by Anna Vaught
Violet begins: Ladies adore Mussolini. Young girls; old crones. He appears, next to starched and bleached contemporaries, preening with his shirt off; cap on; chest out. How they stand by, other flabby politicians, not masculine in the way he was. Even Winston Churchill’s darling Clemmie is taken in, like her husband, but by different things. Do you know that, just weeks ago, March 1926, in gossiping with the embassy ladies, she spoke of how natural he was, how piercing his eyes were—eyes which you cannot but look at. She’ll tell of how all the embassy ladies are dying of jealousy and Ivy Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary’s wife, never got orchids from her husband, only from Benito. Oh yes, I heard, says Violet, that Austen Chamberlain was a tulip man. And none of them quite the man that Muss (to quote that execrable Ezra Pound) was. Potted pelargoniums for the orangery given by one of the British ministers to his best beloved. I have been staggered by the things which menfolk do not grasp!
And Oh Lord, Clemmie might have whispered over the orchids. And Oh Lord, Mussolini laps it up now. Being loved and spectated.
Though I should like to think, says Blanche, that the eight thousand at the Salpêtrière would have eaten this monstre alive!
And after his preening and his meetings, he’s here, inside this glorious building. Here is what he does. Violet knew his routine intimately. I have filled in the rest. But isn’t she clever? Such a shrewd observer of quotidian facts.
He ascends the steps to the building. He’s imagining this place, centre of Rome, across the centuries, as the centre of his Empire: he’s a lodestone. He’s here; they will come. He’s magnetic. He goes past the statue of Marcus Aurelius, which we shall revisit in a moment, and rat-a-tat along the shimmering marble corridors of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Now he has reached the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi and he halts and he orates. Here is the seventh International Congress of Surgeons and he is heaping praise on them. He’s got many war wounds and likes to talk about them, while he thanks them for their work, and, in his cult of personality, he uses his wounds as currency. He’s a real man, a hero, an adventurer, he’s Caesar, the best sort. Then it’s over and he’s on his way out. He tells them, laughing (they laugh back) how he’s enjoyed living dangerously. He’s survived a plane crash, been buried alive and clawed his way out, as Violet had recounted. He likes to keep hand grenades in his office. Bombs. Just in case. A story went the rounds that one had almost gone off, as a cigarette caught the fuse. He pinched it out and carried on with his paperwork.
Apparently, he did not look up and the ladies and his acolytes shivered, Ohhhh, but I’d say that his nerve endings had been cauterised; his feelings had been burnt off, already. Ugh. This Violet, recoiling from thoughts of him, proud, rough beast at his desk.
Now, outside the sun is at its zenith and Mussolini strides out; he’s going towards the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Mussolini has begun to speak. It is staccato, then glissando, or at least an attempt at such. He’s too horrid to effect the grace of a passerine, but the crowd around him laps it up, as his chin juts.
Violet shakes. This is the pivotal point but I must continue. Must press on. But, if we were at the height of a hawk, scrutinising the land below and the people in it, this is what we would see.
Now Mussolini is about a foot away from Violet Gibson. He doesn’t see the old crone and, anyway, she’s going to miss. They always do. Anyway, he likes to live dangerously. He salutes because the anthem has been struck up. This is what Violet was recounting, when you first met her, with no uncertain disgust.
Swear faith to Mussolini.
Click. Then again. A bang, this time. Ah, a trifle, I am here. Did they think they could kill me? His face is bleeding. The blood from his nose runs from his hands, which clutch it, the salute dropped on stone. A misfire and a bad shot because bad bird turned his head.
It is nothing! he says.
Is that so?
Where are our birds? You remember that Violet has Lebel revolvers for us all. Remember the detail, also, that while Violet’s will later be confiscated and disappear, there will be three more. Pay attention. You know, should you yourself feel inspired to shoot. She’s a sly one, the barnacle would say of me. Oh, Mother dear, how right you were!
We are in position. Muss thinks he’s invincible. He’s bleeding and it hurts. But so?
He doesn’t look behind him as he struts past Marcus Aurelius. He who once stated: You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this and you will find strength.
How apposite for this moment; for the adventures of the passerines. Benito thought he could control his world. He had it the wrong way round.
And while we have a few seconds, and stand near the statue, let me tell you that Marcus Aurelius, commemorated thereby, died of a fever, apparently precipitated by Alpine cheese. He died in his bed and his last word was æquanimitas: equanimity. Our Caesar doesn’t have time for equanimity (or Alpine cheese, for that matter); he doesn’t have time for anything any more, and the singing has stopped. It won’t be a good end, but it’s a soft bed compared with the deaths he gave in ditches or with a leather cosh. The manganello clubs, weighted with lead. The slow bleeding or the decomposed bodies and all at his behest, while he oiled his head and Clemmie admired his masculinity.
Blanche is behind the fetlock of the emperor’s horse. Lebel two. Bertha to one side of the steps, near one of the many spies—and she could spot a plain clothes policeman a way off because Bertha never missed a beat in her life—and she keeps him in her sights. And I, Lucia, take the dying Duce from near the boot of his shiny black Lancia. Lebel four.
Or, to put it another way, at the beginning of this moment, his head turns and Violet’s bullet streaks across his nose; only a tiny hollow is made in his nose and a piece of flesh scooped out, smaller than the Taggiasca olives he so loves. He collects himself; congratulates himself. But the next sliver of time sees three further shots. Post mortem will show he tried to deflect the bullets, but the carotid artery, the jugular and the heart are hit and he is down, deep purple before his eyes, the mist of his breath leaving him and the stink of the dictator corrosive.
He’s down.
No time for calling it a trifle, a nothing, now. And with the shots from all angles and the hysteria of the crowd, we have time to run, the assassin and her accomplices. Violet, hand shaking, drops her Lebel and it is later kept by the police; not so the others. Remember that detail.
The birds begin to scatter; they fly. And Caesar is dead.
There is silence, stunned silence. No-one moves before the first wail as burnished wings brush sky, so high and alive above the corpse of Il Duce. The screaming starts and the running hither and thither but everything is changed. As Violet said, He thought he was Christ, until they strung him up by the heels. But now, even now, people begin, although they surprise themselves, to turn away. Oh, how everything turns away/leisurely from the disaster… wrote Auden of Icarus falling from the sky. He fell, our confident waxen boy, but now our passerines do not and Violet—on the wing with good friends—recounts some vainglorious things that Mussolini once said: hollow, hollow! She mocks: We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance and the history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.
Wrong, boy, Violet asserts: Friends are our lifeblood; not to have them eviscerates us. And as for the history of saints, well what did he know? That day I held my hands out to the sky, in St Andrew’s Hospital grounds, I thought of St Francis feeding the birds. I even tried to imitate his pose, his gentleness and understanding. And in my retreats, my reading and prayer, the words and deeds of the saints echoed and I was never further from insanity in observing their beauty.
Their words and deeds echo now, for Violet Gibson, in the three sided piazza of Michelangelo’s sublime design, with the lingering rasps of cordite. And as the dictator lies dead. So, a very human, imperfect character who
lost his head in the words of Ezra Pound?
Always bad bird, retorts Violet. No woman should love a fascist.
And I say: God love you Lady Gibson.
14
We know that her homicidal instincts though dormant
are not extinct.
Comment of Violet’s sister Constance to the Board of Control, 1941.
... so you will not need to fear that I will ever shoot anyone again, as I am old and ill, and occupied in very quiet matter, mostly prayer.
Letter from Violet, petitioning to The Princess Elizabeth, 1944, that she be allowed to live in a convent.
Metamorphoses. Macrocosm. Let’s pause for a moment. Your criminals are back from Rome and sitting, collected... where? A field in Northamptonshire, in sight of St Andrew’s Hospital but out of sight of it. So wrote Ovid:
And now the measure of my song is done:
The work has reached its end; the book is mine,
None shall unwrite these words…
I had always loved that bit of text, you know. And its resonance was greater, now that we had been to Rome. Stupendous change must surely have taken place, yet it is too vast to put down in a single book, and a book which belongs to Violet, not to Muss or an eternal city. Not to a locked ward or barred window: to freedom and madness, if that is what it was. But we cannot change this date in history and cause a metamorphosis, as we must have done, without giving word to the lives that might have been saved; to the freedom that might not have been supplanted.
Let each woman say one thing. This is what Violet asked me to set down. We women are not historians and Blanche, as she has said, is still learning to write and read in tandem with a prodigious resolve and wit. None of these women is a coward, so they try to tangle with difficult questions. I scribe for them, at the gates of St Andrew’s, Northampton, where we met.
Violet: So, in Rome, that crowd begins to turn away. The king takes power; there is no pact with Hitler; Mussolini does not take Abyssinia, in which thrust he would have been supported by Britain and France. He had a notion that he would place international Jews in Somalia; he suggested expansion of local shark fisheries. There, said he, monster that he was, would be the great advantage that, to begin with, many Jews would get eaten. Not so, monstrous man.
Bertha: What you told me, Violet, so abreast of current affairs, that he did. I did not live to see the war, but I knew enough of what might come. I met them, was questioned by the Nazis and I knew what beast was born at Lintz. And I know now of my beloved Hannah Karminski. Lucia, you have told me, as Violet requested. She was my dearest, dearest friend, who worked so tirelessly with me. They took her and they razed our work, what we had done, at Neu-Isenberg. And you gave me to know: by the end of this war, 7,500 Jews were taken from Italy and fed into the Nazi death camps of which you tell me. Is it possible... at all possible that this did not happen? I told you, Violet, that we can never save them all, but did we save some? One? Oh please. O pray that is true.
I, Lucia. I say: I remember, Bertha, Anna O as you were, that Dr Breuer asked you to begin your stories, in your talking cure, with There was a boy and that once you rebelled and you said, NO. There was a GIRL. He might have written down mania or that you had not engaged with treatment, but you were so strong and such a fine storyteller and the point vital. But... you know... on one occasion, when Mussolini swept by in his fine car, There was a boy and he was fifteen. His name was Anteo Zamboni. Just a boy. An enthusiastic fascist, it was said. Then why did this boy shoot, later in our year, in Bologna, October, 1926? An anarchist, perhaps; but he might also have been called the boy who was just there; who did not fire the shot. But the shot came, scorching Mussolini’s beautiful silks and hitting his car. Yet Zamboni did not have time to see for he was beaten down, as you were, Violet; with their kicks and strangulation and then a lynching so he was gone. But in his last few seconds, still, Italo Balbo, commander of the Fascist militia, shot with all his bullets.
He was a child. To be with his mother, whatever he had done, if he done it, was all that was humane. They took pictures of him and displayed them. And then, they took his family and they put them in prison.
NO: make it change in our story.
The work is done, the brute is gone, seven months before.
There was a boy. Maybe a bad lad sometimes; swayed by currents; up to no good. But he might have liked stories about cats, as my father would have told, or to play at hoops or dominoes and he could have lived and laughed and loved and left. Yes, a different time and an ordinary. And the scorching sorrow of a woman, a mother, never came.
Now it is Blanche: I was thinking. You warned off Ida Dalser on Lake Geneva, but what of the other, the one you told me about, Violet—the young Clara Petacci. Not yet his lover, still. The day after you shot him, Violet, I mean before we were there, your murmuration (you taught me that word and it is my favourite), the girl wrote to her future lover. She was fourteen. Not so now. There was time for her, still, to grow up and see her old man splayed, Campidoglio; not to be strung on the scaffold and displayed, all pith and marrow in her crêpe dress and heels, but a bride of elsewhere.
And Violet: It is too simple, my dear girls, too simple, but not all is done
A plangent maybe. A time will tell.
History, says Violet, will record all this and may others, better theorists, expound on what has changed; been changed by what we did on Campidoglio. So maybe. You can find all this out, my darling Lucy Light: I am almost out of breath.
One thing that did not change. That Violet Gibson was still, in time, found out, still considered insane, still committed.
Why not this, Violet? Why not this, too? asks Blanche. Bien-aimée. Why not?
Because it is my time, my darlings, my beautiful murmuration. I might like a little time first, for other things; for those I miss with all my crooked heart, but most of all, what I want now is what I have. Friendship, a good death, the rites I crave and the everlasting. That is why. And to save Lucia, who belongs still to the future, if I can.
There was a man, a poet, John Clare. I think, Lucia, that you may have seen the picture of him in the parlour at St Andrew’s? Then, it was St Andrew’s General Lunatic Asylum and he died here, ten years before I was born. Put his words down in an epigraph, dear girl, when you’ve finished your scribing? Now, as I was saying, I’d mentioned this fellow earlier; been at the old place for twenty-two years, but I beat him at that! Over my dead body will you, Lucia. Still, like me he died here. Oh, he would have loved these soft fields where we sit now; would have loved the passerines! Loved you! He was such a poet of nature. Why do I talk of this now? It’s his poem, I Am! I am going to recite it and, when I do, think of its sentiment, but know I don’t now feel alone. And don’t see Clare as a poet of madness, with ceaseless beating of breast. Ah, it’s a poem about pain, but think how precise it is; how agile. It is excruciating and its story so close to mine. but he’s a poet, an expert at this, not a case for pathology or notes in a book. And neither am I. I have fought to keep my mind clear and my intellect intact. Don’t let me be remembered only as a madwoman, as a case.
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed...
I try my best to translate it for Blanche and I feel we all grasp its meaning. And Violet’s. It’s like a spontaneous song, then. And we sing I am in our different voices. We shout it; yes, we truly proclaim it to the world beyond and the hospital just at our backs and we cry: I am.
I am.
I AM!
15
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake, from The Marri
age of Heaven and Hell.
Metamorphoses. Microcosm.
The passerines talked before of what, in the wider world, they might hope for. Now Violet encouraged them to speak more. Of what they might wish for, if anything had been changed for them. Not directly with the death of the tyrant, but because they all play a part, in this and in other adventures, the passerines find their wings heal. For now, what would they have, with this new breath? This fresh beating of wings?
These things. Things to ask for, bodied forth by imagination.
So we sit together on the soft grass, in an English spring, and bear witness for each other. Violet asks first. Oh, it was a fine day, this:
Something for Bertha who is and Anna O who was?
And if I had had my way, what might it have been? I do realise I am different from the rest of you. You know, in the back-then world. I got to be out and to do. But you know that I suffered, too. To be so ill and thus, it was hard. To have seen the shapes and turns I did—of the snakes out of the corner of my eye; the repulsion at water; the shrivelling of my body before, in time, I got things back. I sensed, although I could not name it, that my illness was also physical. There was a pain in my head and a corruption of my eye. Memory was scant when it should have been full and I was so afraid. But you have seen my diagnosis. At the country house near Vienna, where I was placed for my safety, Dr Breuer would come and would, he wrote, remove the entire stock of phantasms that she had amassed since my last visit. I did wonder: should he not have been more tentative?
But he also said this: Even when the girl was completely healthy, two psychical characteristics predisposed her to hysterical illness. That one, the surplus of psychical liveliness and energy which, unused in her monotonous family life and without any appropriate intellectual work (Tell us about it! shouts Violet) was discharged in the incessant activity of her imagination and also gave rise to, two, her habitual daydreaming (her private theatre), thus laying the foundations for the dissociation of her mental personality.
