just once. No second chance. That one time, it would have to embody everything. Love, tenderness. A whole human life in one discharge … Because of its intensity, weaker specimens wouldn’t stand a chance of survival. May I speak to the man of the house? No, I’m sorry, he can’t come to the telephone. You see, it’s like this … sir ejaculated yesterday, and is now confined to his bed for the next fortnight at least.’

‘Don’t forget fertilisation,’ said Miriam. ‘That’s also got to be bang on that one time, otherwise the poor little species will die out in no time.’

I made a note of this mad notion, and then promptly forgot it. Coming across the sheet of paper later, I saw that the entire conversation had been summarised thus: ‘one-day world, one-day people.’

In the morning, when it wasn’t so hot, we would occasionally walk down the lane to a suburb of Aix, where we caught the bus to the city centre to have lunch and do some shopping. On the way back we would stop at our favourite supermarket for gourmandises that Miriam would only have to heat up for dinner. That is how it went on 29 June, but the next day it was too hot to walk along the searing asphalt. Supplies needn’t be replenished, and there was still half a portion of boeuf à la Normande with pâtes fraiches from the previous evening (what a life). We stayed put in Villa Tagora.

What does a historic day in the life of two lovers look like? Not sensationally remarkable, in this particular case. In my diary, I wrote that on Tuesday, 30 June 1987 we had taken breakfast in the garden at about a quarter after nine. ‘We watch the hornets and butterflies flit from one cone-shaped purple flower to the next. The (white) butterflies remind me of white-jacketed lab assistants going from flask to flask with a pointy pipette. At 9:30 I sit down to work at my small military-invalid table in the shadow of the terrace. Documentation folder Hans K. Notes for Advocaat …’