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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Arturo goes to a bar called the Columbia Buffet and spends his last nickel on a cup of coffee. The coffee is disgusting, and so he waves the waitress over to complain. She ignores his attempts to get his attention. Although he is critical of her appearance, it soon becomes clear that he is attracted to her. He notices that she is wearing “desperately ragged” huaraches, and, to annoy her, he begins to stare and sneer openly at her shoes. She becomes angry and embarrassed and finally comes over to his table. When he confronts her about the bad coffee, she laughs. He replies, “Maybe this isn’t coffee at all…Maybe it’s just water after they boiled your filthy shoes in it” (36). She tells him that she hopes that he “[dies] of heart failure right there in that chair” (37). Before he leaves, he spills his coffee all over the table so that the waitress will have to clean it up. After he goes back to his room, he lies awake all night thinking of the girl and “the way she danced from table to table, and the black glance of her eyes” (38).
The next morning, he goes to the Columbia Buffet with a copy of “The Little Dog Laughed.” In the magazine, he writes, “To a Mayan princess, from a worthless Gringo” (38). Since the bar is not yet open, he knocks on the door and asks the old man who answers to give the magazine to the girl who worked the night before. The man tells him that the girl’s name is Camilla Lopez. After giving the man the magazine, Arturo decides to take it back and write a new autograph; in the new inscription, he refers to her as “ragged shoes” and scolds her for insulting “the author of this story” (39). He asks her to “invest fifteen minutes of your time and treat yourself to a masterpiece” (39). After rewriting the autograph, he gives it back to the man for Camilla.
Chapter 5 Summary
Late that night, Arturo waits outside the Columbia Buffet and watches Camilla leave from work. The next morning, he writes a letter to his mother asking her to send him enough money to come home. As he is writing, Hellfrick enters the room to give him the fifteen cents that he owes him. After getting the money, Arturo tears up the letter to his mother and goes to the Columbia Buffet. As he enters, he sees Camilla and senses that she is glad to see him. He watches her move through the restaurant and feels his desire for her mounting. When she finally comes over to his table, she apologizes for the coffee and says that since it is a bar, everyone usually orders beer. When he says that he is too poor for beer, she offers to pay for a beer for him. She brings one over, but he tries to refuse it; when she leaves it on the table, he takes it and pours it into the spittoon. Camilla then goes into the back and gets the copy of “The Little Dog Laughed”that Arturo brought the day before and rips out all the pages. Arturo gets up to leave, but as he is leaving, Camilla runs out to apologize. She asks him to come back the next night. As she turns to go back to the bar, Arturo calls out to her and asks her if she has to always wear the huaraches: “Do you have to emphasize that you always were and always will be a filthy little Greaser?” (44). Camilla is horrified by his cruel and racist remark and runs back inside the bar.
Chapter 6 Summary
Arturo goes back to his room and thinks about his desire to fit in with other Americans. Because of his immigrant parents and Italian ancestry, he has always felt that he does not fully belong in American society. He knows that he lashed out at Camilla because of his own insecurities about his ethnicity and because of the racism he has faced as an Italian American over the years. He knows that when he called Camilla a “greaser” it was “the quivering of an old wound,” rather than words from his heart, and he feels ashamed of his cruel words (47).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The first encounters between Arturo and Camilla highlight the extent to which the novel is invested in exploring questions of race, ethnicity, and identity. From the beginning, it is clear that Arturo’s fascination with Camilla stems in part from her identity as a Mexican American. He uses highly racialized terms to describe her appearance; he characterizes her nose as “Mayan,” her skin as “dark,” and her lips as having “the thickness of negress’ lips” (34). He initially declares that “she was a racial type, and as such she was beautiful, but she was too strange for me” (34). By describing Camilla as exotic and “strange,” Arturo singles her out from the white American women around her. Throughout the novel, he both extols her as a “Mayan princess” and insults her by calling her a “filthy, little Greaser.”
It also becomes clear that Arturo’s fixation with Camilla’s race and ancestry is due to his own insecurities about his own identity. After using the racial slur “greaser” to refer to Camilla, Arturo returns to his room and acknowledges to himself that the real reason that he used such a horrible slur against her is because of his painful memories of being disparaged for his ethnicity growing up and struggling to fit in with other Americans. Growing up, he was always made to feel different and called derogatory names like “Wop and Dago and Greaser” (46). By behaving cruelly to Camilla and denigrating her for her race, Arturo makes himself feel better about his own status as an American.
Camilla’s huaraches become a symbol of her Mexican ancestry and racial difference in the novel. Huaraches are a type of sandal thought to have originated among indigenous peoples of Central and South America prior to the Spanish Conquest. The shoes therefore connect to Arturo’s tendency to imagine her as a “Mayan princess” and associate her with the southwestern landscape while aligning himself with white European conquerors like Cortez. Arturo sees Camilla’s tattered huaraches as a “defect” on her person that allows him to feel a sense of superiority over her, just as her Mexican origins help him to feel better about his own Americanness as the son of Italian immigrants.
