The Mask of Forgetting
Almost six years before that morning—the morning after the funeral of her grandmother, the morning when she dared to take a bath—Nora Eunice Magliano had appeared one afternoon at the gates of the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy, and asked to fill out an application. Sr. Albertus Magnus, a novice from a small town in Tennessee, was working as the receptionist. She didn’t quite know how to handle a walk-up application, as no one had told her that such a thing was possible, but she found all the necessary papers, and cleared a table that was usually covered with porcelain figurines so that the applicant, who was a little too big for the small desk in the corner, would have a comfortable place to work. It took Nora Eunice less than 45 minutes to fill out the application. She told Sr. Albertus Magnus that she would be back the next day at the same time for her interview. Sr. Albertus Magnus agreed, assuming that the young lady knew more about the application process than she herself did.
The next afternoon Sr. Benignus, the director of admissions, conducted the interview with Nora Eunice. Sr. Benignus had of course been apprised immediately of the unusual application, and this one was indeed most unusual. Almost all the applications for the graduate school at the Villa Schifanoia came by air mail from the United States. Occasionally a young woman would arrive at the Villa without having completed certain steps of the process, and so the department maintained a small “welcome room” near the main entrance, but in fifteen years of working in admissions Sr. Benignus had never met an applicant who just came in off the street, appearing in person without any previous contact.
Sr. Benignus introduced herself to Nora Eunice Magliano and started off by emphasizing, in a general sort of way, that the Villa Schifanoia was a graduate school, and that the requirement for a baccalaureate was rather essential. Nora Eunice responded that she was quite certain that her educational background was more than adequate: three semesters of studio classes at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, two semesters of art history at Edgewood College in Madison, and three months now of intensive study of Italian, with daily visits to the most important museums in the world. Sr. Benignus tried to make very clear the necessity of providing official transcripts from all the institutions of higher education that the applicant had attended, especially the institution that had awarded the bachelor’s degree, but Nora Eunice just smiled. She would return the next day, at the same time, to learn of the Villa Schifanoia’s decision.
On the third afternoon, Sr. Albertus Magnus met Nora Eunice at the front gate while Sr. Benignus watched from a window. The novice from Tennessee, as instructed, then escorted the applicant to the office of the dean of art history. There Sr. Martin de Porres welcomed her niece to Florence, and thanked Sr. Albertus Magnus for her help. When they were alone, Sr. Martin told Nora Eunice that her application was quite the topic of conversation at the Villa, and that her mother, with whom Sr. Martin had just spoken on the phone, was very worried about her, especially since Nora Eunice had left that language school in Rome without telling anyone. When Sr. Martin asked Nora Eunice where she was staying and whether she had any money, the young woman just shook her head. She did not burst into tears, although Sr. Martin suspected that there might be some weeping later, in private.
Sr. Martin came around her desk and sat down on the small sofa, next to her niece.
“It is simply impossible for you to enroll here as a student, not until you earn your degree. You know that, don’t you?”
Sr. Martin then waited a long time until Nora Eunice, who still had not spoken a word, nodded in recognition and acceptance. Only then did Sr. Martin offer her niece a job: research assistant to the dean of art history, pro tempore, a position that offered minimal pay but did include room and board in the convent. That afternoon, Nora Eunice moved her two matching suitcases from the pensione into the tiny room next door to Sr. Albertus Magnus. (Years later, after leaving the Dominicans and earning a doctorate, Sr. Albertus Magnus, now using the name Bea Trixie Fausta, would become the first feminist scholar in the United States to examine the works of Nora Eunice Magliano as important, if retrograde, cultural artifacts.)
The following Monday, Sr. Martin summoned Nora Eunice to her office and introduced her to the subject of “our” current research project. Nora Eunice, somewhat sullenly, interpreted her aunt’s use of the first-person plural as royal, rather than inclusive. Sr. Martin indicated an old lump of greenish metal sitting on her bookshelf. What seemed like an ordinary knick-knack was apparently an ancient mask of some sort. Sr. Martin was writing an article about this mask, an article almost ready for submission, and the citations needed to be verified. She handed her niece a photocopy of the manuscript. Nora Eunice felt a wave of anxiety when she saw that many of the footnotes were in Italian.
“You only need to check the notes in English,” said Sr. Martin. “Sr. Albertus Magnus has already finished le note in italiano.”
And so Nora Eunice went to the library and began to read and cross-reference. The article was about a kind of Etruscan bronze mask, known as the Mask of Forgetting. Only three such masks were known to survive. One was in Rome, in the Vatican collection, one was in the British Museum, and one—the knick-knack on Sr. Martin’s bookshelf—had been donated to the Villa Schifanoia five years before, as part of the estate of a reclusive old woman, whose vulgar American fortune had, near the end of the previous century, rescued a distinguished Florentine family from the gutter.
The Villa Schifanoia’s mask seemed to be at least 100 years older than the other two—it was from the 5th century B.C.—although precise comparative dating was difficult, as the Vatican curators had refused to submit their mask to the latest scientific test. The mask in Sr. Martin’s office—la fiorentina—was the only one of the three still covered in verdigris. The other two (la di londra and la vaticana) had long ago been cleaned, polished, and waxed for display.
In the article, Sr. Martin de Porres summarized two schools of opinion about the masks, and then offered a new reading of their meaning and function. The first school of thought derived from the work of a Franciscan friar in the late 15th century. He had given the mask its modern Italian name, la maschera di oblio, and the interpretation that would become standard in textbooks and museum placards: that the mask was designed to be worn at marriage ceremonies, as a symbol of the wife’s renunciation of her former life. A second school of thought followed the work of a 19th-century Jesuit priest and physician, who maintained that the mask was intended to be worn by mothers during childbirth, so that afterwards, when the mask was removed, the pain might be forgotten and the mother free to love her child. Sr. Martin, after acknowledging the importance of forgetting in these situations, argued that both interpretations were pure speculation, unsupported by contemporaneous evidence from the Etruscan world. She based her own reading on a fragment of a bawdy epithalamium that had been discovered at the archaeological dig at Vulci, a rather explicit poem that had previously been dismissed as scurrilous, ribald, and even obscene.
As she read the words “scurrilous” and “ribald” and “obscene,” Nora Eunice began to feel more than a little trepidation. Sr. Martin de Porres—her own aunt, a respected nun—was arguing that the burden of the poem—that a widow must wear “a mask of forgetting” to find new pleasure in life—was not simply a literary trope, was not in fact a metaphor at all, but rather a ritual prescription. The poem was a recipe for the use of the mask, the how-to directions of a sacred instrument. Together, the mask and the poem formed a toolkit for the liberation of widows, so that widowed women might be able to embrace new lovers, untethered to the past.
Nora Eunice set down the photocopied article.
Could this be her aunt, writing about a dirty poem? She tried to imagine a woman putting on the mask, trying to forget something… those things… those marital things….
That evening, during the 20-minute period of open conversation between supper and Rosary, Nora Eunice told Sr. Albertus Magnus how shocked she was by the article, by what she described, in furtive whispers, as its “paganism” and “carnality.”
“Are you genuinely shocked?” asked Sr. Albertus Magnus. “Or just surprised? To read it here, in a convent?”
Nora Eunice was unable to find any words to respond. Many years later, in an essay about the origins of contemporary anti-feminism among Catholic women, Bea Trixie Fausta, Ph.D., would deconstruct that moment of mute confusion in some detail.
Despite her initial misgivings, Nora Eunice discharged her editorial duties with thoroughness and perception, soon gaining the full trust of the dean of art history, as well as the keys to her office. But then, after only four and a half weeks at the Villa, Nora Eunice disappeared from Florence, along with the Mask of Forgetting.
Sr. Martin did not report the apparent theft to the Italian authorities, for whom she had absolutely no respect. She did, however, notify her eight sisters in the United States of Nora Eunice’s fragile state of mind. The sisters pooled their resources and funded a trip to Europe for Nora Eunice’s mother and her closest sister, the two babies of the family. It was such a shame really, because neither of them had ever been to Europe before, and how could they enjoy the experience under those conditions? For three months they showed pictures of Nora Eunice at tourist offices, hostels, train stations and museum entrances. The best responses came when they showed a charcoal sketch of Nora Eunice, which Sr. Albertus Magnus, that lovely Negro girl, had drawn for them from memory. It caught the beauty of Nora Eunice’s eyes better than any photograph, both sisters agreed.
They found Nora Eunice living in a dismal bedsit in North London. She greeted them as if their arrival was just a pleasant visit, as if they were neighbors who hadn’t seen each other in a week or two. She told them she had just been so very busy at her ceramics studio, and how happy she was to have found such rewarding and creative work. Both mother and aunt insisted on accompanying Nora Eunice to her job the next day. Her “studio” turned out to be located on the fourth floor of a filthy warehouse building. As the daughters of a slaughterhouse foreman, Nora Eunice’s mother and her aunt recognized a factory when they saw one. Hundreds of artisans, working in assembly lines, were producing bright red ceramic poppies by the thousand, remembrances destined for the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice. It broke her mother’s heart to see Nora Eunice slaving so at the kiln.
That evening, her mother and her aunt told Nora Eunice that it was time to come home. Her grandmother, “Big Nora,” needed someone to stay with her in the old house in Dubuque. Otherwise, they’d have to sell the house and put her grandmother in a nursing home.
Nora Eunice hadn’t wanted to give up her artistic career in London, but the pull of family had been too strong. She had acquiesced. She had relocated to Dubuque. She had moved into the old house. Cleaned every inch of it. Every cupboard, every dusty old box. She had been the perfect, devoted granddaughter.
And now, more than five years after that awkward conversation in London, almost six years after her arrival at the Villa Schifanoia, immersed now in water that was becoming lukewarm, she lay perfectly still in the old upstairs bathtub, listening to her mother and her aunt down in the kitchen, talking about difficult people.
Then Nora Eunice heard her own name, and shivered. The surface of the water broke into waves, almost spilling out of the tub. She held herself very still, terrified of causing a splash. Her mother and her aunt were talking more quietly now, and she couldn’t hear every word. She thought she heard Sr. Eunice say credit and acknowledgment and changes in the next edition. Then she heard her mother’s voice, less authoritative, more Midwestern, but the same voice, really, in a lighter register, tinged with permanent apology: ...you mean those letters, she must have….
I have no chance, thought Nora Eunice. They know everything.
Her mother was talking, pouring her heart out: ...so worried… that year in Europe... told people she was… and when I found her… that place in London….
I can’t face this, thought Nora Eunice. I cannot face this.
She looked again at the little table next to the bathtub, at the razor blade, wrapped in cardboard, and at the bronze mask, encrusted in verdigris. Nora Eunice reached over and unwrapped the razor. Then she covered her face with the mask, picked up the razor, and slid down into the tub.
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