Tonio Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. And, pointing: ‘There’s the van.’
    Apparently anticipating a warm day, she, too, wore a short-sleeved shirt, a dark-blue scarf tucked in the open neck. Even now I made a mental note of such details, thinking with almost ulterior motives of Kwaadschiks , which featured female police officers. (Note: cleavage covered by scarf. Even when on a mission of mercy, a police officer carries handcuffs on her belt, next to a holstered can of pepper spray.) The van, its sliding door already open, was painted in the familiar red and blue stripes, perhaps intended to suggest speed. As one could read in my manuscript.
    â€˜It’s best if you get in back,’ said the woman.
    I turned to her colleague: ‘Do you know what happened?’
    â€˜Sir, as far as we know your son was hit by a car at approximately four-thirty this morning on the Stadhouderskade. Somewhere near Max Euweplein. We’ve been told he’s in the Intensive Care unit at the AMC . They’re operating on him at the moment. That’s all we know. The driver of the car is being questioned at the Koninginneweg bureau. We’ve just come from there.’
    â€˜He must have just left Paradiso,’ I said, mainly to myself. And then to him: ‘Could he have taken that footbridge over the canal, towards the Stadhouderskade?’
    â€˜We don’t have any details, sir. Only that the driver of the car remained at the scene of the accident. He phoned the police immediately.’
    â€˜Adri, just get in , will you,’ Miriam said. She was already sitting on the back seat. ‘Before it’s too late.’
    I got in next to her.
    â€˜We’ll get you there as fast as possible,’ the policewoman said before slamming the sliding door shut. ‘It’s still early, the A10 won’t be too busy. Although … with the holiday weekend …’
    She got in next to her colleague, who had taken his place at the wheel. I pulled the sobbing Miriam up close to me. She was now crying uncontrollably.
    â€˜Our sweet Tonio … he might be dead already.’
    7
    H&NE . For more than thirty years, this was my secret code for the woman — even she didn’t know about it — whom I held tight on the back seat of the police van.
    â€˜How’d that rice get into the pasta?’
    Miriam’s question, on a warm summer evening in ’79, had set everything in motion. ‘Memory is like a dog that lies down wherever he wants,’ writes Cees Nooteboom. In this case, it cannot have been purely dog-like that there on the back seat, with this shuddering body in my arms, I thought back on the first time I met her. The two police officers up front had more or less dragged us out of bed because Tonio was badly injured — the son that, nine years after that rice in the pasta, we had made together. The child whose life was now in danger. The boy who we were following a terrible, careening path to be with.
    The official story that I had foisted on the world began at her birthday party, 23 November 1979, three days after she turned twenty. Not many people know that she had already come into my viewfinder six months earlier.
    I wanted to have a short novel finished by the end of the summer, having started it that spring in Perugia. I had hoped to catch up with a young woman, Mara, whom I’d met the previous year in Sicily. I didn’t have her address, but did have a phone number, although I didn’t dare ring her — and so it happened that I just bumped into her on a Perugia street. A hasty and sloppy romance ensued, which was at the very least detrimental to my book. I fled to a tiny island in Lake Trasimeno, with 99 or 102 inhabitants, and set to work. I stayed there until the end of July. On Sundays, Mara came over by ferry. It was a good arrangement, until she started to insist that I join her and a small group of friends on Sardinia for the remainder of the summer holidays. I had