No history of Mussolini’s dead body would be complete without Gadda, whose depiction of Mussolini could not be further from the figure of Il Duce, the dear departed. Beginning in the winter of 1944, Gadda turned on the head of Salò and the corpse of Piazzale Loreto with a ferocious outpouring of deadly invective. From That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, first serialized in 1946, then published in a best-selling version in 1957, to the First Book of Fairy Tales of 1952, to Eros and Priapus of 1955, Gadda worked like no other writer in the 1950s to examine the physical implications of the cult of Mussolini—even, one might say, the genital implications. Focusing on Mussolini’s body to study the Fascist regime, Gadda employed a surprisingly innovative historiographic approach, something close to what today might be called “body history.” In practice, though, Gadda’s approach was original in form but conventional in substance. Damned and pelted with insults, Gadda’s posthumous Mussolini nonetheless paved the way for an all-too-indulgent representation of Fascist Italy.
The names Gadda dubbed Mussolini were near inexhaustible, each one adding meaning to the last and the sum of them amounting to an elephantine corpus of features that constituted the body of Il Duce: Dearly Beloved, Plague-Ridden Plague, Toad, Bowler Hat, Caciocavallo (a round, hard cheese), Cowardly Ass, Our Gloomy One, Maternal Piece of Shit, Emir with Fez, Megalomaniac, Old Bomb, Nastyface, Tool, Broken Tool, Rotten Scoundrel, Farting Genius, Smelly One, Dumb Knee, Judas in a Bowler, Vainglorious, Boneless Boaster, Big Imago, Big Fart, Big Donkey of a Captain, Big Drum Signifying Nothing, Big Bull, Pigface Badblood, Big Puffed-Up Artist’s Model, Blasted Big-Mouth from Predappio, Marquis of the Marches, Jaw of a Jackass, Schizophrenic Jawbone, Crap, Crapola, Little Prick, Great Chief Asshole, Great Big Show-Off, Braying One, Napoleon the Big Ass, Bad Lot, Empty-Headed One, Puffed-Up Paphlagonian, Miles Gloriosus, Idle Threat, Predappio, Predappio Judas, Predappio Crap, Phallus-Obsessed, First Garbage-Collector Loudmouth and Spitter, Small-Town Prophet, Provolone, Punch Playing Caesar, Puppet, Senile Romulus, Fourth-Rate Warmonger, Punched-Up Blowhard, Ass, King of the Seed Spillers, Booted One, Super Penis, Impotent Bully, Death’s Head, Thresher, Triple-Heeled Dwarf, Big-Assed Braggart Optimus Maximus, Ferocious, Big Tuber, Empty-Worded One, Cop of Destinies.…
The torrent of vituperation fails to mask a bad conscience, for, like Bottai, Gadda wrote of Mussolini with the intensity of a lover betrayed. A member of the National Fascist Party from 1921, a moralist who had believed in Fascism as a necessary means to strengthen the nation, Gadda witnessed the miserable end of the regime with a sense of unworthiness at having survived it. He was too profound a spirit and had been too marked by the Great War to have backed Fascism in any superficial way. As little as he liked the roughness of the Blackshirts, Gadda, a middle-class Italian who had been on the battlefield when Italy suffered its historic defeat at Caporetto, sympathized with the regime’s nationalistic passion, its demand for order, its xenophobia. His disenchantment began at the end of the 1930s, after the bloody military campaigns Mussolini undertook in East Africa. Defeat in World War II did the rest, triggering his visceral, all-consuming, paranoid hatred of Il Duce. The sentiment went hand in hand with Gadda’s sexual immaturity; a repressed homosexual, he was obsessed by the story of Mussolini’s syphilis, which was rumored to be a consequence of sexual hyperactivity. Gadda’s writings do not, however, require psychoanalysis to be understood. A powerful portrait of Il Duce emerges from his postwar production; unrivaled in its irreverence, the portrait still provides a moral and historical interpretation.
In Gadda’s rendering, Mussolini’s bald head is like a provolone or a cabbage, but always empty, since Il Duce lacked brains. His piggish face is the sort that says, “born stupid.” His eyes are possessed, the eyes of a man in the final stages of syphi-lis. His donkey’s face has not one jaw but two, more like a mule’s. His “oral sphincter” is ringed by lips set in an idiot’s pout. His tongue is “red, black, then red and black, the tongue of an ass licker.” At the end of two very short arms, the arms of a toad, his hands stick out oddly, like the hands of a dead man or a scarecrow. “Ten fat fingers … rest on his hips like two bunches of bananas,” showing off his “very shitty fingernails.” His chest, which Mussolini frequently liked to bare naked, sports “just two hairs (where others boast a forest) clustered around his nipples.” His stomach is puffy and sagging, barely held in by the belt of his uniform. His genitalia are “leprous,” his penis covered with syphilitic ulcers. Finally, Il Duce’s locked knees, his “legs crossed in an X,” and the triple heels on his shoes conspire to make the globe of his backside “unappealing to all.”
This hideous portrait cannot be attributed wholly to a lover’s sense of betrayal. Nor can it be dismissed as an attempt to show off literary creativity and expressiveness. Gadda uses Il Duce’s body to teach an ethical lesson that consoles him for the national tragedy: Mussolini’s boast notwithstanding, his spirit was not stronger than his material reality. In Il Duce’s grotesque appearance and his Lucifer-like fall, Gadda sees the retribution brought on a false idol. In a section of the First Book of Fairy Tales dealing with “the Great Ass’s Funeral,” Mussolini is subject to the most degrading bodily functions: he is a dead dictator compelled to replicate his living exploits in an excremental hell.22 In fable 111, Gadda has the ghost of Mussolini foolishly haranguing a covey of bats, his hands on his belt to push in his swelling gut, his feet splayed in a way that makes his backside look especially round. But the bats, who couldn’t care less about Il Duce’s oration, are “pissing on the nape of his neck and shitting over his bare head.” And finally, as Mussolini falls silent, from his backside, “by something like divine decree, [comes] a trumpet blast.” In another fable, Gadda writes of Il Duce’s trysts with Death. Mussolini favors the most bestial of sexual positions and refers to the old witch Death as “like Clara” preparing herself “for her marelike duties.”23
There is a well-developed Italian literary tradition of dead men who recount tales from beyond the tomb. But Gadda did not play on that tradition, preferring to rely not on flights of imagination but on the material of history. He was particularly struck by Mussolini’s last hours on the shores of Lake Como as he fled with his lover in one hand and gold from the central bank in the other. Along with millions of other Italians, Gadda saw this last act as evidence of Mussolini’s cowardice, thievery, and infidelity to his wife. Gadda spares the coward Mussolini, about to die at the gates of Villa Belmonte, the attack of diarrhea that he visits on the dictator as he is driven away to prison after his arrest in July 1943. However, faced with the executioner Valerio’s machine gun, Gadda’s chief of the Italian Social Republic has nothing better to say than “But, Colonel!” before he grasps “that these were bullets.”24 The gold Mussolini carries with him is the second capital sin of his final act: he has run away with state money after having repeatedly promised to face death with empty pockets: “They found gold sovereigns in his hollow Fascist purse.”25 Finally, Claretta Petacci’s presence at the execution, rather than Mussolini’s wife, Rachele, gave Gadda telling proof of the hypocrisy of the Fascist propaganda about the sanctity of the family. But he was not content merely to follow Mussolini to the shores of Lake Como or even to Piazzale Loreto; he also alluded—cryptically but earnestly—to the posthumous adventures of Il Duce’s body. “God willing, they have strung him up on a more worthy lamppost. And now he is scattering decomposed thumbs all over the ground,” he wrote in 1946.26 Apparently he had heard enough about the theft of the body from the Musocco cemetery to know that it had cost Mussolini’s corpse a couple of bits of his fingers.
Indirectly in That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and more systematically in Eros and Priapus, Gadda relates the story of Il Duce’s body to a broader history of the Fascist period. His interpretation is based on several core truths, and they are very clear. Mussolini’s “first crime” was his erotic narcissism, his “phallic arrogance.”27 He infected Italian men with the same syndrome, an absurd pride in thei
r sexual prowess, even more than in their political skills. Worse, he infected Italian women with a bottomless sexual appetite: from menarche to menopause, they lived in hope of experiencing the exaggerated virility of Mussolini. The desire for that “ricket-ridden big head,” which That Awful Mess claims began in 1927, grew only more powerful with the years:
They began to go crazy about him as soon as they had their first communion, all the Maria Barbisas of Italy began to invulvatize him on the way down from the altar, all the Madgas, the Milenas, the Filomenas of Italy, wearing their white veils and smelling of orange blossom, captured by the photographer as they left church, dreamed of unforgettable, rotating performances of educational nightsticks. The ladies, whether at Maiano or Cernobbio, went crazy with venereal sighs over the big member of Italy.28
Pathological misogyny partly but not entirely accounts for the virulence of Gadda’s polemics against Italian women. There was an idea in postwar culture that Fascism could be explained, among other things, by women’s passion for the body of Il Duce. More precisely, Fascism was the place where female ignorance and Mussolini’s cult of the phallus met. When That Awful Mess was published in 1957, very few voices on the left refused to join the chorus of praise or pointed out the novel’s reactionary ideological implications. Anti-Fascist culture sought to link Gadda to its own traditions. Giulio Cattaneo, writing in the left-wing literary magazine Belfagor, extravagantly seconded the book’s insults to the dead dictator, while several Communist reviewers suggested that the unsolved murder at the center of That Awful Mess was committed by Il Duce himself.
The singular enthusiasm of the left intelligentsia for the novel’s political philosophy says much about the troubles of anti-Fascist culture in the 1950s. In a period when the dear departed soul of Mussolini enjoyed much favor, even Gadda’s outburst seemed to some a “salutary antidote” to a mere “farcical nostalgia.”29 But Gadda’s interpretation of Fascism was misleading and ultimately not very critical. Il Duce’s main crime was not, as Gadda suggested, that he doused the crowds in Piazza Venezia with the sperm of his rhetoric. Nor was Fascist Italy nothing more than a big pond into which millions of Latin lovers gazed, checking the reflected size of their masculine attributes. Fascist Italy was even less a giant brothel where millions of sighing women awaited Mussolini’s visits. By reducing the Fascist period to the “era of the prick,” Gadda obscured the historical significance of dictatorship with a sea of seminal fluid.30 Beyond the pond and the brothel, were there no intellectual circles, no libraries, no prisons? Beyond the insatiable bodies, were there no ideas, no books, no weapons? Gadda’s genital history of Fascism rendered any history of anti-Fascism futile. At the same time, Gadda never concealed his dislike for the priestly voices of the opposition, for Resistance worthies who righted all wrongs, for the idealists of the republic.
Deep in his North African exile, Bottai the legionnaire saw traces of “necrotic cowardice” in the anti-Mussolini stance of many writers with an expansive Fascist past.31 But when read with care, Gadda, the non-Catholic, with his invective of the corpse, offered an interpretation of the Fascist period that was not so different from the Catholic Bottai’s more pious memoirs. Mussolini and Fascism added up to a display of bodies: the puffed-up body of the chief and the beautiful young bodies of the Fascist youth league, whose multiple perfection Il Duce treated as if it were his own. Like Bottai, Gadda viewed the dictatorship from the deceptive perspective of the stage. Mussolini was a histrionic character and Italians imitated him. The Fascist regime had been an optical and acoustical phenomenon. Through the sting of his vituperative prose, Gadda even managed to dismiss the cult of the knife, a weapon the Blackshirts liked to hang off their belts like a silvery male member. For Gadda, this was one of the many “theatrical myths” of Fascism—as if the Blackshirts never stuck their knives into living Italian flesh.32
* * *
LONG AFTER 1945, Gadda insisted that Mussolini had been afflicted with syphilis, “the scarlet plague that eroded his prick.”33 This was an enduring legend, one that Il Duce’s published autopsy report did nothing to dispel. Indeed, the story gained renewed credibility when the U.S. Fifth Army decided to send a sample of Mussolini’s brain tissue to Washington for further study. The American authorities were bound not to reveal the results, but that did not prevent numerous gossipy articles about Mussolini’s brain from appearing in the Italian press for more than a decade.
The legend of Il Duce’s advanced case of syphilis was so widely known that neo-Fascists could not ignore it; they could not allow the notion that Mussolini had descended into madness during the last chapter of Fascism. Various officials bore witness to the contrary: there was the Salò ambassador to the Third Reich, who declared that Mussolini was in full possession of his faculties, and a minister of the Social Republic who said the rumors about syphilis were “clichés of bad taste.” But where the pathologists did not succeed in banishing the legend, neither did the neo-Fascists. Many Italians remained convinced that toward the end Mussolini had been mentally disturbed because of syphilis.
The story of Il Duce’s syphilis was typical of what happens when a totalitarian system collapses, when people become disenchanted with the leader’s superhuman qualities. When the leader dies, the myths so vital in his lifetime are turned upside down; the charisma is transformed into a deep flaw. In the century of Freud, was there any context more congenial in which to situate the leader’s physical (and mental) flaws than in his sexuality? In post-Nazi Germany, there were those who sought to explain the extermination of the Jews by claiming that Hitler had contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute. Others made much of the connection between Nazi policy and the fact—confirmed by the Führer’s autopsy—that Hitler lacked a left testicle. In the journalist Corrado Alvaro’s diary, we find echoes of such obsessions in postwar Rome. “C. asserts that Il Duce had an undeveloped male member,” writes Alvaro, adding, “B. replies that he took the trouble of measuring it when he saw the corpse and says that the entire genitalia were of normal size.”34 Mussolini’s supporters also had their say in the matter, as in The Handsome Priest, an ironic novel by Goffredo Parise published in the 1950s. In it, Esposito, a retired jailer and widower with four daughters to marry off, is convinced that Il Duce was well endowed. “He had studied him attentively, Il Duce, on more than one occasion, in order to be sure.… You could see it perfectly, even without special equipment.”35
Mussolini’s life after death thus relied on diagnoses dredged from memory or created out of whole cloth. They were perpetuated not only by Il Duce’s doctors but by prominent officials of the defunct regime, by journalists, many of them well known, as well as by ordinary Italians. In a memoir written after the war, Georg Zachariae, a German who was his doctor during the Salò period, recalled a Mussolini in dire physical condition, with low blood pressure, anemia, dry, taut skin, an enlarged liver, stomach cramps, a shrunken lower abdomen, poor peristalsis, and acute constipation. At that stage Mussolini was “a ruin of a man,” Zachariae wrote, suggesting that it was very likely overwhelming pain that caused him to make wrong decisions.36 According to Guido Leto, the former chief of OVRA, the secret police, Mussolini’s physical decline was the real reason for his ejection on July 25, 1943. That is, Fascism died of fatigue rather than as a result of conflict. Cesare Rossi, a Fascist notable in the early years, gave further details in Mussolini Remembered: X-rays of the Former Dictator, advancing the idea that Il Duce’s mental decline was due to the use of aphrodisiacs. To meet Clara Petacci’s voracious sexual needs, Mussolini was reduced to consuming a preparation called Hormovir in large quantities. “This habit,” Rossi explains, “accounts for Il Duce’s personal tragedy, which was the tragedy of Italians.” Fascism was a bodily tragedy, even down to the measures taken by an aging, impotent man.37
Posthumous indiscretions about Mussolini’s medical condition merit the historian’s attention in inverse proportion to their reliability. In fact, when criticism of the Fascist period is
reduced to assessments of Mussolini’s health, the result is indulgence, since the victim of a medical syndrome is still a victim of something. It was left to intellectuals, to the students of Benedetto Croce and Gaetano Salvemini, to weigh whether Fascism was a moral disease of the ruling class or a structural disease of the whole society. Middle-brow thinkers had something better on their minds. The way they saw it, the idea that the body of the regime was sick was less compelling than the idea that the body of Il Duce was sick—and this approach was one that many Italians could subscribe to.
The most highly developed version of it was published in 1968 by Antonino Trizzino, a retired admiral and militant member of the Italian Social Movement, who wrote several best sellers. Trizzino attributed the entire experience of Fascism to syphilis, including Il Duce’s disastrous military campaigns in World War II, when the dictator was “on the brink of madness.”38 But as early as 1950, the journalist Paolo Monelli had already taken the larger ramifications of Il Duce’s frailties to their logical conclusion. In Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois, Monelli traced Il Duce’s uncertainty, frustration, and perpetual doubts to a duodenal ulcer and his megalomania, extreme vanity, and vengefulness to syphilis. Thus, wrote Monelli, “It is pointless to look to heredity, degrees earned, books read, or a man’s environment to understand his character. These two illnesses, one of them due to an encounter with a woman, are all we need to explain everything about him—virtues and defects, triumphs and defeats, decline and fall.”39
The Body of Il Duce Page 13