The Body of Il Duce (22 page)

In 1948, the party national congress gave Audisio his official political investiture. Photographs show Colonel Valerio on the platform of Milan's Teatro Lirico in highly select company. Beside him are Palmiro Togliatti, and direct from Moscow, Delio and Giuliano Gramsci, sons of Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the party who had died a Communist martyr after being imprisoned by the Fascists. Another guest from Moscow, Vagan G. Grigorian, noted the enthusiasm for Il Duce's executioner. According to this important member of the Soviet delegation, Audisio “serves as the party's interior minister.” In his memo to Moscow on the activities of the party congress's political committee, Grigorian conveyed a unique version of what had happened at Piazzale Loreto, which he attributed to Audisio:

Colonel Valerio Audisio [sic] … says that some partisans had been hanged in Piazzale Loreto in Milan with a notice saying that they were supposed to remain there until there were no partisans left in Italy. They brought Mussolini's corpse and some of his men, and overnight took the partisans down from the scaffold and put up Mussolini and the others. So the next morning, the Milanese found Mussolini hanging there instead of the partisans.
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Whether this account emerged from a linguistic misunderstanding or from Audisio's penchant for telling tales, the fact is that three years after the event, the Soviet leadership was spreading a completely imaginary version of what had happened.

Meanwhile, the anti-Communist press did not hesitate to target Audisio with its sarcasm. A vignette in
Candido
depicted a tall, proud Audisio at the party congress wearing his ever-present beret, standing next to a tiny Togliatti, who looked very timid behind his glasses. “In honor of the foreign delegation,” Togliatti is saying, “the famed executioner comrade Walter Audisio will sing ‘How I Executed Benito.'”
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Colonel Valerio was subjected not only to the press's irony but also to accusations. An article in
Il Tempo
claimed Audisio was in possession of lists of people who would be outlawed when the Communists mounted their uprising. Accompanying the article was a photograph of an apartment building that belonged to the party. “In this house at Via Pavia 4 in Rome,” read the caption, “Audisio is said to be hiding weapons and a plan to take the capital.”
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Fanciful suspicions notwithstanding, Mussolini's executioner did play an important role in more clandestine activities of the Communist Party, a role that brought him obsessive police surveillance. The critical attention in the anti-Communist press must also have enhanced Audisio's charisma. Certainly, as national elections—scheduled for April 18, 1948—approached, the pro-government press waved the threatening image of Colonel Valerio before good Italians, as if to say, The man who killed Il Duce could kill any of you. In early postwar Italy, Audisio was also infamous, a negative model.

All the ghosts of the past hovered over the election. The Italian Social Movement, for one, offered policies and candidates with the definite stamp of the Republic of Salò. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Il Duce's executioner, Walter Audisio, a candidate for the united Socialists and Communists, ran against Tito Zaniboni, the Socialist Unity candidate for the voting district of Cuneo-Alessandria-Asti in Piedmont, a man who had once tried to shoot Mussolini. The Christian Democrats, somewhat more cautious about evoking historical ghosts, had based their campaign on the theme of “turning the page.” But that did not stop Mario Scelba, the Christian Democrat interior minister, from stepping into the historical fray by disbanding the partisan units that had flanked the police since the Liberation. Eager to ingratiate himself, Vincenzo Agnesina, police chief of Milan, went so far as to arrest police officers sympathetic to the Communists. The election campaign in Milan took place in a climate poisoned by memories of the civil war. There wasn't a rally of the Socialist-Communist front that didn't have a placard extolling the memory of Piazzale Loreto.

The executioner, Walter Audisio. (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)

In Milan, as election day approached, celebrations of the third anniversary of the Liberation turned into a clash between anti-Fascists and the police. The anti-Fascists had wanted to hold a ceremony in Piazzale Loreto honoring the martyrs of August 10, 1944. Angry that the police chief barred them from entering the piazza, demonstrators pushed past the barriers and moved in. The police then charged the crowd, and in the scuffle that followed one Carabinieri officer was killed. The Resistance veterans succeeded in taking the piazza but it was a Pyrrhic victory, since the Christian Democrats' triumph at the polls ushered in a long period that would leave them out in the cold. Only a month or so after the election, Jesuit priest Riccardo Lombardi—the foremost interpreter of the Christian Democrat line—announced at the Ara Coeli in Rome that the Lord would punish those responsible for Mussolini's “assassination.”

Less apocalyptically, the popular illustrated weeklies targeted Audisio. Now an elected deputy, Audisio had not yet taken his seat in the chamber before a parliamentary reporter described him as “ever-present and belligerent,” the captain of the “Communist boxing team.”
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As the elections receded into the past, the polemics failed to die down: throughout the entire legislature of 1948–53, the weeklies lambasted Walter Audisio and Cino Moscatelli as the incarnation of Communist perversity, superficially democratic but bloodthirsty at heart. In the cartoonish prose of the pro-government press, the Resistance heroes became the “junior officers in an army of death.”
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The more sophisticated anti-Communist journalists depicted the infamous Colonel Valerio as an instrument—in his infinite moral and physical degradation, the partisan hero was the personification of evil, and therefore as necessary to the designs of Providence as the terrible Sanson immortalized by Joseph de Maistre in
The St. Petersburg Dialogues.
Nantas Salvalaggio, a young journalist writing for
Il Borghese
, cast Mussolini's executioner as a scapegoat, condemned to suffer for the gap between his personal mediocrity and the grave historical role he had been assigned. Salvalaggio's Audisio was a man who returned to his filthy apartment in Via Pavia in the dead of night, a fretful insomniac, haunting rooms where no crucifix hung. In the mornings, he had to skirt the newsstands to avoid the covers of the illustrated weeklies, red as they were with the blood he had spilled on the shores of Lake Como. In vain he tried to take out life insurance. When Audisio's friends dragged him to the amusement park he was unable to hit the bull's-eye because he always saw himself back at the Villa Belmonte aiming at Mussolini, and the gun would fall from his hand.

Salvalaggio wrote about Audisio with a pathos absent from the illustrated weeklies, but the popular press's inclination to caricature what was made their depiction so successful. The parliamentary reporter for
Oggi
, Ugo Zatterin, worked harder than any other writer to spread the cliché of Audisio as a silly man, certainly as silly as he was dangerous. Mussolini's executioner was not merely an expert on the use of the machine gun, wrote Zatterin, he was also the party's “wine expert,” surprisingly knowledgeable about the differences between Freisa and Grignolino. He was a man so foolishly taken with his role as Il Duce's executioner that he gleefully accepted the gift of a little golden gun sparkling with diamonds from some Tuscan Communists. Thus even the more measured portraits of Audisio in the anti-Communist press took on laughable outlines, as damning as outright sensationalism. In the Thermidor era of the French Revolution, the anti-Jacobin press had depicted their targets in the same way: at once frivolous and bloodthirsty, murderers who would drink the wine from their victims' cellars and polish off roast chickens they had slaughtered with tiny guillotines.

In May 1949, one illustrated weekly,
Settimana Incom,
explicitly wrote of the “Thermidor butchery of Piazzale Loreto” when it seemed that the debate over Colonel Valerio's misdeeds might be the prelude to a trial against Audisio. Nevertheless, the article warned of the danger of criminalizing the Resistance. The hanging of Mussolini and company in Piazzale Loreto showed what kind of society the Socialists, Communists, and Action Party had in mind: a world where habeas corpus was superseded by habeas cadaver,
Settimana Incom
said. But putting Mussolini's executioner on trial would mean putting four years of Italian history on trial, including, of course, Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi.

This article marked the limits of the pro-government press's campaign against Audisio. It was one thing to take verbal aim at Colonel Valerio, another to assemble the evidence to drag him into court. To accuse Audisio formally of inflicting Mussolini's mortal and postmortem wounds would put in question all that had come after, including the role played by centrist politicians. A trial against Audisio risked becoming a trial against Italy's republican institutions.

*   *   *

“SEND HIM TO
prison,” urges the schoolteacher in Cesare Pavese's
The Moon and the Bonfires
. “Hang that Valerio.” In reality rather than in fiction, there was a shortage of people ready to kill Walter Audisio. But deep in the rough circles of neo-Fascism, in the Italian Social Movement party section in the Colle Oppio neighborhood of Rome, during the spring of 1953, one such assassin dreamed of Audisio's death.

The candidate, Giulio Salierno, was a serious bully, so capable of violence that he had been promoted—at just eighteen—to political leader of several districts in the capital. Too busy beating up Communists to indulge much in theory, Salierno was convinced of one thing: the true path of neo-Fascism was the radical one preached by members like Giorgio Almirante and Giorgio Pini, not the conservative line taken by such leaders as Augusto De Marsanich and Arturo Michelini. Unfortunately, though, since the Chamber of Deputies had outlawed much of the neo-Fascist program, the moderate line had prevailed in the Italian Social Movement. So the radical neo-Fascist youth decided to dedicate themselves to terrorism, to demonstrate that the party really was subversive and to embarrass the leadership in double-breasted suits. With that in mind, what better target than Audisio? The Social Movement's leaders could hardly deplore the murder of Mussolini's murderer without losing face with the party base. But nor could they greet Audisio's death with joy without losing face with their Christian Democrat interlocutors.

To Giulio Salierno, these thoughts were more than a mere political program—they were his life's vocation. “The activists had no alternative but to pursue violence, and I Audisio,” Salierno wrote in his memoirs twenty years later. For the young Roman neo-Fascist, Communist deputy Audisio's murder would be a rite of passage into adulthood and a chance to put into practice Mussolini's precept about making ideas come to life:

The killing of Audisio represented a goal I had dreamed of for years, the instrument through which I would leave my childhood behind and break into the adult world.… The other actions, the battles with the Reds and the police didn't mean anything; they were just routine, without glory. Audisio was different. It would mean leaving my mark, giving substance to my ideas.… It would transform that substance into life, consciously making me not just a number or a thing but a person.
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Salierno's memoirs offer a vivid picture of the context in which his criminal plan evolved—and then foundered. In the weeks before the 1953 elections, the neo-Fascist thug who was still too young to vote saw Audisio's murder as an electoral mission. “His corpse,” wrote Salierno, “would bring the Communists no votes.” From a practical point of view, the killing did not seem very difficult. At the time, Audisio lived in Rome at Largo Brandano, between the Via Nomentana and the Via Salaria. It was a quiet neighborhood, an easy place to carry out the murder. Audisio came and went at regular hours and he had no bodyguards. There was really no choice when it came to the weapon: it had to be an automatic rifle—that is, a weapon of war—to confer the maximum political significance. To practice his aim, Salierno took his gun apart and went to the countryside. He returned to his practice range again and again as he prepared to strike, with a photograph of Audisio glued to a wooden target and the target fixed to a tree. “With his mustache and his beret, ‘Colonel Valerio' looked like a peasant dressed up for a party,” wrote Salierno.
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He drilled into that peasant until he had become a sieve and the “head had exploded,” using bullets with a cross carved into the lead.

A few days before the elections, everything seemed ready. All of a sudden, though, Salierno's plans unraveled. One June night, in an outlying district of Rome, he murdered a young man about whom he knew nothing, “for no reason.” He then fled to France and joined the Foreign Legion but was recognized, identified by the police, and sent back to Italy. Tried for murder, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. So much for Salierno's dream of going down in history as the executioner of Mussolini's murderer. Like other neo-Fascist
squadristi,
he was fairly self-destructive: among the members of his Rome party section in the years after Salierno's arrest, one committed suicide, two died in the Foreign Legion, another two died while performing stunts with an airplane and motorcycle, and yet another with his throat slashed in Africa.