The Pope and Mussolini (9 page)

In one of his first acts as prime minister, Mussolini led his cabinet to a mass at the altar of the Unknown Soldier at the Vittoriano Monument in Rome. There he ordered the men to kneel in prayer for a minute. For many of them, Vatican secretary of state Gasparri quipped, this “must have seemed an exceedingly long time.” Mussolini was eager to convince the pope that he would act aggressively to restore Church prerogatives. “Mussolini let us know that he was a good Catholic,” Cardinal Gasparri explained to the Belgian ambassador.
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In mid-November, Mussolini stood in the Chamber of Deputies for a vote of confidence. Although there were only 35 Fascist deputies at the time, 316 members voted in his favor. Former prime minister Giovanni Giolitti and other members of the political establishment still
believed they could use Mussolini to destroy the Socialists while retaining ultimate control themselves. Members of the Popular Party went along, many grudgingly. So it was that Mussolini first came to power, through a legal vote in a freely elected parliament.

He cut a rather odd figure, exuding an intense energy. He had not yet acquired the thick chest that he would later delight in baring for the cameras, preferably while standing atop a platform, straddling a horse, or grasping a hoe. His hairline had receded, giving him an imposing forehead, his thinning hair combed straight back; his mustache was long gone, and lacking sideburns, his hair was cut in a straight line from his temples to above his ears. But what most impressed those who saw him were his extraordinary vitality and his sharp, piercing eyes.

Benito Mussolini, the new Italian prime minister, November 1922

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photograph credit 2.2
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In his first months as head of the government, Mussolini wore a short black suit jacket and tight pants marred by a deep crease just below the knees. “He must be a poor devil,” observed one of the ushers in Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister’s headquarters. “He hasn’t anyone to iron his pants for him.” The contrast with previous government heads, drawn from the Liberal elite—older, gray-bearded men in tailored dark suits, accustomed to the finer things in life—could scarcely have been greater. “Mussolini was an unusual minister,” his longtime assistant Quinto Navarra recalled; “you thought you were standing in front of a homeless man, a journalist with his sleeves stained by ink and worn heels on his shoes.”
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A former prime minister, Antonio Salandra, described the enigmatic figure that Mussolini cut: an odd mixture of geniality and vulgarity, sincere expression of noble sentiments followed by base instincts for reprisal and vendetta, bluntness and theatricality, tenacious assertions followed by instant changes of course, striking and effective eloquence sprinkled with cultured references, and presumptuous ignorance expressed in lower-class slang. But what most struck the former prime minister and what most, he thought, drove Mussolini, was his devotion to the cult of his own personality. He showed exceptional energy and an iron will, and he tried to make up in intuition for his lack of any real training for running a government. He was “a force of nature.”
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Shortly after becoming prime minister, Mussolini had to attend an official reception for the Spanish royal family, the kind of occasion he hated. When he arrived with his customary two days of stubble on his face, Queen Helen, Victor Emmanuel’s very proper wife, glared at him. It would not be the only occasion she would have to note his failings in the way of personal hygiene. Nor could Mussolini ever get used to the bourgeois habit of taking a bath every day, (over)compensating by frequent splashings of cheap cologne.

Preparing for one of his first diplomatic dinners, held at the British embassy, Mussolini took advantage of the advice of Baron Russo, an
aide to the prime minister who was left over from the previous administration.

“It is very simple, Excellency,” explained the baron. “You will sit next to the British Ambassadress. Watch every move she makes. Use the same spoon, the same knife, the same fork that she does. Everything she does, you do.”

Arriving at the grand hall of the embassy, Mussolini was the center of attention, but he felt ill at ease. His scowls and his bulging eyes worked well at his rallies, but they met a less enthusiastic reception among the tuxedoed diplomats. His host for the dinner, Sir Ronald Graham, the British ambassador, had himself earlier noted Mussolini’s posturing. Reporting his first impressions of the new Italian prime minister to London, Graham admitted that he had been put off by the fact that in his public appearances, Mussolini “adopted an unnecessary degree of pose and manners which can only be described as Napoleonic.” He elaborated, “He has stalked about with his hand across his breast and thrust in the lapel of his coat; his gaze was fixed; he never smiled and appeared wrapt in fierce gloom.”
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At Graham’s reception, Mussolini made his way through the eight-course dinner by watching Lady Sybil, the ambassador’s wife. She soon realized what he was doing, as he followed her with every move of his fork and knife. Although he was momentarily taken aback when she brought her little soup cup to her mouth rather than use one of the innumerable spoons to drink it, he followed her lead.

As he finally got ready to leave, he thanked her, and she made oblique reference to the help she had provided.

“Only once was I confused,” said Mussolini.

“And when was that?” she asked.

“I did not know that the English drank their soup like beer.”
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LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR
after he had first been elected to parliament, and eight years since he had been expelled from the Socialist Party, the
thirty-nine-year-old blacksmith’s son had become the most powerful man in Italy. The previous years had been marked by gut-wrenching violence and frightening uncertainty. For some, the Fascist leader promised the possibility of a return to normality. For others, he threatened a new kind of social warfare. Where he would lead them, no one could then imagine.

C
HAPTER
THREE

THE FATAL EMBRACE

I
F EITHER CARDINAL GASPARRI OR CARDINAL DE LAI WAS HOPING THAT
the new pope would prove putty in their hands, they were to be disappointed. Pius XI would be no weak pope. His love of order and deep sense of obedience to authority quickly set the tone for his reign. “He wears his tiara even when he goes to bed,” joked one of the priests in the Vatican. His commands were to be followed “not immediately, but sooner than immediately,” the pope was fond of saying. For those clergymen who asked to be relieved from one of the many prohibitions found in canon law, he had no sympathy. “Laws are made to be obeyed,” he told them. The French prelate Eugène Tisserant, who knew Ratti from the time he had been librarian in Milan, noted a striking change. They had been close, and Tisserant had seen Ratti’s lighter side. In 1918, when Tisserant, on leave from the French army, had visited him at the Vatican Library, Ratti had introduced him to Benedict XV by saying, “Holy Father, here is my military attaché.” But now he no longer seemed the same man. He was “so strongly overwhelmed by the grandeur of his new charge,” observed Tisserant, “that he seemed extraordinarily distant to us.”
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The new pontiff’s commitment to proper protocol was on display at
the first audience he called for the diplomatic corps, two weeks after his election. When the ambassadors and delegates to the Holy See arrived, along with their numerous assistants, they found that the papal throne stood at one end of the vast hall, with only six seats placed in front of it. Only the ambassadors having full diplomatic status would be permitted to sit down; all the rest were to stand.
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Ratti’s sense of the dignity of the papal throne was so developed that he kept his own family members at a distance. On becoming pope in 1903, the unassuming Pius X had brought his two unmarried sisters to Rome, installing them in a small apartment above a shop near St. Peter’s Square. They visited him often, chatting, sipping wine, and reciting the rosary together. Ratti had once been close to his siblings, but now that he was pope, he would see them only if they made an appointment with his secretary and awaited their turn in the waiting room. On these occasions, he insisted that his brother address him as “Holy Father” and “Your Holiness.” He let it be known he did not want these visits to occur too often, for he was Father to a much larger family that required his attention. Years later, when the pope lay in bed mortally ill, his elderly sister begged to be allowed to come to his side to comfort him. She was turned away.
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Although the new pope angered the
zelanti
by remaining true to his promise to appoint Gasparri secretary of state, the Church’s modernist wing was unenthusiastic as well. The fact that, in choosing his name, he had decided to honor Pius IX and Pius X seemed an ominous sign. At a moment of such great international tensions, wrote one commentator in Rome, what was needed was something much more than “the narrow-mindedness of a life-long paleographer, closed for decades in the dusty reading rooms of the Ambrosiana and the Vatican.” The British envoy to the Vatican was similarly unimpressed. The new pope left the impression in those who met him, he wrote, of a pedantic teacher: “Change his skull-cap and soutane for the M.A.’s mortar-board and gown—and there is your Headmaster as depicted in Victorian schoolboy stories.” True, the envoy added, the new pope was cordial, but he seemed to view all laymen as children who needed to be taught rather
than as people from whom he might learn something. With Europe convulsed by threats of revolution and Italy’s old order in shambles, was this the man who could deal with the challenges that lay ahead?
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The new pontiff surrounded himself with staff he could trust, bringing many of his Milan assistants to Rome. To care for his rooms and kitchen, he appointed Teodolinda Banfi, known simply as Linda: she had already been with him for thirty-six years and had worked for his mother for fourteen years before that.
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He also brought the young Milanese priest Carlo Confalonieri to serve as his private secretary, along with his other Milanese assistant, Diego Venini, and the curiously named Giovanni Malvestiti (Malvestiti literally meaning “poorly dressed”) to take charge of his wardrobe.
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Although Ratti’s tastes were simple, he was partial to Linda’s cooking. In 1926, when he decided she should retire, he told the German Franciscans who were to replace her: “I don’t want to have to remind you: German precision, German silence, but not German cuisine.”
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Each morning at six his alarm clock woke him, and after saying his first prayers, he celebrated mass in his private chapel, followed by a light breakfast. His apartment, consisting of three rooms on the fourth floor,
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was in the left wing of the U-shaped Apostolic Palace that enveloped the San Damaso Courtyard. Perched over Bernini’s colonnade, it looked directly onto St. Peter’s Square. His bedroom was simple, no different from that of a village priest, with a brass-frame bed and an old-fashioned chest of drawers covered with a white tablecloth. On the walls he hung photographs of his parents and his brother, as well as religious paintings.

After breakfast, the pope went down a floor to his office—or as he called it, his “library”—where he began the day reading his mail and the Italian, German, French, British, and American newspapers. It was a large room, with little furniture and only one small rug, placed under his desk. A few old paintings hung on the walls. The pope sat in an ornate Louis XV chair, his desk covered with piles of books and a large crucifix, along with a compass and barometer that told of his nostalgia for his Alpine expeditions. Three windows, their curtains opened during
the day to let in the sun, faced St. Peter’s Square behind him. As visitors entered, they saw a white figure silhouetted against the sunlight seated behind the desk. Three chairs faced him in front of the desk. One of the few personal touches the pope allowed himself was a book stand, where he always kept one of his favorite books open.
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