Vervet monkey

The Vervet monkey is an electrocuted specimen kept in a glass cage in Dr Gómez’s consulting room. Though it never acts as a living participant, its conspicuous, repeated presence gathers force across the clinic’s scenes: Sofia Papastergiadis imagines releasing it, a broken cage makes it loom over a medical review, and Rose Papastergiadis ultimately insists that the display be covered to protect her daughter. The animal becomes at once a visible captive, a witness to clinical authority, and an image through which the narrative examines who is treated as a body to be managed.

Identity and Placement

The Vervet monkey is identified as electrocuted and displayed in a glass cage in Dr Gómez’s consulting room. The evidence supplies no account of how it came to be there or who prepared it. Its status is nevertheless unmistakable: it is a dead animal preserved for viewing, occupying a room in which living patients are examined and their treatment debated. That contrast makes the specimen more than background decoration, without making it a speaking or acting character. Its presence is fixed and visible while the people around it move through consultations, arguments, and decisions about illness.

The clinic scenes place that display beside practical medical concerns. Dr Gómez examines Rose’s feet, identifies two ulcers on the sole of her right foot, asks whether she has been tested for diabetes, and says the slightly infected surface wounds must be attended to immediately. In another consultation he asks Rose to identify which medications she feels attached to and which she could let go, while also pausing to listen to a Spanish broadcast about the austerity programme. These events do not establish that the monkey is present in every consultation, but they define the clinical world to which its caged image belongs: bodily examination, medication, and institutional pressures coexist in the same setting.

A Captive Image in the Consulting Room

The monkey’s cage enters Sofia’s thoughts as she confronts news that Rose intends to pursue amputation with a consultant in London. Shock leaves Sofia unable to stand. Looking at the vervet crouched behind glass, she imagines the force of her gaze shattering its remaining home and freeing it to run into the sea and drown. The imagined rescue is deliberately unstable: release from confinement is joined to the prospect of death, not to a secure or happy freedom. The scene gives the animal a place in Sofia’s emotional response, but the wish to free it is Sofia’s; the monkey does not itself choose or enact an escape.

Dr Gómez turns that image back toward Sofia. He recognizes her wish to free the primate and tells her that she must first free herself from the chair and walk to the door. He urges her to hike in the mountains, warns her not to borrow her mother’s limp or step into Rose’s shoes, and points to Sofia’s hands. She is still holding Rose’s shoes, which are no longer on Rose’s feet. The scene thus connects the enclosed animal with a confrontation about Sofia’s own movement and her caregiving role. The comparison is not a literal equivalence between the monkey and Sofia: it is a forceful clinical metaphor, offered by Dr Gómez as he challenges her to move independently of her mother’s impairment.

The Broken Cage at the Review

At a review attended by medical executives, Dr Gómez explains that Rose has been tested for evidence of a stroke, spinal-cord injury, nerve compression or entrapment, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, motor neurone disease, and spinal arthritis; he adds that the results of a recent endoscopy remain to be discussed. He also describes Rose’s admission to the clinic for dehydration and treatment with intravenous saline. Her difficulty swallowing water, he explains, means she also has difficulty swallowing medication. The monkey’s place in this scene is not as medical evidence, but as a silent object in the room where Rose’s condition is being presented and assessed.

During the meeting, one of the executives throws a golf ball into the air. It rebounds against the shelf above his head, and a small, sharp breaking sound makes the executives turn toward the monkey. From Sofia’s position, the electrocuted animal appears to levitate above the assembled senior consultants from Europe and North America, its dead, bright eyes directed at them. The disturbance gives the specimen a startling prominence: what had been a contained display now seems to occupy the meeting’s sightline, above the people who possess the institutional authority to describe Rose’s body and treatment.

Sofia’s perception expands into an image of the visiting executives as Great White Hunters, accompanied by porters, attendants, armed guards, and gun bearers, enslaving people and shooting for ivory. In that analogy, Rose becomes the ivory: the image makes the medical discussion feel entangled with possession and exchange rather than neutral observation. Sofia reflects that the executive could not pronounce Rose’s surname and describes her as having bartered with him, exchanging her legs for stimulants. This is Sofia’s charged interpretation of the encounter, not an independent clinical finding about the cause of Rose’s impairment. The monkey, suspended above the review in her vision, gives that interpretation a witness and an image of a body rendered available to other people’s scrutiny.

Damage, Protection, and Narrative Significance

After the executives leave, Rose tells Dr Gómez that the glass cage shattered very near Sofia’s head and that her daughter has a small glass splinter near her eyebrow. She asks him to put a cloth over the cage in future. This is the clearest practical consequence of the monkey’s display: the broken enclosure has become a hazard, and Rose responds not with Sofia’s earlier fantasy of release but with a direct request to prevent further injury. Her intervention changes the animal’s significance from a troubling image within Sofia’s thoughts to a concrete matter of care in the consulting room.

The specimen remains present as the review closes: it gazes at the people gathered there while Sofia says that the clinic has given her hope. Rose then speaks privately with Dr Gómez, identifies the danger near her daughter, and asks for the cage to be covered. The sequence places the inert monkey across several different acts of looking: Sofia sees a captive she would free, the executives are drawn to the broken display, and Rose sees a physical risk that requires attention. Its narrative force comes from that recurrence and changing emphasis, not from any action the animal undertakes. The cage makes confinement visible in a room where mobility, medication, and bodily dependence are disputed, while Rose’s request restores the scene to a specific responsibility: protecting a person from the glass beside her.