Claretta
Page 24
On 8 November Rachele returned from Germany with the two teenage children, Romano and Anna Maria, to be greeted by Mussolini with what his new secretary, Giovanni Dolfin, judged to be ‘deep affection’. Rachele charitably enquired about her husband’s health and then moved more aggressively to curse those who had betrayed him, notably their son-in-law, Ciano.48 Here, then, was the major issue of the moment, another matter where private and public life intermingled. A fortnight earlier, Mussolini had conceded to Dolfin that universal hatred was being directed at Ciano ‘in order to strike me’. Ciano, he affirmed, was no worse than many another, a conclusion that he was inclined to voice with the appearance on 20 October of Edda, her unauthorised arrival prompting quibbles from the SS to what they obviously viewed as their Italian underlings.49 Despite her ‘open marriage’, Edda was another woman fixated on saving her husband, rather as both Rachele and Claretta had been in regard to Mussolini on 25 July.50
But Mussolini, for all his overriding egoism, knew two things. Ciano’s fate was sealed. Both the Germans and the radical Fascists were determined that his son-in-law must die. His death was a punishment for the ‘treachery’ of 25 July, as well as for Ciano’s deep doubts since 1939 about the Axis alliance. Yet, at the same time, Ciano had to face the executioners because of the inadequacy of the dictatorship; because, for all its propaganda boasts, it had proved neither totalitarian nor revolutionary. Ciano may have been at heart a young conservative who donned a black shirt in deference to the fashion of the times. But the real failure, the person who in fact had allowed the ‘Italian dictatorship’ to remain ‘Italian’ – coursed by many historical currents and not only those of a total modern ideology and political religion – was Mussolini. He lived on. Ciano was shot at Verona on 11 January 1944. During the three months preceding that event, Mussolini feebly accepted that he could do nothing to stop it, a failure that came at the cost of severing his ties with his favourite child and with a bright young man who had so often been his sounding-board in matters of war and peace.
* * *
By January 1944 then, Arnaldo, Bruno and Galeazzo were dead, while Edda brooded in self-imposed exile in Switzerland. As has been repeatedly remarked, Mussolini was given to congratulating himself for being a loner. Yet, throughout his life, he gave plenty of indication of needing human company of some definition. Once Galeazzo and Edda were gone, Claretta Petacci filled an evident vacuum. Mussolini may have treated the Petaccis during their imprisonment as though they had never been. But, under the Salò Republic, despite the objections of Rachele and a faction of radical Fascists, who, in April 1944 and again at the year’s end, plotted to murder Claretta and end her dalliance with the Duce,51 Claretta and the rest of her family were reinforced as mainstays of the dictator’s life, and Claretta transmuted from being mainly a sex object into a cherished counsellor.
Contact between the lovers had resumed on 4 October with a phone call from the Rocca delle Caminate to Merano. In Claretta’s diary version, it mainly consisted in a long whinge from Mussolini about the treachery that he had suffered, his bad health, disgusting diet and depression, before moving on to arrangements to secure further contact, either by phone or letter. The Duce did not forget to salute ‘Mimi’ and the rest of the Petacci family and to regret the devastation of the Villa Camilluccia, while slipping in a jealous enquiry whether Claretta had anywhere been ‘molested’. He and she, he declared, must accept that most people hated them. Finding a refuge for her would be vexing. But he would write soon in full detail about what might be done for her and her loved ones.52 Given the malfunctioning of the phone system at Salò, the fact that it was no secret that the Germans tapped all calls to and from the Duce, and the difficulty that the lovers had in seeing each other physically, from now on letters became their chief vehicle of contact and expression. Between October 1943 and April 1945, Mussolini communicated with his young partner about twice every three days, often at considerable length.53 She responded even more copiously (often, it was said, with her mother automatically reviewing her prose).54 Giuseppina and Myriam conducted their own correspondence with Mussolini. By the time they were established in their own accommodation on the lake, their typist was Zita Ritossa’s eighteen-year-old brother Giuseppe, who must have been protected from military call-up for this important war work; according to his sister, he often acted as a secretary for his de facto brother-in-law, Marcello.55 It was another case of matters being kept in the family.
The first actual meeting of the lovers occurred on 28 October under close German surveillance and with Claretta, when she travelled towards her partner, praying to ‘God and my Santa Rita to help me and look after me as they always have done’, while through other spare moments she recited the rosary, as she now claimed to do every evening. Once they were in each other’s company, the lovers talked for an hour and more about the double theme – public and private – of the ‘martyrdom’ that each had endured and the tragedy inflicted on the ‘crucified’ nation. Eventually they went to bed presumably for sex (but Claretta recorded the orgasmic si no more) and chatted ‘through the night without a single interruption’. Inevitably Mussolini’s thoughts turned to Ciano and his likely sad fate, even if their conversation found no cure for his concern. The Duce lamented that it was sadistic of people to ‘see if you are brave enough to eliminate your son-in-law’ (and dishonour his own grandchildren). ‘He will do what he must. I feel that he is profoundly upset and sad, and I understand him,’ Claretta wrote trying to be helpful, or to seem such.56
This night of love was very much the exception in their lives. By 15 November Claretta was being instructed by post that she and her family must accept housing at the Villa Fiordaliso at Gardone Riviera, some 20 kilometres south of the Villa Feltrinelli. At least it was better there than to be rusticated to Malcesine far off on the other side of the lake, as the Germans had initially planned.57 The quickest method of communication was by a fast motorboat but it is unclear how many times Mussolini was able to use such a method to join his lover. The Renaissance Torre San Marco on the shoreline, reachable across the lake from the Villa Feltrinelli, was an occasional venue for sex;58 Claretta’s double bed in the villa seldom.
Claretta’s diary now omitted her sexual encounters with the Duce almost entirely, except for the occasional lament that a meeting had been hurried and unsatisfactory: ‘the joy and intensity of an instant’ was ‘succeeded by the desolate sadness of a brevity’ which prevented any ‘interesting talk’.59 Such emphasis on a now more mature and political relationship is, however, contradicted by immediate postwar claims that the two still had trysts ‘two or three times per week’.60
The Villa Fiordaliso was not large. Space in it had to be found for Claretta and her parents, her youthful, perhaps worryingly manly, SS guard, Franz Spögler (who had been born in the Alto Adige), and Ono Shichiro – correspondent of the Mainichi Shimbun from Tokyo and son-in-law of the Fascist propagandist Shimoi Harukichi – and his family.61 Ono and Claretta became friends, according to his postwar account, with him remembering that she often ate a solid breakfast on the terrace while reading the papers of the day, thereafter lying in the sun to improve her tan. He also recalled that she had regretted not being Japanese since, in his country, ‘belief and trust’ still ‘meant something’.62 The Petacci papers show Ono acting as a delivery boy for messages from Claretta to the Duce, thereby avoiding the ban, which Vittorio Mussolini, endeavouring unsuccessfully to cement a major role in his father’s political life, tried to impose on Claretta and her family63
Mussolini’s further advice to Claretta (whom he now always addressed as ‘Clara’) as she settled into the Villa Fiordaliso was guarded: ‘I beg you to lead a completely reserved and absolutely quiet life. Don’t let anyone see you. Don’t seek out anyone. Have yourself forgotten.’ But he did end romantically: ‘There is, however, one whom you should not forget and will never forget because he remains always the same. Your Ben.’64 In other letters around this time Mussoli
ni counselled Claretta and her family to flee while it was still possible to do so, not to Switzerland, where there were too many ‘renegades’, but best to Hungary, although she must be aware that the roads were ‘infested with partisans’ and insecure, while the widely bruited scandal of the Villa Camilluccia continued to heap up popular hatred against the Petacci family. She must always destroy his every letter, he insisted (ineffectually).65
By 19 December the two were discussing an elaborate project, which sounded as though Marcello may have been its progenitor. Could Marcello be made the RSI’s commercial attaché in Budapest, given that Hungary was a country with which diplomatic relations survived, Claretta had suggested, perhaps under the name Signor Colfosco-Schwagenek? It was all a little intricate, Mussolini replied gently. It would be better for Marcello just to go to Budapest on a ‘service passport’ and establish a ‘centre for economic and political information’ for which, the Duce noted drily, ‘he had a disposition’. Could he not choose a more Italian name than Schwagenek, since it would only arouse queries? Yet he did insist that the Petacci name possessed the same notoriety as his own, warning Claretta that it was ‘of the highest danger that you are such a short distance away’. In a postscript he added wearily that it was quite absurd for her to start worrying again about other women. ‘You must not complicate my life,’ he admonished her, ‘if you want to save your own.’66
Mussolini however was not being entirely frank with his lover over his contacts with his sometime partners. In October Alice Pallottelli had written a letter addressed to ‘my dear Prime Minister’, rejoicing in his liberation and expressing anguish at his affliction, while declaring ‘the flame of hope’ still burned in her heart and predicting ‘further miracles’. Through Dolfin, Mussolini offered advice to her to leave Rome for the north where she and her children would be safer.67 Virgilio Pallottelli had returned from his time as a POW and, during 1944–5, won a prominent place in Mussolini’s personal entourage, with his mother sounding maternal as she asked Dolfin to remember that Virgilio was ‘an exuberant young man who sometimes needs a brake and protection’.68 In May 1944 Virgilio sent the dictator a copy of a memoir that he had prepared of his air crash and imprisonment, underlining the hatred of the enemy for ‘our race now that it is finally tired of being enslaved’.69 He was destined to be a member of the final convoy that took Mussolini and Claretta to their deaths in April 1945, when he was known to be a friend of Elena Curti, Mussolini’s illegitimate daughter, who, it has been noted, had engaged in regular contact with her father since 1942, ties that were not broken under the RSI. She, too, would be there in April 1945.
Romilda Ruspi had similarly not lost her connection with her long-time lover, even if the archives do not allow exact tracking of her life after July 1943. In April 1945 she was at Monza, near Milan, but she was one of Mussolini’s harem who herself did not go – nor have a family representative present – on the last convoy. Throughout the RSI, however, Claretta certainly could not, and did not, forget her, as shall be seen below.
* * *
When the New Year of 1944 dawned, for Mussolini the great issue was the fate of his son-in-law and elder daughter, a tragedy which, he wrote, was ‘shaking him profoundly’. After 1945 surviving members of the Petacci family would portray a magnanimous Claretta who had tried to persuade Mussolini not to accept Ciano’s execution, the most romantic story being told by Zita Ritossa, which sounded as though it might have been influenced by an opera plot. In this version, Claretta wanted Ciano to be substituted by another man justly condemned to death and hidden away until he could be led out to execution. But the plan was frustrated by alert German security.70 In reality, however, Claretta had tried malevolently to stiffen Mussolini against his ‘traitor’ son-in-law, guilty, as she wrote, of having been ‘systematically devoted to the [Fascist] system’s disintegration’. For Claretta, Ciano deserved no mercy. Edda, in her judgement, was no better and her lover must not let himself feel sorry for his wayward daughter.71
In a cascade of letters following Ciano’s execution, Claretta tried to ginger her lover into being a ‘real dictator’ again, while not forgetting to urge him to accept her protector, Guido Buffarini Guidi, as his leading counsellor. Equally the Duce should not forget that Hitler loved him. He must arrange soon to meet the Führer and obtain from him the ‘understanding and help’ that he and the RSI needed and deserved.72 In such advice, Claretta envisaged a quadripartite alliance of herself (and, presumably, Marcello),73 Buffarini Guidi, Mussolini and Hitler to dominate the new order. Despite her many retreats and her flaunted humility, Claretta had become a woman willing and anxious to assume a political role.
The other Petaccis had not disappeared, with Giuseppina writing early to Mussolini emphasising the ‘holocaust’ [sic] that her family had undergone for him at Novara, and urging him to make use of their ‘pure and intelligent youth’.74 In January 1944 she demanded more specifically that a position be found for Marcello, by implication a rewarding one that would safeguard ‘him and his little angels [her grandsons]’.75 She did not say so, but Boggiano had been paying the family bills at Merano, and the Petacci lifestyle, even at this stage of the war, needed replenishment.76 Francesco Saverio kept in character, too, when he opened correspondence with the Duce from the Villa Fiordaliso, but merely enclosing a detailed weekly diet. It entailed an intake of from four to seven pills per day and a nightly injection.77 Dr Petacci himself did not carp about the curtailment of his medical career but, on 21 February, Claretta chided her lover for ignoring her father’s ‘moral misery into which he has fallen because of us’.78
Myriam, although only just approaching her twenty-first birthday, was as practical as her mother and more forthright in rebuking the Duce for not paying enough attention to her sister, thus allowing her to sag, to become ‘tired, deluded, prostrate, absent, in sum incoherent and exasperated’.79 But Myriam also had Armando to consider and her rocky marriage. ‘In spite of every effort,’ she informed Mussolini, ‘Armando has not been able to revive his textile factory and believes that he will never succeed in doing so.’ No doubt, Mussolini’s benevolent help had allowed him to restore his palazzo in Milan and systematise some of his other holdings. Yet more could be done for him. ‘Now listen to what I am asking you,’ Myriam charged. ‘As you know there are official places available to control the sequestration of Jewish textile concerns.’ Could not Armando become a ‘commissario or some such’ in that activity and take over a large business with lots of workers? Such a post would allow him to ‘rediscover his equilibrium after many painful events have struck at him so badly and then he could in a happy tomorrow return to being my husband in the real and noble fashion in which I had believed and dreamed’. Buffarini Guidi, she was sure, could deal with the details and thereby achieve ‘the definitive systematisation of Armando’.80
Myriam’s casual anti-Semitism, harnessed more to family advantage than ideological purity, is notable. However, the archives do not provide information whether this request to seize Jewish business was successful and, by spring 1944, Myriam and Armando had separated for ever, with Claretta’s sister finding a new partner in the lawyer Enrico Mancini, apparently a close friend of her husband. By then Myriam’s letters to the Duce, when they were not berating him for mistreating Claretta, sought with more direct self-interest his urgent intervention with Goebbels or others so that she could resume her film career. Fernando Mezzasoma, the RSI’s Venice-based minister for popular culture, she dismissed rudely as ‘a priest who says Mass at any altar going’.81
Marcello joined in the correspondence as well, notably in a long letter sent to Mussolini at the end of May 1944; he presumably did not know that, a month earlier, Mussolini had protested to Claretta over an ‘unpleasant visit’ from him, when Marcello (whom the dictator sardonically called ‘Colfosco’) had expatiated on a set of ‘absurd and impossible proposals’.82 Claretta’s brother began his letter with yet another rebuttal of libels about his family reaching th
e Duce from their many enemies in what he plainly understood as a Darwinian world. ‘The Petaccis have remained like few others with you and are capable of dying with you and for you in spite of the flames, the wreckage, the guns put to necks, the advance of the Anglo-Saxons and Bolshevism.’ ‘For millennia,’ he ran on with bold assertion of historical significance, ‘the Petaccis have taken their modest place solely as the fruit of their work and thought, and so today have a prime right to breathe freely notwithstanding the Badoglio people, the Fascists in bad faith and the imbeciles of every race.’ Mussolini was the most powerful genius of the times and Claretta the greatest saint, racially sprung from the Santa Chiara of 1200, Marcello urged expansively. There must be no conflict between them and he was there to ensure it.83 Mussolini simply must ‘above all defend the woman who alone has followed you in pain and fortune and will follow you tomorrow whether to the calvary of defeat or the bright light of victory’.84
Late in January 1944 Claretta fell ill, receiving solicitude from a distance in Mussolini’s regular letters.85 But in early February she was strong enough to communicate at length, again summoning Mussolini to radical action. ‘Today is the time for the revolution in the revolution. You are reborn.’ The Duce must understand that ‘you cannot live without me and I cannot live without you’. Nothing must be permitted to stand in their way. It was excellent that he was soon to meet Hitler and he must not in any way feel himself an inferior of the Führer. ‘You are always Mussolini and he is Hitler. Nothing has changed . . . He is your dearest friend.’ They must stand together. ‘You are two dictators struggling with the world. You must follow the same idea and pursue it to the end,’ Claretta argued firmly.86