“You’re over-reaching, Salvador. Pushing your luck. Flirting with excess and exception, when the truth is you’re not exceptional at all but just a mule like me, made to work and live an honest proportionate life. Go back to two pounds, Salvador. Two maximum. And please, for the love of God and His angels too, dump some aromatic salts in that bathtub . . .” And then the lips stopped moving in that impress of dough and the voice faded out.
But there it was, revelation from the mouth of a flour tortilla, and the next day, despite the complaints of his customers—human beings, just like him—he went back to the standard-sized burrito. Trade fell off. He had to let Marta go and then Oscar too. The chickens went back to their henhouses and the hogs to their pens and the aliens trooped out across the lot to wherever they’d parked their spaceship and whirred off into the sky in a blaze of light, still traveling as day turned to night and the stars came out to welcome them home.
THE ARGENTINE ANT
(PACE CALVINO)
The baby had been ill, we’d exhausted our savings and our patience too, equally weary of the specialists who seemed to specialize only in uncertainty and of the cramped noisy conditions of our apartment in student housing, so when the chance came to rent the place in Il Nido we jumped at it. We’d never been that far south, but my uncle Augusto had lived in this particular village during the happiest period of his life and had never stopped rhapsodizing it—and since the rent was a fraction of what we were paying for our apartment and my fellowship would provide us with a small but steady income for the coming year, there was nothing to stop us. Provided that the baby stayed healthy, that is. At sixteen months, he was a fine, sturdy-looking child, whose problem—a super-sensitivity to touch, which might have been dermatological in origin or perhaps neurological, depending on which specialist you talked to—seemed to be improving as he grew into the squat stance of his chubby legs. Would there be specialists in this flyspeck of a fishing village on the tip of the southern peninsula? Pediatricians? Neurologists? Dermatologists? Not likely. But in a way, that would be a relief, since his condition was hardly life-threatening and the various diagnoses and explanations for it were more worrisome than the condition itself. No, what our son needed was to get out from under the impress of our dreary northern clime, with its incessantly dripping gutters, and into the sunshine where he could bask and thrive—and, no small consideration, so could we.
A Signora Mauro was the landlady, and our connection with her was through my uncle, who’d rented the house from her twenty years back when he was between marriages and working on a novel that was never published. I don’t remember anything of the novel, portions of which he’d read aloud to me and my sister when I was a boy and he was occupying the guest room over the garage, but I recall vividly his portrait of the village and the tranquillity he’d found there, though, in retrospect—in light of what fell out, that is—I suppose this was fiction too.
My wife and I questioned nothing. This was an adventure, pure and simple. Or more than an adventure: an escape. We took the train and then a succession of buses, the last of which deposited us in front of Signora Mauro’s rambling house in the village, and all the time the baby was well-behaved and my wife, Anina, and I stared out the jolting windows and dreamed of a long period of respite in our lives, she no longer trapped in a minimum-wage job as a temporary secretary and I free to work on solving the projective algebraic problem known as the Hodge Conjecture and thereby winning the one-million-dollar Millennium Prize, a sum that would set us up handily for some time to come. Did I have unrealistic expectations? Perhaps. But I was twenty-eight years old and terminally exhausted with the classroom and academic life, and it is a truism that mathematicians, like poets, do their best work before thirty. So we packed our things, boarded the express and found ourselves on Signora Mauro’s doorstep in the sun-kissed embrace of Il Nido.
The house we were to rent was on a bluff overlooking the sea and it was crowded between two others—both, like ours, modest single-story structures of two or three rooms. Signora Mauro, exhibiting traces of a former beauty that was now for the most part extinct but for the low-level radiation of her eyes, found two men to help carry our things up the parabolic hill to the house on the bluff and spent the next quarter hour showing us the essentials—how to light the gas stove and regulate the temperature of the refrigerator and such—before nudging me to hand over a few crumpled bills to each of the workmen and then vanishing down the hill, looking satisfied with herself.
It took no more than half an hour to put away our things—clothes, books, baby paraphernalia, a box of kitchen items Anina had insisted on bringing along though the house had come furnished and the essentials were all in place—and get a quick impression of the living space. There were three rooms—kitchen, bedroom, sitting room—as well as an indoor bathroom featuring a grand old claw-foot tub big enough to bathe armies, and the casement windows in back gave onto a narrow elongated garden (or former garden: it was dried up and skeletal now) that ended in a low hedge and another fifty feet or so of scrub that fell away to the ocean below. “Look, Anina,” I called, pushing through the back door and out into the yard, “there’s space for a garden! We can grow tomatoes, squash, cucumbers. Beans, beans too.”
My wife, so reticent in public, so proper (humorless, was how my mother put it), was anything but in private. She took a critical view and always seemed to see things for what they were while I tended to romanticize and hope for the best. I watched her come out the door to me, after having set the baby down in his carrier at the foot of our new bed, where he’d promptly fallen asleep. She was grace incarnate, the wafting streamers of her hair caught up in the breeze she generated, her hips rotating in the earthy way that defined her and her lips parted as if in passion, but what she said wasn’t at all graceful or passionate. “You call this a garden? It’s nothing but stones and leached-out soil.”
“The house has been sitting empty—what do you expect? Some seeds, a little water, manure—”
“Where’s the water? I don’t see any water.”
I snatched a look round me. There was a birdbath—or former birdbath—set beside the central path that bisected the yard, the blistered remnants of a wheelless bicycle that looked as if it had been there since Uncle Augusto’s time and a rusted watering can snarled in a tangle of yellowed vines, evidence that the garden had once been provided with water. “But there”—I just now looked behind me to the whitewashed wall of the house to discover the faucet and a length of ancient hose coiled beneath it. I pointed. “What do you call that?”
She didn’t say a word but just walked back up the path to the house, bending to the hose bib as if to twist open the valve and prove me wrong, when she pulled up short and let out a low exclamation. “My god,” she said, the voice dwindling in her throat. “What is that?”
What it was—and I hurried across the yard to see for myself—was a black sinuous ribbon of ants emerging from the ground beneath the hose bib to flow up the wall of the house and vanish into a crevice where the stucco met the overhang of the roof. I didn’t react at first, rooted in fascination over this glistening display of coordination and purpose, a living banner composed of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals in permutations unfathomable (though already I was thinking in terms of algorithms). “Ants,” I heard my wife declare. “I hate ants.”
Without going into detail about her unhappy undergraduate romance with a biologist at the university who happened to be ten years her senior, married and a myrmecologist to boot, I’ll just say that when she snatched up the hose and leveled it on that column of ants she saw nothing fascinating about the creatures—quite the opposite. The hose flared, a stream of water jetted out and the ants fell away, only to mass at the base of the wall, realign themselves and start climbing again, this time in two separate ribbons that converged just above the locus of the spray.
“That won’t help,” I said. “It’s only temporary.”
My wife abruptly
shut off the faucet. “You’ll have to go into the village for poison then. Some sort of powder, what is it? My father used to use it. You sprinkle it along the base of the walls—”
“We can’t use poison here, are you crazy?” I said, thinking of the baby, and in that very moment a high sputtering scream echoed from the depths of the house. We stared at each other in horror, then my wife dropped the hose and we both bolted for the bedroom only to discover that the floor had been transformed into a sea of ants—dislocated ants, angry ants, ants that had fled the wet and come to the dry—and that the baby, all considerations of skin tone aside, was black with them.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here was a child whose condition one specialist likened to the feeling of having phantom ants crawling all over him, and now the sensation was real and the ants no phantoms. He threw back his head in his extremity, screeching till we thought his lungs would burst while I lifted him out of the cradle and my wife tore off his terrycloth pajamas, balled them up and employed them in frantic quick jerks to swipe the ants from his torso and limbs. They were everywhere, these ants, foaming in miniature waves over our sandals to work their way between our toes even as they scurried up our fingers and arms where we came into contact with our son. When finally we’d succeeded in brushing him clean, I went for the broom and attacked that roiling black horde with a pestilential fervor until many thousands of them, crushed and exuding their peculiar acidic odor, were swept out the door and into the courtyard. The baby, whimpering still, was in my wife’s arms as she rocked with him, cooing little nonsense syllables to soothe him, and the remaining ants retreated into one of the crevices where the tile of the floor joined the wall. “This is intolerable,” my wife spat, spinning and rocking, but with her eyes fixed on me like a pair of tongs. “We can’t live here. I can’t live here—not like this.”
I told her, in a quiet voice, though I was seething too, that we really had no choice in the matter, as we’d already put down a deposit and first and last months’ rent and that I had my desk to set up and my work on the prize to do if we ever hoped to rise to the next level.
“The prize?” She threw it back at me. “Don’t make me laugh. You’re going to become a millionaire by solving an all but impossible problem that every other mathematician in the world is probably working on right this minute—without ants? In real houses, in university offices, with air-conditioning, polished floors and no insects at all!”
This stung. Of course it did. Here we hadn’t been in our new home—in our new life—for more than an hour and already she was questioning the whole proposition, and worse, my abilities, my intellect, my faith in the exceptionalism that set me apart from all the others. I’d been close to a solution—it had floated there, just out of reach, for months now, a matter of discovering and applying the right topology—and I knew that if I could just have these months of tranquillity here by the sea to focus my mind, I could do it. I dropped my voice still lower. “I’m going to try.”
A long moment transpired, I standing there in the doorway to the bedroom, she bouncing the baby, before she turned to me again, conceding the point but obstinate still, upset, her nerves frayed by the move and the baby’s fragility and everything given figurative expression in these swarming insects that didn’t even belong here, migrants from across the sea in South America. “All right,” she said, biting her lower lip and swinging round on me with the baby as if she’d taken him hostage, “but you’d better find a solution to this problem, to these, these pests, before you even think about sitting down at that desk.”
We hadn’t eaten, either of us, and as it was now late in the afternoon, I thought I’d walk down to the village to pick up a few things for a quick meal—bread, cheese, salami, a fiasco of wine, milk for the baby—and take the opportunity to inquire about whatever non-toxic powders and sprays might be available for application, anything to discourage the ants—especially after dark. I had a grim vision of tossing all night in a strange bed as the ants boiled up from a crack in the floor and made a playing field of the expanse of my flesh. And my wife’s. I could already foresee hanging the baby’s cradle from a hook in the ceiling like a potted plant—ants couldn’t fly, could they? Or not this species, anyway. In any case, I’d just started down the flagstone path for the front gate when I heard music (jazz violin, sensuous and heartrending over the rhythmic rasp of the bow) drifting across the yard from the house next door and a low murmur of voices punctuated by laughter. On an impulse—and out of a feeling of neighborliness, that too—I changed direction and made my way to the low hedge that separated our property from that of the house next door and peered over.
I was immediately embarrassed. Here were my neighbors, a man and woman in their forties and dressed in swimsuits—he in trunks and she in a two-piece that left little to speculation—staring up at me in surprise. They were seated at a glass-topped table, sipping Campari and soda, and they both had their bare feet propped up on the two unused chairs in the set of four. She was dark, he was fair, and they both looked harmless enough—in fact, once over their initial surprise they both broke out in broad smiles and the woman, whose name, I was soon to learn, was Sylvana, cried out, “Hello, there! You must be the new neighbor.” And the husband: “Come join us. You must. I insist.” And then the wife: “No need for formality—just hop over the hedge. Here, come on.”
I was dressed in khaki trousers and a rayon shirt with sleeves I’d rolled up to the elbows, nothing formal, certainly, but here they were all but naked, so I put away my scruples and vaulted the hedge, and if I came away with a handful of ants where I braced myself atop the vegetation to swing my legs and hips over, it was nothing to eliminate them with a covert clap of my hands. Neither husband nor wife rose, though the wife shifted her (very shapely) legs to prop her feet on the same chair as her husband’s, making room for me. I sat and we made our introductions—he was Signor Reginaudo (“Call me Ugo”)—and soon I was enjoying a cool Campari with ice and a slice of lemon.
How long was it before I began itching? Minutes? Perhaps even seconds? Both the Reginaudos let out a little laugh. “Here,” Sylvana said, a flirtatious lilt to her voice, “put your feet up beside mine—”
It was then that I noticed that the legs of the chairs—and the table as well—were anchored in old pomodoro cans filled with what I presumed to be water, and it was my turn to laugh. “The ants,” I said, and suddenly we were all laughing, a long riotous laugh shot through with strains of relief, frustration and commonality, a laugh of friendship and maybe desperation too. Nodding his head and giggling till he had to steady himself with a deep draught of his Campari and a hyperactive pounding of his breastbone, Ugo repeated the noun, the plural noun, as if it were the most hilarious term in the language.
This was succeeded by an awkward pause, during which I became aware of the violin again and we simultaneously sipped our drinks, trying not to look too closely at the stems, leaves, fronds and petals that surrounded us as if in some miniature Eden for fear of spoiling the illusion. Every blade of grass, every stone, every object in that yard was animated by a dark roiling presence as if the earth itself had come to life. Sylvana gave me a look caught midway between mortification and merriment and I heard myself say, “We have ants next door too,” and then the three of us were howling with laughter all over again.
“This is a fact of life here in Il Nido,” Ugo began, once he’d recovered himself (again, with a gulp from his glass and a rapid thrust of one fist to his breastbone), “but we’ve devised ways of dealing with it.”
I lifted my eyebrows even as Sylvana shifted her feet so that her sun-warmed toes came into contact with mine and rested languidly there.
“Hydramethylnon,” he pronounced, giving me a tight grin. “That’s the ticket.”
A frown of irritation settled between his wife’s eyebrows. “Nonsense. Sulfluramid’s the only way to go.”
Ugo shrugged, as if to concede the point. “Azadirachtin, pyrethrum, spinosad, methop
rene, take your pick. They’re all effective—”
“At first,” Sylvana corrected.
Another shrug. He held out his palms in a gesture of helplessness. “They adapt,” he said.
“But we stay one step ahead of them,” Sylvana said. “Isn’t that right, darling?” Her tone was bitter, accusatory. “One step ahead?”
Ugo pushed himself impatiently up out of the chair, his fair skin showing a pink effusion of sunburn across the shoulders and into the meat of his arms. “What is this, a debating society?” he demanded. “Come, friend, follow me out to the shed and I’ll give you a good healthy sample of them all—and you can decide for yourself which is best.”
I was on my feet now too, gazing down on the gap between Sylvana’s breasts and the long naked flow of her abdomen, which, I have to admit, stirred me in spite of myself.
“Come,” Ugo repeated. “I’ll show you what I’ve got.”
“But what about the baby?” I gazed from him to Sylvana and back again even as I felt the itch start up in my feet and ankles. “He gets into everything. Worse: everything goes in his mouth.”
“That’s a baby for you,” Ugo said. “But this stuff’s harmless, really. Even if he—is it a he or she?”
“He.”
“Even if he somehow gets into it, it won’t do him any harm—”
“Ha!” the wife exclaimed, stretching her legs so that I could see the muscles of her inner thighs flex all the way up to the tiny patch of cloth that covered the mound where they intersected. “And it won’t harm the ants either. Least of all the ants.”
Though I felt a bit tipsy from the effects of the alcohol on an empty stomach, I had no problem vaulting the hedge with two large shopping bags full of various cans of insect powder Ugo had insisted I take, including one labeled “Ant-Away” and another called “Anti-Ant.” When I entered the house to tell my wife what I’d discovered, I saw that both she and the baby were asleep, Anina stretched out diagonally across the bed and the baby tucked in beside her, and perhaps because I wasn’t exercising the soberest of judgment, I spread a healthy dose of Anti-Ant along the base of the outside walls, and, for good measure, dumped a can of Ant-Away (active ingredient malathion, whatever that was) atop it. I didn’t see any ants in the house and I suppose I didn’t really look all that hard for fear of what I’d uncover, but instead made my way back down the hill to the grocery.