Julio and the Ants

It was a heavy, hot day. It was so hot that even in the early
morning when people awoke they felt their limbs pressed to the bed by
the weight of the still air. It was best to stay still in this weather.
That suited Julio fine. The ants were all he was interested in, and he
didn't have to move to see them. At the end of the rocky path that led
away from the road behind him, he knew that his mother was not sitting
still in the rickety wooden house. She was washing sweat-sodden clothes
in the iron bath or fixing a new hole in the disintegrating wood of the
walls. Her arms and face would be covered in sweat. Julio knew from
bitter experience the unpleasant prickling all that wasted water would
cause on her skin. But at that moment he was not thinking about
that.

If he had told his mother about the ants she would have rolled her eyes
to heaven and then continued with whatever chore she had happened to be
doing at the time. But Julio found them fascinating. He was old enough
to know that during these long holidays he had to find his own
amusement. It was a long way into town and there had been rumours of
trouble in the capital, so his mother said. He was safest out here in
the dry valley, away from the town, she had added. To while away the
long dull hours he had offered to help her with her jobs once or twice.
She had rolled her eyes up to heaven and muttered 'Madre de Dios'. Only
once did she offer any explanation. She had thrown his school shirt,
which she had been scrubbing, into the murky hot water in the bath and
said in an exasperated voice, 'It is you job to learn and grow up tall
so you can look all men in the eye; it is my job to keep you
clean.'

Julio had not offered to help again. Soon afterwards he found the ants.
They moved in a long slow line which, like a river, travelled along but
remained in the same place. This chain of ants was marching in a
straight line right across the cracked tarmac and earth that made up
the road into town. When his eyes got used to picking out the little
shiny bodies from the broken road surface he realised that the long
chain was in reality two, one heading away from his house, the other
towards it. He peered closely at a small section of these parallel
chains to see if he could work out what they were doing. What he saw
deepened his interest into fascination. The ants heading outwards, away
from the shack, carried nothing - they hurried along as though they
were late and impatient with the ones in front. The ones going the
other way on the other hand were not hurrying. They were carrying
little things, pellets of something in their jaws. Some held their tiny
heads up high as though they were proud to be burdened in this way.
Julio watched them on his hands and knees, his head sinking closer to
the tarmac as he tried to glimpse every last detail of this strange
procession.

After a while though the heat reflecting up off the ground and into his
face, and the hot stones digging into his knees became too much and he
felt dizzy. He pulled himself up to his feet and ran back to the house.
He poured himself some water from the bucketful his mother had brought
up from the well that morning and poured some more into an empty bottle
that stood nearby. His mother was hunched over whatever task she was
doing and did not look round until he had stoppered the bottle and was
on his way out. Then she glanced over shoulder with a watchful eye.
Julio hurried out into the sun again.

He was going to find the source of the strange pellets those ants were
carrying. Some of them were brightly coloured and this interested him,
but he was still really concentrating on the ants. He wanted to know
why they were performing this odd ritual. He was sure he was going to
find out what made them do these strange things and he set off, full of
enthusiasm. But the route the ants took was hard to follow - it
wandered here and there and went under things - stones and folds in the
earth - where Julio could not follow. After some time he found himself
further from home than he had expected, and not sure whether he had
passed the ants' destination, or whether there was still further to go
before he reached it. He wiped his brow and took a swig of his now warm
water. The bottle was more than half-empty. He looked around him. The
desiccated peaks of the hills were turning golden and the sun had
swollen in the sky. Julio straightened his tired legs. He had to go
back. If he was not inside and at the table by dark he knew that his
mother would begin to wander aimlessly around in their small patch of
ground wringing her hands and wailing imprecations to God. Julio did
not want to put her through such misery again. He abandoned the ants
and hurried over the dry earth towards his home.

Though he had given up trying to find the source of the ants' pellets,
his mind refused to let the creatures themselves slip. He pulled the
sheets tight around him and stared into the flickering light that came
under the door from the other room while he thought. He envied the
ants, he realised. He envied their determination - he imagined the tiny
trail of prints each of those purposeful feet had made in the dust on
the road. They had somewhere to go, something to do, while all he could
do was watch them. He envied their co-operation as well. In that long
string of creatures, he thought, nobody was doing more or less work
than anyone else. The ones that were not carrying anything yet soon
would be, and the ones who did have a pellet would have their unladen
turn.

The light went out in the other room, and distracted him. That meant
that his mother had finished her prayers and huddled herself up on a
pile of ragged sheets in the corner of the room. Julio gripped the
lumpy mattress with one hand. When he had grown up enough to sleep on
his own she had taken herself off to that uncomfortable pile of rags.
Julio still felt uncomfortable about it. Every morning she woke up
looking haggard and grey and sent the day slaving away for him. He
always woke up rested but with nothing to spend his energy on. He had
offered to swap his bed for her rags, during the holidays at least, but
she had bared her teeth and made as if to slap him. 'You should get
used to beds,' she had snapped 'I expect you always to sleep in beds
like other men'. So the arrangement had remained. Julio closed his eyes
in the cool darkness and thought about the ants. He suspected that they
all slept in the same kind of bed.

Next day he spent by the side of the ants at the side of the road.
Early in the morning he went to look for their nest. He found it not
far from the house, but it wasn't as interesting as the columns
crossing the road. The ants there just seemed to wander to and fro
waving their feelers lazily. Julio was disappointed in them and went
back to where the little creatures acted with purpose. Though what he
was watching never outwardly altered Julio was still entranced by it.
Sometimes an ant had taken on a load that was too big for it, and its
feet flailed in the dust. Sometimes an unladen ant would run down the
length of the column stopping every so often as though to check on the
well-being of those who were carrying the mysterious pellets. The more
Julio saw in this minute society the closer his face got to the trail
of scurrying ants.

There were disruptions of course. Every so often a car or a truck would
rumble past on its way in or out of town, right over the ants. The
first time this happened Julio was terrified for them. When the cloud
of dust had subsided he crouched in the centre of the track wondering
where they had gone. To his surprise, within minutes the columns had
reformed themselves and were continuing as though nothing had happened.
The only effect of the incident was the presence of more wandering
ants. Julio watched one of them find a crushed comrade who had been
thrown far from the column by the heavy wheels. He was impressed by
their ability to put their grief behind them until the job in hand was
done. When the vehicles rolled past afterwards he no longer worried
about the creatures. He knew they could look after themselves.

Though his confidence in the ants was unshaken he was surprised to find
himself shaking in the early evening. He had been crouching in the
centre of the road, concentrating so hard on the columns that he hadn't
heard the truck approaching until it was almost on him. As he started
up and the sound of the horn began to blare in his ears the truck
seemed to dart out of vision, then come back into it, safely passing to
one side ofhim, skittering over loose stones, its sides shaking as
though it too was terrified. As it passed he heard over the roar of the
engine the driver's final comment on this scruffy lunatic.
'Hijo de puta! Son of a whore!' This was accompanied by a gesture from
a hairy arm which continued dangling outside the cab until the shabby
truck had disappeared around a long bend.
Normally such an insult would have thrown Julio into a seething
impotent rage, but instead he threw himself down on the scrubby ground
away from the road pinching himself in disbelief. He was so bewildered
by what had just happened that he even forgot about the ants for a few
minutes. When the trembling subsided a little he sat up and tried to
clean then dust from his eyes. He stared through one, then the other,
trying to assess whether it hurt to blink or to look left or right.
While he was doing this he caught sight of a lump under a blanket on
the other side of the road. It hadn't been there before. It must have
fallen from the truck as it swerved to avoid him. As soon as he could
master his quivering legs he went over to have a look.

The thing lay in a peculiar shape on the ground, but it was one he
thought he recognised. He ran forward and lifted one corner of the
coarse woven brown blanket. An eager grin spread across his face. It
was what he thought it was. He looked around quickly but the landscape
was as deserted as ever. Only the ants would be able to tell what he
was doing. He wrapped the blanket around the object and bent to lift
it. He struggled for a few minutes, then sat, defeated, on the ground.
It was too heavy. He aimed a kick at the thing and stared at it angrily
with sore eyes.

After a few minutes his temper left him and he began to think. Without
any obvious prompting, the image of the ants stole into his mind. Like
them he now had a purpose. If he was to succeed he had to model his
behaviour still more on them. He wandered over to where the ants still
marched, seemingly endlessly, across the road. He watched them for a
while with a strange half-smile on his face. Then he turned back back
to the bundle, knelt beside it, pulled back the blanket and set himself
to work.

As he lay in bed that night the job was half done. The movements of his
mother in the next room seemed to him to be more laboured than before,
and he wore a slight frown on his face in the dark. But then, he
reasoned, whatever the ants were doing with those pellets had taken
more than a day. And tomorrow his mother would be going into town to
buy the few vegetables they could afford each week. There was no chance
of her discovering what he was doing until he had finished. He turned
over in his bed as the light went out next door. The frown had gone but
his face remained serious, concentrating.

The following evening Julio lay by the road with his head in his hands.
His limbs were pleasantly tired, slightly twingeing from all the effort
they'd been put to, but not painful. He looked at all the ants with
affectionate eyes. They had taught him well. He had taken what was
under the blanket piece by piece over the road as though it was made up
of little pellets. Then, he presumed, like the ants in the nest under
the ground, he had assembled all the fragments into a single,
organised, and to him, thrilling whole. It was not long now before his
mother was due back from town. He imagined contentedly how her lined
face covered with dust from the hot wind would light up when she saw
what he had done for her. Even better was the idea of her tired eyes
relaxing almost immediately into sleep that night as she got into her
gleaming new brass bed. As the sun quietly prepared for its trip below
the horizon even the ants seemed to be languid, as though, like Julio,
they had all but finished their tasks and were about to take the
contented rest that came with a job well done.