by Roberto Olla
Mussolini found it easy to remain in control of his relationships with women like this, but in Trento his insatiable appetites led him to meet someone who was very different, a woman who was not prepared to be submissive but was tenacious and stubborn, and caused him many problems: Ida Irene Dalser, who gave birth to the only child of Mussolini’s born out of wedlock to obtain legal recognition, an unhappy and unfortunate son called Benito Albino. Mussolini was careful to avoid any sentimental attachment which threatened to become complicated; he preferred one-night or at most one-week stands. He could, exceptionally, remain attached to some women for several months, but always and only on the basis of “free love”, meaning that he was able to come and go as he pleased, without commitment. Ida Dalser refused to be reduced to such a status. She understood Mussolini’s sexual tastes and was able to find ways and times to hook him in again. Their stormy, passion-driven relationship was to go far beyond the limits Mussolini had established to become at first an embarrassment and later a tragedy. But for the time being it was a question of “unforgettable evenings” and bouts of heavy drinking which served as the counterweight to his increasingly frenetic political activity.
A local priest, a committed Catholic activist, published a newspaper article in which he accused Mussolini of having a police record, in effect of being a criminal. Mussolini retorted by writing a piece for his own newspaper in which he publicly vowed to crack the priest’s tonsured head while he was still around in Trento to do it. Events then moved swiftly: Don Chelodi denounced him to the police, a trial took place, but to everyone’s surprise Mussolini was acquitted by the Austrian judges. Leaving the courtroom he quoted a Russian proverb to the socialist companions who were celebrating his victory: “a man can only call himself a man when he’s done six years of high school, four years at university and two in prison”. He’d done various spells inside – and would face prison on other occasions in the future – but for the moment he himself was still far off the requisite of two years stipulated by the Russians.
Under his editorship L’avvenire del lavoratore was closed down eleven times, receiving a formal condemnation and the imposition of a fine on six occasions. He was increasingly the object of denunciation. At the end of May 1909 he spent six days in prison as a result of two combined court sentences against him; he passed this unexpected spell of tranquil leisure reading Sorel’s Reflections on Violence.
Mixing in the city’s intellectual circles helped him to lose much of his awkwardness. As he turned twenty-six, the prize for which he had been waiting and hoping arrived: Cesare Battisti saw that the polemical energy of Mussolini’s journalism might be useful to him and on 29th July – Mussolini’s birthday – he offered him the job of editor-in-chief of his newspaper, Il popolo. According to Rachele Mussolini, Battisti proposed a monthly salary of seventy-five lire which, again in her version, Mussolini turned down, declaring that fifty lire would be enough for him. Whatever the pay he received, he earned it, because sales of the paper immediately began to increase. Battisti wanted to exploit and if possible increase its growing circulation: so the idea arose of getting the new editor-in-chief to write a story for serialization. Perhaps Mussolini had mentioned the idea casually, perhaps Battisti himself suggested it; whichever of the two first thought it up, they both agreed on the subject of the novel: the relationship between a seventeenth-century Prince Bishop of Trento, Carlo Emanuele Madruzzo and his mistress Claudia Particella. The story was a tortuous and passionate one, dating from 1631 and still at the time the stuff of local legend. Apart from the serial story and the numerous articles he wrote, the only significant political text to arise from Mussolini’s experience in Trento, according to De Felice, was written in 1911, a year after he had left the city:
In my opinion there can be no doubt that Mussolini’s contact with the realities of political life in Trento, wholly shaped as it was by the pressure of pan-Germanism and with men like Battisti who made the struggle for autonomy the focus of their political activity, led him to perceive and appreciate certain values which often eluded the majority of Italian socialists, and in particular those, like Mussolini himself, on the revolutionary wing of the party. The importance of language as a factor in the situation was not lost on him: he wrote at length about the issue in his 1911 book Il Trentino veduto da un socialista [The Trento Region as Seen by a Socialist] but the first references to the subject can be found earlier in articles he published in 1909…32
The increase in circulation of Battisti’s newspaper was a source of concern for the Habsburg Empire’s police. They decided they must stop this socialist fanatic newly arrived from Italy who was stirring up the region’s sleepy politics and who, as the editor, was behind this alarming increase in the influence of a vehicle of socialist propaganda. With the unsubtle methods occasionally adopted by the police – and the police of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had special powers – they planned to set Mussolini up. A month after Mussolini started to work for Battisti’s newspaper, the Emperor Franz Josef visited the city of Innsbruck. In Trento someone stuck a life-size puppet dressed in Tyrolean costume round the town’s statue of Dante. During the night a considerable sum of money was stolen from the vaults of the Catholic Cooperative bank. The same day twenty-five kilos of dynamite disappeared from a quarry in Val di Non. The man responsible for carrying out the theft was Cesare Berti, a socialist carpenter who supported Mussolini’s extremist views. At this point the police claimed they had received a tip-off that Mussolini and Battisti were plotting an attack on the printing firm run by De Gasperi. Mussolini was arrested, but once again, to everyone’s surprise, the judge who tried the case in nearby Rovereto saw through the police’s machinations and freed him. He had only just left the court building when the police arrested him again for non-payment of a fine relating to a previous conviction.
Once more in prison, Mussolini began a hunger strike as a form of propaganda, but the imperial authorities in Trento decided to prevent public support building up for him by secretly sending him to Ala on the frontier with Italy and expelling him from the territory. Some of his socialist companions managed to get wind of the move and accompanied him – there are photographs of Mussolini with the group taken at the border crossing. He is wearing a broad-brimmed hat, looks grumpy, but is elegantly dressed, with a gold watch chain visible on his waistcoat. Other socialists in Trento were pleased to see the back of this difficult character and felt the Austrian police had done them a favour by expelling him. Battisti too had begun to see his new editor-in-chief as potentially troublesome, but at the same time wanted to maintain his newspaper’s increased circulation, so he urged Mussolini, even though he was no longer in the city, to continue writing the novel for serialization which they had planned.
While Mussolini was away in Trento, Rachele in the meantime had received other marriage proposals, which she turned down, to the concern of her mother and also of Alessandro: “He was upset because he knew what Benito was like and thought that our married life would not be easy for me.”33 On his return from Trento, Mussolini threatened to beat up her most recent suitor – a quietly behaved accountant from the province of Forlì – and, such was his reputation, rapidly saw him off. News of his activities in Trento had preceded his return; the solid backing he had always received from his fellow Socialists in the party managed to secure his nomination as secretary to Forlì’s local socialist federation, which was affiliated with the Italian Socialist Party. His father was pleased, but his son’s behaviour towards Rachele still worried him. He told Rachele to ignore him and Benito to stop bothering her, but to no avail. Mussolini had seen how the tavern’s customers looked at Rachele and ordered her not to wait at the tables. To keep her under observation he himself worked as a waiter for several days and even did the washing-up in the kitchen, much to the chagrin of his father, who according to Rachele complained: “‘Just think! A qualified schoolteacher who decides to become a waiter.’ But he didn’t care. He was so jealous he would have done any
thing to keep me away from the men who came to the tavern.”34
Mussolini had also forbidden Rachele to go to socialist meetings which often ended up with dances, when men and women could get together. Alessandro didn’t know about the prohibition and one evening took her along with him to hear his son speak and to share his pride in his developing political career. At first Mussolini didn’t notice Rachele in the audience; it was only at the dance which followed when a young man invited her to join him for a waltz that he spotted her. He marched up to her with a furious expression and snatched her from the arms of the young man, who knew nothing about the attractive blonde who’d accepted his invitation. This was what “free love” meant after all. Mussolini spun her round wildly for the rest of the waltz and then dragged her home, still glaring fiercely at her. Meanwhile his father, deep in discussion with friends, hadn’t noticed what was happening. Mussolini started to threaten Rachele: either she agreed to live together with him or her refusal would drive him to commit some violent act.
One evening my mother couldn’t take any more and decided to intervene. I remember all three of us were sitting in the kitchen, my mother and I next to each other, Benito facing us. My mother told him: “I’m warning you – Rachele is still just a girl. If you go on tormenting her in this way I’ll report you to the police and have you put away.” “Fine,” replied Benito, and left the room. We were left puzzled, but not for long. He came back immediately, brandishing a revolver which belonged to his father under my mother’s nose and said with cold and dramatic deliberation: “If that’s what you want, it’s my turn to give you a warning. You see this revolver, Mrs Guidi? It’s got six bullets in it. If Rachele rejects me again, one bullet will be for her and the rest for me. The choice is yours.”35
Rachele accepted him on the spot in front of her astonished mother; now she was officially engaged to Benito Mussolini. As his fiancée she had to submit immediately to his jealous demands: he ordered her to go and live with her sister Pina in Carpena, a village seven kilometres outside Forlì, until he could find a suitable place for them to set up house together. He went to see her every evening, walking the seven kilometres there and back. At the beginning of January 1910 he told her sister that he had found an apartment where they could live together: “He told Pina: ‘I want Rachele to come and live with me and be the mother of my children. […] Go and tell her to get ready to come with me, and be quick about it, I’ve got lots to do…’”36
In her memoirs Rachele gives a romantically tinged description of her wedding trousseau: a pair of three-year-old shoes, a blouse, a pair of handkerchiefs and an another to cover her head, an apron, a handful of coins. The couple walked for seven kilometres under the pouring rain to the inn where they would spend their “first” night together. The following morning Mussolini took her to the flat he’d rented in Via Merenda in a large but run-down palazzo built for local nobility: a couple of rooms containing a few sticks of furniture on the top floor where the domestic servants had had their living quarters. In the early autobiography he penned in prison, Mussolini describes the events simply: “On 17th January 1910 Rachele Guidi and I were joined together without any official ceremony, civil or religious.”37 They would get married in a civil ceremony on 16th December 1915 as a result of pressure from the presence of Ida Irene Dalser, who was going around claiming she was “Mussolini’s wife”; much later, when Mussolini was in secret contact with the Vatican in efforts to resolve the issue of its territorial status, reasons of political convenience led him to marry Rachele in church, on 28th December 1925. Back in the flat in Via Merenda, Rachele immediately became pregnant with their first daughter, Edda. Following the old proverb which advises a man to choose his wife and his cattle from his native place, and making an abrupt decision, based on instinct and temperament, Mussolini set up home with a woman from his local village, someone who would keep the house tidy, make the bed, cook and look after their children. A son, Vittorio, was born five years later in 1916, followed by Bruno in 1918, Romano in 1927 and Anna Maria in 1929.
Mussolini’s idea of fatherhood was patriarchal, and while respectful towards his wife he kept himself completely detached from her: with the sons increasingly ruling the roost and the wife’s role limited to that of the loving mother, it might be called a very Italian family set-up. One of Mussolini’s lovers once revealed to me that he’d told her “my wife is an attractive blonde and the mother of my children. She doesn’t try to wear the trousers, and that suits me fine. I’m fond of her because she lets me do whatever I want to do.”38
While he was determinedly pursuing Rachele, Mussolini was also working on the novel to be serialized in Battisti’s newspaper; by January 1910 he had written two chapters of what was to be called L’amante del Cardinale (The Cardinal’s Mistress). He was earning a hundred and twenty lire a month, he had started up a weekly paper called La lotta di classe (The Class Struggle), he was always in debt and now that he’d set up house with Rachele, he needed to supplement his earnings. Battisti had succeeded in persuading him, and when Mussolini sent him the text he immediately began to advertise the forthcoming attraction. On 10th January 1910 his newspaper carried the following announcement: “Claudia Particella – L’amante del Cardinal Madruzzo. Benito Mussolini, our editor, expelled by the Austrians and now back in Italy, has not forgotten the newspaper for which he fought so many noble battles. He promised us he would write a historical novel for the paper and, after much painstaking research in libraries and archives, he has now completed one.”
In their new flat in Via Merenda, on the outskirts of Forlì, a heavily pregnant Rachele climbed painfully up the narrow stairs. The only table to write on was the kitchen table next to the stove. In his interview with Ludwig, Mussolini declared the novel about the cardinal to be “a dreadful piece of trash. […] I wrote it for a political purpose, for serialization in a newspaper. In those days the clergy was full of corruption. It’s a book of political propaganda.”39 When he corrected the proofs of the interview Mussolini struck out the phrase in italics, as well as censoring numerous other remarks; the interview with Ludwig took place after the signing of the Lateran Pacts, when he had become, in Pius XI’s phrase, Italy’s “man of destiny” and from his solitary eminence governed the country in the name of God, the Fatherland and the Family. The phrase was only reinserted in the critical edition of the interview published in 1950.
But is L’amante del Cardinale really “a dreadful piece of trash”?
Chapter 6
The Two Racheles and Prison
He had the courtiers arrive in the small forest clearing at dusk. He got their servants to lay carpets out on the grass so that they could stretch out at their ease. And then he waited, while the smells of good food tempted the company to start picking at the contents of the hampers they had brought with them. He set the guards to stand at attention around them and paid no heed to the fact they were joking and laughing distractedly. Right in the middle of the travellers he placed Claudia Particella, smilingly turning now to one of the knights, now to one of the ladies. Close by her side was her faithful maidservant Rachele, who looked on in silence while she distributed the food – game, cheese, fruit.
As he was seated at the table opposite the stove in the top-floor apartment in Via Merenda, the pen in his hand felt as cold and heavy as the dagger of the killer who was just about to enter the scene set in the forest glade. He’d had enough of this novel, of its heroine Claudia, of its featureless noblemen. Every evening, coming in tired from the endless political discussions and the turbulent meetings and checking the proofs of the newspaper, he had to sit down and start writing. There was one way to end it: to kill off Claudia Particella. The ambush was prepared. He’d make sure none of the guards was aware of the danger. He stopped with his pen poised to write as Rachele turned to him. She was pregnant – her stomach had just started to swell. They looked at each other: she had learnt how to meet his steely gaze without flinching. All right, they were in need of
the income, a baby girl was on the way, but enough was enough! There must be some other way of earning money than churning out new chapters of this nauseating story for Trento.
Mussolini prompted his killer to get out of the boat which had brought him across the lake from the other side of the island. This way was longer but safer. Wrapped in a black cloak, the man had to slide silently under the trees in the dark like a snake, so he could arrive near the group of travellers without being noticed. Now he could end it, once and for all. On a sudden the assassin rose up and, gripping the dagger high in the air, threw himself on Claudia Particella. One of the guards cried out, but it was too late. The man seemed to fly as he leapt on her; the others didn’t have time to stand. It was the matter of a moment.
Suddenly Rachele left the stove and came to lean over the table, forcing him to stop writing and listen to what she was saying. Claudia Particella couldn’t be killed off, she said, not now, not yet. They couldn’t pay the bills, the baby was on its way, they had bought nothing for it, they didn’t even have anything set aside for the birth. They started to argue and shout, but Rachele held firm, with the determination of a mother-to-be. She seemed to have interposed her whole body between the sheet of paper and Mussolini’s hand holding the pen. He snorted with anger and told her to get out of the way, but in the end he did what she said and started to write again, to go on writing as she wanted him to.