Corelli's Mandolin

by Louis de Bernières

  Whilst editor of Avanti He began an affair with Ida Dalser, who had His child and allowed Him to live off her money. He abandoned her and later imprisoned her in a mental institution, in this way displaying His incredible capacity for loyalty. Similarly He made Margherita Sarfatti his mistress, and later had her imprisoned under anti-Jewish legislation. It should be noted that every single one of His scores of mistresses has been extraordinarily hideous, and no doubt the DUCE has been indulging His charitable impulses by consorting with them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and possibly the DUCE is astigmatic. At this point we should note that Leda Rafanelli declined to become one of His women on the grounds that He was a madman and a liar, and for this slander He later subjected her to police harassment that was entirely justified and had nothing to do with petty and vindictive motives connected with revenge.

  The DUCE refined His ideology into one wherein He agreed completely with the last person to whom he had spoken, and in 1915 tried to avoid conscription into the war which at different times he had both opposed and advocated. He was unaccountably rejected for a commission, and claimed that the Austrians had specially shelled the hospital where He was being treated for shrapnel wounds with the single intention of eliminating Him, since He was the most important man in Italy. By this time His newspaper was being funded entirely by advertisements from arms manufacturers, which had nothing to do with His sudden conversion to the allied cause.

  The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadristi in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation.

  Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He has pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved His head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expressions, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course.

  He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play ‘Giovinezza’, and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

  Everything in His speeches is contradicted somewhere by another speech, since He has acutely observed that we Italians only pick up the points with which we ourselves agree, and in this manner He has made Himself all things to all men. He has burned books and doctored the texts of our schools, He has persecuted the philosopher, Benedetto Croce, He has appointed revolutionary courts with the power to pass sentence of death, and He has turned idyllic islands into prisons where His opponents can be tortured. He has made us all swear oaths of obedience at the age of eighteen, so that only the insincere hypocrites and the terminally stupid may make progress, and He has tried to turn us all into puritans by telling us that it is virile to remain unsmiling except when expressing extreme sarcasm.

  He has violated the islands of the Dodecanese, even effacing the tombstones of Greeks, He has opened a school in Parma to teach terrorism to Croats and Macedonians, He has subverted the League of Nations by infiltrating its administration, He has blocked peace negotiations between Albania and Yugoslavia, He has re-armed Germany, Belgium, and Austria, leaving His own army to fight scandalously unjustifiable wars without weapons, and yet has signed the Kellogg pact that outlawed the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy.

  This Promiscuous Syphilitic has made the transfer of syphilis an imprisonable offence, this Father of Innumerable Stunted Bastards has made contraception illegal, this Foul-Mouthed Peasant has proscribed swearing and has regulated dancing and the consumption of alcohol in an attempt to make us more serious. He has legislated to make women into battery hens, He has suppressed all freedom of religion, He has caused all pronouns referring to Himself to be capitalised, and the word DUCE to be printed in newspapers in the upper case, He has set up concentration camps in Libya, and He has at one time or another decided to invade France, Yugoslavia, French Somaliland, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Corsica, Spain, and Greece. The DUCE has said ‘Better one day as a lion than one hundred years as a sheep,’ and therefore He has become a cardboard lion and we Italians have become the sheep who follow Him into the slaughter house and tell each other that we too are lions. He has said ‘The more enemies, the greater the honour,’ and so we have created enemies out of thin air and gone out to fight them without boots on our feet, and in armoured cars whose barrels are made of wood.

  This Ludicrous Buffoon, owner of a thousand florid uniforms covered with spurious medal ribbons for acts of valour that he has never performed, has caused us to take photographs of our own babies dressed in black shirts, He has made us rehearse the applause at His speeches by means of prompt-cards and bells, He has inaugurated a ‘move towards youth’ that has placed thugs and the disastrously inexperienced in positions of power. Against the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Church He has introduced sterilisation for the ‘racially inferior’, He has signed non-aggression pacts with the USSR and Britain, with both of whom we are now at war for no obvious reason, He has made military training compulsory at the age of eight so that our children are turned into toy soldiers. He has named Hitler as a ‘tragic clown’, ‘a horrible sexual degenerate’, and ‘disloyal and untrustworthy’, and yet this is the man from whom He takes His orders. He has let it be known that His name is to be used as an anaesthetic in hospitals prior to operations, and, as though His own intellect were anaesthetised, He has foolishly declared that the British are too decadent to op
pose us. The British have since then decadently sunk half our fleet, which is why we have everywhere been left to starve, and they have defeated us in North Africa, where our coloured troops have unanimously defected. We invaded Ethiopia at the cost of 5,000 Italian lives, an entire year’s revenue, and the equivalent of the equipment of 75 divisions, and in this way directly caused the decadent British to re-arm with the very weapons that are now being used against us.

  This Moral and Intellectual pygmy has caused the Felix Mater prayer to be addressed to His own dead mother, He has caused us to lose 6,000 troops in the civil war in Spain, for no return whatsoever. Because we have been lions led by a donkey, we were defeated by an army of amateurs at Guadalajara, and worse than this, He has blotted our name forever by ordering the massacre of Spanish prisoners in Majorca. Equally shamefully He has ordered the torpedoing of neutral ships and refused permission for survivors to be picked up, He has entered an alliance with Japan and ordered the newspapers to refer to them as ‘Aryans’, He has made us the lackeys of Germany by forcing us to march at the goose-step, He has performed the semantically impossible feat of appointing both Himself and the King as ‘First Marshal’, He has persecuted Italian Jews in order to please Hitler, and He has declared that we cannot lose against the British because they effeminately carry umbrellas.

  Soldiers! We have no uniforms to wear because the DUCE has ordered that they must be worn by all teachers and government employees, we have been abandoned in North Africa for lack of transport, having marched 600 kilometres across the desert in full summer. We have lost one-third of our merchant marine because He forgot to order them home before declaring war, we have been persuaded that halving the size of a division means that we have double the number of divisions, we have been made to invade Greece from the north in the rainy season, without winter clothing, having been demobilised, through ports in the Adriatic where it was impossible to disembark, without the knowledge of the Army Chief-of-Staff, who first heard about it on the radio. All our Albanian soldiers immediately deserted, and we only know what is happening to us by listening to the BBC. Our Navy, for lack of air cover and aircraft carriers, has been annihilated at Taranto and Cape Matapan, for the loss of one British plane, and in North Africa our 300,000 troops have been defeated by 35,000, because we have no Air Force, our light tanks are made of paper, and our motorised units have no motors. Whilst we die for nothing the DUCE has set up His Headquarters near the Vatican, so that it will not be bombed.

  Soldiers! We have been made to invade an innocent country of brave people, knowing that we could never feed them in the event of victory, so that their starvation is worse than ours. Against all rules of war and conscience, the DUCE has ordered us to kill twenty of them for each of ours that is lost, and to our eternal credit, most of us have ignored Him.

  Soldiers! Let us weep for what has happened at home, where 350,000 of us have been transported as slave labour to Germany, where the DUCE has created the impossible condition of there being unemployment during a war, where there is hopeless inflation and where three-quarters of food is obtainable only on the black market that is run by His own officials, where ration cards are forged without restraint, and where there are forty distribution agencies with overlapping functions that ensure that nothing can ever happen.

  Let us weep for our country, where medals are awarded for the imaginary sinking of non-existent British ships, where we are obliged to stand and salute during radio news bulletins, where the speeches of a lunatic are treated as sacred texts and a million copies printed, where the Lunatic in question is like a conductor Who Himself attempts to play simultaneously all the instruments of the orchestra, Who is like a power station connected to a single broken bulb, Who has had Himself filmed winning tennis matches against professionals in games umpired by the Minister for Propaganda, Who is the Most Disobeyed Man in History because everyone knows that every order will be shortly countermanded.

  Soldiers! This is the Man who commanded us to use mustard gas and phosgene against savages armed with spears. This is the Ridiculous Man whose malicious blackshirted bandits and arsonists run away in battle but kill our fathers, mothers, and uncles by making them drink castor oil laced with petrol. This is the Man who has destroyed the economy and has made us ashamed forever.

  Soldiers! It has been well said that every nation gets the leaders it deserves. VIVA IL BUFFONE. VIVA IL BALORDO. VIVA IL ASSASSINO. VIVA IL DUCE.

  36 Education

  The boys had made kokoretsi out of the intestines and offal of the goat that they had taken from the resentful nomarch of the village, and were watching it sizzle in the cinders of the fire. Appetites were whetted, and to pass the time until it was ready, Hector decided to pass on once more the benefit of his learning. Some of the andartes yawned in scarcely disguised boredom. Some others, who had been pressed into the group for lack of having been presented with an alternative, sat in a resentful sulk and thought about how good it would be to cram the mouth of this lout with goatshit. During the night two of them would take their weapons and disappear in search of a band that fought the Germans instead of their fellow Greeks. They knew that they would die if they were caught, but even that seemed preferable to remaining. A Royalist wrote ‘Erkhetai’ in the dust and carefully covered it with pine needles so that Hector would not see it; it was a fervent hope (‘He is coming’), but it was necessarily a secret one. Four Venizelist republicans listened to Hector and wondered bitterly how it was that all the bands had somehow ended up with a committee of three leaders who were Communist and were against Britain, the only country that had ever tried to help them since the war began. When Hector said something, it was natural to suppose that the opposite of what he said was true; this was how one got the news, just by listening to Hector and reversing it. Only Mandras and the two other nominal leaders listened to Hector with any attention as he paced back and forth with his hallowed copy of What Is To Be Done? under his arm. An owl hooted in the distance, as though in mockery of his discourse, and the night grew colder as a northern wind stirred the branches of the pines. Behind them the peak of the mountain sat brooding between two brightly pulsing stars, oppressing and overhanging that limitless forest, with its strangely intermuddled population of heroes, pine martens, boars, brigands, and thieves.

  ‘Now, comrades, I want to speak to you because I think that many of you have not learned yet that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement, and that the role of vanguard fighter can only be fulfilled by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory. The point is that many of you have no clear idea of how to understand our historical experience, and this leads to narrow ameliorism, economism, concessionism, and democratism. Now, it’s true that this kind of bourgeois socialism, bourgeois social reformism and opportunist-socialism is consciousness in an embryonic form, but it completely fails to take account of the necessary and irreconcilable antagonism between the interests of the proletariat and the interests of reactionary obscurantism. It fails to understand the dialectic of social contradiction. You see, the interests of the proletariat are diametrically opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. It’s not only theory, but praxis that reveals this, and it hardly needs me to try and prove it, because it’s so obvious. What we have constantly to keep before the eyes of our understanding is that the world-historical significance of the struggle demands the direct intervention of the proletariat in social life, and not just some kind of parliamentarian republicanism or military semi-absolutism. The point is that Communism is always to be found in advance of all others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of any given event, and is always the most irreconcilable in the struggle against all defence of backwardness. And I don’t want you to go thinking that we can expose and repudiate the revisionist and eclecticist historico-ideologues of the ruling classes just by arranging strikes and forming into unions, because the trade-unionist politics of the working class is nothing more than precisely a petit-bourgeois politics of
the working class. We go far, far beyond that.

  ‘It is absolutely scientifically true that what we are about is the political and economic emancipation of the masses, but we know only too well that the proletariat must be led by an intelligentsia with sufficient education and leisure to theorise; Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, they were all bourgeois intellectuals who sacrificed their own interests in order to raise the consciousness of the world-proletariat who still do not fully understand the nature of the structures that have to be put in place. What we are aiming at is the effacement of all distinctions between workers and intellectuals, and so we need sufficiently trained, developed and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneously awakening masses away from erroneous theories that deviate from the perception of the necessary and inevitable nature of the materialist conception of history.

  ‘We need leaders who are not susceptible to tailism, leaders who do not give in to working-class aspirations, but who help them to form correct aspirations. With the right leaders it is not necessary to bring the workers up to the level of intellectuals, because all they have to do is place their faith and trust in the leaders who will provide the stable organisation that will maintain continuity and reach a scientific understanding of the concrete conditions prevailing.

  ‘I know that some of you have been complaining about the fact that we don’t submit decisions to democratic vote, but what you’ve got to understand is that we have so many revanchist, recidivist, chauvinist, reactionary forces ranged against us that it is vital for our leadership to remain secret. And if it’s got to be secret, how can it possibly be democratic? Democratic implies an openness that would be suicidal. It’s obvious, isn’t it? So let’s have no more of this votism. It’s a useless and harmful toy.