Claretta
Page 17
The outbreak of the Second World War brought more urgent issues of his public life to the fore, but it was not long before the lovers were again bickering over the Duce’s inability to confine himself to Claretta, with Mussolini, on 14 September 1939, bursting out: ‘God damn and curse her [Ruspi]’, so drolly introducing the language of his public life into his private. His phrase was ‘Dio la stramaledica!’99 Such usage had originated during sanctions in 1935–6, with the English then being the object of the curse, which would become a major part of wartime propaganda. On 12 October the Duce’s self-denial reached a new personal best of fifty-two days, even if he did explain to Claretta that his restraint had been caused by his preoccupation with Italian policy towards the European conflict.100 But ten days later, he conceded he had bumped into Ruspi on her bicycle. In response Claretta wrote that her latest consent to intercourse was granted ‘with the deepest disgust’.101
During the last weeks before Mussolini took Italy into the war, slanging matches recurred on more than one occasion, with Mussolini finding time to see both Pallottelli and Ruspi.102 Claretta did not believe her lover’s assurance that he was only visiting the latter to hand over more money to the mother of one of his children. On 24 May their spat was so serious that Claretta recorded herself refusing intercourse (no in her diary).103 Faced with a sex strike, Mussolini took the time on 11 June – the morning after his declaration of war, when his desk must have overflown with political and military matters – to order Ruspi out of Rome.104 She did not go however, and, four weeks later, Mussolini was still enduring attacks from Claretta about his surviving connection with her.105 Matters only calmed a little with the remarkable seven-clause armistice treaty that the two lovers signed on 11 July (see chapter 2) and the turmoil of Claretta’s extra-uterine pregnancy shortly thereafter. But, even then, Ruspi had not vanished from their lives. As will be seen below, to the very end in 1945 neither Ruspi nor Pallottelli had broken their bonds with the Duce.
If jealous outbursts about private dalliances filled the pages of Claretta’s diary, she also gravely recorded her man’s thoughts about the wider world and his public role as his nation’s Fascist and totalitarian dictator, as well as his more covert desire to impress his young lover with his fame, brutality and foresight, offset, more occasionally, by his paradoxical queasiness at his destiny, emotions and self. After all, as the European powers moved to war and the Holocaust, Claretta was always there.
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Scathing is the word that best defines Mussolini’s estimation of his political opponents and, often enough, his partners. Here, indeed, was the dictator as misanthrope, vain, ill prepared, boastful, aggressive, angry, yet sometimes uneasy in his ‘power’. The English, he advised, were ‘a piggish and fallen people . . . a people who think with their backsides [Claretta wrote ‘c . . .’, not culo] and cannot admit anyone is better than them. They are egoistic, drunk, brainless; the most important part of their body is their bum.’106 Their institutions, he informed her in December 1937, were riddled with Jews. Disraeli had been the great man of their empire; he was an Italian and ‘the lover of Queen Victoria’; the rest were ‘merely Jews and businessmen, tiny beings’ and they hated Mussolini or anyone else risen from the ranks.107 In fact they were all cretins, just like their French allies.108 The British were murderous cynics, too. Once war began, they planned to starve the Germans with a naval blockade and would not mind if ‘ten million’ women and children died.109
The French, Mussolini was still hastier to damn. They had a Jewish prime minister (Léon Blum) and a ‘black’ president of the chamber of deputies (in fact this was the white Radical, Edouard Herriot, born in Troyes, and so Mussolini was again mistaken), while their women were all whores who only enjoyed sex with black men (how awful, Claretta recorded herself interjecting with unlikely sententiousness).110 They were ‘nauseous’ as a people; wrecked by syphilis and absinthe (and their free press); ‘thirty millions, brainless and cowardly’.111 The only exception in his mind to French degeneracy had occurred more than a century before in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, always his ideal historical figure, an admiration that reflected his early training in French language and culture, and his never wholly abandoned hope to be lionised in Paris. So, in March 1938, the dictator moaned that he was destined to die (relatively) young, as both Napoleon and Caesar had done.112 Nine months later he was more specific in his comparison and fantasies. Napoleon and he were the same, he affirmed, in eating vegetables and sleeping with the shutters firmly down, any chink of light banished.113 The emperor only began to fail when his underlings fought among themselves.114 That might also have unfortunate implications for the Duce. But, as Claretta always stressed to him when he was downhearted, he was the greatest of the great, incomparable in his dominance and grandeur.
From the mouth of such a titan she was not surprised to hear that little states like Czechoslovakia were hopeless, doomed to die.115 Current-day Romanians, Mussolini explained to her nonchalantly, were the result of copulation between Roman legionaries and ‘Slav whores’ and so could never amount to much, while King Carol II made things worse by allowing his lover, Madame Lupescu, to dominate him.116 The Poles as a people were beset by a ‘suicidal mania’.117 The king of Sweden was no more than a British ‘slave’.118
The Germans, by contrast, were ‘formidable, dangerous’. As he warned in February 1938: ‘if that mass goes forward, it is terrible, compact, [fighting like] one man’.119 When the Nazis imposed the Anschluss on Austria, Mussolini recalled the terrible death of Dollfuss in 1934 and wept with emotion when he and Claretta listened to Lohengrin together. But, in the Duce’s self-excusing opinion, the French and the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, bore the blame for the destruction of Austria, despite the fact that Nazi ‘fanaticism’ during and after German occupation of the country was troubling.120 One day there would be 800 million Germans, Mussolini predicted with his usual inaccurate ‘mathematical certainty’, and only the Italians could resist them.121
Some of Hitler’s speeches Mussolini found disturbingly ‘raucous’.122 But, Mussolini maintained, the German Führer always deeply admired the Duce. ‘Hitler’s just a boy when he is with me’, Mussolini related after the exchanges of May 1938. The German dictator had been tearful when he was parted from Rome and the Italian dictator. To Mussolini, Goebbels had an Italian soul, which he revealed when the two joked and laughed together.123 At Munich, Hitler was similarly putty in Mussolini’s hands, a ‘teddy bear’ (sentimentalone). The Führer had cried when he met the Duce there. During that negotiation, he – like the respectful and sympathetic Chamberlain and equally deferential Édouard Daladier, prime minister of France – simply followed where Mussolini led.124
By contrast the German seizure in March 1939 of the rump of the Czech state prompted Mussolini to philosophise about the impossibility of peace in Europe where there were 20 million too many Germans and where French and British women failed to keep up their nations’ required birth rates. Already the Nazis had ‘30,000 chemists’ at work on research. It was as well, he remarked, that, over the centuries, the Germans had so often been beaten by the Italians, which ensured that they would never attack them now. But ‘it was necessary not to cling to illusions. It is very difficult to get the Germans to be viewed sympathetically by Italians. Indeed, for the most part, they detest them . . . I, myself’, he explained with deep misanthropy, ‘have no special sympathy for any people. Indeed, in the mass, I detest them all, none excluded’.125
European war did not stop Mussolini’s vacillations towards his ally. Hitler, he lamented in October 1939, ‘suffers from hallucinations, is hotheaded, a visionary’. All would be much better if only he had followed Mussolini’s counsel. The German people were turning against their chief, the Duce predicted with his usual inaccuracy.126 Two months later, he inveighed against the atrocity of German occupation policies whether in Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland; they were of ‘unparalleled cruelty, I am nauseated’. The SS we
re to blame; they are ‘beasts, beasts’, he expostulated to Claretta who, in her political ignorance, was unable to recognise the name of their chief, Heinrich Himmler.127 The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact could lead to no good and must only advantage the Russians; Italians would love a war against the latter.128 Only in May 1940 did Mussolini fully swing round to express support for the German cause. Even if he was a little disturbed by the thought that Hitler had ‘won the war by himself’, the Nazis, he now decreed, had a right to defend themselves ‘with all necessary violence’.129
If the Germans were a quandary, his Japanese partners in the Tripartite Pact could scarcely be loved or admired. Their population grew by a million a year and their economy expanded at a rapid rate, but only because they were ‘like monkeys, they imitate everything’.130 Moreover, their decision-making process was sluggish, their emperor weighed down by tradition and, although they were good soldiers, ‘we do not need them in order to march’. After all, they were ‘a different type, they live within a different mentality’; they sprang from ‘other races’. Of course they loved Mussolini but that did not mean they were loyal. ‘They pursue their interest as every people does,’ he summed up for Claretta with his usual fondness for Machiavelli and Realpolitik.131
The Spanish, by contrast, even those with whom he was allied in their civil war, were ‘like Arabs’ (racist phrasing that belied his waving of the ‘Sword of Islam’ on a visit to Libya in March 1937); their armies could never match Italian élan.132 Their Caudillo Franco was ‘an idiot’. The rival sides in Spain during the civil war shot their enemies out of hand, he declared in some amazement, and Dolores Ibárruri, the communist who proclaimed that the Francoists would not pass, had bitten a man to death and sucked his blood. Her behaviour was, to the Duce’s mind, ‘typically Spanish’.133
In most circumstances, despite the Fascist fanfare about empire, Mussolini’s map of Africa lay, like Bismarck’s, in Europe, while Claretta showed no interest in Libya or Africa Orientale Italiana. The Duce was never actually to visit Ethiopia and, in his bed-chat, was left merely to congratulate himself that the Italian empire had been won at a trifling loss of 1,200 lives and, on occasion, to show his lover pictures of Italian road construction or to applaud other colonial building work there.134
The act of fighting, he, the old soldier from the First World War, remembered – by no means in heroic mode – as a time ‘when a man really becomes a savage, enjoys killing and ignores that another life is involved’.135 The (Fascist) bombing of Barcelona in Spain was ‘terrible’ and killed women and children without mercy or halt. War was never fought for ideals (or ideology). ‘No people,’ Mussolini pronounced, ‘makes war to please another, but only for its own interests, because it is thinking of the booty available.’ He himself would always endeavour to be the last to enter battle, unless he was somehow ‘forced to act’.136 Yet men were born to destroy. It was a shame. But such desire to kill was a fundamental truth. War was as natural to men as motherhood was to women, he stated in echo of a regime slogan.137
In regard to Fascist propriety, he did ask when Francesco Saverio Petacci had taken out his party card: ‘certain formalities are necessary’.138 But his comrades among the PNF bosses were scarcely men to admire. Rather, he imparted cynically to Claretta in March 1939, they were courtiers like any others, people who gave ‘a friendly smile’ all the better ‘to stab a colleague in the back’. He might be an untrustworthy lover, he conceded, but as a man he was ‘straight as a die’ and so completely unlike his underlings and the rest of humankind.139 At least in the Petacci diary record, this dictator was scarcely the vehicle of totalitarian ideology. He was instead a bleak Machiavellian. As he had reported to Claretta back in December 1937 with classic misanthropy: ‘All the world is against me and I am against all the world.’140
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Cynicism apart, the ideas which surfaced most regularly in his conversations with Claretta between 1937 and 1938, if seldom thereafter, were anti-Semitic in nature, along with the linked conviction that he must preside over a racial revolution and allow ideology to drive him. His diatribes about Sarfatti have already been noted. The Jews, he bellowed at his lover in April 1938 while reading a ‘Jewish review’, were ‘pigs, a people destined to be wiped out completely’. They deliberately refused to have a country of their own and instead were always traitors within the gates of those places where they lived. ‘I detest them.’141 He himself, he assured Claretta six months later, had been a convinced anti-Semite since 1923. His aim now was ‘to purify the race and get Aryans into all the posts that have been exploited [by Jews]’.142 ‘I shall massacre them like the Turks did,’ he promised Claretta in between caresses at the beach on 11 October. ‘I have imprisoned 70,000 Arabs in concentration camps. I can do the same with 50,000 Jews. I’ll put them on a small island and shut them all up there . . . I shall kill them, every one,’ he swore.143
On occasion he remarked on the conflict that smouldered between Nazism and the Vatican, in December 1937, for example, favouring the Germans while he explained that he himself was ‘an apostolic Roman Catholic but not a Christian’, although he did add that he always tried to attenuate his German partner’s racial fanaticism.144 German hostility to attendance at Mass was, he pronounced in different tone in July 1938, ‘antipathetic, highly antipathetic’.145 Yet, three months later, it was Pope Pius XI whom he deemed ‘a calamity’ for trying to defend Jews and blacks. He had ‘lost Germany completely’ and ‘had mistaken utterly the spirit of the times’. ‘As a Catholic,’ he told Claretta, whose father still acted as a papal doctor, ‘worse than this pope’ he could not imagine.146 Yet a few months later when Pius died, a phone tap recorded the Duce mentioning to Claretta blithely that he had been the ‘pope of the concordat’. His death was to be regretted. With Pius XI, Mussolini now declared, he had almost always felt secure, although he also admired his ‘highly cultivated and diplomatic’ successor, Pius XII.147 Similarly when the dictator was in expansive mood, King Victor Emmanuel III he judged a monarch whom he appreciated, even if he hated the formality, falsity (and softness) of the court.148
Yet, for all such seeming moderation, Mussolini was ever ready angrily to lament the failings in his eyes of the Italian people. That same day that he let Claretta know his intention to round up the nation’s Jews, he launched into a bitter attack on ‘merciful and cowardly Italians’, whom he claimed to have been studying for ‘thirty years’, a period that was even longer than his vaunted anti-Semitism. There were at least ‘four million’ such fellow citizens, he reckoned. Every one was a descendant of slaves from classical times. Their blood had stayed vile for ‘fifty generations’. Already a few months earlier he had ascribed cohabitation between Italians and Ethiopians as caused by the ‘heirs of Roman freedmen’, who had ‘no racial consciousness, no dignity’.149 Now, if they showed any sign of rising, he shouted, ‘I shall destroy them all, I shall exterminate them’. They were the Jew-lovers. ‘Everyone has his or her own Jew to defend’, not excluding Cornelia Tanzi, poet and his sometime lover, he observed. Such racially degenerate Italians talked feebly about being afraid of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In regard to race, he now declared, it was Hitler who had the right ideas. When it came to implementing tough policies, he bragged, ‘I am like a train, once I am started, I cannot be stopped.’ An alliance of 120 million Germans and Italians would quickly destroy all their enemies. They would not be blocked by a Jew like Anthony Eden (again Mussolini was mistaken in this racial attribution). Throughout the next war, every Italian man, he proclaimed, would have to fight, and women too would work. He had already primed Bocchini, the head of the secret police, to compile a list of any who might refuse, and he would ‘shoot them one by one’.150
Such ferocity may well have lain engrained in the Duce’s soul. But, even if legal restrictions on the nation’s Jews continued to be toughened, and, after 1943, the Germans did use the details that had been recorded by the Fascist bureaucracy to implement the Final Solution in
Italy,151 Mussolini did not continue to fill his lover’s pages with his passion against the Jews or, indeed, against the church and the nation’s bourgeoisie, among whom the Petacci family and Edda and Galeazzo Ciano might naturally be numbered. Rather than preparing his own final solutions, the dictator could still on one occasion sound almost soft when, in October 1939, he read out to Claretta petitions from Jews against rulings of the now established Racial Tribunal, stating a little sadly that ‘it is a tragedy for some’.152 With different emphasis, earlier he had bewailed the actual limitations of his power. ‘I am not a dictator, but a slave,’ he groaned, one who was unable even to command within his own family; there appeasement was his common line.153
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If the Duce’s stance on the international and national issues and ideologies of the day had its vagaries and his children remained ready to speak up for ‘their Jews’, Claretta never forgot that she belonged to the Petacci family. Nor did they forget her. The other Petaccis cast a constant shadow over the relationship between the dictator and his lover. One of the more obvious quiddities of the sex acts that Claretta so fulsomely wrote into history is that, quite frequently, her young sister, Myriam (always then called ‘Mimi’ by her elders), who turned fifteen in May 1938, accompanied the lovers on their trysts, at least to the beach or the mountains. Frequently, while standing somewhere not too far away from the lovers and their sexual encounters, she would be carrying in homely fashion a toothsome snack that her mother had prepared at home. Through to 1945 she would wryly call herself the paciera-vivandiera (‘peacemaker and butler’) or, with rougher humour, the piccola idiota (‘little idiot’), from those times.154 In her mother’s imagining, Myriam may have been performing the role of chaperone and so sustaining Claretta’s honour, despite the immorality of her affair with the Duce.