Thiago and the Ants of Hollywood

He was wary and suspicious of everything, even his own shadow. He had just arrived in Los Angeles from Uberlandia in Brazil and lived in a walk-up apartment. There was no television. He began to feel the cold before the arrival of winter, but, refusing to give in, bought a second-hand jacket for fifteen dollars from the Salvation Army Store on Fairfax Avenue. Now he felt snug.

He got a job delivering pizza for a Domino’s in Hollywood and from then on spent his nights lost on the boulevards of the entertainment capital of the world. He was always late, blundering around desperately with his cold pizzas. Since he rarely got a tip, he had to be content with his eight-fifty an hour wages and the curses of his customers. Since he understood almost no English, he would let it pass and go off to the next delivery. Arriving home exhausted, he only wanted to devour the pizza slathered with salami and jalapeno cheese that all the workers were entitled to, and afterward fall into bed and rest his tired bones.

Since he always saved two pieces for breakfast, he began to get suspicious when in the morning the pad covered with tomato sauce was untouched in its cardboard box. Not a single ant was interested in it. Could it be that the gringos were so evolved that they had done away with all the ants here?

One night when Thiago went to take out the trash to the container near the elevator, he saw an ant apparently lost, wandering in the hallway. Immediately he decided to follow it to find out where it lived. The insect went past the trash container to the second floor, trailing the distraught Brazilian, who could no longer live with the mystery that had tormented him since he arrived in LA. He was sure that after this he would sleep better and learn something new about America.

At the end of the corridor, the ant stopped. Thiago stopped too. They looked at each other. As he was by nature a worrier, he began to fear that someone would see him snooping and call the police. The cops were not his worst fear-- that was reserved for the Migra. Thiago knew that the guys from the Immigration Department in L.A. could be sadistic, heartless b******s. The agents derived a special pleasure in torturing poor souls who had left their countries in search of a better life in America. Before deporting them they would not forget to subject them to a dose of shame and humiliation.

The ant continued to face him as if it were considering alternatives in the present situation. Thiago was considering giving up when the ant slipped under one of the apartment doors. He could hear the sound of the television in the hall. It was one of the best mystery films of all time, considered by many as the first of the film noir genre, made in 1941. The Maltese Falcon, adapted from the novel by Dashiell Hamett and directed by John Huston, had Humphrey Bogart in the role of Sam Spade, a private detective trying to solve a deep mystery. He gets involved with Mary Astor, playing the role of a client, a mysterious femme fatale, who feeling threatened, offers him a small fortune to retrieve a priceless statue of a falcon. But both her pursuer and a man charged to protect her end up dead, and the plot, well devised by Huston, combined mystery, romance, and suspense.

From the serious tone of his voice, it was easy to tell that in the present sequence Bogie was trying to convince the lady to go to bed with him. One could hear incoherent but certainly seductive whispering. Between hearing the song of old Humphrey and going after the ant, Thiago chose the latter and moved left until he found the apartment window, which was identical to his. There was no one in the living room" he had entered in pursuit of his ant and was almost having a heart attack.

Everyone knows that in the society of ants the fertile females are the queens who do nothing except procreate and that the sterile workers spend their lives slaving away, but the clump of ants under the sofa appeared not to have any class issues. Avidly watching Huston’s film, they seemed resolved to stay until Bogie had solved the mystery and won the lady’s heart.

So this it how it was"how had he not seen it before? There were no ants in his abode because he didn’t have a TV. Now he understood the ants of Hollywood were more interested in films than in leftover pizza.