A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  After this, Gentile inaugurated a National Institute of Fascist Culture, which began to churn out books and pamphlets designed to give fascism a gloss of respectability. To ensure that there would be no dispute, all independent-minded writers and particularly journalists were warned that they risked imprisonment on charges of ‘pederasty or fraud’. Croce withdrew into what he called ‘inner emigration’, and lay low in his house outside Naples, trying to see the comic side of things; when asked whether he thought fascism would last, he would say only that he was not a prophet.

  One of the first people to lose his freedom under the new laws was Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party. Gramsci had long been warning that the communists should prepare themselves for many years of secrecy and exile, but had crucially delayed his own departure for Switzerland because he wanted to make a final, formal protest to parliament about the reintroduction of the death penalty. He left it too late. On 8 November he was arrested in Rome. Accused of plotting against the state, Gramsci, a small, graceful man with a large head, stood very still in his iron cage in the dock, exuding unshakable rectitude and contempt. ‘We must prevent his mind working’, the prosecutor declared at his trial, ‘for at least twenty years.’

  The task of implementing all this public security fell to Mussolini’s newly appointed police chief, Arturo Bocchini, the forty-six-year-old former prefect of Brescia and Genoa. Bocchini was the son of a southern landowner, rich enough to send his six children to university, and enjoyed speaking in Neapolitan dialect with the cronies he brought in to serve him. He was a big, flashy, cynical, sharp-tongued man, with an eye for a pretty woman, a gargantuan appetite and a prodigious memory. It was said that he never forgot a name or a face, and that he regularly worked sixteen-hour days. Although Bocchini smiled and chuckled a great deal, and was full of witticisms and anecdotes, he also greatly enjoyed talking about pornography, and liked to say that God’s greatest creation was vendetta. It was rumoured that he had almost come unstuck in Genoa when a young secretary, pregnant by him, died during an abortion carried out in the prefecture.

  Already, Bocchini’s anteroom swarmed, like the levée of a French king, with policemen and army officers, prefects, industrialists and informers, and many pretty girls. Bocchini’s house outside Rome recalled the villas of the late Roman period; visitors never forgot the fountain with statues of naked girls, squirting coloured jets of water from their nipples, or the entrance hall crowded with smiling wax dolls in different costumes, whose physical charms were exposed at the press of a button. In the mornings, dressed in a sumptuous brocade dressing gown, the police chief liked to wander round his estate while his minions came to kiss his hands.

  Arturo Bocchini, Mussolini’s faithful and portly chief of police

  What obsessed Bocchini, from the day of his appointment in the early autumn of 1926, was how to make absolutely certain that no one could assassinate Mussolini. The police apparatus that he inherited was antiquated: he set about reforming it. To run a successful dictatorship, he declared, you needed a highly efficient police force. This meant first of all putting a cordon sanitaire around Mussolini, chosen from a praetorian guard of hand-picked men, and ensuring that no one came within a fifty-metre radius of his house. When Mussolini travelled, roads along his route were closed. It also meant penetrating all anti-fascist groups, of whatever kind and size, both within and outside Italy. As Mussolini put it, what he wanted were ‘octopus-like tentacles’ – everywhere. Soon, Bocchini’s system of repression, complete with spies and informers and agents provocateurs, was indeed many-tentacled. One of these spies was said to be his mistress Bice Pupeschi, whose code name was Diana, but just what she contributed in the way of secret information was not clear.

  One of the casualties of the ‘exceptional laws’ was Il Quarto Stato, whose last number appeared on 30 October. The paper had survived a remarkable seven months and acquired 10,000 readers. At a clandestine socialist congress not long before, Carlo was one of a small group of younger men elected on to the executive; but all plans for reform, along with all political parties, had now been swept away. Another casualty was the distinguished liberal editor of the Corriere della Sera. Luigi Albertini, associated with the paper since 1898, was ousted and left saying, ‘I conserve intact a spiritual patrimony . . . and I save my dignity and my conscience.’ Within days the paper had turned into a fascist rag. With him went another regular contributor, Carlo’s mentor Luigi Einaudi, to whom Carlo now wrote: ‘I know perfectly well . . . that the storm is approaching.’

  Threats were issued against Turati and Treves. Fearing that the net was tightening around them, Carlo sent Marion to stay with a friend’s grandmother. Carlo, wrote another friend, ‘was everywhere at once . . . he formed little groups of friends who were in danger, he gave secret rendezvous, and all with such skill and grace that he made it seem as if he were playing a game.’

  One evening, he called a meeting in the flat in Via Borghetto. To it came Riccardo Bauer and Ferruccio Parri, the two former editors of Il Caffè, and Sandro Pertini, who had helped with Italia Libera and had since had his arm broken by squadristi for writing a pamphlet on ‘barbaric fascist domination’. All three had been repeatedly beaten up at different times. Parri had become very close to Carlo. He was thirty-seven, an economist by training, a calm, modest, unemotional man, with very precise and clear ideas, and much loved by his friends. The fact that Bauer and Parri were not exactly of the left – Bauer said endearingly that he was ‘molto confuso’ when it came to liberty and justice – yet were prepared to risk their lives to oppose Mussolini, made the idea of the pure ‘Mazzini hero for the first time no longer a rhetorical abstraction’, but a reality to Carlo. He spoke eloquently about his long-term hopes for a closer link between all the anti-fascists of the left, whatever their political beliefs. Since all legal avenues for escape were now closed, they would have to resort to illegal ones. Most of the older leaders of the left were now in considerable personal danger, and those who had been deputies had lost their parliamentary immunity. Carlo intended to set up a network to smuggle them out of Italy to safety in France. Sandro Pertini wrote to his sister: ‘I feel that my whole soul is coming alive . . . This difficult task will transform us all.’

  Marion soon returned, and Amelia arrived in Milan to help her finish doing up the apartment. Relations between mother and daughter-in-law were better, and Marion was now pregnant, worrying that a baby would get in the way of their political commitments, and telling Carlo that she feared something was ending between them ‘before something else begins that we don’t yet know . . . The irreparable end of Marion Cave’. Amelia had expected to find a snug and peaceful home. Instead she found a ‘real port in a storm’: people coming and going at odd times, strangers appearing in the middle of the night, secret rendezvous, plans made to meet in churches, in the dark spaces behind the confessional.

  One night Amelia, Carlo and Marion were asked by friends to join them in a box at La Scala. It was all very lively. Carlo and Marion were fêted as a new couple and many old friends, whom Amelia had not seen for years, came up to wish them luck. Gazing at her son, so apparently calm and content, Amelia thought he was looking around him at a world which in his heart he had already left.

  One of the young men waiting to be helped to safety outside Italy was a slightly sinister journalist called Giovanni Ansaldo, a slippery, resentful young man, envious of Carlo’s casual confidence. When Ansaldo asked him sourly whether he did not realise the danger he was running, and told him that he made it all seem like a travel agency, Carlo replied cheerfully that he did not believe the police had yet caught up with his new address. He went on using his flat as the headquarters of the escape operation, and at various times had both Nenni and Treves living with him and Marion. A postal system between Italy, Switzerland and France had been arranged with a friendly local councillor in Lugano, and letters went backwards and forwards in a series of codes: books, which were or were not in a library; exam
s, which were or were not taken; ‘failures’, which meant arrests. The borders were ferociously guarded, not least because Mussolini wanted to avoid his more articulate opponents escaping and spreading the word about conditions in Italy. Two routes were mapped out by Parri, who, like Carlo, thrived on plots and danger. One went across the bridge of Susak in Fiume into Yugoslavia; the other over the mountains into France or Switzerland. Smugglers found by Parri were paid to guide people across, leaving luggage to be taken by a bank clerk who travelled between Italy and Lugano every weekend. After each successful escape, Carlo rang Marion to say that he had received yet another telegram congratulating him on the forthcoming baby. In ones and twos, Treves, Nenni and others were spirited out of Italy across the Alps.

  Then came the disastrous day when Bauer, accompanying Ansaldo and another journalist called Silvestro, was caught on the border with Switzerland and taken to the prison in Como. Parri went into hiding.

  But Carlo would not stop. He wanted to pull off one spectacular escape to show Mussolini the dedication and strength of his adversaries, and to cause a furore in the world beyond Italy. He found the perfect person in Turati, in very poor health with heart problems, his spirit broken by the death of Kuliscioff. He was living in semi-darkened rooms, destroying his old papers in a ‘dark, angry fury’ and writing to a friend: ‘My life is no longer worth the living.’ Turati was now sixty-nine and had requested a passport to take a cure at a spa in Germany. It was refused and the fascists used the occasion to redouble the men at his door, who sung out, whenever he left the apartment, ‘Con la barba di Turati – noi faremo gli spazzolini – per lustrare gli stivali – di Benito Mussolini.’ (‘We will make brushes of Turati’s beard with which to shine Mussolini’s boots.’) He threatened to kill himself and had written a new will, blaming the government. Even so, he was very reluctant to leave the city where he had been so happy. It took much persuading on the part of Carlo to get him to agree, but the decision was made easier when the local questore rang at 4 o’clock one morning to say that he could no longer guarantee Turati’s safety.

  Carlo planned Turati’s escape down to the smallest detail. On the evening of Sunday 21 November, Turati shaved off his long white beard, put on a capacious overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, and was led by Carlo and Marion down to the ground floor, then up the back stairs to the attics and down a passage which joined his house to the one next door. From there they descended to the road behind, where his doctor, Pini, was waiting with a car. As he was bundled out, Turati had an asthma attack and the escape was almost aborted. He had left everything behind, knowing that he would never again set eyes on the things that he and Kuliscioff had bought together and loved, or the magnificent view across to the cathedral in which both had taken such pleasure.

  The escape party stopped first at the house of his other doctor, Gillardoni, in Piazza Duse, but since a porter watched them arrive, it was thought safer to move Turati to a villa near Varese owned by Ettore Albini, former theatre critic for Avanti! and an old-school socialist who had already been in trouble with the fascists. Turati was to have stayed there for just one day, but plans to get him out of Italy had run into difficulties, and he was too frail to walk any distance. Meanwhile his escape had been discovered. Mussolini was furious and sent the inspector general of public security to Milan to track down the fugitives. Bocchini mobilised his local forces. Friends were pursued and hauled off to the prison of San Vittore. Warned that the police were closing in, Carlo hastily collected Turati. Two hours later, Albini’s house was surrounded: Albini was arrested and spent the next eight months in prison.

  A new plan was hastily put together to get Turati to Corsica and from there to mainland France. Pertini, still in pain from his broken arm, was sent ahead to charter a boat and recruit sailors. A thirty-nine-year-old experienced sailor, Italo Oxilia, who held strong anti-fascist views, volunteered to act as captain. Two other men came forward to help pilot the boat. Driving at night through the freezing countryside, avoiding roadblocks, aware that the fascists would be searching trains, Carlo and Turati travelled through Liguria, Umbria and Tuscany. Turati sat quietly in the back of the car, saying little, smoking his miniature Tuscan cigars. When they reached Savona, they registered in a hotel as father and son. An arrangement to leave from Vado had to be abandoned because officers from the Guardia della Finanza were patrolling that stretch of coast. At last, at 8 o’clock on the evening of 11 December, the boat with the six men pulled out of Savona harbour into the open sea. Pertini sang the ‘Internationale’. A fisherman, seeing them pass, shouted out: ‘Good fishing!’ The big fish, wrote Carlo later, had broken free from its nets and was now running in the high seas.

  A strong wind was getting up and water was soon washing over the small boat. A thick fog had settled over the sea and for hours they battled on, not knowing where they were, bailing ceaselessly to prevent the boat from sinking. Oxilia remained calm. From time to time, Carlo went over to Turati to see how he was, to comfort him, to discuss what he would do when he reached France. To the others, it looked as if he were a son talking affectionately to his father. In the faint light of dawn they saw lights and a shoreline. It was indeed Corsica, but not where they had expected to land. The journey had taken twelve hours. A small crowd gathered to watch them come ashore, ‘exhausted, drenched but happy’, and a policeman appeared to conduct them to his superior officer. But Turati was well known and much loved. He was allowed to send a telegram to Briand, the French minister for foreign affairs, requesting asylum for himself and Pertini, who had realised that he too was now in grave danger of arrest. Both were welcomed to France.

  Lorenzo da Bove, Turati, Carlo, Sandro Pertini and Ferruccio Parri in Calvi, after Turati’s successful escape

  Meanwhile a reception was hastily organised to honour Turati. He was extremely tired, but ‘It was miraculous,’ Carlo wrote later. In perfect French, Turati gave a speech describing Italy in chains and the struggle of the anti-fascists for liberty. ‘Exhaustion, the crossing, seasickness, all was forgotten. The old war horse pawed the ground.’

  The escape party slept the night in Calvi. Next day, leaving Turati and Pertini to catch the ferry to Nice, Carlo, Parri and the sailors set off back for Italy. As he said goodbye, Carlo bent down and kissed his old friend. Turati, standing on the quayside, waved his handkerchief until they were lost from sight. His eyes were full of tears. He had hoped that Carlo would escape with him. Turning to Pertini he said: ‘I am old, I will never see Italy again in my lifetime.’

  There was a thought of the boat putting in at La Spezia but Carlo and Parri preferred to be dropped at the Marina di Carrara where they had friends. There, however, the police were waiting. Soaked, filthy and unshaven, their hair ruffled by the wind and salt water, they were at first suspected of being bandits. They were taken to a police station, where their details were transmitted to Milan. Word soon came back with their identities and orders for their arrest. Still protesting that they had merely been on a tourist outing, they were transferred to the prison at Forte di Massa.

  Nello and Maria’s wedding had been set for 22 December. The evening before, there was to be a party at which Nello was to be introduced to Maria’s many relations. A telegram arrived from Marion: ‘Carlo ill in hospital in Massa.’ They knew exactly what it meant: ‘ill’ was arrested, ‘hospital’, prison.

  Nello took off at once in his car to Massa, but was not allowed to see his brother. Amelia then tried, but was not let in either. It was only later that they read in the papers of Turati’s escape, and of his triumphant arrival in Paris, and of Carlo’s part in the adventure. The Popolo d’Italia carried a sneering article about this ‘impotent and feeble-minded Mephistopheles . . . a sad exponent of the old barbaric and vile Italy’, now conveniently spirited abroad. But to the prefect in Milan, Mussolini, beside himself with anger, was said to have shouted, ‘You are a donkey!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Defying the Barbarians

  On Christmas
Eve, Carlo and Parri were moved to San Donnino prison in Como. Marion was able to be on the same train and the carabinieri let her sit and talk to Carlo; she was haunted by the chained prisoners and their sinister clanging that made her think of Tsarist Russia. In Milan, where the train stopped, Alessandro Levi was waiting at the station and saw Carlo in handcuffs between two carabinieri, his nose in the air, looking ‘defiant and ironical’.

  Bauer, Silvestro and Ansaldo were already in San Donnino, but the slippery, spiteful Ansaldo was already sliding his way towards the fascists. He would later say that the only reason Carlo had been so active in helping others to leave Italy was that ‘he wanted to remove the competition’. The prison was a former convent, rather dark and poky. Carlo asked if he could have a bath and was reluctantly taken down into the cellars and offered an old wooden vat into which two buckets of hot water were poured. He remained determinedly cheerful and kept everyone’s spirits up by his teasing, exuberant behaviour. The friends had been put into a cell together, and slept in hammocks. One night Carlo arranged a pillow fight. A police report noted that he had ‘an eager, merry face and a ringing voice’. Ernesto Rossi, who had smuggled his way back across the border from France, managed to secure a pass to visit the prisoners. Carlo was ‘noisy and extremely lively, just like a high-spirited Maremmano puppy’. To Amelia, Carlo joked that prison was the place to be, now that all his friends and all right-thinking people were either in jail or internal exile.