Joan Weldon in “Them!” (1954)
Warm weather has finally arrived in southern Maryland and with it, of course, ants. When my family moved here years ago, I felt overwhelmed with swarms that seemed everywhere. After I saw the film Poltergeist, I wondered whether our house had been built on some sacred ant burial site, prompting the ants to wreak revenge.
I called our county extension agent and he basically said that complaining about ants was like complaining about the weather. Years later, when we were selling our house and needed an exterminator, we discovered that there was a large colony within one of our walls.
Maryland ants, however, are a picnic (should I use that metaphor?) compared to the “crazy ants” that have been invading southern Texas. (“Crazy ants” is their actual name.) According to one article, they are “mysteriously attracted to electrical equipment,” sometimes causing power shutdowns, and they have the potential to devastate ground-dwelling bird populations, just as, in the past, Texas fire ants devastated the quail population.
Which reminds me of the apocalyptic H. G. Wells story that enthralled me as a boy and an even more frightening tale, “The Argentine Ant” by Italo Calvino, that I read more recently. If we can’t stop ants, at least we can write fiction about them.
Wells predicted in “The Empire of the Ants” (1905) that ants would one day take over the world. An encounter with these ants in the Amazon changes the worldview of British engineer Holroyd:
[I]n England he had come to think of the land as man’s. In England it is indeed man’s, the wild things live by sufferance, grow on lease, everywhere the roads, the fences, and absolute security runs. In an atlas, too, the land is man’s, and all colored to show his claim to it–in vivid contrast to the universal independent blueness of the sea. He had taken it for granted that a day would come when everywhere about the earth, plough and culture, light tramways and good roads, an ordered security, would prevail. But now, he doubted.
And further on:
In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men in the whole world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few thousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilization that made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But what was to prevent the ants evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived in little communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concerted efforts against the greater world. But they had a language, they had an intelligence! Why should things stop at that any more than men had stopped at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organized war?
Things came back to him that [Captain] Gerilleau had gathered about these ants they were approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes. They obeyed greater leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were carnivorous, and where they came they stayed…
I like that ellipsis, which is the author’s. The story concludes with one of Wells’ famous predictions:
By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as they are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway, and force themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist. By 1920 they will be halfway down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or ’60 at the latest for the discovery of Europe.
Okay, so army ants aren’t swarming over Europe. Calvino’s tale, on the other hand, appears entirely plausible. “The Argentine Ant” (in The Watcher and Other Stories) begins quietly enough and then becomes a terrifying allegory of modern day life.
A couple and their baby move to what appears to be an idyllic house by the sea, only to discover that the entire town is infested with “the Argentine ant.” They freak out when they discover ants crawling on their child. One gets into his ear. Their neighbors, they learn, have been fighting the ants for years.
One couple has purchased a bewildering array of poisons, none of which work. Another man devises elaborate ant traps, including one where ants are enticed across a thin wire with a bend in it that drops them into a gasoline bucket:
“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.
Different classes respond differently. The upper class landlady refuses to acknowledge that the village has an ant problem, even as ants crawl all over her body. The lower class villagers have fatalistically surrendered to the ants. Only the middle class villagers think they can do anything. The narrator finds himself thinking of nothing else:
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.
“Argentine Ant” is Calvino at his Kafkaesque best. The story effects me because of my own ant experiences, but it also functions as an allegory about how small irritants come to dominate our lives and preoccupy our waking consciousness. Instead of ants, we could be talking about the deluge of e-mails and texts, car problems, cluttered houses, dirty dishes, dirty laundry, constant bills, student papers and exams, committee reports, overgrown lawns, weeds in the garden, health issues, weight regimens, political anxieties at home, political anxieties abroad, work place tensions, retirement anxieties, concerns about the children, unending insurance forms (car, house, health, retirement, flood, theft), grocery shopping, house repairs, unending commercials…should I go on or have you already fled the room?
After watching Calvino’s family go through its ant nightmare, we cling with relief to the image of clean, white shells that ends the story. The family has found temporary refuge in a walk by the seaside:
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-sinned 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.”
Unfortunately, in a few minutes they will have to get up and return to their house. The screams that you hear will be your own.
