“Don’t worry, it’s not poisonous!” I quickly said.
No, it wasn’t poisonous, but it wasn’t good to eat either; our son was screaming with pain. He had to be made to vomit; he vomited in the kitchen, which at once filled with ants again, and my wife had just cleaned it up. We washed the floor, calmed the baby, and put him to sleep in the basket, isolated him all around with insect powder, and covered him with a mosquito net tied tight, so that if he awoke he couldn’t get up and eat any more of the stuff.
My wife had done the shopping but had not been able to save the basket from the ants, so everything had to be washed first, even the sardines in oil and the cheese, and each ant sticking to them picked off one by one. I helped her, chopped the wood, tidied the kitchen, and fixed the stove while she cleaned the vegetables. But it was impossible to stand still in one place; every minute either she or I jumped and said: “Ouch! They’re biting,” and we had to scratch ourselves and rub off the ants or put our arms and legs under the faucet. We did not know where to set the table; inside it would attract more ants, outside we’d be covered with ants in no time. We ate standing up, moving about, and everything tasted of ants, partly from the ones still left in the food and partly because our hands were impregnated with their smell.
After eating I made a tour of the piece of land, smoking a cigarette. From the Reginaudos’ came a tinkling of knives and forks; I went over and saw them sitting at table under an umbrella, looking shiny and calm, with checked napkins tied around their necks, eating a custard and drinking glasses of clear wine. I wished them a good appetite and they invited me to join them. But around the table I saw sacks and cans of insecticide, and everything covered with nets sprinkled with yellowish or whitish powder, and that smell of chemicals rose to my nostrils. I thanked them and said I no longer had any appetite, which was true. The Reginaudos’ radio was playing softly and they were chattering in high voices, pretending to celebrate.
From the steps which I’d gone up to greet them I could also see a piece of the Braunis’ garden; the captain must already have finished eating; he was coming out of his house with his cup of coffee, sipping and glancing around, obviously to see if all his instruments of torture were in action and if the ants’ death agonies were continuing with their usual regularity. Suspended between two trees I saw a white hammock and realized that the bony, disagreeable-looking Signora Aglaura must be lying in it, though I could see only a wrist and a hand waving a ribbed fan. The hammock ropes were suspended in a system of strange rings, which must certainly have been some sort of defense against the ants; or perhaps the hammock itself was a trap for the ants, with the captain’s wife put there as bait.
I did not want to discuss my visit to the Braunis with the Reginaudos, as I knew they would only have made the ironic comments that seemed usual in the relations between our neighbors. I looked up at Signora Mauro’s garden above us on the crest of the hills, and at her villa surmounted by a revolving weathercock. “I wonder if Signora Mauro has ants up there too,” I said.
The Reginaudos’ gaiety seemed rather more subdued during their meal; they only gave a little quiet laugh or two and said no more than: “Ha, ha, she must have them too. Ha, ha, yes, she must have them, lots of them....”
My wife called me back to the house, as she wanted to put a mattress on the table and try to get a little sleep. With the mattresses on the floor it was impossible to prevent the ants from crawling up, but with the table we just had to isolate the four legs to keep them off, for a bit at least. She lay down to rest and I went out, with the thought of looking for some people who might know of some job for me, but in fact because I longed to move about and get out of the rut of my thoughts.
But as I went along the road, things all around seemed different from yesterday; in every kitchen garden, in every house I sensed streams of ants climbing the walls, covering the fruit trees, wriggling their antennae toward everything sweet or greasy; and my newly trained eyes now noticed at once mattresses put outside houses to beat because the ants had got into them, a spray of insecticide in an old woman’s hand, a saucerful of poison, and then, straining my eyes, the rows of ants marching imperturbably around the door frames.
Yet this had been Uncle Augusto’s ideal countryside. Unloading sacks, an hour for one employer and an hour for another, eating on the benches at the inn, going around in the evening in search of gaiety and a mouth organ, sleeping wherever he happened to be, wherever it was cool and soft, what bother could the ants have been to him?
As I walked along I tried to imagine myself as Uncle Augusto and to move along the road as he would have done on an afternoon like this. Of course, being like Uncle Augusto meant first being like him physically: squat and sturdy, that is, with rather monkeylike arms that opened and remained suspended in mid-air in an extravagant gesture, and short legs that stumbled when he turned to look at a girl, and a voice which when he got excited repeated the local slang all out of tune with his own accent. In him body and soul were all one; how nice it would have been, gloomy and worried as I was, to have been able to move and joke like Uncle Augusto. I could always pretend to be him mentally, though, and say to myself: “What a sleep I’ll have in that hayloft! What a bellyful of sausage and wine I’ll have at the inn!” I imagined myself pretending to stroke the cats I saw, then shouting “Booo!” to frighten them unexpectedly; and calling out to the servant girls: “Hey, would you like me to come and give you a hand, Signorina?” But the game wasn’t much fun; the more I tried to imagine how simple life was for Uncle Augusto here, the more I realized he was a different type, a man who never had my worries: a home to set up, a permanent job to find, an ailing baby, a long-faced wife, and a bed and kitchen full of ants.
I entered the inn where we had already been, and asked the girl in the white sweater if the men I’d talked to the day before had come yet. It was shady and cool in there; perhaps it wasn’t a place for ants. I sat down to wait for those men, as she suggested, and asked, looking as casual as I could: “So you haven’t any ants here, then?”
She was passing a duster over the counter. “Oh, people come and go here, no one’s ever paid any attention.”
“But what about you who live here all the time?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “I’m grown up, why should I be frightened of ants?”
Her air of dismissing the ants, as if they were something to be ashamed of, irritated me more and more, and I insisted: “But don’t you put any poison down?”
“The best poison against ants,” said a man sitting at another table, who, I noted now, was one of those friends of Uncle Augusta’s to whom I’d spoken the evening before, “is this,” and he raised his glass and drank it in one gulp.
Others came in and wanted to stand me a drink as they hadn’t been able to put me on to any jobs. We talked about Uncle Augusto and one of them asked: “And what’s that old lingera up to?” “Lingera” is a local word meaning vagabond and scamp, and they all seemed to approve of this definition of him and to hold my uncle in great esteem as a lingera. I was a little confused at this reputation being attributed to a man whom I knew to be in fact considerate and modest, in spite of his disorganized way of life. But perhaps this was part of the boasting, exaggerated attitude common to all these people, and it occurred to me in a confused sort of way that this was somehow linked with the ants, that pretending they lived in a world of great movement and adventure was a way of insulating themselves from petty annoyances.
What prevented me from entering their state of mind, I was thinking on my way home, was my wife, who had always been opposed to any fantasy. And I thought what an influence she had had on my life, and how nowadays I could never get drunk on words and ideas any more.
She met me on the doorstep looking rather alarmed, and said: “Listen, there’s a surveyor here.” I, who still had in my ears the sound of superiority of those blusterers at the inn, said almost without listening: “What now, a surveyor... Well, I’ll just...”
/> She went on: “A surveyor’s come to take measurements.” I did not understand and went in. “Ah, now I see. It’s the captain!”
It was Captain Brauni who was taking measurements with a yellow tape measure, to set up one of his traps in our house. I introduced him to my wife and thanked him for his kindness.
“I wanted to have a look at the possibilities here,” he said. “Everything must be done in a strictly mathematical way.” He even measured the basket where the baby was sleeping, and woke it up. The child was frightened at seeing the yellow yardstick leveled over his head and began to cry. My wife tried to put him to sleep again. The baby’s crying made the captain nervous, though I tried to distract him. Luckily, he heard his wife calling him and went out. Signora Aglaura was leaning over the hedge and shouting: “Come here! Come here! There’s a visitor! Yes, the ant man!”
Brauni gave me a glance and a meaningful smile from his thin lips, and excused himself for having to return to his house so soon. “Now, he’ll come to you too,” he said, pointing toward the place where this mysterious ant man was to be found. “You’ll soon see,” and he went away.
I did not want to find myself face to face with this ant man without knowing exactly who he was and what he had come to do. I went to the steps that led to Reginaudo’s land; our neighbor was just at that moment returning home; he was wearing a white coat and a straw hat, and was loaded with sacks and cartons. I said to him: “Tell me, has the ant man been to you yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Reginaudo, “I’ve just got back, but I think he must have, because I see molasses everywhere. Claudia!”
His wife leaned out and said: “Yes, yes, he’ll come to the Casa Laureri too, but don’t expect him to do very much!”
As if I was expecting anything at all! I asked: “But who sent this man?”
“Who sent him?” repeated Reginaudo. “He’s the man from the Argentine Ant Control Corporation, their representative who comes and puts molasses all over the gardens and houses. Those little plates over there, do you see them?” My wife said: “Poisoned molasses...” and gave a little laugh as if she expected trouble.
“Does it kill them?” These questions of mine were just a deprecating joke. I knew it all already. Every now and then everything would seem on the point of clearing up, then complications would begin all over again.
Signor Reginaudo shook his head as if I’d said something improper. “Oh no... just minute doses of poison, you understand... ants love sugary molasses. The worker ants take it back to the nest and feed the queens with these little doses of poison, so that sooner or later they’re supposed to die from poisoning.”
I did not want to ask if, sooner or later, they really did die. I realized that Signor Reginaudo was informing me of this proceeding in the tone of one who personally holds a different view but feels that he should give an objective and respectful account of official opinion. His wife, however, with the habitual intolerance of women, was quite open about showing her aversion to the molasses system and interrupted her husband’s remarks with little malicious laughs and ironic comments; this attitude of hers must have seemed to him out of place or too open, for he tried by his voice and manner to attenuate her defeatism, though not actually contradicting her entirely—perhaps because in private he said the same things, or worse—by making little compensating remarks such as: “Come now, you exaggerate, Claudia.... It’s certainly not very effective, but it may help.... Then, they do it for nothing. One must wait a year or two before judging....”
“A year or two? They’ve been putting that stuff down for twenty years, and every year the ants multiply.”
Signor Reginaudo, rather than contradict her, preferred to turn the conversation to other services performed by the Corporation; and he told me about the boxes of manure which the ant man put in the gardens for the queens to go and lay their eggs in, and how they then came and took them away to burn.
I realized that Signor Reginaudo’s tone was the best to use in explaining matters to my wife, who is suspicious and pessimistic by nature, and when I got back home I reported what our neighbor had said, taking care not to praise the system as in any way miraculous or speedy, but also avoiding Signora Claudia’s ironic comments. My wife is one of those women who, when she goes by train, for example, thinks that the timetable, the make-up of the train, the requests of the ticket collectors, are all stupid and ill planned, without any possible justification, but to be accepted with submissive rancor; so though she considered this business of molasses to be absurd and ridiculous, she made ready for the visit of the ant man (who, I gathered, was called Signor Baudino), intending to make no protest or useless request for help.
The man entered our plot of land without asking permission, and we found ourselves face to face while we were still talking about him, which caused rather an unpleasant embarrassment. He was a little man of about fifty, in a worn, faded black suit, with rather a drunkard’s face, and hair that was still dark, parted like a child’s. Half-closed lids, a rather greasy little smile, reddish skin around his eyes and at the sides of his nose, prepared us for the intonations of a clucking, rather priestlike voice with a strong lilt of dialect. A nervous tic made the wrinkles pulsate at the corner of his mouth and nose.
If I describe Signor Baudino in such detail, it’s to try to define the strange impression that he made on us; but was it strange, really? For it seemed to us that we’d have picked him out among thousands as the ant man. He had large, hairy hands; in one he held a sort of coffeepot and in the other a pile of little earthenware plates. He told us about the molasses he had to put down, and his voice betrayed a lazy indifference to the job; even the soft and dragging way he had of pronouncing the word “molasses” showed both disdain for the straits we were in and the complete lack of faith with which he carried out his task. I noticed that my wife was displaying exemplary calm as she showed him the main places where the ants passed. For myself, seeing him move so hesitantly, repeating again and again those few gestures of filling the dishes one after the other, nearly made me lose my patience. Watching him like that, I realized why he had made such a strange impression on me at first sight: he looked like an ant. It’s difficult to tell exactly why, but he certainly did; perhaps it was because of the dull black of his clothes and hair, perhaps because of the proportions of that squat body of his, or the trembling at the corners of his mouth corresponding to the continuous quiver of antennae and claws. There was, however, one characteristic of the ant which he did not have, and that was their continuous busy movement. Signor Baudino moved slowly and awkwardly, as he now began daubing the house in an aimless way with a brush dipped in molasses.
As I followed the man’s movements with increasing irritation I noticed that my wife was no longer with me; I looked around and saw her in a corner of the garden where the hedge of the Reginaudos’ little house joined that of the Braunis’. Leaning over their respective hedges were Signora Claudia and Signora Aglaura, deep in talk, with my wife standing in the middle listening. Signor Baudino was now working on the yard at the back of the house, where he could mess around as much as he liked without having to be watched, so I went up to the women and heard Signora Brauni holding forth to the accompaniment of sharp angular gestures.
“He’s come to give the ants a tonic, that man has; a tonic, not poison at all!”
Signora Reginaudo now chimed in, rather mellifluously: “What will the employees of the Corporation do when there are no more ants? So what can you expect of them, my dear Signora?”
“They just fatten the ants, that’s what they do!” concluded Signora Aglaura angrily.
My wife stood listening quietly, as both the neighbors’ remarks were addressed to her, but the way in which she was dilating her nostrils and curling her lips told me how furious she was at the deceit she was being forced to put up with. And I, too, I must say, found myself very near believing that this was more than women’s gossip.
“And what about the boxes of man
ure for the eggs?” went on Signora Reginaudo. “They take them away, but do you think they’ll burn them? Of course not!”
“Claudia, Claudia!” I heard her husband calling. Obviously these indiscreet remarks of his wife made him feel uneasy. Signora Reginaudo left us with an “Excuse me,” in which vibrated a note of disdain for her husband’s conventionality, while I thought I heard a kind of sardonic laugh echoing back from over the other hedge, where I caught sight of Captain Brauni walking up the graveled paths and correcting the slant of his traps. One of the earthenware dishes just filled by Signor Baudino lay overturned and smashed at his feet by a kick which might have been accidental or intended.
I don’t know what my wife had brewing inside her against the ant man as we were returning toward the house; probably at that moment I should have done nothing to stop her, and might even have supported her. But on glancing around the outside and inside of the house, we realized that Signor Baudino had disappeared; and I remembered hearing our gate creaking and shutting as we came along. He must have gone that moment without saying good-by, leaving behind him those bowls of sticky, reddish molasses, which spread an unpleasant sweet smell, completely different from that of the ants, but somehow linked to it, I could not say how.
Since our son was sleeping, we thought that now was the moment to go up and see Signora Mauro. We had to go and visit her, not only as a duty call but to ask her for the key of a certain storeroom. The real reasons, though, why we were making this call so soon were to remonstrate with her for having rented us a place invaded with ants without warning us in any way, and chiefly to find out how our landlady defended herself against this scourge.
Signora Mauro’s villa had a big garden running up the slope under tall palms with yellowed fanlike leaves. A winding path led to the house, which was all glass verandas and dormer windows, with a rusty weathercock turning creakily on its hinge on top of the roof, far less responsive to the wind than the palm leaves which waved and rustled at every gust.