The Watcher and Other Stories (21 page)

“But that bit of land in front of us is black with 'em,” I said hurriedly, “and however clean we keep the house, they come from the garden in their thousands....”

“Of course,” said the Signora, her thin hand closing over the arm of the chair, “of course it's rough uncultivated ground that makes the ants increase so; I intended to put the land in order four months ago. You made me wait, and now the damage is done; it's not only damaged you, but everyone else around, because the ants breed...”

“Don't they breed up here too?” asked my wife, almost smiling.

“No, not here!” said Signora Mauro, going pale, then, still holding her right arm against the side of the chair, she began making a little rotating movement of the shoulder and rubbing her elbow against her ribs.

It occurred to me that the darkness, the ornaments, the size of the room, and her proud spirit were this woman's defenses against the ants, the reason why she was stronger than we were in face of them; but that everything we saw around us, beginning with her sitting there, was covered with ants even more pitiless than ours; some kind of African termite, perhaps, which destroyed everything and left only the husks, so that all that remained of this house were tapestries and curtains almost in powder, all on the point of crumbling into bits before her eyes.

“We really came to ask you if you could give us some advice on how to get rid of the pests,” said my wife, who was now completely self-possessed.

“Keep the house clean and dig away at the ground. There's no other remedy. Work, just work,” and she got to her feet, the sudden decision to say good-by to us coinciding with an instinctive start, as if she could keep still no longer. Then she composed herself and a shadow of relief passed over her pale face.

We went down through the garden, and my wife said: “Anyway, let's hope the baby hasn't waked up.” I, too, was thinking of the baby. Even before we reached the house we heard him crying. We ran, took him in our arms, and tried to quiet him, but he went on crying shrilly. An ant had got into his ear; we could not understand at first why he cried so desperately without any apparent reason. My wife had said at once: “It must be an ant!” but I could not understand why he went on crying so, as we could find no ants on him or any signs of bites or irritation, and we'd undressed and carefully inspected him. We found some in the basket, however; I'd done my very best to isolate it properly, but we had overlooked the ant man's molasseS—one of the clumsy streaks made by Signor Baudino seemed to have been put down on purpose to attract the insects up from the floor to the child's cot.

What with the baby's tears and my wife's cries, we had attracted all the neighboring women to the house: Signora Reginaudo, who was really very kind and sweet, Signora Brauni, who, I must say, did everything she could to help us, and other women I'd never seen before. They all gave ceaseless advice: to pour warm oil in his ear, make him hold his mouth open, blow his nose, and I don't know what else. They screamed and shouted and ended by giving us more trouble than help, although they'd been a certain comfort at first; and the more they fussed around our baby the more bitter we all felt against the ant man. My wife had blamed and cursed him to the four winds of heaven; and the neigh‹ bors all agreed with her that the man deserved all that was coming to him, and that he was doing all he could to help the ants increase so as not to lose his job, and that he was perfectly capable of having done this on purpose, because now he was always on the side of the ants and not on that of human beings. Exaggeration, of course, but in all this excitement, with the baby crying, I agreed too, and if I'd laid hands on Signor Baudino then I couldn't say what I'd have done to him either.

The warm oil got the ant out; the baby, half stunned with crying, took up a celluloid toy, waved it about, sucked it, and decided to forget us. I, too, felt the same need to be on my own and relax my nerves, but the women were still continuing their diatribe against Baudino, and they told my wife that he could probably be found in an enclosure nearby, where he had his warehouse. My wife exclaimed: “Ah, I'll go and see him, yes, go and see him and give him what he deserves!”

Then they formed a small procession, with my wife at the head and I, naturally, beside her, without giving any opinion on the usefulness of the undertaking, and other women who had incited my wife following and sometimes overtaking her to show her the way. Signora Claudia offered to hold the baby and waved to us from the gate; I realized later that Signora Aglaura was not with us either, although she had declared herself to be one of Baudino's most violent enemies, and that we were accompanied by a little group of women we had not seen before. We went along a sort of alley, flanked by wooden hovels, chicken coops, and vegetable gardens half full of rubbish. One or two of the women, in spite of all they'd said, stopped when they got to their own homes, stood on the threshold excitedly pointing out our direction, then retired inside calling to the dirty children playing on the ground, or disappeared to feed the chickens. Only a couple of women followed us as far as Baudino's enclosure; but when the door opened after heavy knocks by my wife we found that she and I were the only ones to go in, though we felt ourselves followed by the other women's eyes from windows or chicken coops; they seemed to be continuing to incite us, but in very low voices and without showing themselves at all.

The ant man was in the middle of his warehouse, a shack three-quarters destroyed, to whose one surviving wooden wall was tacked a yellow notice with letters a foot and a half long: “Argentine Ant Control Corporation.” Lying all around were piles of those dishes for molasses and tins and bottles of every description, all in a sort of rubbish heap full of bits of paper with fish remains and other refuse, so that it immediately occurred to one that this was the source of all the ants of the area. Signor Baudino stood in front of us half smiling in an irritating questioning way, showing the gaps in his teeth.

“You,” my wife attacked him, recovering herself after a moment of hesitation. “You should be ashamed of yourself! Why d'you come to our house and dirty everything and let the baby get an ant in his ear with your molasses?”

She had her fists under his face, and Signor Baudino, without ceasing to give that decayed-looking smile of his, made the movements of a wild animal trying to keep its escape open, at the same time shrugging his shoulders and glancing and winking around to me, since there was no one else in sight, as if to say: “She's bats.” But his voice only uttered generalities and soft denials like: “No... No... Of course not.”

“Why does everyone say that you give the ants a tonic instead of poisoning them?” shouted my wife, so he slipped out of the door into the road with my wife following him and screaming abuse. Now the shrugging and winking of Signor Baudino were addressed to the women of the surrounding hovels, and it seemed to me that they were playing some kind of double game, agreeing to be witnesses for him that my wife was insulting him; and yet when my wife looked at them they incited her, with sharp little jerks of the head and movements of the brooms, to attack the ant man. I did not intervene; what could I have done? I certainly did not want to lay hands on the little man, as my wife's fury with him was already roused enough; nor could I try to moderate it, as I did not want to defend Baudino. At last my wife in another burst of anger cried: “You've done my baby harm!” grasped him by his collar, and shook him hard.

I was just about to throw myself on them and separate them; but without touching her, he twisted around with movements that were becoming more and more antlike, until he managed to break away. Then he went off with a clumsy, running step, stopped, pulled himself together, and went on again, still shrugging his shoulders and muttering phrases like: “But what behavior... But who...” and making a gesture as if to say “She's crazy,” to the people in the nearby hovels. From those people, the moment my wife threw herself on him, there rose an indistinct but confused mutter which stopped as soon as the man freed himself, then started up again in phrases not so much of protest and threat as of complaint and almost of supplication or sympathy, shouted out as if they were proud proclamations. “The ants are eating us alive.... Ants in the bed, ants in the dishes, ants every day, ants every night. We've little enough to eat anyway and have to feed them too...”

I had taken my wife by the arm. She was still shaking her fist every now and again and shouting: “That's not the last of it! We know who is swindling whom! We know whom to thank!” and other threatening phrases which did not echo back, as the windows and doors of the hovels on our path closed again, and the inhabitants returned to their wretched lives with the ants.

So it was a sad return, as could have been foreseen. But what had particularly disappointed me was the way those women had behaved. I swore I'd never go around complaining about ants again in my life. I longed to shut myself up in silent tortured pride like Signora Mauro—but she was rich and we were poor. I had not yet found any solution to how we could go on living in these parts; and it seemed to me that none of the people here, who seemed so superior a short time ago, had found it, or were even on the way to finding it either.

We reached home; the baby was sucking his toy. My wife sat down on a chair. I looked at the ant-infested field and hedges, and beyond them at the cloud of insect powder rising from Signor Reginaudo's garden; and to the right there was the shady silence of the captain's garden, with that continuous dripping of his victims. This was my new home. I took my wife and child and said: “Let's go for a walk, let's go down to the sea.”

It was evening. We went along alleys and streets of steps. The sun beat down on a sharp corner of the old town, on gray, porous stone, with lime-washed cornices to the windows and roofs green with moss. The town opened like a fan, undulating over slopes and hills, and the space between was full of limpid air, copper-colored at this hour. Our child was turning around in amazement at everything, and we had to pretend to take part in his marveling; it was a way of bringing us together, of reminding us of the mild flavor that life has at moments, and of reconciling us to the passing days.

We met old women balancing great baskets resting on head pads, walking rigidly with straight backs and lowered eyes; and in a nuns' garden a group of sewing girls ran along a railing to see a toad in a basin and said: “How awful!”; and behind an iron gate, under the wistaria, some young girls dressed in white were throwing a beach ball to and fro with a blind man; and a half-naked youth with a beard and hair down to his shoulders was gathering prickly pears from an old cactus with a forked stick; and sad and spectacled children were making soap bubbles at the window of a rich house; it was the hour when the bell sounded in the old folks' home and they began climbing up the steps, one behind the other with their sticks, their straw hats on their heads, each talking to himself; and then there were two telephone workers, and one was holding a ladder and saying to the other on the pole: “Come on down, time's up, we'll finish the job tomorrow.”

And so we reached the port and the sea. There was also a line of palm trees and some stone benches. My wife and I sat down and the baby was quiet. My wife said: “There are no ants here.” I replied: “And there's a fresh wind; it's pleasant.”

The sea rose and fell against the rocks of the mole, making the fishing boats sway, and dark-skinned men were filling them with red nets and lobster pots for the evening's fishing. The water was calm, with just a slight continual change of color, blue and black, darker farthest away. I thought of the expanses of water like this, of the infinite grains of soft sand down there at the bottom of the sea where the currents leave white shells washed clean by the waves.

I
TALO
C
ALVINO
(1923–1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels
Invisible Cities
(1972) and
If on a winter's night a traveler
(1979). Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.