Claretta
Page 26
Back at the Villa Feltrinelli, Rachele was enraged at the evidence that yet another of her husband’s compromises was in progress. So, according to a memoir account, on the morning of 24 October she marched into the office of the portly Guido Buffarini Guidi, until that moment a man who had tactfully persuaded both Rachele and Claretta that he was the privileged agent of each to the power elite of the RSI, equipped with the guile of ‘not saying things out loud but letting them be understood’.130 Now, however, Rachele commanded that he find a car and military support, and take her to her rival’s villa. Nervously Buffarini Guidi agreed. Since Rachele was also by now a little stout, the two crammed into the back seat of a Fiat Topolino with an armed driver and headed south along the lake at ‘a mad pace’. Once they arrived at the Villa Fiordaliso, Rachele pulled out her own revolver and, since the gates were locked, forced Buffarini Guidi to crawl through the fence, tearing his trousers in the process.131
Claretta came to the door, dressed as usual in a negligee (she was said generally to get up at 10 a.m. and then spend two hours grooming),132 to be greeted by Rachele with a volley of insults, vociferated in ‘the most expressive’ Romagnol dialect; the word ‘whore’ was used more than once. Rachele pushed her way into the villa, shouting ‘Signora, I am no longer young and I know it. But, believe me, if the Duce saw you at the moment, without all the make-up’, he would ‘not consider you any more as his idol’. Under such physical and verbal assault, Claretta burst into tears and fainted more than once, readily revived by a sip of the brandy that Buffarini Guidi had been quick to locate in the house. She doubtless thereby confirmed Rachele, who was proud never to have shed tears,133 in her contempt. To exacerbate the pandemonium, Mussolini was contacted by phone, with accounts disagreeing whether he was rung by Claretta or Rachele or whether he himself, apprised of the confrontation, had used the line to try to calm the conflict between his wife and lover. Finally Rachele, after a couple of hours of abuse, yelled a lame if prescient imprecation: ‘You will come to a bad end’ and stalked out, pulling Buffarini Guidi with her.134
They then drove back to the Villa Feltrinelli where – in the account of German interpreter, Eugen Dollmann – Buffarini Guidi, ‘breathless, dishevelled and bathed in perspiration . . . tottered in and flung himself down on the sofa with a groan, having first . . . tossed aside something which looked suspiciously like a revolver. Then he moaned: “Queste donne, ah, queste donne” [’These women, ah, these women’].’135 Mopping his brow, he proceeded to relate to Dollmann all that had transpired.
From his own office Mussolini rushed off a letter, ingratiatingly telling Claretta how happy he was to hear from a third party that she had agreed to move further away. ‘In your new “place of retirement” you will settle back down. I shall find a way to communicate with you, by phone and letter, and to see you. We must change [the] system,’ he emphasised, ‘since everything is now known and put under surveillance. I give you infinite thanks for allowing things to go ahead and I send you every tenderness,’ he concluded, with what he hoped were winning emotions, and there was space for the last advice: ‘Destroy this,’ and then again on the back of the page ‘Tear it up! Tear it up! Tear it up as soon as you have read it.’136
Alas, these hopes of a more peaceful private life were short-lived! On the morning of 25 October Mussolini scribbled another note to Claretta: ‘This morning there has been an attempt at suicide. Immediate intervention. Nothing alarming but a serious [medical] crisis . . . I have the impression that the only intended aim was not to break me from you which is impossible but to put a greater space – territorially speaking – between you and me.’ While he was in the act of writing, Gina Ruberti burst in to inform him that ‘the poisoning is grave and there are moments of delirium’. Even if, in another display of his personal cowardice, Mussolini did not mention Rachele by name in his letter, he ended with a crabwise request to his lover for appeasement. ‘I, too, am very disturbed [by the act] and hope that it does not have a dramatic epilogue. If your momentary move away somewhere is necessary, you will do it, I think, as you already have done in the name and sign of our love.’137 After this open skirmish, would it prove impossible in future to sustain the uneasy historic compromise between Mussolini’s legitimate family and his lover and her kin? Claretta, for the moment, feared so. She wrote back accusingly: ‘your wife and your family have won again as they always do’.138 Yet, in fact, battle immediately resumed. The melodrama of the Petacci and Mussolini families could not be calmed by an armistice, an unsurprising situation since, over recent months, Claretta (and her family) often seemed made of sterner stuff than was the fading dictator. A Ducessa (of some definition) bid fair to outlast the Duce.
7
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
On 25 October 1944 it may have appeared that Mussolini’s life had reached a personal turning-point. Appearances, however, were misleading. Rachele survived her attempted suicide. At the Villa Feltrinelli life returned to its customary edginess, and the long war between the Mussolini and Petacci families, in a curious parody of the world conflict, smouldered on. All that really happened was that Claretta moved out of the Villa Fiordaliso, thereafter being housed across the road and up the hill at the Villa Mirabella, part of the estate of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s pompously named Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. D’Annunzio, dead now for six years, had left behind a widow, Maria Hardouin di Gallese, principessa di Montenevoso, a title in which she continued to rejoice, despite many years of separation from the sexually athletic poet.1
The princess was willing to welcome Claretta (and her SS guard) as tenants. Claretta shared the new quarters with Count and Countess Cervis, the couple with whom, in April 1945, she left her diary and other family papers.2 Through the depressing months ahead, Claretta may have been troubled by the view from the windows of the villa of the prow of the torpedo boat Puglia, cemented into the hillside above at D’Annunzio’s command in 1923, with the Germanophobe message that Italians would never again allow the lake waters below to be called Gardasee.3 The Petacci parents had removed themselves from Claretta’s presence some months earlier, thereafter residing mainly with Zita and Marcello’s children in their more modest but still commodious villa at Merano; from the viewpoint of Giuseppina Persichetti, its great advantage may have been its attractive chapel where she could continue her regular Catholic worship.
While these minor changes in location were occurring, Mussolini composed reams of words to Claretta aimed at ensuring peace in his time between wife and lover, or at least a lasting armistice. Perhaps, he did not dare to hope openly, a solution to these private battles could be somehow replicated in the world war? As usual, when he put thoughts down on paper at Gardone, Mussolini found it hard not to be sorry for himself. He had, he admitted, been swept away by jealousy when told both about Claretta copying his letters and about ‘an [alleged] Italian lover’, and so had ordered the police requisition of the Villa Fiordaliso. But that was only the beginning of his woeful list. ‘Then came the scene on Tuesday [with Rachele], another horror.’ Then Wednesday morning and the suicide attempt from which his wife would need a long convalescence. ‘In the midst of the greatest dangers,’ he drifted on, ‘I have never lost my head, but now I [have] lost it. I confess and ask your forgiveness. Hence the proposal to have you hidden away for a while.’
But any scheme that he and Claretta should for a time part had not advanced far, he interjected hastily. His own life had been foul, the family disputes having filled the Villa Feltrinelli with rage and imprecation. It was awful to have to live ‘in this wretched little village, full of gossip and spies’. Yet, switching to a more sentimental key that he must have hoped would charm Claretta, he declared, ‘I thank fate that has allowed us to live near to each other. I love you. No doubt troubles wear love down. But love will find a way . . . We have overcome other obstacles . . . I embrace you tenderly and I beg you to tear up every piece of paper,’ he concluded, combining (tepid) warmth and (feeble) command.4
A second letter that day contained a similar mixture of emotion, self-interest and persuasion. Claretta should not put herself in the wrong by objecting to his latest plan. ‘You must understand my situation. My soul is rocked by a tempest. I send you my every thought,’ he pledged unconvincingly, with reiterated instruction to destroy that letter, too.5 On the next day he composed a longer appeasing epistle, which started with good news before venturing into bad. ‘You have given your youth to me and it is fair that I give you the rest of my life . . . I shall not permit anyone, and I mean anyone, to raise a scintilla of doubt about your crystalline faith as a Fascist and Italian woman – as a courageous Fascist – from your adolescence on,’ he vowed. Yet, he revealed, he (not she) might have to move away – his polio-stricken younger daughter, Anna Maria, was, he claimed with what sounded a palpably cheap excuse, in declining health. And, he acknowledged, he could not overcome his suspicion of Claretta’s relationship with the young SS guard, Franz Spögler. What did the German’s habit of using the phone in her bedroom entail? A man and a woman, he knew in his soul, could only come together in private for one purpose. Yet his peroration attempted upbeat as he concluded virtuously, ‘I have practised passive resistance [to his suspicions and those of others] and I am sure that I shall save our love.’6
Hardly had this note reached Claretta than she composed a bitter reply, accusing Mussolini of being swayed by the ‘unworthy and cowardly campaign’ against her in her new quarters at the Villa Mirabella. ‘You have not defended me,’ she charged, ‘nor do you ever defend me. I must look after myself . . . I do not believe in you anymore . . . They have won but you have lost and you will understand the matter when it is too late.’ By now, she was, she confessed, ‘in a complete state of collapse . . . Reflect before you do something. Think before you act,’ she ordered with more telling command than his.7 A Mussolini–Petacci family armistice still lay – at least in her mind, it seemed – some way off,.
Faced with Claretta’s stubborn opposition, Mussolini began to retreat, even if there was further discussion of transferring her to a villa near Vittorio Veneto. While the debate swung to and fro, the poor Duce had caught what might reasonably be diagnosed as ‘man flu’. Despite being ill, he wailed, he was having to work very hard – twenty interviews on just one afternoon, thirty on another. But, he added with attempted brightness, he had not forgotten his responsibilities towards Myriam in Spain (a return flight from Madrid, even under German protection, might prove difficult and dangerous, while the Germans did not accept that Myriam and Mancini deserved priority in their air travel schedules). Meanwhile his cold ground him down further. He feared that his health had been utterly broken by his approval of the house invasion of 22 October; he could not believe he had been silly enough to think his Claretta had been behaving badly. When he looked in the mirror he was sure he could see new wrinkles on his face that had not been there before. Mournful thoughts about his public and his private life tangled depressingly in his mind.
After a fresh salvo from the Villa Mirabella, he now had to promise that he had not been seeing other women and that he had had nothing whatever to do with Ruspi, while at the end of the month he had to rebut furious objection from Claretta about Elena Curti, whom she was sure had arrived from Milan for sex. He was sorry to learn that Claretta, at least by her own account, had now also fallen ill. But soon Rachele, who must have been recovering more speedily than was initially predicted, was back on the attack, and likewise Vittorio Mussolini. Did it really make sense for Claretta still to live nearby, the dictator asked plaintively? Over and over again he hinted at her departure, but Claretta showed no sign of moving. Rather her relationship with the puppet dictator meandered on in its accustomed fraught way, even as Scottish soldiers marched in mid-November 1944 into Forlì, capital of la provincia del Duce, and the town where Mussolini had once been an eager socialist journalist and the lusty abductor of young Rachele from his father’s and her mother’s tavern.8
Although a couple of assignations were now successfully arranged between the two at their lakeside tower, with some presumed sexual satisfaction, perhaps more to the relief of a bored Claretta than to Mussolini, contact mostly remained indirect and, on 7 December, news of the death of the Futurist chief, Marinetti, deepened the Duce’s gloom. ‘I love the telephone when there is not a storm between us,’ he confided, ‘and I detest it when we fight because I am convinced that there is someone listening and noting it down. Today I am empty in body and soul. Today – really – I would like to be dead. As will soon happen,’ he whined with yet further urgent instructions to tear up his letter.9
* * *
With the rival residences on Lago di Garda continuing in their tussle, Claretta tried to divert her lover into choosing a centre of last resistance, which, at the time, she thought should be the Alto Adige. She still hoped in a ‘miraculous intervention’ that could somehow save Italy’s cause in the war. But the real problem, she insisted, was that Mussolini was again being weak and failing to listen to her, a repetition of his error on 25 July. He was too uncertain in his decision-making, too optimistic about his Italian comrades, too fearful of being as violent as he should be, and too humble in dealing with Hitler. In that last regard, the public and the private again mixed in her counsel as she urged that he must make it crystal clear to the German authorities in Italy how much she mattered to him and how, if he must be shifted somewhere, so must she.10
In a succession of letters through December, Claretta pressed on with her psychological siege. His sexual performance was, she chivvied him, so ‘tired’ that she knew that, when he did come to her bed, he had just left another woman’s side. Such limpness was clear proof that he had abandoned her. If amatory thrust was not the issue, then it was the constant ‘malignant campaign by your wife and friends’. ‘I experience your decay, your tiredness,’ she wrote in attempted, if self-obsessed, understanding. ‘I feel they have exhausted you.’ But he must be strong. He must not let Gina Ruberti, his daughter-in-law, seduce him with her beguiling glamour and fondness for dubious business dealings, Claretta now warned (in curious reversal of the rumours circulating about the Petaccis and still at that time doing the rounds among radical Fascists).11 He was not eating enough and what he ate was not good for him, she counselled maternally. ‘For all of us you still represent everything, the banner, the Idea, the Credo,’ she pronounced in more political terms. ‘Either you are with us, for us, and the man whom we believe in and love, or we – and I, too – will head for the hills and rebel.’ There could be only one 25 July. He must prevent another. He must persevere in backing Buffarini Guidi (Claretta had not detected any double play from that party boss on 24 October). He should also at once organise a workers’ pay rise of ‘25 lire per day, otherwise you will find yourself in serious trouble,’ she suggested with surprisingly precise detail.12
Amid the encircling gloom one chink of light glimmered when Mussolini returned to Milan and, on 16 December, broadcast a public speech from the Teatro Lirico. It combined a history of the ‘betrayals’ of 25 July and 8 September, a propaganda blitz about a Fascism which had returned to its origins in the RSI and was committed to the ‘socialisation’ of profit and land, and predictions that the war could still be won via a breakup of the ‘unnatural’ liberal–Bolshevik alliance or the sudden impact of some new weapon. With its ‘third way’, Mussolini bellowed, almost as if he were back on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, the Social Republic could yet strangle communist internationalism and Judeo-Masonic cosmopolitanism in the interests of the Italian people.13
Claretta may have griped before her lover left for Milan that he should have consulted her about the speech’s wording,14 but no one was more impressed and enthused than she when she heard the speech. Her language became almost girlish again: ‘Ben, for the first time after 14 months I am not sure that I am finding the best words for you,’ she gushed. ‘I feel as though I am starting again and I am suddenly a part of a shining life that
has already done much but now seems new, more beautiful, more grand, more ours.’ ‘I am stunned, astonished, happy and unhappy,’ she continued. His speech had meant a ‘physical return to your people, always yours’, who knew they were being offered his ‘unchanged and completely pure soul’. For so long his depression had made plain to everyone that he did not believe in himself. But now ‘you have found yourself in yourself and in your people’. ‘On my knees before your voice,’ she avowed, ‘I sustained you with my soul, with the violent beating of my heart as I listened, enraptured . . . At every pause, a shudder froze me, and I cried, throbbed, spoke with you, word for word, phrase by phrase, breath by breath.’ When he left the stage in Milan, back at Gardone, ‘I collapsed into unconsciousness’.
She hoped a phone call might confirm such mystic identification with her lover and his politics. Alas for Claretta, nothing. Yet, she wrote with personal infatuation (and wilfulness) fusing with ideology: