Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  The assassin’s blow fell on Claudia Particella: it seemed her end had come. The others watched frozen with terror. Only Rachele, her maidservant, reacted. She threw her body between her mistress and the dagger so that the killer stabbed her and Claudia’s life was saved.

  He must be patient, he must hold on, he must go on writing – they really needed the money.

  He brought horsemen and guards running up to throw themselves in a scrum on the assassin. They tied him up and took him to the castle. Rachele’s bodice was dripping with blood; speaking faintly she was trying to reassure her mistress she would be all right, she would survive, but her face grew more and more pale. Claudia made her lie down on the rich carpets spread out on the floor of the boat.

  The other Rachele was quiet again and began to talk gently to him, all the time keeping her eye on the stove. He only needed to write a few more chapters, just enough to pay for an outfit and a cot for the baby. Now supper was ready: he could take a break and go on writing later. She would sit by his side and help him.

  Cesare Battisti was unaware he had an ally in the Mussolini household. For weeks he’d been pleading with his former editor-in-chief to continue the serial which had increased the sales of the newspaper to such an extent that they had been obliged to print this announcement on 22nd January 1910: “In order to satisfy the many readers who have tried in vain to buy from newsagents copies of back issues containing the first two episodes of Benito Mussolini’s new novel, we are pleased to announce that we are reprinting them together with two new parts.”1 When his author decided to go “on strike”, Battisti was forced to divide some episodes in half in order to eke out the publication and gain time. He tried to keep Mussolini on his side and persuade him to continue – the same battle which Rachele was waging back at home. When Mussolini stopped sending new instalments, Battisti wrote to him: “The serial is being read avidly. It’s true you may not get paid much for writing it, but there’s a chance they’ll put up a statue to you in the main square. Doesn’t that impress you?”2

  For Mussolini, not much. Praise and acclamation meant little to him: his only reason for continuing to write was money. He replied to Battisti:

  As you’ll see from the newspaper cutting I enclose, my father has been taken to hospital paralysed by a stroke. We had to sell everything we’ve got to put him there. We had to pay in advance the money for a month’s stay at three lire a day. The crisis is made more acute by my faux ménage, since January, with Rachele. Don’t think I’ve written Claudia Particella for the entertainment of your young lady readers in Trento, or to squeeze money out of the Popolo. In short, I’m asking you for a loan of 200 lire.3

  It is true that Mussolini’s finances were fairly precarious, yet he was not unduly concerned. For example, his father gave him the money to return to Forlì. Claudia Particella was in danger on several occasions of being killed off, but money from Battisti or Rachele’s pleas saved her. In writing what he later described to the journalist Ludwig as a “dreadful piece of trash”, Mussolini drew on all the notes he had made while researching the novel. He recycled the stories about the two lovers which could still be heard in Trento. His visceral hatred of the clergy found expression in the episodes he rapidly set down on paper. With one exception, all of the characters – whether they are fictional creations or based on historical originals – are evil: Carlo Emanuele Madruzzo, the cardinal and prince bishop of Trento, Claudia’s lover, who is determined on marrying her although prevented from doing so by the Pope’s veto; Claudia Particella herself, a negative, shadowy figure; her hateful brother Vincenzo and Father Ludovico, who is also the cardinal’s leading counsellor; and the grim, black-hearted assassin Paolo Martelli. Among these leading characters Mussolini introduced two inventions of his own. The first was the evil Don Benizio, the cardinal’s private secretary, driven by an obsession with Claudia – as his name might indicate, the character is a sort of negative alter ego of his creator, a puppet he could bring on stage as fantasy or the plot demanded. He also made up the figure of the faithful maidservant – the only positive and sincere character in the book – whom he named Rachele after his own wife, pregnant with their first daughter Edda, busy doing the household chores round him while he wrote.

  After their quarrel over his wish to finish the novel followed by Rachele’s soothing words, the virtuous maidservant in the novel, her namesake, starts to be described in cloyingly sentimental terms. Perhaps he was trying to make up for the fact that in a fit of temper he had had her stabbed instead of Claudia. He wrote rapidly, not lifting his eyes from the page: the killer was sentenced to death

  and Claudia was not inclined to pardon him. But Rachele, now recovered and resuming her normal activities, grew increasingly insistent. […] “Now that it’s all over and what happened is only a memory, pardon the poor wretch who is facing his last day on earth… be generous towards him and I will continue to serve you humbly and lovingly, as I would serve the Madonna…” These words, which came from a pure and still unspotted heart, moved Claudia. Her debt of gratitude towards her faithful servant was great and in the end she yielded to her wish.4

  By the end of the book’s fifty-six published instalments, after a series of miraculous rescues, Claudia Particella manages to survive. After the Pope had dubbed him “a man of destiny” it is only to be expected that Mussolini would have been quick to dismiss his novel as “trash”, but L’amante del Cardinale is no worse than other stories serialized in the newspapers of the time with the principal aim of making money both for the paper and for the author. It could probably still earn a profit today if adapted for the television screen as a short drama series, especially if flashbacks and flash-forwards from the author’s own life were added – his various experiences at the time, his lovers, his wife Rachele – as a background to the tale of Claudia Particella’s passions three centuries earlier. The figure of Don Benizio, Mussolini’s alter ego, gives us an inside glimpse of the centre of what was to become the myth of Mussolini the man, its sexual dimension which gave rise to so many stories and on which the whole structure rested.

  It was commonly thought – and confirmed by his private valet – that the Duce slept with a woman a day – an impossible number; even if we halve it, it’s still highly improbable. If we say that on average he slept with a different woman once a week, the total would be in the order of several hundred, which begins to look more plausible as a realistic estimate. Many of these, as we shall see, were extremely brief encounters, lasting no more than half an hour or so, and that included, in addition to the act of penetration itself, entering and leaving the room they were using, any social preliminaries, getting undressed and dressed, or at least partly disrobing and then adjusting their clothes afterwards. There was a continual stream of women: as mentioned before, a special office was set up in Palazzo Venezia in Rome when the leader himself no longer had time to spare for their pursuit and seduction. It is important to understand the sexual energy which enabled Mussolini to deal with this continuous relay or supply of women, the approach towards sex which he developed while still a young man and which led him in later years to create this kind of bureaucratic organization for his sexual activities. The bureaucracy worked efficiently: it screened out his “insatiable female pursuers” and shielded him from the world’s – especially foreign journalists’ – curiosity while at the same time it allowed the public a glimpse of the activities which would nurture the myth of the Duce as “the great lover”, “the alpha male” who was potent in every sense of the term.

  Don Benizio in the novel helps us to trace Mussolini’s attitude to sex:

  Don Benizio accompanied his colleagues to the door. On returning to his room he could not restrain a gesture of triumph. As he undressed to get ready for bed, his mind reeled with thoughts of revenge, of conquest, of enjoyment. […] Ah Claudia!… Tomorrow you will be mine… as I want… And the woman – in a vision of nudity such as only the lusts of those vowed to celibacy can imagine – tomorrow
the beautiful, shameless woman would throw her arms round his neck, looking at him with her eyes black as the Devil’s, with her round fragrant shoulders, her heavenly mouth, her soft white skin. Claudia the courtesan tormented Don Benizio’s sleep with the nightmare of unsatisfied desire, with the yearning for caresses he had never experienced and for sensations of indescribable pleasure to the point of exhaustion and of satiety. His priestly flesh trembled like some sylvan god who espies a naked nymph reflected in the clear water of a quietly flowing stream. Claudia had rejected him, had pushed him away as one would an importunate beggar. […] Yet the priest had not given up his dream. He had made it the purpose of his existence. In order to possess Claudia he would have sold his soul to the Devil and preferred eternal hellfire to the bliss of heaven. The grip of passion, in which hatred and love alternately assailed him, had hardened his soul: he was petrified, fossilized in his desire, and now that the energies of his manhood were in decline, the flames of lust obsessively tortured his flesh. He was like the bow drawn to shoot its arrow, stretched to the point when it breaks and shatters.5

  Don Benizio’s vision of sex then is typical of those who are obliged to remain celibate – one that has no time for sweet words of love but explodes in carnal desire, which seeks relief from its burning obsessive lust, which shoots an arrow from the tensed – over-tensed – bow. There’s a violence in Mussolini’s description which evokes a rapacious sexuality, like a hunter stalking his prey, like a faun provoked by brazen nymphs, by the image of women playing on men’s sexual urges and provoking them to the point of exasperation, and so justifying their being taken by force.

  Compare this page from L’amante del Cardinale with what Mussolini wrote in the autobiographical account he worked on when he was in prison two years later: “The sudden revelation of sexual pleasure disturbed me. The vision of naked women entered my life, my dreams, my lusts. I used to undress in my imagination the girls I met and lust after them in my thoughts.”6

  Another remark which helps us to understand how the sexual dimension was at the centre of Mussolini’s myth and was the primary force which drove it forward is the already quoted comment he made on Angelica Balabanoff when he was in Switzerland, after she had become his mentor and occasional lover. As we have seen, the remark comes in a letter written to his sister Edvige, but Mussolini shows no awareness of the violence of his words or of the vision of sexual relations they reveal, which betrays a profound contempt for women: “While her body is full of juice, her mind is full of dried-up ideas.”7

  Margherita Sarfatti saw that it was not possible to dismiss, in a scornful aside, L’amante del Cardinale as “trash”. She realized that it contained the central element of the myth she was helping to construct.

  The historical novel in the style of Dumas père, Claudia Particella ossia l’amante del Cardinale [Claudia Particella or the Cardinal’s Mistress] is a formless and overlong potboiler, resembling a film melodrama in its overblown style, but nevertheless there’s something vital in its coarseness and brutality. Just as in one of his speeches or newspaper articles or political acts, the author knows instinctively which word or phrase or event will be most effective. […] Since the heroine had to be spared, the killing instinct is deflected onto the secondary characters. In Trento, that charming town at the foot of the mountains, all the seamstresses, the artisans, the young working men would run to buy their copies of the newspaper, eager to read the latest tragic turn of the plot, tears streaming from their eyes as they scanned the densely printed columns. Then they would lift their eyes to the towers of Buonconsiglio castle, and thoughts of the feudal Prince-Bishop and his mistress would fill their drab working day with delicious frissons.8

  Mussolini finally got what he wanted when he sent Battisti the final instalment on 11th May 1910 and so brought the serial to a close. Perhaps Rachele, now in her fifth month of pregnancy, was too tired to oppose his decision.

  “My God, your heart’s beating fast. Sit down, have a rest. Feeling a bit better now?” Mussolini’s words to his mistress Claretta, many years later, in 1938: “Now just see what I’ve got planned for you, while you sit and listen – while I read from the manuscript of a book I wrote when I was twenty-five. It’s been found by a publisher who didn’t know whether to destroy it or send it to me. It makes me laugh now when I reread it. I was certainly a bit strange in those days.”9 When his mistress is sitting comfortably in the armchair, he starts to read from the manuscript he wrote while still living in Trento, La tragedia di Mayerling (The Tragedy of Mayerling). It’s a small arithmetic exercise book consisting of about forty numbered pages: over the years it had disappeared and then re-emerged by chance a number of times. The first time Mussolini lost it was during the police search of his apartment when he was expelled from Trento. Sixteen years later, in 1926 – by then Mussolini was the dictator of Italy – a publisher came across it and sent it to him. Perhaps he was hoping to reap the benefits of a publishing coup: an unpublished story from the pen of the Duce no less. But the time was wrong: engaged in secret negotiations with the Vatican, Mussolini had no intention of publicizing his earlier opposition to the Church as this emerged in his writings at the time. In its radical anticlericalism, Mayerling is very similar to other pieces he wrote while in Trento, such as Claudia Particella or Giovanni Huss il veridico (John Huss the Truth-Teller). So the unfortunate publisher who’d found the piece probably received nothing more than a curt letter of acknowledgement and thanks. The little exercise book then disappeared among Mussolini’s papers. He probably came across it by chance in 1938 and decided he could read it – at no risk to his reputation with the Vatican – to his mistress. After the war the manuscript once more disappeared. Since then, most of Mussolini’s writings during his period in Trento have been “rescued”, so to speak, from oblivion and republished, largely with the critical intention of showing the extent of their author’s self-contradictions and tendency to change with the circumstances, revealing him to be, in De Felice’s words, the political turncoat he actually was.

  Only Mayerling didn’t come to light until one day in 1972 when, in an episode itself like something out of a novel, a lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, who in recent times was president of Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers), was asked to provide expert advice on a mass of letters and other documents which had been found inside a trunk.10 They included the manuscript of Mayerling. It was duly valued and fetched a high price, going to a private collector before ending up where it is today, in the library of Stanford University in the US. It was published for the first time in the periodical Il Borghese in 1973. In 2005 the popular weekly magazine Gente republished it. There is probably more than one reason Mussolini wrote this historical account intended for a popular readership: without doubt he wanted to paint a negative picture of the religious establishment, but he also intended to discredit the Habsburg rulers. The text is brief, as we have seen, no more than forty manuscript pages, but it represents only the first chapter of a longer book which Mussolini wasn’t able to finish after he was expelled from Trento. He lists the titles of the projected chapters: ‘La tragedia di Mayerling’ (‘The Tragedy of Mayerling’); ‘Il fucilato di Querétaro’ (‘The Querétaro Shooting’); ‘L’Imperatrice Elisabetta’ (‘The Empress Elisabeth’); ‘Franz Joseph intimo’ (‘The Private Life of Franz Josef’). Mussolini divided the Mayerling part into two sections: ‘Rodolfo d’Austria’ (‘Rudolph of Austria’) and ‘La notte di sangue’ (‘The Night of Blood’). In 1938, when he read some pages aloud to Claretta Petacci, it was with a critical and ironical air, but her account of the evening also shows that he was amused by the way the recently discovered story mirrored the amorous complications of his own private life. Mayerling too is peopled by a cast of women – including one who is Jewish – from various social classes:

  Rudolph used the services of a cabman called Bratfisch to ferry him to his various secret love assignations in his humble carriage. Princes
s Stefania knew from the spies she had employed to follow him that one day Rudolph had visited a Jewish lady. She ordered her carriage to take her to her rival’s house, whereupon she left it waiting outside the gate while she returned home in a hired vehicle. When Rudolph finally emerged, he found himself surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers who had recognized the imperial coach and wanted to greet its occupant. This cruel practical joke started to undermine the tyrannical rule of the Habsburgs. Stefania and Rudolph now loathed each other openly. He started to pursue all kinds of love affairs without the slightest consideration for his wife.11

  Every now and then, while reading to Petacci, Mussolini asked her if she was enjoying it; he wanted to see her reaction, to win her approval. He asked her to sit with him in his chair while he read the next passage to her, the climactic scene of castration – but, he hastened to assure her, he’d made it all up, it was just the product of his imagination.

  Towards midnight Rudolph let out a high-pitched, terrifying cry of pain. Mary had carried out her threat and performed the abominable act: she had castrated the man who was trustingly asleep beside her, tired after their sweet lovemaking. The blood spread across the white sheets while Mary, half-undressed, tried to move towards the door to escape. After his first cries, assailed by intolerable pain, Rudolph no longer uttered a sound. He’d fallen back across the bed as if he was dead; Mary dressed and made to leave the room. At that point Rudolph suddenly reached her and fired his revolver into her. She collapsed to the ground: Rudolph had killed her. He laid her on the bed, covered her and stretched out beside her. A few minutes later another muffled shot was heard… Rudolph had killed himself.12