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WHEN WE came to settle here we did not know about the ants. We’d be all right here, it seemed that day; the sky and green looked bright, too bright, perhaps, for the worries we had, my wife and I—how could we have guessed about the ants? Thinking it over, though, Uncle Augusto may have hinted at this once: “You should see the ants over there… they’re not like the ones here, those ants…” but that was just said while talking of something else, a remark of no importance, thrown in perhaps because as we talked we happened to notice some ants. Ants, did I say? No, just one single lost ant, one of those fat ants we have at home (they seem fat to me, now, the ants from my part of the country). Anyway, Uncle Augusto’s hint did not seem to detract from the description he gave us of a region where, for some reason which he was unable to explain, life was easier and jobs were not too difficult to find, judging by all those who had set themselves up there—though not, apparently, Uncle Augusto himself.

On our first evening here, noticing the twilight still in the air after supper, realizing how pleasant it was to stroll along those lanes toward the country and sit on the low walls of a bridge, we began to understand why Uncle Augusto liked it. We understood it even more when we found a little inn which he used to frequent, with a garden behind, and squat, elderly characters like himself, though rather more blustering and noisy, who said they had been his friends; they too were men without a trade, I think, workers by the hour, though one said he was a clockmaker, but that may have been bragging; and we found they remembered Uncle Augusto by a nickname, which they all repeated among general guffaws; we noticed, too, rather stifled laughter from a woman in a knitted white sweater who was fat and no longer young, standing behind the bar.

And my wife and I understood what all this must have meant to Uncle Augusto; to have a nickname and spend light evenings joking on the bridges and watch for that knitted sweater to come from the kitchen and go out into the orchard, then spend an hour or two next day unloading sacks for the spaghetti factory; yes, we realized why he always regretted this place when he was back home.

I would have been able to appreciate all this too, if I’d been a youth and had no worries, or been well settled with the family. But as we were, with the baby only just recovered from his illness, and work still to find, we could do no more than notice the things that had made Uncle Augusto call himself happy; and just noticing them was perhaps rather sad, for it made us feel the difference between our own wretched state and the contented world around. Little things, often of no importance, worried us lest they should suddenly make matters worse (before we knew anything about the ants); the endless instructions given us by the owner, Signora Mauro, while showing us over the rooms, increased this feeling we had of entering troubled waters. I remember a long talk she gave us about the gas meter, and how carefully we listened to what she said.

“Yes, Signora Mauro…. We’ll be very careful, Signora Mauro…. Let’s hope not, Signora Mauro…”

So that we did not take any notice when (though we remember it clearly now) she gave a quick glance all over the wall as if reading something there, then passed the tip of her finger over it, and brushed it afterward as if she had touched something wet, sandy, or dusty. She did not mention the word “ants,” though, I’m certain of that; perhaps she considered it natural for ants to be there in the walls and roof; but my wife and I think now that she was trying to hide them from us as long as possible and that all her chatter and instructions were just a smoke screen to make other things seem important, and so direct our attention away from the ants.

When Signora Mauro had gone, I carried the mattresses inside. My wife wasn’t able to move the cupboard by herself and called me to help. Then she wanted to begin cleaning out the little kitchen at once and got down on her knees to start, but I said: “What’s the point, at this hour? We’ll see to that tomorrow; let’s just arrange things as best we can for tonight.” The baby was whimpering and very sleepy, and the first thing to do was get his basket ready and put him to bed. At home we use a long basket for babies, and had brought one with us here; we emptied out the linen with which we’d filled it, and found a good place on the window ledge, where it wasn’t damp or too far off the ground should it fall.

Our son soon went to sleep, and my wife and I began looking over our new home (one room divided in two by a partition—four walls and a roof), which was already showing signs of our occupation. “Yes, yes, whitewash it, of course we must whitewash it,” I replied to my wife, glancing at the ceiling and at the same time taking her outside by an elbow. She wanted to have another good look at the toilet, which was in a little shack to the left, but I wanted to take a turn over the surrounding plot; for our house stood on a piece of land consisting of two large flower, or rather rough seed beds, with a path down the middle covered with an iron trellis, now bare and made perhaps for some dried-up climbing plant of gourds or vines. Signora Mauro had said she would let me have this plot to cultivate as a kitchen garden, without asking any rent, as it had been abandoned for so long; she had not mentioned this to us today, however, and we had not said anything as there were already too many other irons in the fire.

My intention now, by this first evening’s walk of ours around the plot, was to acquire a sense of familiarity with the place, even of ownership in a way; for the first time in our lives the idea of continuity seemed possible, of walking evening after evening among beds of seeds as our circumstances gradually improved. Of course I didn’t speak of those things to my wife; but I was anxious to see whether she felt them too; and that stroll of ours did, in fact, seem to have the effect on her which I had hoped. We began talking quietly, between long pauses, and we linked arms—a gesture symbolic of happier times.

Strolling along like this we came to the end of the plot, and over the hedge saw our neighbor, Signor Reginaudo, busy spraying around the outside of his house with a pair of bellows. I had met Signor Reginaudo a few months earlier when I had come to discuss my tenancy with Signora Mauro. I went up to greet him and introduce him to my wife. “Good evening, Signor Reginaudo,” I said. “D’you remember me?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “Good evening! So you are our new neighbor now?” He was a short man with spectacles, in pajamas and a straw hat.

“Yes, neighbors, and among neighbors…” My wife began producing a few vague pleasant phrases, to be polite: it was a long time since I’d heard her talk like that; I didn’t particularly like it, but it was better than hearing her complain.

“Claudia,” called our neighbor, “come here. Here are the new tenants of the Casa Laureri!” I had never heard our new home called that (Laureri, I learned later, was a previous owner), and the name made it sound strange. Signora Reginaudo, a big woman, now came out, drying her hands on her apron; they were an easygoing couple and very friendly.

“And what are you doing there with those bellows, Signor Reginaudo?” I asked him.

“Oh… the ants… these ants…” he said, and laughed as if not wanting to make it sound important.

“Ants?” repeated my wife in the polite detached tone she used with strangers to give the impression she was paying attention to what they were saying; a tone she never used with me, not even, as far as I can remember, when we first met.

We then took a ceremonious leave of our neighbors. But we did not seem to be enjoying really fully the fact of having neighbors, and such affable and friendly ones with whom we could chat so pleasantly.

On getting home we decided to go to bed at once. “D’you hear?” said my wife. I listened and could still hear the squeak of Signor Reginaudo’s bellows. My wife went to the washbasin for a glass of water. “Bring me one too,” I called, and took off my shirt.

“Oh!” she screamed. “Come here!” She had seen ants on the faucet and a stream of them coming up the wall.

We put on the light, a single bulb for the two rooms. The stream of ants on the wall was very thick; they were coming from the top of the door, and might originate anywhere. Our hands were now covered with them, and we held them out open in front of our eyes, trying to see exactly what they were like, these ants, moving our wrists all the time to prevent them from crawling up our arms. They were tiny wisps of ants, in ceaseless movement, as if urged along by the same little itch they gave us. It was only then that a name came to my mind: “Argentine ants,” or rather, “the Argentine ant,” that’s what they called them; and now I came to think of it I must have heard someone saying that this was the country of “the Argentine ant.” It was only now that I connected the name with a sensation, this irritating tickle spreading in every direction, which one couldn’t get rid of by clenching one’s fists or rubbing one’s hands together as there always seemed to be some stray ant running up one’s arm, or on one’s clothes. When the ants were crushed, they became little black dots that fell like sand, leaving a strong acid smell on one’s fingers.

“It’s the Argentine ant, you know…” I said to my wife. “It comes from South America…” Unconsciously my voice had taken on the inflection I used when wanting to teach her something; as soon as I’d realized this I was sorry, for I knew that she could not bear that tone in my voice and always reacted sharply, perhaps sensing that I was never very sure of myself when using it.

But instead she scarcely seemed to have heard me; she was frenziedly trying to destroy or disperse that stream of ants on the wall, but all she managed to do was get numbers of them on herself and scatter others around. Then she put her hand under the faucet and tried to squirt water at them, but the ants went on walking over the wet surface; she couldn’t even get them off by washing her hands.

“There, we’ve got ants in the house!” she repeated. “They were here before, too, and we didn’t see them!”—as if things would have been very different if we had seen them before.

I said to her: “Oh, come, just a few ants! Let’s go to bed now and think about it tomorrow!” And it occurred to me also to add: “There, just a few Argentine ants!” because by calling them by the exact name I wanted to suggest that their presence was already expected, and in a certain sense normal.

But the expansive feeling by which my wife had let herself be carried away during that stroll around the garden had now completely vanished; she had become distrustful of everything again and made her usual face. Nor was going to bed in our new home what I had hoped; we hadn’t the pleasure now of feeling we were starting a new life, only a sense of dragging on into a future full of new troubles.

“All for a couple of ants,” was what I was thinking—what I thought I was thinking, rather, for everything seemed different now for me too.

Exhaustion finally overcame our agitation, and we dozed off. But in the middle of the night the baby cried; at first we lay there in bed, always hoping it might stop and go to sleep again; this, however, never happened and we began asking ourselves: “What can be the matter? What’s wrong with him?” Since he was better he had stopped crying at night.

“He’s covered with ants!” cried my wife, who had gone and taken him in her arms. I got out of bed too. We turned the whole basket upside down and undressed the baby completely. To get enough light for picking the ants off, half blind as we were from sleep, we had to stand under the bulb in the draft coming from the door. My wife was saying: “Now he’ll catch cold.” It was pitiable looking for ants on that skin which reddened as soon as it was rubbed. There was a stream of ants going along the windowsill. We searched all the sheets until we could not find another ant and then said: ‘‘Where shall we put him to sleep now?” In our bed we were so squeezed up against each other we would have crushed him. I inspected the chest of drawers and, as the ants had not got into that, pulled it away from the wall, opened a drawer, and prepared a bed for the baby there. When we put him in he had already gone to sleep. If we had only thrown ourselves on the bed we would have soon dozed off again, but my wife wanted to look at our provisions.

“Come here, come here! God! Full of ’em! Everything’s black! Help!” What was to be done? I took her by the shoulders. “Come along, we’ll think about that tomorrow, we can’t even see now, tomorrow we’ll arrange everything, we’ll put it all in a safe place, now come back to bed!”

“But the food. It’ll be ruined!”

“It can go to the devil! What can we do now? Tomorrow we’ll destroy the ants’ nest. Don’t worry.”

But we could no longer find peace in bed, with the thought of those insects everywhere, in the food, in all our things; perhaps by now they had crawled up the legs of the chest of drawers and reached the baby…. We got off to sleep as the cocks were crowing, but before long we had again started moving about and scratching ourselves and feeling we had ants in the bed; perhaps they had climbed up there, or stayed on us after all our handling of them. And so even the early morning hours were no refreshment, and we were very soon up, nagged by the thought of the things we had to do, and of the nuisance, too, of having to start an immediate battle against the persistent imperceptible enemy which had taken over our home.

The first thing my wife did was see to the baby: examine him for any bites (luckily, there did not seem to be any), dress and feed him—all this while moving around in the ant-infested house. I knew the effort of self-control she was making not to let out a scream every time she saw, for example, ants going around the rims of the cups left in the sink, and the baby’s bib, and the fruit. She did scream, though, when she uncovered the milk: “It’s black!” On top there was a veil of drowned or swimming ants. “It’s all on the surface,” I said. “One can skim them off with a spoon.” But even so we did not enjoy the milk; it seemed to taste of ants.

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.”

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.

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 manure 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.

My wife and I climbed the path and gazed down from the balustrade at the little house where we lived and which was still unfamiliar to us, at our patch of uncultivated land and the Reginaudos’ garden looking like a warehouse yard, at the Braunis’ garden looking as regular as a cemetery. And standing up there we could forget that all those places were black with ants; now we could see how they might have been without that menace which none of us could get away from even for an instant. At this distance it looked almost like a paradise, but the more we gazed down the more we pitied our life there, as if living in that wretched narrow valley we could never get away from our wretched narrow problems.

Signora Mauro was very old, thin, and tall. She received us in half darkness, sitting on a high-backed chair by a little table which opened to hold sewing things and writing materials. She was dressed in black, except for a white mannish collar; her thin face was lightly powdered, and her hair drawn severely back. She immediately handed us the key she had promised us the day before, but did not ask if we were all right, and this—it seemed to us—was a sign that she was already expecting our complaints.

“But the ants that there are down there, Signora…” said my wife in a tone which this time I wished had been less humble and resigned. Although she can be quite hard and often even aggressive, my wife is seized by shyness every now and then, and seeing her at these moments always makes me feel uncomfortable too.

I came to her support, and assuming a tone full of resentment, said: “You’ve rented us a house, Signora, which if I’d known about all those ants, I must tell you frankly…” and stopped there, thinking that I’d been clear enough.

The Signora did not even raise her eyes. “The house has been unoccupied for a long time,” she said. “It’s understandable that there are a few Argentine ants in it… they get wherever… wherever things aren’t properly cleaned. You,” she turned to me, “kept me waiting for four months before giving me a reply. If you’d taken the place immediately, there wouldn’t be any ants by now.”

We looked at the room, almost in darkness because of the half-closed blinds and curtains, at the high walls covered with antique tapestry, at the dark, inlaid furniture with the silver vases and teapots gleaming on top, and it seemed to us that this darkness and these heavy hangings served to hide the presence of streams of ants which must certainly be running through the old house from foundations to roof.

“And here…” said my wife, in an insinuating, almost ironic tone, “you haven’t any ants?”

Signora Mauro drew in her lips. “No,” she said curtly; and then as if she felt she was not being believed, explained: “Here we keep everything clean and shining as a mirror. As soon as any ants enter the garden, we realize it and deal with them at once.”

“How?” my wife and I quickly asked in one voice, feeling only hope and curiosity now.

“Oh,” said the Signora, shrugging her shoulders, “we chase them away, chase them away with brooms.” At that moment her expression of studied impassiveness was shaken as if by a spasm of physical pain, and we saw that, as she sat, she suddenly moved her weight to another side of the chair and arched in her waist. Had it not contradicted her affirmations I’d have said that an Argentine ant was passing under her clothes and had just given her a bite; one or perhaps several ants were surely crawling up her body and making her itch, for in spite of her efforts not to move from the chair it was obvious that she was unable to remain calm and composed as before—she sat there tensely, while her face showed signs of sharper and sharper suffering.

“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 neighbors 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.