Pasquale fell from the building and died

Pasquale Tempesta’s fatal fall is a sudden accident that leaves his brother Domenico Onofrio Tempesta alone and binds him, through a deathbed promise, to the little monkey Filippa. The scene’s force lies in its collision of ordinary work and irreversible loss: Pasquale is laying shingles when he hears Filippa’s cries, hurries to protect her, and falls through the house to the cellar below. In the aftermath, his concern remains fixed on Filippa, while Domenico’s grief immediately becomes a promise to carry forward.

The accident

On the day Domenico calls horrible, Pasquale has eaten a formidable lunch and drunk most of a bottle of good-luck wine given to him that morning by Pippo Conti, a fellow roofer visiting on his way to Sunday Mass. Pasquale is whistling as he lays a row of shingles. These details place him in the rhythm of an ordinary working day, but also make the scene’s abrupt turn especially stark: his hammering is interrupted by Filippa’s cries for help.

Filippa is high in a nearby tree, suddenly beset by angry bluejays. Pasquale rises and runs to defend her, forgetting the gap between the roof and the tree. The account presents this as the decisive circumstance of the fall, without suggesting that he sees or weighs the danger before moving. His attention has shifted entirely to Filippa’s distress; the gap, which separates the roof from the tree, becomes the overlooked opening through which the day’s rescue attempt turns fatal.

Pasquale falls through the stairwells to the foundation below, still holding his hammer, and strikes the dirt floor of Domenico’s cellar. Domenico emphasizes that he witnessed the fall and heard Pasquale’s bones break. The movement from roof to cellar carries the event through the house’s vertical spaces, ending not outside where Filippa had been threatened but at the foundation beneath the home. What began as a roofer’s effort to reach an animal ends with Pasquale gravely injured in his brother’s cellar.

The death and its witnesses

Domenico runs to Pasquale and cradles his head in his lap. He describes the head as wobbling like that of a broken doll, an image that registers the bodily devastation he has just witnessed. His repeated cry for divine protection comes with immediate self-reproach: he wishes he had held his tongue with the old priest and had not thrown cement. The passage records those regrets but does not explain their circumstances; their abrupt appearance makes them part of Domenico’s grief, not a stated cause of the fall.

Filippa has meanwhile rid herself of the bluejays and hurried down from the tree. She sits huddled on Pasquale’s chest and curls the hair on his head around one small pink finger. The gesture brings the rescue scene to its painful close: the creature Pasquale rushed to defend reaches him after his fall and remains physically close as he dies. Filippa’s small touch contrasts with the violent injuries Domenico describes, while making her presence central to the last moments.

Pasquale can no longer speak normally. He mouths Filippa’s name, repeating it as his last words. Domenico watches the life leave him and describes his own anguish as the greatest possible. Pasquale’s attention, even in dying, remains on Filippa; the scene’s emotional focus therefore falls not only on the loss of a brother but also on the vulnerable animal Pasquale is about to leave behind.

The promise and its significance

As Pasquale dies, Domenico pledges, on the lives of their ancestors and descendants, that he will care for Filippa. The promise gives the death an immediate consequence: Domenico takes on the responsibility Pasquale can no longer fulfill. It also reaches beyond the two brothers by invoking generations before and after them, making the obligation a family vow rather than a passing expression of grief.

The sequence ends with Pasquale convulsing and vomiting blood, his eyes taking on the gaze of holy statues. Domenico then states that he is alone. That final solitude marks the change wrought by the fall: the brother who had been beside him in the workday is gone, and the promise to care for Filippa remains. The scene joins protection, accidental death, and inheritance in a single chain of action. Pasquale’s instinct to defend Filippa leads to his fall; his last concern for her becomes Domenico’s enduring charge.