That afternoon of Friday 15 October, a message reached Claretta to join her lover at the beach. Mussolini was the first to get to Castelporziano. ‘Happy to see the sun’, he entered the little room there and stripped off his working clothes (usually a battered blue suit rather than party uniform). ‘Now,’ he announced contentedly to his partner when she arrived, ‘two or three hours of sunshine and freedom.’5 She undressed too; a photographic record of her swimming costume survives, even if it now seems scarcely ‘very brief’, as contemporary critics judged it.6 Two-piece costumes had been pioneered in Italy by the slimmer Edda Ciano.7 Despite her three children, the Duce’s elder daughter, at the beach or in an evening gown at the gambling tables, scandalously resembled the image of the donna crisi (‘neurotic woman’) derided by Fascist propaganda. By contrast, Petacci’s two-piece was a little bulky, and suggested that Claretta had a well-developed bosom and hips, with the rest of her body appearing sturdy as well. At a glance, she, unlike Edda, whom she growingly viewed as a rival,8 looked like the natural donna madre (ideal mother), meant to be the norm for all Italians.9
Sunbathing stimulated meandering conversation between the two lovers, with the main initial topic being their family lives. Through his recent naval, academic and political activities, Marcello Petacci, Mussolini stated, would win applause, although he did warn Claretta that her brother should not be quite so outspoken in opinion and judgement. His private secretary Osvaldo Sebastiani, he confided, had told him that Marcello was ‘a little exuberant but really very nice’. Sebastiani had therefore been, and by implication remained, happy to assist him in appointment and promotion as Claretta wanted.
Marcello’s manifold dealings were destined regularly to preoccupy the couple (indeed, only ten days later, Claretta was earnestly defending her brother against a charge that he had flown illegally low in his plane and had to circumvent pious protestations from her lover that it would be improper for him to interfere in the case).10 But, on this day, Mussolini wandered into a disquisition about Vittorio, his eldest son, who was currently touring the USA.11 There, he was aiming to improve communication between the raffish world of Italian cinema – where Vittorio was, despite his youth, a leading figure – and Hollywood. As far as grand politics were concerned, Vittorio, his father observed complacently, had reported that Americans were afraid of the Duce but retained sympathy for his human character, whereas they simply detested Hitler. His clever son, he remarked, had not allowed himself to fall for the lures of the stars and starlets of US films. ‘He says they are almost all ugly and any physical attraction that they have is due to the make-up artists . . . They can completely re-fashion a face, add a bit to a nose, push out a cheek or a forehead. They create a face to fit the scene that the artist has to play,’ the wide-eyed dictator continued, trying to seem knowing but actually displaying provincial innocence about the cunning skills of cinema and the rich wonders of American capitalism. Vittorio had also been to New York and slept on the 14th and the 17th floors of a skyscraper. But, his father insisted with family pride, he had not been over-impressed, since he was a tough, sensible, Italian boy, a Mussolini, ‘not afraid of anything’. When he returned to Italy, his father published a piece of his in Il Popolo d’Italia. Entitled ‘Cinema Americano-Cinema Ebreo’ (American cinema, Jewish cinema), the article gave Vittorio the chance to deride the communist penetration of Hollywood, denouncing the place for being ‘as full of Jews as Tel Aviv’.12
Once launched into his family review, Mussolini was hard to stop. Anna Maria was still afflicted by polio, he mused. When she tried to walk by herself she often sagged to the ground. Then she would struggle up and say nothing but be visibly crestfallen, ‘poor little thing’. As she recovered into a difficult life, Anna Maria mostly struck her father with her ruthless avoidance of sentimentality, unmoved by the sight of a lamb being butchered or a pet fish dying. It was the way of a modern child, he philosophised.13 Anna Maria, he confided on a later occasion, reacted like a stone when, in March 1939, he took a tumble from his horse in front of her. ‘She did not bat an eyelash, she showed no emotion.’ ‘Perhaps she has already suffered too much,’ he added with paternal generosity and excuse.14 In fact, there were few signs that his younger daughter had earned the place in his heart possessed by his eldest child, although Edda’s wayward or independent behaviour also frequently made him grumble.
Most recently, Ciano’s wife had been a worry, he told Claretta, since she had hired a German governess for her children who sought, ‘in the Prussian manner’, to discipline her elder son Fabrizio, ensuring that he ran wild whenever she was absent. In any case, Mussolini added, again sounding like the vehicle of popular prejudice, ‘I disapprove completely since these foreigners brought into the home are all spies. My wife hates them,’ he observed; Rachele may also be presumed to have damned Edda’s bathing costume, in her view almost as deplorable as her son-in-law’s effete fondness for golf. In her dress and in many other aspects of her high-society lifestyle, Edda was annoyingly intractable, which meant, her father lamented to his lover, that the regime could not give her worthy employment. Mussolini confessed that he sometimes wondered if Ciano doubted whether he should have married the Duce’s daughter. This comment elicited from the jealous Claretta a tart reply that Ciano owed everything to his father-in-law and, when Mussolini tried to point out that he was a bright boy, she told him ingratiatingly that ‘he lives from your light, like all the rest’.
Then Mussolini, still a little ruffled, promised to calm such waves. ‘I’ll talk very clearly to my daughter. She’s a really difficult woman, strange. But I dominate her.’ Anyway there were other matters at hand, a late lunch and lovemaking, with a diversion into a discussion of the Petacci family plans to acquire land for what would become the Villa Camilluccia. The dictator was anxious that the building not be situated too far away from his office or the Villa Torlonia. ‘I don’t want to make love only once a week like a peasant, all the more since I am accustomed to you and to frequent sex and I hope you don’t want to change the rhythm of things,’ he retorted half jokingly. That thought stimulated them into intercourse instead of the kisses and caresses that they had been exchanging while they chatted. It proved to be, Claretta judged in what would become a habit of assessment, ‘a mad embrace’ and was followed by a walk before the dictator left at 4.20 p.m., after she had first helped him to dress. Once back in Rome, he rang her again at 6, 8, 9.30 and 10 p.m., on the last occasion to say that he was going to bed, signing off fondly ‘Today has been delightful, divine. I love you.’15
When it came to sex, Petacci kept a record by writing the word si (‘yes’, thus underlined) into her diary, sometimes but not always followed by her assessment of the quality of their congress. Her si must have recorded orgasm on her lover’s part, and presumably her own, although her Catholic education had left her ill equipped to provide much detail about the physical side of their lovemaking. Nonetheless, over the months, a history of their intercourse was registered. It mixed violence and satisfaction, gross patriarchy and stubborn love.
On 4 November, a national holiday celebrating Italian victory in the First World War, the partners, back at the beach (Mussolini sometimes got there to his boyish pleasure riding his own motorcycle),16 squabbled over whether their intercourse was still ‘up to standard’ (vibrante). That debate was, however, enough for the Duce to curl up in her arms ‘like a great big cat and shut his eyes’. Then he informed her that he really loved her and her flesh, initiating intercourse ‘like a madman, like a wounded beast; it is divine’. Maybe the penile power that he had exerted prompted Mussolini, after they drew apart, to dream in Freudian manner of a ‘colossal’ monument to himself carrying a 2-metre-long drawn sword, of sufficient loftiness for children to gasp: ‘This was Mussolini.’17 On another occasion, the Duce persuaded her to sunbathe nude with him, presumably out of sight of police agents, in what he claimed was ‘the Arab style’,18 and they also once made love, although not very rewardingly accord
ing to Claretta, in the sand dunes.19
Most of the time sex was energetic and pleasurable, even if, on one occasion, she recorded that her partner had left a deep wound in her ear by biting it hard during intercourse.20 On another occasion, he scratched her nose painfully, with the explanation that, sometimes, ‘I lose control. If it wasn’t that way we’d be having sex like a married pair, tired out.’21 During a third coupling he bellowed, ‘I love you madly. I want to thrash you, harm you, be brutal with you. Why does my love express itself with such violence’? he asked. ‘A need to crush and to break, it’s a violent thrust. I am a wild animal. Every strong thing, every great sensation, gives me this sense of impetuous force,’ he announced with brazen Fascist manliness.22
Whether such impulse to rape was his ordinary mode may be doubted but, when Claretta was less responsive than usual and he particularly savage, Mussolini chided her: ‘you’ve been like a wife, paying your tax just as a wife does’. When eventually she helped him dress, his mood darkened and he murmured ‘the Latin phrase: post coitum’, an intimation of death that recurred on later occasions following their mating.23 In April 1938 the Duce reacted violently to her comment that he was too tired and flaccid for intercourse, biting into her shoulder in a way that left his teeth marks on her skin.24 On New Year’s Day 1939 he verbalised his depression by upbraiding his young lover: ‘You are inhuman. You really have let me down. It’s true; I don’t love you any more. It is all over and I have almost decided only to let you come [to the Sala dello Zodiaco] for important days, ceremonies and such things, like that for [Neville] Chamberlain [the British prime minister was due to visit during the following week in a last British attempt at appeasing the Italian dictator]. Afterwards, I’ll just live alone. I like solitude. I’m getting old, really old,’ he continued dismally. Why could he not find time to relax as Hitler did? he asked (with the sort of aggrieved sentiment that a neoliberal CEO feels when he finds he only earns 10 million per year while a colleague and rival nets 20 million). The Italian dictator was always working and far too hard, he muttered. But a siesta revived him and his spirits, and he and his biddable lover were soon having what Claretta deemed another ‘loving’ orgasm.25
Fiery sex, Mussolini philosophised in happier vein, was ‘good for you, it refreshes ideas, expands the vision, helps the brain, makes a man perceptive, splendid’. ‘I’d like to jump from here onto your bed like a big tomcat,’ he added with his usual male bravado.26 When he and his lover were apart, sex did not lose its charge. Rather Mussolini rang the Petacci household time and again, eleven times on 6 December 1937 alone, the last from the Palazzo Torlonia after midnight just to say that he could not forget her for an instant, bidding farewell with the thought that no one was more beautiful than she.27 On 3 January 1938 his tally of telephone calls reached thirteen (at 8.45, 10.45 and 11.30 a.m., and at 2.30, 3, 3.15, 4, 6, 6.15, 7, 8, 8.15 and 9.45 p.m.).28
Here indeed was a national boss who did not always have government business at the top of his agenda. His sex talk could become crude. On Christmas Day 1937 he rang from his office where he was at work, perhaps grumpily so since he began by expatiating on a nameless earlier lover whom he had mistrusted and spied on to find she had betrayed him and so, he announced abruptly, ‘I left her.’ With that misanthropic warning off his chest, Mussolini continued in what may have been for him the Yuletide spirit: ‘Darling, you are enough for me. Do you realise that I don’t do anything except think of you? Morning, evening and night. For example, if at night I wake up and go down to piss [Mussolini was approaching his fifty-fifth birthday and such need may have been increasing], a lot of the time I am so drowsy that I do it on the floor. Then you come into my mind and I think: if only you were here and doing it [urinating] from the other place, wouldn’t that be nice? I am really amazed that I think of you so much.’29
Yet, on occasion, their tie could become almost lyrical. On Sunday, 28 February 1938, after attending mass, Claretta reached the Sala dello Zodiaco at 3 p.m. to find the Duce reading the Romagnol poet Luigi Orsini, who intermingled localism and Fascism in his verses. Mussolini recited words about a dying boy asking his mother for his uniform until his own voice broke. With his eyes full of tears and unable to go on, he pushed the book over to Claretta: ‘I bowed my head and placed my cheek on his and we read together in silence, united, filled with emotion. At the end we looked into each other’s eyes and our souls came together in emotional understanding. We had tears on our eyelids just like kids. His soul is grand. He read a bit more from here and there to recover himself.’30
Often now, especially in the room that they utilised at the Palazzo Venezia, afternoon sex would be followed by a more practical snooze, with Claretta youthfully acknowledging that the Duce snored on such occasions.31 On others he rehearsed in his sleep memories of his conquests of two decades ago,32 in his devotion to history (of a kind) again characteristically mixing his private and public preoccupations.33 Occasionally, when he woke, the couple had sex again. They did so for example on 13 March 1938, while Mussolini tried to digest the news from the outside world that the Anschluss was imminent and with it the ruin of Italy’s strategic gains over Germanic Europe won in 1918. As Claretta recorded: ‘we made love like mad, enough to make your heart sore, and then immediately afterwards we did it again. Then he slept, completely out of it and happy.’34 On New Year’s Day 1939, they also managed intercourse twice, once in the afternoon after he had taken a refreshing nap, and then again in the evening following a period when he had gone back into his office and reappeared, only at first to flip angrily through the French newspapers. That day had begun with five phone calls before Claretta reached the Palazzo Venezia at 2.45 p.m., but she was still inclined to grouse to her diary about his preoccupation with government business.35 Trying to be generous, on 25 May 1938 the dictator assured his lover that, from now on, the Sala dello Zodiaco was hers to visit and use whenever she wanted,36 although whether she might be bored and lonely while waiting for his attention was not a question that he asked.
Reading Boccaccio made him horny, as he confessed to Petacci with a degree of innocence on the phone: ‘Yes, the pictures [in the book] are amazing. There’s an image of a naked woman bringing plates to men sitting around a table. No, it doesn’t interest me,’ he added unconvincingly. ‘But the style is pleasurable, interesting, always original.’37 On another occasion, he divulged that, at the family farm at Villa Carpena, he had watched a bull mating with a cow, ‘a grandiose spectacle’. ‘In a few seconds’ it was all over, he mused. ‘It happens with bellowing, deep breathing, tremendous groans. Then the animal quickly gets down, melancholy, beaten as though he had been hit.’ ‘Isn’t nature marvellous?’ he concluded to his lover, whose genteel urban lifestyle did not normally take in such sights.38 His personal sense of bullish power could even persuade him to reject artificial insemination of cattle as unfair to the animals involved.39
Sometimes, after intercourse, Mussolini simply went back to work in his office, on occasion after eating an orange or some other fruit, although there were also plenty of occasions when the couple listened to classical music together: their middlebrow bourgeois tastes took in The Merry Widow, Rossini, Puccini, Verdi, Vivaldi, Chopin, Wagner (Tannhäuser and Lohengrin) and Beethoven.40 On 26 December 1937 disconcerting static from the regime’s growing anti-Semitism afflicted their pleasure when Mussolini muttered that Beethoven was great but it was ‘a shame that he was a Jew. Great but still a Jew.’ That ‘knowledge’ did not stop them from listening to the celebrated German romantic composer on other occasions, however.41 Contemporary music, by contrast, they agreed was ‘nauseating’ (only a fool could prefer the celebrated contemporary, ‘modernist’ composer Alfredo Casella to Verdi, Mussolini advised his lover).42 Indeed, the last act of La Traviata made the dictator sob out loud (although he tried to hide his tears and emotion from Claretta).43 La Bohème similarly caused him to quiver with tearful sentiment.44 For these lovers’ emotional life, music was the natural
partner of sex, and included occasions when Mussolini played his violin to her.
To be sure, sometimes Claretta jotted into her diary the news that the dictator was ‘too nervous’ at some political issue or other to attempt intercourse45 or was ‘slack’ when they tried a second intimacy.46 On other occasions, the pain from his ulcer made his performance of a kind that she reckoned was ‘lacking in enthusiasm’ and could be followed by his begging her for a bread roll to eat and so alleviate his stomach pains; in her memoirs Myriam recalled that the hampers that her mother packed for the lovers’ picnics outside Rome were sometimes almost too heavy to carry.47 Moreover, there were days when his passion was already spent, times when, as will be outlined below, Claretta was sure that he had already exhausted himself on another partner.48 And, as he ruminated only too frequently, he was getting old. On 2 November 1939 he appeared before her unshaven and tired, to lament that his younger children were not starring at school. Bad-temperedly he pulled out of intercourse before attaining full satisfaction.49 Then and earlier, enveloping European crises could demand Mussolini’s presence elsewhere, but when, for example, he came back from the Munich conference, briefly convinced that it had been his personal triumph, the couple’s passion in their renewed meeting on 1 October 1938 was great. ‘It is 2 p.m. when I get there and he is waiting for me in an armchair in the dark. “Love, turn on the light. I’m here. You can’t see me”. He embraces me and kisses me like a madman. With our lips united we fall into the armchair. Never have we made love like this. Perhaps the first time. But now it is more perfect. With our clothes pulled down we make love twice. He says to me quietly: “I’ve suffered being so far from you.”’50
Their conversation could take strange turns, as it did, for example, on Easter Day 1939, when Mussolini suddenly confided that in 1907 he had seen the Devil, ‘a very tall black man dressed in evening clothes and notably elegant’. The spectre had offered the young Mussolini a choice, to be made within five minutes, of wealth, power or glory. Mussolini, with the Devil’s approval, opted for glory and swore to his lover: ‘I am in part a devilish creature and, for three quarters, a creature of God in whom I sincerely and profoundly believe.’ Claretta did not register how her Catholic training judged such confession but soon they made love, ‘with a tenderness and a passion equalled on few other occasions’, only to quarrel afterwards about his infidelities, while he morosely let slip that he was ill with the flu.51 Six months later, he repeated the story with some variations and a precise placing in a restaurant at Tolmezzo, where he had taught scuola elementare (early primary school) in 1906. The Devil was no longer black but was tall and dressed in evening clothes and had cloven feet. Again he gave Mussolini five minutes to decide but this time the Duce opted for power instead of glory, once more to the Devil’s pleasure and approval but with a cry that ‘your soul is mine’. Only the arrival of a friend, who recited the Lord’s Prayer fervently to a stunned Mussolini, cut through the overwhelming tension that had filled the room and stopped the Duce himself from any appeal to God.52
Claretta Page 15