Prosperine Tucci

Prosperine Tucci, known in the narrative as the Monkey, is both a protector and a figure shaped by concealment. Her account to Domenico Tempesta reveals that her name was bought for her rather than inherited, and that her attempt to protect Violetta D’Annunzio from Gallante Selvi led to Selvi’s death. The story does not make her revenge uncomplicated: she acts against a brutal man, yet later speaks of the death as a source of lasting moral danger.

Identity and Background

Prosperine’s story reaches the reader as a disclosure to Domenico Tempesta. She explains that she became Prosperine Tucci by taking the identity of a girl five years younger who had died. The name was purchased, she says, not stolen. The distinction matters to her: it connects the identity to the sacrifices made by her father rather than presenting it as a simple act of fraud. The account does not disclose her birth name.

Her father’s sacrifice was material as well as personal. He sold his macaroni shop to provide money for passage, counterfeit passports, and support for the fugitives once they reached America. Prosperine links that act to a painful history of being treated as someone whose life could be arranged by others: her father had first rented her to an old woman and then left her under the authority of that woman’s godson, Selvi. The purchased identity thus belongs to a larger history of displacement, in which escape depended on money, aliases, and the willingness of others to give up what they possessed.

The name Monkey is also attached to her role as a caretaker. When Violetta returns to Pescara, Prosperine tends to her, brushes her hair with Violetta’s tortoiseshell brushes, puts her to bed in clean clothes, and watches over her. This attentive care stands in sharp contrast to the retaliation Prosperine later considers. She is not defined only by violence: her account places protection and tenderness at the center of the same relationship that gives rise to revenge.

Violetta, Selvi, and the Plan for Revenge

Prosperine’s decision to act follows Selvi’s treatment of Violetta. She understands him as the source of her friend’s suffering and imagines that he should pay with his life. In the village square, she butchers rabbits while thinking of Selvi, turning an ordinary task into a private enactment of vengeance. Yet she weighs the practical consequences of attacking him openly. A public killing would expose her to imprisonment and leave Violetta without the person who had returned to care for and protect her.

She first attempts to use the evil eye against Selvi. For several days she watches him with hatred, hoping that knowledge associated with diagnosing and curing the evil eye might also give her the power to inflict it. When this brings no resolution, she and Violetta prepare another means of retaliation. Prosperine collects Selvi’s discarded colored glass, grinds it to powder, and combines it with residue from the material he uses in his work. Their plan is to contaminate his food while he is away. The preparation is deliberate and shared: Prosperine’s desire for vengeance becomes an act undertaken with Violetta, whose safety remains a central concern.

Selvi stops breathing before sunrise. Prosperine takes charge of what follows, while Violetta grieves and asks the dead man for forgiveness. Prosperine tells Violetta that doing nothing and failing to seek a priest or doctor would invite suspicion; because Violetta is afraid to remain alone, she stays outside while Prosperine goes to the village. The scene preserves the difference between them. Violetta’s grief does not erase what Selvi did, and Prosperine’s resolve does not make her indifferent to the death.

Disclosure and Moral Limits

Years later, Prosperine’s account to Domenico Tempesta makes the assumed name and the killing part of a single confession about survival. She explains how the Iaccoi brothers’ lies helped make her new identity possible and how their profit left Domenico a fool. She describes the two of them as bound together by mutual resentment, each a curse to the other. Her revelation therefore does more than explain her name: it exposes the cost and compromises behind the story of her escape, while recasting her relationship with Domenico as one shaped by shared grievance and distrust.

Domenico asks whether she intends to poison him or attack him. Prosperine answers that she has no wish to watch another man die or to be condemned for a second death. She distinguishes Selvi, whom she regarded as exceptionally cruel, from Domenico, whom she calls a bully and a fool, and warns him to keep his hands off his wife. The warning is not a claim that she has become harmless; it marks the condition under which she will leave him alone. Her account holds vengeance and restraint in unresolved tension: she helped cause Selvi’s death to defend Violetta, but refuses to treat killing as a general license or to repeat it casually.

Narrative Significance

Prosperine’s history enters the book through retrospective telling rather than an independent account of her earlier life. Domenico later recounts her story, including the murder of the stained-glass artist and the conflict over his treatment of his wife, during his confession to Father Guglielmo. The episode consequently becomes part of the family’s larger record of violence and secrets, filtered first through Prosperine’s disclosure and then through Domenico’s recollection.

Her role is defined by the uneasy connection between care and retaliation. She protects Violetta through practical attention, considers the threat that an open attack would pose to both of them, and chooses a covert plan that ends in Selvi’s death. Later, she names the moral cost of that act rather than presenting it as uncomplicated triumph. Her purchased identity likewise gives escape a concrete price: freedom depends on a dead girl’s name, her father’s lost livelihood, and a network of deception. Prosperine’s story therefore shows survival not as a clean break from the past, but as a life assembled from protection, compromise, and consequences that cannot simply be left behind.