Unto the Sons (76 page)

A year later, in 1895, his mother entered him in another boarding school, in the town of Forlimpopoli, which was closer to home, and not under the direction of clergymen. Here church attendance was voluntary; the food was better, and all the students received the same servings. Benito would attend classes here for the next six years, maintaining passing grades in all his studies. He was most interested in history, particularly the era of the Romans and, second, the Risorgimento. He also was drawn to music, playing the trombone in the school band and later taking up the violin. He could quote long passages from Dante, but he was no less engrossed in contemporary fiction and in the Marxist tracts recommended by his father, who visited him frequently and drove him home by wagon for school holidays. Much as Benito preferred the school at Forlimpopoli to that of the Salesian friars, he still had clashes with the faculty and his fellow students. Twice he was suspended—the first time for impertinence, the second for knifing a student—but the school’s administrators permitted him to return; and during his last year he was selected to address the entire school at a program dedicated to the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who had died days before, on January 27, 1901. Benito turned it into a political occasion, associating Verdi not so much with his operas
Il Trovatore
and
La Traviata
as with his conscience as an idealist and social reformer, and the fact that he had been a member of parliament during the Risorgimento. The speech by the seventeen-year-old Benito would be praised the next day in the Socialists’ leading newspaper,
Avanti!
This would be the first mention of “the comrade student Mussolini” in the press. Almost twelve years later, in late 1912, twenty-nine-year-old Benito Mussolini would become that newspaper’s editorial director and a leading voice in the Italian Socialist Party.

Between these two events, Mussolini traveled often, wandering
through Switzerland and France, Austria and Germany; but he would never escape the conflicting forces that linked him to his mother, the educator, and his father, the agitator. His first job after graduating in 1901 was as a substitute teacher in an elementary school in Gualtieri, northwest of his home. But he was hostile toward his disobedient pupils and directed threats at them which they repeated to their parents, and his position was soon in jeopardy—and was terminated altogether before the summer of 1902 with disclosures of his heavy drinking, gambling, and carousing with the wife of a local soldier on active duty.

Mussolini himself was now approaching the age of required military service; and this among other unpleasant circumstances surrounding his life in Gualtieri—not the least being the querulousness of his unpaid landlord, and the pressures from those demanding he redeem his gambling debts—influenced his decision to leave Italy for Switzerland. Waiting at the train station in Chiasso, on the Italian–Swiss border, he read a newspaper account of his father’s imprisonment for disrupting recent elections in Predappio. Benito was tempted to return home, but after communicating with his mother, he was convinced to proceed to Switzerland. Only by his remaining far from his father did she believe Benito could avoid becoming his cellmate.

Shortly after arriving in Lausanne, Benito was nonetheless arrested for vagrancy by police who discovered him sleeping outdoors under the Grand Pont. He moved on to Bern, where he finally found employment with a gang of Italian stoneworkers and ended up in jail for ten days after helping to organize a strike. Migrant Italian laborers had for years been welcomed in Switzerland so long as they toiled uncomplainingly for low wages and constructed railway tunnels through mountains, and paved roads and sidewalks, and functioned as janitors and porters in the hotel and tourist trades, and performed other tasks that the Swiss preferred not to do—and that Mussolini preferred not to do, either. Mussolini loathed subservient labor. He found contentment only as a labor organizer and battler against the workers’ bosses. And this is what consumed much of his time during his first tour of Europe, between 1902 and 1904; under the auspices of the Socialist radicals whom he sought out in every city he visited, he served as a junior ringleader of protest rallies, a distributor of revolutionary leaflets, and a maker of so many speeches that in his latter-day reminiscences he would call himself a “walking gramophone.”

When there were no Socialist causes to which he could attach himself, and no “peoples’ kitchen” to satisfy his hunger between speeches, he
was
forced to accept jobs he considered demeaning—hauling stones at
four dollars a week in helping to build a chocolate factory; serving as an errand boy for a grocer and as a line worker in a plant producing agricultural machinery. In Paris, speaking an exotic, Italianized French, he even represented himself as a fortune-teller. But he rarely continued with any scheme or endeavor for more than a few days—except when it came to writing for radical newspapers, which was what he most enjoyed doing. He pursued the editors of Socialist weeklies and dailies wherever he traveled, and charged no fees for his impassioned prose; his pieces would appear in the proletarian press circulated throughout the leading cities of Europe as well as in such American cities as New York and Philadelphia. In these periodicals he lashed out at the industrialists and the upper classes of Europe, and all the kings still enthroned. “Their mentality is barely sufficient to sign decrees,” he wrote about ruling royalty, in the newspaper
Il Proletario
, published in the United States, in 1903. “Their military career, the education they usually receive from Jesuits, the stupid court etiquette, in the long run crush their brains and deprive them of their thinking power.” In another article he referred to priests as “black microbes,” and in a pamphlet he wrote: “Religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality, in men a disease.” He described the army as “a criminal organization designed to protect capitalism and bourgeois society”—while the army at the same time described him as a “deserter,” a man subject to immediate arrest should he reappear on Italian soil.

But late in 1904, after the Italian king had celebrated the birth of his first son by offering amnesty to deserters willing to fulfill their military duty, twenty-one-year-old Benito Mussolini expeditiously put aside his contempt for monarchism and returned to Italy, volunteering his services to the Bersaglieri and being sent to Verona. The military authorities had access to a police dossier branding Mussolini an “impulsive and violent” young man, and he was watched carefully during his time in the service. His behavior, however, was surprisingly exemplary. While he left the army in September 1906 with the same rank of private that he had received on entering in January 1905, he never complained aloud or in his writing about his military experience; on the contrary, he complimented the army for introducing him to the pleasures of physical exercise and for channeling his energies toward the formation of a more orderly life that he would later try to impose upon all Italians.

In February 1905, while he was in the army, his mother died at age forty-six. Benito was shaken by her death, unable to speak at the funeral. After his discharge from the army, he returned to teaching. In November 1906 he accepted a position at an Italian elementary school in the town of
Tolmezzo near the Austrian border. In March 1908 he took a job at a private school at Oneglia, on the Italian Riviera. But his overbearing classroom manners and his extracurricular leftist journalism invited criticism from many quarters, and during the summer of 1908, while he was visiting his father, his career as an educator was suddenly sidetracked by an eight-month prison sentence.

His father for once was not personally involved in the latest violent strike by farm workers against the landholders and their tenant managers; the elder Mussolini was in fact suffering from the first symptoms of the paralysis that would end his life within two years. But Benito represented him characteristically by leading the strikers against their employers, upending and damaging the proprietors’ threshing machines and injuring several bystanders. He was arrested for “revolutionary expression,” and was sent to the same prison that in the past had confined both his father and his grandfather.

Although Benito’s imprisonment would be greatly curtailed (his case was soon appealed, and the verdict overturned), he was in prison long enough to appreciate a number of visits from a young woman named Rachele Guidi. He had first known Rachele as a child in his mother’s classroom. Now nearly seventeen, Rachele was living with her widowed mother, Nina, who was a combination mistress, nurse, and bartending companion to the ailing Alessandro Mussolini. Shortly after the death of Benito’s mother, Alessandro sold the smithy in Predappio and relinquished the family’s living quarters in the school building to the schoolmistress who had succeeded his late wife, and moved with his younger children to the nearby town of Forlì, where he opened a tavern that catered to politicized workers and their organizers. Young Rachele and her mother helped out at the tavern, tending bar and serving food at the tables; after Benito had come to visit his father in the summer of 1908, it took little time for the young couple to become lovers.

Like Benito’s late mother, and like nearly every other woman whom Benito would get close to during his young manhood and early middle years—an eclectic consortium of women that included the Russian-born Socialist traveler Angelica Balabanoff, who helped him learn German; the anarchist Leda Rafanelli, who would convert to Islam and later embarrass him with her memoir; an affluent Jewess from Milan, Margherita Sarfatti, who would become the art critic at
Avanti!
and follow him into Fascism, only to lose favor with him during the Hitler-induced Italian Prussianization period of the 1930s; and an Austro-Italian shopkeeper from Trent, Ida Dalser, with whom Benito would have an illegitimate
son—Rachele Guidi was not a physical beauty, nor would her role in his life be anything more than fragmentary.

Shy, practical, kindly, and very loyal, with almost platinum-colored hair braided in a matronly manner, she represented a maternal figure to Benito well before she would produce the first of their five children. In 1909, after they had begun living together, he left for a job with a Socialist weekly in a town near the Austrian border, where he would at the same time improve his German by translating some of the philosophical works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant. He never wrote to Rachele during his seven months’ absence. But she took him back uncomplainingly. In 1911, after he had been convicted of staging a riotous protest in the streets of their town against Italy’s colonial war against the Turks in Libya, Rachele visited him faithfully each day at the local jail, carrying in her arms their infant daughter. The child would be four years old before Benito would marry Rachele in a civil ceremony. And it would take ten more years, and the birth of two more children, before he would marry her in a religious ceremony.

The coup by which Benito Mussolini took over the government of Italy was completed on the morning of October 30, 1922, when—wearing a black shirt, black trousers, and white spats—he strode into the royal palace in Rome, shook hands with the timid king, and said, “Your Majesty, will you forgive my attire? I come from the battlefields.”

He had actually come from the train station, having arrived in Rome on a sleeper from Milan. Such an admission, however, would not have been dramatic enough; more to Mussolini’s liking would have been galloping into Rome on a black charger after having crossed the Rubicon. But it would have been highly inappropriate on this occasion, for Rome had surrendered without opposition—meaning that Mussolini’s men were also deprived of the triumphant procession that would have appealed to his operatic sensibilities and those of most Italian citizens. This omission had to be rectified. As Mussolini himself had previously stated, the Italian people respected only those conquerors who arrived with much fuss and fanfare. So on the day
after
the government and the king’s army had yielded to his leadership, Mussolini staged an invasion that might appease the theatrical needs of the national character.

While boasting earlier that 400,000 fully equipped Fascist marauders awaited his beck and call, the most Mussolini could produce for this pseudo-event was a somewhat bedraggled contingent of fewer than 30,000 who had been rained upon for hours while forming crooked ranks in the
outskirts of the city, and who in many cases marched through Rome entirely unarmed. But the demonstration was sizable and churlish enough to induce the respectful fear that Mussolini sought, especially after some of his more evil-tempered Blackshirts began to ransack and burn Socialist bookstalls along the sidewalks, and to force foreign embassies to fly Italian flags, and, as they had before, to pour castor oil down the throats of those spectators overheard making unwelcoming comments (the elixir was now commonly called “Fascist medicine”).

So self-involved was Mussolini during this slow-moving spectacle through the city that he paid it only perfunctory attention as he stood near the window of his hotel suite, in a state of excitation provided mainly by his dowdy mistress who had no view of the parade. The sexual prowess of Mussolini was a subject he did not discourage his propagandists from circulating, so long as it was kept at a discreet distance from Rachele, who had remained at home with the children in Milan—which is where he would encourage them to remain for
years
until it became politically advantageous for him to move them to Rome and appear with them in public as befitting a proper Catholic family man. But trysts would always remain a part of his agenda, although never so time-consuming as to compromise his prompt attendance to the affairs of the state. Punctuality was a Fascist virtue.

Fascist photographers printed the pictures Mussolini had ordered taken of the “invasion” in order to lend credibility to his version of what had transpired. According to Fascist accounts released to the international press, on October 31, 1922, there had been a massive attack on the Italian capital by black-shirted legions who, amid much opposition and bloodshed, overcame the defenses of the unpopular government to win the hearts of grateful citizens—citizens who implored their new conquerors to make Rome again worthy of the caesars. Since Mussolini had earlier seen to the destruction of the opposition Italian press, there was no strong editorial voice to refute his version, and thus his so-called March on Rome became a heroic event in the annals of Italy. He also ordered that the Italian calendar should disregard all previous events, starting with the birth of Christ, and begin with October 1922 as the first month of
anno primo
.