Insectopedia (38 page)

I think it was also that day that Karim told me about catching
houara
when he was little. I think it was that day—although it could have been earlier, as the bus worked its way into the sunset across the plains from Maradi, or it could have been in a taxi at another time altogether, as we drove onto Kennedy Bridge past the U.N. billboard that celebrates the “Rights of the Child,” or it might even have been before we left Maradi, driving back from Dan mata Sohoua along the only road in Dakoro, a road lined with signs for international development agencies (just as the main drag in a U.S. town is lined with signs for motels and fast-food restaurants). Anyway, it was on one of those occasions that Karim told me about catching
houara
when he was little. It was in the village close to Dandasay where he grew up. It was a favorite game. All the children played. They’d make a light to draw the insects and catch as many as they could, the more the better. There was no shortage, and the winner was the one who caught the most. It was a simple game but a happy one, he said.

In Japan, the crickets sing in fall, giving voice to the season’s transience and its reassuring melancholies. But in Florence, writes the folklorist Dorothy Gladys Spicer in her
Festivals of Western Europe
, the cricket arrives in spring as a symbol of renewal, and its song is the soundtrack to lengthening days, to life lived outdoors, and on Ascension Sunday in the Parco delle Cascine, the city’s most important public park, to its very own festival.

It’s not clear whether Dorothy Spicer actually witnessed the
festa del grillo
herself, but she describes it vividly anyway. On the forty-third day of Easter, a warm Sunday in late May or early June, she writes, “parents pack generous lunch baskets, gather up the children, and flock to Cascine Park.” In earlier times, children hunted the crickets themselves; nowadays (this is 1958), they buy them on the festive market. It’s all so colorful: “hundreds of brightly-painted wicker or wire cages imprisoning hundreds of crickets caught in the Park, dangle from vendors’ stalls.” Traders sell all kinds of food and drink. There are red, green, orange, and blue balloons. There is music. And there is plenty of ice cream. It is, she comments drolly, “one of the happiest and gayest spring events for everyone—except the
grilli
!”
¹

The Parco delle Cascine is no more than a thirty-minute walk along the shadeless northern bank of the Arno from the historic center of Florence. But especially in summer, it’s a very different urban space, a world away from the tourist crush of the Ponte Vecchio, the Duomo, and
the Piazza delle Signoria, the iconic splendor of the Fra Angelicos, the Giottos, and the Michelangelos. The famous treasures truly are stunning individually and overwhelming in their abundance. It’s no mystery that the English and other visitors have been spellbound ever since the eighteenth-century Grand Tour made the city an obligatory destination for any of the upper class in need of an education. For good reason, the paintings, statues, and historic buildings of Florence were recognized as emblems of Western civilization centuries before UNESCO, with true Enlightenment spirit, declared the city center a World Heritage Site.

Still, even when Dorothy Spicer wrote, the intensity of cultural consumption was not what it is today. I know this because just a few years before Spicer wrote her book, my parents—young Jews abroad and somehow at ease in postwar Europe—found themselves stranded in Florence on their honeymoon after rapidly running through the £50 in cash that the British government allowed travelers to take out of the country. Those were the days before credit cards, but they got by, happily eating picnics in the hills around Fiesole, overlooking the tranquil sea of red roofs punctured by the soaring cupola of the Duomo.

Florence then was still much more the city beloved of Ruskin, Shelley, and Henry James than the one recently tagged by a jaded
New York Times
travel writer as a “Renaissance theme park.”
²
Today, the historic center is still an extraordinary place, but now it’s part museum, part playground, and wholly commercial. Everyone browses, and so do we. The line for the Uffizi Gallery is a three-hour wait, and like Goethe—though perhaps with more regret—Sharon and I end up being bad tourists. In October 1786, early in his travels through Italy on his own version of the Grand Tour, the great writer-scientist-philosopher “took a quick walk through the city” to visit the Duomo and the Battistero. “Once more,” he wrote in his diary, “a completely new world opened up before me, but I did not wish to stay long. The location of the Bobboli Gardens is marvellous. I hurried out of the city as quickly as I entered it.”
³

Tucked away among the stores selling handmade gelato, handmade paper, and handmade shoes, there are shops that offer another Florentine specialty: wooden Pinocchios. Some of them are giants, far taller than the puppet-boy in Carlo Collodi’s much-loved morality tale. Collodi was born in Florence and worked there as a civil servant, journalist, and writer of children’s stories his entire life. His madcap adventure story, serialized from 1881 to 1883 in the weekly children’s magazine
Giornale per i bambini
, is a box of tricks that takes fairy tales (Collodi translated French ones) as well as oral narrative (he was an editor of an encyclopedia of the Florentine dialect) and the Tuscan short story, and turns them inside out to give his readers something new, something sharp and darkly funny, full of unexpected twists, and, beneath the pyrotechnics, deeply serious.

One of Collodi’s most memorable creations is the talking cricket, the
grillo parlante
, a rather minor character that Walt Disney Productions transformed into Jiminy Cricket. It seems significant that Florence’s most famous modern novel gave the world its most famous cricket, but I can’t say to what extent this
grillo
was a product of local or, more broadly, Italian lore. The Florentine fascination that produced the
festa
might well be just an expression of a larger national or even regional (southern European? Mediterranean?) insect intimacy.

People have kept crickets here for centuries. Little cages similar to the ones sold at the Florence festival were even found painted on the walls of houses unearthed in Pompeii. And there is plenty of linguistic evidence that noisy insects have chirruped their way far into Italian life. The connections between talking insects and human speech are audible in the many terms that
cicala
, the cicada, has spawned for frivolous or convoluted human chattering (
cicalare, cicalata, cicaleccio, cicalio, cicalino
).
⁴
Evidence like this tells us something about the place of crickets today but only confuses their cultural location in the past. After all, modern Italian is derived in large part from the Florentine dialect nationalized by Dante, and I’m not sure that it’s possible to know precisely where this particular etymological cluster originated. Perhaps there
is
something unique about Florence and its crickets. Either way, the great early-nineteenth-century poet and philologist Giacomo Leopardi dignifies the notion that insect sounds are empty chatter when—along with that other southern European philosopher-poet and insect lover Jean-Henri Fabre—he explains that crickets and cicadas, like birds, sing for the joy of it, the pleasure of it, the sheer beauty of it.
⁵

The European tradition of hearing only silliness, vanity, and a source of irritation in the cricket’s song is ancient and survives in Italy in the phrase
Non fare il grillo parlante
, which translates as something like “Don’t talk nonsense!” This isn’t the only tradition, of course, as these insects played an entirely different role as fixtures of the classical idyll,
but it’s nonetheless the theme of the two fables of Aesop’s in which crickets appear. Collodi, who achieved fame, if not fortune, despite having grown up in profound nineteenth-century poverty, revels in subverting expectations, and his talking cricket’s words are unmistakably meaningful. Yet—and this, too, is surely biographical—the
grillo parlante
has a much harder time of it, a much more grittily realistic time of it, than Disney’s chirpy Jiminy Cricket. Nightmarish as the classic American remake can sometimes be (“Pleasure Island,” where kidnapped little boys are encouraged to throw off their inhibitions, was sufficiently lurid to be invoked during Michael Jackson’s pedophilia trial), Collodi’s original is altogether darker, and Pinocchio, initially a spectacularly selfish puppet-boy with no sense of the ordeals he inflicts on his destitute father, Geppetto, suffers a range of exemplary tortures, which include burning, frying, flaying, drowning, forced confinement in a dog kennel, and the more traditional transformation into a donkey.

Disney’s
Pinocchio
was released in the bleak February of 1940, with the shadows of war and mass unemployment darkening all horizons. Jiminy—“Lord High Keeper of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, Counselor in Moments of Temptation, and Guide along the Straight and Narrow Path”—burst from the opening credits, a tireless spirit of can-do energy and well-judged humility who sings one of Hollywood’s most enduringly democratic lyrics, a lyric that brilliantly captures the emptiness, naïveté, and consolations of the American dream. (I wanted to quote from the song—“When You Wish Upon a Star”—but the copyright holder wanted way too much money.) Collodi’s
grillo parlante
was no less a virtuous insect. He urges Pinocchio to honor his father, to go to school, to work hard and practice thrift, to learn the values needed to survive in modern society. But he has tougher words for a tougher puppet, a working-class puppet in a harsh world who would have finished the story swinging by his neck from the Big Oak at the end of chapter 15 but for the outpouring of protest from appalled readers and the intervention of a savvy editor.
⁶

The outrage saved Pinocchio, but it was too late for the cricket. As Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Hero of Two Worlds, lay dying on Caprera, off the coast of Sardinia, the
grillo parlante
faced his own mortality. The ailing Garibaldi, the Sword of Italian Unity, was also the founder of Italy’s
first animal-protection society and a man who, as death neared, gathered his family to listen to a songbird perched on his windowsill above the crystalline Tyrrhenian Sea. Collodi, a patriotic volunteer in Garibaldi’s wars of independence and, like the father of the new nation, a critic of political corruption, social inequality, and clericalism, departed at this point from the author of the maxim “Man created God, not God man.” Perhaps it was Collodi’s disillusionment with the failure of unification to bring with it social transformation. Perhaps it was life in a hardscrabble, topsy-turvy world of insecure income and rapid social change. Or maybe he just couldn’t resist an occasion for slapstick violence. In Collodi’s universe, everyone fights for his crumbs without the privilege of species. It’s a dog-eat-dog, dog-eat-puppet, puppet-eat-dog, boy-become-donkey world in which it’s never quite clear who needs protecting from whom or even who is who. It is the scoundrel fox and the ne’er-do-well cat who string Pinocchio from the oak. By the end, Pinocchio has chewed off the blinded cat’s paw, and the starving fox has sold his own tail. And the talking cricket? With the story barely under way, in another scene that didn’t make it into the Disney movie, the
grillo parlante
finds himself, with scant warning, “stuck, flattened against the wall, stiff and lifeless”—speechless, too, flat as a pancake beneath the petulant puppet’s flying mallet.
⁷

Maybe there’s something in the coexistence of Disney and Collodi that helps explain a confusion surrounding the
festa.
Crickets have long been visible enough here to attract their own feast day; it’s just not clear whether the event exists to celebrate or demonize them—just as it’s not quite clear whether this region loves them or hates them.