The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  And I, Bandini, was grief-stricken and crawling in the dust, myself so soon to die. So write a suicide note, Bandini, write a good one—a long one for Camilla. And it was done, a long suicide note written with a broken heart, the tears falling on the keys through the long night as he wrote, then fell asleep in his chair, then crawled to bed, too tired to commit suicide. And in the morning over coffee he read his suicide note, and oh boy was it sweet! Oh boy all he needed was a title, and he gave it one and mailed it off and in a few days there was a check and a note from the editor of the green magazine: “Dear Bandini—this is one of the most amusing pieces we have ever read. We are glad to have it and hope you’ll send us more like it. Our check is enclosed.”

  Bandini, great humorist, rushing down Angel’s Flight to bring his story to Camilla: look, it’s marvelous, very funny. A new side of my talent: I’m a humorist! And she read it and laughed, and then he died the death he forgot to die that night, for he hoped that she would see the tragedy, but no, even she thought it was funny.

  Dust in my mouth, dust in my soul, so away from the dusty ones to the green sea, off with a green-dressed girl to Long Beach to a little room in Long Beach overlooking the sea, and all night a bottle of gin and the green-dressed one, calling her Camilla by mistake, until she screamed; “Stop calling me Camilla! My name’s Doris—not Camilla.” Asleep with the green-dressed one, pretending it was Camilla, all that night and all next day by the green sea—two hundred for another story and I’ll get my Camilla in my own fashion, for I have had you Camilla in my fashion. All that day and in the evening a paralysis of death over the earth, a whispered silence of angry dust, and suddenly the room is reeling, the house is falling apart, the walls groan, the dust rises, the women everywhere scream and when we reach the street no bird is in flight, no twilight fills that March evening, only dust from the earthquake, and in the dust and ruins the dead everywhere, and I panic-stricken, the earth convulsing in hatred for my sins, because the earth hated me and all of us, the dead under bloody sheets on the lawns, the birds gone, and dust upon the world. Then hurrying back to Los Angeles, hoping she is dead, hoping Camilla is among those gone back to the dust.

  But a great man must forgive, and so the great man sat in his room and pondered the twisted soul of his love and condemned himself for her shame—she was not at fault any more than any nice American girl would be at fault for screaming her hatred at the vulgarity and grossness of lower Main Street. A letter of apology was necessary, to be written in well-chosen words and in pen and ink upon simple white paper and signed with the full flourish of a carefully practiced signature. No sooner said than done, a careful letter not admitting his great love and closing with “Cordially yours.”

  A few nights more and again the sounds of pebbles on my window pane, and she was below smiling, she had forgiven and forgotten, and to prove her generosity she slept with me while I tossed and shuddered at this desire without passion.

  Then the days that brought Camilla’s change, the wasting away of her flesh, the cloudy eyes, the lassitude, the lies, lies, lies. A night when she appeared with a blackened eye: an automobile accident, she said. Then Sammy got tuberculosis and had to go to the desert, and she followed him out there and he drove her away, told her to get away from him, that he wanted to be alone and die alone in an adobe he built at the edge of the desert.

  Sammy, my enemy, and he too became a writer and she brought his flimsy stupid stories to me, “because you’re smart, Arturo, you can help Sammy become a writer.” And I read them and I laughed at the fun I’d have tearing them to pieces, and I did it: three stories he sent me and sentence for sentence I tore them to pieces, told him he had best stick to bartending, but a great man must be friend of man and beast alike, so I tore up the letters and wrote them over, doing my best, giving him what I thought sound advice, and he began to write me from the desert, that stupid Sammy, but he was a good man at heart, a trifle cold-blooded, always referring to Camilla as “the little Spick,” advising me she was a sweet lay and that she was mine if I handled it right. “Treat her rough, Bandini, treat her like she was dirt under your feet, like the dust on the road, kick her around and she’ll wrap herself around your cock and die there.” And this was the man Camilla loved—this was my competition.

  So why not? I tried Sammy’s advice. She came one night and Bandini was waiting. “Hello, you little moron, from what alley have you come this time?” Her eyes widened, her lips smiled and she was strangely quiet as Bandini carried on: I’m busy here; if you’ve come to waste my time, get out. And it worked! Then I knew she didn’t want to be treated as a queen, as a true love, as a Cabell dream of fair woman. She was used to harshness and afraid of admiration. And it made me sick, it nauseated me, and I threw her out, took her by the arm to the door and told her to go away and never come back. She walked away delirious with desire, ready to fall in the dust at my feet. God what a pitiful Bandini that night, his queen preferring to be a slave.

  Then the night we smoked marijuana. Down feet, stay down my feet, but they rose and I was a foot off the floor, two feet, and I couldn’t come down, and she was so absurd, her body so fantastic, her beauty something to laugh about—and that was the night there was passion without desire and a seduction from Baudelaire and DeQuincey. But it ended everything for us, she went away and I lay on the bed and my body would not come down but as the effect wore off my head ached vaguely and I felt something I had not felt since childhood, that need for confession, for retribution, for punishment, because I had spoiled a dream and broken a law of God and man. Still my feet would not come down, still that feeling of being off the earth, longing to return, and I reached for a water pitcher, broke it on the floor and walked in the broken glass until the ecstasy of retribution was sharpened to faintness and I thought to stop ere I collapse. That was the night I limped to a little Catholic church in the Mexican quarter and spent long hours sitting in the quiet, trying to reorganize my life, making plans and vows to be a better man. Always to be a better man, that was the idea with Arturo Bandini, to be the great man, up from the dust on the road, lover of man and beast alike. To go and sin no more.

  The days went by and I worked hard, and as it always happened with me, when I worked hard there was success. No more Camilla, I stayed away and she did not come back to throw pebbles against my window. Three months passed and luck and work combined to suddenly change matters and a play I’d written was bought by the movies and I’d got almost $10,000.

  So the great man gets himself tailored and perfumed and in a fancy chariot goes back to the scenes of his early struggles, to chat good-naturedly with Benny the Gouge and slip him five dollars for his kids. “Regards to your wife, Benny. Tell her I remember her well.” Over to see Marcus, insisting I owe him ten, he insisting I don’t, forcing him to take it, admonishing him for his bad memory, glad to pay ten dollars for such a triumph, an honest man, a great man, squaring up old accounts.

  Then the last stop. But she is not there, another girl is in her place and the world is suddenly lonely and the success of Bandini is hollow and incomplete. But she must know. If SHE does not know, then it has not happened. But everyone is taciturn and nobody knows what has happened to her. A bribe to the new waitress and I got her address. I go there, meet her mother—a woman like my mother, sweet woman with a broken heart living in a shanty in the Mexican quarter, tragic-faced woman telling me Camilla had been taken to Patton, the asylum. We weep about it and I go away and out to Patton, but they won’t let me see her. A month later she was released and I saw a ghost girl, terror in her eyes and loneliness hurting her. She wanted one thing from me—would I buy her a dog? So it was done. We called him Pancho, and she was happy with him and nothing more, sleeping with him, talking with him, ghost girl whose ghostliness was like a disease and with the passing of days Pancho too became a ghost, a strange dog with a hungry lonely look like his mistress’s. Always she cried, we sat under a eucalyptus tree in her backyard and unaccountably the tears wou
ld start, Pancho would howl and his eyes too would smart, and I knew she was still in love with Sammy. Then one day a letter came from him in the desert, he wanted me to come out and get her and her goddamn dog, she hung around his adobe like a beggar asking for crumbs of love, he couldn’t stand her, and would I come out and get her. I drove a hundred miles out there. She was gone. Her battered yellow Ford, the tires flat, was parked off the dusty road in a grove of Joshua trees. Where was she? Sammy didn’t know. He had ordered her away, thrown stones at the dog, he was sick of her and didn’t give a goddamn. And so it is, nobody knows. Her car is still out there, the tires stripped from it, everything movable stolen from it. She is gone, swallowed up by the desert. Maybe someone picked her up and took her to Mexico. Maybe she got back to Los Angeles and died in a dusty room. All I know is that she is gone, the dog is gone, and there is nothing left but her story which I want to tell.

  Bus Ride

  HE SAT IN THE REAR of the bus, did Julio Sal. Always back there for the Pinoy. A couple of Mexicans back there with him. A Mexican and his wife and child, Mamacita changing the baby’s diaper. The bus was loaded now. Julio Sal had a full seat to himself.

  Goodbye, Los Angeles! All aboard for the mighty San Joaquin. Bakersfield. Merced. Turlock. Modesto. Lodi. Stockton. Sacramento. A bit of Julio Sal in all those towns, fragments of his life, grains of his years, oozing from his pores in the days that were dusty, in the days that were rainy, in the cold and heat. The stoop-worker: tons of tomatoes, asparagus, onions, lettuce, melons, rice, carrots. This was his country. This earth had covered him, fed him, hurt him, sheltered him.

  Aye, he knew it better than his beloved Luzon, his sperm fruitless in a hundred rumpled beds, up and down the fabulous hot valley, the soil so rich a broomstick blossomed, where the cattle were fat and bright-eyed, where the cherries were as big as walnuts, walnuts as big as plums, plums as big as pears, pears as big as melons, melons as big as Filipinos. Where everything grew except the sperm of the Pinoy.

  The Danceland in Sacramento. The Linda Ballroom in Stockton. The Teapot in Bakersfield. Manuel’s Place in Lodi. Steve and Mary’s in Modesto.

  Peggy, Martha, Connie, Alice, Babe, Opal, Jenny, Jean, Virginia, Oklahoma Mary—what’s in a name? But la! The fragrance of their arms, the fruit of their loins, the greedy little dreams in their eyes when the crop was done and the perfumed Island Boy came bounding up the stairs, his pockets jingling with stoop-money.

  Julio dozed. The Mexican baby wailed. The driver turned off the interior lights and the bus rumbled through the night toward Hollywood and Cahuenga Pass. Up front two American girls chatted with the driver. Julio listened vaguely. They were undergraduates of the College of the Pacific. Their voices floated a thousand miles down the length of the bus. Incomprehensible, something about Delta Gamma and Tri Delt. About Professor so-and-so in Zoology, what a darling he was, not caring if they cut classes…and the weary mind of Julio Sal conjured up a pruning knife hacking away at he knew not what. Sleep captured Julio Sal. He awakened when the bus pulled into the San Fernando Station. He watched the Mexican family get off. Without the baby’s sobbing the cavernous bus seemed empty. Three new passengers boarded the bus. A man and woman stumbled down the aisle and took the seat vacated by the Mexicans. Sticky-eyed, his hat tilted over his forehead, Julio Sal watched them. He could not see their faces. The man sat next to the window. He made a nest with his arm. The woman snuggled into it, quiet and content.

  Behind them came the third passenger, a girl. She looked about for a seat. Julio Sal glanced at the empty section of his own chair, then at the girl. Thought Julio Sal: high class. Now she was making her way down the aisle, carrying a small overnight bag. She wore a camel’s hair topcoat and a white tam-o’-shanter. She saw the empty place beside Julio. Quickly she groped her way toward it. The bus jerked forward and the girl caught herself on an overhead strap. She was about to throw herself into the seat when she saw Julio Sal.

  “Oh.”

  She did not sit down.

  “It’s okay,” said Julio. “Sit.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Her smile was full of gratitude, but she did not sit down. Instead, she clung to the overhanging strap and placed her overnight bag beside Julio on the seat. Julio looked at the bag, at the girl. Again she smiled.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Is okay for you to sit too,” he said.

  In front of Julio sat a young man in a yellow leather jacket. He had neat blonde hair, neatly parted. He turned to look up at the girl, then he swung around and glared at Julio Sal, who pushed himself closer to the window to make way for her. A most polite girl.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’d rather stand.”

  It was not a new experience. In his time, Julio Sal had frightened countless American girls on streetcars and buses and at store counters. He had seen them standing beside him and quaking on San Francisco cable-cars, and he had seen them shudder and wince on San Jose buses. He had scared them out of their wits in San Diego, and he had made them clammy with fear in Long Beach.

  Bravely the girl stood in the aisle, her lithe body racked in anguish to the overhanging strap, her lips uncomplaining, the tassel of her tam-o’-shanter bouncing with the movement of the bus. Again the blonde young man swung around to glower accusingly at Julio Sal. But Julio Sal was very tired, his eyelids fluttering, fumes of cigarette smoke and champagne mumbling in his body.

  Once in the state of Washington. One time, one summer up there in Washington, a beautiful girl had once shared a bus seat with Julio Sal all the way from Seattle to the apple country around Yakima. A priceless memory. True, the citizens of Yakima later ran Julio Sal and fifty other Filipino apple-pickers out of town. But that had nothing to do with the sweet girl who had shared the seat with him, shared it in rich, beautiful silence. A golden memory. He slept.

  When he awakened, the bus was forty miles from Bakersfield on the Grapevine over the somber fog-drenched Tehachapi Mountains. His sticky eyes sought the tam-o’-shanter girl. She was no longer in the aisle. Instead, the blonde young man in the leather jacket stood there, clinging gallantly to the strap. With fierce stamina he looked down at Julio Sal, then disdainfully at the empty seat beside him. The girl had taken the young man’s place in front of Julio Sal. She turned to smile gratefully at the young man. It seemed to give him renewed strength. His body tightened. His eyes shone with determination. He was her hero.

  The bus came to a stop before a combined café and filling station, and the driver announced a five-minute stopover. Outside the cold fog half-smothered the lights of the café, The groggy passengers rose and staggered down the aisle and out the door.

  Julio Sal’s dry mouth said: water.

  He followed the others, stepping down upon a graveled path beside the gasoline pumps. Bending over, he drank water from a short length of rubber hose. From inside the café came juke-box music and the voice of Bing Crosby. It was Julio’s first clear view of his fellow-travelers. The tam-o’-shanter girl and the proud young man sat at the counter, talking shyly as they drank hot coffee that steamed up before their faces. The college girl’s mouth was wide with laughter at something the bus driver was saying. The others sat around the counter sipping hot coffee, blowing into their cups with tired breaths.

  Then he saw the other Pinoy.

  Yes—another Filipino was among the passengers. He sat in the only booth in the café. The person with him was an American girl. The girl was holding a fragment of doughnut to the Filipino’s mouth. He snatched it with glistening teeth. The girl laughed and kissed his lips quickly.

  Julio Sal frowned. Trouble ahead for that Pinoy. Nobody knew it better than Julio Sal. Shivering with the cold, he pulled the lapels of his topcoat tight around his neck and groped for a proverb: experience is a dear school but a rolling stone saves time. Once more he felt the knife of a dancer named Helen twisting within a wide expanse of his soul marked Los Angeles. The memory brought pain to his entire face. He turned from
the window and went back to the water hydrant. As he drank, Julio Sal made up his mind: he would foil the girl in the café he would warn his fellow Pinoy before it was too late.