We do not know whether Gadda liked Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois as much as Roma 1943, Monelli’s previous book. What is certain is that the interpretations of both writers were excessively physical. By going deep into the recesses of Il Duce’s body, they remained on the surface of Fascist Italy.
* * *
AT RAI, THE state broadcast network where Gadda worked as an editor in the 1950s, Giovanni Guareschi, a writer far more familiar to the average reader, launched a radio program called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Court Is in Session. Every Sunday afternoon Guareschi, assisted by actors from the Radio Milano theater company, broadcast a “radio trial with a jury.” The cases were fictional, but they were believable enough that listeners often responded as if they were based on fact. The success of Guareschi’s show can only be explained by Italians’ strong interest in crime reporting and court proceedings after twenty years of half-truths and silence. The program did not, however, touch on the moral problems connected to Benito Mussolini; in the postwar years of De Gasperi, state radio preferred to keep its distance from the Fascist period. Here Guareschi’s radio trial is of interest because the popular interest in court cases extended to a book published in the same period, a book that dealt directly with Mussolini’s posthumous destiny.
Il Duce’s summary execution on the shores of Lake Como deprived Italians not only of his final testament but of a trial—the international trial for war crimes that he feared facing in the hellish confusion of New York’s Madison Square Garden, the trial Allied prosecutors eventually convened against Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. Anti-Fascists and neo-Fascists experienced the absence of a due process differently. Few anti-Fascists, at least immediately after 1945, publicly deplored the fact that Mussolini’s execution had robbed the country of court proceedings. In their view, Il Duce’s had been a hasty but necessary affair, even if Italians were denied the satisfaction of unmasking their “cardboard Caesar” in public.40 Neo-Fascists held the conviction that the Communist partisan squad had prevented a trial whose outcome was by no means certain—Mussolini might well have shown the world that he had acted in good faith. Once again, imagination sought to fill the void left by reality. In the absence of an Italian Nuremberg, several writers produced reports of an imaginary trial.
The one conceived by Yvon De Begnac, a writer with an open passion for Il Duce, is a pro-Fascist version of an ancient classic. With Il Duce as his protagonist, De Begnac, Mussolini’s “official” biographer during the 1930s, wrote a Trial of Socrates on the Banks of Lake Como. It is hard not to laugh at the idea of placing the Athenian master next to the man from Predappio; the comparison refers to the story that in his waning years Mussolini became an assiduous reader of Plato, both in Italian translation and in the original. De Begnac’s Mussolini claims credit for building the dam of Italian Fascism to contain the powerful river of Soviet Communism. He criticizes himself for not having assumed the powers of a dictator in full. He did not commit suicide after the Italian armistice with the Allies, he explains, because he wished to defend Italian lives from Salò. The democratic forces that sought to condemn him were a macabre farce, Mussolini–De Begnac goes on. It is his hope that he will be remembered by his fellow Italians as a man above politics.
These arguments follow the anti-Resistance gospel of the immediate postwar years. They differ little, in essence, from Mussolini’s last wishes as expressed by Indro Montanelli in My Good Man Mussolini. But the open neo-Fascism of De Begnac limited the impact of his Trial. Although an anti-Fascist publication like Il Ponte called De Begnac’s tale scandalous, the anti-Fascist cause had little to fear from such a book, which at best demonstrated the ability of neo-Fascists to write fiction. Il Duce’s imagined trial needed to be written by someone outside the demimonde of neo-Fascist journalism, if it was to have any ideological impact. All the better if it appeared in a controversial best seller. Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin was such a work—indeed, it was among the most widely read and discussed books in postwar Italy.
Malaparte was a man obsessed by corpses. He was also obsessed by fantasies about Il Duce’s body. The diary he kept in Paris from 1947 to 1949 during the writing of The Skin makes this evident. Having once admired Mussolini the tough guy, he had come to see him as a human monster. In Malaparte’s description, Mussolini is a beast whose veins flow with thin blood, or perhaps just whey. He is “a goose, an enormous goose,” worthy of Bosch, Brueghel, or Rousseau, a swollen, slow, lazy beast, “a body on the verge of decomposing.” Thus Malaparte depicts not the ox but the goose of the nation, whose head, always large in relation to his body, has over the years grown gigantic, deformed. When he speaks, Il Duce’s large, dark, disturbing eyes roll, so the irises float in a sea of white, “like the eyes of a gazelle in its death throes or of certain women enjoying sexual pleasure.” His skin has “the smell of a wet chicken” or “the odor of a corpse.”41
These quotations from Malaparte’s diary do not appear in The Skin. But the imaginary trial of Il Duce in one of its chapters is just as morbidly expressionistic. Malaparte explains that he had taken a break from his work as a journalist following the Allied troops during Italy’s bitter civil war and was staying in the tiny house of an obstetrician friend in Rome. Because space was cramped, he slept on a sofa in the doctor’s studio, which was crowded with books, obstetrical instruments, and a row of jars filled with yellowish liquid, each one containing a human fetus. Understandably, Malaparte found the company disturbing, “because a fetus is a cadaver, a monstrous cadaver that was never born and never died.”42 One night, his studio companions came too close for comfort. The fetuses climbed out of their jars and began to move around the room, scaling the desk, the chairs, and even the bed of the feverish writer. Then they drew back to the middle of the room and sat on the floor in a semicircle, “almost like an assembly of judges,” and fixed Malaparte with their round, dull eyes. Suddenly the fetus chief, a three-headed female specimen, turned to several little monsters standing off to one side and ordered them to bring in the accused.
So Malaparte, in a nightmarish place between life and death—or between nonlife and nondeath—has Mussolini enter the scene:
Slowly an enormous fetus with a loose stomach and two legs covered with shiny, whitish hair came forward between the two guards.… Two huge watery yellow eyes, eyes like a blind dog’s, shone in the large, white, swollen head. The fetus’s expression was proud yet fearful, as if traditional pride were doing battle with a new fear of something unknown, neither winning, so they combined to produce an expression at once cowardly and heroic.
The face was made of flesh (the flesh of a fetus yet also of an old man, the flesh of an old fetus); it was a mirror in which the grandeur, poverty, superiority, and cowardice of humans shone in all their stupid glory.… And for the first time I saw the ugliness of the human face, the disgusting matter of which we are made.43
Beyond the bravura writing, there is a message in Malaparte’s text, a message to be decoded. The Skin is not just literary prose to be admired; through his trial of Mussolini, Malaparte—a Fascist true believer in the 1920s who fell into disgrace in the 1930s and then improvised a new anti-Fascist identity in the 1940s—has something to tell Italians. He confesses that he despised Il Duce, his chest puffed out triumphantly, at the apex of his glory in Piazza Venezia. But now, in an obstetrician’s humble studio, with Mussolini reduced to a “bare, repellent fetus,” Malaparte refuses to laugh at him. No, the more he looks, the more Malaparte feels “affectionate compassion” for Mussolini. His compassion extends to Fascists and anti-Fascists, to the Republic of Salò and to the Resistance—all joined by the wonderful fatal destiny of defeat. Before the council of fetus judges, Malaparte assumes the role of Mussolini’s lawyer and the Italian people’s defender. “A man, a people, beaten, humiliated, reduced to a bit of rotten flesh. What in this world is more beautiful, more noble?”44
Malaparte’s political message is not so very different from Montanelli’s in My Good Man Mussolini:
the Resistance was a Grand Guignolesque bloodbath from which the defeated paradoxically emerged the victors. Furthermore, Malaparte explicitly rejects any reading of the civil war as a tragic but salutary rite of passage toward Italian maturity. “The dead, I hated them. All the dead,” he writes in The Skin. What made Malaparte, writing in 1949, different from both the left and the right was that he embraced an ethic of survival, while the ex-Resistance fighters and neo-Fascists cultivated an ethic of sacrifice. It was precisely that ethic of survival that helped explain The Skin’s extraordinary success, all the more notable in the light of the critics’ negative reviews and the absence of backing by a major publishing house. The book sold seventy thousand copies in its first eight months, or twenty times the average novel’s sales in that period. It seems unlikely that all of its readers shared the narrator’s voyeuristic interest in the dead and unborn; more likely, The Skin attracted readers drawn to anti-anti-Fascism. The book was calculated to appeal to Italians in the gray area—all those who, after the collapse of Mussolini, were still not won over to the ideals of the Resistance.
After Malaparte makes his case in The Skin, he ends the trial without reaching a verdict. Before leaving the courthouse, the fetus Mussolini recalls, “in the sweetest of voices,” the final days of his incarnation as a man: “They slaughtered me, hung me up by my feet on a butcher’s hook, spat on me.” Then two fetuses who look like police take Il Duce out of the hall as he “cries quietly.” This lachrymose nonending must have pleased the profoundly Catholic Italians whom Malaparte considered his audience. At a time when a certain segment of post-Fascist Italy shrank from the stark Calvinist reality of the Nuremberg trials, there was an alternative to the brutal choice between blessed and damned, an alternative deeply rooted in the Italian tradition, at once terrifying and consoling. Was Mussolini destined for hell? Or was he headed to paradise? Neither: Mussolini was sent to purgatory.
* * *
IN THE EARLY postwar years, his followers prayed for Mussolini as if he really were a soul in purgatory. Each year on the anniversary of his death, pious and enterprising neo-Fascists organized secret memorial masses to be said in the absence of the body. At times the assembled crowds were large enough to draw the attention of the authorities: in Rome in 1947, the police estimated there were hundreds of participants at the masses. When, not content with intercession for the dear departed’s soul, the faithful extended the Catholic liturgy to include the Fascist salute, the police proceeded to make arrests. But in general, the forces of order avoided interfering with the neo-Fascist services, a fact that earned the praise of the independent press. In his column in the illustrated weekly Tempo, onetime Fascist enthusiast Vitaliano Brancati applauded the police for standing back as the “best way to show that ‘weak’ democracy feared Mussolini’s soul a thousand times less than ‘powerful’ Fascism feared Matteotti’s soul.”45 During the Fascist period, said Brancati, anyone even suggesting a mass for Matteotti would have found himself in prison, along with his card-playing friends.
In an article about the masses offered in three Roman churches on the second anniversary of Il Duce’s death, the popular weekly Oggi provided an intriguing detail. On the same evening as the masses, a number of Romans gathered at the office of a “famous” lawyer for a séance to make contact with Mussolini’s spirit. A session held in Palermo a few years later gives some sense of what may have transpired that evening. A group of people from various social backgrounds assembled at the house of a man who described himself as the Professor, according to the local neo-Fascist paper, I Vespri d’Italia. First, the Professor had each participant fill out a questionnaire. What was their overall judgment of Mussolini? Was the conquest of Ethiopia a heroic venture or an error? Was it opportune or mistaken for Italy to join the war in 1940? Was the Italian Social Republic legal or illegal? Then the group was conducted to a darkened room where, next to the only lamp, stood a giant photo of Mussolini on the balcony at Palazzo Venezia. From next door a gramophone played the most celebrated of Il Duce’s speeches as the assembled attempted to commune with his spirit: “Each person’s gaze was nailed to the huge photograph. In the holy silence Mussolini’s words cut into the flesh like slivers of glass.”46 When the recording ended, the Professor handed out the same questionnaire as before. Inevitably, the answers were more pro-Fascist this time around.
One should not overemphasize the importance of such sessions in Il Duce’s posthumous life. Attendees amounted to no more than a few dozen Italians, perhaps a few hundred, drawn as much by a dictator who died in ignominy as by a fascination with the paranormal. It seems that even Mussolini’s wife, in her modest home on the island of Ischia, where she lived in compulsory residence after the war, had the ability to commune with the spirit world. At least once, in the fall of 1947, Rachele Mussolini called together her children and several trusted friends and asked the table legs to indicate the secret place where the prefect of Milan had buried Il Duce’s body. According to Giorgio Pini, a founder of the Italian Social Movement as well as the ghostwriter of Rachele’s memoirs, who was present at the session, the reply, although wrong, was clear: P–A–V–I–A. Spiritualism and table levitation say a lot about postwar neo-Fascism, which was more ingenuous than rational, more pathetic than insidious, as much sentimental as political.
Along with the thrills of spiritualism, Rachele Mussolini had dreams, image sequences that she fed to the hungry readers of the illustrated weeklies. In one such dream, Mussolini, young and smiling, appeared from on high to tell her, “There are no bad feelings here, Rachele, not about anyone.”47 Yet Il Duce occupied other dream landscapes beside his widow’s. Carlo Levi, a painter and writer, had a landlady, Jolanda, who also encountered Il Duce. “You should have seen him, pale, sad, and suffering,” she told Levi. “He said they had wronged him, they had betrayed him, but up there it is a better world, and from there he would protect us.”48 Levi himself could hardly have better conjured up the bizarre world of neo-Fascism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a world turned upside down. Author of the classic Christ Stopped at Eboli, with its sharp yet tolerant vision of the Italian south, Levi was well equipped to re-create the atmosphere of early postwar neo-Fascism, its hoped-for phony miracles, spiritualism, cult of the saints, and invocations of the dead.
As we know, the neo-Fascist world was not entirely apolitical. When Il Duce’s body disappeared from view, his followers were given the chance to revive the Fascist mystique through its absence. One such initiative was the Buried in Italy campaign of the autumn of 1950. The idea was to find, in every city and town, a small but visible place—a street corner, a chapel wall, the base of an abandoned monument—to decorate with flowers, candles, photographs of Mussolini, and sacred images. In short, to create a substitute tomb for Il Duce, an altar for his devoted followers to tend or to rebuild in the event that it was destroyed. Thanks to the neo-Fascists’ efforts, Mussolini would have countless graves around the country. “His tomb is Italy,” explained the newspaper that launched the initiative.49 Thus Mussolini’s life after death grew ever more intense so long as his real burial place remained a secret. Making a virtue of necessity, the dialogue with Il Duce eluded the strict relationship with the corpse imposed by a tomb. By reviving age-old traditions of talking dead men and messages from the Great Beyond, the neo-Fascists were able to bring Il Duce’s formidable profile to life against the gray backdrop of De Gasperi’s Italy and give voice to his big baritone. Like the Führer, the dead Mussolini got his share of posthumous literary attention, effusions somewhere between yellow journalism and pulp fiction, more fanciful epitaph than coherent political statement.
The most original of these creations was Benito Mussolini without Fascism: 12 Conversations from the Other Side, published in Milan in 1952 by Piero Caliandro (possibly a pseudonym). The book opens with a declaration addressed by Il Duce to the coroner who did his autopsy: “Oh, anatomist, these are not the imaginings of someone who is dead. I here am in possession of the truth; you,
instead, examine putrefying matter or that which has hardened in formaldehyde or alcohol.” Why, Mussolini wonders, was Professor Cattabeni, the coroner, melancholy and irascible, in the days after the autopsy? In part because working on such a corpse inevitably affected one. In part because he was annoyed at failing to find an ulcer that had turned cancerous, a brain tumor, or a case of tertiary syphilis—in short, “something big” to describe to the scientific world and earn himself academic titles and to offer to the public as cytological proof of the biological basis of Mussolini’s politics. People should stop, then, spreading the legend of a Mussolini “sick in the head,” suggests Caliandro’s Mussolini. They should accept the evidence that Fascism is still alive and promises Italy a new season. “You, anatomist, along with the executioners, you have not extinguished Mussolini; rather, you have blown on a flame that was going out,” says Il Duce. Dozens of incoherent pages follow, concluding with an appeal for Italians to solve their problems by forming a National Patriotic Party, a party that will replace the decrepit pyramid of the state with a “scientific arboreal construction” that will be the nation.50
More remarks from the Great Beyond were published by Marco Ramperti, a journalist who was a theater critic before becoming an official spokesman for the Republic of Salò and who was sentenced to prison after the war for anti-Semitic propaganda. In Benito I, Emperor Ramperti imagines the Axis partners winning the war, thanks to the timely use of the atomic bomb, and Mussolini returning to Rome to be triumphantly crowned as emperor. The book is thus a monologue by a Mussolini “victorious and imperial rather than defeated and hanged.”51 It is also a torrential assault on anti-Fascism—the rotten fruit of the betrayal of the monarchy on September 8, 1943—and on the false flag behind which a band of assassins hid. But the shadow of Il Duce fell over writings more cultivated and sophisticated than Ramperti’s Benito I, Emperor. Il Borghese, a magazine of culture and politics founded by Leo Longanesi in 1950, used every pretext to contrast the volcanic master of Predappio with “boring old Aunt” Democracy. That the Fascist period had been one of illusions was acknowledged, but they were illusions of the sort that made life nobler or at least gave meaning to the young, dreams of transforming the country or of winning a war. For while Longanesi hated Fascism for the damage it did to Italy, he saw Il Duce as the only statesman in modern times who had asked something serious of the Italians.
The Body of Il Duce Page 14