The rabbit’s division and the miracle of twins

The rabbit’s division and the miracle of twins is a remembered tale of apparent multiplication that Prosperine uses to interpret a family’s painful birth. In her account, a rabbit split in two becomes two living rabbits; years later, Prosperine sees the echo of that event in the birth of twins to Domenico Tempesta and Ignazia Tempesta. Domenico dismisses her explanation as superstition, but the story’s striking correspondence between one becoming two—and the different fates of the twins—makes it a key image of the novel’s intertwined concern with twinship, inheritance, and the limits of rational certainty.

The remembered event and its telling

On the night of August 12, 1949, Prosperine tells Domenico the story of a strange event she witnessed as a fourteen-year-old in Pescara. The scene is presented as a memory within a memory: Prosperine recounts what happened long ago to explain why the birth of Domenico and Ignazia’s twins has revived the incident for her. Her disclosure comes in a charged encounter with Domenico, whom the narration describes as an enemy who has drunk her wine. The tale is at once personal testimony and an attempt to persuade him that the past bears on the present.

Prosperine recalls that the event took place during a visit to town with Ciccolina, an older woman who sometimes suffered dizziness and headaches. That day Ciccolina had fallen twice against the cart and once in the road, and her anger had followed her into a dispute over the price of a rabbit. The schoolmaster, Pomaricci, complained that the animal would yield too little meat for the price. Ciccolina answered his complaint with a challenge: if twice the meat would satisfy him, he would get twice the meat. The ordinary transaction becomes the prelude to the extraordinary claim.

The division and its aftermath

Ciccolina directed Prosperine to hold the rabbit while she brought down a cleaver. Prosperine says the animal was divided cleanly, without blood, and that each half then grew into a whole living rabbit. The account insists on the transformation as something witnessed not only by Prosperine but also by Pomaricci. Its force lies in the sudden change from a practical question of meat and price to an event neither witness can explain within the terms of the transaction.

The witnesses respond differently. Pomaricci drops his coins, backs away, and runs off, shouting about the devil’s work. Ciccolina, by contrast, gives him both rabbits and tells Prosperine to say a blessing and make the sign of the cross. Prosperine follows the instruction in a daze, still unable to look away from the two animals that had been one. The tale holds fear, religious reflex, and material plenty together without resolving them into a single explanation.

That evening, the church bell rings for Pomaricci, who has died of apoplexy. The account does not establish that the rabbit incident caused his death. Ciccolina and Prosperine celebrate instead: Ciccolina orders Prosperine to prepare the rabbits, and the two share a meal of fried rabbit, squash from the garden, and bread with tomato gravy. Prosperine remembers both her initial reluctance to eat the animals and the meal as the most delicious she had tasted. The miracle, as she tells it, does not remain only an apparition; it enters the ordinary necessities of cooking and eating.

The birth that gives the story new meaning

Prosperine explicitly connects her childhood memory to the twins she has just delivered for Domenico and Ignazia. One boy was stillborn, while the surviving girl was born with a cleft lip. For Prosperine, the remembered rabbit’s division returns through this birth: in both episodes, a single expectation of what a living creature should be gives way to an unsettling form of doubling, and in the human birth that doubling is marked by loss and bodily difference. Her question to Domenico is not simply whether the old event was real; she asks what it means now that the two births seem to recall it.

That connection is Prosperine’s interpretation, not a conclusion confirmed by the narrative. The rabbit story supplies a pattern through which she understands the twins’ arrival, but it does not explain the stillbirth or the girl’s cleft lip. Its importance comes from the act of linking events across time: a childhood memory, preserved by Prosperine, is made newly urgent by the birth she has witnessed as an adult. The remembered marvel becomes a framework for confronting an outcome that offers no easy comfort.

Twinship, evidence, and uncertainty

Domenico rejects Prosperine’s reading. He calls her belief foolish and tells her that she should have left superstition and hallucinations behind on the journey to the New Country. His response sets skeptical dismissal against her insistence that the past has returned in the present. Prosperine warns him, “Where there is no shadow, there is no light.” The line leaves the argument open: Domenico refuses the supernatural explanation, but his certainty does not erase the force the story has for Prosperine.

Elsewhere, the novel gives twin comparison a scientific, rather than miraculous, vocabulary. Dr. Patel describes Dominick Birdsey as Thomas Birdsey’s mirror and a healthy control for understanding Thomas’s past and shaping his therapy. She asks Dominick to listen to recordings of Thomas’s sessions and contribute memories, particularly of their childhood and the onset of Thomas’s schizophrenia. Later, she discusses research at the National Institute of Mental Health into brain differences between people with schizophrenia and their healthy twins, including possible links to early viral infections or autoimmune disorders and the possibility of MRI scans for the brothers. Dominick objects that they are not lab rats; Dr. Patel says she is not proposing the scans immediately, but raises them to reassure him that she is informed about current research.

The clinical comparison does not establish what caused Thomas’s illness, just as Prosperine’s tale does not establish a supernatural cause for the twins’ birth. Both accounts make the twin relationship a means of asking what resemblance can reveal and where its explanatory power ends. Dominick’s own sense of responsibility sharpens that question: after Thomas cuts off his hand, Dominick first blames his brother’s stopped medication, then admits that he too should have recognized what was happening. He also insists that Thomas feels safe with Dr. Ehlers and asks Dr. Patel to contact him about getting Thomas out. Set beside Prosperine’s effort to read a pair of births through an earlier doubling, this practical care shows that being a twin is not only a mystery to interpret. It is also a relationship in which one person may feel responsible for seeing, understanding, and protecting the other.