The Body of Il Duce (26 page)

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THE GERMAN GREATCOAT,
the money, and the “lover girl” were images that stuck in anti-Fascist minds as symbols of treason, larceny, and adultery—Mussolini's crimes at Dongo. But in 1950s Italy, anti-Fascist memory existed only among a minority, since opposition to the Fascist regime as well as the armed struggle against the Republic of Salò had been decidedly minority phenomena. In the immortal words of the writer Ennio Flaiano, the Fascists had been “a negligible majority.”
38
Under such circumstances, forgiving mercy of the Thermidor variety was bound to win out over the sterner Jacobin approach of the Resistance. This remained true until the passage of time changed the balance between two generations: those who had been adults during the regime, those for whom Fascism was a living memory began to decline, while their children, who had grown up after the war and saw the regime as history, were in the ascendent. The tensions of 1968 can be traced to the dynamic between these two generations. In the 1950s, however, hegemonic Italian culture—epitomized by the popular weeklies, the predecessors of television—rigorously excluded the ideals of the Resistance. At the same time the weeklies vigorously stoked compassion for the fate of Il Duce's body.

The literature of intimate confessions about Mussolini's life and death passed first through the illustrated weeklies and then appeared in book form, expanding the audience. Edda, Mussolini's daughter, was not the only woman in her family to publish her memoirs and keep Mussolini's memory warm; so did her mother, Rachele, and her aunt Edvige. Mussolini's ghost was also revived by the popular history writers of the period. Two small classics of cheap popular literature—Giovanni Artieri's book on the failed attempts on Mussolini's life, and Franco Bandini's book tracing the background of Walter Audisio's mission—got their starts in the illustrated weeklies. A former big name in Fascist journalism, Paolo Monelli, published a short version of his postwar book
Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois,
in the weekly
Europeo
. The sum total of all this recollection, reportage, and storytelling was to sketch an indulgent version of Il Duce's last days, in which the crimes he committed were transmuted into venial sins, to be duly pardoned.

The figure of Mussolini fleeing in a German greatcoat was therefore transformed by a chorus of voices that tended to downplay his cowardice and dismiss his act of treason. Mussolini, it seemed, had always intended to die a good death. In his final days, his Fascist co-conspirators had forced a man who had become “inert … still thinking but inert” to run away, the apologists argued.
39
He might have been inert, but when he donned the German coat, Il Duce nonetheless revealed his tortured soul, readers of the weeklies were told; and besides, there was no incontrovertible proof that he ever actually wore the Luftwaffe coat. As for concealing himself in a German transport truck, Il Duce had only acceded to Claretta Petacci's insistence. Should Mussolini have committed suicide as Hitler had done in his bunker? No, it would have been unseemly for the earthy boss from Predappio to end his days in chilly Wagnerian abstraction. In any case, “more than a man's death, what counts is his life,” as contemporary writers claimed.
40
This seemed all the more true in the twentieth century, when the Romantic concept of a hero had been mostly expunged by World War II. Had Mussolini betrayed his country? “We are all betrayers,” explained one journalist.
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Italians had to stop punishing themselves for offenses both real and imagined. It was time to stop worrying about pacts with the Germans and civil wars; the histories of many other countries were “rife with Piazzale Loretos and Fosse Ardeatine,”
42
the latter a brutal reprisal in 1944, in which the Germans murdered 335 civilians on the outskirts of Rome.

To counter the shameless picture of Il Duce with his hand in the till, the journalists pulled out an old chestnut of Fascist propaganda, the image of a Mussolini so indifferent to money as to constantly forget his wallet. Mussolini was captured “without a lira in his pocket,” the apologists were still—incredibly—writing in 1950.
43
Even the terrible events of Piazzale Loreto were proof of Il Duce's perfect honesty, for not one lira fell from his pocket when the partisans strung him up. Mussolini's hands were also made to look clean after it was learned that some of the money he was carrying, which was seized by the partisans, ended up in the accounts (or in the pockets) of Communist functionaries. Thus, for more than a decade after the fact, the centrist press was writing about the “gold of Dongo” in an anti-Communist, not an anti-Fascist, vein. Among the petty thieves in action on the shores of Lake Como, wrote the weeklies, was a future representative for the Communist Party, Dante Gorreri, charged in the theft of Mussolini's traveling alarm clock and in the murder of a woman, a partisan comrade. Perhaps there was also Walter Audisio, suspected of having taken a wristwatch and a gold cigarette case. In the opinion of a journalist for
Corriere della Sera,
the “double game” of the Resistance had allowed the Communists to pocket in twenty days what the Fascists had taken twenty years to accumulate—meaning the Fascist leadership, not Mussolini. According to one weekly, Il Duce's only material concern before his death was for two of his dressing gowns, “the black one and the velvet one with the fur,” which he asked his wife to look after.
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The fact that Claretta Petacci shared Mussolini's last hours at Lake Como was corrected in the weeklies after the war with a barrage of stories about Rachele Mussolini. While Il Duce's widow was living in Forio, on the island of Ischia, the weeklies vied with one another to recount the most minute details of her compulsory residence there. The stories were illustrated in high neorealist style with black-and-white pictures of the good housewife living in honest poverty, her neighbors eager to be of help and the whole island admiring her. When she finally got permission to move to Rome, the coverage did not let up during the long wait to reclaim Benito's body. How could they resist publishing a picture of Rachele embroidering the shroud to wrap her husband's body, like a modern Penelope awaiting the day her Ulysses would return as a corpse? Rachele was by no means silent; in addition to making herself available to the photographers, she gave interviews and offered assorted memoirs to the weeklies. Whenever given the chance, she replicated the feat she had accomplished with her 1948 memoir,
My Life with Benito,
which canonized Il Duce in a perfect apologia for the regime. She was helped in this enterprise by her ghostwriter, Giorgio Pini, Mussolini's biographer and the chief repository of Fascist historical memory.

There was no cliché about Mussolini that did not make it into Rachele's version, whether in her two books or in the popular press. There was Mussolini the elementary school teacher who had mesmerized her with his flashing black eyes; Mussolini the young man of integrity, taking on the humblest jobs if it meant keeping his intellectual independence; Mussolini the Socialist bohemian, touring Europe in tattered clothes but always with a stack of books and newspapers; Mussolini the natural-born journalist who could write any article in fifteen minutes. There was Mussolini the true believer, ready to take a 50 percent pay cut as editor of
Avanti!;
Mussolini the lover of culture, so passionate about the theater he would take the maid along when Rachele couldn't attend; Mussolini man of courage, imperturbable when attempts were made on his life; Mussolini man of honor, who wouldn't hesitate to challenge his most vicious political adversaries to a duel. Then there was Mussolini tireless worker, a prime minister so hardworking as to wreak havoc on the placid routines of the Roman bureaucracy; Mussolini the natural athlete, who, kicking the ball around with his children, was capable of breaking the windows at his Villa Torlonia residence; Mussolini the kindhearted Duce, quick to wriggle out of the grasp of his bodyguards and get close to the people. There was Mussolini the leader, whose charisma was such that one or two visitors to Palazzo Venezia would invariably faint; Mussolini the lover of nature, who like a trained gardener pruned the old almond tree near Rocca delle Caminate, his property near Predappio; Mussolini the polyglot, able to converse with world leaders in English, French, Spanish, or German; Mussolini the good father, as much involved in his children's upbringing as in affairs of state.

Above all, Rachele made a point of insisting on the cliché of Mussolini the perfect husband. Il Duce, whose eye never wandered, “fulfilled his conjugal duties right up to the end,” she told her readers.
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It wasn't enough for Rachele to reassure Italians about the frequency of her sexual relations with Benito. She also published a highly edifying letter that she claimed had been written by Il Duce (“with a red pencil”) on the eve of his death:

Dear Rachele,

I have now arrived at the last stage of my life, at the last page of my book. We may not ever see each other again, and so I wanted to write you this letter. I ask your forgiveness for any wrongs that I have involuntarily done you. You know that you were the only woman that I ever really loved. I swear that to you before God and our dear departed son Bruno in this moment of supreme sacrifice. You know that I and the others must go to the Valtellina. You, with the children, should try to reach the Swiss border. Up there you can begin a new life.
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As a document attesting to Mussolini's marital, Christian, and patriotic virtues, this letter became a monument to Il Duce's glorious memory. The weeklies printed and reprinted it for a good half century, always ready to accept Rachele Mussolini's explanation for why she no longer had the red-penciled original, which was that she had memorized the words and destroyed it to prevent it from falling into partisan hands. But a few years before she died, Rachele Mussolini finally admitted that the letter was completely invented. She had written it herself, she said, to gain sympathy at a moment when she thought the public favored Claretta Petacci.

Following Rachele's lead, others also sought to minimize Claretta's role in Mussolini's life as a way to lessen the gravity of the crime of adultery. “On the verge of death,” wrote Il Duce's sister, Edvige, Benito found himself with Clara at his side, but before his eyes “were the faces of Rachele and his children.” The supposed love between Il Duce and Clara was a one-sided passion, asserted another writer. Mussolini had long tried to free himself from his mistress and was constantly unfaithful to her; the only thing he loved about her was her “enormous bosom.”
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Thus Il Duce was supposed to have behaved like a typical middle-class Italian: he had a wife to look after the house and children and a lover so he could feel successful, and he betrayed his lover as frequently as possible. What was the point of dwelling on the liaison between Mussolini and Petacci? For an Italian male there was nothing more routine than accumulating lovers. Committing a few sins was a salutary way to keep evil at bay. The books and weeklies maintained that Il Duce was a libertine, thereby dismissing the scandal about his death beside Claretta.

Unlike the daily papers, subsidized by the state, the weeklies depended on the market. Perhaps, therefore, they can be considered more indicative of postwar Italian taste and orientation. The people who flocked to buy the illustrated weeklies seemed to like their benevolence toward Mussolini. Obviously, readers didn't buy the weeklies solely for their pictures of Il Duce and Rachele Mussolini's memoirs; the magazines also contained photos of film stars and gossipy details about various sordid crime stories. If the black-and-white images from the Fascist period contributed to their popularity, it was for sentimental, not ideological, reasons. Photographs win us over with their aura of time gone by, and even the pictures of Mussolini, images that a whole generation of Italians had been poring over since childhood, partook of that aura. In the 1950s, in a country that was undergoing vast social changes, it was possible to be nostalgic without regretting the demise of Fascism.

The fact that Mussolini's big jaw could appear in the weeklies alongside pictures of “naughty” Brigitte Bardot and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano was a sign of the times. That the roles of Il Duce, the pinup girl, and the gunman were interchangeable pointed to the decline of a certain postwar morality, one that the partisans had hoped to impose. If ever it had risen over postwar Italy, the star of the Resistance had set in a hurry.

There was no room for Jacobin grief in the illustrated weeklies—mourning for the victors' dead, as the Resistance veterans would have preferred. When the popular magazines depicted Il Duce as a family man led astray by corrupt Fascist leaders and hunted down by Communist agents, they bolstered an image of Mussolini, dear departed, and popularized the Thermidor version of mercy, offering sorrow for the losers. They also created a climate in which the government could finally decide to return the “restless corpse” to the family. But the mood of forgiveness was at least as useful to the living as it was to the dead. It allowed Italians to measure themselves against Il Duce's memory without feeling uneasy. Absolving Mussolini of the crimes of Dongo—the greatcoat, the money, the lover girl—meant absolving him of the crimes of the regime. And to forgive the crimes of the regime—the political opportunism, the economic corruption, the duplicitous morality—meant forgiving Italians their past as Fascists.

7

T
HE
R
ETURN OF THE
R
EMAINS

In the days of Piazzale Loreto, Il Duce's remains were the civil war incarnate—a trophy for the partisans, a sacrifice for the Fascists. During the first decade of the Italian republic, the remains generated two competing forms of mercy: the anti-Fascists' harsh brand and the saccharine variety of the anti-anti-Fascists. When, in 1957, Il Duce's body was transferred to the San Casciano cemetery at Predappio, there was yet another occasion for these sentiments to clash. Inside the walls of San Casciano—and elsewhere in Italy—the two souls of the postwar period went to war.