The Watcher and Other Stories (18 page)

I followed the stream of ants on the walls to see where they came from. My wife was combing and dressing herself, with occasional little cries of hastily suppressed anger. “We can't arrange the furniture till we've got rid of the ants,” she said.

“Keep calm. I'll see that everything is all right. I'm just going to Signor Reginaudo, who has that powder, and ask him for a little of it. We'll put the powder at the mouth of the ants' nest. I've already seen where it is, and we'll soon be rid of them. But let's wait till a little later as we may be disturbing the Reginaudos at this hour.”

My wife calmed down a little, but I didn't. I had said I'd seen the entrance to the ants' nest to console her, but the more I looked, the more new ways I discovered by which the ants came and went. Our new home, although it looked so smooth and solid on the surface, was in fact porous and honeycombed with cracks and holes.

I consoled myself by standing on the threshold and gazing at the plants with the sun pouring down on them; even the brushwood covering the ground cheered me, as it made me long to get to work on it: to clean everything up thoroughly, then hoe and sow and transplant. “Come,” I said to my son. “You're getting moldy here.” I took him in my arms and went out into the “garden.” Just for the pleasure of starting the habit of calling it that, I said to my wife: “I'm taking the baby into the garden for a moment,” then corrected myself: “Into our garden,” as that seemed even more possessive and familiar.

The baby was happy in the sunshine and I told him: “This is a carob tree, this is a persimmon,” and lifted him up onto the branches. “Now Papa will teach you to climb.” He burst out crying. “What's the matter? Are you frightened?” But I saw the ants; the sticky tree was covered with them. I pulled the baby down at once. “Oh, lots of dear little ants...” I said to him, but meanwhile, deep in thought, I was following the line of ants down the trunk, and saw that the silent and almost invisible swarm continued along the ground in every direction between the weeds. How, I was beginning to wonder, shall we ever be able to get the ants out of the house when over this piece of ground, which had seemed so small yesterday but now appeared enormous in relation to the ants, the insects formed an uninterrupted veil, issuing from what must be thousands of underground nests and feeding on the thick sticky soil and the low vegetation? Wherever I looked I'd see nothing at first glance and would be giving a sigh of relief when I'd look closer and discover an ant approaching and find it formed part of a long procession, and was meeting others, often carrying crumbs and tiny bits of material much larger than themselves. In certain places, where they had perhaps collected some plant juice or animal remains, there was a guarding crust of ants stuck together like the black scab of a wound.

I returned to my wife with the baby at my neck, almost at a run, feeling the ants climbing up from my feet. And she said: “Look, you've made the baby cry. What's the matter?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I said hurriedly. “He saw a couple of ants on a tree and is still affected by last night, and thinks he's itching.”

“Oh, to have this to put up with too!” my wife cried. She was following a line of ants on the wall and trying to kill them by pressing the ends of her fingers on each one. I could still see the millions of ants surrounding us on that plot of ground, which now seemed immeasurable to me, and found myself shouting at her angrily: “What're you doing? Are you mad? You won't get anywhere that way.”

She burst out in a flash of rage too. “But Uncle Augusto! Uncle Augusto never said a word to us! What a couple of fools we were! To pay any attention to that old liar!” In fact, what could Uncle Augusto have told us? The word “ants” for us then could never have even suggested the horror of our present situation. If he had mentioned ants, as perhaps he had—I won't exclude the possibility—we would have imagined ourselves up against a concrete enemy that could be numbered, weighed, crushed. Actually, now I think about the ants in our own parts, I remember them as reasonable little creatures, which could be touched and moved like cats or rabbits. Here we were face to face with an enemy like fog or sand, against which force was useless.

Our neighbor, Signor Reginaudo, was in his kitchen pouring liquid through a funnel. I called him from outside, and reached the kitchen window panting hard.

“Ah, our neighbor!” exclaimed Reginaudo. “Come in, come in. Forgive this mess! Claudia, a chair for our neighbor.”

I said to him quickly: “I've come... please forgive the intrusion, but you know, I saw that you had some of that powder... all last night, the ants...”

“Oh, oh... the ants!” Signora Reginaudo burst out laughing as she came in, and her husband echoed her with a slight delay, it seemed to me, though his guffaws were noisier when they came. “Ha, ha, ha!... You have ants, too! Ha, ha, ha!”

Without wanting to, I found myself giving a modest smile, as if realizing how ridiculous my situation was, but now I could do nothing about it; this was in point of fact true, as I'd had to come and ask for help.

“Ants! You don't say so, my dear neighbor!” exclaimed Signor Reginaudo, raising his hands.

“You don't say so, dear neighbor, you don't say so!” exclaimed his wife, pressing her hands to her breast but still laughing with her husband.

“But you have a remedy, haven't you?” I asked, and the quiver in my voice could, perhaps, have been taken for a longing to laugh, and not for the despair I could feel coming over me.

“A remedy, ha, ha, ha!” The Reginaudos laughed louder than ever. “Have we a remedy? We've twenty remedies! A hundred... each, ha, ha, ha, each better than the other!”

They led me into another room lined with dozens of cartons and tins with brilliant-colored labels.

“D'you want some Profosfan? Or Mirminec? Or perhaps Tiobroflit? Or Arsopan in powder or liquid form?” And still roaring with laughter he passed his hand over sprinklers with pistons, brushes, sprays, raising clouds of yellow dust, tiny beads of moisture, and a smell that was a mixture of a pharmacy and an agricultural depot.

“Have you really something that does the job?” I asked.

They stopped laughing. “No, nothing,” he replied.

Signor Reginaudo patted me on the shoulder, the Signora opened the blinds to let the sun in. Then they took me around the house.

He was wearing pink-striped pajama trousers tied over his fat little stomach, and a straw hat on his bald head. She wore a faded dressing gown, which opened every now and then to reveal the shoulder straps of her undershirt; the hair around her big red face was fair, dry, curly, and disheveled. They both talked loudly and expansively; every corner of their house had a story which they recounted, repeating and interrupting each other with gestures and exclamations as if each episode had been a huge joke. In one place they had put down Arfanax diluted two to a thousand and the ants had vanished for two days but returned on the third day; then he had used a concentrate of ten to a thousand, but the ants had simply avoided that part and circled around by the doorframe; they had isolated another corner with Crisotan powder, but the wind blew it away and they used three kilos a day; on the stairs they had tried Petrocid, which seemed at first to kill them at one blow, but instead it had only sent them to sleep; in another corner they put down Formikill and the ants went on passing over it, then one morning they found a mouse poisoned there; in one spot they had put down liquid Zimofosf, which had acted as a definite blockade, but his wife had put Italmac powder on top which had acted as an antidote and completely nullified the effect.

Our neighbors used their house and garden as a battlefield, and their passion was to trace lines beyond which the ants could not pass, to discover the new detours they made, and to try out new mixtures and powders, each of which was linked to the memory of some strange episode or comic occurrence, so that one of them only had to pronounce a name “Arsepit! Mirxidol!” for them both to burst out laughing with winks and comments. As for the actual killing of the ants, that, if they had ever attempted it, they seemed to have given up, seeing that their efforts were useless; all they tried to do was bar them from certain passages and turn them aside, frighten them or keep them at bay. They always had a new labyrinth traced out with different substances which they prepared from day to day, and for this game ants were a necessary element.

“There's nothing else to be done with the creatures, nothing,” they said, “unless one deals with them like the captain...”

“Ah, yes, we certainly spend a lot of money on these insecticides,” they said. “The captain's system is much more economical, you know.”

“Of course, we can't say we've defeated the Argentine ant yet,” they added, “but d'you really think that captain is on the right road? I doubt it.”

“Excuse me,” I asked. “But who is the captain?”

“Captain Brauni; don't you know him? Oh, of course, you only arrived yesterday! He's our neighbor there on the right, in that little white villa... an inventor... They laughed. “He's invented a system to exterminate the Argentine ant... lots of systems, in fact. And he's still perfecting them. Go and see him.”

The Reginaudos stood there, plump and sly among their few square yards of garden which was daubed all over with streaks and splashes of dark liquids, sprinkled with greenish powder, encumbered with watering cans, fumigators, masonry basins filled with some indigo-colored preparation; in the disordered flower beds were a few little rosebushes covered with insecticide from the tips of the leaves to the roots. The Reginaudos raised contented and amused eyes to the limpid sky. Talking to them, I found myself slightly heartened; although the ants were not just something to laugh at, as they seemed to think, neither were they so terribly serious, anything to lose heart about. “Oh, the ants!” I now thought. “Just ants after all! What harm can a few ants do?” Now I'd go back to my wife and tease her a bit: “What on earth d'you think you've seen, with those ants...?”

I was mentally preparing a talk in this tone while returning across our piece of ground with my arms full of cartons and tins lent by our neighbors for us to choose the ones that wouldn't harm the baby, who put everything in his mouth. But when I saw my wife outside the house holding the baby, her eyes glassy and her cheeks hollow, and realized the battle she must have fought, I lost all desire to smile and joke.

“At last you've come back,” she said, and her quiet tone impressed me more painfully than the angry accent I had expected. “I didn't know what to do here any more... if you saw... I really didn't know...”

“Look, now we can try this,” I said to her, “and this and this and this...” and I put down my cans on the step in front of the house, and at once began hurriedly explaining how they were to be used, almost afraid of seeing too much hope rising in her eyes, not wanting either to deceive or undeceive her. Now I had another idea: I wanted to go at once and see that Captain Brauni.

“Do it the way I've explained; I'll be back in a minute.”

“You're going away again? Where are you off to?”

“To another neighbor's. He has a system. You'll see soon.”

And I ran off toward a metal fence covered with ramblers bounding our land to the right. The sun was behind a cloud. I looked through the fence and saw a little white villa surrounded by a tiny neat garden, with gravel paths encircling flower beds, bordered by wrought iron painted green as in public gardens, and in the middle of every flower bed a little black orange or lemon tree.

Everything was quiet, shady, and still. I was standing there, uncertain whether to go away, when, bending over a well-clipped hedge, I saw a head covered with a shapeless white linen beach hat, pulled forward to a wavy brim above a pair of steel-framed glasses on a spongy nose, and then a sharp flashing smile of false teeth, also made of steel. He was a thin, shriveled man in a pullover, with trousers clamped at the ankles by bicycle clips, and sandals on his feet. He went up to examine the trunk of one of the orange trees, looking silent and circumspect, still with his tight-lipped smile. I looked out from behind the rambler and called: “Good day, Captain.” The man raised his head with a start, no longer smiling, and gave me a cold stare.

“Excuse me, are you Captain Brauni?” I asked him. The man nodded. “I'm the new neighbor, you know, who's rented the Casa Laureri.... May I trouble you for a moment, since I've heard that your system...”

The captain raised a finger and beckoned me to come nearer; I jumped through a gap in the iron fence. The captain was still holding up his finger, while pointing with the other hand to the spot he was observing. I saw that hanging from the tree, perpendicular to the trunk, was a short iron wire. At the end of the wire hung a piece—it seemed to me—of fish remains, and in the middle was a bulge at an acute angle pointing downward. A stream of ants was going to and fro on the trunk and the wire. Underneath the end of the wire was hanging a sort of meat can.

“The ants,” explained the captain, “attracted by the smell of fish, run across the piece of wire; as you see, they can go to and fro on it without bumping into each other. But it's that
V
turn that is dangerous; when an ant going up meets one coming down on the turn of the
V
, they both stop, and the smell of the gasoline in this can stuns them; they try to go on their way but bump into each other, fall, and are drowned in the gasoline. Tic, tic.” (This “tic, tic” accompanied the fall of two ants.) “Tic, tic, tic...” continued the captain with his steely, stiff smile; and every “tic” accompanied the fall of an ant into the can where, on the surface of an inch of gasoline, lay a black crust of shapeless insect bodies.

“An average of forty ants are killed per minute,” said Captain Brauni, “twenty-four hundred per hour. Naturally, the gasoline must be kept clean, otherwise the dead ants cover it and the ones that fall in afterward can save themselves.”