Filippa

Filippa is a small monkey whose brief life in Three Rivers becomes bound to Pasquale’s grief, tenderness, and death. First treated as an exotic neighborhood attraction, she becomes the object of Pasquale’s devoted care; after he dies, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta’s promise to protect her turns into a plan to dispose of her. Her story exposes the gap between the family’s language of loyalty and what its surviving members are willing to do.

Arrival and Transformation

Pasquale buys Filippa from a sailor recently returned from Madagascar, during a drunken visit to a tavern with fellow workers. The purchase follows his dismissal from the mill: Flynn fires Pasquale but keeps another worker, a decision Domenico remembers as an injustice. Pasquale quickly finds work as a roofer for Werman Construction Company, but his new companion marks a change in his life beyond employment. The monkey is no bigger than a house cat, with orange fur and unusually human-looking eyes and fingers. Pasquale names the animal Filippo, after a boyhood friend, and makes a cage for him; then the supposed male proves pregnant and becomes Filippa.

Filippa’s arrival gives the neighborhood a spectacle and, briefly, a shared project of care. Signora Siragusa allows Pasquale to keep the cage on her porch. West Side girls knit and sew little hats and dresses for Filippa, while a piano tuner who boards at the house writes a song called “La Regina Piccola” and performs it on the porch. His singing brings the neighbor women to tears. Domenico, by contrast, shuts the window and covers his ears: the monkey’s growing place in the neighborhood is also a source of irritation to him.

The Loss of Filippa’s Baby

In August, Filippa gives birth to a stillborn baby. She cradles the tiny, shriveled body for two or three days before finally letting it go, and Domenico remembers seeing her cry. Pasquale, too, weeps—more openly than he had for his father, mother, brother Vincenzo, or even his boyhood friend Filippo. He buries the baby in the boardinghouse backyard, then holds Filippa in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours. Instead of performing the piano tuner’s showy song, he hums “The Little Queen” as a lullaby, a quiet lament for the mother and child.

The scene overturns Domenico’s expectations of his brother. Pasquale is usually nearly silent, yet Filippa’s loss draws out his grief and a sustained, physical tenderness. He responds to her not as a novelty or pet to be shown off, but as a bereaved creature to comfort. Filippa’s stillbirth does not only mark her own loss; in Domenico’s account, it reveals a capacity for attachment and mourning in Pasquale that the family’s earlier sorrows had not made visible to him.

Filippa and Pasquale at Work

After the baby dies, Pasquale begins taking Filippa with him to work. Each morning they leave Signora Siragusa’s house together, Pasquale on foot and Filippa riding on his shoulder. While he hammers and hauls shingles, she sits on the peaks of new or unfinished buildings or in nearby trees, grooming her fur. Their daily routine makes her more than a porch attraction: she accompanies Pasquale through his working life, close enough that the narrator remembers the small indignities of the arrangement, including monkey droppings drying on the back of his shirt or coat.

That companionship ends in the cellar under construction at Domenico’s home. Pasquale falls through the stairwells to the foundation while holding a hammer. Domenico sees him strike the dirt floor and describes cradling his brother’s head as the bones break. Filippa comes down from a tree after ridding herself of bluejays and settles on Pasquale’s chest. She curls a lock of his hair around one small pink finger as he mouths her name: “Filippa . . . Filippa.” Domenico watches Pasquale die, then vows, on the lives of their ancestors and descendants, to care for the monkey. Filippa is thus present at Pasquale’s final moment, and the promise made over his dying body makes her the living charge his brother leaves behind.

The Promise and the Bridge

Domenico’s care for Filippa proves short-lived. Signora Siragusa warns that the boarders will soon be scratching themselves, packing, or meeting tragedy like Pasquale; her house, she insists, is not a zoo. Later that evening, as Domenico reaches into Filippa’s filthy cage to empty it, she bares her teeth and bites his wrist. He curses her, sucks the wound, and makes a plan. The sequence makes his decision follow both the boardinghouse complaint and the bite, while placing it in sharp contrast with the solemn promise he has just made to Pasquale.

The following Sunday, Domenico pays the young Cavoli a nickel to carry a burlap sack to Hollyhock Avenue, line it with broken discarded bricks, and bring it to the Sachem River Bridge. Domenico cautiously opens Filippa’s cage and leashes her. On the walk toward the river she balks, and at several points he has to drag her; he thinks she seems to understand the fate awaiting her. At the bridge, Filippa grips the bars of the footbridge railing. The remembered scene ends with her holding fast, a concrete image of resistance set against Domenico’s plan and his earlier oath. The account establishes the threat to Filippa and her refusal to go willingly; it does not establish her eventual fate.

Memory and Significance

Filippa’s story reaches the reader through Domenico’s retrospective account, which is shaped by his effort to recover the reasons behind his own actions. He invokes Omertà even as he recounts the private grief he witnessed: Filippa’s mourning, Pasquale’s tears, and his brother’s final words. Remembering the animal becomes part of the old man’s attempt to understand why Pasquale loved her and why he himself failed to honor that love as promised.

The contrast between Pasquale’s care and Domenico’s plan gives Filippa’s presence its narrative force. Her helpless newborn dies; she is comforted and then becomes a comforter in return, sharing Pasquale’s final hours. After his death, she is treated as a nuisance and danger by the people who inherit his obligations. The monkey is not merely a symbol in the account: her grief, closeness to Pasquale, and physical resistance at the bridge are the actions through which the family’s tenderness, secrecy, and betrayal become visible.