46 pages • 1 hour read
John FanteAsk The Dust
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
The next day, Arturo sits at his typewriter, reimagining the scene at the beach as if he and Camilla had actually had sex. He then goes to eat at a restaurant before heading to the Columbia Buffet. He gets too nervous to enter the bar and instead goes to the telegraph office. He writes out the message, “I love you Camilla I want to marry you Arturo Bandini” and pays the clerk to deliver it to the Columbia Buffet. Soon after, he sees the telegraph boy and tries to pay him to not deliver the telegram. The boy refuses, and Arturo follows him to the bar, so he can watch Camilla open the telegram. She laughs when she reads the message and hands it first to the bartenders and then to a nearby group of men, who all laugh afterreading it. After witnessing this scene, Arturo becomes sick to his stomach and goes to a dancehall, where he pays to dance with a blond woman.
The next day, Arturo decides that he wants to write Camilla a poem. He goes to church and asks to speak with the priest. In the priest’s office, he spies a copy of the magazine with “The Little Dog Laughed”and shows him his story; the priest replies that the story was blasphemous and “a piece of hogwash” (74). Arturo tries to talk to the priest about Camilla, but his pride is hurt by the comments about his story, and he decides to leave. He gets home and tries to write an article condemning the Catholic Church. Instead, he ends up plagiarizingErnest Dowson’s poem,“Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” but addressesit to Camilla instead of Cyanara. He sends her his version of the poem as a telegram. He watches her read and then rip up the telegram. After this, Arturo goes to a bar called the King Edward Cellar, where he pays to dance with a blond girl named Jean. After several drinks, he goes to another bar where he dances and drinks with two sisters named Evelyn and Vivian, who have come to Lose Angeles from Minnesota and ended up as prostitutes.
Chapter 11 Summary
Arturo waits for Camilla in the parking lot the next night and confronts her when she comes out of the Columbia Buffet with Sammy the bartender. He tells her that he wants to talk to her, but she replies that she is too busy to see him that night. Arturo refuses to get out of Camilla’s car unless she agrees to talk to him. She refuses and walks off with Sammy. Arturo returns to his room.
Back in his room, Arturo hears a knock at the door. He opens the door to find an “attractive and mature” woman who is well-dressed and has obviously been drinking (79). She walks over to his desk and takes out the page from his typewriter. After reading the contents, she tells him that “it’s no good” and he “can’t write at all” (80). She proceeds to recite several Edna St. Vincent Millay poems and then declares, “That’s literature! You don’t know anything about literature” (81). She then says, “You will love me tonight, you fool of a writer; yes, tonight you will love me” (81). She tells him that she has money and that they should go somewhere and drink. They head to Solomon’s Bar, where they order drinks and the woman tries to get him to kiss her. When he refuses, she claims that she must know about her “wounds” and is disgusted by her. Arturo begins to suspect that the woman is crazy and asks the bartender to show him a backway out of the restaurant, so he can escape.
He goes back to his room, but after awhile the woman comes to find him. She throws herself at him again and tells him that she is very lonely. He sympathizes with her loneliness and suggests that they sit and talk. She tells him that her name is Vera Rivken and that she is “a housekeeper for a rich Jewish family in Long Beach” who left her home in Pennsylvania after her husband cheated on her (85). Eventually, she tells Arturo that she has wounds on her body that she fears will disgust him. As she becomes increasingly hysterical, Arturo tries to comfort her by assuring her that she is still beautiful and is confused by her insistence that she is disfigured in some way. She begs him to tell her that she is “beautiful like other women” (87). When he does as she asks, she tells him that she will show him what she means and removes her clothes. He sees that she is severely disfigured by a burn or a birthmark at “the loins” (88). He assures her that he does not see her as unattractive because of the wound. As Vera prepares to leave, she tells Arturo to visit her in Long Beach. After she leaves, he begins to regret not sleeping with her. The next day, he begins to think that sex with Vera could give him the confidence he needs to make Camilla become interested in him. He resolves to go see her in Long Beach.
Chapter 12 Summary
When Arturo reaches Vera’s house in Long Beach, she is surprised to see him again so soon. She invites him in and gives him a glass of milk. He sees that she is wearing the same clothes as the first time they met, and he realizes that she must not have any others. Since she has not had time to put on makeup, he can see that she is significantly older than him. She coaxes him into lying down on the Murphy bed with her. After they lie down, she asks him if he is in love with someone else. He tells her that he is “in love with a girl in Los Angeles” who does not love him back (93). She tells him that she is lonely and asks him to pretend that she is Camilla. Arturo agrees, and they sleep together.
When Arturo wakes up, Vera is gone. Before leaving her house, he leaves two dollars on the table because he knows that she is poor. After leaving, Arturo begins to feel guilty about what he has done. Although he is no longer a practicing Catholic, he feels as if he has sinned against God and betrayed himself, Vera, and Camilla. As he is walking along the beach in Long Beach, feeling guilty and ashamed, an earthquake occurs. For a moment, he feels as if he has brought the wrath of God down upon the earth. He goes to Vera’s building to find out if she has survived. He overhears someone say that conditions are worse in Los Angles and that thousands are already dead. He immediately thinks of Camilla and worries that she has been killed. Soon after, he hears that the city of Long Beach is under martial law and that everyone is forbidden to leave. He spends the night in the streets listening to the lists of the dead on the radio and hoping not to hear Camilla’s name.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
These chapters follow Arturo’s brief encounters with Vera Rivken. In some ways, Vera is a comic, larger-than-life figure. In the first scene in which she appears, she bursts into Arturo’s room, insults his writing, recites poetry, and then commands him to love her before taking him out to a bar to drink more. Nonetheless, it soon becomes clear that Vera shares the loneliness, unhappiness, and desperation that seem to affect so many of the characters in the novel, from Arturo to even minor characters like Mrs. Hargraves and Mr. Hellfrick. Like Arturo and Camilla, moreover, Vera appears to inhabit a marginalized position in American society as she lives in poverty and ishinted to be Jewish. (Significantly, both “Mexicans and Jews” are not allowed in the Alta Loma Hotel by Mrs. Hargraves). Furthermore, like Arturo, Vera is seeking validation of her self-worth through sex; because of the wounds that disfigure her at the waist, she fears that no man can ever find her attractive.
Although Arturo is frightened by the older woman’s sexual aggressiveness and emotional instability, he realizes that she is offering him the chance to gain the sexual experience that he believes he needs to pursue Camilla and become a great writer. Unlike the prostitutes with whom he has tried to have sex, Arturo has true compassionfor Vera and empathizes with her loneliness. When he goes to Long Beach and sleeps with Vera, Arturo uses the experience to pretend as if he is having sex with Camilla, his true love. He tells Vera that her name is Camilla and that she is a “Mayan princess” who reigns over the unsettled “deserts and the mountains and the sea” (94). In this fantasy, he is his ideal version of himself:Arturo Bandini,“the greatest writer the world ever had” (94). He also describes himself as “a conqueror”: “I’m like Cortez, only I’m Italian” (94). This fantasy allows Arturo to use Vera as a substitute for Camilla to profess his love to her and have sex with her on his terms. Above all, this fantasy highlights Arturo’s longing to possess Camilla and his tendency to associate her with thepre-Columbian peoples and landscape and to align himself with the European conquerors who raped and pillaged those civilizations.
After having sex with Vera, Arturo is stricken with guilt. Although he tries to remind himself that he is no longer religious, he cannot escape the feeling that he has committed “a mortal sin” against God and against Vera herself (96). Not only has he had sex outside of marriage, he has slept with Vera even though he loves somebody else. When Long Beach is struck by an earthquake, he feels as if his misconduct has brought “the wrath of God” down upon the earth; he thinks to himself, “You did it, Arturo. Up in that room on that bed you did it” (98).
The Ernest Dowson poem, “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” that Arturo plagiarizes in his telegram to Camilla, in Chapter 10, captures many of the feelings that surround Arturo’s relationships with both Camilla and Vera. Dowson’s poem is addressed to a lost love, Cyanara; though the speaker has tried to forget his former lover by immersing himself in wine, music, and dance, he is haunted by the memory of her. In every verse, the speaker describes himself as “desolate and sick with an old passion,” and each stanza concludes with the line “I have been faithful to thee, Cyanara! in my fashion.” Although Arturo intends the plagiarized poem as a romantic gesture, the actual contents of the poem highlight the darker side of romantic passion. The hungry and obsessive quality of the speaker’s passion for Cyanara evokes a similar strain in Arturo’s feelings for Camilla, whom he worships as a princess but also longs to conquer and possess. Indeed, throughout Ask the Dust, romantic and sexual passion borders on sickness; Arturo’s love for Camilla, Vera’s desire for Arturo, and, later, Camilla’s infatuation with Sammy are all unrequited and unhealthy passions that result in further pain and misery for those in love. The poem can also be seen as anticipating what will happen between Arturo and Vera; Arturo could be described as faithful to Camilla “in his fashion” since he imagines that Vera is Camilla and uses the encounter to gain confidence to pursue Camilla.
