Red ants

Red ants are the relentless occupants of a Spanish sergeant’s shack in Rio del Rio, where their annual migration turns an isolated colonial outpost into a cramped contest over space and food. Their presence makes the shack a comic miniature of the colony’s hardship: even a can of cassoulet offered in kindness cannot be left unattended without attracting the ants’ collective assault.

The Shack and Its Occupants

Bardamu encounters the sergeant at a stony promontory near the meeting of two rivers, close to a cataract whose noise gives the meeting an almost infernal setting. The sergeant has lived alone in his shack for three years, and the ants have been marching through it for nearly two months. They occupy almost all the available space; anyone who gets in their way is bitten hard. The colony’s most visible inhabitants are thus not the human officials but the mass of insects that dictates how a person can move inside his own home.

Food Under Siege

The sergeant has survived for years on tomatoes, having consumed more than three thousand cans. Tired of preparing them in different ways, he has taken to sucking them through two small holes in each lid. When Bardamu gives him cassoulet, the ants recognize the unfamiliar food and gather to guard it. A freshly opened can cannot safely be left standing: the ants would summon the rest of the colony to it. Their response turns an ordinary meal into a risky event and exposes how completely their migration governs domestic life.

Narrative Significance

The red ants extend the episode’s running portrait of colonial isolation, where survival depends on improvised routines and the human inhabitants have little command over their surroundings. Their occupation is both a concrete nuisance—the bites, the lost space, the threatened food—and a source of bleak humor. The sergeant’s peculiar method of eating canned tomatoes and his guarded cassoulet make the ants’ intrusion feel less like a grand calamity than a relentless, intimate pressure on an already narrow existence.