The “Monkey” and the reversal of dark magic

The “Monkey” and the reversal of dark magic is a scene in which a rabbit’s apparent transformation recalls an earlier marvel and becomes part of the narrator’s plea for forgiveness. Before a dying woman, the narrator first displays two rabbits, then changes what she sees: one is returned to its box, and the remaining rabbit stands for the pair. The scene makes a mysterious old event available for reversal, while leaving its wonder intact.

The Rabbits Before the Monkey

The narrator lifts the rabbits by the scruffs of their necks and holds them before the Monkey. One kicks in the air and then grows still as the pair rock back and forth. The display is careful and physical: the rabbits are held up, moved, and watched, rather than described from a distance. Its motion gives the scene a pendulum-like rhythm and directs the dying woman’s attention toward the apparent change to come.

The woman initially closes her eyes as wind and rain beat against the building. The narrator drops one rabbit back into the box and holds the other still before her. When she opens her eyes again, the two rabbits have become one. The change is presented through the altered arrangement of the animals, without an explanation that settles how the transformation occurs.

Reversing the Earlier Wonder

The woman watches the remaining rabbit swing before her and recognizes the reversal of the dark magic she had witnessed long ago. Her recognition gives the scene its connection to the past: the rabbit display does not merely surprise her, but recalls an earlier encounter with the same kind of uncanny change. By staging the animals before the Monkey, the narrator makes the present scene answer that remembered event without explaining away its mystery.

The reversal also changes the emotional direction of the encounter. The narrator asks whether the woman can forgive him and make him whole again, then repeats the plea softly as she watches. The performance is therefore both a return to an old image and an appeal addressed to someone whose response matters. Its outcome is not spoken aloud; instead, the woman reaches from beneath the sheet and caresses the rabbit’s fur.

Forgiveness and the Family Legacy

After touching the rabbit, the woman moves her hand back across her forehead, heart, left shoulder, and right. The scene gives this gesture particular weight by placing it after the rabbit’s transformation and her touch: the plea for forgiveness receives no verbal answer, but the woman responds through movement and contact. The rabbit remains a tangible focus for a reconciliation the narrator cannot secure by words alone.

The book’s final reflection broadens the scene’s concern with forgiveness and the past. The narrator credits his maternal grandfather, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, with teaching him how wrongly used power defeats both oppressor and oppressed. He comes to value the grandfather’s troubled manuscript not as proof of greatness but as a legacy shaped by failure and self-confrontation. The rabbits’ reversal thus belongs to a conclusion in which inherited stories and old wounds can be revisited, while forgiveness offers a way to approach wholeness. The narrator’s closing convictions join love to forgiveness and find evidence of God in the roundness of things.