The Body of Il Duce (19 page)

The story of Il Duce's syphilis was typical of what happens when a totalitarian system collapses, when people become disenchanted with the leader's superhuman qualities. When the leader dies, the myths so vital in his lifetime are turned upside down; the charisma is transformed into a deep flaw. In the century of Freud, was there any context more congenial in which to situate the leader's physical (and mental) flaws than in his sexuality? In post-Nazi Germany, there were those who sought to explain the extermination of the Jews by claiming that Hitler had contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute. Others made much of the connection between Nazi policy and the fact—confirmed by the Führer's autopsy—that Hitler lacked a left testicle. In the journalist Corrado Alvaro's diary, we find echoes of such obsessions in postwar Rome. “C. asserts that Il Duce had an undeveloped male member,” writes Alvaro, adding, “B. replies that he took the trouble of measuring it when he saw the corpse and says that the entire genitalia were of normal size.”
34
Mussolini's supporters also had their say in the matter, as in
The Handsome Priest
, an ironic novel by Goffredo Parise published in the 1950s. In it, Esposito, a retired jailer and widower with four daughters to marry off, is convinced that Il Duce was well endowed. “He had studied him attentively, Il Duce, on more than one occasion, in order to be sure.… You could see it perfectly, even without special equipment.”
35

Mussolini's life after death thus relied on diagnoses dredged from memory or created out of whole cloth. They were perpetuated not only by Il Duce's doctors but by prominent officials of the defunct regime, by journalists, many of them well known, as well as by ordinary Italians. In a memoir written after the war, Georg Zachariae, a German who was his doctor during the Salò period, recalled a Mussolini in dire physical condition, with low blood pressure, anemia, dry, taut skin, an enlarged liver, stomach cramps, a shrunken lower abdomen, poor peristalsis, and acute constipation. At that stage Mussolini was “a ruin of a man,” Zachariae wrote, suggesting that it was very likely overwhelming pain that caused him to make wrong decisions.
36
According to Guido Leto, the former chief of OVRA, the secret police, Mussolini's physical decline was the real reason for his ejection on July 25, 1943. That is, Fascism died of fatigue rather than as a result of conflict. Cesare Rossi, a Fascist notable in the early years, gave further details in
Mussolini Remembered: X-rays of the Former Dictator
, advancing the idea that Il Duce's mental decline was due to the use of aphrodisiacs. To meet Clara Petacci's voracious sexual needs, Mussolini was reduced to consuming a preparation called Hormovir in large quantities. “This habit,” Rossi explains, “accounts for Il Duce's personal tragedy, which was the tragedy of Italians.” Fascism was a bodily tragedy, even down to the measures taken by an aging, impotent man.
37

Posthumous indiscretions about Mussolini's medical condition merit the historian's attention in inverse proportion to their reliability. In fact, when criticism of the Fascist period is reduced to assessments of Mussolini's health, the result is indulgence, since the victim of a medical syndrome is still a victim of something. It was left to intellectuals, to the students of Benedetto Croce and Gaetano Salvemini, to weigh whether Fascism was a moral disease of the ruling class or a structural disease of the whole society. Middle-brow thinkers had something better on their minds. The way they saw it, the idea that the body of the regime was sick was less compelling than the idea that the body of Il Duce was sick—and this approach was one that many Italians could subscribe to.

The most highly developed version of it was published in 1968 by Antonino Trizzino, a retired admiral and militant member of the Italian Social Movement, who wrote several best sellers. Trizzino attributed the entire experience of Fascism to syphilis, including Il Duce's disastrous military campaigns in World War II, when the dictator was “on the brink of madness.”
38
But as early as 1950, the journalist Paolo Monelli had already taken the larger ramifications of Il Duce's frailties to their logical conclusion. In
Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois,
Monelli traced Il Duce's uncertainty, frustration, and perpetual doubts to a duodenal ulcer and his megalomania, extreme vanity, and vengefulness to syphilis. Thus, wrote Monelli, “It is pointless to look to heredity, degrees earned, books read, or a man's environment to understand his character. These two illnesses, one of them due to an encounter with a woman, are all we need to explain everything about him—virtues and defects, triumphs and defeats, decline and fall.”
39

We do not know whether Gadda liked
Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois
as much as
Roma 1943,
Monelli's previous book. What is certain is that the interpretations of both writers were excessively physical. By going deep into the recesses of Il Duce's body, they remained on the surface of Fascist Italy.

*   *   *

AT RAI, THE
state broadcast network where Gadda worked as an editor in the 1950s, Giovanni Guareschi, a writer far more familiar to the average reader, launched a radio program called
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Court Is in Session
. Every Sunday afternoon Guareschi, assisted by actors from the Radio Milano theater company, broadcast a “radio trial with a jury.” The cases were fictional, but they were believable enough that listeners often responded as if they were based on fact. The success of Guareschi's show can only be explained by Italians' strong interest in crime reporting and court proceedings after twenty years of half-truths and silence. The program did not, however, touch on the moral problems connected to Benito Mussolini; in the postwar years of De Gasperi, state radio preferred to keep its distance from the Fascist period. Here Guareschi's radio trial is of interest because the popular interest in court cases extended to a book published in the same period, a book that dealt directly with Mussolini's posthumous destiny.

Il Duce's summary execution on the shores of Lake Como deprived Italians not only of his final testament but of a trial—the international trial for war crimes that he feared facing in the hellish confusion of New York's Madison Square Garden, the trial Allied prosecutors eventually convened against Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. Anti-Fascists and neo-Fascists experienced the absence of a due process differently. Few anti-Fascists, at least immediately after 1945, publicly deplored the fact that Mussolini's execution had robbed the country of court proceedings. In their view, Il Duce's had been a hasty but necessary affair, even if Italians were denied the satisfaction of unmasking their “cardboard Caesar” in public.
40
Neo-Fascists held the conviction that the Communist partisan squad had prevented a trial whose outcome was by no means certain—Mussolini might well have shown the world that he had acted in good faith. Once again, imagination sought to fill the void left by reality. In the absence of an Italian Nuremberg, several writers produced reports of an imaginary trial.

The one conceived by Yvon De Begnac, a writer with an open passion for Il Duce, is a pro-Fascist version of an ancient classic. With Il Duce as his protagonist, De Begnac, Mussolini's “official” biographer during the 1930s, wrote a
Trial of Socrates on the Banks of Lake Como.
It is hard not to laugh at the idea of placing the Athenian master next to the man from Predappio; the comparison refers to the story that in his waning years Mussolini became an assiduous reader of Plato, both in Italian translation and in the original. De Begnac's Mussolini claims credit for building the dam of Italian Fascism to contain the powerful river of Soviet Communism. He criticizes himself for not having assumed the powers of a dictator in full. He did not commit suicide after the Italian armistice with the Allies, he explains, because he wished to defend Italian lives from Salò. The democratic forces that sought to condemn him were a macabre farce, Mussolini–De Begnac goes on. It is his hope that he will be remembered by his fellow Italians as a man above politics.

These arguments follow the anti-Resistance gospel of the immediate postwar years. They differ little, in essence, from Mussolini's last wishes as expressed by Indro Montanelli in
My Good Man Mussolini
. But the open neo-Fascism of De Begnac limited the impact of his
Trial
. Although an anti-Fascist publication like
Il Ponte
called De Begnac's tale scandalous, the anti-Fascist cause had little to fear from such a book, which at best demonstrated the ability of neo-Fascists to write fiction. Il Duce's imagined trial needed to be written by someone outside the demimonde of neo-Fascist journalism, if it was to have any ideological impact. All the better if it appeared in a controversial best seller. Curzio Malaparte's
The Skin
was such a work—indeed, it was among the most widely read and discussed books in postwar Italy.

Malaparte was a man obsessed by corpses. He was also obsessed by fantasies about Il Duce's body. The diary he kept in Paris from 1947 to 1949 during the writing of
The Skin
makes this evident. Having once admired Mussolini the tough guy, he had come to see him as a human monster. In Malaparte's description, Mussolini is a beast whose veins flow with thin blood, or perhaps just whey. He is “a goose, an enormous goose,” worthy of Bosch, Brueghel, or Rousseau, a swollen, slow, lazy beast, “a body on the verge of decomposing.” Thus Malaparte depicts not the ox but the goose of the nation, whose head, always large in relation to his body, has over the years grown gigantic, deformed. When he speaks, Il Duce's large, dark, disturbing eyes roll, so the irises float in a sea of white, “like the eyes of a gazelle in its death throes or of certain women enjoying sexual pleasure.” His skin has “the smell of a wet chicken” or “the odor of a corpse.”
41

These quotations from Malaparte's diary do not appear in
The Skin
. But the imaginary trial of Il Duce in one of its chapters is just as morbidly expressionistic. Malaparte explains that he had taken a break from his work as a journalist following the Allied troops during Italy's bitter civil war and was staying in the tiny house of an obstetrician friend in Rome. Because space was cramped, he slept on a sofa in the doctor's studio, which was crowded with books, obstetrical instruments, and a row of jars filled with yellowish liquid, each one containing a human fetus. Understandably, Malaparte found the company disturbing, “because a fetus is a cadaver, a monstrous cadaver that was never born and never died.”
42
One night, his studio companions came too close for comfort. The fetuses climbed out of their jars and began to move around the room, scaling the desk, the chairs, and even the bed of the feverish writer. Then they drew back to the middle of the room and sat on the floor in a semicircle, “almost like an assembly of judges,” and fixed Malaparte with their round, dull eyes. Suddenly the fetus chief, a three-headed female specimen, turned to several little monsters standing off to one side and ordered them to bring in the accused.

So Malaparte, in a nightmarish place between life and death—or between nonlife and nondeath—has Mussolini enter the scene:

Slowly an enormous fetus with a loose stomach and two legs covered with shiny, whitish hair came forward between the two guards.… Two huge watery yellow eyes, eyes like a blind dog's, shone in the large, white, swollen head. The fetus's expression was proud yet fearful, as if traditional pride were doing battle with a new fear of something unknown, neither winning, so they combined to produce an expression at once cowardly and heroic.

The face was made of flesh (the flesh of a fetus yet also of an old man, the flesh of an old fetus); it was a mirror in which the grandeur, poverty, superiority, and cowardice of humans shone in all their stupid glory.… And for the first time I saw the ugliness of the human face, the disgusting matter of which we are made.
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Beyond the bravura writing, there is a message in Malaparte's text, a message to be decoded.
The Skin
is not just literary prose to be admired; through his trial of Mussolini, Malaparte—a Fascist true believer in the 1920s who fell into disgrace in the 1930s and then improvised a new anti-Fascist identity in the 1940s—has something to tell Italians. He confesses that he despised Il Duce, his chest puffed out triumphantly, at the apex of his glory in Piazza Venezia. But now, in an obstetrician's humble studio, with Mussolini reduced to a “bare, repellent fetus,” Malaparte refuses to laugh at him. No, the more he looks, the more Malaparte feels “affectionate compassion” for Mussolini. His compassion extends to Fascists and anti-Fascists, to the Republic of Salò and to the Resistance—all joined by the wonderful fatal destiny of defeat. Before the council of fetus judges, Malaparte assumes the role of Mussolini's lawyer and the Italian people's defender. “A man, a people, beaten, humiliated, reduced to a bit of rotten flesh. What in this world is more beautiful, more noble?”
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Malaparte's political message is not so very different from Montanelli's in
My Good Man Mussolini:
the Resistance was a Grand Guignolesque bloodbath from which the defeated paradoxically emerged the victors. Furthermore, Malaparte explicitly rejects any reading of the civil war as a tragic but salutary rite of passage toward Italian maturity. “The dead, I hated them. All the dead,” he writes in
The Skin
. What made Malaparte, writing in 1949, different from both the left and the right was that he embraced an ethic of survival, while the ex-Resistance fighters and neo-Fascists cultivated an ethic of sacrifice. It was precisely that ethic of survival that helped explain
The Skin
's extraordinary success, all the more notable in the light of the critics' negative reviews and the absence of backing by a major publishing house. The book sold seventy thousand copies in its first eight months, or twenty times the average novel's sales in that period. It seems unlikely that all of its readers shared the narrator's voyeuristic interest in the dead and unborn; more likely,
The Skin
attracted readers drawn to anti-anti-Fascism. The book was calculated to appeal to Italians in the gray area—all those who, after the collapse of Mussolini, were still not won over to the ideals of the Resistance.