The Body of Il Duce (20 page)

After Malaparte makes his case in
The Skin,
he ends the trial without reaching a verdict. Before leaving the courthouse, the fetus Mussolini recalls, “in the sweetest of voices,” the final days of his incarnation as a man: “They slaughtered me, hung me up by my feet on a butcher's hook, spat on me.” Then two fetuses who look like police take Il Duce out of the hall as he “cries quietly.” This lachrymose nonending must have pleased the profoundly Catholic Italians whom Malaparte considered his audience. At a time when a certain segment of post-Fascist Italy shrank from the stark Calvinist reality of the Nuremberg trials, there was an alternative to the brutal choice between blessed and damned, an alternative deeply rooted in the Italian tradition, at once terrifying and consoling. Was Mussolini destined for hell? Or was he headed to paradise? Neither: Mussolini was sent to purgatory.

*   *   *

IN THE EARLY
postwar years, his followers prayed for Mussolini as if he really were a soul in purgatory. Each year on the anniversary of his death, pious and enterprising neo-Fascists organized secret memorial masses to be said in the absence of the body. At times the assembled crowds were large enough to draw the attention of the authorities: in Rome in 1947, the police estimated there were hundreds of participants at the masses. When, not content with intercession for the dear departed's soul, the faithful extended the Catholic liturgy to include the Fascist salute, the police proceeded to make arrests. But in general, the forces of order avoided interfering with the neo-Fascist services, a fact that earned the praise of the independent press. In his column in the illustrated weekly
Tempo,
onetime Fascist enthusiast Vitaliano Brancati applauded the police for standing back as the “best way to show that ‘weak' democracy feared Mussolini's soul a thousand times less than ‘powerful' Fascism feared Matteotti's soul.”
45
During the Fascist period, said Brancati, anyone even suggesting a mass for Matteotti would have found himself in prison, along with his card-playing friends.

In an article about the masses offered in three Roman churches on the second anniversary of Il Duce's death, the popular weekly
Oggi
provided an intriguing detail. On the same evening as the masses, a number of Romans gathered at the office of a “famous” lawyer for a séance to make contact with Mussolini's spirit. A session held in Palermo a few years later gives some sense of what may have transpired that evening. A group of people from various social backgrounds assembled at the house of a man who described himself as the Professor, according to the local neo-Fascist paper,
I Vespri d'Italia
. First, the Professor had each participant fill out a questionnaire. What was their overall judgment of Mussolini? Was the conquest of Ethiopia a heroic venture or an error? Was it opportune or mistaken for Italy to join the war in 1940? Was the Italian Social Republic legal or illegal? Then the group was conducted to a darkened room where, next to the only lamp, stood a giant photo of Mussolini on the balcony at Palazzo Venezia. From next door a gramophone played the most celebrated of Il Duce's speeches as the assembled attempted to commune with his spirit: “Each person's gaze was nailed to the huge photograph. In the holy silence Mussolini's words cut into the flesh like slivers of glass.”
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When the recording ended, the Professor handed out the same questionnaire as before. Inevitably, the answers were more pro-Fascist this time around.

One should not overemphasize the importance of such sessions in Il Duce's posthumous life. Attendees amounted to no more than a few dozen Italians, perhaps a few hundred, drawn as much by a dictator who died in ignominy as by a fascination with the paranormal. It seems that even Mussolini's wife, in her modest home on the island of Ischia, where she lived in compulsory residence after the war, had the ability to commune with the spirit world. At least once, in the fall of 1947, Rachele Mussolini called together her children and several trusted friends and asked the table legs to indicate the secret place where the prefect of Milan had buried Il Duce's body. According to Giorgio Pini, a founder of the Italian Social Movement as well as the ghostwriter of Rachele's memoirs, who was present at the session, the reply, although wrong, was clear: P–A–V–I–A. Spiritualism and table levitation say a lot about postwar neo-Fascism, which was more ingenuous than rational, more pathetic than insidious, as much sentimental as political.

Along with the thrills of spiritualism, Rachele Mussolini had dreams, image sequences that she fed to the hungry readers of the illustrated weeklies. In one such dream, Mussolini, young and smiling, appeared from on high to tell her, “There are no bad feelings here, Rachele, not about anyone.”
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Yet Il Duce occupied other dream landscapes beside his widow's. Carlo Levi, a painter and writer, had a landlady, Jolanda, who also encountered Il Duce. “You should have seen him, pale, sad, and suffering,” she told Levi. “He said they had wronged him, they had betrayed him, but up there it is a better world, and from there he would protect us.”
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Levi himself could hardly have better conjured up the bizarre world of neo-Fascism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a world turned upside down. Author of the classic
Christ Stopped at Eboli,
with its sharp yet tolerant vision of the Italian south, Levi was well equipped to re-create the atmosphere of early postwar neo-Fascism, its hoped-for phony miracles, spiritualism, cult of the saints, and invocations of the dead.

As we know, the neo-Fascist world was not entirely apolitical. When Il Duce's body disappeared from view, his followers were given the chance to revive the Fascist mystique through its absence. One such initiative was the Buried in Italy campaign of the autumn of 1950. The idea was to find, in every city and town, a small but visible place—a street corner, a chapel wall, the base of an abandoned monument—to decorate with flowers, candles, photographs of Mussolini, and sacred images. In short, to create a substitute tomb for Il Duce, an altar for his devoted followers to tend or to rebuild in the event that it was destroyed. Thanks to the neo-Fascists' efforts, Mussolini would have countless graves around the country. “His tomb is Italy,” explained the newspaper that launched the initiative.
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Thus Mussolini's life after death grew ever more intense so long as his real burial place remained a secret. Making a virtue of necessity, the dialogue with Il Duce eluded the strict relationship with the corpse imposed by a tomb. By reviving age-old traditions of talking dead men and messages from the Great Beyond, the neo-Fascists were able to bring Il Duce's formidable profile to life against the gray backdrop of De Gasperi's Italy and give voice to his big baritone. Like the Führer, the dead Mussolini got his share of posthumous literary attention, effusions somewhere between yellow journalism and pulp fiction, more fanciful epitaph than coherent political statement.

The most original of these creations was
Benito Mussolini without Fascism: 12 Conversations from the Other Side
, published in Milan in 1952 by Piero Caliandro (possibly a pseudonym). The book opens with a declaration addressed by Il Duce to the coroner who did his autopsy: “Oh, anatomist, these are not the imaginings of someone who is dead. I here am in possession of the truth; you, instead, examine putrefying matter or that which has hardened in formaldehyde or alcohol.” Why, Mussolini wonders, was Professor Cattabeni, the coroner, melancholy and irascible, in the days after the autopsy? In part because working on such a corpse inevitably affected one. In part because he was annoyed at failing to find an ulcer that had turned cancerous, a brain tumor, or a case of tertiary syphilis—in short, “something big” to describe to the scientific world and earn himself academic titles and to offer to the public as cytological proof of the biological basis of Mussolini's politics. People should stop, then, spreading the legend of a Mussolini “sick in the head,” suggests Caliandro's Mussolini. They should accept the evidence that Fascism is still alive and promises Italy a new season. “You, anatomist, along with the executioners, you have not extinguished Mussolini; rather, you have blown on a flame that was going out,” says Il Duce. Dozens of incoherent pages follow, concluding with an appeal for Italians to solve their problems by forming a National Patriotic Party, a party that will replace the decrepit pyramid of the state with a “scientific arboreal construction” that will be the nation.
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More remarks from the Great Beyond were published by Marco Ramperti, a journalist who was a theater critic before becoming an official spokesman for the Republic of Salò and who was sentenced to prison after the war for anti-Semitic propaganda. In
Benito I, Emperor
Ramperti imagines the Axis partners winning the war, thanks to the timely use of the atomic bomb, and Mussolini returning to Rome to be triumphantly crowned as emperor. The book is thus a monologue by a Mussolini “victorious and imperial rather than defeated and hanged.”
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It is also a torrential assault on anti-Fascism—the rotten fruit of the betrayal of the monarchy on September 8, 1943—and on the false flag behind which a band of assassins hid. But the shadow of Il Duce fell over writings more cultivated and sophisticated than Ramperti's
Benito I, Emperor
.
Il Borghese,
a magazine of culture and politics founded by Leo Longanesi in 1950, used every pretext to contrast the volcanic master of Predappio with “boring old Aunt” Democracy. That the Fascist period had been one of illusions was acknowledged, but they were illusions of the sort that made life nobler or at least gave meaning to the young, dreams of transforming the country or of winning a war. For while Longanesi hated Fascism for the damage it did to Italy, he saw Il Duce as the only statesman in modern times who had asked something serious of the Italians.

Longanesi's main contribution to the theme of Mussolini, dear departed, came with a book entitled
A Dead Man among Us,
which he published in 1952. It expresses a philosophy that he shared with his many affectionate readers, the cynical philosophy of every man for himself, the skeptical philosophy of “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It is the kind of history writing that Longanesi thought the Fascist period deserved, fundamentally merciful and eager to preserve all the little details of a past that had been shared by all Italians. In the closing pages of the book, Longanesi tells how he recently rediscovered his enthusiasm for painting, which he had not indulged for many years. And how he painted a picture of an ancient castle clinging to a hard spur of rock. Imagine his surprise when, several nights later, he looked at the picture and saw a lit window in the castle. Longanesi was sure he had never even painted that window, because he was certain that no one lived in the castle. The following night, when it was dark, the artist returned to look at his painting and found the window once again lit up. There was surely someone in the room—the scene was reminiscent of Il Duce's insomniac nights in Palazzo Venezia. “Then,” wrote Longanesi, “I heard, far off, some dogs howling.” The wind blew across the rock, under the squalid light of a moon that Longanesi said he had not painted. Finally, dawn broke over that troubled landscape. “Then I heard a cry, a terrible cry, that came from the window. The light went out and from the crevices of the rocks I saw rivulets of blood streaming down.”
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Longanesi's ghost of Mussolini, it seems, had been torn apart by the dogs.

5

T
HE
E
XECUTIONER

With their invented last words, imagined autopsies, and fantasized trials, the writers who put Mussolini's case to the people swelled the ideological arsenal of anti-anti-Fascism and kept the dictator vividly present. But the history of Il Duce's posthumous life requires mention of a third party, one that stood between the dicator and the country: the executioner. To reconstruct Il Duce's existence beyond the grave during 1946–57, when his body was hidden from public view, we need to look sideways, at the man who shot him.

The story of Il Duce's body was shaped by living men, and the first to have made his mark was the executioner, Colonel Valerio. When Italians thought of Colonel Valerio, they thought of Mussolini. Grateful to him or not, they inevitably saw the dead man embodied in the live one.

*   *   *

WHO SHOT MUSSOLINI?
In Italy in 1947, few people could have answered the question. Immediately after Il Duce's execution, the Communist daily
l'Unità
reported the role of a certain Colonel Valerio, a Communist partisan. But just who stood behind the nom de guerre remained a mystery. What did he look like, the man who had erased Mussolini from the face of the earth? As we have seen, rumors had emerged from the shores of Lake Como that the executioner was as charismatic a figure as the one executed, that the action had been carried out by Cino Moscatelli, a famous partisan. When the rumor proved false, there was no further word on the man responsible.

In Rome, the Communist Party leaders did nothing to solve the question. A young party member who worked at the headquarters recalled that “a special air of admiration and mystery” surrounded two functionaries in the party executive, Walter Audisio and Aldo Lampredi.
1
It was whispered that they had taken part in the action on Lake Como, but no one dared to ask direct questions. The ability to keep secrets seemed to be an essential requisite for an organization that was just emerging from twenty years of clandestine activity. But neither the economic and social imperatives of rebuilding the country nor the important postwar political issues kept Italians from being curious about the executioner. On the contrary, as Resistance momentum declined and the removal of former Fascists from office slowed, many ex-Resistance fighters were tempted to see Mussolini's executioner as the sole winner in a civil war that had otherwise been lost. At the first Socialist Party congress following the Liberation, held in Florence in the spring of 1946, party leader Pietro Nenni was applauded when he said that only one man had really been successful in eliminating Fascists from public life—Colonel Valerio.