Masetto's feigned muteness

Masetto’s feigned muteness is a practical disguise rather than a bodily impairment: he pretends to be deaf and unable to speak so that a convent will admit him, keep him, and cease to regard him as a threat. The deception turns what could have barred him from the convent into his chief advantage. It wins him shelter and work, persuades the nuns that he cannot expose their secrets, and ultimately gives him leverage to renegotiate the arrangement when its demands exceed his strength.

Identity and Design

Masetto forms the plan after hearing Nuto describe his departure from the convent. Nuto had found the nuns difficult to satisfy in their requests about his work in the garden, and the bailiff had asked him to recommend another worker. Masetto, already eager to get among the nuns, sees a difficulty: because he is young and good-looking, he fears he may not be accepted. He reasons that if he can appear mute, no one there will know him and the convent will have less reason to reject him.

He sets out with an axe around his neck, disguised as a beggar. At the convent he communicates by signs, asking for food and offering to split wood in return. The performance depends on more than silence: he acts as though he cannot hear or understand speech, even while listening closely to what others say. His apparent disability is therefore a chosen role, maintained for a particular audience and purpose.

Admission Through Work and Assumed Disability

The bailiff gives Masetto food and tests his offer against a stack of logs that Nuto had been unable to split. Masetto quickly cleaves them. He then works in the coppice, cuts firewood, and brings it home on an ass. These visible demonstrations of strength and usefulness make the disguise credible as a reason to employ him, rather than merely a pretext for entering the convent.

When the abbess asks who he is, the bailiff describes him as a poor deaf-and-dumb man taken in out of charity. He recommends keeping him to cultivate the garden, emphasizing that the convent needs a worker and that the man is strong. The abbess approves: she instructs the bailiff to provide shoes, an old hood, food, and kind treatment, while reasoning that the supposed mute poses no danger to the young women. Masetto overhears this exchange while pretending to sweep the courtyard. His role has secured not only admission but a place in the convent under the protection of the very assumption he set out to exploit.

As he tends the garden, the nuns mock him and speak freely in his presence because they think he cannot understand. One day, while he pretends to sleep after a morning’s labor, two young nuns discuss their confinement and the pleasures they have heard a woman may experience with a man. One proposes testing those claims with the mute, believing he cannot tell anyone. Masetto waits for the opportunity he has anticipated. The disguise that won the abbess’s confidence now makes the nuns believe that their own conduct is safe from disclosure.

The Disguise Tested and Abandoned

The first two nuns take Masetto to a hut and have sex with him; afterward, they return repeatedly. Another nun sees them from a lattice and brings others into the secret rather than reporting them. More sisters join in time. The abbess, still unaware of what has been happening, discovers Masetto asleep beneath an almond tree, his clothes displaced by the wind. She too succumbs to the desire she had previously treated as a danger confined to her nuns, and keeps him in her chamber for several days before summoning him again on later occasions.

The arrangement grows beyond what Masetto can endure. He has to work by day and satisfy the nuns by night, and the abbess demands more than her share. One night, in her company, he speaks for the first time. He explains that one man cannot serve nine women indefinitely and says that he can no longer continue as before; she must either let him go or find another remedy. His speech overturns the abbess’s understanding of him. She had believed him mute, but he explains that an illness had taken his speech and that it has only now returned. She accepts this account and asks what he means by serving nine. Masetto tells her what has occurred, revealing that he knows the full extent of the secret.

Cover Story, Consequences, and Significance

The abbess does not dismiss him or expose the nuns. Instead, she consults them, and the women acknowledge to one another what each has secretly done. With Masetto’s consent, they settle on a public explanation: his speech has returned after long muteness through their prayers and the merits of the convent’s patron saint. When the bailiff dies, they appoint Masetto in his place and distribute his work so that he can bear it.

The deception remains concealed until after the abbess’s death. By then Masetto is growing old and wants to return home wealthy. Once the story becomes known, he can leave with money and children, without the burden or expense of raising them. He returns to the place from which he had set out carrying an axe, claiming that Christ treats those who wear horns in this way. His final boast recasts the episode as a profitable trick: the assumed silence that once protected his access also helps preserve the convent’s secret until he is ready to depart.

The episode makes the disguise operate at several levels. Masetto uses the appearance of disability to pass through an institutional gate, to listen without being suspected, and to conceal his own capacity for speech. The nuns’ belief that he cannot report them gives them confidence, while their need to protect the convent’s reputation later gives him a negotiated position. His muteness is not simply a mask that opens the plot; it is a changing arrangement of knowledge and power, abandoned when its costs become too great and replaced by a shared explanation that permits both Masetto and the convent to avoid public disgrace.