Writing an In Memoriam - Antoon van Tomme

[timpeltje]

It feels odd to write this down, but who else would write an In Memoriam for him?

The backstory: Erik had his big move yesterday from Gent to Brussels, moving from our cosy apartment to his very own place in Brussels. I’d given him everything he needed to have the landlord sign for the water and electricity paperwork so we could settle everything well.

It’s not an In Memoriam for the apartment, if that’s what you’re thinking.

Erik asked our landlord if he’d be home yesterday evening to sign everything and hand over the keys. So after having closed our apartment door for the very last time, he went down to knock on our landlord’s door to sign the final papers.

He gave no reply, which was annoying. So Erik tried calling him, heard the mobile phone ringing in his apartment, remaining unanswered.

Our friendly downstairs neighbours agreed to let our landlord sign them for us and that would be that...

This morning, Erik texted me that the man had apparently hung himself yesterday, quite probably during the whole move.

It was quite clear that he hadn’t been happy, maybe ever, having always been on weed or other drugs.

It’s sad. The few people I know who actually have enough money have always been the most unhappy. Our landlord raked in about 4000€ a month from rent from his tenants plus everything he made from having the peepshow and the sex cinema where Gent’s horny older men went to get their daily wanks.

I cannot say that I was extremely surprised (I actually remember telling Erik that I might see our landlord committing suicide one day). It comes with the lifestyle of having a porno empire where you employ a squad of raunchy looking Eastern European women with cross-eyed breasts with the only intent of emptying the pockets of a bunch of sad old (and probably married) men. At least he had a succesful business plan. He provided a service to those people who maybe didn't want to cheat on their wives, so they'd just go for an easy wank. 

Sometimes in his life, he also wanted to make a change. When E. came back from visiting me last year in Berlin, he was full of energy, liking the manner in which nudity of older people became a subject of the people at the gallery I was interning for. He liked all the political ideas and the hope and effort. Should we have gone round to talk to him about it more and convince him to be a more active part in it? Well, he couldn't really be trusted, the things we asked him for the small part of the project he did not do... But still, we wonder about his timing, he knew Erik was going to knock on his door later that day to hand over the keys....
Maybe he was in love with Erik, a feeling I could understand, I would also kill for Erik, though not myself :-)  -this is how AWKWARD it gets thinking about this. Why the timing, when Erik had only agreed to see him a few hours earlier? You don't hang yourself because of a futility, right? 
Earlier, he fixed the roof-gutter in our last week there, had only just had the façade painted a few weeks before.
It's weird, it's weird, it's weird.......Another one succumbed to the age-old Belgian disease of not wanting to talk to anyone about your problems.

Still, to make this piece of writing more into a proper In Memoriam, I must say he was actually a really really kind man who always wanted to be helpful, in his own way. He was genuinly nice.
I always feel it is important to appreciate the person you are renting from (i.e. giving hard-earned cash to someone else because some paper says it is his property), and both of us did, at some level.

Of course he was quirky, sure, he may have lived in a Mongolian tent he had built on his terrace, but at least there he could say:

“Come in, come in! There are no worries here.”
“Err... OK, but our boiler is broken, could you get your plumber to come by and...”
“Shhhh.... sit down.... no worries... everything will be alright. Here, there is nothing to worry about..

Wouldn’t we all want a tent like that?