Claretta
Page 30
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In quite a few ways, then, the more prolific Mussolinis retain a presence in contemporary Italy that the Petaccis do not. Had they thereby won the family war? Yet, when it comes to ghosts, image and ‘mythistory’, Claretta’s impassioned and doughty ‘love’ may have found a deeper place in Italian souls than anything that genuinely survives of Fascist ideology and practice, ensuring that, in our own times, Mussolini’s body matters more than his mind. It is a result that could already have been predicted during the events near Lake Como. On 28 April 1945 the partisans killed a bewildered and defeated old puppet dictator who had long outlived his aspirations and whose public ridiculousness had been clear for a time; alongside him they killed a youngish woman utterly determined upon a private sacrifice that would never die.
CONCLUSION
A diarist’s tale
I have told my tale. Or should I say Claretta has told hers? She is the real narrator of my book: so many of the words that I have inscribed are her own. I have translated them from the diary and the letters that she so persistently, stubbornly, self-righteously, obsessively and even hysterically wrote. I have added where necessary material from the numerous messages that Mussolini sent her, especially in 1943–5, and the correspondence that members of her family, led by her thrusting little sister, Myriam, were always ready to dash off to the Duce. With the assistance of such rich sources I have portrayed a love story of a kind. It has been replete with emotion: lust and sensuality, jealousy and passion, infatuation and manipulation, devotion and sacrifice, fear and hatred, kisses, love bites and orgasm, snoring and insomnia, cowardice and commitment, betrayal and forgiveness. In the ‘Ben and Clara’ relationship high sentiment mixed with grosser bodily functions, the extrusion of semen and vaginal fluid, tears and sweat, piss and spit, blood menstrual and vital. This romance led not to true happiness but rather death, if not a death exactly planned and arranged. My book might be best read with the Sturm und Drang of Clara and Ben’s favourite music, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, playing loudly in the background (the couple did not seem to care that the composer, once a fan of Napoleon Bonaparte, Mussolini’s hero and historical competitor, was by his 7th Symphony composing for the emperor’s counter-revolutionary enemies, the Habsburgs).
Armed with a vast verbal record, I have been able to depict a dictator and his lover, and their surrounding family members, who, as they piloted themselves through the first totalitarian state, were driven by Fascist zealotry. At least at first sight, Mussolini’s sexual record – five legitimate children and at least nine illegitimate (from eight different partners) – and his hasty and brutal sexual habits might seem proof that he was, as Gadda derisively called him, the ‘Great Ejaculator’, the supreme embodiment of Fascist disdain for, and exploitation of, women. Yet more nuanced conclusion is possible.
Certainly their attachment to the intrusive modern ideology of Fascism did not exclude Claretta and her family from being moved by Catholic piety and ingenuous religiosity, medical science and academic pretension, class arrogance and ambition, social climbing, romanità, whether in its regime or its older, more manipulative and venal, versions, timid fatherhood and unyielding matriarchy, rampant egoism and blind oblation. Above political commitment and even sometimes, it seemed, beyond her adoration, Claretta remained tied to her family, whose members were doughtily linked to her. Following their favoured (if clichéd) slogan ‘One for all, and all for one’, the Petacci family unrelentingly pursued their advantage and profit. Over time, such pursuit was shadowed by Claretta’s increasing determination one day to overthrow and replace Rachele, the Duce’s legitimate wife. Although the evidence is slighter on their side, the Mussolini family were equally staunch in resisting Claretta and the other Petaccis’ attacks, similarly convinced that they constituted a fortress in an imponderable and dangerous world. By 1943–5 the romance had become one of ‘two households’ warring to the death, almost as though they were a microcosmic parody of the bitter international conflict which saw the Italian dictatorship bring nation and regime to destruction. In such circumstances, the likelihood became steadily greater that this ‘pair of star-crossed lovers’ must also face their doom.
Not that Claretta for a moment accepted that the Petaccis and the Mussolinis were ‘alike in dignity’ or sincerity of devotion to the Duce. She knew that her family were good, her rivals bad. In her simplistic Darwinian reading of the world, there was a further complication since Mussolini had possessed so many women, comprising what has been well called his ‘harem’.1 To Claretta’s constant disgust and dismay, he treated two of its members, Romilda Ruspi and Alice Pallottelli, as though they were sub-wives, from whom he was no more capable of his own free will fully to break than from Rachele. Mussolini continued to have sex with them, describing it to Claretta using the same deprecatory term that he used for coitus with his wife: from time to time, he stated, he must pay his taxes.
Both Ruspi and Pallottelli had borne illegitimate children to the dictator. Such paternity meant in his mind that they were part of his ‘continuation’, again to use his own terminology, one rooted not so much in contemporary Nazi-fascist racism as in traditional familism. Mussolini’s comprehension of fatherly duty and obligation extended into the harem, if rather more in his later than his earlier days. While he was still a journalist and not a political chief, his cruel persecution of Ida Dalser and their son, Benito Albino, is notorious, while his seduction and abandonment of Bianca Ceccato reads mainly as a banally patriarchal case of office exploitation. By contrast, from 1942, pushed by her mother, Angela Cucciati, who had never renounced contact with the Duce, Mussolini welcomed his illegitimate daughter Elena Curti into his personal circle, perversely without fully explaining to the jealous Claretta who Elena was. He had similarly not forgotten Ines De Spuches, mother of a son of his killed in the war. With Curti, as with the children of Ruspi and Pallottelli, including ones who were not his, Mussolini did not gainsay responsibility for their financial wellbeing, or, when they were old enough, employment. Fitting this familial pattern, when his sometime partners, even Bianca Ceccato, were in childbirth, he was likely to be less harshly dismissive of them than at other times. Anthropologists used to talk about the deep significance within the Italian family of sistemazione (finding a place in life); Mussolini, with an extended family of greater breadth than the orthodox version, is a case study in that regard, a pattern not unknown among aristocrats of an earlier generation and Mafia bosses, then and later. The Duce was both more and less than a Fascist patriarch.
When it came to producing children, Claretta, after her extra-uterine pregnancy in August 1940, was a failure. Their hopes for what Mussolini told her in July 1940 was the ‘infinite joy’ of fatherhood proved barren.2 Her illness and Mussolini’s solicitude during her suffering, if a little wavering, became engraved into her history of their relationship as a moment of pure love. Mussolini, too, looked back on her travail and his reaction to it with nostalgia. In their relationship, there may have been no blood ‘continuation’, but perhaps there was a presence of the ‘child that never was’, ensuring that they could not part.
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In recent years, emotions have become a modish topic of historical research. Jan Plamper, a leading theoretician of the subject, has dated interest in them to the French Annales school of the 1930s, underlining that Lucien Febvre was alerted to the subject by the emotionality of the crowds who applauded Mussolini and Hitler.3 Plamper’s predictable assumption is that dictators whip up those dark passions left inert in better societies. Yet it is worth noting that Mussolini, too, and not just his fans, was prey to a visible array of emotions. Lust may often have been the strongest but Mussolini could also sob while listening to La traviata or La bohème, be translated in mood when playing his violin or, as his circumstances declined during the Second World War or he reflected on a dead (legitimate) son, howl in desperation and frustration and bewail the crumbling of family life.
Most literature on dic
tatorship concentrates on high politics, assuming that the public thought and action of tyrants are what matters and that the private is of secondary significance, scarcely worth review or merely the natural and inevitable result of a perverse childhood.4 Such attitudes are reinforced by the fact that Hitler, the supremely wicked artificer of the Holocaust, stands unchallenged as the prime model of a modern dictator. This all but automatic assumption detracts from our understanding of the type, among whom Mussolini was the twentieth-century and European pioneer. Yet, in most literature, the Duce is reduced to being a rather laughable clone of the Führer. When, in 2016, some Americans sought to ridicule Donald Trump, they readily highlighted an alleged parallel with Mussolini (prompted by the Republican candidate’s ingenuous citation of a Fascist propaganda slogan: ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep’) and labelled him ‘Il Douche’.5
As a man, Hitler combined a profound fanaticism, determined utterly to liquidate ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, with a limply petit-bourgeois, Biedermeier-style sociability. Or perhaps, as a recent culturalist study has argued, it was merely his propaganda machine that constructed this banal persona.6 Maybe the public prim formality hid what were deeper currents. Yet Hitler’s arid dealings with Eva Braun bear little comparison with Mussolini’s tumultuous relationship with Claretta. Certainly, the Führer gave no sign of caring about his physical ‘continuation’. According to his latest biographer, Volker Ullrich, Hitler was certainly still a virgin at the end of the First World War and by 1924 had decided never to marry. He did like to be admired by much younger females, including Eva Braun, born, like Claretta, in February 1912 and therefore twenty-three years younger than the Führer. Ullrich explains in some detail the impossibility of knowing whether the two had sex.7 But what is patent is Hitler’s patriarchal certainty that women were too irrational to be taken seriously, a cliché of masculinity that Mussolini too expressed and yet, as has been shown, in practice gave his private life nuance and variety beyond the German dictator’s ken.
Hitler’s tedious personality is well expressed in his collected ‘table talk’8 and could run to his ‘knowledge’ that Italian women owed their beauty to their regularly carrying their property on their heads.9 On any given night, Hitler chattered away into the wee hours with his entourage, who were forced to listen to his disquisitions on such matters, unable to admit the truth that he was a boring little man (in his frequent meetings with the Führer, Mussolini typically swung between being cowed by Hitler’s power and fanaticism and being derisive of the German dictator’s strangeness and loquacity).
Joseph Stalin, the second great tyrant of interwar Europe, was a different personality, mixing the cruel ideas and practices of a bandit with an entrenched belief in Marxist ideology, coloured by the literalism of the swiftly or partially educated. Because Stalin – unlike Mussolini and Hitler (with the exception of the murders within the Nazi party on the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934) – directly eliminated many of his immediate political circle, his behaviour with his entourage was never free of menace. Nonetheless, as historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has recently illustrated, there was a ‘Stalin team’ and it did involve sociability of various kinds from family exchanges to deep, most often all-male, drinking. At their happiest before the purges, she has noted, ‘the Stalins and their guests [at their dachas] played tennis, billiards, bowls, and chess; skied; went horse-riding; danced to the gramophone; sang; drank Georgian wine; and played with their own and other people’s children’.10 They nourished a profound attachment most of the time to others in the team, while possessed by a greater loyalty and an unmeasured respect for Stalin.
By contrast with the other two dictators, Mussolini was a man of some human span, curiosity and intellect, if doubtless better at tactics than strategy, time and again making the wrong overall choices in his life, and, in very many senses, a failure (perhaps more interesting because of that; most dictators ‘fail’). In regard to personal emotions, Mussolini commonly bragged that he was a ‘loner’, being much given to misanthropic gibes at his closest Fascist colleagues, the Italian people and humankind. He did all that he could to avoid socialising with such comrades as Roberto Farinacci, Giuseppe Bottai, Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi, although they served his regime in many different posts throughout the ventennio. There was no intimate Mussolini ‘team’. The Duce was the reverse of the Italian who likes to stroll arm in arm with his friends in a daily passeggiata. He was never a touchy-feely person and neither took tea nor drank wine with his ‘friends’, a word he did use but always in terms of such people’s immediate utility to him.
Mussolini’s standard position therefore was to be proud to be alone in a wicked and treacherous world; his arrogance always suggested that no party colleague could come close to matching his authority, drive and intuition. Yet, especially as he grew older and as the war enhanced his depression, particularly once he had to endure being a puppet dictator at Salò, Mussolini did on occasion grumble about his solitary fate. Such melancholy could lead him to remind Claretta wistfully of people with whom he had once had human contact. They were not party colleagues but instead family members: Arnaldo, his brother, with whom every evening he had talked on the phone until Arnaldo’s early death in December 1931, Bruno, his dead son (here often embroidering the truth of their actual distant relationship), Edda, his eldest and favourite child, Galeazzo Ciano, her husband, admiring interlocutor, and, by the mid-1930s, implicit dauphin, despite the fact that the son-in-law was a soft gilded youth and no rough and tough Fascist boss.
There were also his bed partners. Again the Duce’s reiterated line was that women were constitutionally inferior to men and that no one could ever take their views seriously. When it came to bodily matters, Mussolini sounded like a patriarch of the old school, a man for whom sex could only be nasty, brutish and short. Yet, as Christopher Duggan archly noted, ‘Though Mussolini endeavoured to keep his lovemaking as perfunctory as possible, there is little doubt that his relations with women consumed a huge amount of his time.’11
The Petacci diaries and other papers, the stream of phone calls and letters, certainly confirm that they did, whether in her direct regard or in his regular reflection to her on his other love affairs (by preference in historical recounting), even if, typically, his memories were overwhelmingly misogynist. Despite such lordly maleness, Mussolini more and more mixed his public and private activities, allowing Claretta space under the RSI to become a Ducessa of a kind, just as once he had engaged in massive correspondence with, and accepted counsel from, Margherita Sarfatti (while later so volubly despising both her and his weakness in listening to her), Leda Rafanelli and Angelica Balabanoff. Contrary to his loud pronouncements about female inferiority, Mussolini often mingled his decision-making in high politics with his emotions.
In that regard, as Italo-British historian Giuseppe Finaldi has acutely suggested, the Duce’s life and attitudes as expressed in his speeches bear less comparison with Hitler or Stalin and more with Winston Churchill, that other overflowingly emotional journalist-politician of the interwar.12 Finaldi does not endorse the fantastic theories about a lost Mussolini–Churchill correspondence. But he does draw attention to the parallels that exist between the voice of an Italian, risen to power from ‘below’ at thirty-nine, and an impecunious and imperialist English aristocrat, held from the most glittering of prizes until he was sixty-five. Through the interwar and indeed his life, much of Churchill’s emotion was directed at his gambling with financial fortune (and in minimising tax on it),13 rather than on the lust for sex that occupied so many of Mussolini’s hours. But each politician is difficult to understand without a constant reckoning with his emotions.
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If rage, passion and disquietude were a common part of Mussolini’s mind and a regular trigger of his actions, hardly an hour seemed to pass without Claretta giving play to her emotions. Hysteria was a daily matter. Claretta regularly relied on stereotypically female floods of
tears, a ready swoon in times of crisis, a devoted religiosity to Santa Rita and emanations of the Virgin, a huge repertoire of the melodrama of love and infatuation and a reviving sip of cognac. At the same time, she retained the primness of her class training, which stopped her from writing out such horrid words as ‘bum’ and ‘whore’. No doubt she did list her sexual acts and, over time, frequently added an assessment of Mussolini’s performance during them. Yet her si was not enlarged into more detailed description of how she and the Duce intermingled during their sexual congress. Claretta Petacci was no Henry Miller; at least in her descriptions of sex, she followed the missionary method.
As has been noted, except during her last hours, Claretta’s emotional life was never fully detached from that of her family and, in turn, her father, mother, brother and sister reacted emotionally to her life choices. Francesco Saverio anxiously clung to his medical profession. Giuseppina Persichetti told her rosary beads and implored the Virgin for support, even while she approved or fostered the irregular lifestyle of each of her daughters. Marcello gave rein to his vivid ambition as doctor, thinker and moneymaker. Myriam belied her years in her importunity. Only Zita Ritossa, with available evidence the most shadowy member of the family, behaved like an ‘exemplary wife and mother’, devotedly cossetting her damaged son, Benghi, until his death in his thirties; she herself lived ten further years before succumbing to a heart attack in 1987. She had also been a good daughter in finding a residence for her parents – refugees from Istria in what was now Yugoslavia – in Merano, where, despite the postwar loss of the Villa Schildhof, they stayed until their deaths.14 Yet, despite such conventional female attention to duty, even Zita was ‘modern’ or independent enough never to complete a church or state marriage with her partner.
Among the Petaccis, Myriam is of special interest, growing from an early teenage chaperone, piccola idiota (and object of lascivious side glances) to an ambitious film star, fleeting wife, and cocksure client determined to make the most of her opportunities in dealing with the grand patron Mussolini, not minding being, on at least one occasion, anti-Semitic in the process. It is Myriam who found the words that best expressed the potency of the Petacci family unit when she told the Duce that he must accept that Claretta ha avuto sempre ragione (‘has always been right’).