this is my day, these hours belong to me, they are mine, mine, from my love, my desperate faith, my certainty, my constancy. They are mine, from my sacrifice, my torment, my humiliation. They are mine from my devotion, my oblation, my renunciation, my suffering.
But her moment of hysterical celebration soon switched to besotted self-abnegation. He mattered; she did not. Now that with her help he had rediscovered his true path, off he must go. ‘You could make a gesture to me and my love; it could re-inspire me with hope and put the lie to evil. But you do not know it and will not do it. Goodbye, my great Ben, my credo, my faith, my useless but huge love. Clara’, she signed off disconsolately.15
But in the ‘Ben and Clara’ relationship, times of transport, however sublime, could only be fleeting. Within days, Claretta had detected another, less empyrean, feature of the Milan trip; while there, Mussolini had managed to meet Pallottelli, Ruspi and Elena Curti. Soon he and Claretta were quarrelling in familiar manner over the phone about the implications. As Mussolini tried to explain with jaded self-justification, he had seen Pallottelli and Ruspi very briefly, for old time’s sake, to hear of their current troubles and anyway they were now too old for sex. He had told Curti to go away (the fact that Elena Curti was actually his daughter was not accepted by Claretta until the last journey in April 1945). But how could Claretta spy on him, he expostulated, and how could one of his entourage act as her spy! ‘It is really humiliating and I beg you not to do it,’ he adjured her with his usual hollow force, before moving back to vainglorious boasts about his courage in touring around Milan in an open car where, finally, he trusted, ‘a little sunshine has reappeared on the horizon’.16
Back at Gargnano, the momentary optimism of Milan vanished and he soon slipped back into depression, not helped by his decision on Christmas Day to read over the proceedings of the Verona trial that had cost Ciano his life (on 10 January, the anniversary of the execution, in his egoism Mussolini recalled downheartedly what a ‘dramatic day’ it had been for him).17 Again, he announced glumly, ‘I am tired, totally stuffed with too many skirts. But not of course yours since I love you,’ he remembered to add.18 By 27 December his letter virtuously revealed that he had refused to see Ines De Spuches, mother of his other dead son, who had come looking for him; naturally, mention of someone she labelled the ‘dirty woman’ reignited Claretta’s jealousy, with her extracting from her partner another denial that De Spuches possessed any significance for him a few weeks later.19 Trying to absolve himself from blame and return the focus of their exchanges to politics and war, Mussolini lamented that ‘the magnificent flame of Milan is turning into a pile of words reduced to ashes’, before promising that he could fit in a meeting with Claretta on New Year’s Eve. And, he added trying yet again to find a positive, at least Myriam was back from what had not been a very successful venture to Spain.20
Claretta did not take a step back as she drafted a seven-page charge sheet against his current self-absorption, reiterating her disgust about Ruspi and her lover’s many failings, while again reprimanding the Duce for not taking sufficient advantage of the alliance with the Nazis. Now only the Germans could ‘defend our land’, she told him peremptorily. She had changed her mind about the place to resist. A retreat to the Alto Adige would be useless. Milan was the city where he should make a last stand.21
In his response, written after the New Year dawned, Mussolini endeavoured to be blunt in emphasising that he did not welcome such advice from his lover. Their last meeting had gone badly. She had lain on the ground shouting imprecations at him, humiliating him. ‘You think too much. You’re too cerebral,’ he charged. She should ask herself how best to receive him when he saw her, he suggested ‘With some enthusiasm?’ ‘I embrace you, in spite of all, your Ben,’ he concluded in some lightening of tone, followed by another order to destroy the letter.22
But Claretta was not going to let him get away with such rebuke. ‘There is no danger in getting bored at your place,’ she wrote sarcastically, ‘especially given your marvellous and unique ability to adapt.’ His charge that she was ‘cerebral’ ignored her love, sacrifice, devotion and acceptance of his betrayals. It was no way to enter what should be the happiness of the Befana fascista (‘Fascist Epiphany’, a regime festival of gift-exchange in better days), and, with her own feminine gesture of appeasement, she did remember to send his granddaughter Marina a doll.23 She had also not forgotten her dedication to Santa Rita (indeed, while Myriam was in Spain, she had adopted the pseudonym ‘Rita Colfosco’ for their correspondence), and she continued to hope for divine help for Italy and the Repubblica Sociale.24 But Mussolini’s mood did not lift. ‘I am fed up with being a fool,’ he grouched on 7 January, ‘I am just a ridiculous person. I am a grotesque puppet.’ Only death could bring release and he desired it ‘ardently’.25
* * *
As winter drifted into spring – with what seemed to the pair, who for so long had lived in Rome, culpable tardiness – the tone and topic of exchanges between the two lovers, each now often claiming to be ill, altered little in its fusing of private and public catastrophe. Mussolini noted wryly that he had taken so many pills that he felt as though his bones were dissolving, but then he always did exactly what doctors told him to do;26 can he have been subtly contemplating whether he was prey to the medical expertise and obduracy of the Petacci family? For her part, Claretta alternated between the role of counsellor, trying to stiffen her Duce for one last effort at bloody resistance, and an hysterically jealous lover convinced, as for example in early February, that ‘you have betrayed me, you are betraying me, you will betray me’ with Ruspi. ‘I believe,’ Claretta predicted with what proved foresight, that, ‘in dramatic circumstances, you will go away with your people, including the intruder [Curti], without caring a jot for me and without making a minimal attempt to find a place in the world where we can still see each other.’27
Every now and again, Mussolini tried to obtain the upper hand, telling Claretta on 31 January for example that he was in a complete fury towards all the women around him and that he would add her to his list if she continued to chide him so unmercifully.28 Only a few days before, his wife had grabbed him as he emerged from the air raid shelter to castigate him for an hour about Claretta. Gina Ruberti then disclosed to him that a rumour (which Mussolini was sure must be false) had reached the Villa Feltrinelli that Claretta had petitioned the German ambassador to confine Rachele to a home. Being shouted at was one problem. Just as bad was the fact that the Mussolini women had taken to table-turning to discern the future; with his own misreading of history, the Duce wondered whether life would not be better as a prisoner in the Tower of London.29
An ever-more pathetic old man, in mid-February Mussolini fussed that his weak eyesight meant that he was having trouble with Claretta’s handwriting even when using his glasses: could she make sure her future correspondence with him was typed?30 That wish prompted an unsympathetic response from Claretta, who told him firmly that her writing was only bad when he had made her ‘nervous’, ‘apathetic, irritable, tired and bored, bored with everything’. Once launched, she did not stop: ‘Everything is useless. With you, for you, for me, for everyone. I can read your heart and know that you will only do for me what does not disturb your so-called family quiet and your marvellous and ineffable egoism’, before she moved back to sentimental memories of their early days together in the sunshine, and signed off excusing herself and requesting his ‘comprehension’.31 His sacking of Buffarini Guidi from the Ministry of the Interior on 21 February similarly earned him flinty rebuke from Claretta; she wrote three letters in a single day to try to save Buffarini Guidi or to have him placed in charge of RSI foreign policy: he was the only person tough enough to stand up to the Germans and their growingly evident desire to remove themselves from Italy.32
The loss of Buffarini Guidi, a man whom she regarded as her political patron, stimulated Claretta to a ferocious statement of her own radicalism and romanità (however tinctured, so
mewhere beneath the words, by her willingness to sacrifice anything for love). ‘I declare that I am an anti-Semite by racial instinct,’ she told Mussolini on 25 February. ‘Really I am a patrician – in my blood there is not a single drop of impurity – and I feel a profound pride that springs from my utterly pure stock. I do so, not so much from aristocratic sensibility but in [my natural] rectitude in behaviour, in honesty, [in devotion] to the safety of and love for the patria, understood in the widest terms.’ She then went on in more Machiavellian mode to explain away the charge that the RSI’s deputy police chief, Eugenio Apollonio, who had fallen with Buffarini Guidi and been arrested by the Germans, was stained by Jewish blood (his enemies were charging that he was racially contaminated by a Jewish great-grandparent).33
* * *
Claretta was still seeking the best words to craft a path through the murky high politics of the RSI as her own domestic affairs remained in turmoil. Myriam’s return from her unsuccessful venture to Spain had renewed Petacci family solidarity, with Myriam recommencing her lengthy and critical letters to the Duce. In February 1945 Claretta’s young sister, still short of her twenty-second birthday, detailed a familiar register of error and blame. Once she had been the sweet child waiter and food provider, she began. She had not changed and neither had her sister. He, however, had bowed to ‘the obnoxious connections that surround you’. He was failing to recognise Claretta’s love and sacrifice. He simply must get rid of ‘those reptiles who . . . fill you with poison’, notably ‘your wife who uses any dire means to strike at Claretta’, Myriam demanded, not mincing her words. Only yesterday, Rachele had spent two hours filling Paolo Zerbino, the new minister of the interior (he had replaced Buffarini Guidi), with lies about Claretta and her family. Mussolini must understand, as Myriam and all the Petaccis understood, that ‘Claretta has always been right’ (Claretta ha avuto sempre ragione; Myriam was, consciously or unconsciously, parodying the regime slogan: Mussolini ha sempre ragione). The Duce must listen to his piccola idiota, now reduced to being an ‘unhappy little person beset by destiny’. He must make sure to see Claretta on her birthday and then concentrate on a proper reconciliation with her.34
Amid her fervent pleas for her sister, Myriam did not forget her own concerns and pressed Mussolini to ready passports and letters of recommendation to Franco and others, should she and Mancini return to Spain, this time in the company of her parents. It also might be sensible for them to have a contact with the Japanese ambassador in case of need; with what sounds like superb geographical ignorance, Vittorio Mussolini and his friends were allegedly around this time thinking of transferring Mussolini by submarine to the ‘security’ of the East.35 Myriam had no knowledge of such fantastical schemes and urged with more humdrum purpose that Mussolini must write ‘a clarifying letter to Claretta about the intention that you presently have for the morrow since, to me, it looks very dark for Claretta without the understanding, tenderness and gratitude that Claretta merits’.36
From late February 1945 much of Mussolini’s correspondence to Claretta was duly devoted to plans to get the Petaccis away safely to Spain, with helpfully false names on their passports and with German backing, however grudging.37 But for the moment no action followed and instead Mussolini again intimated that he should move back to Milan for some sort of final resistance, perhaps in the city, perhaps in the Valtellina on the border of Switzerland. For Claretta, all such sketches meant was that he was doing what his wife and Ruspi wanted: he was paying no attention to her. In Milan he could be killed by any stray bomb, while chat about the city as a final bulwark was an absurdity. On 18 March she wrote at length to say that intimation of his imminent departure meant that she had come ‘to a final decision to leave you cost what it may’. She had stayed with him without ‘fear’, ‘mental reserves’, ‘false shame’ and despite his own odious ‘cowardice’. She had fully merged her ‘faith’ and her love, her politics and her life, her public and private self. But he did nothing for her and was not even brave enough to break with Rachele, who had done nothing worthwhile for him for thirty-five years. He was not big enough for her ‘love and offering’, she had decided. Yet perhaps he still carried potential power as the Duce, she concluded in final sentimentality.38
Predictably, Claretta had not really shaken herself free from her lover, nor had Mussolini accepted that she had sundered their ties, sending a reply insisting that they both should move in short order to Milan, while complaining again about his time being wasted listening to Marcello’s wild schemes and tolerating the ‘canaille’ who were his friends (Marcello had taken on occasion to elevating himself to the nobility as conte di Colfosco). The dictator had, however, readied matters for the departure of Myriam and Mancini,39 although, with her family loyalty ever at the ready, Claretta accused him a few days later of failing to appoint Mancini Italian commercial attaché in Madrid and assured him that he was completely wrong to doubt the political commitment to Fascism of Myriam’s new partner.40
As wintry weather lingered and Mussolini caught another cold (it hampered fidgety plans for a sexual encounter),41 the two lovers continued their epistolary wrangling, for example over who was spying on whom.42 On 29 March Mussolini expostulated how ‘grotesque, sublime and humiliating’ it was, ‘at a moment when the old and new world are burning’, that ‘I must talk to you about Elena Curti’.43 By early April he disclosed that he was working on the assumption that, although Franco’s Spain was becoming steadily less welcoming to its old Fascist friends, he could still get the Petaccis, including Claretta, away there.44 Maybe, he wrote with what might have been a flicker of lust, there was in fact a last sexual opportunity somewhere near the lake, even if the bed would not be supplied with sheets; better at his place than hers and their tryst could last a whole night, he claimed.45 In the meantime, it went without saying, he maintained, that he was ‘chaste in the most strictly literal meaning of the term’.46 As far as the wider world was concerned, the news of the death of Roosevelt, ‘the greatest criminal’, might yet be a good omen.47
At around that time, Claretta compiled another of her lengthy despatches, ranging freely over her dissatisfaction with Mussolini and tabulating his inadequacy in public and private life. He must read the letter twice, she urged. She devoted a whole page to his failure to treasure Marcello Petacci, a man who had sacrificed his professional life and his naval career, in which all his promotions had been won strictly on merit, to the Duce. Mussolini had not noticed how Marcello had kept ‘his faith intact and totally pure since adolescence’, as was appropriate for the ‘first-born’ and heir of a family name that was ‘flawless, honourable, innate’. As she painted her lyrical portrayal of her brother, Claretta was working herself up to a conclusion that was an even more definite declaration of family loyalty than the pronouncement of her racism a few days before. ‘Now, I tell you. One day it will finally be the time of reckoning. I do not believe that I shall expire beneath a bomb or be riddled by a machine gun or anything else. The day will come when you won’t recognise me anymore. Then you will see how I know how to defend the honour of my father, my mother, Marcello, Mimi and all my family.’ Such a final reckoning could only be avoided if he at last perceived how much gratitude and justice he should grant ‘to a whole family condemned to death by Badoglio for your sake and by you and today condemned to civil death by you’.48
* * *
On 18 April Mussolini penned his last letter to ‘Clara’. It contained mixed news. Entering Spain was more and more problematic. Those who arrived on a clandestine flight would be interned and have their plane seized. He was off to Milan, where he would have no time for thoughts about women. He hoped eventually to get back to Lago di Garda. If she herself somehow reached Milan, he would hope to see her there. With a hug and a final message to tear up the letter, that was all.49
Claretta replied twice at greater length and with heavy emphasis on her accustomed themes. She began with sarcasm: ‘to help me you have decided to leave, not to see me,
not to speak to me, to leave me alone to consume myself’. Despite his trying for the hundredth time to escape the issue of her role in his life, she would follow him to Milan: one last kiss might be enough, she wrote romantically before again charging him with wanting to fix some arrangement there with Ruspi. ‘I now consider my life over, my cycle closed . . . Everything is finished for me as for all those who give everything with no reward,’ she announced bleakly before wishing him ‘Goodbye’.50
In her second letter she concentrated more on trying yet again to ginger the dictator into drastic action against all those whom she believed were plotting against him. As for herself, ‘never as now have I known that I am definitively alone, alone in my faith and my pain that I alone know . . . Today in my desperation, I can do everything. I have overcome everything. I am beyond good and evil,’ she scrawled with what may have been suicidal intent. ‘If you do not seek me, I shan’t seek you,’ she repeated before a final digression into patriotic politics and the reminder that Trieste was another place that had to be defended to the last since, from the First World War, it throbbed with Italian ‘blood’ and Italian ‘heroism’.51
At its end, therefore, Claretta, in her correspondence, managed to fuse fervent Fascism, familism, infatuation, devotion and ‘love’; as so often, the public and the private. She avoided any analysis of what might now seem the contradictions of such ideas, even while she so often excoriated Mussolini for his own weak failure to choose between her and his legitimate family, his ideal public policy and the bad part of his private life. Now, inevitably alone and with Mussolini giving few thoughts to her, she hastened on the evening of 18 April to organise her own departure from the Villa Mirabella. Contrary to romantic accounts of their love story, it was still by no means certain that ‘Ben and Clara’ would die together. But they had fewer than ten days left to live.
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