MichaelMorris

Dio cane: The View of God in

John Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini

Shortly before the publication of John Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini in 1938, the author wrote a letter to his mentor, H.L. Mencken, in which he speaks of the novel in terms that reveal the ambiguous feelings Fante seems to have had about many things:

I hope my book makes a lot of money so I can travel a bit and develop my ideas. I hope you read it -- I'll send you a copy -- and though I have not the temerity to suggest that you review it, I hope you will get behind it and tell other people to buy it. I you don't like the book, then by all means warn people against it. I have great faith in it. (Fante & Mencken 121-122)

Fante's characters show this duality. They are both holy and corrupt. Each, like all humans, has the potential for evil or charity. The god each serves may differ, but each god, being made by humans, has the quality of changeableness. For Fante's characters, God dies and is then refined into a better, more practical god emerges. As Jumbo is one among many, he is the best thus far.

John Fante's first published novel (he wrote two before the publication of Bandini) is an absorbing account of a young boy's struggle between passions. Arturo Bandini is torn constantly between his father, whose quest for the things of the flesh seems religious, and his mother, an earthbound saint. The Bandini family encounters a great deal of suffering, mostly self-inflected, during the painful Winter. But when Spring nears, they pick up the pieces of their broken lives and make the best of what they have, attempting to live happily ever after in a cycle not of life and death, but death and different life. Arturo's coming to terms with both mother and father is neither forgiving not grudging: he merely continues to live altering when necessary his view of his family, and along the way, his God.

The contrast between Arturo's parents are revealed in the first few pages of the novel, because of Fante's use of color imagery. Svevo says that the white Colorado snow "harassed him always" (12). Indeed, in the Winter, when the snow was at its worst, Svevo could not practice what brought him the most joy: his work as a bricklayer. "No sunshine, no work" he comments as he reflects that even as a boy in Italy, "he hated the snow too" (11). Apparently, even the color white makes Svevo uneasy: "The beautiful white snow was like the beautiful white wife of Svevo Bandini, so white, so fertile, lying in a white bed in a house up the street" (12). Maria's rosary is also white, "so white you could drop it in the snow and lose it forever" (13-14). Svevo hates it because of "the many times he had got into the warm bed beside Maria, and the tiny cold cross on her rosary touched his flesh on winter night like a tittering little cold serpent" (14).

The snow is perhaps a symbol of the cold purity that God inflicts upon the earth, freezing joy and desire to death, until Spring, when these things are renewed with vigor. Not only can Svevo not work during this time, but when he falls over Arturo's sled coming home the snow attacks his hands "like frantic ants" (15). Later, after Maria has clawed his face horribly, he reflects: "The snow! It chokes the world" (170).

Fante describes the parents' eyes' so that their dual natures are shown. Svevo's eyes "were brown, they were soft, they were a woman's eyes" (12). Svevo is both earthly and passionate. His attitude and philosophy is worldly and practical. He sees no need to go to church: "Why can't I go do down to the Imperial Poolhall? Isn't God down there, too?" (54).

Maria's eyes are black, revealing a dark, perhaps cruel, streak within her that allows her, for all her religion and peaceful ways to say to herself that she hates her husband (160) and later throw a pair of scissors at him when he comes to beg forgiveness (219). Another contrast to her religious aspect is that her eyes are "sickly bright from love" (13). She is pure sexually in that her only partner has been her husband, but her urge for him is almost overwhelming, perhaps one of the many reasons she becomes a "like a dead woman" (135) while Svevo is gone. As Iris Berry wrote in her 1938 review of Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Maria's heart "is equally divided between an unquestioning love of God and the Virgin and an infinite, animal passion for her husband and boys" (6).

Even the eyes of Sister Celia, Arturo's teacher, do not escape the notice of Arturo Bandini. For a reason that is not explained, she wears a glass eye. When readers first encounter the nun, her glass eye is "aching in its socket" and she is "in a dangerous mood" (46). In addition, "The left eyelid kept twitching, completely out of control" (46). Arturo, seems to be the only person to notice how transparent and unseeing she and the other nuns are. When Sister Celia refuses to allow him to be a pall-bearer at Rosa Pinelli's funeral, he responds:

Ah, Rosa! He could have carried her in his arms for a thousand miles, in his own two arms to a hundred graves and back again, and yet in the eyes of Sister Celia he was not strong enough. These nuns! They were so sweet and gentle -- and so stupid. They were all like Sister Celia: they saw from on good eye, and the other was blind and worthless. (250-1)

Sister Celia, who strangely enough is the Church's only figure of authority in the novel, is not useful because of her inability to see reality, and so through the young boy, Fante rejects the supposed instrument of God's love, the church: "In that hour he knew that he should hate no one, but he couldn't help it: he hated Sister Celia" (251).

Effie Hildegarde is perhaps a dark Madonna or angel of light in contrast to Maria. Svevo, upon first seeing her notes that she is a "fine-looking woman. Not like Maria, but still a fine looking woman. Dark hair, blue eyes, a woman who looked as though she had money" (174). She is a woman that Svevo cannot explain to his wife, though his initial thoughts about her are not directed toward adultery. "Could he tell Maria that the attractive woman felt a sudden pity for him?" (175). In fact, it is her praise of the work he takes such pride in and not her physical beauty, that makes Svevo so happy. "No passion lured him as she stooped to examine the new brick inside the fireplace, her sleek girdled bottom so rounded as she sank to her haunches" (178).

Svevo begins a kind of adoration of the Widow Hildegarde. He thought his work-dirty hands were unworthy to be washed in her sink (179). After an uncomfortable lunch, he begins to relax smoking a cigar while she puts up the dishes. Fante writes,

Even then his thought was clean, no vagabond sensuality clouding his mind. She was a rich woman and he was near her, seated in her kitchen; he was grateful for the proximity: for that and nothing more, as God was his judge. (181-2)

Hildegarde praises Svevo's work and offers him more. Here Svevo's pride gets the best of him and he begins to adore her even more. "Maria might sneer, but those words almost pinched a tear from his eyes" (182). When he first saw the Hildegard house, he is so stricken with how well it is built that he wishes "he might have had some hand in its construction" (174). She has caused him such great joy in offering him the chance to improve her property that "This, he vowed, would be one of the finest little bricklaying jobs in the state of Colorado" (188). As he works, he even sings "a song of spring: Come Back To Sorento (189).

However, she is only interested in Svevo's flesh. She lures him to her bedroom on the pretense of his professional opinion, "her hips weaving like a cluster of serpents" (197). When Svevo sees that she wants him to have sex with her and refuses, the Widow appeals to his baser nature and insults him: "`You fool!' he heard her say. `You ignorant peasant'" (198). Their love-making is vicious, savage: "He had torn her blouse away even as Maria had torn the flesh from his face" (198). Afterwards, he laughs "the triumph of his poverty and peasantry" and leaves her in "delicious torment" (199). Fante continues: "And when he left her sobbing in her fulfillment, he walked down the road with deep content that came from the conviction he was master of the earth" (199).

This conviction is, of course, false. Svevo claims that the Widow, not he, committed adultery (200). "He was her victim" he says. He will later get what he deserves from Maria, when she attacks him, leaving deep scratches in his the face he is proud of. But he will curse her for that and not consider it justice. He calls her "crazy" (163). He uses the snow to soothe his bleeding face, but does not acknowledge that it has helped him. [He will continue to hate Winter and the snow that comes with it. Suffering purifies, but Svevo cannot comprehend sanctification.

The characters of Fante's novel go through life not understanding how God works in their lives. In anger, Maria burns the money that Svevo has made working for the Widow Hildegarde. Arturo returns after seeing about his injured father and thinks (but does not say), "You could be holy and firm, but why must they all suffer? His mother had too much God in her" (165). The money, honestly made, could have helped the impoverished Bandini family, but Maria destroys it and the children endure another miserable Christmas.

In the first chapter Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Svevo curses God for his misfortune, though he at fault for coming home broke.

Dio cane. Dio cane. It means God is a dog, and Svevo Bandini was saying it to the snow. Why did Svevo lose ten dollars in a poker game at the Imperial Poolhall? He was such a poor man, and he had three children, and the macaroni was not paid, nor was the house in which the three children and the macaroni were kept. God is a dog. (13)

Svevo cannot bring himself to admit that he is the reason for most of his misery. He even says the house is "his enemy" and that it has a voice which has "heckled him and exasperated him with its idiotic independence" for fifteen years, saying "you do not own. . .and I will never belong to you" (15).

Ironically, Maria had thought of Svevo "pure as bread" (21), but he thinks that she would know different if she had at least finished high school. In his raving, Svevo even laments his wife's lack of education. "God was against him. Of them all, why had he fallen in love with this woman at his side, this woman without a high school diploma?" (21).

Iris Berry points out "It was the dog Jumbo who really brought Bandini back home, who exorcised the shadow of the sorceress-widow from the Bandini lives" (6). Jumbo is the next in a long line of dogs that Arturo has befriended that decided to keep. Fante writes of the group of dogs that Jumbo has been with prior to his acquisition by Arturo that they make "quick stops at every tree" (254), showing them to be quite earthy. Before he is named, the dog takes to the boy quite naturally, falling asleep in the crook of Arturo's arm and licking Arturo's face with "overwhelming affection" (254).

Jumbo is described as "brown and black, with huge white paws" (254). He is the colors of Arturo's parents eyes and the snow, and thus Fante synthesizes two pictures of God into one being. Like Maria, the dog disappears in the coal shed; like Svevo, Jumbo will soon follow Maria "around devotedly, with no regard for anyone else" (256). Arturo's "heart went out to the animal" (255).

Jumbo proved himself intelligent to Arturo by sitting up and going through the motions of a bloodhound. He shows the kind of wisdom only an omnipotent God could possess by using the stinking carcass of a rabbit to cause a rift between Svevo and Miss Hildegard, which ultimately leads to the family's reunion.