by John Fante
He pretends to hate the Irish. He really doesn’t, but he likes to think so, and he warns us children against them. Our grocer’s name is O’Neil. Frequently and inadvertently he makes errors when my mother is at his store. She tells my father about short weights in meats, and now and then of a stale egg.
Straightway my father grows tense, his lower lip curling. “This is the last time that Irish bum robs me!” And he goes out, goes to the grocery-store, his heels booming.
Soon he returns. He’s smiling. His fists bulge with cigars. “From now on,” says he, “everything’s gonna be all right.”
I don’t like the grocer. My mother sends me to his store every day, and instantly he chokes up my breathing with the greeting: “Hello, you little Dago! What’ll you have?” So I detest him, and never enter his store if other customers are to be seen, for to be called a Dago before others is a ghastly, almost a physical, humiliation. My stomach expands and contracts, and I feel naked.
I steal recklessly when the grocer’s back is turned. I enjoy stealing from him—candy bars, cookies, fruit. When he goes into his refrigerator I lean on his meat scales, hoping to snap a spring; I press my toe into egg baskets. Sometimes I pilfer too much. Then, what a pleasure it is to stand on the curb, my appetite gorged, and heave his candy bars, his cookies, his apples into the high yellow weeds across the street!…“Damn you, O’Neil, you can’t call me a Dago and get away with it!”
His daughter is of my age. She’s cross-eyed. Twice a week she passes our house on her way to her music lesson. Above the street, and high in the branches of an elm tree, I watch her coming down the sidewalk, swinging her violin case. When she is under me, I jeer in sing-song:
Martha’s croooooss-eyed!
Martha’s croooooss-eyed!
Martha’s croooooss-eyed!
III
As I grow older, I find out that Italians use Wop and Dago much more than Americans. My grandmother, whose vocabulary of English is confined to the commonest of nouns, always employs them in discussing contemporary Italians. The words never come forth quietly, unobtrusively. No; they bolt forth. There is a blatant intonation, and then the sense of someone being scathed, stunned.
I enter the parochial school with an awful fear that I will be called Wop. As soon as I find out why people have such things as surnames, I match my own against such typically Italian cognomens as Bianchi, Borello, Pacelli—the names of other students. I am pleasantly relieved by the comparison. After all, I think, people will say I am French. Doesn’t my name sound French? Sure! So thereafter, when people ask me my nationality, I tell them I am French. A few boys begin calling me Frenchy. I like that. It feels fine.
Thus I begin to loathe my heritage. I avoid Italian boys and girls who try to be friendly. I thank God for my light skin and hair, and I choose my companions by the Anglo-Saxon ring of their names. If a boy’s name is Whitney, Brown, or Smythe, then he’s my pal; but I’m always a little breathless when I am with him; he may find me out. At the lunch hour I huddle over my lunch pail, for my mother doesn’t wrap my sandwiches in wax paper, and she makes them too large, and the lettuce leaves protrude. Worse, the bread is homemade; not bakery bread, not “American” bread. I make a great fuss because I can’t have mayonnaise and other “American” things.
The parish priest is a good friend of my father’s. He comes strolling through the school grounds, watching the children at play. He calls to me and asks about my father, and then he tells me I should be proud to be studying about my great countrymen, Columbus, Vespucci, John Cabot. He speaks in a loud, humorous voice. Students gather around us, listening, and I bite my lips and wish to Jesus he’d shut up and move on.
Occasionally now I hear about a fellow named Dante. But when I find out that he was an Italian I hate him as if he were alive and walking through the classrooms, pointing a finger at me. One day I find his picture in a dictionary. I look at it and tell myself that never have I seen an uglier bastard.
We students are at the blackboard one day, and a soft-eyed Italian girl whom I hate but who insists that I am her beau stands beside me. She twitches and shuffles about uneasily, half on tiptoe, smiling queerly at me. I sneer and turn my back, moving as far away from her as I can. The nun sees the wide space separating us and tells me to move nearer the girl. I do so, and the girl draws away, nearer the student on her other side.
Then I look down at my feet, and there I stand in a wet, spreading spot. I look quickly at the girl, and she hangs her head and looks at me in a way that begs me to take the blame for her. We attract the attention of others, and the classroom becomes alive with titters. Here comes the nun. I think I am in for it again, but she embraces me and murmurs that I should have raised two fingers and of course I would have been allowed to leave the room. But, says she, there’s no need for that now; the thing for me to do is go out and get the mop. I do so, and amid the hysteria I nurse my conviction that only a Wop girl, right out of a Wop home, would ever do such a thing as this.
Oh, you Wop! Oh, you Dago! You bother me even when I sleep. I dream of defending myself against tormentors. One day I learn from my mother that my father went to the Argentine in his youth, and lived in Buenos Aires for two years. My mother tells me of his experiences there, and all day I think about them, even to the time I go to sleep. That night I come awake with a jerk. In the darkness I grope my way to my mother’s room. My father sleeps at her side, and I awaken her gently, so that he won’t be aroused.
I whisper: “Are you sure Papa wasn’t born in Argentina?”
“No. Your father was born in Italy.”
I go back to bed, disconsolate and disgusted.
IV
During a ball game on the school grounds, a boy who plays on the opposing team begins to ridicule my playing. It is the ninth inning, and I ignore his taunts. We are losing the game, but if I can knock out a hit our chances of winning are pretty strong. I am determined to come through, and I face the pitcher confidently. The tormentor sees me at the plate.
“Ho! Ho!” he shouts. “Look who’s up! The Wop’s up. Let’s get rid of the Wop!”
This is the first time anyone at school has ever flung the word at me, and I am so angry that I strike out foolishly. We fight after the game, this boy and I, and I make him take it back.
Now school days become fighting days. Nearly every afternoon at 3:15 a crowd gathers to watch me make some guy take it back. This is fun; I am getting somewhere now, so come on, you guys, I dare you to call me a Wop! When at length there are no more boys who challenge me, insults come to me by hearsay, and I seek out the culprits. I strut down the corridors. The smaller boys admire me. “Here he comes!” they say, and they gaze and gaze, my two younger brothers attend the same school, and the smallest, a little squirt seven years old, brings his friends to me and asks me to roll up my sleeve and show them my muscles. Here you are, boys. Look me over.
My brother brings home furious accounts of my battles. My father listens avidly, and I stand by, to clear up any doubtful details. Sadly happy days! My father gives me pointers: how to hold my fist, how to guard my head. My mother, too shocked to hear more, presses her temples and squeezes her eyes and leaves the room.
I am nervous when I bring friends to my house; the place looks so Italian. Here hangs a picture of Victor Emmanuel, and over there is one of the cathedral of Milan, and next to it one of St. Peter’s, and on the buffet stands a wine pitcher of medieval design; it’s forever brimming, forever red and brilliant with wine. These things are heirlooms belonging to my father, and no matter who may come to our house, he likes to stand under them and brag.
So I begin to shout to him. I tell him to cut out being a Wop and be an American once in a while. Immediately he gets his razor strop and whales hell out of me, clouting me from room to room and finally out the back door. I go into the woodshed and pull down my pants and stretch my neck to examine the blue slices across my rump. A Wop, that’s what my father is! Nowhere is there an American father who
beats his son this way. Well, he’s not going to get away with it; some day I’ll get even with him.
I begin to think that my grandmother is hopelessly a Wop. She’s a small, stocky peasant who walks with her wrists crisscrossed over her belly, a simple old lady fond of boys. She comes into the room and tries to talk to my friends. She speaks English with a bad accent, her vowels rolling out like hoops. When, in her simple way, she confronts a friend of mine and says, her old eyes smiling: “You lika go the Seester scola?” my heart roars. Mannaggia! I’m disgraced; now they all know that I’m an Italian.
My grandmother has taught me to speak her native tongue. By seven, I know it pretty well, and I always address her in it. But when friends are with me, when I am twelve and thirteen, I pretend ignorance of what she says, and smirk stiffly; my friends daren’t know that I can speak any language but English. Sometimes this infuriates her. She bristles, the loose skin at her throat knits hard, and she blasphemes with a mighty blasphemy.
V
When I finish in the parochial school my people decide to send me to a Jesuit academy in another city. My father comes with me on the first day. Chiseled into the stone coping that skirts the roof of the main building of the academy is the Latin inscription: Religioni et Bonis Artibus. My father and I stand at a distance, and he reads it aloud and tells me what it means.
I look up at him in amazement. Is this man my father? Why, look at him! Listen to him! He reads with an Italian inflection! He’s wearing an Italian mustache. I have never realized it until this moment, but he looks exactly like a Wop. His suit hangs carelessly in wrinkles upon him. Why the deuce doesn’t he buy a new one? And look at his tie! It’s crooked. And his shoes: they need a shine. And, for the Lord’s sake, will you look at his pants! They’re not even buttoned in front. And oh, damn, damn, damn, you can see those dirty old suspenders that he won’t throw away. Say, Mister, are you really my father? You there, why, you’re such a little guy, such a runt, such an old-looking fellow! You look exactly like one of those immigrants carrying a blanket. You can’t be my father! Why, I thought…I’ve always thought…
I’m crying now, the first time I’ve ever cried for any reason excepting a licking, and I’m glad he’s not crying too. I’m glad he’s as tough as he is, and we say good-by quickly, and I go down the path quickly, and I do not turn to look back, for I know he’s standing there and looking at me.
I enter the administration building and stand in line with strange boys who also wait to register for the autumn term. Some Italian boys stand among them. I am away from home, and I sense the Italians. We look at one another and our eyes meet in an irresistible amalgamation, a suffusive consanguinity; I look away.
A burly Jesuit rises from his chair behind the desk and introduces himself to me. Such a voice for a man! There are a dozen thunderstorms in his chest. He asks my name, and writes it down on a little card.
“Nationality?” he roars,
“American.”
“Your father’s name?”
I whisper it: “Guido.”
“How’s that? Spell it out. Talk louder.”
I cough. I touch my lips with the back of my hand and spell out the name.
“Ha!” shouts the registrar. “And still they come! Another Wop! Well, young man, you’ll be at home here! Yes, sir! Lots of Wops here! We’ve even got Kikes! And, you know, this place reeks with shanty Irish!”
Dio! How I hate that priest!
He continues: “Where was your father born?”
“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
“Your mother?”
At last I can shout with the gusto of truth.
“Denver!” Aye, just like a conductor.
Casually, by way of conversation, he asks: “You speak Italian?”
“Nah! Not a word.”
“Too bad,” he says.
“You’re nuts,” I think.
VI
That semester I wait on table to defray my tuition fee. Trouble ahead; the chef and his assistants in the kitchen are all Italians. They know at once that I am of the breed. I ignore the chef’s friendly overtures, loathing him from the first. He understands why, and we become enemies. Every word he uses has a knife in it. His remarks cut me to pieces. After two months I can stand it no longer in the kitchen, and so I write a long letter to my mother; I am losing weight, I write; if you don’t let me quit this job, I’ll get sick and flunk my tests. She telegraphs me some money and tells me to quit at once; oh, I feel so sorry for you, my boy; I didn’t dream it would be so hard on you.
I decide to work just one more evening, to wait on table for just one more meal. That evening, after the meal, when the kitchen is deserted save for the cook and his assistants, I remove my apron and take my stand across the kitchen from him, staring at him. This is my moment. Two months I have waited for this moment. There is a knife stuck into the chopping block. I pick it up, still staring. I want to hurt the cook, square things up.
He sees me, and he says: “Get out of here, Wop!”
An assistant shouts: “Look out, he’s got a knife!”
“You won’t throw it, Wop,” the cook says. I am not thinking of throwing it, but since he says I won’t, I do. It goes over his head and strikes the wall and drops with a clatter to the floor. He picks it up and chases me out of the kitchen. I run, thanking God I didn’t hit him.
That year the football team is made up of Irish and Italian boys. The linemen are Irish, and we in the backfield are four Italians. We have a good team and win a lot of games, and my teammates are excellent players who are unselfish and work together as one man. But I hate my three fellow-players in the backfield; because of our nationality we seem ridiculous. The team makes a captain of me, and I call signals and see to it my fellow-Italians in the backfield do as little scoring as possible. I hog the play.
The school journal and the town’s sport pages begin to refer to us as the Wop Wonders. I think it an insult. Late one afternoon, at the close of an important game, a number of students leave the main grandstand and group themselves at one end of the field, to improvise some yells. They give three big ones for the Wop Wonders. It sickens me. I can feel my stomach move; and after that game I turn in my suit and quit the team.
I am a bad Latinist. Disliking the language, I do not study, and therefore I flunk my examinations regularly. Now a student comes to me and tells me that it is possible to drop Latin from my curriculum if I follow his suggestion, which is that I fail deliberately in the next few examinations, fail hopelessly. If I do this, the student says, the Jesuits will bow to my stupidity and allow me to abandon the language.
This is an agreeable suggestion. I follow it out. But it backtracks, for the Jesuits are wise fellows. They see what I’m doing, and they laugh and tell me that I am not clever enough to fool them, and that I must keep on studying Latin, even if it takes me twenty years to pass. Worse, they double my assignments and I spend my recreation time with Latin syntax. Before examinations in my junior year the Jesuit who instructs me calls me to his room and says:
“It is a mystery to me that a thoroughbred Italian like yourself should have any trouble with Latin. The language is in your blood and, believe me, you’re a darned poor Wop.”
Abbastanza! I go upstairs and lock my door and sit down with my book in front of me, my Latin book, and I study like a wild man, tearing crazily into the stuff until, lo, what is this? What am I studying here? Sure enough, it’s a lot like the Italian my grandmother taught me so long ago—this Latin, it isn’t so hard, after all. I pass the examination, I pass it with such an incredibly fine grade that my instructor thinks there is knavery somewhere.
Two weeks before graduation I get sick and go to the infirmary and am quarantined there. I lie in bed and feed my grudges. I bite my thumbs and ponder old grievances. I am running a high fever, and I can’t sleep. I think about the principal. He was my close friend during my first two years at the school, but in my third year, last year, he was transferred to anothe
r school. I lie in bed thinking of the day we met again in this, the last year. We met again on his return that September, in the principal’s room. He said hello to the boys, this fellow and that, and then he turned to me, and said:
“And you, the Wop! So you’re still with us.”
Coming from the mouth of the priest, the word had a lumpish sound that shook me all over. I felt the eyes of everyone, and I heard a giggle. So that’s how it is! I lie in bed thinking of the priest and now of the fellow who giggled.
All of a sudden I jump out of bed, tear the fly-leaf from a book, find a pencil, and write a note to the priest. I write: “Dear Father: I haven’t forgotten your insult. You called me a Wop last September. If you don’t apologize right away there’s going to be trouble.” I call the brother in charge of the infirmary and tell him to deliver the note to the priest.
After a while I hear the priest’s footsteps rising on the stairs. He comes to the door of my room, opens it, looks at me for a long time, not speaking, but only looking querulously. I wait for him to come in and apologize, for this is a grand moment for me. But he closes the door quietly and walks away. I am astonished. A double insult!
I am well again on the night of graduation. On the platform the principal makes a speech and then begins to distribute the diplomas. We’re supposed to say: “Thank you,” when he gives them to us. So thank you, and thank you, and thank you, everyone says in his turn. But when he gives me mine, I look squarely at him, just stand there and look, and I don’t say anything, and from that day we never speak to each other again.
The following September I enroll at the university.
“Where was your father born?” asks the registrar.
“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
