The first telegram that reached Florence was unclear: ‘Serious accident, come at once’. Amelia assumed that there had been some kind of car crash in Normandy, and that both Carlo and Nello had been injured. Maria, who was breastfeeding Alberto, was staying with Zia Gì at Il Frassine, but Amelia asked for a passport and was given one at once – Bocchini later told Mussolini that he thought this a sensible move – and she left by train for Paris. Aldo Forti, their close friend and tenant in the top flat in Via Giusti, insisted on accompanying her; his wife, terrified for his safety, made him promise to take the train straight back. What Amelia spent the long night thinking, as the train wound its slow way northwards, one can only imagine. Whatever desperate hopes she may have clung to were dispelled as soon as she reached the Gare de Lyon. On the platform were many reporters and photographers. It was enough to see their faces.
Amelia was already on the train when Marion telephoned Zia Gì to tell her what had happened. Fearing Maria’s despair, Zia Gì asked the local doctor, a close family friend, to break the news. Nello’s two boys, Aldo and Alberto, were too young to understand, but Silvia was now nine and Paola seven. Nothing was said to them. No one could quite bear to. Their grandmother Luisa arrived to collect the girls and take them to her house in Mugello. Days passed. When after a month the girls were finally collected by Zia Gì, Silvia asked: ‘How is Babbo?’ ‘Well,’ replied Zia Gì, ‘he has a bit of a cold.’ They found their mother in bed. She had decided to see them in her nightdress, to conceal her black mourning clothes. She started to speak, stopped, cried, then said that Nello had gone off on a long journey and would be away for some time. When one of the girls said: ‘I do hope that Babbo will be back soon,’ Maria faltered and replied that he was very ill.
It was Zia Gì, when they went to Il Frassine, who told them the truth. Silvia asked: ‘So is our mother a widow?’ Zia Gì said that she was. Paola said: ‘So we are orphans.’ Then Silvia asked: ‘And Mellina and Andrea too?’ The girls were relieved when Zia Gì agreed: it made them feel less alone. But though they knew that their father was dead, when they saw Nello’s car driven back to the house, they thought that it was their father coming home.
News of Carlo’s death reached the Italian anti-fascists fighting in Spain on the evening of 15 June. Pietro Nenni wrote in his diary: ‘It was as if something broke inside us. I can’t sleep . . . Rosselli, Matteotti’s torch bearer.’ In Regina Coeli prison in Rome, Rossi and Bauer overheard the guards talking. Rossi said: ‘The future has suddenly become darker.’ To his mother, he wrote that the Rosselli brothers were part of his spiritual family, composed nowadays ‘almost all of the dead’, but who nonetheless felt more real and alive to him than the cell in which he lived. He and Bauer smuggled out a message written on cigarette paper saying that they would avenge Carlo and Nello’s deaths, but Salvemini, who was on a visit to Paris, decided not to make it public, on the grounds that it would only cause them more trouble, and they had enough of it already.
When the bodies were released by the police in Normandy and brought back to Paris, the coffins were taken to Rue Notre-Damedes-Champs for the wake. The many visitors, French and Italian, who came to pay their respects were received by Amelia and Marion, both of them grimly self-contained. They insisted on sitting all night by the bodies. The two coffins were draped in dark-red velvet, Carlo’s with the words ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ in black. The Rosselli cousins Sandro Levi and Sarina Nathan arrived from London. At some point during the long hours of darkness, Amelia said, in a low voice: ‘At times I seem to feel the cuts of the knife in my own flesh.’
Of all the close friends, only Lussu, who had hastened back from Spain when he heard the news, did not wish to see the bodies. Writing about Carlo later, he said that he could not bear to ‘see so much physical power destroyed’. He preferred to remember his friend, the man to whom he had talked almost every day for the last ten years, as he had known him, ‘youthful, smiling, his eyes kind and, after the war in Spain, more thoughtful and penetrating’. Later, Guglielmo Ferrero said that Aldo, Carlo and Nello had as boys represented everything that was best in the Italian tradition: a hunger to learn, respect for intelligence and morality, a liberal spirit, humane ideals, simplicity of manner and seriousness about life. ‘I feel lost,’ Amelia wrote to Maria of Nello. ‘I don’t know where to be. I want to stay where he is, I want to hear people talking about him, and yet I also want to flee. Far away from everyone.’ What haunted her was the memory of saying to Nello, when he offered to take her place and go to meet Carlo in Bagnoles: ‘Of course.’
The funeral took place on Saturday 19 June. Before leaving for Spain, Carlo had requested that Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony be played in case of his death at the front. Marion had got to know Toscanini during his occasional visits to Paris and she now asked him whether he would come to conduct at the funeral; he was not able to get away from London, but sent affectionate messages. The bodies had been taken to the hall of the Maison des Syndicats and here, before an enormous crowd, an orchestra played the Beethoven symphony. The street outside was lined with wreaths and summer flowers. As she listened to the first bars, Marion, who had been staunch and composed, put her face in her hands and began to cry. She was heard to say softly: ‘Addio, Carlo.’ Speaking of Carlo in his funeral address, Cianca made a promise: ‘In your name, we will continue the fight . . . We will commemorate you every day, your spirit living on in our actions. This is not a farewell. It’s a vow.’
Every Italian anti-fascist organisation, every left-wing French newspaper, every group of foreign exiles had called on people to follow the coffins to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Some 200,000 people did. Many were in tears, but along with the sadness there was also considerable anger. At the front walked Marion, Cianca, Tarchiani, Lussu, all Carlo’s close friends in exile. One carried the beret that Carlo had worn in Spain. Behind them walked a long, largely silent crowd of men and women in their dark clothes: trade unionists, writers, members of Blum’s government, French intellectuals, and many friends. Nello and Carlo were buried side by side, in a plot in the middle of one of Père Lachaise’s northernmost sections, not far from Gobetti, Treves and Turati. A bunch of white hydrangeas had been laid on the coffins, with the words ‘La Mamma’. A photographer had followed the cortege, taking pictures of the principal mourners. Copies were soon on their way to Bocchini, the names of the most important anti-fascists neatly transcribed by Antonio Bondi on sheets of tracing paper carefully pasted on top.
Amelia did not join the cortege. For days, she had been ferociously self-contained. But as the coffins with her two sons were carried down the stairs, she let out a low moan of pain and horror. It was like that of a wounded animal. For the two days that they had lain together in the flat, she had been able to think of Carlo and Nello as boys, sleeping, side by side. Watching them go, she knew that she had lost them for ever.
It took some time for the truth about the killings to emerge. In Italy, Mussolini’s skilled propaganda machine put out a story that Carlo, a ‘little and ridiculous dictator’, had fallen foul of his left-wing associates, angry because he was making peace with the fascists and intended to return to Italy. His murderers were variously said to be Spanish anarchists, the Russian secret services or even the giellisti themselves. Giovanni Ansaldo, Carlo’s former friend and now editor of Il Telegrafo – and branded not long before by Carlo as ‘obscene’ and a ‘prostitute’ for having gone over to the fascists – wrote that Carlo was an unscrupulous, ambitious, ridiculous ‘despiser of men’, and that he had probably been killed because he had approved the death of Berneri, murdered recently in Barcelona. These rumours were so deftly circulated that even the London Times ran a story speculating that these were the reasons for the murders.
But the Rossellis had many friends, both in England and in France. In London, several prominent writers and politicians signed a letter to The Times, calling these allegations ‘monstruous’. Two days later, evidently embarrassed by its earlier in
correct stories, the paper published a second letter, this time from Marion, who wrote that Carlo had been faithful to the end to his ‘ideal of truth and liberty’, and that to say otherwise was ‘worse than a crime’. In France, while a few of the more rabid right-wing papers referred to Carlo as a terrorist and urged the government to rid itself of this kind of ‘leprosy’ – and a cartoon showed Mussolini addressing an officer with the words ‘And you can add Bagnoles-de-l’Orne to the list of our victories!’ – there was an outpouring of anger and grief.
In a letter carried by most of the mainstream papers, Pablo Picasso and André Breton were among a group of intellectuals who wrote that if the death of Matteotti had signalled the death of liberty in Italy, that of the Rosselli brothers had signed its death warrant in the whole of Europe. In letter after letter, article after article, Carlo’s intelligence, lucidity, erudition and courage were warmly praised. He had been, said Tarchiani, ‘the supreme physical and spiritual force of the second Italian Risorgimento’. It was by becoming such an evident future leader of Italy, said Carlo’s friends, that he had signed his own death warrant. Even Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the communists, who had been so critical of Carlo, declared that his party would ‘dip our flag in memory of Carlo and Nello, promising that we will do all that we can to avenge them’. Carlo himself had had a keen understanding of the powers of the press, and his own use of it – exposing Mussolini’s lies about Spain and printing the unhappy letters of the so-called volunteers – had unquestionably played a part in the decision to have him killed.
In Paris, the government remained uneasily silent. They had no wish to stir up trouble with the Italians. In any case, ten days later, Blum fell, to be replaced by another short-lived parliament.
Bocchini had boasted on several occasions that the anti-fascists had been crushed. Each time he had been proved wrong. But Carlo’s murder threw the exiles into paralysis and disarray, and even though Lussu and Cianca kept Giustizia e Libertà alive, it had been seriously weakened. It was certain that the fascists had intended to silence their opponents’ most visible and effective leader; but they were not sorry to get rid of Nello either, slowly emerging as one of Italy’s most impressive and independent-minded historians. The killings sent a useful message that the fascists were organised, powerful, dangerous and had a very long reach. On Carlo’s dossier in the Rome police archives was stamped the word ‘Morto’ in large, bold, purple lettering.
Of all the Rossellis’ friends, Salvemini, who had loved them like sons, was the most tenacious at getting to the truth. In July, he wrote an article for I Quaderni, under the headline ‘Il Mandante’, ‘The Principle’. In it, he formally accused Mussolini of having given the order for their deaths. It was already perfectly clear to him and Lussu that French assassins had been hired by the fascists and that Nello had been killed only because he happened to be with Carlo at Bagnoles at the time. As Marion said, it was absurd to imagine that Mussolini and Ciano had not known precisely what was going on.
The French police had not been idle either. The search for the killers had set off in several different directions. Anyone known to have been in recent touch with Carlo was tracked down and interrogated. Car-drivers in the locality who spoke Italian were questioned. Appeals went out to trace a ‘big, swarthy’ man with brown hair swept back, seen at the Hotel Cordier. Names of possible assassins were bandied about.
The Cagoule had been clumsy: they had left several obvious traces. Hélène Besneux, the young girl who had cycled past the murder scene, remained bold and uncowed in her testimony, even after receiving anonymous threatening letters. In due course, Filliol, Bouvyer and Jakubiez were picked up, and Marion remembered Jakubiez’s face from the time he had called at the flat posing as a travelling carpet salesman. Then a senior figure in the Cagoule confessed that the organisation had indeed been responsible for the assassinations. More names were produced. In February 1938, the police staged a reconstruction, with Carlo’s car, and Hélène Besneux cycling past. Various alibis foundered; more confessions followed. It would be another year before seventy-one people from the extreme right were charged with a variety of crimes, among them the murders of Carlo and Nello, but by now there was little doubt in anyone’s mind about where the orders for the killings had come from.
As for the Italian spies in Paris, several were unmasked during the course of the French investigations. Bellavia was briefly arrested, then went back to Italy to work for OVRA in Turin. Others disappeared. A few were put to work under a new boss who gave them new names and identities. But with Carlo gone, something of the urgency had gone too. Bocchini turned his attention back to what was going on in Italy, and mopped up Pentecostalists and members of the Salvation Army.
From Alberto Moravia, Amelia’s much-loved nephew, there was total silence. No telephone call, no letter, no flowers. She did not take it well.
‘Everything still seems to me impossible,’ wrote Amelia to Gina Lombroso soon after the funeral. ‘Nothing is real, I can’t take anything in, I am like a robot, I can understand nothing except for the fact that my life is finished.’
She stayed on in Paris to help Marion, whose heart troubles had intensified, though she kept worrying that she should go back to Florence to be with Maria. The only thing that made life bearable, she told her Italian daughter-in-law, whom she had always found easier to love than Marion, was that they had descended together into the abyss, and that together, in these black and despairing depths, they would discover the strength to live. Marion’s grief was so extreme, so entirely focused on herself, that even Amelia felt irritated, telling Zia Gì that she found the degree of egoism ‘unbelievable’. It was beginning to dawn on her that, though she was sixty-eight, it would be up to her to look after the two widows and their seven children, decide where to live and how, and that whatever they all did, they would have to do it together. Amelia, wrote Sandro Pertini later, was like ‘the heroine in a Corneille tragedy’.
Andrea, Silvia, Paola (back row) and Aldo and Melina (sitting) in Switzerland
Her first decision was that neither she nor Carlo’s children would set foot inside Italy again while Mussolini remained in power. Towards the end of 1937, Amelia rented a house in Villars, above Montreux in Switzerland, not far from the Ferreros in Geneva. Maria and her four children joined her and the older ones went to Swiss schools, where they were soon speaking good French. In the evenings, Amelia read to them in Italian, so that they should not forget their native language. To counter what she described to her friend Max Ascoli as their ‘torment of grief’, the two women threw themselves into plans for publishing all Nello’s writings.
Marion, restless, frantic, uncertain, stayed on for a while in Paris, then paid a brief visit to Villars. It was the first time the sisters-in-law had met since the murders. Amelia worried about how they would get on, knowing how very different the two young women were, and conscious that she had long managed with a different voice, a different way of being, with each of them. She told friends that she felt the pain three times over, for all three of them, and was comforted only by the thought that she herself would not survive long. Slowly, mourning together, dressed in black, the three women forged a shared bond in sadness.
They were there when, in Catalonia, the communists, anarchists and socialists created a nightmare of confusion and disagreement, spies and commissars carrying out brutal purges, unleashing a civil war within a civil war; and later when the Spanish Republic disbanded all foreigners fighting with them. It was in some ways a relief that Carlo had not lived to see his friends reduced to murderous in-fighting and the Republic fail to transform the Spanish Civil War into a global crusade against fascism.
The house in Villars was remote, and they saw very few people. Later, Silvia and Paola would remember their mother and grandmother listening to Beethoven’s Seventh with tears in their eyes. The solitude was such, Amelia wrote to Zia Gì, that ‘I no longer think that I belong to the species of sociable animals.’ She could find
no religious faith to fall back on and reported that even the pleasure in books seemed to have deserted her. ‘The word future’, she wrote, ‘has no meaning for me. In fact, it frightens me. I go forwards, looking backwards.’ But Amelia was made of strong stuff, and she needed more than the silent Swiss mountains could provide. Switzerland was indeed peaceful, but it was peaceful intellectually too, and living so far from ‘the great universal problems, from great ideas’ was not good enough. What was more, it was not good enough for the children either, for whom she wanted ‘a country with wide horizons, a long history, intellectual richness’.
Amelia at Quainton in Buckinghamshire
Nello’s four children at Quainton
Maria had decided that England would suit them all better, and in October 1939, when the Swiss refused to renew the children’s visas on the grounds that they had enough Italian exiles already, they moved first to Eastbourne and then to the little village of Quainton in Buckinghamshire. But here the house was unheated and the pipes froze and, accustomed to the warmth of Italy, the women found the cold unbearable. There was no good local school so the girls had to be sent away as boarders, to a school where the windows were kept open at night all through the winter and Silvia was bullied until she learnt to hide her feelings and made the other pupils laugh with imitations of Mussolini.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 41