Occasionally she remembered sex. On 14 February Claretta wondered whether her Ben was yet asleep: ‘I cannot as yet,’ she mused. ‘I want to sleep with you in the big bed as on 28 [October]. I desire to pass a whole night with you and I believe this will happen. Our love is stronger than everything and everybody.’87 Less than a week before she had been imagining a solution to their sexual drought whereby Rachele (‘your wife’) would move out of the Villa Feltrinelli, either back to the Rocca delle Caminate or onto an island in the lake.88 But the events of the war could always enhance her new political extremism. When Montecassino suffered a massive Allied aerial strike on 15 February, Claretta excoriated Pope Pius XII for his acceptance of such barbarism. The pope was vilely genuflecting to ‘dollars and gold’. ‘Ah our wretched Lord, our wretched religion. Today this pope is absolutely a figure without honour or dignity . . . Is it perhaps the end of the Christian religion? . . . I don’t understand anything anymore,’ she cried.89
But the epistolary exchanges with Mussolini brought little satisfaction, full as they were of the Duce’s deep depression, physical debility and psychological certainty that he now counted for nothing. On 23 March Claretta found the depression contagious as she complained: ‘I cannot be and do not want to be in your cabinet.’ She might express political views but they did not lie at the heart of her relationship with Mussolini, she contended. Or maybe jealousy of his other family was the real issue: ‘I want to leave. I’m tired. I don’t want to live like a prisoner, like a slave, like a beast in a cage’, especially when those dwelling at Villa Feltrinelli – full, as she sarcastically put it, of ‘Olas, Vitos, Idas and Ginas’ – were in practice lording it over her.90 When another of Marcello’s schemes broke down, Claretta grumbled that she and her family were victims not merely of Badoglio but of ‘you and yours’. He would react to her scolding merely with fudges as he always did, she predicted. ‘Nothing remains for me but to abandon the field, in a totally just reaction to so much infamous wickedness, incomprehension, injustice, lack of courage in response to our courage. My love is being transformed into hatred and vendetta.’ ‘Addio, Ben’, her letter finished melodramatically.91
Mussolini hastened to calm her, although his prose soon wandered into his own depression, and he fixed a tryst with her for the following Sunday. But that proved impossible, all the more so because he had to get Party Secretary Pavolini to deal with a plan to kidnap or murder Claretta that had been brewing among radical Fascists, with the support of some of the Duce’s own family.92 When Ben and Clara could arrange an assignation, their contact was always short and likely, as Mussolini observed, to be shredded by ‘bitter’ news from the war.93 Claretta herself described how, ‘to the joy and intensity of the moment, is added the desolating sadness of a brevity that prevents any interesting talk’, although that did not stop her from writing to counsel the Duce to get closer to the Japanese through Ono Shichiro and Japanese ambassador Shinrokuro Hidaka. ‘Listen to my advice,’ she insisted yet again. ‘Avoid the error of overvaluing the merits and capacity of your family circle,’ especially Vittorio. He and his louche friends had cost his father ‘the sympathy of all the Germans who love us’. The family circle was equally responsible for Mussolini’s weak refusal to impose capital punishment on his opponents. All was not yet lost. He should work with Buffarini Guidi, who knew Himmler well, while Marcello was always worth a discussion, Claretta advised.94
Despite her rarely leaving the Villa Fiordaliso, it was now common for Claretta to endeavour to galvanise her partner into ever more brutal policies. It would be good to imagine another 25 July, she wrote, when, this time, Mussolini killed his enemies himself, as the German dictator had once done.95 As he prepared for a meeting on 22 April with Hitler at Klessheim, the first since the foundation of the RSI, Claretta sent him composite preparatory material: detailed political notes, a photo and a holy image of Santa Rita. He must not bow to the Führer but instead simply assume ‘absolute parity’ with the Nazis and display ‘a sharply defined and developed programme from which you must not even minimally diverge’. No German interference into Italian politics could be tolerated.96 When he returned with paltry achievement and ruin grew closer, Claretta conjured up Fascist phantasmagoria as she imagined their death, ‘buried under the wreckage caused by drunken negroes, Jews, plutocrats, and those sold for pleasure to these priests without a patria or religion, only because their chests are filling with dollars and pounds sterling’.97
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For all the violence of Claretta’s opinions, the relationship remained boxed in between the rival villas on the lake, with Mussolini supplicating his lover after his return from Germany: ‘I beg you to have complete faith in me and in what I do and shall do. You must stay where you are, whatever happens.’ There could be no ban on their love as had been attempted in May–June 1943.98 Yet their meetings remained rare. Even when they happened, squabbling was likely to result, as for example after Mussolini on going home failed to phone Claretta with a love message. At the Villa Feltrinelli, Rachele still campaigned unrelentingly against her husband’s lover, while among the Petacci family Myriam did not refrain from rushing off a letter to the Duce, again inveighing against his mistreatment of her sister. Giuseppina wrote attacking Rachele more directly, whom she accused of ‘having entered a state of insanity with murderous ideas based on a senile post-menstrual phobia’, entertaining ‘mediocre, uncultivated and unscrupulous men’, who defamed Claretta and planned worse actions.99 As his women warred rowdily around him, Mussolini accepted the persona of puppet dictator, endeavouring without hope or strategy to appease each side.
In May 1944 Myriam despatched another broadside, maintaining that Claretta had decided to take Mussolini at his word when, in his weakness, he had asked to be left in peace and quiet; now she intended to separate herself from him. ‘Love for you has reduced a woman to a state deprived of will and dignity. [Claretta] has been allowed to reach the pit of humiliation when she should possess the right to have near her the person who understands and comforts her and gives her a sense of life and a constant and devoted tenderness. She has not had one decent hour; nothing more than anxiety, punishment, vexation, calumny, gossip, betrayals.’ It was intolerable, now that his wife was back from a trip to the Rocca delle Caminate, for there to be no communication with Claretta for a fortnight. ‘I, Duce, just do not understand you anymore,’ the twenty-one-year-old declared in an intrepid manner (not designed to appeal to all dictators), ‘unless it is simply true, as Claretta keeps repeating, that now you have lost any love and any desire’. Could he at least ring her sister, she asked?100 Further letters of this tone and sentiment followed, sometimes with an added request that more be done for Marcello,101 who continued, generally to Mussolini’s annoyance, to demand interviews with the Duce and to pursue his complex business affairs as though he had support from on high.102
For Mussolini, who was watching the Allied armies approach Rome, the onslaught from Myriam and the accusations from Claretta provoked minor rebellion when, on 22 May, he charged his lover over her single-mindedness and blindness to his multiple woes. ‘The dominant note and in normal times the beauty of your love had been your egocentricity, your egoism driven to insurmountable limits. Nothing exists except it,’ he protested. ‘That the English are at Formia, Gaeta, Terracina and threaten Rome; that Italy is in flames and ashes; that I am trying to work amid a thousand difficulties, and with a thousand idiots and bastards, none of that has anything to do with you. You don’t give a toss. You want what you want even if it means your and your family’s ruin.’103 Such retort did little to divert Claretta from her now accustomed rhetorical course, however. In regard to Rome, Claretta urged simplistically, he must rouse Hitler in the Eternal City’s defence: ‘Two Chiefs, two men, two friends, alone [sic].’ It would not matter if, in grandiose battle, Rome was razed to the ground, she pronounced imperiously. What was important was that the two geniuses unite to defend it to the last.104 Claretta’s virulence ab
out the fate of her own birthplace may have been exacerbated by the news that Mussolini had seen Ruspi again (only because – he claimed – her eldest son had died as an airman above Florence, after heroically refusing to dodge the draft).105
Over the summer the content of exchanges between the two did not vary much, although Claretta did sketch a series of charming cartoons of herself as Mussolini’s ‘little puppy dog’ (sometimes being booted out of the august presence),106 perhaps as much to while away her empty hours as to win her lover’s applause for her artistic skill. In more solemn vein, she continued to push the crumpling Duce forward, somewhere and somehow, in order to defeat the ‘war criminals’, Roosevelt and Churchill: ‘You are a Man of world stature. If today the Great God could allow you to sit at a table negotiating a just peace . . . You and you alone could give us and the world light and truth . . . Speak to Hitler, telegraph, write, communicate in some way . . . But courage, Ben,’ she ended before a typical personal twist and the recommendation that above all ‘you love me while there is still time’.107
* * *
On 15 July Mussolini set out by train on another visit to Germany, destined to coincide with the attempt five days later by Claus von Stauffenberg to blow the Führer to smithereens at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on the Eastern Front. Mussolini should have been there too, but his train was late, delayed in Munich by Allied bombing. There could have been another reason for Mussolini’s good fortune, since the anxious Claretta had again insisted that ‘you do not forget the wallet with Santa Rita’ in it, before hastening on with her familiar message to ‘remember that you are alone, the only person who can save the world situation’. Despite such hopes she was terrified, she conceded, that he would not come back. She would ‘kill herself’ rather than falling into the hands of ‘the English or the rebel Italians’, she promised.108
When he did return, a little chuffed to find that Hitler had experienced his own ‘25 July’, she declared: ‘I prayed a lot. Santa Rita has again saved you for the good of this poor humankind.’ He was happy enough to agree that the saint must have been useful, sentimentally assuring her he had been cocooned by her love and by her ability to act as a lightning rod for what was occurring both near and far off.109 Claretta, more vengefully, tried to use the fact that Hitler, as well as Mussolini, was now one of ‘two Great Men, betrayed in their certainties, work, and immense struggle’, to demand that the Duce strike down his enemies inexorably, whether dissidents like Roberto Farinacci or – she did not say aloud – Rachele and the Mussolini family circle.110
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For some months, the two lovers had been discussing where a refuge might be found for the Petacci parents with, as yet, no concrete result. But Myriam and her new partner had transferred to Spain in June, having first tried to organise the Duce into finding some well-rewarded job, for example as cinema or commercial attaché, for Enrico Mancini. ‘The air [on Lago di Garda]’, Myriam wrote in her usual blunt manner, has become ‘impossible to breathe and, if I do not leave this madhouse as soon as possible, everyone will go mad’. That confession off her chest, she did not hold back from lambasting Mussolini’s ‘cruel indifference’ towards her sister. He should come clean about his new lover (here perhaps were renewed suspicions about Elena Curti). He should ask why he permitted Rachele to drive him mad and so render everyone else insane. ‘Examine your own conscience,’ she urged, ‘and do so serenely without false pride and egoism. Then you will find grave, the gravest wrongs and you will accept that I am right.’ He had only himself to blame if Claretta made the sensible choice finally to leave him.111 When Mussolini objected to such scathing words, Myriam gave no ground, instead further chastising him over her sister’s ‘prostration’, before peremptorily adding that ‘you must organise [matters in Spain] with the maximum seriousness, everything’.112 Moreover, she was leaving in his charge her parents, Marcello and his children, and he simply must do more to free her brother to utilise his ‘intelligence and devotion’ in one or other of his excellent schemes.113
Once in Barcelona, Myriam wrote to Claretta to persuade her to join her and Mancini (Jesus would assist her to get there, she suggested), with Mancini adding a note that, deprived of her sister, Myriam spent every day weeping.114 Petacci emotions, it seemed, swelled ever more abundantly. Myriam had taken with her some film rushes, hoping to transfer her cinema career to Franco’s Spain, while Mancini pursued business interests, armed with a personal recommendation from Mussolini and the title of Italy’s ‘film commissar’ to Spain.115 Perhaps the Duce’s visible backing helped pay the bill at the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona where the couple, as Avv. Mancini and signora (‘Lawyer Mancini and wife’), first took residence.
Matters were complicated, however, by the Spanish regime’s cautious failure to recognise the RSI and by the fact that the new Italian ambassador from the pro-Allied ‘Kingdom of the South’, Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, did not actually reach Madrid until February 1945.116 Myriam and Mancini cast around but openings for them were few and Italians on the ground reported the fact that the two had brought no capital with them and found none in Spain.117 In regard to Claretta’s sister’s career and wellbeing, Mussolini preferred to lie low but, in September, he did agree to write to Ramón Serrano Suñer, the retired minister of foreign affairs and Franco’s brother-in-law, on her behalf. Serrano replied politely, but no financial advantage followed and, by Christmas, Myriam – who claimed to be suffering from appendicitis – returned to Italy with her partner.118
Her mother missed Myriam badly while she was away, as Claretta pointed out to Mussolini when there was further talk of some eventual sanctuary for the family.119 One suggestion in July was that Claretta should follow her ex-husband, Federici, to Japan.120 If her parents were to join Myriam in Spain, as was also projected, Claretta requested a hefty subsidy of 20,000 Swiss francs (‘they only accept Swiss francs, dollars or sterling’, she explained); that sum would allow them to live well enough for six months.121 What, too, she did not fail to ask, should be done for Marcello’s ‘kiddies’, for whom he was seeking some refuge?
But even as she fought for her family’s good, Claretta was opening a familiar old front, that where Mussolini engaged with Ruspi. To Claretta’s disgust, on 22 July 1944, the two had met again. He must see what a contrast, Claretta wrote in anger, Ruspi was, compared with herself, a woman ‘dedicated to him as far as the holocaust’. Ruspi had set up at Varese, was living cosily with another man, and happily cashed the money that Mussolini over-generously passed to her. ‘I tell you, with extreme frankness, Ruspi must be liquidated from your life,’ Claretta exclaimed. ‘If she has any need of financial help (in spite of the industrialist [her new partner]), she can go via your personal secretary. There must be no taxes [that is, coitus] of any kind paid and no excuses of any colour.’ She was watching, she promised menacingly122 (and, later that month and again in September, Mussolini had to fob off an ever-alert Claretta’s irritable charges that he had seen his ex-lover, who herself had launched at least one tirade against Marcello and Petacci family ‘corruption’). But, the Duce retorted listlessly, ‘there is no new woman in my life’ adding that, to his mortification, Claretta was wasting her time and money spying on Ruspi.123
In September the Petacci parents did transfer to Marcello’s Villa Schildhof in the Tyrol, where, as Mussolini told Claretta, not altogether comfortingly, the zone was ‘for the moment, quieter’ than Lago di Garda. In reality, he added gloomily, ‘the internal situation worsens from one day to the next. The audacity of the partisans grows with every further demonstration of our impotence [sic].’ As he had explained bleakly the day before: ‘my nights are very long . . . I don’t care if I die. I am an utterly ridiculous person.’124 Not long after, his mood grew Stygian: ‘Goodbye darling. If I could blow up the world with a load of dynamite I would do it and [take] us with it.’125
By late in the month Allied troops were marching across those regions where he had been born: ‘Goodbye Rocca delle Camina
te! Goodbye Romagna! And, in not too long, goodbye Italy!’ Soon, he thought, orders would come to flee to Germany. ‘You must go and join your family in Merano, from where you can come afterwards to where I go,’ he counselled. ‘I embrace you and am always Ben.’126 Spain remained another possibility and Mussolini assumed the role of an elderly teacher when he tried to persuade Claretta that learning a new language would be easy, that he had already mastered it and that there was a great overlap in vocabulary with Italian. To speed her progress, he sent her a Spanish magazine to read.127
As one disaster followed another at the front, private and public still intermingled. On 10 October Mussolini wrote Claretta a review of his love life. ‘Many women have fallen out of my life. I scarcely remember them,’ he assured her. Although it turned out that he had seen Ruspi again a few days before, he pledged that she was only of interest because her children thought of him as a father; indeed, ‘with my help, as was their due, they are now grown up and established. They have followed their destiny.’ Pallottelli was living on Lake Como in straitened circumstances. Giulia Gangi was ‘interned I know not where’. Giulia Brambilla had finally disappeared. Even Elena Curti had moved to Milan. Whatever had happened in the past, Claretta was his only love, Mussolini maintained: ‘You are you and you are not comparable to any other being in the whole world. You are in my heart. You alone.’128
* * *
Mussolini’s harem may have threatened dissolution under the impact of war. But Rachele had by no means surrendered her man to his lover. Like Claretta, she had a team of spies at work and, on 28 September, upbraided her husband for seeing ‘the pimp’ Marcello, who, she griped, always worked on his sister’s part. Four weeks later, the cold war that had rumbled on between the Villa Feltrinelli and the Villa Fiordaliso burst into flames. The first salvo was fired on Sunday, 22 October when local police chief Emilio Bigazzi Capanni burst into the Villa Fiordaliso, with personal orders from Mussolini to check if Claretta had been copying his letters to her. The dictator had repeatedly demanded that she tear them up, but she had disobeyed him and indeed copied some, although seemingly with Mussolini knowing that fact. When the police knocked at her door, Claretta, according to one romantic account, rushed to her bedroom, emerging to threaten the intruders with her revolver but fainting rather than firing a shot. She was revived with brandy and some heart medication. Incriminating evidence not being hard to find in the confined space of the Villa, Bigazzi Capanni left carrying Mussolini correspondence, but without arresting Claretta, despite what may have been instructions to do so.129
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