A REVIEW OF RICO'S VLEUGELS
BY RASCHA PEPER

Rico's vleugels, a novel by Dutch writer Rascha Peper (1949-2013), was published by Veen in Amsterdam in 1993.

More than the money
by C. Caunter, March 2025

Rico’s vleugels (Rico’s wings) by Rascha Peper, a novel about the budding rapport between a boy of 14 and a man of about 60 from sharply contrasting backgrounds, was published in the Netherlands in 1993. This was the tail end of a period in which the country was at its least intolerant of boy-man-relationships, and a time when the law briefly allowed teenagers aged 12 and over to choose their own sexual partners provided no one filed a complaint. The narrative fits this background, as it refuses to impose a simplistic abuse lens on the events. In 2001, when the country’s flirtation with nuance was already a memory, the book was nonetheless still issued in a special series of novels assigned to high-school students – albeit with a cover photo of a muscular man standing in for slight 14-year-old Rico. This review does not reveal how the novel ends.

Catch of a lifetime

Eduard and Cecile Rochèl are an eccentric older Dutch couple: he a former ambassador, she an heiress of old money. Cecile has dedicated her life to collecting shells, and her husband became a fervent collector fifteen years ago after retiring suddenly. Together they have built up one of the world’s foremost shell collections. Living in the Philippines, they spare no expenses – hiring boats and divers – to secure not only the rarest shells but as many specimens of each as they can find. Cecile, however, is unhappy about the worsening security situation in Mindanao where they live. She also fears the Philippine government has designs on the collection and will eventually refuse them an export permit for it. Keeping the treasure safe has become a burden for the Rochèls, and they decide to donate it to a Dutch malacological (that is, mollusc-studying) institute that can care for it properly and securely. The director of the institute, Ernst Bol, is beside himself with joy at the prospect of securing the catch of a lifetime, but he has to tread on eggshells in dealing with the domineering, whimsical Cecile. Rather than shipping the shells directly to the institute in Amsterdam, she has them sent first to a villa specially rented by Bol on the Dutch North Sea coast. In this retreat in the dunes, the couple want to go through all of their shells one last time, both to improve the labelling and as a ritual leave-taking.

The villa is located near the small hometown of Rico Gabriele, an only son in a dysfunctional family. He’s a slender-hipped kid with gel-slicked black hair and a slight squint; cocky in the presence of his friends but on the whole reserved and distrustful of life. He dresses in black and lives for his Yamaha motorcycle, which he has illegally tuned up and which he’s also too young to be allowed to ride. The police have already taken down his details once and have threatened to impound the bike if they catch him on it again. His Venezuelan father, a bad-tempered drinker, lugs crates of cod at the fish auction, a humble job for which Rico despises him. His mother dabbles in prostitution. Seeing little prospect of ever obtaining a tolerable job himself, the boy stays away from school and engages in petty theft with his pals, a gaggle of maladjusted boys who deal and consume drugs.

A secret weakness

One day Rico comes across a car parked at the side of the road with the hood up, a man hunched over the engine. The man is clueless, but Rico has no trouble getting the engine going. The grateful motorist, who turns out to be institute director Dr Bol, considers that the kind-hearted boy might actually be a godsend. The Rochèls need an assistant at the villa to unpack and repack boxes of shells as they sift through their collection, and the institute employee who was going to assist them has been taken ill. Moreover, Cecile finds herself having to decamp in short order to France where her sister lies dying. In her fateful absence the boy spends a trial day at the villa and, meeting Eduard’s warm approval, is unofficially hired. Had Cecile been there, this would never have happened, because she is determined to keep her husband from relapsing into a secret weakness of his. Years ago, when they were living in Tunisia where Eduard was the Dutch ambassador, he had fallen head over heels for an underage boy. He had made mad plans for the both of them to run away from it all, but the boy’s family had nipped the adventure in the bud and extorted hush money from the Rochèls. Ever since, Cecile has gone to great lengths to avoid any unaccompanied contact between her husband and young males, while Eduard himself has sublimated his sexuality by going all in on shell collecting. As to the couple’s own relationship, they love each other as life partners with a shared passion, but Cecile hates the very thought of sex and Eduard has understood ever since a Mexican street urchin of 12 seduced him on a long-ago holiday why women have never aroused him much.

With Cecile far away, Eduard and his hire plug away at the cataloguing job. Rico proves a keen assistant, happy to be paid handsomely for such an easy task. While it’s obvious he’s from a disadvantaged background, Eduard has no inkling that the boy is toying with the idea of burgling the villa. Soon, however, Rico concludes there is nothing worth stealing short of the shells, which he wouldn’t know where to sell, and that robbing Rochèl would be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. For his part, the normally quiet, introverted Eduard comes to life in the presence of his young assistant. He regales him with a stream of adventurous and comical tales, not always truthful, of hazardous diving missions in quest of shells, some of whose occupants are liable to sting you to death. Within a matter of days, his delight in the boy’s company morphs seamlessly into an aching obsession.

Passion and danger

When Rico steps barefoot into a piece of glass and Eduard treats him on the spot a bit more lovingly than is strictly needed, the street-smart boy instantly gets where it’s at. Having experienced Eduard’s generosity, he ponders getting over his distaste for the old man’s wrinkled physique and selling limited sexual favours. His own sexuality is uncrystallised and his experience with girls very limited. His transactional scheme is soon complicated as, to his surprise, he finds there’s more to his enjoyment of working at the villa than the money. He has developed a measure of affection for the old man, who is the only person in the world who takes a genuine interest in him and who treats him like a king. He starts to entertain fantasies of escaping his bleak life by becoming Eduard’s permanent assistant and sailing the seas with him. Meanwhile, Dr Bol finds out from his brother-in-law, a diplomat, about the narrowly averted scandal in Tunisia and is horrified at having unwittingly supplied Eduard with an irresistible teenage helper. In France, Cecile decides that if her sister slips into a coma from which she won’t wake up – which looks like it can happen at any moment – she will fly back to oversee the cataloguing at the villa.

A rich, repressed man; a needy kid who spells passion and danger. The scene is quickly set to ensure that the reader is sucked into this tale of obsessive pursuits, proscribed desire and elusive happiness. Rascha Peper effectively portrays the gulf between the elite world in which the Rochèls move and the shabby milieu of Rico and his friends. The boy, his mates and their parents all speak a dialectal Dutch rife with flowery slang best avoided in polite society – although Rico’s way of talking delights Eduard. One wonders a bit to what extent the protagonists border on caricature: Cecile a hulking, “tapir-faced” woman who is stiflingly protective of her husband and likes to boss people around; Eduard the meek spouse who has resigned himself to his neutered life but proves defenceless when inadvertently left to his own devices with a boy; Rico the switchblade-carrying rebel without a cause torn between juvenile delinquency and his embattled better self. It is impressed on the reader that he is essentially not a bad kid and just needs that nudge in the right direction from someone who takes his interests to heart rather than seeing him as a little pest. On the other hand, don’t people in real life tend often enough to be recognisable to the point of caricature?

What teens make of it

Rico’s vleugels went through at least 14 print runs and was nominated for the AKO Literatuurprijs, one of the most prestigious Dutch literary awards. An audiobook and a large-print edition were produced. In 2007, the news broke that Dutch actor and director Jeroen Krabbé was working on a film adaptation, reportedly starring himself (though presumably not as Rico). The project was evidently shelved – a lost soldier indeed. The novel’s runaway success is all the more remarkable given that the author does not judge what is going on between Rico and Eduard. She makes it clear that complex factors are at play – involving both blatantly egoistic and more altruistic instincts on all sides – and suggests that the way such dynamics play out is influenced crucially by the attitudes and actions of third parties and wider society. In the light of this thoughtful treatment and the novel’s page-turner quality, one forgives minor credibility issues such as Dr Bol deciding to involve an unknown teenager with a priceless collection, the neat coincidences needed to bring Rico and Eduard together and the ease with which the latter falls for the boy after having steered clear of temptation, in the Philippines no less, for so many years. The subtlety with which Rascha Peper (the pen name of Jenneke Strijland, 1949-2013) treats the phenomenon of boy-man-relationships earns her a place among a lineage of woman authors of perceptive, nuanced novels on this theme. One reason for her interest in the theme may have been her self-reported fascination with the Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work is saturated with the allure of boys.

I close with some excerpts from reviews of Rico’s vleugels written by Dutch high-school students, translated from www.scholieren.com. “Peper describes Rochèl’s love for Rico with such nuance that you can empathise with it and it actually seems to be about a normal infatuation.” “Of course it’s about a subject that’s strongly taboo: paedophilia, because Rochèl is in love with a boy of fourteen. I think she’s done this very well. You empathise with all characters”. “When we got the 2001 Grote Lijsters [novels selected for high-school reading] from school and I had a quick look at the books, Rico’s vleugels spoke to me because of the synopsis. I was really curious about the passion Rico stirred in Eduard Rochèl. I began to read the book almost immediately and after a few chapters I already had a positive impression.” “It really spoke to me and made a strong impression on me. That’s because I was astounded by how such an ordinary young boy and a rich old man could develop such a great connection. I just hadn’t expected this, and the author describes it really well. […] At first I thought Rico would be sent home straightaway and I definitely hadn’t expected Eduard to fall in love with him. I just think that’s very moving.”