Between the first and the second phase I need a bit of physical, intellectual, and moral rest. No considerations of a material nature have influenced my decision. Discomforts don’t frighten me. What I want is to live morally. The influence and popularity that I’ve acquired in many emigration centers induce me to conceive of my future activity (as soon as I’ve reestablished my health) in the shape of a completely independent literary and editorial activity. I should add that these days great modifications are taking place in my ideology and that I feel greatly attracted again to religion (if not the church) and that the evolution of my thought is facilitated by the cretinous and criminal orientation the Communist Party is assuming. The only thing about my separation from it that causes me regret is that it is a party under persecution in which, except for the leaders, there are thousands of workers in good faith. In order to exercise a little influence on the base, I continue to hesitate about publicly announcing my break from the party and will wait for an imminent, propitious moment. This letter of mine to you attests to my esteem. I want to close, definitely, a long period of loyal relations with an act of loyalty. If you are a believer, pray God to give me the strength to overcome my remorse, to begin a new life, and to spend it all for the good of the workers of Italy.
Yours,
Silvestri
Anyone familiar with Silone’s writing can here detect his familiar voice, and the letter certainly appears to be in his handwriting. Furthermore, a typed copy of this letter has a cover document marked with the customary blue pencil of the chief of the Fascist political police, Arturo Bocchini, that the letter was from “Secondino Tranquilli,” thereby firmly establishing that “Silvestri” was indeed Silone. Another document from the archives, as early as October 7, 1924, refers to a “Silvestri” in the third person, with many biographical details paralleling Silone’s own: his rise in the Communist Party hierarchy, personal obligations to a younger brother, grandmother, sisters-in-law, etc. Yet another letter, dated July 5, 1929, also signed “Silvestri,” is in a quite different hand, is addressed to “Egregia Signorina” (Emilia Bellone was Guido Bellone’s sister), and refers to Silone (“Tr.”) in the third person.
Tr. has arrived here, where he is in a private clinic; he never leaves given that his health is still delicate. It is difficult to visit him in the clinic, because there are people who know him [or me?] among the staff.
It seems that he will remain in the clinic another 2–3 weeks and then go to a pensione. Then it will be possible to approach him.
I will write to you again in a few days. You justly complain of the scarcity of my letters: our rapporti [“reports,” or “relationship”?] could be more regular and frequent if they change their nature and character. At this point in my moral and intellectual formation, it is physically impossible for me to remain in the same relationship as 10 years ago. I suppose that you also might be interested in a different arrangement of our relationship. The first thing to eliminate, because it leaves me indifferent or humiliated, is money. But of this we will speak privately with greater ease.
Cordial greetings,
Silvestri
While the letter of April 1930 might appear to be the proverbial smoking gun, its status is undermined by the earlier one. At the very least, this letter indicates that someone else—perhaps Gabriella Seidenfeld—was also aware of Silone’s correspondence with Bellone. It was possible that Seidenfeld, knowing of Silone’s exchange of letters with Bellone, drafted this one (and perhaps others now lost). A single sentence in this letter exploded like a bombshell in the controversy: “At this point in my moral and intellectual formation, it is physically impossible for me to remain in the same relationship as 10 years ago.” It was supposedly proof that Bellone and Silone had carried out an exchange for a decade. (The word “physically” and its implications are examined below.) Later in July 1929, “Silvestri” sent the following letter, translated in its entirety. Whether or not it was addressed to Bellone is unclear.
Yesterday I received your three letters, leaving a sanatorium where I was for a month and a half, afflicted with serious nervous disorders [gravi squilibri nervosi]. In 15 days I will go to the Mezzogiorno to rest and then I will be able to write to you with greater ease.
Seemingly, the case was closed: Silone was guilty of spying for the Fascist police. Yet the letters before 1928 (that is, before the arrest of Romolo) are not signed “Silvestri.” Romolo had been arrested on April 13, 1928, suspected in the bombing in Milan. A week later, an arrest warrant was signed for Silone for having “revealed political and military secrets concerning the security of the State.” On April 23, 1928, chief of police Bocchini sent Mussolini a report that “the Inspector General of Public Security Guido Bellone has received a telegram from Basel from Tranquilli Secondino—one of the Communist leaders—giving notice of his arrival in Italy. The conversation with him could be interesting.” A week later (April 30), Bellone received word from Silone that, owing to the fact that his name had been circulating at the frontier and that the Fascist police had standing orders to arrest him, the trip was canceled.
Silone’s epistolary exchange might be explained in several ways. Most convincing, since the correspondence before 1928 cannot definitively be attributed to Silone, is that the letters were an attempt to mitigate Romolo’s fate. If one accepts the Biocca-Canali claim that the letters pre-1928 are indeed Silone’s, an alternative scenario unfolds. In September 1919, Silone’s name (as Secondino Tranquilli) was entered into the file of the Questura of Rome as a “subversive.” At the time, Guido Bellone was the police prefect of Rome and would have come across his name and paid him a visit. There is some speculation but no evidence that Bellone and Silone had already met, either in Pescina or in Rome, in the aftermath of the 1915 earthquake. By late 1919, Silone had been named editor of L’Avanguardia, the organ of the Italian Socialist Youth organization. In that capacity, he would have been required by the laws of the Kingdom of Italy to present his weekly newspaper to the Questura of Rome in order to abide by the censorship laws then in effect. In either case, it seems that Bellone may have established a kind of stern, paternal relationship with the young orphaned country boy lost in the metropolis.
Yet if Silone was spying for the Fascist regime, why did his name often appear on the lists of those to be apprehended, with permission granted for the subject to be shot if resisting arrest? In the immediate aftermath of the attempted regicide in Milan in April 1928 and Romolo’s arrest, the name Secondino Tranquilli appeared on such a list.
This most recent caso Silone cannot be understood outside the unfolding of Italian domestic politics in the 1990s as the entire political establishment crumbled under the revelations of the Tangentopoli bribery scandal and “Mani Pulite” (clean hands) corruption investigation. Add the hyperpoliticization of historical writing in Italy and the stage was set. Biocca and Canali’s essays were originally published in the journal of the increasingly conservative revisionist historian Renzo De Felice at precisely the moment when the anti-Fascist legacy was under virulent attack.
Many commentators have remarked that while the critical commentary on Silone’s oeuvre always made mention of how closely Silone resembled his main protagonists, especially Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada, these new revelations make it seem that Silone was closer to the police spy Luigi Murica in the novel Bread and Wine (1936) and the play And He Hid Himself (1944). Murica is a member of the Communist Resistance who turns informer. Although he is despised by his colleagues, Murica achieves redemption after being tortured to death by the Fascist police. In the play, the scene of his interrogation, torture, and death is a replication of Christ’s Passion. Of course, these critics now say, how could we have been so blind? It was there all along: Silone was confessing to his spying through the tragic figure of Luigi Murica. But perhaps we might propose an (admittedly) improbable but perhaps possible alternative scenario linked with another work: In The Secret of Luca (1956), the main character refuses to defend himself
against a charge of murder and is imprisoned for forty years. Andrea Cipriani, long assumed to be another one of Silone’s alter egos, is a native son reluctantly returning as a politician in the new republic after years of persecution for his participation in the anti-Fascist underground, determined to uncover Luca’s secret. To defend the honor of a married woman whom he loved, Luca refused to offer a defense to clear his name of the murder. Perhaps Silone here was portraying himself not in the guise of Andrea Cipriani but in Luca himself and defending someone else, such as Gabriella Seidenfeld? As his companion during the decade of the 1920s when the letters in dispute were being written and sent to Bellone in Rome, Seidenfeld was in a position to be in the same cities as Silone (where the letters were mailed from) and to have the same inside information on the politics and movement of party members.
Other lines of defense have not proved to be convincing. The political and cultural commentator and dean of Italian journalism, Indro Montanelli, indignantly thundered in the pages of Italy’s most authoritative newspaper that “even if Silone himself rose from the tomb and confessed, I would not believe that he was a Fascist spy. The man who stood up to Stalin cannot be reduced to a confidant of a minor Fascist functionary.” Montanelli attempted to use his considerable cultural authority to foreclose any discussion or debate on the subject, but his tactic backfired and made it seem that Silone’s defenders could not argue the case on its merits. Montanelli did, though, make an intriguing argument in his essay: “I have no doubts concerning the authenticity of the documents, but permit me to put forward some doubt about the equation: Document equals Truth.”
Another line of defense soon developed: Silone, in his epistolary relationship with Bellone, was attempting to influence the fate of Romolo, then suffering in Fascist prisons. But this defense too proved implausible because the exchange supposedly began long before Romolo’s arrest. More damaging than the letter of July 5, 1929, speaking of a ten-year relationship is a cache of forty pages of documents written by Silone detailing the underground organization and activities of the PCI. These, although carrying no addressee or date, were supposedly written for Bellone by Silone in April 1923. They are partially reproduced photographically in Canali’s book and certainly appear to be in Silone’s hand. Sending the materials from Genoa, Bellone drafted a cover letter to his superior in Rome, Cesare Bertini, that the documents were written by “our friend” (dal nostro amico) over the course of two days, in Bellone’s presence. But these could also have been internal party documents drafted by Silone and seized by the Fascist police in one of their many raids against safe houses and party headquarters.
If this most recent caso Silone can be compared to France’s trauma over the Dreyfus affair, Silone’s Émile Zola is Giuseppe Tamburrano, president of the Fondazione Pietro Nenni and former professor of history at the University of Catania. The indefatigable Tamburrano has been the most vocal defender of Silone, publishing dozens of indignant letters, essays, and two books in reply to Biocca and Canali’s claims. Tamburrano and his research assistants present what they claim is a point-by-point refutation of the charges, with some convincing arguments.
Several inconsistencies, they point out, are obvious: If Silone had been an informer since 1919, his productivity was exceedingly small. Considering his personal role in many of the historical moments of Italian and international communism (the founding of the PCI in January 1921; his subsequent trips to Moscow, Berlin, Paris, etc.; the momentous Moscow meeting in May 1927 when Stalin sought to expel Trotsky; the tortuous internal divisions within the movement), there seems to be relatively little pay dirt for the Fascists. Furthermore, it seems almost impossible to believe that Silone would have been allowed an “emergency exit” from spying if he was as valuable as Biocca and Canali claim. A parallel with organized crime is perhaps not inconsistent. There are no known cases of an informer being permitted to return to “civilian” life. In some cases, their work for the Fascists was leaked and they were dispatched by Stalin and his henchmen. Also, it seems impossible that the Silone/Silvestri–Bellone relationship would have been unknown to other Fascist officials. Guido Leto, Arturo Bocchini, Michelangelo Di Stefano, and Carmine Senise were all high-ranking Fascist police officials. None made mention of Silone’s alleged spying for the Fascists after the war. In 1957, when a right-wing Christian Democrat political rival sympathetic to fascism, Ferdinando Tambroni, taking advantage of his position as minister of the interior with full access to all police documents, sought damaging material on Silone in the files, he came away empty-handed. Many of the older Fascist police officials, such as Leto, were still alive in 1957. (Bocchini had died in 1940.)
Another line of defense has been to challenge the mathematical equation that Silvestri = Silone. This has been most authoritatively put forth by Dr. Paola Carucci, former director of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome (before her politically motivated dismissal). Carucci, having access to the list of police and OVRA informants (more than 360), has written that neither “Silvestri” nor his supposed code number (73) appears in the list; missing also is any mention of the names Silone or Tranquilli. A document from the Ministry of the Interior dated October 12, 1937, proves that Silone did write to Fascist authorities: “indifferently sending generic information about the activities of the fuorusciti.” But the document goes on to say that the information sent was to mitigate the fortunes of Romolo in prison; it makes no mention of letters written to Fascist authorities prior to Romolo’s arrest.
Darina vacillated, at times calling the accusations “a shameful slander,” at other times seeming to consider the letters genuine. In an interview, she admitted to me that some of the letters may indeed be his.
Umberto Terracini, a high-ranking member of the PCI for many years, told the writer and critic Luce d’Eramo on the occasion of the publication of her book Deviazione in 1979 that Silone was actually a triple agent. Having met Bellone as early as 1915 in the aftermath of the earthquake, Silone continued corresponding with Bellone even after the official became a Fascist police officer. Revealing this relationship to the Communist hierarchy, Silone was ordered to maintain it for purposes of counterintelligence. This may be why Palmiro Togliatti, secretary-general of the PCI and minister of justice after World War II with access to the files and Silone’s sworn enemy, failed to unmask Silone as a Fascist spy. In 1945, Togliatti would surely have welcomed an occasion to destroy the man he referred to as “the renegade.” Once Silone had extracted himself from communism with his “emergency exit” and submission to expulsion, Togliatti played the role of the “Grand Inquisitor” until his death in 1964.
This brings us to a question of paramount importance, best formulated in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze.” “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” asks Watson. “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” responds Sherlock Holmes. “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” answers Watson. “That was the curious incident,” concludes Holmes.
Why did neither the Fascists nor the Communists “bark”? Once Silone had become internationally known and respected as a writer and anti-Fascist with the publication of Fontamara, why did the Fascist police not release the incriminating letters? Was Bellone such a gentleman that he could have resisted the certainly incessant pressure from OVRA, Leto, Bocchini, Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, and Mussolini? The latter two were not above assassination to silence their political opponents, such as Piero Gobetti, Giacomo Matteotti, Giovanni Amendola, and the Rosselli brothers (not to mention the slow assassination in prison of Antonio Gramsci). More than once, the Fascist police contemplated assassinating Silone. Or they could simply have revealed Silone’s duplicity and had Stalin and the Communists extract their own “justice.”
Biocca and Canali are careful to present their work in neutral terms, as objective scholarship. But it has not passed unnoticed that their work has appeared in revisionist and conservative venues. Nor do they offer a motive f
or Silone’s spying. Several times they suggest that significant sums of money changed hands, yet Silone was chronically short of funds in the 1920s, sometimes dangerously so. In a January 1930 letter to Romolo in prison, Silone confessed that “financially I am in very bad shape. For the first time in my life I have had to take on debts.” Throughout his life, Silone led an economically precarious existence, later shielded from the vagaries of finance by Darina. He refused to own outright a modest apartment in Rome, turned down lucrative positions in postwar Italy (including director of the state-run television program), was often shortchanged by Italian and foreign publishers, and died almost penniless. It seems incongruous to assume, as many Italian journalists did, that Silone was a paid informer.
By crafting an “emergency exit” from the party, Silone not only liberated himself from the depravity of the Stalinist system, he also freed himself from bondage to Bellone. He no longer was a useful informer. He could therefore dedicate himself to seeking redemption in literature. “It was over. Thank God.”
And yet it wasn’t. Togliatti didn’t give up hope that the “prodigal son” might find his way back into the fold. Nor was Silone’s relationship with the Fascist police completely severed. Documents archived in Rome that have not been published or discussed over the last decade reveal that during the 1930s, Silone continued to meet with Fascist spies and that the spies continued to follow Silone, one even suggesting assassinating the now famous writer.
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