The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]

by Michael Moorcock

  At this she became deliciously sympathetic. A small tear brightened her eye as she told me she understood that I must find the subject too painful to discuss. Of course, I was still technically married to Mrs Cornelius, but I returned to Esmé. Indeed, the circumstances of our parting, the cruelty of her ultimate betrayal, were things I am still reluctant to discuss. Sometimes I am too much of a gentleman for my own good. When it became clear to Miranda that I had lost my wife at the hands of a Bolshevist gang I did not elaborate. After all, I had lost my original Esmé in this way and no doubt by now she was dead in some anarchist trench. ‘Maddy’ asked why I had left Russia. I told her my departure had not been voluntary. The Reds were the reason I had left. They had stolen everything.

  Estates? she wanted to know.

  ‘Property is nothing,’ I told her. ‘They stole my future. I share that view, at least, with the great Tolstoy and with Prince Kropotkin. My patents and prototypes.’

  Priceless?

  She possessed an uncanny understanding of my situation and my values. Such delicious, eager approval from so voluptuous an acolyte was irresistible. Before I embraced her, she was talking of telegraphing her paper to see if they would run a feature in their Sunday section. I saw this as useful publicity should I ever wish to return to my twin careers as actor and engineer in the US. And while I had never made any reference to my aristocratic blood, it seemed no harm would be done if she chose to refer to me, even in the first hours of our lovemaking, as Prince Max. I told her I preferred to be known as simple Max Peters or, in Spain, as Señor Gallibasta, but as Prince Max I was best recognised thereafter in Italy. She asked me if I knew how much I resembled Rudolph Valentino. I told her delicately that I had never considered the comparison flattering.

  She added gracefully that my looks were, of course, a far more refined version of his. And she believed there were better actors than Valentino.

  ‘You must judge for yourself,’ I said. I promised her that I would take her over to Les Bon’ Temps the next day and show her some of the films I rescued from Morocco.

  In the morning she paid me the supreme compliment: only Benito Mussolini had a personality as powerful as mine. Had I ever considered seeking political office? I assured her that my political days were over. All I really desired was a chance to serve the world in practical ways, by solving scientifically problems of population and social hardship. Her face shone with idealism. She was my disciple. ‘And you will, dear Prince! You will!’

  With such commitment and support, I knew that my stolen future was about to be restored to me.

  When I returned to the port a few hours later I discovered to my astonishment that Les Bon’ Temps had upped anchor. Ashore I asked what had happened to her. The hotel manager told me that apparently there had been some urgent business. ‘The coastguard was involved.’ Shura had been unable to contact me but had left my luggage with the baker. I found a note attached to my carpet bag - ‘Sorry, old fellow. I know you’re among friends. We’ll look you up in Rome!’ At first I was depressed, upset at losing my cousin’s company, but clearly his urgent business was dangerous and I suspect Stavisky had encouraged Shura in what he had done. I knew I was something of a liability to the political broker and was not greatly disappointed. I was now free to enjoy the company of my American admirer! Da Bazzanno had already invited me to come with him to Venice. Fate had determined my path for me. Once before, with Esmé, I had set out for Venice. Now at last I would arrive in reasonable style with a paramour almost as delightful as my little sweetheart but more of an intellectual equal. I seemed, at that time, to be ascending, slowly but surely, a golden staircase with my dreams about to be realised. I had journeyed into the Land of the Dead and I had been face to face with the Beast; I had braved the oceans and the deserts and learned to live among savage nomads. I had flown where none had flown before, and I had discovered secrets previously forbidden to white men. Journeying through a dozen different versions of Hell, I had survived. Now these hardships and spiritual ordeals were about to be over, and I was to be rewarded.

  There could be no more perfect a candidate for Mussolini’s service. I had been tempered in the fires of the most extreme experience not once but many times. I had died and been reborn in the birthplace of civilisation. I had first-hand knowledge of politics in many countries. I was thoroughly conversant in American and European literature, music and painting, while sharing an aversion to the neurotic obscenities of certain French and Norwegian ‘artists’. Inevitably I would add to Il Duce’s greatness as he would add to mine. His was a mighty soul ready to embrace the future and all its brilliant uncertainties, its monumental rewards. I saw myself in a Griffith film, marching up the Appian Way to the Gates of Rome, striding through the wide streets to the Palace of Il Duce, up the steps and through corridors to that vast hall where at last Mussolini himself stepped away from his desk, from which he directed all affairs of state, and came forward to embrace me.

  ‘Il ragazzo è arrivato!’

  I will admit I came close to weeping as I visualised the scene.

  That night, my pleasure was complete. At around eleven, after we had dined at the hotel, Fiorello da Bazzanno made us get into a huge Mercedes he had hired and drove us down the curving, rocky road to Palma where he had arranged for the local cinema to be available, together with a projectionist. We sat in the comfort of the first-class seats, da Bazzanno, Margherita Sarfatti, Miranda Butter and myself, while before us, larger than life as he should be, the Masked Buckaroo rode again! Before a background of prairies and buttes he performed his acts of daring and skill, defending justice wherever it was threatened. We watched as the White Ace’s twin Lewis guns raked the skies clear of Hun battle-birds or I embraced Gloria Cornish, the loveliest lady of the screen, with a passion which was electrically conveyed to the fascinated audience. Da Bazzanno flung himself into the adventures, hissing and applauding, clapping me on the back whenever my screen persona performed a particularly spectacular piece of heroism. Even Signora Sarfatti drew amused relish from the proceedings and her manner to me was even warmer when the lights went up. Miranda Butter was ecstatic. She clapped her little pink hands together and cried that I had revived all her most wonderful memories. She had seen several of my movies before as a girl, and had been entranced by them. ‘That must be why I was reminded of Valentino!’ Later she would apologise and repeat that my looks were far more refined than the ex-gigolo’s, that I was so clearly an aristocrat and Valentino merely a coarse peasant of the type who appealed to the commoner sort of girl. Encouraged by her remarks I introduced her to some refined aristocratic pleasures that very night and at last the ghost of Esmé was laid to rest.

  Next morning, in the flying boat’s miniature saloon, Fiorello spread out my blueprints and sketches, the photographs and news cuttings I had managed to save from a hundred different disasters. My Desert Liner especially impressed him. He became almost exaggeratedly enthusiastic. ‘But my dear Max, with just a few of these ideas you could transform the world! Why has no other government put them into production?’

  The financial collapses of the past years were not conducive to investment, I said. And, what was more, I had chosen to show my designs only to a few select people. It concerned me that they might fall into the wrong hands. Imagine the Reds equipped with such inventions! Fiorello agreed that the notion was terrifying. ‘You carry a terrible secret, my friend. Now it is clear to me why these days you lead such a discreet life. And yet here you have been the most public of figures! You have nerve, Max. I don’t think I could stand to be the guardian of such earth-shattering secrets. Or to live such an exhausting double life. How have you been able to sustain it for so long?’

  ‘I have been waiting,’ I spoke gravely, ’for the right man to emerge, the kind of man who will mount his own horse and brandish his own sword and lead his own troops into the field to drive back Red Jewry even as she now masses against the West. I have come to the conclusion that Mussolini is that man.�
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  ‘A wise conclusion, indeed!’ Fiorello promised he would secure me an interview with Il Duce as soon as we arrived in Rome. ‘In two years whole fleets of your desert vessels will be crossing Italy’s North African Empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea! And your flying cities will establish our Dominion of the Air. The New Rome will continue her great march towards Destiny, recovering her ancient heritage and establishing the benefits of Roman law across the whole planet. That is our historic destiny. Rome’s was the greatest empire, the greatest system of universal justice the world has known. She established civilisation wherever she marched. As we civilised Libya, so we shall civilise the whole of Africa. Then Asia, too, will welcome us. Bolshevism will inevitably fall. What’s more, our New Rome shall be cleansed of the corrupting influence of the Pope and all his minions. Her new gods will be her living emperors, as they were in the days of her greatest glory. Mussolini, who bears the blood that founded our patrician dynasties, will be our first Caesar, taking his rightful place at the helm of the world-ship. But in place of Caesar’s legions will be Caesar’s gigantic bombing aeroplanes, Caesar’s mammoth tanks, Caesar’s radio-controlled flying centurions. And you shall be Caesar’s armourer, the practical interpreter of his great dream. The chief engineer of our new Roman Empire!’

  I enjoyed his vision but was also amused by it. ‘Old Rome’s strength was in her soldier-engineers. While she commissioned them to solve the problems of the empire, she was strong. When their skills were used to make increasingly magnificent spectacles, then she fell.’

  ‘She went soft,’ agreed da Bazzanno, his equine face glowing. ‘But we have become hard again and we shall stay hard. It is our duty to impose the Rule of Law upon the whole world! For what other reason were we put here?’

  ‘By God?’ I asked a little sardonically.

  ‘Yes, yes! By God, if you like, old comrade. You remember the days when we were in the wilderness. When our ideas were regarded as intolerably outré? Look at us today? We say which ideas are outré and which are not! We are the masters now!’

  Such talk was commonplace in those heady times. We were all still stuffed with idealism and ambitions to save the world. The ideals and principles that we stood for seemed on the brink of sweeping the entire planet. But, of course, we reckoned without the manipulative powers of Big Business. We rested too readily on our laurels. That is when the Devil always wins — at the moment when you believe yourself victorious.

  Italians in those days were certainly among the few peoples who seemed victorious. All else was doom and chaos, the promise of violence on every street corner, uncertainty about every coming day. Jobs, once considered secure for life, were in jeopardy. The promised future, which had been offered as soon as the War was over, had crumbled like fairy gold. No nation in Europe was free of fear. Most of us fully expected to face the threat of Bolshevism’s all-engulfing hordes which, as was generally agreed, must soon begin to press upon our borders as their Mongol ancestors had done a thousand years before; as if the whole of Europe lay awake at night listening for the jingle of harness, the snort of ponies, the guttural whispers, the pervasive smell of death, which signalled the coming of the Oriental outriders.

  True Russians were not the enemy. But true Russians were no longer the rulers of their own land. Communism is the name of Attila’s fifth column. Asia has conquered Russia but Russia will arise. The Church is not dead. The Grand Patriarch is not gone. There must be a final reconciliation when the Pope shall bow to Greek authority. A final great union symbolised by this historical recognition and reconciliation. The spirituality of the Greek and the practicality of the Roman shall again combine to unite the world and make it whole again. And safe again.

  Conversations with da Bazzanno helped give intellectual form to my ideas. With dawning joy, I realised that an outlook I had once believed mine alone was shared by a growing multitude. A few thousand understood — but millions instinctively supported us. We knew a glorious moment. The frustrated dreams of a decade must eventually become reality. The midwife for this momentous change in the history of the world would be a simple schoolmaster from a remote mountain region who had led a march on the capital to demand power in the name of his nation! We could soon be living in truly epic times!

  We spent a couple more days in Port d’Andratx while the repairs were completed. I introduced my friend, the retiring young Spanish officer Jaime Pujol, to da Bazzanno and the ladies. They took enthusiastically to Pujol and made him welcome. A small group of us usually dined together. Da Bazzanno rarely joined the ras who were on vacation here and privately told me that they represented the necessary end of administrative Fascism but they were not exactly the soul of the movement. His duty was not to upset them or to make them feel that he was condescending to them, and whenever he fell in with one or was forced to pause at a table where several of them sat, he would adopt a slightly vulgar manner and exchange a coarse joke or two.

  Margherita Sarfatti hated them, murmuring the opinion that they were all baboons. It didn’t matter if they called themselves Bolshevists or Fascists, they were just a bunch of gibbon apes snapping and snarling and struggling for ascendancy. They wanted power for the basest of reasons. ’To fuck,’ she said in English, ’to feast and to frighten creatures weaker than themselves. The only three things they can actually feel. Those are the three Fs of their fascism.’ Pure fascism, she said, could be understood only by intellectuals and artists.

  ‘But surely,’ I insisted, ‘there is an ideological struggle? You can’t believe that everything reduces to bestialism?’

  She shrugged at this and laughed into the air. She gestured with her cigarette. ‘I would like to think that it didn’t, Prince Max, but I suspect that I see only the truth. Not palatable, I suppose, to you dreamers.’

  ‘Quite right. I am inspired by altruism and idealism. They mean more than meat and drink to me. The brute motives you describe are as far from mine as can possibly be.’

  She seemed anxious to change the subject, perhaps because I resisted her cynicism. ‘Which I suppose is why I like dreamers. Da Bazzanno is no more practical than you are, for all his talk of machinery and efficient violence and the rest of it. There must be a difference between the likes of you and the likes of those swaggering gangsters over there. But not quite the large difference you would prefer to believe.’ And she showed hearty amusement at my chagrin. ‘Without them, dear Prince, our Duce and his ministers could not survive a day.’

  ‘They are the salt of the earth,’ I said. ‘I have every respect for your old fighters.’

  ‘Just as well, for they have no respect whatsoever for you. You should be grateful for their tolerance.’

  I found her cynicism a little hard to accept. I caught her watching some of the ras with a speculative eye and could only conclude that she felt sexually attracted to those tough pioneers of the March on Rome, Mussolini’s most loyal administrators. In spite of her physical stillness, her expression was forever restless, forever bored. She seemed perpetually on the point of creating a crisis, though I never knew her to engineer anything of the kind. She was completely loyal to da Bazzanno, at least while attached to him. Her flirtations were almost always intellectual, in the nature of a specialised and abstract game. Da Bazzanno was proud of this quality in her. He would watch her from a table or two away, remarking to me on her beauty, her cool easiness, her clever manipulations.

  ‘We have not made love in a year,’ he told me. ‘We do not need to. And we are so happy, Max. Of course, we still see other people.’

  I understood perfectly. I, too, had known the joys of purely spiritual love; the case with myself and Mrs Cornelius. Though married, we had never physically consummated our union. The spiritual compact was far more satisfying. One learned to relish the subtler ecstacies of the desert life, I told him. Eventually they became preferable to all others. In the desert, ‘love’ took on a more important meaning, when it truly was possible to love one’s camel more than one�
�s wife. In the desert one must frequently choose between life and death. The desert does not tolerate empty words.

  Da Bazzanno blew his nose on a silk Liberty handkerchief and remarked approvingly how much harder I had become since he had last seen me in Rome. He repeated that he meant to introduce me to Mussolini as soon as possible. ‘Italy has always honoured such men as yourself, Prince Max.’ His enthusiasm rose. ‘The editor-writers, the soldier-poets and the philosopher-engineers — those who combine the talents of a man of action and a man of creative intellect. You have read Jünger, of course. It’s all in Storm of Steel. So much better than Remarque’s novel. Every great Renaissance artist was also an expert duellist. We cannot turn our backs on our violent natures. But we can control that violence and direct it. Promise me, Max, that you will come with me to Rome - that you will throw in your destiny with ours — that you will become an Italian! A modern Italian!’

  I restrained myself, merely smiling and saying that I was seriously considering the idea.

  ‘We take off for Venice in two days’ time.’ He refilled my champagne glass for me. ‘You will love Venice. And then — to Rome! What do you say?’

  When I hesitated, anxious not to seem too eager now that my great dream was so close to realisation, he became apologetic. ‘My dear fellow! How insensitive of me. You are afraid that this diversion will interrupt your career as an actor. You must have many contracts and obligations!’