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

by John Fante

you under.

You can’t write, Sammy. I suggest you concentrate on the business of putting your idiotic soul in order these last days before you leave a world that sighs with relief at your departure.

I speak for all sensible, civilized men when I urge you to burn

this mass of literary manure and thereafter stay away from pen and ink.

All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.

she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those

calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle.

Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla,

wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.

I was serene: she would come back. It would be at night. I never thought of her as a thing to be considered by daylight. The many times I had seen her, none had been in the day. I expected her like I expected the moon.

got out of the car, grinning, because I knew that would hurt her. “Good night,” I said. “It’s a fine night. I don’t mind walking.” “I hope you never make it,” she said. “I hope they find you dead in the gutter in the morning.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. As she drove away a sob came from her throat, a cry of pain. One thing was certain: Arturo Bandini was not good for Camilla Lopez.

The good days, the fat days, page upon page of manuscript; prosperous days, something to say, the story of Vera Rivken, and the pages mounted and I was happy. Fabulous days, the rent paid, still fifty dollars in my wallet, nothing to do all day and night but write and think of writing:

the indomitable. Arturo Bandini, already deep into his first novel.

will go sit and look at her, Camilla Lopez. It was done. It was like old times, our eyes springing at one another. But she was changed, she was thinner, and her face was unhealthy,

“Well, I gotta go. Just dropped in to see how you were getting along.” “It was nice of you.” “Not at all. Why don’t you come and see me?” She smiled. “I might, some night.”

“Ah Camilla, you lost girl! Open your long fingers and give me back my tired soul! Kiss me with your mouth because I hunger for the bread of a Mexican hill. Breathe the fragrance of lost cities into fevered nostrils, and let me die here, my hand upon the

soft contour of your throat, so like the whiteness of some half-forgotten southern shore.

She came toward me, almost stalking, her arms out in an embrace that was yet a protection against my attack on the closet door. She opened her lips and kissed me with peculiar fervor, a passionate coldness, a voluptuous indifference. I didn’t like it. Some part of her was betraying some other part, but I could not find it.

“If you were only him,” she whispered. Suddenly she screamed, a piercing shriek that clawed the walls of the room. “Why can’t you be him! Oh Jesus Christ, why can’t you?” She began to beat me with her fists,

an outburst of madness against the

destiny that did not make me...

By dawn we were in a land of grey desolation, of cactus and sagebrush and Joshua trees, a desert where the sand was scarce and the whole vast plain was pimpled with tumbled rocks and scarred by stumpy little hills.

The road rose and fell to the rhythm of the listless hills. It was daylight when we came to a region of canyons and steep gulches, twenty miles in the interior of the Mojave Desert. There below us was where Sammy lived, and Camilla pointed to a squat adobe shack planted at the bottom of three sharp hills.

“Hello, Sammy.” “Oh,” he said. “I thought it was her.” “She’s here,” I said. “Tell her to screw outa’ here. I don’t want her around.”

“You can come in,” he said. “But not her.”

“Let her in, Sammy,” I said. “What the hell.” “Not that bitch,” he said.

His voice changed and became soft when he spoke. “Wrote another story last week,” he said. “Think I got a good one this time. Like you to see it.” “Sure,” I said. “But hell, Sammy. She’s a friend of mine.”

He opened the door and pushed his head out. “Hey, you!” I heard the girl sob, heard her try to compose herself. “Yes, Sammy.” “Don’t stand out there like a fool,” he said. “You coming in or ain’t you?”

She stood off by herself, a creature without spirit or will, her shoulder blades humped, her head drooping as though too heavy for her neck. “You,” Sammy said to her. “Go get some wood, you.”

In a while she came back, her arms loaded. She dumped the sticks into a box beside the stove, and without speaking she fed the flames, a stick at a time.

“You,” he said. “Make some coffee.”

The more Sammy talked, the more cordial and personal he became. He was interested in the financial side of writing more than in writing itself. How much did this magazine pay, and how much did that one pay, and he was convinced that only by favoritism were stories sold.

I knew that his kind of rationalizing was necessary in view of his sheer inability to write well.

Camilla cooked breakfast for us, and we ate from plates on our laps. The fare was fried corn meal and bacon and eggs.

begged to be excused. He led me outside to an arbor of palm branches. Now the air was

warm and the sun was high. I lay in the hammock and fell asleep, and the last thing I remember was the sight of Camilla bent over a wash tub filled with dark water and several pairs of underwear and overalls.

the wafting away from the earth, the joy and triumph of a man over space, the extraordinary sense of power. I laughed and inhaled again. She lay there, the cold languor of the night before upon her face, the cynical passion. But I was beyond the room, beyond the limits of my flesh, floating in a land of bright moons and blinking stars. I was invincible. I was not myself, I had never been that fellow with his grim happiness, his strange bravery.

five hundred dollars! I was one of the Morgans. I could retire for life. War in Europe, a speech by Hitler, trouble in Poland, these were the topics of the day. What piffle! You warmongers, you old folks in the lobby of the Alta Loma Hotel, here is the news, here: this little paper with all the fancy legal writing, my book! To hell with that Hitler, this is more important than Hitler, this is about my book.

you’ll remember it to the day you die, you’ll lie there breathing your last, and you’ll smile as you remember the book. The story of Vera Rivken, a slice out of life.

looked down at the city below me in the nebulous, dusty haze of the late afternoon. The heat rose out of the haze and my nostrils breathed it. Over the city spread a white murkiness like fog. But it was not the fog: it was the desert heat, the great blasts from the Mojave and Santa Ana, the pale white fingers of the wasteland, ever reaching out to claim its captured child.

This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigaret, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.

I looked at the faces around me, and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood

drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast. I had to get away from that town.

The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness

night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance.