In this story, the unnamed narrator moves to a seaside town with his wife and their baby, even though Uncle Augusto had warned them about the ants.
“You should see the ants over there … they’re not like the ones here, those ants,” said Uncle Augusto.
But really, how bad can some ants be?
However, it turned out that in this nameless city in a nameless place, everything was covered with ants. Not only the houses and the fences and the gardens and all the tools and the guts and all the food and the bags that the food came in, but all the people and their children and the mattresses and the children’s toys. The ants were actually inside the children’s noses and ears and crawling into the babies’ eyes. Endless numbers of ants still breeding, ferocious little bastards who cared about nothing or anyone but filling their little blood-soaked ant mouths.
So the nameless narrator (let’s call him Bob) asks his neighbors for help.
“What do you do about all these ants?” asks Bob, or words to that effect.
(For some reason, Calvino wrote in Italian. Maybe because he was from Italy—his choice, not mine. Every quote in this column, in fact the whole damn column, is a rough translation of mine. You can call me Bob.)
“What do you mean?” some neighbors answer.
“What are you talking about?” ask others.
It seems that the way most people deal with it is to deny that there are any ants at all, even when the ants are all over them, biting them… biting them everywhere, biting their children, eating the food they just bought at the market, even when they keep the food at home, stuffing the food on the children’s plates.
A neighbor invents a machine to crush ants: drag them to a place and then crush them into ant paste. “I’m smarter than any ant,” says this neighbor. “Sooner or later I will solve the problem, in my house, anyway.” But he doesn’t.
It is very expensive and time-consuming to invent, build and distribute ant traps, and even when he does, the slippery ant paste simply attracts other ants, who take the nutritious and smelly food home to the ant nest, to feed the other ants – the baby ants.
Then one day, unbidden, the government’s Ant-Man arrives, with the government-approved solution to the ants. Ant-Man enters Bob’s house without asking permission, as he does with all the neighbors, then begins to smear a sweet-smelling, molasses-like substance in the corners, along the baseboards, in the closets, on the baby’s mattress, in fact, everywhere in Bob’s house.
“Stop!” Bob cries. “What are you doing?” But Ant-Man shows him a badge and proceeds to smear molasses, which is suspected to contain powerful formicides.
Bob runs to his friendlier neighbor, who is in their adjoining yards, hitting ants with the flat side of a shovel.
“What’s going on?” Bob pleads, pointing to the giant, armored Antmobile parked on their lawn. “Is that really a government man?”
“Animal,” the man replies.
“Does he have permission to paint my house with molasses?”
“Ayup. Gummint says the ants turn the molasses into their nests and the p’isin kills them all.”
“And you do it?”
“No, sir.”
“But people believe it?”
“Animals.”
“But the ants are biting my child, eating his food, biting my wife.”
“Animals.”
“Is there any way I can get him out of my house?”
In response, the man bent down and picked up another shovel and handed it to Bob.
“Use the flat side,” he said.
(Erratum: There weren’t actually an infinite number of ants in this horrible village; a later group counted only 77,302,580, plus one named John Fetterman.)
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