Claretta

by R. J. B. Bosworth

  With the outbreak of European war (they did manage ‘savage’ intercourse on the afternoon of 30 August, despite the dictator complaining that the Germans were out of hand in their warmongering and predicting that the Maginot Line would prove ‘formidable and impossible to break’),53 Mussolini grew sentimental, worrying that his and Claretta’s love was not yet ‘continued’. So, on 13 September, after what she described as ‘a sweet and poetic’ intercourse like few others, he told her that ‘these are the embraces and divine moments’ when a woman ‘becomes a mother’.54

  Six months earlier, Mussolini had warned his lover that war could severely dent their accustomed sex life.55 Perhaps the Duce’s career as a sexual athlete was in any case in decline; Francesco Saverio Petacci sometime around now gave him a prescription for Hormovin, a German-made drug that was the Viagra of the time.56 Certainly the diary now contained fewer descriptions of ecstatic sex, with Mussolini on 16 January 1940, for example, perturbed by the war, by Hitler’s hopes to pull him into battle four years before he would be ready, and by his desire to help ‘the brave Finns’ in their winter conflict with the USSR (then the ally of Germany in the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact). Popping in and out of the Sala dello Zodiaco the Duce saluted Claretta affectionately but somewhat distractedly: ‘My love! What is my little one doing, waiting for her bridegroom? You are my darling little girl. We love each other with the tenderness of our first days, the poetry of our first days.’ Though he was deeply moved by a rendition of ‘Che gelida manina’ on the radio, Mussolini avoided sex. ‘Now I really don’t want it: I work and go to bed. Bye-bye, darling. This evening it will be Istituto Luce newsreels.’ And so, at 8.30 p.m., he limped off to the Villa Torlonia.57

  On 7 February 1940, after he was back in town from a trip to the Rocca delle Caminate, they did manage intercourse, but he slept deeply afterwards.58 On 2 March they did it twice, but on the 3rd Claretta was left to scold her partner at their ‘slack’ congress that day; it was no better on the 4th.59 In their bed-chat of the day before, Mussolini switched from a disquisition about the sexual habits of animals and birds – sparrows he admired as ‘the most lustful of creatures’ – to say: ‘Oh my love, if you could succeed in having a child, you would be so happy.’ He would be ‘very sad’, he disclosed, if she failed (keeping to his patriarchal insistence that reproduction was woman’s business). The lovemaking that followed, according to Claretta, was ‘of infinite sweetness’.60

  Two months later, their lovemaking again failed to reach full conclusion on one occasion, and he refused sex on another, with further laments that managing military action would stop them seeing each other.61 On 10 June 1940 Italy entered the Second World War on the German side, with Mussolini orating in (premature) triumph to a crowd that had been assembled by 5 p.m. below his balcony on the Palazzo Venezia. Ciano more dolefully scribbled into his diary: ‘The adventure begins. May God help Italy.’62 While such momentous events were occurring, Claretta was waiting in the Sala dello Zodiaco, where she had been summoned by three phone calls at 9.15 a.m., 9.50 a.m. and 12.15 p.m. She found the dictator ‘twitching like a beast, shouting wildly, beside himself’. But she calmed him down and he was then so ‘tender, loving and understanding’ that she burst into tears. Mussolini gave assurance that he would still love her despite the war and left, without sex, at 9 p.m., only to ring her three more times once he was home.63 In one of those conversations, the tap, kept by the secret police even on the dictator’s phone, recorded a quarrel over whether current politics should outweigh ‘love’ in their relationship.64

  With the great decision made, intercourse became more active, being ‘violent’ on 13 June and ‘enthusiastic’ on Sunday 16th, when Mussolini ejaculated twice (the two regularly had sex on the Sabbath, following Claretta’s attendance at mass).65 On the 21st they repeated their coitus, although Mussolini was troubled by sore eyes and overwork (he had long worn glasses in the office, if never when dolled up in uniform and in public). Buoyed by reports from France, on the 24th he predicted that the war would end in ‘four days’ time’, preening himself with the news that Italian soldiers had fought well. Spurred by such happy auspices, they began sexual dalliance, but Claretta’s record suggests that Mussolini then decided to pull out. She had been ‘a precious little mascot’, he told her patronisingly, but that evening he was ‘tired’, while he was again drooping and ‘nervous’ five days later.66 Sex was better on 5 July but again ‘slack’ on the 6th, with Mussolini, despite picking up his violin to play to his partner, being ‘depressed, worried and nervous’.67 On 18 July they found time to go to the beach together and had sex twice, but Mussolini fretted about his absence from the office while Italian soldiers were dying.68

  Battle was not after all over, the war had not ended, and Italy’s pledge to run its own ‘parallel campaign’ was proving hollow. Meanwhile, before summer was out, a major crisis erupted in the lovers’ lives; in his personal life, Mussolini’s hope in ‘continuation’ with Claretta would be frustrated just as surely as the war was not bringing victory. Claretta was pregnant. But she was not destined to be another lover who would transmit Mussolini’s blood to a new generation. Nor had she yet alerted the Duce to her condition. On 19 August he expected to see her, despite being crotchety after reviewing a parade of party sportspersons whose female members, he grumbled, had no experience of gymnastics and were hopelessly inadequate compared with the ‘magnificent’, ‘tough’ young men. After three phone calls she did arrive at the Palazzo Venezia, if more tardily than usual. She was feeling unwell and that made the egotistical Duce irritable and angry: he openly insulted her and said it was time to end their relationship. His crossness prompted her to burst into tears and she blubbered for half an hour without him offering comfort. Their tryst continued to go badly, with Mussolini distractedly mulling over accounts from the front in East Africa and eventually going home to watch a film.

  Eventually realising that something must be wrong, he rang her flat at 10.50, 11, 11.30, 11.45 p.m. and midnight to find his lover in agony from what was quickly being diagnosed in her medical household as an extra-uterine pregnancy.69 Over the next days, Claretta’s condition worsened, while she was racked by ‘atrocious stomach pains’. Mussolini, who knew something about physical discomfort in that part of his body, was aghast at his lover’s fate, even if he could be distracted by fear that Rachele had overheard one of his phone calls. At 6 p.m. on 20 August he appeared at the Villa Camilluccia, where the Petaccis had moved the previous October amid congratulations from Mussolini to Claretta about her finding her ‘nest’,70 to swear the depth of his love and to talk sentimentally about Edda and his grandchildren. On the 21st and 22nd he rang no fewer than twenty times each day. On the 21st he started at 6.15 a.m., excusing the dawn call with the information that he had been afflicted with insomnia, and offering Claretta the perhaps unhelpful counsel that she should try to sleep in till 9 a.m. Just after noon that day Giuseppina informed him that her daughter would have to have an operation, a recourse to imponderable medical experts for which he held a native fear. He dropped by the Villa Camilluccia again at 7 in the evening to swear: ‘I have infinite anguish in thinking of your suffering. I’m suffering what you’re suffering’, failing as so often to move the conversation too far from himself.71

  At 6.20 p.m. on the 22nd he was back again, ‘smiling’, announcing that she was looking better and declaring ‘now I’ll cuddle up close and that will cure you at once’. He then launched into a rambling conversation asking for the medical opinion of her father and describing the alleged failure of an air raid on the Caproni factory at his hometown of Predappio. ‘I work like a black man, like a dog. I only have work and you: nothing and no one else,’ he maintained. Despite the fact that he claimed to be worried about her moving in her bed of pain, Claretta performed some sort of sex act on him, whether masturbation or fellatio is unclear. He then went on to chat about his family and high politics, before further cross-examining Francesco Saverio about the coming
operation. He left for the Villa Torlonia at 8.15 p.m., not forgetting to reward Claretta first with many kisses. He rang again at 8.45, 9.15, 9.45, 10.15 and 10.45 p.m., with a wish that she, and he, sleep well; he was off to ‘beddy-byes’, as he put it playfully before hanging up.72

  * * *

  Claretta’s operation occurred on Tuesday, 27 August and her recovery from it was slow and probably debilitating; certainly she now stopped jotting her effusions into her diary until Christmas and beyond. It is probable that the surgeons’ intervention (they were assisted by her father) meant that she could no longer have children, although, in December 1941, she was recorded by the secret police claiming again to be pregnant, a comment that led Mussolini to declare his pleasure and announce that he did not mind if the baby was male or female.73 But it was soon clear that she was mistaken.

  During her recuperation through autumn 1940, she and Mussolini exchanged letters and phone calls which allow their relationship to be charted, if without the detail of her diary. One day in October that he deemed full of ‘the grave, gravest, great and important events’ (Italy’s humiliatingly unsuccessful invasion of Greece began on the 28th, without the Germans being forewarned), he rang her seven times in the afternoon, fitted in a game of tennis at the Villa Torlonia and reached the Villa Camilluccia just before 7 p.m. They engaged in sex of some kind (another si in her scribbles), before he talked over her condition with her father and then departed to ring again at 8.45, 9.15 and 10.25 p.m., promising to return the next day.74

  By 11 December Mussolini’s mood was blacker: the campaign in Greece and Albania lurched from one disaster to the next. Now he wrote to his lover beseechingly: ‘Clara, listen. I love you as before and even more than before. But I beg you on my knees to leave me alone, alone with my struggle, alone with my thoughts, alone with the drama of my life . . . I must see, I must be at the helm and I cannot be disturbed . . . My nerves are aquiver: everything goes badly, everything is upside down. I’m on the phone from one minute to the next and God knows that I am at work trying to fix things up and get things done.’

  Such rhetoric might craft an image of a stalwart dictator working away at his desk. But Mussolini’s plea this day was at least partly inspired by the fact that on the 9th he had been forced to admit that he had spent half an hour with Alice Pallottelli. Love between Ben and Clara there might have been – and on 24 April 1941, the ninth anniversary of their meeting, he was to give her the gold locket and chain with the inscription: ‘Clara, I am you and you are me. Ben.’75 As noted above, she would carry it to her death. However, along with love, there was also jealousy, continued violent squabbling over Mussolini’s failure to end his relationship either with Pallottelli or, more especially, with Romilda Ruspi. Then there was the fact that Mussolini was a married man, who, at the Villa Torlonia, lived for at least some of the year with his wife and (legitimate) children.

  When it came to Rachele, the record in Claretta’s diary is, for the most part, a highly predictable repetition of the vocabulary of adultery. In autumn 1937 Mussolini dilated on more than one occasion about his wife’s limitations. She had ‘never thought of me as a great man and never taken a part in my [real] life,’ he growled egotistically. He was sure that, at the Villa Carpena, a local squadrist called Corrado Valori had been Rachele’s lover for some years.76 Sex acts between him and his wife, he reckoned, were down to ‘seven or eight per year’, with his sexual desire, but not perhaps hers, ‘entirely spent’. Worse were her intellectual limits: she ‘never reads anything; she doesn’t know how to read’.77 On 8 January 1938 he was still irritated by a furious fight that had broken out between them, lamenting that Rachele understood nothing about politics. He would not mind if she went out and enjoyed herself but instead, he groaned, she stayed at home and talked mutinously to the servants.78 When he did pay his tax, as he put it, to his wife, he swore that, throughout the act, he thought only of his lover.79 When he and Rachele sunbathed in spring sunshine in the park of the Villa Torlonia, all he noticed was how wrinkled she had become.80 When he saw her in her bath, her nudity did not arouse him, he promised.81 He had not slept in her bed since 1918 or thereabouts. Moreover, on the rare occasions when they made love, she never suggested that he stay for the night.82 On 13 May 1940 he did report that he had been driven to have sex with Rachele for the first time for three months but, as for its quality, it was best to keep silent.83 In any case, as he had explained cynically to Claretta three years earlier: ‘Every man betrays his wife, even barber’s boys do. All, without doubt, without justification. But I have justification,’ he concluded self-righteously.84

  As he assured his young lover in April 1939, he had only ever been attracted to Rachele physically; he had made the error more than once of mistaking lust for love, he added in typically careless betrayal of his wife. Now Claretta had taught him what love really was. ‘I think of you, I suffer [over you], I desire you.’ Their relationship was ‘beautiful, different, sublime, great’, in sum incomparable.85 No doubt it was best if they hid their lovemaking from his wife – and Rachele would insist that she had no real understanding until July 1943 of the major role that Claretta had obtained in Mussolini’s life.86 With the predictable tactics of a half-guilty adulterer, he cut his young lover off when he feared Rachele was eavesdropping on a phone call,87 and hastened to tell her to come when Rachele went away to the Villa Carpena or the Rocca delle Caminate. But, Mussolini insisted, Rachele was no competitor in his love for Claretta.

  A melodramatic confrontation between wife and lover would eventually occur, but not till late in 1944. Rather than being preoccupied with the betrayed wife, Claretta’s diary is replete with reference to her contest with Romilda Ruspi. It is a story full of weeping – even on a couple of occasions on Mussolini’s part – and other high emotion, as well as of suspicion, surveillance and continuing disloyalty. The Duce found it impossible altogether to renounce his habit of sex twice a week with a woman who, in his mind at least, remained part of the fittings of the Villa Torlonia.88 Meanwhile one hollow protestation that their affair was over succeeded another. Just before Christmas 1937, he notified Claretta that, after three recent encounters, he had broken permanently with Ruspi, who had burst into tears at the news, adding that she knew he loved Claretta as he never had her.89 Two weeks later he repeated the pledge, urging that Ruspi was now as far off as ‘Australia’ from his life.90

  Such promises were too good to be true, however. In any case, Alice Pallottelli still lived nearby. In April 1938 Claretta, who must have been watching from the Via Spallanzani, timed a Mussolini visit to her villa at twenty-four minutes, whereas he had clocked a rapid twelve and then tried to allay Claretta’s jealousy with the comment ‘All right, twenty-four minutes then. Listen, as a woman she’s past it. After seventeen years, there’s no enthusiasm. It’s just like when I take my wife.’91

  Nor had Ruspi disappeared, being duly exposed by Claretta’s neurotic tracking of her presence at this parade or that ceremony or when she turned up at the Villa Torlonia to have lunch with her sister, who still worked there. A Mussolini boast that he had gone thirty days without having sex with Ruspi or anyone else failed to make Claretta feel secure. Another twenty-five minute visit to Pallottelli reduced her to insomnia and made her refuse to take her lover’s apologetic phone calls.92 But it was Ruspi who really alarmed and dismayed Claretta, it being clear that Mussolini had not in fact cut contact with her.93 On 22 May 1938 he admitted two recent sexual encounters and told Claretta in what he must have deemed beguiling words: ‘I’m a bad boy. Hit me, hurt me, punish me’ but do not suffer yourself, ‘since I love you’.94 In November there was a fresh twist to the story, with Mussolini declaring that he had only gone off to Ruspi’s flat after he rang Claretta and found her not at home. Once with Ruspi, he maintained, he had spent most of the time playing with her children and, with his common, rather innocent curiosity about the wider world, admiring their stamp collection and the geographical knowledge of Ruspi’s daught
er (not his) – ‘Where is Uruguay? Where is Cuba?’ he had asked.95 When in more bitter mood, he bemoaned the fact that he had just handed over 60,000 lire to Ruspi and she was still sponging for more.96

  In February 1939 Mussolini was himself ‘peeved’ to be briefed with the news that Claretta had been secretly tracking Ruspi to check where she went and whom she saw; the taxi Ruspi had hired was equipped with the number plate 223-33533, Claretta reported. Mussolini replied rudely that ‘all women have a double or triple life’. Yet he rang Ruspi the next day to certify the detail, to be met with her denials, tears and protest that she had not seen him for three weeks and now her (that is, their) child was ill with a high fever.97 On 2 July Mussolini did another of his tabulations of his virtue, assuring Claretta that he had been loyal to her for thirty-seven long days.98