Claretta
Page 23
As the anonymous editor of a 1946 edition put it, Claretta’s prison diary constituted ‘a document of exaltation and morbid passion which history, more than the news, should not ignore’.17 It combined in characteristic fashion Catholicism, the family, Claretta’s infatuated love for Mussolini and a politics, half fanatically Fascist and half self-interested, that trickled down into and from it.
The first entry was on 12 August, with Claretta imagining herself narrating to ‘Ben’ her and her family’s sad fate as they were dragged into Novara, an arrival that coincided with a violent air raid. Their property was seized, they were strip-searched, the three women locked in a small, dirty, dingy cell and Francesco Saverio separated from them. ‘I’ve always been terrified of prison,’ Claretta confided to her pages, ‘my mental state wavers; may the great and good God help and save us, we can do no more’.18
The second day brought further deterioration. Giuseppina was collapsing under the conditions; the mottled skin, which Zita had once noted, may have been a sign of high blood pressure, and she had been treated for heart trouble since 1940. An undated appeal by her to the Novara police chief during her imprisonment, requesting the return of her fur coat to keep her warm (despite it being August), contains an impressive list of other illnesses including lingering pleurisy, throat blockage, ear pain provoked by a radical mastoid surgery with frequent re-intensification, chronic inflammation of the colon (a legacy of another botched operation) and appendicitis. ‘I cannot put up with the cold and the humidity,’ she wrote, ‘and have an absolute need for covering at night.’19 She equally found time to list the ‘family jewels’ taken from her; they had belonged to her father, she stressed with studied ingenuousness.
While awaiting charity, the Petacci women summoned Francesco Saverio to their aid. He must have been allowed to keep his black bag on his admission to prison and arrived to give his wife an injection.20 He was then escorted back to his cell but that night the family came together in the prison air raid shelter. ‘I’ve never seen Papà cry,’ Claretta observed first sadly and then vengefully. ‘May this unmerited evil fall on the head of whoever has struck us down.’21
On Sunday, 15 August, Myriam fainted at the pain and disgrace of her treatment, while Claretta meditated wrathfully on the ‘injustice’ that had ‘thrown into prison people who have never done anything wrong to a living soul . . . What will happen to us? What has happened to Armando [whom she knew was in gaol in Rome] and Marcello?’ ‘Why, Ben, why?’ she asked her imagined interlocutor emotionally. ‘Is it perhaps a crime for us to have loved as I did you in purity? Where are you? What are you doing? At least if you think of me, I shall be less alone,’ she reasoned hopefully.22
The Petaccis’ prison days continued. On 16 August Giuseppina endured a worse cardiac attack, a crisis due to which, according to Claretta, even the nuns and other detainees wept over her sad condition. Claretta feared her mother was dying: ‘Mamma was leaving us, everything was collapsing all about us, everything to do with us was finished if she died.’ ‘It’s atrocious what is happening, Ben,’ she expostulated, still writing as though he were in the next room. ‘You loved your Mamma and can understand me, can grasp the atrocity of these moments of supreme anguish.’ Such thought reminded Claretta of her own medical crisis in 1940 and of Mussolini’s solicitude for her during that time. ‘Your caress, your love, your voice were my medicaments,’ she scrawled again a few days later, seeking self-consolation in her prose.
Only Dr Petacci’s injections seemed minimally to steady Giuseppina’s health, and her husband was allowed to stay the night perhaps because, as Claretta stated, the head of the prison was both moved and alarmed by the Petaccis’ evident tribulation.23 The fleas and cockroaches, the ‘fat, black scorpions’ in the cell, reminded Claretta of the plight of Silvio Pellico, whose memories of Austrian imprisonment constituted one of the school textbooks of Risorgimento history.24 She herself was ill with fever, she groused. Myriam had spent a whole day in tears. The other female common prisoners were noisy, ugly and horrible. As she remarked, they sang constantly, either ‘of the most obscene matters’ (unsuitable to a genteel Catholic ear) or ‘a sad, lugubrious dirge’ (which demonstrated how far their class culture was from hers). Only the nuns were good: ‘little, delicate, thoughtful: a breath of human sweetness amid so much bitterness’.25 When on the 22nd Claretta knelt in piety in the prison church, however, it was for Mussolini and not for her mother whom she prayed. He also dominated her dreams on the two following nights.
Yet her family did not lose its prominence in Claretta’s life. So, she registered fearfully on 25 August, there was a threat to send her to another prison, perhaps back in Rome, and ‘to divide us one from another’. ‘To leave Mamma without Papà would kill her, do you understand Ben?’ she wrote. ‘Kill her. She needs continuous injections, she weeps, she is mistreated and overcome. Oh! My Ben. What have you done and what have we done to be shut in like this?’ That evening, however, she and Myriam were feeling more sparky when they took their daily walk in the prison courtyard. ‘Mimi and I did the goose step [passo romano] up and down and sang Fascist songs, especially the one about Battaglione M, and Giovinezza, and that which finishes “Duce, Duce, Duce!”’ she recorded just a little vaguely.26 Such behaviour ‘really irritated the sentinels and the guards but we did not give a stuff at all about that and kept going as long as we could, thereby comforting ourselves’. They even did some gymnastics, reminding Claretta romantically of her sportive days with ‘Ben’ by the seaside at Castelporziano.27
On 29 August there was a new, deeper, ‘great pain’ to be endured. A copy of La Gazzetta dello Sport had come into their hands and it repeated the scandalous account of the Petaccis in Il Messaggero and other mainstream papers. How disgusting it was to read of Myriam being dragged into the affair, Claretta whined. ‘It really went beyond the bounds of decency’ thus to be exposed to ‘popular derision’. ‘Can you imagine, Ben,’ she asked her missing partner, ‘the effect on Mamma and Papà, from whom we failed to hide the paper? They wept all day. I swallowed my tears as usual and so did Mimi. Then, that night, Mimi was struck by a terrible attack of stomach pain . . . We were in despair. I cried for Armando about whom we know nothing. Can you believe it, Ben, I seem to live a life beyond reality, in a tough arena where neither logic nor intelligence reign?’ All Italians had gained so much from two decades of Fascism, Claretta maintained defiantly. But now its credo was deemed ‘utterly horrendous’. Only the lost war had provoked such a reversal in attitudes. As usual, however, it did not take her long to switch from public to private thoughts. ‘The suffering has cut years from my life – my hair is going white,’ she protested. Once ‘Ben’ had hoped to see ‘snow in her curls’. But where was he now, as she sought him ‘in every light and shadow and every dream’?28
The days limped by and her invocations of ‘Ben’ and her love for him grew still more intense. ‘Our heart,’ she wrote with an unspoken opposition to the science of her medical family, ‘commands our nervous system, our very fibre, our will, our desire, anxiety, memory, sense of pain.’ Such emotions, with ‘the ability to wait and hope, live, breathe, tremble’, lay beyond any ‘power, effort or brake’.29 She was a total prey to them; they commanded her being. Nor was her jealousy quite overcome. On 4 September she wondered at the current fate of Ruspi, Pallottelli, their children, Rachele and even Cesira Carocci, Mussolini’s housekeeper at the Via Rasella during the 1920s. Was she the only woman in his life to be wracked by such torment, Claretta asked pathetically, again unable to stem her tears? If only he were keeping to that slogan of once upon a time: Nec tecum nec sine te vivere possum (‘I can neither live with you nor without you’).30
* * *
By 7 September Claretta calculated that she had endured ‘twenty-seven sleepless nights’, perhaps hyperbole given the regularity with which she welcomed Mussolini’s appearance in her dreams. Giuseppina was ill again on the 8th and Francesco Saverio was only permitted briefly to br
ing comfort, leaving Claretta to make the camphor injections that her mother needed: ‘I trembled at the thought of messing them up,’ she confessed anxiously. Her nerves were a wreck until she slept. But she woke more happily to think herself back in the Sala dello Zodiaco, with the taste of her lover on her lips.31
Two days later, the news of the armistice with the Allies belatedly arrived at the prison, with Claretta bewailing the fact that ‘it is the end, it is the end. The end of our Italy, of our grandeur, the end of empire, of everything’. Communism, she prophesied fearfully, would take over, unless the Germans advanced in time to seize the whole country. And where was Mussolini? What had the ‘traitors’ done to him? While she waited for answers, her family, she lamented, were not being fed anymore; the authorities were behaving towards them ‘with a Russian-style cruelty’.32
Still no information percolated into the gaol from outside. One torrid day and night succeeded another. Now Claretta told ‘Ben’ that, for twenty-seven days, the Petacci women had been praying, morning and evening, to the Madonna of Pompeii (la Beata Vergine del Santo Rosario di Pompei; her religious site had been founded in the late nineteenth century and expanded notably under the regime) ‘for your safety, for your liberation’. ‘I have faith, I have faith,’ she swore emotionally, readily fusing her Catholicism and her Fascism as her comforters.33
By Monday, 13 September, the Germans had reached Novara, the imprisoned Fascists had been released, with some immediately taking over guard duty at the Visconteo-Sforzesco prison. But no succour arrived for the Petacci family. Perhaps it was Freudian of Claretta to record her dream that night that Mussolini was betraying her with a ‘foreign woman’, with people depressing her with stories that he did so every day. Setting aside heretical thoughts about her lover, now she transmogrified her Christian God into a human God; she prayed to ‘my Ben: free me. Today,’ she added, ‘I learned by chance that Hitler called you “his most faithful friend”, and I wept with joy and emotion.’34 Two days later, still lost and abandoned, she was flustered lest Mussolini was angrily staying away in dread that she had become a ‘Presidentessa like Sarfatti’. ‘But do you not realise the gulf between that woman and me?’ Claretta remarked with radical Fascist propriety. ‘Race, only race. Race which dominates all the rest!’ When, in May and June, she had warned him against the traitors enveloping his life and regime, it had only been for his good. He must not count her foresight against her. Feeling cosier with that thought and ideologically armed for a Nazi-fascist republic, she cried herself to sleep.35
Finally, on 16 September, came the promise of release, but not – as in Claretta’s dreams – following her lover’s miraculous arrival. First to reach the prison was instead Armando Boggiano, Myriam’s husband. ‘I cannot describe to you,’ she explained as if Mussolini were near, ‘how their reunion went. They fell on each other. They held each other in their arms, crying. Pallid, emaciated, destroyed. Fifty days of prison [for Armando], with no food, [except for] bread and water and soup, a quarter of a hour’s walk, a small hole in the ceiling to let in air, and all alone, alone, like a beast raddled by fleas and other such things.’ Then Marcello, who had actually been the one to contact the Germans and arrange the family’s exit from gaol, turned up. How well the Petacci family had resisted their cruel fate, Claretta crowed, however fretfully, even as they waited until the next morning actually to walk free.
‘And you, my Ben, you naturally have forgotten me completely. Not a word for me,’ she groaned. Nor had there been any kindly message for the Petaccis, whose family life had been ‘destroyed’ for him. ‘What will happen to us?’ she asked plaintively. ‘I put up with everything, I suffered everything, I struggled not to die and now, now, the end awaits me. Without your love, it is the end.’36 When they finally made ready on 17 September to go to Marcello’s Villa Schildhof, she again mentioned to her lover how she kissed first the images of Santa Rita the Madonna of Pompeii, and then his photo. Maybe, she hoped, again prostrating herself to his grandeur, ‘you will understand me’.37
Travelling northeast the next day proved a troubling wartime journey, with three tyres blown out before they got to Bergamo. They had stopped to find a replacement Fiat Balilla at a Nazi-controlled air base when the news came that Mussolini was to hold forth on the radio at 9.30 p.m. from Germany. They stayed to listen38 and Claretta’s emotional effusions (and sensuality) boiled over. ‘You speak, you speak to the people still . . . but to me it seems you speak also to me. Your soul passes into mine in drops and I feel you within me as before. I am transfused as always! Your unique words, your touching phrases, your way of speech, so human, simple, precise, poetic.’ When he finished, she fainted to the consternation of the rest of his audience, and had to be revived with cognac.
They went back to their car and, with a military escort, drove into the night: ‘I was in ecstasy, shuddering with love and poetry, transfixed by melancholy and adoration, with fat, slow, hot tears pouring down my face while I begged Santa Rita desperately to let me see you again.’ In Claretta’s sensibility, the very stars glittered as they had never done before. They reached Marcello’s villa only to find he had forgotten the keys. But they knocked up the German garrison and were told to move instead to the Albergo Parco in Merano, which they reached, exhausted, at 6 a.m.
The Petaccis were safe; even Zita Ritossa now joined them, narrating how she had had to flee from one sanctuary to another during ‘fifty’ days, avoiding arrest at Trieste by a lucky ten minutes. Boggiano, who had not taken well to imprisonment and the concurrent sequestration of his property, and had had enough of his wife’s family, went off by himself.39 Soon it was clear that, despite the poignant embraces in the prison of a few days before, his marriage to Myriam was disintegrating. But the more important questions, certainly for Claretta, were whether her relationship with Mussolini survived, and how it could be fitted into the new politics of what was becoming the Social Republic.
* * *
In his oration, said by some to have been delivered in tired and depressed tone, Mussolini spoke in terms that his Nazi rescuers applauded. He had been betrayed, he maintained, by those same forces that had always held back his regime. Now ‘the state that we want to institute will be national and social in the highest sense of these words; that is, it will go back to the origins of Fascism,’ he proclaimed. It would also be bloody; its prime task was to ‘annihilate the parasitic plutocracy’.40
Naturally enough there was no room for talk of love on such occasion. Nor did Mussolini admit any influence from his relationship with Claretta in a short memoir that he, ever the able journalist, rushed out to portray his imprisonment. Indeed, in his Pensieri pontini e sardi (‘Thoughts on Ponza and in Sardinia’), he was categorical in rejecting demeaning suggestions that he had been prey to women. Females, he repeated, ‘have never had even a minimum effect on my politics’. He was not finished with the subject, however, adding somewhat perplexingly: ‘Perhaps that was an advantage. Yet, thanks to their delicate sensibility, women are more far-sighted than men.’41 Thoughts of both Rachele and Claretta warning him in July 1943 to ‘kill them all’ may have been lurking beneath the patriarchal phrases, while he hurried on to another cliché about himself. He was a ‘loner’, he bragged; in his whole life he had never had a friend and been all the better for that lack.42
In the weeks following his release, Mussolini had much to decide. Rapidly he was detached from Rachele and the children, travelling to see Hitler at Rastenburg near the Eastern Front. The Führer made it known that, should the Duce prove unwilling to return to command, German vengeance on the Italian people would be drastic.43 In any case, like many a politician, Mussolini, for all his depression and pessimism about the war, had not lost a sense of his own indispensability. The Nazis were telling him what he wanted to hear when they continued to applaud him as the only possible Duce. Meanwhile, German doctors fussed about, seeking a remedy for Mussolini’s ulcer; eventually Georg Zachariae was appointed as a court medical e
xpert who stayed with the Duce almost to the end, and later published an apologetic memoir about his experience, full of admiration for Mussolini’s intellect and human generosity.44
On 27 September Mussolini re-entered Italy, initially staying at the Rocca delle Caminate, with plans already drafted to create what, in November, was formalised as the Repubblica Sociale Italiana.45 It became known as the Salò Republic, after the small town on Lago di Garda that housed some of its reconstituted ministries, although others were scattered across Venetia, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, based in Venice itself. By 11 October Mussolini had taken residence in the Villa Feltrinelli at Gargnano, halfway up the lake’s western shore. The large and elegant structure stood in an estate of 8 acres owned by the publishing family, with space for an orchard, a tennis court and a guardroom to house the thirty members of the SS who defended and monitored the restored Duce. The villa became a combined office for a puppet dictator and residence for his extended (legitimate) family, with Gina Ruberti and her little daughter Marina, Vittorio Mussolini, his wife and children, Arnaldo’s son Vito, and various other relatives finding continuous or sporadic shelter there. By one estimate, after October 1943, more than two hundred people related to Mussolini had taken sanctuary at the villa or in other quarters near Lago di Garda.46 In one of his letters to Claretta in January 1945, Mussolini noted that family food supplies were bolstered by the presence of a cow, a newborn calf, two pigs – one live, one recently slaughtered – a few dozen egg-laying hens, some rabbits, three dogs and two cats. Despite such rural joys, Mussolini almost always ate alone, he told her, ostentatiously solitary even at his table.47