Insectopedia (11 page)

The “anti-science” rejection of mechanistic theory, the intuitive connection of observer and observed, the immersive affinity of person and world, this enfolding of a life and its work. Remember Fabre: the simplicity, the patience, the life eked out far from metropolitan glamour, the attempt to grasp the living whole, the disdain for authoritarianism, the ethical independence, the moral life, the scholarly life, the pedagogical
life. These are lessons that appeal just as strongly to old and young, to radical and conservative.

And what’s more, for Imanishi as for Okumoto, Fabre’s pursuit of the godly in insects is recognizable in another way. It has a sensibility that is easily assimilated to a set of ideas often invoked by Japanese nature lovers (and foreign commentators on Japanese attitudes toward nature) seeking to explain what nationalists, Romantics, New Agers, and others frequently consider a unique Japanese affinity to nature and, in particular, to insects: that animist, Shintoist—and subsequently Japanese Buddhist—notion that divinity (
kami
) “take[s] abode in natural features that give people a feeling of awe or spirituality,” that “nature is divine,” that nature
itself
is divine.
⁵⁵
(Not, I should emphasize, as Fabre would have it, that nature is an expression of the Divine.)

And there’s something else. Osugi and Okumoto reveal the inadequacies of literal-meaning-centered reading. They remind us that to understand Fabre and his appeal, we have to listen for other languages in his work, not simply to what the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin would call his “constative” meanings—his unconvincing theory of instinct, his poorly reasoned rebuttal of transformism—but to his poetics, the poetics of his storytelling and of the writing that unexpectedly pulls you through the hand lens and into the wasps’ nest, the poetics of his haunted life and of his consummate self-mythologizing, the poetics of grand affinity with the natural world, the poetics of his insects, of the impossible, uncertain intimacy between you, me, and those others that are simultaneously most commonplace and most alien.
⁵⁶

In one of his famous monthly essays in the magazine
Natural History
, the evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould noted that the parasitic wasps—both the endoparasites, which consume their living prey from the inside out, and those ectoparasites described by Fabre, who eat from the outside in—confronted Western theologians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century with their most terrifying problem, the problem of evil. If God is benevolent and the Creation an
expression of his goodness and wisdom, “why,” they agonized, “are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world?”
⁵⁷
It was easy to understand that predation was intrinsic to survival in nature, but why would a compassionate God allow the horrors inflicted by the wasp on its victims, the “slow death by parasitic ingestion,” a death made more nightmarish in that it was suffered by living, evidently conscious beings in a manner that, as Gould put it, recalled “the ancient English penalty for treason—drawing and quartering, with its explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive and sentient.”

“As the king’s executioner drew out and burned his client’s entrails,” Gould wrote, “so does the [wasp] larvae eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the [victim] alive by preserving intact the essential heart and central nervous system.”
⁵⁸

It is hardly original to point out that nature has long been an irresistible mirror to the human condition, its laws seen as expressions of God’s laws, its every gesture embodying a moral lesson, its “societies” taken as atavistic versions of our own. Faced with the frightening inscrutability of the parasitic wasp, two roads were possible to these observers. One involved the painful acknowledgment of nature’s evil followed by the necessary next step of a determination to transcend animality and fulfill the promise of humanity through goodness. The second, more common nowadays than in earlier centuries and more aligned with the contingency of modern evolutionary theory, rested on the moral disenchantment of nature, on the claim that there are in fact no lessons to be found in the behavior of nonhuman beings or phenomena, that nature, in Gould’s word, is “nonmoral,” that, as he put it, “Caterpillars are not suffering to teach us something; they have simply been outmaneuvered” (and that, although currently improbable, they and their fellow victims may one day even turn the tables on the wasps).

But parasitic wasps don’t lend themselves to disenchantment. Somehow, in their presence, observation is filled with drama. “We cannot,” Gould pointed out, “render this corner of natural history as anything but story, combining the themes of grim horror and fascination and usually ending not so much with pity for the caterpillar as with admiration for the [wasp].”
⁵⁹

Poor parasitized Fabre! A fine host indeed. If he had only seen it this clearly perhaps he would not have told us quite so much about the
Sphex
, the
Bembix
, and the rest. He might have thought twice before dwelling so long on the details of their hunting strategies and, in particular, on the precision of their surgical skills. But the point, of course, is that he couldn’t help himself. From the moment he wept before the
Ammophila
, the die was cast. And that surrender was both his undoing and his triumph. When it came to it, he let the animals tell their tales. In this, at least, his instincts were exactly right.

That too-hot, too-shadeless morning, pushing the outboard motor to its very limit, first one river, then the next, those never-ending Amazon rivers—never realized anywhere could be so far, worrying about the gas tank, worrying about fallen trees in the water, worrying about the time, heading for the medical post with poor, sad Lene, her hair hacked short in an act of rebellion that only confirmed her madness; Marco, her husband, stone-faced, watching over her, her body now sprawled under the bench seats in the hull of the bouncing dinghy, motionless, lifeless but not quite dead, lifeless on the outside, but everything happening within, malaria coursing through her veins, bloating her liver, fevering her poor, troubled brain.

Everyone got sick. It made no difference that the area around the house had been cleared of forest, as the public health leaflets insisted. Nor did it matter that each house had its neat, handwritten number on the doorpost to confirm that it had been sprayed with DDT. Everyone got sick, some worse than others, the weakest—the children and the elderly—as always, worst of all. When it was my turn, I just lay in my hammock, burning with icy shivers, my body racked from top to toe, eyes dull, mind listless, utterly dependent on the kindness of people who knew there was nothing to do but wait it out. Every day as night fell, it returned. And then, afterward, in the morning, a feeling of weakness
that was pleasantly ascetic, as if I had been purged and cleansed, had survived a trial. But within, the knowledge that my body was stitched fatefully to the rhythm of the day in a new and previously unanticipated pattern.

And my sickness was as nothing compared with that of others. Dora, young and strong, my best friend here, came that close to death. She, like Lene, had
falciparum
, the most dreaded, she told me. I’d been away when she took ill, and that absence gave her the chance later to narrate with the full melodrama that the crisis deserved. It was the
três cruzes
, three crosses, she said, though, like me, she had never quite figured out why it was called that.
Um cruz, dois cruzes, três cruzes.
Some people said it referred to the intensity of the infection. But the printed slip they had given both of us at the clinic in town had three Latin names (although there are really four
Plasmodium
protozoa that inhabit human hosts) and a space for a tidy little cross beside each. Mine had just one cross, and the box next to
P. falciparum
was unmarked. Lene and Dora both had three crosses, so one cross had to be inside the box for
P. falciparum
, the parasite that swims all the way to your brain.

It makes little difference if you clear the vegetation around your house the way the leaflets tell you. It can even make it worse. This is the Amazon floodplain, for heaven’s sake; the houses are on the banks of the river, and when the tide falls, it leaves pools of standing water everywhere. For a few weeks each year, the mosquitoes are so thick in the air at dawn and dusk that everyone burns wood inside the house, hoping that the thick smoke will force the devils to leave. With streaming eyes, slapping ourselves repeatedly on thighs, arms, sides, even the face, hitting each other when we see one land, jumping around like Keystone Kops, we try to eat the evening meal but more often than not simply give up. It’s impossible to sit down or even stay still, and if the needle-sharp bites weren’t so painful, we’d probably find it comical. Within minutes we retreat to the safety of mosquito nets or cover ourselves with cotton blankets, frustrated, sore, hungry.

In the city there are various contraptions for seeing off mosquitoes. But here, without electricity, there is only smoke. With no effective recourse, the insects exhaust us. I never talked to anyone about this, but those insects made me feel like an interloper. Not—as when I first arrived—an awkward intruder in the lives of the people who became my hosts (making me their parasite). Now, when we ran from the clouds of mosquitoes and the billowing smoke, together in our pain and annoyance, it was clear that we all were intruding on this landscape and its forms of life.

Although
P. malariae
can make a home in a range of primates,
falciparum
and the others live in humans only. Between the female
Anopheles
mosquito and its parasitic protozoa, these are life cycles of awe-inspiring elegance, devastation, and persistence. In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died from malaria he contracted in Ireland. Now Europeans know it only as a disease of the tropics, of poverty, distance, and underdevelopment, a disease without profit. According to the World Health Organization, malaria kills 1.5 million people each year. Thankfully, Lene was not one of them. At least, not then. At the health post, they gave her an injection and some tablets, and we took her back home, more slowly, less anxious.

So many problems, so overwhelming, where even to begin? No nearby health post, no sanitation, insufficient food in summer, the insupportable inequalities of health, life expectancy, and well-being. And then the shame, so much shame, so much uselessness, the overwhelming boredom that drove this woman beyond restlessness and consigned her family to the margins of this margin. The day I went to say my final good-bye, Lene stayed inside the two-room wooden house with her daughters—the four preteen girls who cared for her. I sat outside with Marco on a tree trunk overlooking the creek and his field of maize. He drew on his cigarette and listened patiently as I lied for the last time, telling him about my journey and promising I’d come back to see them all again soon.

On the way to the cricket fight, Mr. Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. “More numbers,” said Michael. He read:

It was Mr. Wu’s answer to a question I’d asked him earlier that day in the smoke-filled, gold-papered private banquet room upstairs at the Luxurious Garden in Minhang, an industrial district in southwest Shanghai. But it wasn’t the answer we’d expected. Ask him anything you want, said Michael, and I thought we were all relaxed enough, too. Boss Xun and Mr. Tung, the charming gambler from Nanjing, were telling funny stories; tight-lipped Boss Yang was red-faced and expansive; we were toasting health and uncommon friendship. But when I told Mr. Wu that I didn’t yet understand the Three Reversals, he looked straight through me without a smile.

Michael had taken time out from college in Shanghai to work as my translator. But he’d quickly become my full-fledged collaborator. Together, we were trying to find out as much as we could about cricket fighting and what everyone said was its revival. We spent our days running around the city, finding ourselves in places new to both of us, meeting traders, trainers, gamblers, event sponsors, entomologists, and all kinds of experts. By the time we sat down to eat in the Luxurious Garden,
we already knew two of the Reversals and suspected the third, and my question was supposed to be an uncontroversial conversation starter. But Mr. Wu was having none of it. Like so many people we met in Shanghai, he wanted us to understand how deep was the world of Chinese cricket fighting—and how shallow were our questions.