He then described for me the extent of human ignorance. Aristotle, he said, believed that flies were generated from rotten meat. The Bible held that the rabbit and the hyrax chewed their cud. ‘The poor fools,’ he whispered, lowering his voice as he always did when holding an insect. ‘The ignoramuses! And for sheer misinformed stupidity, nothing beats that fable of the cicada and the ant. Why, the cicada winters underground in larval form and doesn’t need any favours from the ant! And in summer it’s the ant, more rapacious than industrious, that robs the cicada of its labours.’
I was ten years old. I still remember the feel of the cicada’s hard body between my fingers as it struggled to kick free with sturdy legs. Pinness showed me how it sucked juice from the bark of an apple tree while a long row of dark little ants, attracted by the sweet smell, ascended the tree in a black stream. The lead column attached itself to the cicada’s beak and clambered over its back, sipping the drops of juice that trickled from the apple bark and giving off a bad, aggressive smell of formic acid.
‘Take a good look,’ said Pinness. ‘“Go to the ant, thou sluggard” – to that beggarly swindler of a parasite that practises its piracy in broad daylight under the aegis of King Solomon and his proverbs and of that bourgeois Aesop, La Fontaine.’
Grandfather was not interested in creatures like the cicada. Insects that neither helped nor harmed his fruit trees did not concern him. Sometimes, to be sure, the cicadas left a red ring on the peel of the fruit, but Grandfather did not consider this a defect. Once, hoeing next to him in the orchard, I found a cicada larva in its deep tunnel, living in utter night and clinging to a root from which it sucked its sustenance. Pale, clumsy, and bleary-eyed from the darkness, it wriggled slimily in my hand.
With Pinness’s help I also saw the final stage of the cicada’s metamorphosis. ‘It’s a matter of luck,’ he had warned me – and just then a pupa emerged from the ground and looked for a bush to ascend. It was slow and awkward, but its eyes glittered blackly.
‘The matrix is now ready to receive light and form,’ Pinness whispered. ‘For the light is sweet and a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold,’ he said. We sat down on the ground, and my teacher put his hand on mine. The pupa gripped the bush, began to climb, and stopped. As though slit by an invisible knife blade, the chrysalis split lengthwise down the back.
Little by little the adult cicada emerged from its baby suit. Still moist and weak, it wriggled its legs slowly while the damp robe of its wings began to harden. We sat watching for three hours as the sunlight and air filled its veins and its yellowish hue turned green and then grey-brown. Suddenly it let go of the shrub and flew off, and all at once – drunk with the pride of accomplishment, the passion for life, and its own existence – it joined its loud, exhorting voice to the chirps of its comrades.
Pinness grew pensive. ‘You’ve seen something today that few people ever see,’ he said to me as we walked home. He took my hand.
‘All his days he eateth in darkness,’ he quoted. ‘For four years he burrowed in the ground, and now he has four weeks to sing in the sweet light of the sun. Is it any wonder that he’s so lusty and loud?’
Those words impressed me greatly. When I related them to Grandfather, however, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. ‘Pinness knows a great deal,’ he said, ‘but he spins a lot of tall tales around his insects. How does anyone know that the larva in the ground is sad? Or that the cicada in the tree is happy? Pinness takes human feelings and gives them to insects.’
But back then, in the fields of my childhood, my teacher looked at me and smiled, happy to give, to educate, to influence. Young though I was, I understood that he was doing his best to make something of me. I knew that he and Grandfather sometimes argued about me, and I stretched out my neck like a big calf to be lavishly petted by both of them.
‘Isn’t being an orphan enough without your burdening him with all your tragedies?’ Pinness asked over a nocturnal bowl of olives.
I lay in bed with Fabre’s insect book on my chest, a loan from Pinness, feeling blissful when I heard Grandfather reply:
‘He’s my child.’
It was only years later that Pinness admitted his entomological rhapsodies were baseless and had been uttered simply for their effect on me, to win me over to the study of nature. ‘The magic spell animals cast on human beings is nothing more than a form of egotism that confirms our own prejudices. We domesticate cattle, train birds, and dress monkeys in top hats to reassure ourselves that we are the crowning act of Creation.