The Argentine Ant - an overlooked classic of absurdist, fabulistic fiction by the master of the absurd and fabulous, Italo Calvio.
At forty pages, The Argentine Ant could be classified as either a brief novel or a long short story, but no matter how you look at it, this tale packs a serious punch, a tale aptly described by Goodreads friend Paul as both funny and menacing at the same time.
The first line features foreshadowing with a vengeance: "When we came to settle here we did not know about the ants." The unnamed first-person narrator moves into a tiny rustic house with his wife and baby boy, a house built on a rough seedbed where they have been given permission to grow vegetables by the seller of the house, Signora Mauro, who lives up the hill.
In the evening, after putting their baby to sleep, Alessandro and Benedetta (my names for the narrator and his wife) venture out to visit their nearby neighbors. They hail Signor Reginaudo who is busy spraying around his house with bellows. The Signor lets off spraying and calls to his wife Claudia to come out to meet the new couple. Following an exchange of pleasantries, Alessandro asks Signor Reginaudo what he is doing with the bellows. "Oh . . . the ants . . . these ants . . . " the Signor replies with a laugh as if not wishing to make it sound important. "Ants?" Benedetta asks in a rather detached voice but the group's brief conversation quickly moves on to another topic.
Once back home, exhausted from their day's journey, our young couple decides to go straight to bed. But before lights out, Benedetta walks to the kitchen for a glass of water. Hearing Benedetta scream, Alessandro rushes to the kitchen and turns on the light.
Ants. Ants crawling all over the faucet, a thick stream of ants coming up the wall, ants now covering both their hands, so many ants Benedetta and Alessandro must vigorously shakes their wrists to prevent the ants from crawling up their arms. Finally, ridding their hands of the ants, they return to bed and, completely exhausted, doze off. But they are awoken in the middle of the night by their baby's cries. Benedetta rushes to his basket to find their baby boy covered in ants. The next morning Alessandro resolves he must initiate "an immediate battle against the persistent imperceptible enemy which had taken over our house."
"Our house," you say. Oh, Alessandro, like so many other humans who view the world in anthropocentric terms, it might be more accurate to recognize that you have moved into a territory belonging to Argentine ants.
In his alarm, Alessandro consults Signor Reginaudo and his wife about a remedy for the ants. Their reply is vintage Italo Calvino: "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!"
Poor Alessandro! The Reginaudos are little help. He's sent off to see a Captain Brauni, the man who really knows how to deal with those ants. Upon arrival to the good Captain's abode, Alessandro scans all varieties of odd contraptions with streams of ants moving back and forth until, in one case, dropping into a sort of meat can at the bottom of a wire.
HIs question anticipated, here's the explanation Alessandro is given: "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."
Next stop has Alessandro dealing with the ant man who pays a visit to his own house and surrounding properties. Perfect. Now that the Argentine Ant Control Corporation is on the case, the ant problem will surely be solved. Sorry, Alessandro. Perhaps predictably, the ant man does more to exacerbate the problem than solve it.
Ah, those ants! How should we most effectively deal with the problem? Answers are various: laugh it off, have a drink and forget about it. blame it all on the ant man, Italo Calvino proves himself a master by taking one issue and constructing a rich, forty-page tapestry of humans confronting a hostile non-human world. Again, a tale that's both humorous and menacing at the same time.
The Argentine Ant is included in The Watcher and Other Stories and can also be read online: https://classic.esquire.com/article/1...
Italian author Italo Calvino, 1923-1985
"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 aide, 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." - Italo Calvino, The Argentine Ant.
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