The Watcher and Other Stories (19 page)

I could not take my eyes off that thin but regular trickle of ants dropping off; many of them got over the dangerous point and returned dragging bits of fish back with them by the teeth, but there was always one which stopped at that point, waved its antennae, and then plunged into the depths. Captain Brauni, with a fixed stare behind his lenses, did not miss the slightest movement of the insects; at every fall he gave a tiny uncontrollable start and the tightly stretched comers of his almost lipless mouth twitched. Often he could not resist putting out his hands, either to correct the angle of the wire or to stir the gasoline around the crust of dead ants on the sides, or even to give his instruments a little shake to accelerate the victims' fall. But this last gesture must have seemed to him almost like breaking the rules, for he quickly drew back his hand and looked at me as if to justify his action.

“This is an improved model,” he said, leading me to another tree from which hung a wire with a horsehair tied to the top of the
V
: the ants thought they could save themselves on the horsehair, but the smell of the gasoline and the unexpectedly tenuous support confused them to the point of making the fatal drop. This expedient of the horsehair or bristle was applied to many other traps that the captain showed me: a third piece of wire would suddenly end in a piece of thin horsehair, and the ants would be confused by the change and lose their balance; he had even constructed a trap by which the corner was reached over a bridge made of a half-broken bristle, which opened under the weight of the ant and let it fall in the gasoline.

Applied with mathematical precision to every tree, every piece of tubing, every balustrade and column in this silent and neat garden, were wire contraptions with cans of gasoline underneath, and the standard-trained rosebushes and latticework of ramblers seemed only a careful camouflage for this parade of executions.

“Aglaura!” cried the captain, going up to the kitchen door, and to me: “Now I'll show you our catch for the last few days.”

Out of the door came a tall, thin, pale women with frightened, malevolent eyes, and a handkerchief knotted down over her forehead.

“Show our neighbor the sack,” said Brauni, and I realized she was not a servant but the captain's wife, and greeted her with a nod and a murmur, but she did not reply. She went into the house and came out again dragging a heavy sack along the ground, her muscular arms showing a greater strength than I had attributed to her at first glance. Through the half-closed door I could see a pile of sacks like this one stacked about; the woman had disappeared, still without saying a word.

The captain opened the mouth of the sack; it looked as if it contained garden loam or chemical manure, but he put his arm in and brought out a handful of what seemed to be coffee grounds and let this trickle into his other hand; they were dead ants, a soft red-black sand of dead ants all rolled up in tight little balls, reduced to spots in which one could no longer distinguish the head from the legs. They gave out a pungent acid smell. In the house there were hundredweights, pyramids of sacks like this one, all full.

“It's incredible,” I said. “You've exterminated all of these, so...”

“No,” said the captain calmly. “It's no use killing the worker ants. There are ants' nests everywhere with queen ants that breed millions of others.”

“What then?”

I squatted down beside the sack; he was seated on a step below me and to speak to me had to raise his head; the shapeless brim of his white hat covered the whole of his forehead and part of his round spectacles.

“The queens must be starved. If you reduce to a minimum the number of workers taking food to the ants' nests, the queens will be left without enough to eat. And I tell you that one day we'll see the queens come out of their ants' nests in high summer and crawl around searching for food with their own claws.... That'll be the end of them all, and then...”

He shut the mouth of the sack with an excited gesture and got up. I got up too. “But some people think they can solve it by letting the ants escape.” He threw a glance toward the Reginaudos' little house, and showed his steel teeth in a contemptuous laugh. “And there are even those who prefer fattening them up.... That's one way of dealing with them, isn't it?”

I did not understand his second allusion.

“Who?” I asked. “Why should anyone want to fatten them up?”

“Hasn't the ant man been to you?”

What man did he mean? “I don't know,” I said. “I don't think so....”

“Don't worry, he'll come to you too. He usually comes on Thursdays, so if he wasn't here this morning he will be in the afternoon. To give the ants a tonic, ha, ha!”

I smiled to please him, but did not follow. Then as I had come to him with a purpose I said: “I'm sure yours is the best possible system. D'you think I could try it at my place too?”

“Just tell me which model you prefer,” said Brauni, and led me back into the garden. There were numbers of his inventions that I had not yet seen. Swinging wire which when loaded with ants made contact with a battery that electrocuted the lot; anvils and hammers covered with honey which clashed together at the release of a spring and squashed all the ants left in between; wheels with teeth which the ants themselves put in motion, tearing their brethren to pieces until they in their turn were churned up by the pressure of those coming after. I couldn't get used to the idea of so much art and perseverance being needed to carry out such a simple operation as catching ants; but I realized that the important thing was to carry on continually and methodically. Then I felt discouraged as no one, it seemed to me, could ever equal this neighbor of ours in terrible determination.

“Perhaps one of the simpler models would be best for us,” I said, and Brauni snorted, I didn't know whether from approval or sympathy with the modesty of my ambition.

“I must think a bit about it,” he said. “I'll make some sketches.”

There was nothing else left for me to do but thank him and take my leave. I jumped back over the hedge; my house, infested as it was, I felt for the first time to be really my home, a place where one returned saying: “Here I am at last.”

But at home the baby had eaten the insecticide and my wife was in despair.

“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.