LatinosUSA

A short story in Vietnamese by Trần Băng Khuê
Translator: Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

1.

He hates ants.

All species, the entire family of formicidae.

Black ants, red ants, big ants, small ants, clawed ants, pharoah ants.

People come up with wonderful ways to elevate “virtue”, like how ants are diligent and hard working. In general, they use such metaphors to dignify their virtue. Ants, naturally are noted in paragraphs, in literature. Ants, the formicidae family, a topic he is beginning to find rather nonsensical and irrelevant, a boring and lazy way to teach and convey the aptitude of morality.

He hates ants.

They are everywhere and they come in hordes, armies of them line up in a row each time they find a feast. Then again, that is not the real reason he finds them detestable. There are a few other reasons. Though, rather unfounded. To put it simply, he finds them a bother. Their existence in hordes is not unlike the way people are racing each other to populate the earth. People find him mumbling constantly something like, “How is it possible that they are everywhere?”. He finds them in every hole in the house, in the cracks of the wall, on the window sill. They even make themselves available around the latches and key holes.

They can be found in every corner and alley way. Even on the termite nests formed overnight after the rain. He would watch the few ants stray from their colony, swinging precariously, crawling around slowly on his arm, eyes, and nose. Not once were they afraid. Upon nightfall, before he goes to sleep, he has the unusual habit of using a torch to check for ants on his blanket and tatami mat. He is rather relaxed when he is doing it, he’s not out to kill the small petty creature the way he would mosquitoes. Patiently. He would gently coax them onto his hand before releasing them on the ground. He is fascinated by the painting of An Ant Tomb sitting in the dark. Painting is his way of retaliating against the existence of the pesty creatures in his life. A maze reserved for the ants. The maze has the shape of a round tomb – deep, with lots of caves and caverns, endless turns and tunnels, but without a way out.

Sometimes, he would find the ants congregating in groups, they would carry the dead mosquitoes he had killed and thrown on the floor, marching like battalions of soldiers. As though they were performing some kind of sacrifice. The dead mosquito is the ants offering. To them, he is lazy, useless and wasteful. More than often he would find them picking on him. They crawl all over his hand, onto his face, into the dark and hidden places on his body, to simply bite him gently out of their affection for him, so he can at least acknowledge their existence. The mosquitoes entertain no such thing. They crave blood. And when he is on the attack, there is no holding back. Plus, blood is their sustenance. And blood sucking creatures are not his concern. Since he knows they do not discriminate, they do not care where the blood comes from. Though, they, these blood sucking mosquitoes, he’s pretty sure that: “They would choose the most pungent blood to hunt down first”.

2.

Before he knew it, ants became his obsession, his concern. Not necessarily are those mosquitoes. Even though, the mosquitoes were the ones on a constant hunt for what is red inside his body daily with the dark.

3.

He was in the middle of painting a horde of ants, (the whole formicidae family and the caverns in the ground). There was a sudden knock on the door. He couldn’t be bothered standing up. There is nothing he finds fascinating about interacting with people. The knocks on his door were steady and constant but grew louder. He refused to move from his spot. But his curiosity grew. He thought about who the person might be out of all the people he knew. No one was close to him enough for him to bother about. He has no energy to entertain people beyond his personal space. The knocks on the door became more urgent the third time. He moved his arm in the motion of utter exhaustion, chucking his paintbrush on the floor. He opened the door. A rather eccentric being seemed to have fallen out of the sky was right there at his doorway. It has the body of a person, clearly, but its head is that of an ant. Long whiskers and glasses. In the formicidae world, it has to be some kind of Professor. He stared at the eccentric creature. The creature studied him from head to toe. Before the Ant person proceeded to push him aside and enter his house. It walked toward the painting of the ant maze. It opened its mouth, its hairy ant finger pointed at the painting asking, “Is this where we will live, at the heart of darkness?”.

“At the heart of darkness”, as he repeated what the Ant person had said and thought about what he was trying to build, create a piece that could permanently bury the ants, to satisfy his frustrating dark desire. On the other hand, he understood that he was Human – not Ant. Humans are greedy. As for his desire? Now and then creating a tomb in a painting turned him on. He will bury the ant species in it. Then the cockroaches, rats and mosquitoes. Such disgusting creatures should be eliminated from such a beautiful world. The Ant person was quiet, its whispers were like the sound of the wind in his ear, “what will happen when all living things turn into human beings?”

He turned to look at the Ant person in the face. The Ant person, within that very moment, had disappeared. And the disappearance did not bother him. All he cares about is whether it is there or not? He dropped his brush after another glass of wine. He stared and stared again at his painting. He had no control then over his faculty. He had been drinking before he had even started on the painting, at “the heart of darkness” of the Ant tomb. He finds himself meandering the tiny caves, going in and out, turning left and then right inside a maze without an exit to escape danger. But at that very moment, the Ant person appeared, chasing him out of the heart of darkness. He screamed: “I will imprison all of you in here. And we’ll see how diligent, and hard working you will be, before you can find your way out?”. Then he thought, might as well, and it could be fun to throw a dead mosquito here and there in there for a nice plot twist. In his heart he hated the ants. But, if he were to really give it more thought, he finds that, he was more excited about killing all those mosquitoes.

He tried to sober up, tried to concentrate. He finds himself standing in front of an unfinished painting of a tomb. Nothing but a painting with ants lining up in a row, marching around a spot of undefined colour of the soil. Without much thought he reached out and grabbed the clc electric racket with a three-month battery life, with no warranty and waved it up and down. The dead mosquitoes constantly fell to the ground. Exciting the ants not in the painting. They aligned in rows, getting themselves into formation right in front of him. The ants in the paint stopped moving, they stopped crawling. He saw the human body with the ant head raised its feather duster, like a conductor of an orchestra. The ant from the heart of darkness formed two lines like performers on a stage. And it was not long before he felt his body was being sucked into a giant painting of a tomb. An entire world of ants surrounded him.

4.

Once, he had dreamed about his glorious death. He saw his body being carried away by a horde of ants like he was their sacrifice. And at the head of the procession was the Ant person marching grandly to the sound of music just for ants.

5.

Winter came as a surprise to his sparsely decorated room. He was barely alive. There were no ants to take him anywhere. Rather, it was the opposite, he was surrounded, battling, trying to defend himself from being the target of the mosquitoes. Because his blood was pungent and intoxicating.

He more than understood, he thought about ending such a lonely existence. He tried to kill himself. He tried to find the meaning tucked between what is there and what is not. What is the meaning of passion? Creativity? There was nothing he found interesting, ultimate high in this life. It’s at least fortunate that he can paint. Something to do, to kill time. He has to paint, he has to finish whatever he had started. He hates people who are not committed. Like how he has to finish the painting of the Ant Tomb. He looked deeper into the heart of darkness, the ant caves and caverns, the painting was a mess. He was unsatisfied with the colour of the tomb. While the mosquitoes continued to attack his skinny malnourished body.

6.

The sunrise round and just right peaked over the top of the mountain, and perched there right on top of the holey canopy. The farmers heading out on to the fields discovered the hordes of ants, lots and lots of ants. Big and small, ants the colour of cockroaches, red and black ants, or armies of tiny pharoah ants. They all line up, row after row, line after line, marching down the well worn path. A couple of curious spectators followed them. Then, people were shouting, wide eyes, witnesses to a terrifying death none of them had ever seen before. A dry and shrivelled dead body in the middle of a painting of an ant tomb. The hollow of his eyes, like a maze, was full of ants. And, dead mosquitoes with their fat bellies full of blood, spattered all around him. Some of the mosquitoes were so full they couldn’t fly, their suckers still pinned on the dead body.

The daily herald published a rather short article about the strange and mysterious death of a man with long hair who lived behind a grove at the foot of the sacred mountain. The people who lived in the surrounding part of the forest were adamant that, the rather eccentric painter had violated a forbidden domain of spirits. And, hence, he must die.

That part of the forest shrivelled up through the chill. The turn of the seasons. 

People who work in the fields in the highlands, still cut through the same worn path to head up the mountain to seed the land. But, this year, no one amongst them cares for the harvest. Now and then, they feel as though they were lost in a maze the shape of the ant tomb in the painting by the artist who had died.

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Trần Băng Khuê, born in Vietnam in 1982, lived for a period in Auckland, New Zealand. A talented writer and an aspiring artist who currently lives and work in Huế, Vietnam.

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm, the blogger, poet, and translator, was born in 1971 in Phu Nhuan, Saigon, Vietnam. The pharmacist currently lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia.