Every night, the second-class passengers partied. There was a group that washed dishes in the kitchen by day and played for our dances by night. They were all Italians, and many of them were Communists who sympathized with the Chilean turn toward socialism. Sometimes they asked for a volunteer from the audience to come up onstage to sing or do magic tricks or tell jokes. When we came into port, they disappeared en masse and spent every minute they could at some brothel. Back on board the first night after we set out to sea again, they were so exhausted that they couldn’t perform and we had to settle for music from a record player. The rest of the crew were calmer about shore calls and many didn’t even disembark in port. The passengers bade farewell to those leaving the ship for good by waving handkerchiefs from the gangway, though moments later many of them also went ashore for a brief touristic visit. When I asked a Peruvian woman returning from Italy why the departing passengers’ friends didn’t say their goodbyes on dry land, her reply was that it was more romantic this way.
Sometimes we talked politics. At my table, the student returning from Europe declared himself a Christian Democrat. His German wife said that she was a Democrat, and the Spanish Jesuit claimed to be a leftist, broadly speaking, not specifying any particular party. At the neighboring table, Dora Montes said she wasn’t interested in politics, while her sister confessed her sympathies lay on the right, and Johnny Paredes claimed to be resolutely apolitical (going so far as to idiotically declare: “After extensive study of the scene, I’ve chosen to opt out”). The Peruvian businessman, who was transporting pipes and tools bought secondhand in Panama and who was obsessed with Peruvian customs procedures, which he was constantly plotting to get around—he planned to pass off his cargo as personal baggage—murmured that he leaned slightly toward APRA, the indigenist party. The person I spent the most time talking to was the Jesuit. One night, leaning on the railing with Rita Pavone songs playing behind us, he lectured me on Erasmus and Spinoza’s thinking as it related to the Latin American liberation struggles. In gratitude, I made him read my best story, about an extraterrestrial invasion. The extraterrestrials are a lot like ants: small, strong, organized, but more technologically advanced than man. The first spaceships to reach Earth (there are three of them) measure five feet long, one foot tall, and eighteen inches wide. At first, their intentions are peaceful. Talks are held with the United Nations, the ants are welcomed, and the ant ships remain in orbit around the planet, with the occasional mysterious foray over some small town, remote crossroads, or mountain range that no one has ever heard of. But after ninety days, when the hopes and expectations aroused by their presence are beginning to wane, two of the ships abandon their orbit in the stratosphere and land on a plantation in Jefferson County, West Virginia. It’s a tobacco plantation, and it belongs to John Taeger. The county sheriff is alerted by the frightened landowner, and soon the plantation is overrun by state and federal authorities, policemen, soldiers from the Pentagon, television cameras, rubberneckers, etcetera. The extraterrestrial ants emerge from their ships in small flying contraptions no more than two inches in diameter and they open rudimentary channels of communication with the North American authorities. Meanwhile, other ants have begun to bore holes and raise towers constructed of something like fine, crisscrossing wire. After five hours, the Earth authorities decipher the message: the ants have decided to take possession of the place. The president of the United States, the UN Security Council, the world’s top ufologists, and the higher-ups at the Pentagon are informed, but in the end no agreement is reached. The Taeger family is simply advised to abandon their house, and the plantation is surrounded by a strong security barrier. That night, of course, no one sleeps: not the agents controlling access to the plantation, not the national radar defense systems, not the reporters waiting for any news at the scene, not the sandwich and T-shirt vendors who’ve arrived at the plantation, and not John Taeger, who has roundly refused to leave his house and spends the night sitting on his porch, sometimes weeping bitterly, other times trying to find the positive side of this new and unexpected situation. The president of the United States calls the Soviet prime minister twice. The Soviet prime minister calls the American president once. The ants, surveilled with infrared equipment by the military police and the FBI, work all night. The next morning, the explosive news mysteriously appears in the papers. Not only do the extraterrestrial ants plan to uproot the Taeger family, they’ve laid claim to all of Jefferson County. The news, rapidly picked up by newspapers and TV channels all over the world, provokes contradictory reactions. At first, American public opinion is divided: there are those who refuse to relinquish a single square foot of sovereign soil and those who see the plans of the extraterrestrial insects as an opportunity for technological exchange; cooperation in the space race (with the ants’ help, they’ll show the Russians a thing or two); accelerated progress in astronomy, physics, astrophysics, and quantum mathematics—all in exchange for a fairly poor, rural county wholly devoted to the monoculture of a low-grade strain of tobacco. The next day, poor John Taeger suffers a heart attack, and meanwhile all kinds of meetings take place. The talks follow one after the other at a feverish pace. The Jefferson County Rotary Club proposes that the ants be deeded a similar piece of land in Honduras. The European and Warsaw Pact ambassadors trust that the American president will keep his head and try to bring matters to a peaceful conclusion. The experts make calculations: if there are five to ten thousand ants in the two ships that have landed on Taeger’s farm, and if the ants are capable of reproducing on Earth, and if they have the power to eliminate their natural enemies, and if their lives are double or even triple as long as those of native Hymenoptera or Neuroptera, and if what they seek is found in abundance in Jefferson County (everything seems to indicate that this is so), it will be at least one hundred years before they demand to be granted another county with similar characteristics. Still, the voices of the warmongers grow louder on that first day of deliberations: a massive attack on the Taeger plantation, by air and by land, could wipe out the extraterrestrials in a single strike; a deal could be struck with the ship that is still orbiting the Earth, negotiated from a position of strength, or an agreement could be reached later, or the ship could be shot down; any other solution will only make the ants stronger, causing the extraterrestrial cancer to spread in the United States and ultimately all over the world. The day ends in exhaustion and expectation. The ants, per observers’ reports, haven’t stopped working for an instant. The next day, the president of the United States reaches a decision. The extraterrestrials are informed that the land they’ve claimed is the private property of John Taeger, who has no intention of selling it at this moment. In addition, whether for sale or not, his lands lie under the jurisdiction and flag of the United States of America; and therefore the ants must immediately cease their extraterrestrial excavations and/or construction, under the sun or underground, in Jefferson County, and immediately send a delegation to the White House to discuss the terms of their projected stay in the United States and on Earth in general. The ants’ response is curt: they haven’t come to despoil anyone, their intentions are essentially commercial and peaceful, they’ve chosen a rather small and not very populous county—basically, they don’t think it’s a big deal. Subsequent demands receive no response. The soldiers believe it’s their turn to act. They plan to attack with overwhelming force, though on a limited scale, dropping bombs within a one-mile radius of the point where the two spaceships are still perched. The extraterrestrials maintain their silence, which some advisers interpret as indifference or even arrogance. After a full day of hesitation, the president gives the order to bomb. The area around Taeger’s house and two other farms is evacuated, along with a crossroads made famous back in the day by a Colonel Mosby (his actions are commemorated on a moldy plaque that no one thinks to rescue), and the bombing gets underway. Planes drop a considerable quantity of bombs that have been successfully tested in Vietnam. But everything goes wrong. The few bombs that actually fall are neutralized by what a few science fiction writers, guests on live TV, describe with undisguised glee as a
magnetic force field or an electromagnetic protective barrier. And most of the planes are shot down by a mysterious ray from the sky, soon identified by experts as issuing from the ship still in orbit around the Earth. But the ants’ response is not simply to repel the attack. The ship’s death ray—as it is dubbed by the tabloids—is immediately trained with hair-raising precision on the White House, reducing it to ashes. All of those present in the building are killed in the attack, including the president of the United States (Richard Nixon) and most of his advisers. The vice president (Spiro Agnew) takes over, putting Strategic Air Command on maximum alert, though minutes after being sworn in he’s dissuaded by his own staff and others from launching a nuclear attack on West Virginia. A ground skirmish, led by the West Virginia National Guard and a commando unit specializing in biological and chemical warfare, ends in disaster, with the soldiers charred to the bone. After the storm, there is calm at last. The new American president suspends all preparations for war. The perimeter of the Taeger plantation, surrounded by security forces, is abandoned. The troops that could previously be seen moving through some Jefferson County towns vanish. As the weeks go by, the de facto sovereignty of the ants—or at least their free usufruct of Jefferson County—is established. Many of its inhabitants abandon their homes and move to California. Others wait to see what will happen. But nothing happens; they’re able to remain in their houses, they’re able to drive the roads unhampered by ant checkpoints, they’re able to leave the county and return without being bothered. In fact, very few people have seen the extraterrestrial ants at all, and in some newspapers in Idaho and Montana (and several Latin American papers) voices question whether the ants really exist. For those who live close to the old Taeger plantation, however, things have changed: no one dares to step on an ant, let alone an anthill; in summer, insecticide is used only inside, on the assumption that the extraterrestrials would never fall into such an obvious trap. All over the world, especially among writers and artists, cases of zoopsia are up 1,000 percent. Some attribute this to a rise in alcoholism and drug use. Others, more diplomatic, see it as a case of sensitive souls responding to a future threat. One day, every radar system on Earth registers the takeoff of the two ships remaining in Jefferson County. Shortly afterward, before anyone can really believe it, the news spreads all over the world. Of the three ant ships, one is still in orbit around the Earth and the other two have disappeared into the vastness of space, probably on their way back to their home planet. On the old Taeger plantation, according to spy plane photographs and the occasional bold interloper, things have scarcely changed: there are five braided-wire towers scarcely five feet tall, spaced sixteen inches apart, with the small wasp ships hovering around them every so often. The rest of the colony is clearly underground. No one in Jefferson County has yet made physical contact with the extraterrestrials. In view of this new situation, the Pentagon proposes another attack. The president hesitates or pretends to hesitate. He consults with friendly powers, who advise him to talk to the Russians, but the president and his staff believe that the Soviets are capable of disclosing their plans to the ants. The president has many considerations to weigh, but ultimately it’s the vision of the White House and its nuclear-proof underground bunker in ruins that prevails. To the relief of many, a détente is reached. A new era begins on Earth. The United Nations offers the ants a seat in the permanent assembly, a seat that they reject for the sake of decorum. Despite everything, fluid communications are established between Earth dwellers and extraterrestrials. A group of experts who have gathered along the property line of the old Taeger plantation, where they set up their machinery and tents, state that it will be at least fifty years before the extraterrestrials outgrow Jefferson County, since it’s been two months and they have yet to reach the house’s backyard. As time goes by, greater knowledge of the ants will make them more accessible and therefore more vulnerable. Papers are published and a few conclusions are reached: the ants subsist on a different diet than their sisters on Earth; everything seems to indicate that they possess no written language; their culture is oneiric; the land on which they’ve settled hasn’t undergone noticeable surface changes. All of these conclusions are partial, of course. According to the local farmers, the ants eat ants. A tour guide at the Great Pyramid in Teotihuacán says that he’s seen extraterrestrial ships no bigger than a pack of cigarettes hovering near the many anthills around the pyramid. The Earth ants are led one by one into the spaceships. A missionary priest in the Amazon claims to have witnessed an epiphany (God forgive me) above a swarm of red ants in the region of Manicoré. According to the missionary, the red ants were raised silently into flying objects that looked a lot like black boiled eggs, riddled with cracks. Around the nest, the red ants clambered over one another instead of fleeing, as if trying to touch their antennas to the eggs that…