Wait Until Spring Bandini (21 page)

‘Arturo!’ Bandini snapped.

‘You peasants!’ the Widow said. ‘You foreigners! You’re all alike, you and your dogs and all of you.’

Svevo crossed the lawn toward the Widow Hildegarde. His lips parted. His hands were folded before him.

‘Mrs Hildegarde,’ he said. ‘That’s my boy. You can’t talk to him like that. That boy’s an American. He is no foreigner.’
‘I’m talking to you too!’ the Widow said.

‘
Bruta animale!
’ he said. ‘
Puttana!
’

He spattered her face with spittle.

‘Animal that you are!’ he said. ‘
Animal!
’

He turned to Arturo.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’

The Widow stood motionless. Even Jumbo sensed her fury and slunk away, leaving his noisome booty before her on the lawn. At the gravel path where the pines opened to the road down the hill, Bandini stopped to look back. His face was purple. He raised his fist.

‘
Animal!
’ he said.

Arturo waited a few yards down the road. Together they descended the hard reddish trail. They said nothing, Bandini still panting from rage. Somewhere in the ravine Jumbo roamed, the thicket crackling as he plunged through. The clouds had banked at the peaks, and though the sun still shone, there was a touch of cold in the air.

‘What about your tools?’ Arturo said.

‘They’re not my tools. They’re Rocco’s. Let him finish the job. That’s what he wanted anyway.’

Out of the thicket rushed Jumbo. He held a dead bird in his mouth, a very dead bird, dead many days now.

‘That damn dog!’ Bandini said.

‘He’s a good dog, Papa. He’s part bird dog.’

Bandini looked at a patch of blue in the east.

‘Pretty soon we’ll have spring,’ he said.

‘We sure will!’

Even as he spoke something tiny and cold touched the back of his hand. He saw it melt, a small star-shaped snowflake …

Now that I am an old man I cannot look back upon
Wait
Until Spring, Bandini
without losing its trail in the past. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, a phrase or a paragraph or a character from that early work will mesmerize me and in a half dream I will entwine it in phrases and draw from it a kind of melodious memory of an old bedroom in Colorado, or my mother, or my father, or my brothers and sister. I cannot imagine that what I wrote so long ago will soothe me as does this half dream, and yet I cannot bring myself to look back, to open this first novel and read it again. I am fearful, I cannot bear being exposed by my own work. I am sure I shall never read this book again. But of this I am sure: all of the people of my writing life, all of my characters are to be found in this early work. Nothing of myself is there any more, only the memory of old bedrooms, and the sound of my mother’s slippers walking to the kitchen.

John Fante

Born in Denver on 8 April 1909, John Fante migrated to Los Angeles in his early twenties. He began writing in 1930 and had numerous short stories published in American magazines. Fante also wrote several collections of short stories and numerous screenplays, including
Full of Life
and
Walk on
the Wild Side
.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini
was his first published novel and appeared in 1938. It was followed in 1939 by
Ask the
Dust
, also produced as one of the Arturo Bandini cycle of novels. Though he made his living as a screenwriter, Fante was often out of place in a town built on celluloid dreams, and was not truly discovered as a great fiction writer until many years later.

Stricken with diabetes in the 1950s, Fante died in 1983 at the age of 74. He was posthumously recognised in 1987 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by PEN, Los Angeles. He is now regarded as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Dago Red
(later published as
The Wine of Youth: Selected
Stories of John Fante
)
Full of Life
The Brotherhood of the Grape
1933 Was a Bad Year
West of Rome
The Road to Los Angeles
Ask the Dust
Dreams From Bunker Hill

The Big Hunger: Stories 1932–1959
Selected Letters: 1932–1981

Also published by Canongate

The Bandini Quartet