No police guards intervened. To Claretta’s effusive greeting, Mussolini replied cautiously, enquiring about her family car’s Vatican number plates. When Claretta told him who her father was, he, attuned to the nuances of status, politely claimed to have heard of Francesco Saverio Petacci as ‘among the best-regarded doctors’ in Rome. He added winningly that he knew Claretta, too, from her poetry and correspondence that his office had received. When addressing Federici, he more soberly elicited his rank and air base. Courteously, the Duce then said goodbye. More than satisfied, Claretta stumbled back to the family car in a state of high emotion, declaring that destiny had made the magical meeting possible.16
No doubt it might have been just an accidental rendezvous with no particular meaning or result. Mussolini was guiding his country through what his most comprehensive biographer, De Felice, called ‘the years of [popular] consent’ and expected his countrymen and countrywomen to love and adore him. Claretta, it is often contended, had been infatuated with the dictator from the time of Gibson’s assassination attempt or earlier. Yet, there had been rumours that she had found a boyfriend, the son of a rich businessman, at Grottaferrata in the Alban hills in 1928,17 and she was now engaged to Federici, whom she automatically hauled along with her in salutation. Even though Claretta’s own obsessive version of her history would become that she had adored Mussolini from the very first, it was not yet wholly clear that her crush was anything more than that, nor that she had determined from her early teenage years to dedicate her sexuality, life and death to the Duce.
* * *
Three days later Mussolini, who was either predatory or missing Edda, was on the phone to the Petaccis. According to Myriam, who may well have added a sentimental gloss to the story, Mussolini asked to speak to Claretta, identifying himself theatrically as ‘the man from Ostia’. Then the stunned family heard Claretta say: ‘Yes, Duce. Yes, Your Excellency. Thank you, yes.’18 When Claretta put down the receiver, she related that she had been summoned to Mussolini’s office in the Palazzo Venezia. A pass was awaiting her. Mussolini wanted her personally to read her poetry to him.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Giuseppina was perturbed at the call – as Myriam put it, ‘Mussolini did not rejoice in a good name in regard to women’ – but everyone in the family agreed that Claretta must accept the invitation. Mother, always the dominant personality in the Petacci household, took pains to decide what her daughter should wear: a brownish woollen dress, stylish shoes and matching bag, and a neat little hat. Soon mother and daughter were being driven by the family chauffeur the few hundred metres that separated their flat from the Palazzo Venezia. When Claretta went inside, Giuseppina sat in the car and prayed.19
Cliché would predict that, if Petacci were still a virgin, she must have emerged from her ‘interview’ one no longer, and Giuseppina’s prayers must have been stimulated by that fear. But in fact, again according to Myriam, this first conversation stuck to banalities, with Mussolini remarking mildly that he had thought her much younger than twenty, perhaps still a schoolgirl of fourteen. Rather as if he were addressing a teenager, he turned the conversation to her interests, from culture to sport, and then sent her away with a suggestion to come back with the poems she had not had time to read on this occasion.
What is to be made of this meeting? An older man’s preliminaries in seduction? Mussolini-style grooming? Very likely. Flattery was evidently involved, just as it had been in the encounter at Ostia. And, fifteen years earlier, Mussolini had seduced and abandoned the teenaged Bianca Ceccato, although since then his lust seemed to have been satisfied by older women. After all, there was another parallel, one with different implications in regard to Mussolini’s motivation and behaviour. When, from Easter 1942, Mussolini revived his interest in Elena Curti, his illegitimate daughter, he similarly called her to his office or rang her late at night for regular chats, often about philosophy, partly hoping for congratulations about his own elevated intellectuality (‘Professor’ Mussolini again), partly with an apparent interest in a younger (female) mind and its preoccupations, and partly with an almost ingenuous pleasure in being able to be a young woman’s patron.20 He even asked that she address him as tu.21 Elena Curti’s Mussolini was more a sugar daddy than the violent Ejaculator of Gadda’s imagining.
What, then, would be Claretta’s fate? Meetings and telephone contact, once initiated, continued. A companion of his early days as a Fascist remembered Mussolini’s calls graphically as ‘febrile, wandering, nervous, calm, curious, pernickety, obsessive, acute, ingenuous, clever,’ by no means narrowly focused in other words; the dictator certainly found time for very many conversations, every day.22 As will be seen, Claretta was sometimes the recipient of a dozen or more during her waking hours. From November 1932 she began to record them in some detail, however banal their content. Quite often Mussolini’s prime task was to explain to a precociously jealous Claretta why there were fallow periods in his attention to her. ‘For two months,’ she told him half accusingly, she had scarcely been away from the family phone in the hope that, at some precious moment, she would again hear his voice. If he did not ring, she wrote instead, obsequiously informing him that she was trembling with emotion as she put pen to paper. She, ‘just a little thing’, could not dare to approach him except for her ‘immense desire, [her] joy to be able to see you again and because of [her] memory of your lovely goodness’ (she habitually used the formal Lei to address him, a word choice about to be damned as effeminate and foreign by the new populist PNF secretary, Achille Starace).23 Another phone call ended with Mussolini counting on his fingers the ‘two months and two days’ since they had last been in communication. ‘How awful!’ he said, perhaps lost for better words. ‘Yes, it is really awful,’ she replied and won from Mussolini a promise that he would call again the next day.24
Gradually, however, another theme began to enter their conversations, one that was familial in nature and where the initiative came from Claretta. When they were in direct contact, Signorina Petacci, rather than merely worshipping the great dictator, eagerly besought him for advantages to her father, her brother and her fiancé, for raccomandazioni, for special privileges, for financial gain, for promotion, for circumventing the bureaucratic system. (Party Secretary Starace had banned such behaviour on at least three occasions).25 For the moment at least, Claretta did not mention the purist ideals of the Fascist revolution, with its strict hierarchical rules and pledged hatred of ‘corruption’. Her family mattered more than her ideology (if she had one). As she petitioned her hero, Claretta began to seek reward for her devotion, rather as Italian Catholics have been found to view their ties with a local saint or with some emanation of the Madonna: godlike beings, yes, but ones that must forever prove themselves generous benefactors.
* * *
The new and momentous year of 1933 began. On 30 January President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, a rise to power destined to set Europe ablaze, and a change in government that, for the moment, Italian Fascists, including Mussolini, viewed equivocally.26 At that time, the Duce still had every reason to think of himself as dictator major, even if, on 29 July 1933, he would pass the milestone of his fiftieth birthday. Photos from this period show a nuggety, fit-looking man, still possessed of a firm stomach – it was said that he weighed himself daily and hated the idea of running to fat.27 Unlike most politicians of his era, he was ready to display his physique to his adoring public, for example when striding along the beach in his bathers at Riccione in the company of his client authoritarian leader in Vienna, Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934). The Austrian chancellor, a decade Mussolini’s junior, was more fastidiously sporting a suit and tie, although the heat had forced him to remove his soft hat and carry his coat slung over an arm.28 Even as Mussolini showed off his masculine athleticism, one small private sign of doubts about the future could be detected in the decision to shave his head. It was the sure way to hide the visible whitening of his hair. Mussolini was, howev
er, still equipped with his famous jutting chin, fleshy mouth and burning eyes, these last automatically transfixing onlookers (a common talent of those said to bear charisma). A sometimes visibly happy dictator, he could still smile in public, not yet fully transmogrified into the stern, ‘granitic’ figure that he would become by the later 1930s.
For Claretta Petacci, 1933 was the year when her family celebrated her twenty-first birthday. She had a roundish face, quite a prominent nose and dark, on occasion heavily waved, hair. She was neither tall nor slender but her bust was well developed, and one – decidedly catty – upper-class critic conceded that she had ‘beautiful legs’.29 Her fiancé, Federici, was appreciably taller than she was and his hair was beginning to thin, although it remained youthfully black. Petacci was said to be a nervous eater but did love chocolates. Although possessed of a better swimming style than the Duce, she was not especially athletic, often happy to remain in bed, armed with a box of chocolates, well into the late morning. Jewels and furs could similarly improve her days. She liked Lanvin and Arpège perfumes,30 Parisian products that broke the regime’s rules on autarky and the compulsory use of ‘made in Italy’ products. Among high-society dames, Claretta was scarcely alone in such preference and behaviour. In most ways she was an unremarkable young bourgeois woman.
Yet she was also persistent. A record grew of her petitions to the Duce for special help to her father in a law case, and for early promotion for Federici. When Mussolini huffed and puffed in response, with sententious statements that ‘in ten years I have never interfered with the course of justice, out of a deep sense of conscience’, and that, even though he was the chief of all, he could not break the formal procedures of officer ranking, she did not back off. Rather she assured him that he did indeed have total power: could he not find some way to advantage her and hers? ‘It’s precisely because a law bans it,’ she remarked blithely, ‘that I have asked for your support. Otherwise it would just be stupid to disturb you.’31
On 15 December 1932 a lengthy phone conversation about such issues took a strange turn when Mussolini, perhaps trying to fob off Claretta and her importunities, asked her what she wanted to do with her life. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied skittishly, ‘to live, to do something, to achieve my possibilities, to do something, I repeat, that will fill my life.’ Pressed further, Claretta retreated, saying ‘I’m afraid of talking rubbish. You [she was still using the polite third-person form, whereas he used the ‘intimate’ tu, more as a reflection of their age difference than of genuine intimacy] are such a superlatively intelligent man . . . and I am just a child. You might just tease me.’ Nonetheless she tentatively raised an idea that she must have read about somewhere of taking on a career as a secret agent. She could follow the path of people who had worked secretly for Napoleon (a personage destined to recur in their conversations). Mussolini – perhaps thinking of Brambilla or his desk drawer of secret denunciations or the Petacci family’s Vatican connections – did not dismiss the idea. Rather, he warned her sapiently that becoming a spy must mean utterly changing her life. ‘A dangerous activity and one of sacrifice’; once she entered the profession, she could not retreat, he added portentously.
When, perhaps struck by the absurdity of their theme, he began to hesitate and reiterate that she was just a child and he would have to wait until her understanding matured, she interrupted him with another strange query. ‘And can these informers also have a husband? . . . Can they be faithful or must they by necessity . . .?’ Here Mussolini, sounding sternly parental, cut her short. ‘Ah no! Indeed no, Clara, if I’d thought you were going to propose such infamy, such a low and vulgar bargain, I would not have let you speak, I would not have let you continue. I respect you too much to make such a shameful proposal. Ah no! For you to sleep with men, no, never, Clara.’ He then affirmed that, even in the greater world, with a few wartime exceptions, such things never happened. It was time to hang up. But Claretta managed to slip in a last request that he ring again soon, and to ask his judgement of her father, whom he had just met again. ‘Excellent,’ Mussolini replied automatically, ‘he made a great impression on me.’32
At 7 p.m. on 30 January 1933, the very day that in Germany Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, Mussolini and Petacci had another of their increasingly cosy meetings at the Palazzo Venezia. As Claretta did not fail to record, Mussolini sat on the arm of his chair with his feet on its leather surface. In what was perhaps mock anger he raised with her a report that he had received, accusing Federici of flying too low over Rome, with an official request that he must therefore be rebuked, and then transferred after a week or two in military confinement. In response, however, Claretta switched the conversation to sex and corruption. The problem was, she reckoned, that a married captain had tried making ‘shameful court’ to her in the presence of her mother and father and although it was well known that she was engaged. She had rejected the propositioning of course. But from then on, a ‘clique’ had shamefully pursued a vendetta against her poor fiancé. It was a wicked world, it seemed, enough to make Mussolini stop teasing her about Federici.33
So their relationship continued as an odd couple. Most initiative came from Claretta. Only a few days after their talk about Federici, she scribbled down her thoughts on a train trip and sent them on to the dictator. Her spirit, she declared a little glumly, ‘stays with you. My soul has been taken over. Only my body is here.’34 On 18 April 1933 she wrote still more gushingly to say that she had just survived a dreadfully sad Easter but now the anniversary of the 24th was approaching. ‘I know that you [Ella] have heaps to do but I don’t know how to tell you that I’d love to come to Your [office] on the 24th, Monday. Do you not remember anything of this date? For me it was the happiest day of my life, the most precious moment when you spoke to me for the first time. I try to preserve for ever my gentle, sweet, shiver [of that day], that same violent emotion. How I trembled – do You remember? – but it wasn’t the cold. Be nice, I beg You, and let me be near You on Monday.’35
Amid such effusions, she did not forget family duty. So she sent to the Duce copies of papers that her brother had written and pressed him for a positive reaction; before long, Mussolini rang to say that a good job was indeed coming Marcello’s way.36 Yet, mostly, her letters brimmed with her utter devotion, a sentiment harder and harder to separate from physical love, all the more so given that her conservative upbringing made it almost impossible for her openly to express sexual desire.37 So she was left to beseech ‘one little word from you’ (now she switched to the party-approved Voi to address him, not the conventionally formal Ella). She could only compare him to the Sun God: ‘I cannot live without your warmth,’ she wrote. When she saw him at a parade, she explained that his presence aroused in her ‘the ecstasy of my heart throbbing with affection. You who dominate the world gave me a smile. You were aware of me and so made me infinitely happy. Thanks.’38
In March 1934 another long conversation in the Palazzo Venezia potentially signalled a turning point in the contact between the two. Their conversation started predictably enough, with Claretta pushing the Duce for a change in Marcello’s temporary and precarious academic status as a doctor and for an improvement in his pay. But a suddenly irritated Mussolini broke in to ask her ‘Why do you come? It is absurd, ridiculous, it does not make sense . . . I am old,’ he added mournfully. ‘You are a child.’ But then Claretta had an idea. ‘What if I were married?’ she asked. Mussolini was struck by the suggestion: ‘Well, then it would be different. You’d be a signora.’ ‘Well, then, let me get married,’ Claretta suggested with surprising aplomb. ‘Me?’ Mussolini exclaimed. ‘Yes, you.’ ‘But how?’ the conversation ran on. There had been a development. ‘He [Federici] has come back,’ Claretta told the dictator.
No sooner was that information given, with its intimation that her fiancé had been flirting or worse with other women, than the conversation diverted into the fact that, as an officer, Riccardo Federici could not marry until he turned thirty,
an event still more than a year off. Moreover, he did not really earn enough to provide for a wife of Claretta’s social ambition and lifestyle. Could something be done? What about making him Mussolini’s personal air adjutant, Claretta submitted, (in what sounded like a naive proposal for a ménage à trois)? ‘No,’ replied Mussolini, ‘because they would say that he’s been made adjutant because I am a friend of his wife.’ ‘But,’ Claretta countered, ‘Napoleon always looked after his girlfriends and gave them favours.’ ‘Yes,’ was the pompous reply she drew, ‘and that was one of his weaknesses.’ Once launched, however, Claretta did not give up, not being sidetracked by a sententious Mussolini effort to underline how poor he had been as a young man. She could not cope with poverty. Rather she wanted decent pay, further promotion for her fiancé: ‘Yes, captain, then major. It would be great and then?’ she let the conversation meaningfully hang.
In response, she earned a grudging statement from Mussolini that he would see what could be done: she burst into tears of gratitude. Their conversation now became still more intimate. ‘What do you see in me?’ Mussolini asked. ‘You’re mad, you’re stupid.’ ‘I love you and . . .’ Claretta declared impetuously. ‘You love me, me,’ Mussolini responded incredulously. ‘Oh, that’s great. But I am old. You’d do better to love your fiancé Riccardo and live a quiet life.’ Up and down they went, with Claretta again seeking advantage for Federici and Mussolini reiterating that his office made him a ‘slave’ of petitioners. ‘But treat the matter as though I am your daughter,’ Claretta urged. ‘OK. But I can’t. I always strike down my relatives when I can and never give them special help. That’s just the way I am,’ Mussolini retorted, propriety personified (while, in reality, lying shamelessly).39 ‘Help me,’ Claretta again requested. Audibly tiring of the talk, Mussolini assured her one more time that he would do anything he could to assist her marriage to Lieutenant Federici, before suddenly asking whether she had eaten, intimating that it was time for her to depart.
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