Ask the Dust (The Saga of Arturo Bandini #3)

by John Fante

A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.

Wash your face, comb your hair, put some stuff on to make you smell good while you stare into the mirror looking for grey hairs; because you’re worried Arturo, you’re worried, and that brings grey hair.

The city spread out like a Christmas tree, red and green and blue. Hello, old houses, beautiful hamburgers singing in cheap cafes, Bing Crosby singing too. She’ll treat me gently. Not those girls of my childhood, those girls of my boyhood, those girls of my university days. They frightened me, they were diffident, they refused me; but not my princess, because she will understand. She, too, has been scorned.

Are the dead restored? The books say no, the night shouts yes.

I used to get so impatient with the slow crawl of time and boyhood, longing for this very moment, and here I am, and I have not changed nor have the Lola Lintons, but I fashioned myself rich and I am poor.

It left me lonely like a thirsty man holding a cup, and I walked toward the Mexican Quarter with a feeling of sickness without pain.

Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book!

And please, dear God, one more favor: make my mother happy. I don’t care about the Old Man; he’s got his wine and his health, but my mother worries so. Amen.

“My advice to all young writers is quite simple. I would caution them never to evade a new experience. I would urge them to live life in the raw, to grapple with it bravely, to attack it with naked fists.”

The thin bones of her face, the odor of sour wine from her mouth, the awful hypocrisy of her sweetness, the hunger for money in her eyes.

I shall smell lilacs in Connecticut, no doubt, before I die, and see the clean white small reticent churches of my youth, the pasture bars I broke to run away.

But you’re cleaner than me because you’ve got no mind to sell, just that poor flesh.

It was so sad down there in my stomach. There was much weeping, and little gloomy clouds of gas pinched my heart.

Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

If someone only loved me, even a bug, even a mouse, but that too belonged to the past; even Pedro had forsaken me now that the best I could offer him was orange peel.

I was so miserable that I deliberately sank my fingernails into the flesh of my arm until a spot of blood appeared. It gave me great satisfaction. I was God’s most miserable creature, forced even to torturing myself. Surely upon this earth no grief was greater than mine.

The night came slowly, first the cool odor of it, and then the darkness.

I walked deliberately, without stealth, like a man going to the lavatory down the hall.

It was a saloon where old men gathered, where the beer was cheap and smelled sour, where the past remained unaltered.

The world was full of uproariously amusing people.

Don’t come right away, Camilla; let me sit here awhile and accustom myself to this rare excitement; leave me alone while my mind travels the infinite loveliness of your splendid glory; just leave awhile to myself, to hunger and dream with eyes awake.

I was an American, and goddamn proud of it. This great city, these mighty pavements and proud buildings, they were the voice of my America. From sand and cactus we Americans had carved an empire.

They hurt me so much I could never become one of them, drove me to books, drove me within myself, drove me to run away from that Colorado town, and sometimes, Camilla, when I see their faces I feel the hurt all over again, the old ache there, and sometimes I am glad they are here, dying in the sun, uprooted, tricked by their heartlessness, the same faces, the same set, hard mouths, faces from my home town, fulfilling the emptiness of their lives under a blazing sun.

But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father’s father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

She was lonely, and so lost and still proud.

For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her.

She wore green all the time, her copper head too startling for beauty, her eyes too grey for her face.

How can you he such a wonderful man?

Standing at the mirror, I tilted my hat over on eye, and examined myself.

watched her at work, and the sight of her lifted me, a buoyancy like oil upon water.

So this was the end of Camilla, and this was the end of Arturo Bandini—but even then I was writing it all down, seeing it across a page in a typewriter, writing it out and coasting along the sharp sand, so sure I would never come out alive.

Something like a grey flower grew between us, a thought that took shape and spoke of the chasm that separated us. I didn’t know what it was.

Love wasn’t everything. Women weren’t everything. A writer had to conserve his energies.

Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring.

sat before my typewriter and the great awful void descended, and I beat my head with my fists, put a pillow under my aching buttocks and made little noises of agony. It was useless. I had to see her, and I didn’t care how I did it.

she had nervous black eyes. They were brilliant, the sort of eyes a woman gets from too much bourbon, very bright and glassy and extremely insolent.

What should I be but a prophet and a liar, Whose mother was a leprechuan, whose father was a friar? Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water, What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter? It was Millay,

writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget.

You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”

“I’m so lonely,” she said. She meant that. Something was wrong with her, twisted, gushing from her with those words, and I felt ashamed for being so harsh.

Something was wrong with her and it was not alcohol and I wanted to find out what it was.

And then I told her some more; oh, I was no angel; my soul had a few twists and bends all its own; so don’t you feel so lonely, lady; because you’ve got lots of company; you’ve got Arturo Bandini, and he’s got lots to tell you.

So don’t you cry, because you haven’t heard anything yet, because I’m awful, lady, and my heart is full of black ink;

Love on a budget, a heroine free and for nothing, all for the black heart of Arturo Bandini, to be remembered through a window swimming with trout and frog legs.

I could say something to you about a night on the beach with a brown princess, and her flesh without meaning, her kisses like dead flowers, odorless in the garden of my passion.

I went down to the end of the hall to the landing of the fire-escape, and there I let go, crying and unable to stop because God was such a dirty crook, such a contemptible skunk, that’s what he was for doing that thing to that woman. Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I’ll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster. If it wasn’t for you, this woman would not be so maimed, and neither would the world, and if it wasn’t for you I could have had Camilla Lopez down at the beach, but no! You have to play your tricks:

And where were those reveries, and where was my desire, and what had happened to my courage, and why did I sit and laugh so loudly at things not amusing?

It crept upon me—the restlessness, the loneliness.