Ask The Dust (16 page)

'Sammy's not here any more. He's gone.'

If she thought I was curious about his whereabouts, she was badly mistaken. I put my feet on the desk and lit a cigarette.

'How are all your other boy friends?' I said. It had bolted out of me. I was sorry at once. I softened it with a smile. The corners of her lips responded, but with an effort.

'I haven't any boy friends,' she said.

'Sure,' I said, touching it slightly with sarcasm. 'Sure, I understand. Forgive an incautious remark.'

She was silent for a while. I made a pretence at whistling. Then she spoke:

'Why are you so mean?' she said.

'Mean?' I said. 'My dear girl. I am equally fond of man and beast alike. There is not the slightest drop of enmity in my system. After all, you can't be mean and still be a great writer.'

Her eyes mocked me. 'Are you a great writer?'

'That's something you'll never know.'

She bit her lower lip, pinched it between two white sharp teeth, looking towards the window and the door like a trapped animal, then smiled again. 'That's why I came to see you.'

She fumbled with the big envelopes on her lap, and it excited me, her own fingers touching her lap, lying there and moving against her own flesh. There were two envelopes. She opened one of them. It was a manuscript of some sort. I took it from her hands. It was a short story by Samuel Wiggins, General Delivery, San Juan, California. It was called 'Coldwater Catling', and it began like this: 'Coldwater Catling wasn't looking for trouble but you never can tell about those Arizona rustlers. Pack your cannon high on the hip and lay low when you seen one of them babies. The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Catling. They don't like Texas Rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Catling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Catling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.'

That was the first paragraph. 'Hogwash,' I said. 'Please help him.'

He was going to die in a year, she said. He had left Los Angeles and gone to the edge of the Santa Ana desert. There he lived in a shack, writing feverishly.

All his life he had wanted to write. Now, with such little time remaining, his chance had come.

'What's in it for me?' I said. 'But he's dying.' 'Who isn't?'

I opened the second manuscript. It was the same sort of stuff. I shook my head.

'It stinks.'

'I know,' she said. 'But couldn't you do something to it? He'll give you half the money.'

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'I don't need money. I have an income of my own.'

She rose and stood before me, her hands on my shoulders. She lowered her face, her warm breath sweet in my nostrils, her eyes so large they reflected my head in them and I felt delirious and sick with desire. 'Would you do it for me?'

'For you?' I said. 'Well, for you - yes.'

She kissed me. Bandini, the stooge. Thick, warm kiss, for services about to be rendered. I pushed her away carefully. 'You don't have to kiss me. I'll do what I can.' But I had an idea or two of my own on the subject, and while she stood at the mirror and rouged her lips I looked at the address on the manuscripts. San Juan, California. 'I'll write him a letter about this stuff,' I said. She watched me through the mirror, paused with the lipstick in her hand. Her smile was mocking me. 'You don't have to do that,' she said. 'I could come back and pick them up and mail them myself.'

That was what she said, but you can't fool me, Camilla, because I can see your memories of that night at the beach written upon your scornful face, and do I hate you, oh God how I loathe you!

'Okay,' I said. 'I guess that would be best. You come back tomorrow night.'

She was sneering at me. Not her face, her lips, but from within her. 'What time shall I come?'

'What time are you through work?'

She turned around, snapped her purse shut, and looked at me. 'You know what time I'm through work,' she said.

I'll get you, Camilla. I'll get you yet.

'Come then,' I said.

She walked to the door, put her hands on the knob.

'Goodnight, Arturo.'

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'I'll walk up to the lobby with you.' 'Don't be silly,' she said.

The door closed. I stood in the middle of the room and listened to her footsteps on the stairs. I could feel the whiteness of my face, the awful humiliation, and I got mad and I reached my hair with my fingers and howled out of my throat as I pulled at my hair, loathing her, beating my fists together, lurching around the room with arms clasped against myself, struggling with the hideous memory of her, choking her out of my consciousness, gasping with hatred.

But there were ways and means, and that sick man out in the desert was going to get his too. I'll get you, Sammy. I'll cut you to pieces, I'll make you wish you were dead and buried a long time ago. The pen is mightier than the sword, Sammy boy, but the pen of Arturo Bandini is mightier still. Because my time has come, Sir. And now you get yours.

I sat down and read his stories. I made notes on every line and sentence and paragraph of it. The writing was pretty terrible, a first effort, clumsy stuff, vague, jerky, absurd. Hour after hour I sat there consuming cigarettes and laughing wildly at Sammy's efforts, gloating over them, rubbing my hands together gleefully. Oh boy, would I lay him low! I jumped up and strutted around the room, shadow-boxing: take that, Sammy boy, and that, and how do you like this left hook, and how do you like this right cross, zingo, bingo, bang, biff, blooey!

I turned around and saw the crease on the bed where Camilla had been seated, the sensuous contour where her thighs and hips had sunk beneath the softness of the blue chenille bedspread. Then I forgot Sammy, and wild with longing I threw myself upon my knees before the spot and kissed it reverently.

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'Camilla, I love you!'

And when I had worn the sensation to vaporous nothingness, I got up, disgusted with myself, black awful Arturo Bandini, black vile dog.

I sat down and grimly went to work on my letter of criticism to Sammy.

Dear Sammy,

That little whore was here tonight; you know, Sammy, the little Greaser dame with a wonderful figure and a mind for a moron. She presented me with certain alleged writings purportedly written by yourself. Furthermore she stated the man with the scythe is about to mow you under. Under ordinary circumstances I would call this a tragic situation. But having read the bile your manuscripts contain, let me speak for the world at large and say at once that your departure is everybody's good fortune. 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 wish I could honestly say that I hate to see you go. I wish too that, like myself, you could endow posterity with something like a monument to your days upon this earth. But since this is so obviously impossible, let me urge you to be without bitterness in your final days. Destiny has indeed been unkind to you. Like the rest of the world, I suppose you too are glad that in a short time all will be finished, and the ink spot you have splattered will never be examined from a larger view. I speak for all sensible, civilized men when I urge you to burn this mass of literary manure and thereafter stay away from pen

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and ink. If you have a typewriter, the same holds true; because even the typing in this manuscript is a disgrace. If, however, you persist in your pitiful desire to write, by all means send me the pap you compose. I found at least you are amusing. Not deliberately, of course.

There it was, finished, devastating. I folded the manuscripts, placed the note with them inside a big envelope, sealed it, addressed it to Samuel Wiggins, General Delivery, San Juan, California, stamped it, and shoved it into my back pocket. Then I went upstairs and out of the lobby to the mailbox on the corner. It was a little after three o'clock of an incomparable morning. The blue and white of stars and sky were like desert colours,
a
gentleness so stirring I had to pause and wonder that it could be so lovely. Not a blade of the dirty palms stirred. Not a sound was to be heard.

All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. 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.

I looked southward in the direction of the big stars, and I knew that in that direction lay the Santa Ana desert, that under the big stars in a shack lay a man like myself, who

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would probably be swallowed by the desert sooner than I, and in my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence towards which he was being hurled. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn't matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task. And Sammy was soon to die.

I stood at the mailbox, my head against it, and grieved for Sammy, and for myself, and for all the living and the dead. Forgive me, Sammy! Forgive a fool! I walked back to my room and spent three hours writing the best criticism of his work I could possibly write. I didn't say that this was wrong or that was wrong. I kept saying, in my opinion this would be better if, and so forth, and so forth. I got to sleep about six o'clock, but it was a grateful, happy sleep. How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, man and beast alike.

JOHN FANTE

I didn't see her again for a week. In the meantime I got a letter from Sammy, thanking me for the corrections. Sammy, her true love. He also sent some advice: how was I getting along with the Little Spick? She wasn't a bad dame, not bad at all when the lights were out, but the trouble with you, Mr Bandini, is that you don't know how to handle her. You're too nice to that girl. You don't understand Mexican women. They don't like to be treated like human beings. If you're nice to them, they walk all over you.

I worked on the book, pausing now and then to re-read his letter. I was reading it the night she came again. It was about midnight, and she walked in without knocking.

'Hello,' she said.

I said, 'Hello, Stupid.'

'Working?' she said.

'What does it look like?' I said.

'Mad?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'Just disgusted.'

'With me?'

'Naturally,' I said. 'Look at yourself.'

Under her jacket was the white smock. It was spotted, stained. One of her stockings was loose, wrinkled at the ankles. Her face seemed tired, some of the lip rouge having

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vanished. The coat she wore was dotted with lint and dust. She was perched on cheap high heels.

'You try so hard to be an American,' I said. 'Why do you do that? Take a look at yourself.'

She went to the mirror, studied herself gravely. 'I'm tired,' she said. 'We were busy tonight.'

'It's those shoes,' I said. 'You ought to wear what your feet were meant to wear -

huaraches. And all that paint on your face. You look awful — a cheap imitation of an American. You look frowsy. If I were a Mexican I'd knock your head off.

You're a disgrace to your people.'

'Who are you to talk like that?' she said. 'I'm just as much an American as you are. Why, you're not an American at all. Look at your skin. You're dark like Eyetalians. And your eyes, they're black.'

'Brown,' I said.

'They're not either. They're black. Look at your hair. Black.'

'Brown,' I said.

She took off her coat, threw herself on the bed and stuck a cigarette in her mouth. She began to rumble and search for a match. There was a pack beside me on the desk. She waited for me to hand them to her.

'You're not crippled,' I said. 'Get them yourself.'

She lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, her stare at the ceiling, smoke tumbling from her nostrils in quiet agitation. It was foggy outside. Far away came the sound of a police siren.

'Thinking of Sammy?' I said.

'Maybe.'

'You don't have to think of him here. You can always leave, you know.'

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She snubbed out the cigarette, twisted and gutted it and her words had the same effect. 'Jesus, you're nasty,' she said. 'You must be awfully unhappy.'

'You're crazy.'

She lay with her legs crossed. The tops of her rolled stockings and an inch or two of dark flesh showed where the white smock ended. Her hair spilled over the pillow like a bottle of overturned ink. She lay on her side, watching me out of the depth of the pillow. She smiled. She lifted her hand and wagged her finger at me.

'Come here, Arturo,' she said. It was a warm voice.

I waved my hand.

'No thanks. I'm comfortable.'

For five minutes she watched me stare through the window. I might have touched her, held her in my arms; yes, Arturo, it was only a matter of getting out of the chair and stretching out beside her, but there was the night at the beach and the sonnet on the floor and the telegram of love and I remembered them like nightmares filling the room.