Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  After the National Socialist Congress had ended, Mussolini returned to Forlì and his daily routine, but his work as secretary to the Federation was now livelier, full of meetings and political assemblies, which were always followed by dancing and drinking. The revolutionary wing of the party was newly energized and focused round the figure of Mussolini. In Milan the party leadership had managed to delay a decision on the vacant post of the editor-in-chief of their official newspaper Avanti!. Three months after the congress, factional pressure from the tendency which had won a victory there forced them to accept Mussolini as a candidate. At a meeting of the party’s national committee on 10th November 1912, the decision was unanimously taken to appoint him to the job. Mussolini moved to Milan, without his family, to take up his post on 1st December. He immediately marked the change of editorial regime by announcing that his predecessor Claudio Treves’s salary of seven hundred lire had been too high: he would take a reduced figure of five hundred a month. The two men’s dislike of each other became an open conflict which not even a subsequent duel between them managed to resolve.

  Chapter 8

  Scent of a Woman

  There was a smell of incense and sandalwood when you entered, then a faint trace of citrus followed by the sensation there was a bowl full of apples nearby; once you turned the corner of the hallway, a sudden intense fragrance assailed you – a combination of thyme, lavender, rosemary, mint. Then, at the door of the drawing room a sharp smell of varnish which gave way to a gentler smell of mild tobacco. Meanwhile the scent of roasting coffee wafted nearer. Waves of perfumed air, now acute, now subtle, drifted round them as they made their way towards the sofas and cushions in the room. “Blessings on the guest who comes to my house,” Leda murmured. Her mouth was large, and her eyes were black and shining; as she shut the door the illusion of being transported to the East was complete. The long robe she had wound round her showed the soft curves of her figure as she moved; her warm presence was disquieting. The windows faintly glimmered with the last light at dusk; a pierced brass lamp had already been lit and threw its curious shadow patterns on the walls. There was no doubt that strange dreams could be dreamt on those sofas. Some scented leaves were scattered over a low table; Leda brushed them aside, releasing a brief fragrance of honey and violets. Then she put the coffee pot down and proceeded to pour it into two small cups of Arab design. She handed him his coffee and their hands touched. A quiver darted through them. “Muslims drink coffee together as a sign of friendship,” she said. “Friends who have drunk coffee together are incapable of treachery.”1

  Leda Rafanelli was three years older than Mussolini, not that this mattered to either of them. She had anarchist and socialist leanings and was a committed Muslim. Writing came easily to her: as a very young girl she had published a poem in Avanti!. Her family had moved to Alexandria in Egypt; while there she had come into contact with some of the anarchists who belonged to the large Italian community in the city. She had also travelled extensively in the country in order to find out more about its history and traditions. She became fascinated by Sufism and decided to become a Muslim. She saw her conversion as a form of protest against Western culture and its repressive colonialism. When she returned to Italy she began to write regularly for Avanti!. She was married very briefly to an anarchist by the name of Ugo Polli; after they separated she had relationships with several men, including the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà.

  She waited patiently, in silence, for Mussolini to emerge from his embarrassment. It was his first visit, and all the scents and smells he had encountered had turned his head. He needed some time to focus properly on the woman now sitting opposite him. He eventually noticed that round her neck she wore a pendant on a simple string which formed a “V” shape over her breasts. Leda saw his glance and explained that the pendant was made of sandalwood and combined the two basic streams of the life force, yin and yang. Her visitor gave no sign of wanting to leave; in fact, he started to recline on the sofa. Rafanelli thought good Muslims should not show their tiredness in the presence of a guest, so she let him stay stretched out on the sofa while for the next three hours she told him stories of her life and travels. The next day she received a letter from the new editor-in-chief of Avanti!: “Visiting you in your house was a revelation and a surprise for me. You made me feel I was in the marvellous and mysterious Orient, with its intense perfumes and its mad, fascinating fantasies, and for this I want to thank you. Please forgive me if I seemed ill at ease and untalkative – that is what I am like. But I will keep a sweet memory of the afternoon spent in your company. Nor will I mention it to another living soul.”2

  Mussolini became a frequent visitor to Leda Rafanelli’s “oriental” house, often staying until the small hours, lulled by the perfumes and the tales she told him. She was struck by how easily he gave way to her in all their discussions; he was always quick to give up on an opinion – even one he had just expressed – in order to agree with his new friend’s point of view. In her memoirs, written after the Second World War, Rafanelli dismisses Mussolini as someone who, far from being tough and intransigent, switched opinions and changed his mind easily. And it is true that in politics he frequently and rapidly abandoned positions which only a moment before had appeared to be unchangeable beliefs. With Leda Rafanelli, on the other hand, it was a mere tactic to reach his goal, the usual goal, the only one which mattered to him – and one which could be consummated on the very sofa on which he was sitting, breathing in deeply the strange aromas. She too deployed tactics of her own, making the process of courtship as complicated as a maze in which at every turn she could disappear and reappear at a whim. Mussolini grew impatient and tried to undermine such a tortuous construction by speaking bluntly of free love, of sex, of jealousy – but he was too hasty. Leda began to regret welcoming him to the warm fragrant sitting room with its atmosphere of erotic disturbance and desire. It would have been better if they’d met in his office at the newspaper, after she had given him her new article.

  She asked him if he was married, and he told her he wasn’t, which was true. Then did he live with someone, did he have a partner? Intent on reaching his goal, Mussolini said he hadn’t. Leda found herself increasingly pushed back into a corner where her only choice was either to yield to his pressure or react violently against it. He asked her if she was jealous. No, she retorted, she wasn’t jealous of him. Why on earth should she be?

  “Very well, since you’re not jealous of me, I can tell you a secret: there are two women who are passionately in love with me but I don’t love them. Can you guess who they are?” “I’m not interested in knowing who they are,” I replied – and I remember that I was genuinely indifferent – and added, “Besides, it’s not very gallant of you to tell me another woman’s secrets – two women’s secrets.” “No, it’s because you’re truly my friend and you wouldn’t be jealous… One is really ugly, but she has a noble and generous soul. The other one is beautiful but she’s deceitful, avaricious, even sordid. […] The woman who’s ugly and good-natured is Angelica Balabanoff.” I gave a start – I knew her well, knew her to be a strong and courageous socialist, I had greeted her many times after speeches she had given brimming with revolutionary ardour, and I admired her. The thought of her suffering the pains of unreciprocated love grieved me. But immediately another thought struck me: Balabanoff was different from other women: she was a Slav by temperament, used to life’s struggles, she was widely travelled and knew socialists in many different countries; she certainly wasn’t the sentimental fainthearted type who’d be plunged into despair because a man didn’t care for her. “What about the other woman?” I asked, almost against my will but wanting to change the subject away from the brave Angelica Balabanoff. “The avaricious beauty? That’s the writer Margherita Sarfatti, as sly as Balabanoff is honest.” “You mean the wife of the lawyer Sarfatti?” “That’s her… her love is obsessive, but I’ll never be able to return her feelings.”3

  The tactics Mussolini used
with women who hadn’t surrendered to him within a few hours or, at most, a few days were not over-refined. They were the usual techniques of the “hunter male”, cynical and banal. But during his period as editor of Avanti! Mussolini found himself up against strong-minded and determined women who left a mark on him. In her essay which was appended to Balabanoff’s book on him, Maria Giudice, perhaps wishing to dismantle what she saw as the central element of the myth, describes Mussolini in these terms:

  Benito Mussolini, with his physical and cultural shortcomings, his lack of morality, his unsteady temperament often subject to rapid changes of mood – he often openly admitted he was an opportunist – closely resembled the clay-footed giant mentioned in the Bible in connection with Nebuchadnezzar. He always knew his feet were of clay, he was aware of this weakness inside him with a kind of obsessive fear, so he was always searching for a reliable support. He found it in two women: Angelica Balabanoff during the period he still called himself a socialist, and then, later on when he became an interventionist and subsequently a Fascist, Margherita Grassini Sarfatti. Both women were highly cultivated, both exceptionally intelligent.4

  So the editor of the leading socialist newspaper prowled Milan in search of his usual short-lived adventures; the new women in his life were now firmly centre stage. An increasingly angry and impatient Rachele had stayed at home, back in Forlì, together with their small daughter Edda; she was well aware of what the man she called her husband would get up to if left on his own in Milan for too long. Angelica Balabanoff was indispensable to him for her help with managing the paper and contributing to the editorial work; Margherita Sarfatti was introducing him to the world of culture and art, and gradually teaching him, with her own sense of style and the money at her disposal, how to dress and behave; Ida Irene Dalser had followed him to Milan from Trento, and it is probable that he still enjoyed being in her company. Leda Rafanelli also contributed to Avanti! and Mussolini was only too willing to let her exotic perfumes weave their coils around him.

  He stood up to go. For the first time his visit had been brief. I didn’t ask him to stay. […] At the door of the room he suddenly and unexpectedly – it was so sudden and unexpected I didn’t have time to react – embraced me and kissed me. I felt his face burning as if he had a fever. I didn’t have time to withdraw from the embrace, but I didn’t return his kiss. During his previous visits I had realized what he wanted and had always been careful to avoid giving him any opportunity, but the gesture now came so unexpectedly that I had to submit to it.5

  So Leda had submitted to the kiss, the kiss had taken place and she either failed to extricate herself or found herself incapable of doing so. For Mussolini it confirmed his conquest. At twenty-nine he found himself occupying the most influential position a revolutionary could hold; when he wished to conquer a woman, he regularly triumphed.

  Now that he was the editor of Avanti!, he and his opinions were prominent on the national stage; he didn’t lead the party, but he was its most publicly visible exponent. He fired off some broadsides: what he called the “inert masses” of socialism must rapidly become a strategic force to bring about change, otherwise nothing could be achieved. As soon as he’d been given the editorship he asked for Angelica Balabanoff to work alongside him as his deputy – not because he felt insecure in his new post, as she herself and various historians have surmised. Renzo De Felice sees it as a tactical manoeuvre:

  It is my considered opinion that Mussolini wanted the collaboration with Balabanoff – which because of her rigidly held Marxism was an uneasy and turbulent partnership – in order to “compromise” so to speak, at least in the early days, the whole revolutionary wing of the party, to force it to share in the responsibility for the direction in which he intended to take the newspaper, so that he wouldn’t be seen as the only proponent of a change which was bound to cause a rift between the majority and minority tendencies in the party.6

  Mussolini exploited his success in the classic way and used Balabanoff to get rid of the reformist journalists who had been working for the paper. He also came into conflict with some of its leading contributors, beginning with his predecessor Treves. Treves had signed a contract to continue contributing articles to the paper and immediately submitted three pieces which Mussolini as promptly rejected. On leaving the editorship, Treves had the right to severance pay, but Mussolini insisted he shouldn’t get it and accused him of greed. Kuliscioff, a close friend of Treves and a fellow Jew, had to mediate between the two men. “Kuliscioff’s worth a lot more than most men, even the best,” Mussolini commented to his family, much to the amazement of his sister Edvige. “There was no love lost – and not much contact – between the new, prickly, turbulent editor of Avanti! and the circle round Kuliscioff in her apartment in Piazza Duomo, where she and Turati worked on some form of politics which attempted to remain true to Marxism and be post-Marxist at the same time, all the while dispensing hospitality to friends and followers with a style which was both typically Milanese and also cosmopolitan.”7

  In the end Mussolini agreed to let Treves have his severance pay, but only on condition that he donated it to a fund which supported the newspaper. Kuliscioff, defeated, was alarmed by the situation; she even wrote to Turati suggesting a bomb should be placed in the new editor-in-chief’s office. She tried to enlist the support of the party’s executive committee to no avail. In the meantime Mussolini was busy filling the place with journalists who were loyal to him as well as engaging some prominent writers, such as Gaetano Salvemini and Sergio Panunzio, as contributors along with various revolutionary syndicalists. The party’s executive committee decided to approve the new line the paper had adopted. Mussolini’s observation was a shrewd one: Kuliscioff was “worth more than most men” and was the only person capable of opposing his rapid takeover of the party, but fortunately for him, she wasn’t a man and wasn’t in a position to muster and manoeuvre others to support her.

  The beginning of 1913 saw a series of bloody massacres in the course of political demonstrations throughout the country, from Sicily to the Po Valley. The clashes were particularly severe in Roccagorga, in the Ciociaria region, around sixty miles south-east of Rome, where on 6th January seven agricultural labourers were shot dead by army troops. The following day Mussolini joined the fray with a hard-hitting article under the headline “State-Sponsored Murder”; the government reacted by bringing an accusation of incitement of class hatred against him. He was unconcerned. Before he appeared in court, the thought crossed his mind that a trial and possible condemnation might win the sympathy of some of the women he was pursuing. He wrote to Leda Rafanelli:

  So what do you say? When can I come round and see you? I come back from Rome on Tuesday morning, but on Thursday the trial begins and I’ve no idea how long the grotesque charade will last. Let’s hope the Milan jury are intelligent enough to find me guilty. Wednesday afternoon is the only time I’m free. What about then? Spring is in the air, the capricious weather of March is over, and you can buy bunches of violets from the Milan flower-sellers. But they’re not scented. Do you think even the spring violets are on strike?8

  Angelica Balabanoff observed Mussolini and his behaviour closely, even down to small details, so she must have realized how sensitive he was to perfumes and to smells in general. In her memoir, she examines this aspect of his personality, deriding his obsession with smell and interpreting it as a form of hysteria.

  One evening I was working alone in the newspaper offices when Mussolini came in. I hardly recognized him, he seemed to be in pieces, tottering as if carrying a heavy weight… he threw himself down in an armchair, buried his face in his hands and started to sob. I shut the door so that no one who came into the office would see this spectacle and asked him, with the calm which is the only proper response to hysteria, what had happened to him. “What do you mean, can’t you smell it?” he replied in a hoarse voice, lifting his face towards me. He seemed hardly human, and I felt pity for him. “What smell?” “You mean
you don’t smell the ether,” he replied irritably. “The doctor had to take a blood sample. I fainted, and since then I can’t get rid of the smell of the gas.” He started to swear.9

  Margherita Sarfatti also recalls the episode in her memoir My Fault, written after the fall of the regime: Mussolini had fainted when Dr Pini, a fellow socialist, had taken a blood sample from him: the results of the test were not promising, and her lover had angrily cursed the young free-living woman who had infected him in Switzerland.