Monkeys

Monkeys connect a frightening episode in Dominick Birdsey’s hospital recovery with a remembered story from Domenico Onofrio Tempesta’s life. In the first, a monkey appears in a morphine nightmare and becomes part of Dominick’s anxious speculation about what Thomas Birdsey may experience. In the second, a monkey named Filippa is a living animal cared for by Pasquale Tempesta, whose grief for her stillborn infant moves Domenico to recall a tenderness he had rarely seen in his brother. Together, these appearances make Monkeys a motif of uncertain perception and unexpected fellow feeling, while Filippa’s needs and responses also give her a place in the narrative beyond the meanings humans attach to her.

The nightmare and Dominick’s fear

During his hospital recovery, Dominick closes his eyes and tries to push away the image of Henry Rood. Instead, he returns in memory to a morphine nightmare involving a monkey and a cedar tree. The episode leaves him nauseated and shaken by the possibility that, in the dream, he had strangled Thomas. The monkey is part of the nightmare’s disturbing imagery, not evidence that Dominick has harmed his brother in waking life.

Later, the remembered command to kill Thomas leads Dominick to question whether the experience was only a drug-induced dream. He wonders whether the force of the monkey voices might offer him a glimpse of what Thomas has endured over the preceding twenty-one years. His reasoning is fearful and tentative: he considers whether he could be developing schizophrenia despite the age at which he believes such an onset would be unusual, and imagines himself sharing a ward with Thomas. The episode thus makes the monkey an element in Dominick’s anxious attempt to understand his brother, while showing how readily that attempt turns into dread about his own mind.

Filippa’s arrival and life among the boarders

Domenico’s memoir recounts a very different monkey. After Pasquale is fired from the mill, he quickly finds work as a roofer. One night, while drinking with fellow workers, he buys a monkey from a sailor recently returned from Madagascar. Pasquale names the animal Filippo, after a friend from his boyhood, and builds a cage for her on the front porch of the boardinghouse where Signora Siragusa allows him to keep her.

The name changes when it becomes clear that the monkey is female and pregnant: Filippo becomes Filippa. Her presence draws interest from the neighborhood, and several young women make her hats and dresses. A piano tuner who lodges at the house writes a song for her and performs it on the porch through the summer. Domenico resents the attention, closing his window against the performances. His account sets his irritation beside other people’s efforts to welcome Filippa into their daily lives.

Filippa’s circumstances are not only a source of amusement or neighborhood attention. She depends on Pasquale and the people around her for food and shelter, and the household’s responses to her change as its demands become more difficult to manage. This practical dependence becomes especially consequential after her infant is stillborn.

Pasquale’s grief and Domenico’s response

Filippa holds her dead infant for two or three days before relinquishing it. Pasquale buries the infant in the boardinghouse yard, then holds and rocks Filippa and sings the song written for her as a lullaby. Domenico emphasizes that his brother cried as he had not cried for their parents, their brother Vincenzo, or even his boyhood friend Filippo. He sees Pasquale grieve for the infant as if it had been his own child.

This memory unsettles Domenico because it reveals a tenderness in Pasquale that the family’s losses had not drawn out in the same way. The monkey and her infant are not simply props in a story about human sorrow: Filippa’s loss elicits a response directed toward her, and Pasquale’s care continues through holding, rocking, and singing. For Domenico, the scene also becomes a question he cannot resolve. He invokes the family’s code of silence even as he writes about the memory, explaining that he is trying to understand his brother rather than shame him.

Domenico’s conduct toward Filippa elsewhere contrasts sharply with Pasquale’s. During the construction of his house, Domenico shouts at his brother to return to work and throws wet cement toward Pasquale and Filippa. The frightened monkey jumps from Pasquale’s shoulder and hides in a large maple tree. The act gives concrete form to the difference between the brothers: Pasquale’s attachment makes him attentive to Filippa, while Domenico treats her presence as an interruption to work.

Neglect, memory, and the motif’s significance

After Pasquale’s death, Domenico becomes responsible for Filippa, a responsibility he had promised his dying brother to fulfill. As a property owner and boss dyer, he dismisses the growing suspicion of il mal occhio as women’s foolishness and regards Filippa as an inconvenience amid the costs of his new home and his brother’s funeral. He reduces the expensive food Pasquale had provided to kitchen scraps. Signora Siragusa complains about lice and the effects of the changed diet, and does not want Filippa kept in the coal cellar through the coming winter. Domenico recognizes that he must do something, but the passage leaves the outcome unresolved.

That unfinished practical problem complicates the memory of Pasquale’s compassion. Filippa has ongoing needs that outlast the brief moment of neighborhood fascination, and the care she received from Pasquale is not automatically continued by his brother. Domenico’s account moves from his irritation and attempts to control the animal to a later recollection in which her grief exposes what he had failed to recognize in Pasquale. The narrative does not disclose what ultimately happens to Filippa in this passage.

The two appearances of monkeys also remain distinct. Filippa is an animal with a place, caretakers, and changing material circumstances; the monkey in Dominick’s nightmare belongs to a drug-influenced episode whose meaning he cannot establish. Their connection is therefore associative rather than proof of a single explanation: each appearance draws attention to how fear, grief, and uncertainty shape the human interpretation of animals. Filippa’s story, in particular, complicates Domenico’s family history by preserving a moment of care that his own conduct toward her does not sustain.