Silone, apprised of his brother’s arrest from the newspapers, wrote immediately from Berlin:
Dearest brother,
Never before as now have I felt so strongly the bonds of fraternity that bind us together! I live, hour by hour, the entire lie into which chance has thrown you. I hope with you, hour by hour, I suffer with you, I resist with you. What I wish to tell you at this time you can imagine but, with the present conditions, is inexpressible. I assure you that everything will be done so that the truth of your innocence will triumph. In the meantime, be strong and patient. I embrace and kiss you with great affection.
Your brother, Secondino
Don Orione hastened to collect all of Romolo’s letters in an effort to work on his behalf. Showing one typical letter to his colleague Don Gaetano Piccinini, a friend of Romolo’s, Orione pointed out the relevant passage: “I don’t feel like a Marxist: I don’t want to emigrate far away; I feel the Gospel in my heart, I don’t want to be on the other side . . . Thank you for the good you have done me and the goodness with which you have guided me, and the evil you have kept me from. I have always followed your teachings! This though I feel: I could not eat a piece of bread without turning to share it with one who does not have any. And this comes all from you who always acted like a father.” Someone who writes like this, Don Orione said to Don Piccinini, could not have placed a bomb for the king or killed so many innocent people. “I will defend the poor boy against anyone!”
Don Orione was indeed called to testify in the investigation and handed over all of Romolo’s letters to the prosecutor in Genoa. The real perpetrators of the bombing were never discovered, but much evidence points to a radical republican wing of Fascists. Silone, by then in Swiss exile, anxiously followed these developments and decided to contact a police official in Rome, Guido Bellone. A handwritten document dated April 23, 1928, from Chief of Police Arturo Bocchini to Mussolini stated: “From Basel, Guido Bellone has received a telegram from Tranquilli Secondino—one of the Communist leaders—that announces his arrival in Italy. The colloquium that will follow could be interesting. I will keep Your Excellency informed.” But five days later, Silone wrote to Bellone: “I canceled my trip to Rome following information from the Lugano police, according to whom I was wanted at every Italian border crossing. My friends, who were already against my returning to Italy, didn’t want me to go . . . I will also write to you tomorrow; in the meantime, I want some assurances regarding my brother. Write to me through some Fascist relative (for example a member of the Fascio of my town) with trustworthy information, to an address that I sent to my grandmother.” (A more detailed discussion of this correspondence is in chapter eight.)
In Pescina, Silone was assisted in his efforts by a cousin, Pomponio Tranquilli, and a precious few friends: Gianbattista Barbati and Vincenzo Parisse. Pomponio Tranquilli acted as intermediary between the two brothers, facilitating an exchange of letters, funds, and small gifts. Pomponio Tranquilli often visited Romolo in his various prison cells: from the San Vittore in Milan to the infamous Regina Coeli in Rome, to temporary quarters in L’Aquila and Perugia (where the Communist Gastone Sozzi was tortured to death), to Romolo’s final internment at Procida. For his troubles, Pomponio was arrested more than once. (Barbati and Parisse would arrange for secret safe houses for Silone when he returned to Pescina in the 1920s.)
Even Silone’s grandmother was paid a visit by authorities. They wanted to know who was sending Romolo money and the provenance of the funds. In reality, Silone and Romolo had decided to sell some property, and the resulting transactions had been handled by Pomponio. The grandmother lamented her eighty-five years and poor finances in finding an attorney: “Who will now help poor Romoletto?” Here in Pescina, “no one thinks of defending Romolo’s innocence.” She charged Silone with finding “an honest lawyer” so that Romolo could be freed and she could die in peace.
Romolo was brought before the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, a Fascist judicial organ created to deal with anti-Fascist opponents. On Mussolini’s orders, the tribunal changed its locale from Rome to Milan and passed a death sentence on Romolo.
Silone immediately began to organize an international campaign on his brother’s behalf. Among those protesting Romolo’s arrest were Henri Barbusse, president of the Comité de Défense des Victimes du Fascisme; Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature; and the British foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, president of the Socialist International. Perhaps because of this attention, the regime dropped charges of attempted regicide against Romolo when it became apparent that he was not involved in the bombing. No less a personage than Arturo Bocchini, chief of police, realized that Romolo and the others held were innocent of the bombing. He intervened in the pretrial proceedings and so Romolo was spared the firing squad. Still held on charges of being a subversive, and defiantly claiming to be a Communist, he was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The official charges were membership in the PCI and possession of false identity papers. The map discovered on Romolo was not a diagram of Piazza Giulio Cesare in Milan where the bombing took place but of a piazza in Como where Romolo was to have met Luigi Longo of the PCI for instructions on fleeing Italy. As for the poison mentioned in the press accounts, this may have been a case of yellow journalism. Romolo had supposedly been instructed to commit suicide if captured. Why he would have been charged by the PCI to carry out such a rash act has never satisfactorily been explained.
The official verdict sounded more like an indictment of Silone than Romolo: “a dangerous Communist,” “always maintaining control of the direction of the Communists,” “clandestine publisher of incendiary, subversive, revolutionary material,” “an influential functionary of the party.” In 1965, Silone explained his own role in Romolo’s travails, persuading his brother to illegally depart Italy and make his way to Switzerland. There, Romolo was to have enrolled at the Polytechnic in Zurich, at Silone’s expense. Silone’s proposal was transmitted to Romolo via Edoardo D’Onofrio, a Communist Party member. Since Romolo’s request for a passport would surely have been denied, it was decided that Romolo would meet in Como with D’Onofrio, who would introduce him to Longo. It would be Longo who would arrange for Romolo’s crossing the border into Switzerland.
There has long been a question of Romolo’s “communism.” Silone always insisted that his brother was not a Communist but rather an “anti-Fascist of Catholic upbringing.” Romolo defined himself as a “Communist sympathizer” (simpatizzante comunista) in his testimony, but there is some question as to whether he claimed allegiance to communism as an expedient to leave the country, depending on the party’s network to get him to Switzerland.
Alternative explanations for what unfolded further cloud the waters. Don Flavio Peloso, present director of Don Orione’s Order of Divine Providence, has suggested that perhaps Romolo was merely bait in an intricate web woven to catch Silone. Peloso ventures two hypotheses: that OVRA, the Fascist secret police, set up Romolo to snare the more famous older brother and, more startling but hardly out of the question, that elements of the PCI, wanting to destroy Silone, sacrificed the younger brother.
By the time the sentence of twelve years was pronounced on June 6, 1931, Romolo had been in prison more than three years. He turned and denounced his court-appointed lawyer (his remarks, recounted in a letter to Silone, were redacted by prison officials). In Rome’s notorious Regina Coeli prison, he had been tortured, suffering three broken ribs and pulmonary lesions. The abuse continued with his transfer to the prison in Perugia (July 28, 1931, to July 12, 1932) and finally the prison on Procida, the island midway between Ischia and Naples. Conditions there exacerbated the ill effects of torture. In mid-July 1932, when he appeared on Procida, the medical doctor on staff noted that Romolo suffered from “tuberculosis with frequent and serious hemoptysis” and that his general condition was “declining rapidly.”
Like his older brother and so many before him, Romolo spent his time in
prison reading. Fellow prisoners recall seeing him with the Bible, speaking of St. Francis and Don Orione. In a letter to his brother, he wrote: “Now, if I read Dante, I am able to understand his beauty, which previously I understood very imperfectly. I enjoy Petrarch and the other two: Tasso and Ariosto. Dante, Petrarch, et al.; I’m in good company, don’t you think?” Responding to some advice from his older brother, Romolo wrote: “You said it well: one must endure and harden oneself. I desire nothing more than to become better, morally stronger, to free myself from every baseness, to be able to make any sacrifice for my ideas.”
A devoted exchange of letters took place between Romolo and Gabriella Seidenfeld. In fact, it seems that in prison, Romolo developed a strong emotional bond with Seidenfeld. While letters between the brothers often carried a note of tension regarding a lack of funds and Silone’s excuses about not sending more money, those between Romolo and Gabriella seem to have offered the young man a psychological and emotional anchor. Reading between the lines, one can detect notes of resentment toward Silone. “I have received much news from Pescina,” Romolo wrote to Gabriella on September 13, 1930, “not by letter, but from a paesano who is here in prison with me.” A week later, he strikes a darker note, hinting at a nervous breakdown: “I’ve always withstood [torture]; even when I suffered terribly, and didn’t know what the devil might happen, I wasn’t afraid . . . it wasn’t enough to make me ask for pity.” Or a month later: “Dear sister-in-law, I have received your check for 200 lire . . . But don’t 200 lire seem really very little to you? They do to me.”
Romolo’s letters to Silone ranged from the mundane details of prison life (asking for a wool sweater and clean underwear, the perils of shaving with a rusty razor, lacking funds to pay for writing paper) to the poignant. In April and May 1931, Romolo was nostalgic for springtime in Pescina; memories of the town were both a comfort and a torment in prison. “I must make something of an effort to not think that outside it is spring, that in Pescina the cherries are blooming, that the fields are green, . . . all stuff that I wish to enjoy once again after three years in prison.”
Conditions in the various prisons, combined with the effects of torture, spelled disaster for Romolo’s health. Coughing up blood, he sent a letter whose tone was either mocking or despairing: “I was angry at myself because as a former athlete and soccer player, I shouldn’t be subject to such incidents.” In early September 1932, Romolo was admitted to the infirmary of the Procida prison with a raging temperature. From his sickbed, he sent a last letter to Silone asking for two sweaters. His tuberculosis worsened, and on October 27, 1932, he died. There is some indication that near the end, Romolo asked for, and received, permission to confess to Don Orione. Silone was notified by their cousin Pomponio, whose letter, written on All Souls’ Day, assured the writer in Zurich that he would take care of the necessary arrangements to have a tombstone ordered. Romolo’s grave, in the squalid prison cemetery, was marked by a simple cross. Silone, returning to Italy in 1944, attempted to exhume the body for a proper burial in Pescina, only to discover that during the war, the cemetery had been bombed; the grave and Romolo’s remains had been destroyed.
Silone, convinced he was responsible for his brother’s fate, spent the rest of his life in grief and guilt, haunted by his brother’s ghost, tormented by the tragedy and especially by a line from one of Romolo’s letters: “I have tried to act as I thought you would have in my place.” Silone’s first book, Fontamara, was dedicated to Romolo (and Silone’s companion of ten years, Gabriella Seidenfeld). The writer was not above using his brother to make a point: In writing about how Italian writers had prostituted themselves under fascism (and every other political system in Italian history), Silone insisted they were all courtiers, and that any man who had any pride must decline the name of littérateur. “A young Italian intellectual, Romolo Tranquilli once asked me, ‘How can we avoid this terrible fate?’ I advised him, ‘We must give ourselves body and soul to that class which is the mortal enemy of the present social system in Italy. That is the only way we can save ourselves from becoming bootlickers.’ He took my advice. He wanted to become a worker, a printer. But he paid dearly for it. The government had him killed in prison.”
Expulsion
“The life of a revolutionary,” Silone wrote more than a decade after his expulsion, “is much more difficult, dangerous and full of pitfalls than that of a Nietzschean hero.” It was dangerous, for example, to go forth into battle “without being completely truthful with oneself, down to the depths of one’s soul.”
In Silone’s recounting of his experience as a Communist, the May 1927 meeting in Moscow of the Executive Committee of the Communist International is pivotal. Thinking that they had arrived late, Silone and Togliatti found themselves in the midst of a discussion denouncing Trotsky for his critical analysis of the situation in China and the drafting of a resolution to expel the Russian. When Silone naïvely asked to read the supposedly incriminating document, he was told it was not possible and was astonished to learn that no one of the Executive Committee had read it either. When the two Italians refused to condemn Trotsky for a document that neither of them had seen, the meeting was adjourned to the next day. The Executive Committee appointed the Bulgarian Vasil Kolarov to convince Silone and Togliatti. The two were invited for tea at the Hotel Lux that night. After admitting that he himself had not seen the document, but that “documents have nothing to do with it,” Kolarov stated simply, “We have to choose . . . we’re not in an academy here. Have I made myself clear?” he asked, looking straight at Silone. “Yes,” Silone answered, “very clear.” “Have I persuaded you?” asked Kolarov. “No,” was Silone’s reply. “Why not?” Kolarov wanted to know. “I’d have to explain,” Silone concluded, “why I’m against Fascism.”
The next day, when the two Italians still refused to condemn Trotsky, Stalin smiled and simply withdrew the motion from a vote. But Silone and Togliatti were astonished to read in a newspaper picked up the next day on the train ride back to Berlin that the Executive Committee of the Communist International had “unanimously” condemned Trotsky for betrayal.
For the next two years, Silone continued carrying out important tasks within the PCI but with increasing disgust. In the summer of 1929, he requested and was granted a leave of absence for medical reasons. It would be another two years before he was expelled and finally free.
Silone’s expulsion from the Communist Party in June 1931 was the culmination of a long, drawn-out political and psychological battle that left an indelible stigma on his public persona and trauma on his private self. However, it does not appear that Silone was entirely innocent in the ambiguous and murky maneuvering of the PCI and its attempt to expel the three “deviationists”: Pietro Tresso, Alfonso Leonetti, and Paolo Ravazzoli. Further complicating the drama was the fact that Tresso was Silone’s brother-in-law, having married Barbara Seidenfeld. At the height of the crisis, Silone wished only “to disappear in silence.”
The dispute revolved around the changing tactical and strategic thinking of both the Communist International and the PCI. Moscow ordered that social democrats were now to be referred to as “social-fascists” and that Communist parties were to increase their domestic networks in preparation for a soon-to-be-expected collapse of the bourgeois order. Tresso, Leonetti, and Ravazzoli disagreed, thinking the policy suicidal. Silone hesitated at first, refusing to take a clear public position. Writing from Switzerland on January 15, 1930, Silone (as “Pasquini”) committed his position to a memorandum: Without explicitly aligning himself with Tresso, Leonetti, and Ravazzoli, and with an implied critique of the “socialfascism” theory, he agreed that returning to underground activity in Italy would be suicidal. Togliatti was furious, condemning Silone as an opportunist whose position would lead to a “liquidation of the party.”
When it appeared that Silone was less than straightforward in his dealings with Tresso, Leonetti, and Ravazzoli, the PCI published excerpts of his letters, clearly dem
onstrating that while privately he agreed with the three, publicly he was criticizing them. Trapped by party intrigue and his own less-than-forthright declarations, Silone was openly charged with betrayal: “[Pasquini] should have the courage of a Communist. He should openly declare: ‘I have betrayed the party.’ He says it but doesn’t say it. He confesses yet searches for an excuse.” One critical point in the fiasco was the revelation that Silone sometimes had Gabriella Seidenfeld write and sign the incriminating letters to Ravazzoli, Leonetti, and Tresso. From Moscow, Ruggero Grieco wrote that “the party must conduct a pitiless campaign against the positions held by Pasquini.” (It can be no coincidence that the party bureaucrat who investigates Rocco De Donatis in A Handful of Blackberries is named Ruggero.)
Silone’s close confidant, Angelo Tasca, was expelled from the PCI in 1929. Accused of “right deviationism,” Tasca was paying the price for criticizing the doctrine of “socialfascism,” which held that the real enemy was not so much fascism (the orthodox definition was that fascism was a sign of the impending crisis of capitalism and therefore, in a bizarre way, to be welcomed) as social democracy. In this reading, the social democrats were guilty of diluting the revolutionary fervor of the working classes and, by so doing, strengthening Fascist regimes. Tasca had been a colleague of Gramsci’s in founding the Ordine Nuovo movement in Turin. The latter emphasized the factory councils; the former, the trade unions. Tasca had joined Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, Umberto Terracini, and Silone in the Italian Communist Party in 1921 but almost immediately fought against Amadeo Bordiga’s left-wing faction. A member of the executive committee of the PCI, Tasca clashed with the Executive Committee of the Communist International while in Moscow. His stance against the “socialfascism” thesis was the final straw: He was expelled in September 1929 and spent years in exile in Paris, taking French citizenship and moving increasingly to the political right—so far to the right that he collaborated with the Vichy regime as a journalist and radio commentator.
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