The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings manuscript

The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings manuscript is Domenico’s account of his own life and a material link between his immigrant past and the family that follows him. Ma gives it to Dominick alongside the dictionary her father used to learn English, entrusting the next generation with a history she cannot read and that Domenico had guarded closely. The manuscript’s journey—from private dictation, to a scattered set of pages, to an attempted translation and eventual loss—makes its unfinished passage through the family as consequential as its written contents.

Physical Form and Title

The manuscript is found inside a strongbox, curled in a large manila envelope around a small, coverless dictionary and held with an elastic band that breaks when Dominick touches it. The paper is thick; its first ten or fifteen pages are typewritten originals and carbon copies, while the remaining pages are handwritten in an ornate, scrawling script with blue fountain-pen ink. Its Italian is immediately apparent to Dominick, but the pages are not something he can simply read. Their musty smell, mixed formats, and fragile binding materials make the work feel like a kept family object as well as a text.

The first page is hand-lettered with flourishes and curlicues. Ma helps Dominick make out its title: The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. The title presents the life as a history and its author as a great man, a self-conscious grandeur that makes Dominick smile. Ma, by contrast, responds with tears and affection, insisting on her father’s worth. The first surviving date is 8 July 1949. That date places the manuscript’s opening within the summer in which Domenico dictated his life story and died, but it does not establish when every later page was written.

Making the Manuscript

Domenico began the work by dictating. Ma remembers an elaborate arrangement involving a stenographer, a Dictaphone, and separate private rooms for the person dictating and the person taking dictation. It lasted about a week. A dispute over the rental charge ended the arrangement: Domenico had understood the price to be eight dollars a week, but learned that it was eight dollars a day. He sent the equipment back, and the carts remained on the front porch for two days before someone came from Bridgeport to collect them. Ma remembers worrying about the unattended machines and the possibility of rain or theft.

After that scheme failed, Domenico returned to dictating directly to Angelo Nardi, but Ma says that arrangement did not go better. She kept away from the parlor when her father was dictating; he treated the project as private and could become angry when she approached. Eventually, he worked alone. Every morning after breakfast, unless it rained or he felt unwell, he climbed the back stairs to a small metal table and wrote with his fountain pen. Ma remembers him spending the rest of that summer there, by himself. The surviving manuscript’s change from typed pages to handwritten ones preserves, in its very form, the transition from a managed dictation project to solitary writing.

Ma’s Gift and the Translation Attempt

Ma tells Dominick that the manuscript is her father’s life story, dictated in the summer he died. She has never read it. She explains that she had difficulty with the languages he used: at times he spoke the Italian he had learned in the north, and at times Sicilian, which she confused with it. She also recalls that he had not wanted her near the project. When she brought him a drink or went outside to hang laundry, he might shout at her to stay out of his business. The manuscript therefore carries a silence built into its making: Ma is its closest surviving witness, but neither its intended reader nor its interpreter.

She gives the manuscript and dictionary to Dominick, saying that the materials are for Thomas as well if he wants them, but especially for Dominick because, as a child, he used to ask about his grandfather. The dictionary makes that inheritance tangible. Its onionskin pages are stained with grease from Domenico’s fingers; when Dominick places his thumb over one of those marks, he considers his grandfather as more than old photographs and repeated family stories. He asks Ma to translate the history, but she says she cannot reliably do so. Her gift is thus also a request that someone else make the account accessible.

Dominick later pursues a translation through Nedra Frank at the university. By mid-April, while Ma is in near-constant pain and he has been occupied with work, he returns to the university because he wants his grandfather’s story back, whether the translation is finished or not. Nedra has withdrawn from her degree program for personal reasons, and her former office mate will not provide her forwarding address. The effort has not brought the manuscript into a form Ma can read, and Dominick cannot retrieve it at that point.

Loss and Family Memory

On the morning he died, Domenico told Ma that he was nearly finished. She remembers being startled by this progress report because he had not previously spoken directly to her about the work. When she asked what he would do with it, he said he might burn it in an ash barrel after completing it, despite the trouble he had taken to write it down. Ma heard him sobbing in the room that morning but did not go to him, fearing that her presence would anger him or make things worse. When she later brought his lunch, she found him slumped over the table after a stroke, with pages scattered into the hedges and against the chicken coop. The manuscript’s preservation was precarious from the beginning: its author entertained destroying it, and its pages were physically dispersed at his death.

Ma dies without reading her father’s history. Before then, Dominick has wanted to recover it, but the book’s loss becomes explicit when he later looks through the family scrapbook: he has lost Domenico’s dictated story, while Ma had rescued the family photographs from the fire. The contrast is not that the photographs replace the manuscript; rather, one kind of family record survives where another does not. The scrapbook’s shuffled images bring Domenico into view for his grandsons even though he died before they were born, but they cannot supply the written account he made of himself. The manuscript remains a charged absence: a personal history carefully begun, entrusted to descendants, and never made available to Ma through translation.