During my school years I was continually punished for my obstinate friendship with the pupils from what the nuns called “the poor school,” that is, free elementary school. They were dressed in rags, and their shoes, when they had shoes, were broken. I preferred their company, walking along the street to school, to that of my “legitimate” companions. The nuns considered my behavior as a form of “class betrayal.”
Earning a degree in languages in Dublin, she then traveled throughout Europe, studying in France, Germany, Venice, and the Università per Stranieri in Perugia. In Zurich, she washed floors in exchange for Russian lessons. She was an omnivorous reader, “but my quest was solitary: I could not shock, I could not wound, and even later my contemporaries seemed terrified of hellfire, in which I did not believe because no good God could have invented it.”
After her father had been wounded in World War I, Darina became a fervent pacifist and devoured the war’s trench literature and poetry, particularly struck by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. During the summer of 1935, at age eighteen, she traveled to Germany to learn the language. In preparation for study there, she read Willi Münzenberg’s The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. When her father sent her money to purchase a camera, she immediately walked into a “Jewish” store whose window was emblazoned with “Gute Deutsche kaufen nicht hier” (Good Germans don’t buy here). An avid reader of the London Times and carefully reading posters plastered with the ranting of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer on the walls of German cities, Darina was fully conscious of what National Socialism meant for Germany and Europe. Some Germans were fascinated by her Nordic beauty. In Freiburg, she was introduced to university friends. One of these “good Germans,” after speaking to Darina of his fiancée in Munich, jumped to his feet, clicked his heels together, and proposed to her on the spot. When Darina demurely inquired about his fiancée, he responded, “But she’s a brunette, not an Aryan type like you!” Instead of accepting the gallant marriage proposal, she consoled herself by purchasing a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, then banned in Ireland.
With the Fascist hymn to the Ethiopian War, “Facetta nera,”* ubiquitous throughout the country, Darina spent the summer of 1936 in Italy, studying Italian. From Italian newspapers, she read of Franco’s attempt to overthrow the Spanish republic. Returning to Dublin, she learned of a student friend who had gone to Spain in defense of the republic. Meanwhile, she failed to hide her disgust of Ireland, which sent a legion of Blue Shirts to aid Franco; on their departure from Ireland, they were blessed by Irish priests in their battle against “godless atheism.”
Having won a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne, she traveled to Paris in October 1938. Her first stop was at the embassy office of the Spanish republic, where she offered her services to the Loyalists. Half a century later, she could still recall her conversation when a consular official inquired about what services she could offer the republican cause:
“Anything, except killing.”
“Do you know Spanish?”
“No, but I can learn it quickly.”
“Can you drive a car?”
“No, but I can learn quickly.”
“Can you be a nurse?”
“No, but I can at least learn a little quickly.”
“Mademoiselle, the best thing that you can do for the republic is to speak about our cause with your friends here in Paris.”
Kristallnacht and the final dismemberment of Czechoslovakia forced her to a painful conclusion: Pacifism was no longer a possibility. Upon meeting a French Jesuit priest who had been interned in Dachau, she concluded that Hitler could be defeated only by force of arms. A planned trip to Krakow for September 1939 was put off at the announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then September 1, 1939, and “the world changed forever.”
On June 10, 1940, when Mussolini declared war on France, Darina found herself in Milan. Ignoring her family’s pleas to return home, she went instead to Rome and wrote for the Herald Tribune and the International News Service. Often she was the only woman present at the daily news conferences held by the Fascist press service Agenzia Stefani. Her first and only question at a news conference concerned the bombing of Coventry, an episode that led to the transformation of the city’s name into a verb when an Italian official proclaimed: “Yes, we want to coventrize many English cities.” The audacious question and its even more audacious answer found their way into many American newspapers the next day. Italian police harassed her, and the German Gestapo in Italy insistently sought her collaboration; she turned them down, but only after three ominous attempts to embroil her in espionage. In an hourlong telephone conversation, the Gestapo agent reassured her that spying “wasn’t like the movies” and inquired, “Do you like diamonds? No? Furs then? Everyone has his price. The Pope has his price . . .” Some days later, meeting at a Rome café, the agent told her that her newspaper office “was full of spies” and warned her, “Something terrible will happen to that young man in Milan.” That young man died a week later. “Now do you believe us?” the Gestapo agent asked menacingly.
She was pressed by John McCaffrey of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive, or military intelligence) to answer 253 questions about Italy. In June and July of 1941, McCaffrey was persistent in his amorous pursuit of Darina; when she continually refused his advances, he responded by denouncing her as a Nazi spy. Not to be outdone, OVRA opened a file on her. Expelled by the Italian government, she was on a train headed for Bern the day Germany invaded Russia. The Fascist secret police had her followed in Switzerland.
Working in the Museumgesellschaft in Zurich one day in December 1941, she was noticed by Silone. The library had heat, a welcome relief from the cold, and had hosted both Karl Marx and Lenin in the past. Silone first noticed the pile of books at her side dealing with Mussolini. Darina was trying to write an essay pointing out the contradictions in Mussolini’s past public pronouncements as a Socialist and official Fascist policy. Ironically, when Silone inquired about her, British intelligence agents warned him that she was a spy. Silone was intrigued but did not approach her directly, instead sending a note to her to meet him at Fleischmann’s villa for tea. “Dear Signorina, I have heard much spoken of you from my editor [a blatant lie, as Oprecht did not know Darina at the time] and it would give me great pleasure to make your acquaintance. You can come to visit me next Tuesday for tea at 4:00 p.m.” Either Silone did not believe British intelligence or, perhaps wryly amused that she may very well have been a spy, was curious. As the episode in chapter eight with the Italian Fascist spy Platone will demonstrate, Silone was more than able to hold his own in their company.
Silone and Darina met privately for the first time at Fleischmann’s villa on Tuesday, December 9, 1941, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which apparently did not come up in conversation. In fact, there was almost no conversation at all. What little was said was spoken in Italian. Darina was overwhelmed by Fleischmann’s luxurious villa and the original paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Cézanne, and Braque. Silone made Darina wait for thirty minutes in the parlor; she passed the time petting a large German shepherd guard dog. Silone, watching this scene unobserved, was entranced: The dog was usually ferocious around strangers. (Silone later confessed that he himself had at first been terrified of the dog.)
Dressed in a muted blue velvet jacket, Silone made no effort to help Darina feel at ease. She, for her part, was enormously self-conscious of her own threadbare clothes and worn shoes. Having just read Silone’s dark satire The School for Dictators, she was convinced that he was an active member of the Resistance and volunteered her services. Silone, perhaps still not convinced she was not a spy, refused to accept her offer and the conversation languished. When Silone asked why she agreed to meet him if she had nothing to say, the visit ended prematurely. Darina immediately wrote to her parents of the visit, a letter intercepted, opened, copied, and diligently filed away by the Fascist police.
After their first awkward meet
ing, Silone suspected Darina was a spy; Darina found Silone a frightful bore. “Better to read a writer,” she thought to herself as she left, “than to meet him.” She had an unpleasant impression that Silone enveloped himself in figurative “peacock feathers.” Yet he pursued her and she allowed herself to be pursued. “He fascinated me by telling stories the way a peacock displays his most beautiful feathers. Silone’s noble feathers were made of stories of every kind.”
Two more diverse people could hardly have come together in these circumstances. They did, however, share a disenchantment with the Catholic church. Darina soon confessed to Silone that although born an Irish Catholic, she no longer considered herself part of the church. She was not willing, though, to renounce Christianity. Christ, she once wrote, was “the spiritual leader fate had allotted to me.” Surely Silone recognized himself in her as a “Christian without a church.” But Darina refused to recognize Christ’s divinity; for her, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Mozart “were my conceptions of the divine.” It took Darina almost a lifetime to be convinced of Christ’s divinity, and that revelation occurred, paradoxically, in a Hindu temple in India. “In that single moment of revelation,” she later wrote, “I knew at last that Christ was divine.”
After somehow assuring himself that she was no spy, Silone put Darina to work translating documents and essays. Revealing that he was indeed involved in the Resistance as head of the Centro Estero of the PSI, he asked her to translate the letters of Rosa Luxemburg for publication in Italian. She agreed: “I did quite a lot of work for the Centro Estero (translating from English and German) but of course never dreamed of compensation, though I was pretty hard up at the time. I mean, no one got any money out of it.” Darina Laracy had proved herself to Silone. Giving her a copy of his novel Der Samen unter dem Schnee (The Seed Beneath the Snow), in November 1942, he inscribed it “To my companion Darina: Unum in una fide et spe: libertas” (United in a single faith and hope: freedom).
With Silone interned in Davos for six months at the beginning of 1943, Darina made “several expeditions” to Bern to meet with Allen Dulles of the OSS. OVRA learned of Silone’s work in the Centro Estero by opening Darina’s letters to her parents in Ireland. Her attempt at hiding his identity by referring to him as “S” obviously failed.
By early 1943, the Fascist police had augmented her file, noting that in Zurich she “lived a rather modest and morally correct life” (apparently the police were unaware of the full extent of her relationship with Silone) and that she worked as a journalist, using her knowledge of English, French, Italian, and Russian. In Davos, she taught languages in a school that sheltered Jews who had somehow evaded deportation to Dachau. There, they were working toward degrees that would permit them to study medicine and then practice later in what was to become Israel. It was these exiled Jews who, on the morning of July 25, 1943, told Darina of Mussolini’s fall from power.
The Swiss police were diligent, arresting her on June 22, 1942. To their demand that she open her door at seven in the morning, she responded that no decent woman would open a door to an unknown male. The Swiss police, polite to the extreme, withdrew and returned with a female officer. Darina, reading Pascal, put down her book and was taken to the canton barracks in Zurich, the same prison that Silone had occupied earlier and would occupy again in six months’ time. She was subjected to an absurd interrogation. Pointing to a letter from Silone on how to catch a squirrel, the police insisted this must have been code for political espionage. In truth, it was in fact about how to catch a squirrel. Finally, after four days of interrogation and Darina’s threat to stage a hunger strike (“Considering the quality of the food there it would have been very easy”), she was released with profuse apologies. Before leaving the prison, while getting her fingerprints and photo taken, she was asked if she was a movie star. Silone, playing the part of the jaded ex-prisoner with good humor, found the whole episode very amusing. The Swiss police, for their part, found a new respect for her: “The signorina’s morality is beyond reproach and she possesses an unusual intelligence.” They were, though, according to a letter from Darina to her parents, “permanently scandalized by my lipstick.”
The Fascist secret police were more ominous in their work, while McCaffrey of the SOE informed the Russians, who then broadcast the vital information regarding the Centro Estero on Radio Moscow.
Silone’s own intimate knowledge of Swiss prisons was not without some comic scenes. Most curious was an earlier visit in December when his reputation had already been established with the publication of Fontamara. Prison authorities, noting the prisoner’s fame, had loosened regulations to permit an unlimited supply of food, clothing, and flowers. Soon there was no more room in his modest cell, so Silone politely asked permission to share his Christmas bounty with the other prisoners; permission was granted. All his fellow prisoners were extraordinarily grateful, except for one. Silone entered his cell: “Good morning. May I offer you a rose?” “What?!” the astonished prisoner roared. “A rose,” replied Silone, who had not been informed by the guard that this prisoner had just killed a flower vendor. “A rose. May I offer you a rose?” The prisoner looked at Silone, who, unlike the others incarcerated had been allowed to keep collar, necktie, belt, and shoelaces and so appeared to the prisoner to be a “civilian” and not a fellow “criminal.” Silone placed the rose on the table and left the cell, while the murderer glared at it as though it were a bomb. The next day, in court, the flower killer turned to the judge: “Your Honor, thank you for the rose.” The judge, understandably, erupted in a fury. It appears the accused may have avoided a verdict of murder with a ruling of “mental incompetency.”
Silone and Darina finally returned to Italy in October 1944, flown to Naples on an American military plane made available to them by Dulles. Descending the steps from the plane, Silone bent down and kissed the ground. The two passed the night in the royal apartments in Caserta, guests of the Allies. Silone spent the next day on the large terrace overlooking the Capuana plains covered with golden vineyards, never tiring of the scene. With tears in his eyes, he kept whispering to himself: “What a beautiful country!”
On their arrival in Caserta, Silone immediately drafted a report that eventually made its way to the desk of President Roosevelt. Never one to mince his words, Silone began with a blunt warning: “The Allies are showing themselves incapable of establishing free and peaceful democracies in Europe.” Roosevelt’s public statements promising punitive measures against German industrial giant I. G. Farben—responsible for war matériel and supplying the extermination camps—were “a ray of light amidst confused and contradictory policy,” but the press had given little publicity to them. The democratic European revolution must be supported by the Allies. “This does not mean a radical and total form of Socialism but series of structural changes analogous to Roosevelt anti-trust measures.” If Americans were in Europe representing the interests of the cartels and trusts and monarchical restoration and the Catholic clergy, the “result will be chaos and the birth of future Hitlers.” For their part, the Italian and Swiss Socialist parties would insist that the British Labour Party call a conference of all Western European Socialist parties to confront the public with the “problem of democratic revolution in Europe.” The fate of democracy in Italy, Silone insisted to his American colleagues, was bound to the labor movement. “If movement falls mainly in Communist hands, hopes for political democracy will vanish.” The fusion of the PCI and PSI “would imperil hope of democratic regime.” For the moment, Silone wrote, the danger of fusion had faded. “Work and bread to the masses indispensable. Freedom propaganda to homeless, starving men ironic.” The current Allied relief programs were not the best solution to the elementary needs of the people. Italians, Silone insisted, must be given “legal responsibility to help themselves.” Finally, he called upon the Allies to promote the formation of a constituent assembly with widespread local autonomy, for a “future democratic state will arise built by a political class
with capacity for local government.”
At dusk, the exiles left by car for Rome, where they were placed in a luxurious apartment in the fashionable Parioli district. But the brutal reality of the recently ended German occupation of the Eternal City hit home, literally. Answering the door one day, Silone and Darina were confronted by an elderly woman and her daughter, both dressed in black mourning, humbly asking entrance into their former home. They were the widow and daughter of General Giuseppe Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, an aristocratic and distinguished officer who had joined the Allies and the Resistance, been captured and tortured by the Nazis in the infamous via Tasso prison in Rome, and finally executed in the notorious Fosse Ardeatine massacre in March 1944. (The Nazis killed 335 innocent men and boys in retaliation for a partisan attack that killed 33 German soldiers the day before.) Visibly moved by the simple dignity of the two, Darina and Silone insisted on leaving the apartment immediately, going first to the Genio hotel (with no running water or electricity) and then to the Plaza (where composer Piero Mascagni had died). They lived on what Marcel Fleischmann had lent them before their departure from Switzerland.
Settling in Rome, Darina broached a subject that the two had studiously avoided until then: marriage. On the few occasions when Silone consented to discuss the possibility, Darina had expressed a wish to wed in Switzerland; Silone insisted on Rome. They were married in a civil ceremony at the Campidoglio on December 20, 1944. Although both were estranged from the Catholic church and did not agree to a religious ceremony, husband and wife attended Christmas and Easter Masses either in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore or Santa Prassede, not far from their apartment. Silone also made trips to the municipal records office in Rome and tangled with the notoriously inefficient bureaucracy to legally change his name to “Ignazio Silone.” But as with everything else about Silone, this was a more complex turn of events than might appear at first sight. Two years earlier (1942), while still working for Allen Dulles and the American OSS and using various pseudonyms, but using Secondino Tranquilli for his political writings, he wrote that “after years of using false papers and borrowed names, it is odd suddenly to reacquire one’s original name. This name can easily seem stranger and more unreal than the others we have used, since it brings back the years in which we were not entirely ourselves.”
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