Jil was a lively and bright child whose childhood was a happy one, until the age of eight. He remembers living in a huge house, a gift of his grandparents to his mother and father, and he remembers the large garden and his bedroom, full of toys. But one day, their father abandoned them, suddenly and for no apparent reason. For days afterward Jil cried, afraid of being alone, or that something would happen to his mother. Childhood ended then for him. It was many years later that his mother reminded him how, from the moment his father left, the happy and carefree child he had once been disappeared. Instead, he grew accustomed to wearing a mask that was never really Jil, never himself.
Laws in most countries are sometimes quite peculiar, and injustices occur that are unthinkable. Under Dutch law, divorced fathers had no obligation to continue comprehensive child support for their adopted children. For Janneke, on the other hand, they were all her children and she did not want to abandon them. This meant that she had to stretch her salary to raise four children, and it was not sufficient.
The family moved to an old house in Loosdrescht, a town near Amsterdam where they lived for a time. Jil remembers sharing a tiny bedroom with his brother. The council offered the house for very low rent because it had not been renovated. It was one hundred years old and it was falling apart. There was no running water in the bathroom and all the siblings had to take turns taking a shower outside under a hose. They lived near a forest, and their small yard looked like a farm, with chickens, goats, and rabbits. Jil liked the animals outside, except inside they were overrun with mice that scared him. To this day, the only animals he is scared of are mice.
The worst memory that Jil has of his childhood isn’t the house, because he connects it with the animals and all the games they played, but how hungry they all were. Having to live on an empty stomach drove them to do things sometimes that they would never have done otherwise. This is how Jil came to organize his siblings into a team so that they could be lookouts while the others would go about stealing food.
Two Accidents and A Lot of Rehab
During those years, Robert, Ann Marie and Jil all had different accidents, although luckily for them, theirs were not as serious. Two years in a row, Jil was injured. The first time was when he was 12. During a fight with his brother Robert, Jil chased him and put his fist through a glass door, trying to open it. At first he didn’t realize what had happened, but his hand had practically shattered, cutting tendons and nerves. On the way to the hospital he was barely conscious, and when he was wheeled to the operating room he was afraid that he would die. He remembers that he asked every nurse wearing green scrubs along the hospital hallways whether they thought he would survive. When they gently told him that yes, of course he would, he didn’t quite believe it.
But the worst part wasn’t going to the operating room. It was when the doctor who handled his case offered to call his father to explain what had happened. Jil was sitting on the stretcher, his legs dangling, his arm hurting so much that he could barely think. His mother had her hand on his thin shoulders.
“Your son has had an accident and is in the hospital,” Jil heard the doctor say.
Suddenly the possibility of seeing his father again was there, and Jil held his breath.
”Do you want to come see him? He is in serious condition,” the doctor told his father on the phone. He forgot about his pain for a moment and searched the doctor’s round face for a sign, waiting for him to nod, or smile, but he didn’t find it.
”I’m sorry, son, your father won’t come,” the doctor told him, finally. He saw how his mother covered her face with her hands and left the room. He understood that he and his family were utterly alone, and that they would have to make their own way in life. His father would never come back, and he had to let him go.
Many years later, after Mónica, his first daughter was born, Jil had the opportunity to meet his father. The first thing his father did was to try offer an excuse for having left them. He said that the reason had been an affair his mother had with another man, but somehow the knowledge of this event made no difference to Jil. He could only feel sorry for the aging man, who had not been able to overcome his pain in order to remain close to his children. This was a man who left everything and lived a life completely separate from Jil, a man who did not even try to stay in contact with him.
On the other hand, for Jil Van Eyle, his mother Janneke has always been an important figure. She has blue eyes and a ready smile on her face, and even though today she wears her hair a bright shade of red, Jil and his mother share a great physical resemblance to each other. In those days, she wore long dresses just like the ones women wore in the musical, Hair. In fact she still wears a similar dress, long, in a flowered pattern. She worked as a nurse, as she had before Jill’s father abandoned them. She had been a ballerina when she was younger, so she also gave ballet lessons when they moved to Loosdrescht. As time went on, he saw how hard his mother had to work to take care of them all, and how she never stopped fighting for all of them. An obsession took root inside him: the firm resolution that he would be strong and help his family to survive, doing whatever was needed of him and that someday he would be a good father, the best father.
The following months were very hard, because the rehab exercises to recover movement in his wrist were time consuming, strenuous, and painful. The therapist who worked with Jil, a dark, very patient young man, talked with him.
“The tendons in the wrist allow you to move your hand and your fingers, and if you don’t do the rehab the best you possibly can, you might end up losing strength. You won’t be able to wrestle with your friends! Remember, you need your hands for a lot of things…”
Jil didn’t want to be a fool and end up having no strength, so he did his rehab exercises without complaint. Even if tears came to his eyes or grimaced in pain, he kept doing practicing over and over, with a strength of will that amazed his therapist and his mother. Finally, he recovered 90% of movement in his hand.
And then, only two months after recovering completely, while playing with his brother on the rooftop of the old house, he fell backwards on the sidewalk. His back hit the pavement hard. It was a miracle he survived and nothing worse happened. This time, the doctors didn’t try to contact his father. Jil had to go through many painful trials in rehab again, and once more, with sheer will power, he overcame them all.
Jil, the Great Gatsby
When he turned fourteen, he began to work washing cars. Later, he worked until he was 19-years-old delivering newspapers from house to house, when the temperature outside often plummeted below 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, the job that insured his future turned out to be when he was a gardener for a wealthy attorney. He learned what luxury was. While he was mowing the lawn outside, with his family going hungry, he would glimpse through the windows the vast carpeted salons and Chinese porcelain vases. In the garage, a red Porsche was always parked in which, once in a while, the lawyer gave him a ride. Feeling the wind on his face through the car window and the way girls admired him, these times were the happiest that Jil had known in a long time. The house also had a pool in the back that simply fascinated him. Jil had a very clear idea of how he would get ahead, and emulating Jay, the Great Gatsby, he wrote in a little notebook a list of everything he would need to become rich while still young. When the lawyer went away on vacation, Jil began to hold parties by the pool as if the house was his— and that’s where Jil kissed a girl for the first time.
But overall, even though Holland had been a prosperous and rich country for a long time, Jil could not follow the kind of straight-forward path of other Dutch children, in which their parents accompany them and in some cases, push them to be successful. In his case, because of the accidents, poverty, and work, he was always behind in his studies and in sports. Nevertheless, when the time came to go to college, he managed to enroll in Economics and Business Administration, and took night courses at the University.
During