The Watcher and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  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 num
bers 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.