The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  From the alley came the clatter and belch of an engine. Only one car in Sacramento made such a noise, his son Tony’s.

  Two years younger than Nick, Tony had a temperament to match his red hair. He too was a bricklayer, having served an apprenticeship under his father. They were in business together, a stormy partnership in which even the smallest matters were never settled. Unlike Nick or Vito, Tony stood toe to toe with Papa in arguments that frequently ended with fists flying. In spite of his seventy years, Papa still held his ground against a son half his age, but not without a club or a trowel with which to defend himself.

  Tony had married at seventeen and soon divorced. It set a pattern in his life. He was now with his fourth wife, a man of intense jealousies, insecure with his women. He worked very hard, never satisfied to get a job done in any fashion. He was always in need of money, for his was a hopeless integrity in a trade where speed and trickery were the measures of success.

  Tony and his latest wife lived in a nearby hotel, for Tony always contrived to be as near his mother’s cooking as possible. His craving for the Italian food upon which he had been raised brought him back home for at least one meal a day, but Mama Andrilli never knew when he was coming, and it infuriated him when she asked.

  As Tony opened the kitchen door Mama rose with a cry so piteous that he stopped in his tracks. She lurched toward him, her hair loosed from its braids, her face thickened by weeping. With fierce strength she clung to him, her hands around his neck, her tortured mouth crushing kisses to his throat and now on his hands as he fought her off and tried to learn the reason for her hysteria. Shouting and struggling across the waxed linoleum floor, it took all his strength to break the locked hands behind his neck.

  “What’s happened?” he yelled. Then he sniffed the burnt peppers and saw the room still clouded with smoke. “For God’s sake, what’s going on around here?”

  Suddenly Mama was calm, limp in his arms, and he dragged her back to the chair. He blew into her face and fanned her with wild hands. Her eyes were closed, her chin resting on her breast.

  “Mama,” he begged. “Oh, Mama. Please.”

  She opened her eyes and began to cry again and Papa staggered from the living room. With bloodshot eyes he leaned in the doorway, the wine bottle almost empty in his limp hand.

  “So that’s how it is,” Tony concluded. Quickly he was across the room, his fists in Papa’s collar, shaking him. “What’d you do to my mother?” he demanded. “You drunkard, you dirty old man.”

  That hurt Papa. He covered his eyes and wept softly. Tony let him go. Mystified, he looked from one parent to the other. The confusion was more than he could cope with. He seized his thumb with his teeth and pounded his own head with heavy blows, now his jaw, now his temple, staggering clouts that left one side of his face crimson. Then he calmed down and dropped to his knees before Mama Andrilli. He touched her gently.

  “Tell me, Mama. What happened?”

  She sat back, panting, unable to speak.

  “It’s Nick,” Papa intervened. “Your own brother.”

  “Is he sick?”

  Mama flung herself upon the table and began to cry again. Papa’s lips quivered, but he could not say more. Tony waited until Mama got control of herself. She crossed her arms over her bosom, one hand on each shoulder, and spoke with careful deliberation, her eyes toward heaven.

  “Last night I had a dream,” she began. “There was my Nick, in his coffin, with his typewriter…”

  Tony leaped to his feet, bit his thumb, and started slugging himself again.

  “Dreams!” he yelled. “Always dreams. What do I care about your dreams? I want to know what happened. Is Nick alright? Is he alive, or dead, or in jail, or what?”

  But Mama kept talking with the same somber deliberation. “And then the telegram came.”

  “Telegram? What telegram?”

  They looked around. The telegram was not in sight. Tony got down on his knees and peered under the stove. One of the cats was playing with the wadded telegram. Tony swept the animal aside and picked up the crushed yellow ball.

  “Why,” he said, “it ain’t even open yet.”

  “Don’t open it, Tony,” Mama begged. “Oh, God in heaven, don’t read it!”

  Tony tore the envelope apart and read the message aloud. He read it with consternation, fury and horror.

  It said: Arriving tomorrow. Fix ravioli. Love and kisses. Nick.

  For a moment there was silence. Then from Mama there came a long, penetrating wail. She threw back her arms and head and let it pour from her throat. Even the cats responded, their backs arching.

  “Thank God, “Mama cried. “Oh thank Our Blessed Lord for this miracle from heaven.”

  Papa sighed and smiled gratefully, but Tony’s disgust was inarticulate. Exhausted, he threw himself into a chair and methodically pulled at his red hair. Mama’s face was bright with elation, yet still puffed from so much weeping. Seeing her like that, Tony turned his eyes away with an expression of wrenching nausea.

  “Fix me something to eat,” he said.

  Papa Andrilli drained the wine decanter and studied the telegram, his eyes squinting from the bright sunlight. The blood moved up his cheeks and nose as his anger flowed steadily.

  “He’s crazy,” he said, crushing the telegram. “He never did have any brains.”

  “What’s wrong with you now?” Tony asked.

  “Him,” Papa said, shaking the telegram. “Writing books, writing telegrams, scaring people to death. Who does he think he is, sending telegrams?”

  “Why not?”

  Papa went to the window and looked out at the fig tree with the young fruit no larger than marbles. The wine had reached him fast in the heat of the day. He shook his head in confusion.

  “What’s going on in the world?” he asked the fig tree. “Telegrams, and war, and hamburger eighty cents a pound. When I was a boy I worked for one lira a week. I never got any telegrams in those days. I never sent any either. One lira week, I made.”

  “Last time it was one lira a day,” Tony said.

  “Let’s have a glass of wine,” Papa said.

  He opened the trap door near the stove and the cool musty air came from the cellar. He went down the steps and Tony listened to the wine gurgling from the spigot. In a moment Papa was back, the ruby red beads of wine gleaming in the sunlight.

  They drank in silence, father and son. Mama put a new batch of peppers in Cathy’s pot, and the aroma of garlic and rosemary and olive oil pervaded the kitchen. Papa got a round ball of goat’s cheese from the refrigerator and cut up thick chunks of sourdough bread. They sat and drank in silence, thinking about Nick.

  The Sins of the Mother

  DINNER WAS SERVED. Donna Martino, big and menacing, sat down at the head of the table. The chair squealed a protest. Rosa and Stella sat at her right, Bettina at her left. Papa Martino was down where he belonged, at the foot. A place was set for the other one but she was still upstairs. The sound of high heels clicking overhead made Bettina giggle.

  “Shaddup!” roared Donna Martino.

  Papa shivered. Lowering his head, he groped blindly for a glass of wine. He felt the black fury of his wife’s large dark eyes. For Papa knew the thoughts turning in Donna Martino’s mind—how she loathed his softness, scorned his gentleness, how she blamed him for conspiring with the one upstairs—that Carlotta, that traitor, that strangest daughter of them all.

  With jutting lips Donna kept her eyes on Papa Martino as she placed the roast before her. With clenched teeth she picked up the carving knife and the sharpener. With savage intensity she flayed the knife against the Carborundum until the sparks flew. Papa Martino put his thin delicate fingers against his throat.

  So, at long last it had happened. The ominous predictions of Donna Martino had come true, and the sins of a fanciful father had marked one of his offspring.

  The others, thank God in Heaven, had profited by their mother’s mistakes. They had not married a m
iserable tailor like Papa. Rosa was the wife of Dr. Faustino, one of Denver’s finest dentists. Stella’s husband owned four drugstores. And Bettina, the shrewdest of them all, was the wife of Harvey Crane, who the newspapers said would some day be governor of the state.

  The daughters were now gathered in a fateful homecoming. Donna Martino had ordered it, asking that they come without their husbands. If there had been any doubt that this family conclave concerned the one upstairs, Carlotta’s empty chair removed it. And they were glad—Rosa, Stella and Bettina—their eyes bright with flashing expectancy.

  That Carlotta! Since childhood she had waged quiet war against them, against Mama, an undeclared hostility toward their thinking, their friends, their ambitions. But they had been obedient children, bending to the mighty will of Donna Martino, achieving the goals she had set for them.

  “Remember my fate,” she had said a thousand times. “Remember, and marry well.”

  True, it had not been easy for Donna Martino. For in his way, Giovanni had tricked her. Had she known, she might have stayed in Sicily to live out her life in her native land. But thirty-five years ago Giovanni Martino had espoused Donna and come to America alone to make a home for himself and his prospective bride. Ah, that scoundrel! He had been handsome too, his teeth the color of a white moon, his thoughts as seductive as a dream.

  She did not see him again for five years. Five years—one letter a week, fifty-two letters a year from her betrothed in New York City. What pirate of a woman’s heart was this who wrote of his vast piles of money, the magnificent house he had prepared for her, the fabulous freedom and gaiety of America—he had put it all down in letters which she still read now and then to assuage her disillusioned heart and reassure herself of his shameless cunning.

  Well, she had finally come to America the year after the Armistice. She had arrived in humility, anxious to prostrate herself at the feet of her conquering Giovanni.

  Mama mia! What a rascal! She had found him living, but barely alive, in a boardinghouse on Mulberry Street. All of his wealth could have fitted into two suitcases. His tales of the merchant prince, his thousands in the bank—all pitiful whimsies of a lonely suitor whose coal-black hair had greyed in five years of toil in the needle trades, whose dim eyes longed for a girl symbolizing his Sicilian homeland where the soft blue sea came up to caress the lemon groves.

  Choking back her grief, she had married him anyhow. What else was there to do? He had developed an alarming cough, with fever every afternoon, and his heart was broken. Remembering hard the young Marco Polo of five years before, she had married a memory. He had saved a few hundred dollars and because the doctor had ordered him to a high place, they had come to Denver.

  That was nearly thirty years ago. Thirty years, four daughters and Giovanni. For in his way Papa Martino was more boy than man. The mountain air had quickly restored his health, but he never recovered from the devastation of those bad years in New York.

  He was a good tailor. His little shop was a few blocks from the old brick house he had managed to buy out of his earnings. Year after year he tailored clothing for his regular customers, his paesani. The shop had become a rendezvous for old-time Italians. Here they gathered to play chess and pinochle, to argue the flow of history.

  But for Donna Martino, Papa might have failed completely. She made periodic invasions of his tailor shop, driving out the venerable loafers, shrieking at them, swinging a broom as they scattered in all directions. She knew every detail of his business, every bolt of cloth and spool of thread. Sometimes, in order to make sure a job was done on schedule, she planted herself in a chair before Papa’s workbench, watching him with big threatening eyes, defying him to waste one moment of time. Si, si, without Donna Martino Papa’s business would have failed.

  But he was a noble lover, that Giovanni, tender and lonely, forever seeking his lost Sicilian groves and finding them full of bloom and blossom in the scented world of her embrace. And when they were together, the wit and cunning of his early times mocked her and made her the shy and beautiful creature he remembered in Mediterranean sunlight.

  Papa Martino was a stranger to his children. Baffled by fatherhood, he lived in a world remote from the problems of young people. He accepted fatherhood as the will of God. Beyond that, he had no active participation.

  Donna Martino had done it all—brought them into the world, had them baptized, nursed them through illness, sent them through school, given them spending money and advised them as best she could on the mysterious problems of childhood and youth. No, it was not easy for Donna Martino. America was not like a Sicilian village. Here the customs were different, the language new and stubborn. Papa was no help to her in the endless dilemmas of four daughters.

  The fact that three of his children were now married sometimes puzzled the old man. Closing his eyes, he tried hard to remember when they had grown to womanhood. The process had been so imperceptible he recalled no phases of it. Yet one by one they had come of age, taken husbands and moved to other houses. He knew nothing of his sons-in-law and cared less. It was specially at mealtimes around the big oak table that he noticed the absence of his daughters. And as each of them disappeared, Mama sat with a melancholy face, determined not to weep, but with uncontrollable tears washing her face. Then Papa realized another girl was gone. Stella first, then Rosa and Bettina, all within four years.

  Only Carlotta remained. If the old man had a favorite daughter, it was Carlotta. She was like Donna Martino thirty years ago, tall and brave and beautiful, with Mama’s implacable will. She had Donna Martino’s quick impatience with his lassitude but she controlled it better. Mama shrieked at him for drinking too much red wine, but Carlotta kissed him first and took the bottle away.

  Donna was heavy now and full of the rheumatism. She couldn’t walk the few blocks to Papa’s tailor shop and the paesani were in full control, with as many as three pinochle games going at one time. But Carlotta did the marketing now and visited the shop every day. She did not come like a thundering witch, brandishing a broom. She came with cheeks bright from walking, smiling at Giovanni’s cronies. She made jokes with Angelo. She inquired about the health of Pasquale’s wife. Better still, she took off her coat and helped Papa with his work. There wasn’t much she could do but Giovanni loved having her there, talking of a hundred things, talking mostly of his boyhood in Sicily. Before long the paesani were gone and he was hard at work again.

  The crisis in the Martino family had its beginnings three months ago in Giovanni’s tailor shop. Papa remembered the incident well because of the truck, a big diesel engine job, its motor roaring as it pulled up before the shop. Trucks of that size rarely appeared on the quiet little street and the excitement broke up the pinochle game. Giovanni and his friends hurried outside to examine the red monster.

  The serious young man who drove this juggernaut emerged from the cab like one freed from some physical ordeal, his breathing a series of sighs as he pulled off leather gloves and massaged his temples. He looked very tired as he began an inspection of the truck, walking slowly around it, now and then kicking one of the ten big tires. The paesani watched in silence. At that moment Carlotta arrived. She stood in the doorway of the shop and watched with uncertain curiosity. If something was wrong with the truck, the young man’s expression failed to show it. He suddenly broke off the inspection and started for the tailor shop. Then he saw Carlotta.

  “You the tailor?” he asked.

  “Hardly.” She smiled “But my father is.”

  Giovanni entered.

  “A gentleman to see you, Papa.”

  “Brancato’s my name,” the young man said. “Gino Brancato. I need a suit of clothes.”

  Papa rubbed his hands. “She’sa pleasure, Signor.”

  But Signor Brancato was a hard man to please. For an hour he fingered bolts of cloth and draped yardage over his leather jacket as he stood before the mirror. Nor was he at first the sort of customer Giovanni liked to serve, neither gossipy nor au
tobiographical.

  It took all that hour for Papa to squeeze from Brancato these simple facts: that he lived on the west side of Denver, that his mother was dead but his father lived with brothers in Philadelphia, that his parents were from the Abruzzi in the south of Italy. Young Brancato was a Denver boy but during the war he had fought in Italy.

  Giovanni wanted to know about Sicily. Had Signor Brancato ever visited his home town of Palermo?

  “I was stationed in Palermo three months. One of the prettiest towns in Europe.”

  Here was the key to the soul of Papa Martino. All at once this weary young trucker became friend. With quivering hands Papa led him to a chair and pushed him gently into it. Brancato glanced at Carlotta for help. She smiled sympathetically.

  Papa’s voice fluttered. There was a little farm, he said in Italian, five kilometers east of Palermo, on the Via Sardinia. The house was of pink stone, with a sloping roof of red tile. Had the young man ever seen it? Brancato frowned, watching Giovanni’s face.

  “I was there, sir,” Brancato said. “The house was on a hill, above the lemon grove. We used to stop there to buy figs and wine. Very good wine, Signor. Angelica and port.”

  For a moment it looked as though Giovanni were going to cry. He stared into the eyes of Gino Brancato worshipfully, holding back an impulse to throw his arms around the young man. Instead he took Gino’s hand and studied the big knuckles, the thick fingers. He opened the hand gently and smiled into the muscled palm. Then he closed it gently again, as he might a jewel box.

  From that moment Giovanni Martino wanted to possess Gino Brancato as a son. For Gino Brancato had drunk the wine of his own youth and savored the figs of that time.