Dutch writer Angelo Tijessens is perhaps best known for his work in film (as co-writer of Girl and Close) and theatre (with the Ontroerend Goed theatre collective) but in 2022 he wrote the short novel De Randen which has now been translated into English by Michele Hutchison as The Edges. In the novel a young gay man returns to his hometown after his mother’s death to seek out the first boy he loved. It begins forcefully in second person with a confrontation between the man (the characters are never named) and his mother in which she tells him, “You have nothing, you are wearing nothing, and you are nothing,” a scene from an abusive childhood made worse by his mother’s homophobia, cutting off all contact with their neighbours when she discover they are not, in fact, brothers. The abuse is physical at times:
“You were dragged out of bed by the collar of your pyjamas because you had to turn out the light because do you think money grows on trees and your nose hit the bedside table and in the middle of the night you looked at your nose in the mirror and were happy your nose wasn’t broken and was only bleeding.”
Later, when he is informed of his mother’s death and the need to arrange the funeral he asks, “do I have to do it?”
The rest of the novel is narrated in the first person by the man, who has messaged his first love after years of no contact. Whereas he has left to live a life of numerous, inconsequential sexual encounters, his friend has withdrawn from society and is now:
“…practically a hermit, a caretaker guarding the empty houses, the empty lake, all the emptiness while waiting for the bulldozers to tear down the holiday park in the spring…”
“I haven’t slept with a boy since you,” he tells the narrator, “I didn’t tell anyone about it either, I never told anyone about it.” The narrator, on the other hand, has slept with “ten, twenty, thirty, I didn’t keep count.” The contrast, and the closeness, create a charged erotic atmosphere, but, as the narrator discovers, even as their previous attraction to each other resurfaces, there is still “a world between us.” The narrator’s initiation into sex is sordid, in a changing room at the pool with another boy and a “paunchy man in his fifties”. When he leaves for the city, he changes:
“I moulded myself to the city’s demands, I fitted myself to others, my legs folded between my chest and theirs, I fitted myself around other bodies in buses and trams that took me to more and more new places, in daylight and in morning light, in the orange glow of streetlamps, on my way to the flat of someone whose name I didn’t know.”
Despite the affection the two men feel for one another, the narrator is aware that they are very different. When they were younger their relationship was also characterised by his belief that the other could not understand:
“You will spend years wondering whether he knew, whether he sensed it, the fear, whether he saw or smelled it.”
The tension in the novel is not only erotic – it also makes the reader question whether there is any future to the feelings they have for each other. Both are hampered by fear. In the narrator’s case, this is a fear he has carried with him since childhood, a dear of accepting affection only to lose it. For the other man, we sense it is a fear to accept his homosexuality which does not exist outside this relationship.
Though short, The Edges does not lack content as it flits between the past and present while conjuring various possible futures. Though its circumstances are particular, all readers will recognise a desire to reclaim a lost happiness and the dangers such an attempt may hold.
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