Pasquale Tempesta

Pasquale Tempesta is the quiet, hard-working brother whose unshowy kindness unsettles the self-serving story Domenico Tempesta tells about their family. Raised as a miner’s laborer and repeatedly overshadowed by Domenico’s education and ambition, Pasquale later gives his deepest care to Filippa, a monkey he protects and mourns. His accidental death while hurrying to her defense leaves Domenico with a promise to care for her—and with a guilt that persists long after the event itself.

Identity and Background

Pasquale is the middle and, after the deaths of his father and brother, Domenico’s sole remaining brother. His childhood is sharply divided from Domenico’s: while Domenico attends a convent school and imagines himself destined for an elevated life, Pasquale takes his place in the sulphur mines as their father Giacomo Tempesta’s caruso. The work means carrying excavated rock up from the mine to the kiln, labor Domenico depicts as dirty and exhausting. He regards Pasquale as suited to toil in a way he believes himself not to be, exposing the hierarchy of worth he has built between the brothers.

That hierarchy is reinforced at home. Their youngest brother Vincenzo Tempesta grows unruly, while Pasquale is beaten for failing to meet their father’s demands in the mines. Domenico, whose conduct earns praise, escapes those blows. His later account makes clear that the brothers did not receive equal childhoods: Domenico’s schooling and special standing gave him a sunny, cultivated youth, while Pasquale’s early world was underground, among rock, sulphur, and punishment.

Pasquale is described as private, passive, and sometimes simple-minded, but also as happy in childhood. On Sundays, when the family reunited, he ran through the village and hills with the other carusi, boys who spent their one day off in the Sicilian sun. Their rough games and pranks offered a brief contrast to the mines. Pasquale’s closest friend among them was Filippo. When the mine collapsed and killed their father and eleven other miners and carusi, Filippo died too; Domenico later understands the disaster as having buried the happy part of Pasquale along with his friend.

Work, Loss, and Migration

The mine disaster in March 1898 spared Pasquale because he was at the kiln when Mount Etna’s eruption shook the ground and brought down the mine. His survival did not spare him the loss of his father, nor did it restore the childhood companionship lost with Filippo. In Domenico’s recollection, Pasquale’s subsequent quietness belongs to a life marked by labor and bereavement, though he admits he cannot know whether the mines, their father’s blows, or some other cause explains his brother’s oddness.

Later, when work in the United States becomes a possibility, Pasquale resists the idea of moving to Three Rivers, Connecticut. He fears the place may be the Wild West and imagines that Indians could shoot them with arrows. Domenico and Vincenzo take him to the New York Public Library, where an atlas shows the short distance from New York to Three Rivers; a librarian explains that the town is only a four-hour train ride away and that Connecticut has no savages hiding in its hills. Pasquale and Vincenzo speak little English beyond a few practical phrases. The episode makes Pasquale’s anxieties visible without reducing him to them: he is wary of the unfamiliar, but he goes with his brothers toward a new life.

In the United States, Domenico’s memory continues to measure the brothers against one another. An employment agent describes Domenico as working like a well-oiled machine and Pasquale as laboring like a plowhorse. Domenico’s account repeatedly casts himself as the gifted and industrious one, yet the comparison also registers Pasquale’s endurance. Pasquale does not compete for family honor or rightful ownership; Domenico says he cares chiefly that supper is on the table. This practical simplicity is part of the contrast between them, but also a measure of how little Pasquale values the ambitions by which Domenico judges a life.

Filippa and Pasquale’s Capacity for Care

Pasquale’s tenderness becomes clearest through his attachment to Filippa. After the monkey gives birth to a stillborn baby, she cradles the dead infant for days before letting it go. Pasquale weeps with her, buries the baby in the boardinghouse yard, and holds Filippa in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours while humming a song as a lullaby. Domenico emphasizes that Pasquale cries more openly for this small creature than he had for their parents or Filippo. The scene reverses the elder brother’s ranking of the younger: the man he had called simple displays a profound capacity to share another being’s grief.

Domenico tries to persuade Pasquale to keep Filippa in a cage and stop bringing her to work. He appeals to the prospect of a wife and children, treating the monkey as an obstacle to a conventional household. Pasquale answers not with an argument but by throwing down his shovel and refusing to continue working on a house where Filippa is not welcome inside. His refusal turns affection into a concrete choice, challenging Domenico’s assumption that the animal can be dismissed as an eccentric attachment. The disagreement carries into supper and late into the night, while Pasquale insists on Filippa’s place in the home.

Domenico later confesses that he once saw Pasquale asleep on his cot with Filippa sitting on his belly and playing with his trouser buttons. The sight becomes, in his telling, the basis for suspicion about an improper relationship, although he acknowledges that Pasquale spoke very little and never confided in him. Father Guglielmo challenges the accusation: what Domenico witnessed does not prove the immoral conduct he attributes to his brother, and Pasquale may have died innocent of it. The distinction remains unresolved. Domenico’s account supplies an observation and a suspicion, not proof, and the priest offers a more charitable possibility—that Pasquale simply loved another of God’s creatures.

Death, Promise, and Lasting Guilt

Pasquale dies while working on a roof. After drinking good-luck wine and laying shingles, he hears Filippa calling for help from a nearby tree, where angry bluejays are attacking her. He runs to defend her and forgets the gap between the roof and the tree. He falls through the stairwells to the foundation below. Domenico witnesses the fall and the fatal injuries; in the scene’s terrible reversal, Pasquale’s instinct to protect Filippa is also what places him in mortal danger.

Filippa comes down from the tree and curls Pasquale’s hair around one finger as he lies dying. He mouths her name, and Domenico promises, in the name of their ancestors and descendants, to care for her. The promise becomes an obligation attached to Pasquale’s last moments. Domenico remembers his brother’s death as one of the greatest anguishes of his life, and later confesses that he believes his own earlier actions helped bring it about: he had thrown cement in anger, angering an old priest who cursed his house, and he links that curse to Pasquale’s fall. Father Guglielmo hears the confession but does not affirm that chain of causation.

In retrospect, Domenico recognizes Pasquale as quiet, shy, eager to help, and fundamentally decent, though he also recalls stubbornness, occasional drinking, and moments when his brother seemed not fully present. He speculates that mine labor and their father’s repeated blows may have affected him, but cannot establish either explanation. Pasquale’s enduring significance lies in this gap between the elder brother’s judgments and the care he actually witnessed: Domenico calls him simple, yet remembers him mourning Filippa’s baby, standing up for her place in the house, and risking his life to save her. Pasquale’s death leaves Domenico with a duty he swore to fulfill and an uncertainty he cannot resolve about the brother he loved, misread, and lost.