To read accounts of the perfunctory hearings is to understand how tenacious, brave and innocent were Mussolini’s early opponents. Many of them were conducted in absentia, and all were closed to the public. There were few absolutions and the Special Tribunal had retroactive powers. By the spring of 1927 lines of manacled prisoners had become a familiar sight on trains going south, unshaven, dirty, often in striped prison clothes, a number printed on the left side. Among them were Freemasons, socialists, anarchists and above all communists, from the ‘più rosse’, the reddest Italian regions in the north: boys of fifteen, grandfathers of seventy-five and the wives of trade-union officials, along with artisans, journalists, writers and many prominent political figures.
Soon, there were well over a thousand men and women in confino, scattered between Ustica, Favignana, Lipari, Pantelleria, Lampedusa and Le Tremiti, the harsh, scorched, waterless volcanic islands lying far off the coast of southern Italy and Sicily, from which many of the destitute original inhabitants had long since emigrated. Greeted with a mixture of dismay and curiosity by the few who remained, the visitors brought with them a director for their penal colony, most often a senior policeman, and a number of guards, both policemen and militia. On arriving, the confinati were told that if they shed their ‘aberrant’ ideas and became totally submissive, then they might just be pardoned, through the ‘infinite goodness and generosity of Il Duce’.
For many, the initial relief at reaching the islands – after interminable journeys manacled on trains, with halts along the way in verminous, overcrowded jails, medieval in their horror – was overwhelming. No sooner had they stepped on shore, than they were given a rule book which spelt out how they were to behave: find work (where?), conduct themselves obediently, not fight, not wear scruffy clothes, not be rude to the guards and on no account to play cards, frequent bars or discuss politics. The confinati were also forbidden to speak a foreign language, to gather in groups of more than three or to wander beyond a small, carefully denoted area. There was no need for a prison: being islands far off the coast, no escape was thought possible. Articles 5, 6, 7 and 8 specified that a confinato was not allowed to have a weapon, a means of transport, a radio or a camera. (The 11th commandment, the men joked, was ‘Thou shalt not hope.’) Failure to obey would result in a one- to three-year prison sentence, to be served after the period of confino expired. Once a year, every prisoner was issued with a suit, a pair of shoes, a shirt and a ‘military style’ pair of underpants.
Carlo had been on Ustica between prison in Como and his trial in Savona. Nello, sent to Ustica early in July 1927, had hoped to find Carlo still there, but by then his older brother had been returned to the north. By the end of the year, however, both young men were on the islands, Nello on Ustica, Carlo on Lipari, each facing five years of discomfort, extremes of cold and heat, scant and unhealthy food, incessant curfews and roll-calls, little water, restrictions of every kind, complete political and intellectual isolation and crushing boredom. All mail was censored, and Bocchini made certain that he had spies planted among the prisoners.
Nello reached Ustica, in chains, on 4 July, to be greeted by Carlo’s friends as he stepped off the boat on to the rocky beach. His first but misleading impression of the island was, as he wrote to Amelia, of ‘splendid colours and reflections in the water, a picturesque little village, the uninterrupted song of the cicadas, an occasional light passing at night on the horizon, beautiful sunsets’. The single-storey houses had an Arab look to them. While the common criminals and the poorer confinati lived in various small dormitories behind heavy wooden doors with padlocks and barred windows, Nello had enough money to pay for his share of what had been Carlo’s house, a pretty red building belonging to a priest, in which, as Carlo had written to him, ‘I have left a little of my heart.’ Sleeping in what had been until a fortnight earlier Carlo’s bed, writing at his table, looking around at the ‘elegant’ objects with which his brother had furnished the room, Nello felt both charmed and saddened. ‘They consider me to be his representative,’ he told Amelia, ‘and his friends enjoy comparing me to him and saying: he is worthy of Carlo.’
One of the first sights that struck the new arrivals was a plaque to a nineteenth-century local hero, reading: ‘What could you possibly lack here, which you would find in the big metropolises?’ The answer was simple. Ustica, which lay seventy kilometres off the coast of Sicily, a speck in the vast surrounding ocean, lacked almost everything. Its single village, in which lived most of its population of 900, was partly derelict, many of its original inhabitants having emigrated to become the early pioneers in Louisiana. It had no electricity, no wheeled vehicles, no school, no chemist or hospital – though one of the prisoners had once been a nurse and, when not drunk on the execrable local wine, dispensed a few drugs from a chest. There was no tarmac road and no jetty, the original one having long since been washed away in a freak storm, and when cows were occasionally brought over to the island to provide fresh meat, they were made to swim the last few metres before being led up to the single square and tied to one of the very few trees on the island.
Ustica was very dirty: after the prisoners were locked in at nights – the political ones were allowed two hours more freedom than the criminals – pigs were released to clear up the rubbish. If heavy seas prevented the arrival of the thrice-weekly boats, the island ran out of food and water and the inmates were obliged to drink from the heavily polluted wells. When doctors in Palermo saw a patient clearly dying of hunger and disease, so ran the joke, they would ask him if he came from Ustica. There had already been many deaths among a large contingent of Arab prisoners – rebels from the days of the Libyan campaigns – from tuberculosis, dysentery, bronchitis, gastric flu and pneumonia, brought on by being kept fifty to a room. The few survivors crouched on the rocks in their white robes, staring mournfully out to sea.
But the island was not without its charms. Prickly pears grew along the shoreline and over the dry stone walls, and though there were never enough to go round, the rich volcanic soil produced peas, beans, lentils, courgettes, capers and cucumbers, which could grow to almost a metre in length. Melons did well, as did small, sweet grapes, harvested, wrote Nello, ‘as in Virgil’s time’. In the autumn, the rocky ground was covered in the delicate white flowers of the asphodels. And if most of the houses had floors of beaten earth and dung, some of them had coats of brightly coloured paint, and in summer delightful geckos prowled across their walls. Along the dusty streets, a special crossbreed of grey donkeys wandered at will. Spring brought nightingales and on clear days you could see Etna. The sea was the centre of life, its contours, its moods, its horizons; the confinati gathered sea snails and urchins along the seashore and gazed out across the water, dreaming of freedom. But when the winds got up, and howled over the little houses, it seemed as if island and sky were as one and their homes might be blown away in the gale.
Having settled himself in Carlo’s room, Nello took stock. ‘We read, we discuss, we grumble and sleep,’ he wrote to the Ferreros in one of his dozen or so weekly letters. ‘This is our life.’ It was, he said, ‘neither exhilarating nor boring; rather, it is a peaceful flow of equal days, their monotony broken by the vivacity and variety of thoughts about good friends, about new work, about the past.’ He was not idle. Among the first confinati to reach Ustica in 1926 had been the communist leader Antonio Gramsci who, sentenced to 20 years, 4 months and 5 days for calling for a general strike, had arrived manacled and chained with his few belongings stuffed in a pillowcase. One of Gramsci’s first acts had been to start a library in a whitewashed room and arrange classes for his fellow confinati. Ustica, he wrote later, was a ‘kind of paradise of personal freedom’ compared to what came later.
The men who arrived with him had since been teaching the local inhabitants to read and write, while giving talks on all possible subjects. Nello immediately volunteered to teach a course on the Risorgimento, thinking it might become part of a new book that he was planning, an
d offered to work in the library, which was already well-furnished with books sent by friends. The police and militia, baffled by all these scholars, asked the prefect in Palermo to send them some ‘intelligent guards’, able to follow what was going on.
The well-organised communists, some of whom had taken to wearing high-collared Russian-style tunics with embroidered borders, had started communal kitchens in order to make the most of the little food and money by buying collectively, directly from producers. The political prisoners tended to eat according to their party affiliations, the criminals by the region of Italy they came from. When the ‘maximalists’ were found to be eating with the ‘unitarians’, Nello joked, there was talk of socialist unification. He started a mess himself, and invited a Masonic friend of his uncle Ernesto to join it. Antonio Bordello, a communist engineer from Naples, was fascinated by astrophysics and held Socratic sessions on the stars; he was also an excellent cook and his mess was much in demand, though the one run by the men from Emilia was considered the finest. ‘With an engineer for cook, a lawyer for scullery maid, a jurist for waiter . . .’ sang the confinati. Another communist had turned a field into a football pitch and his matches aroused much passion. A third had asked his family to send vaccines against typhus; others had got their families to send olive oil and smoked hams.
Giuseppe Scalarini, the former political cartoonist on Avanti!, arrested for his irreverent depictions of fascism, asked his wife to bring games and toys for the local children. Later, he hid his drawings of Ustica inside the stuffing of his daughter’s dolls, in packets of medicine and even inside a chicken, announcing that it was a special hen ‘stuffed with the islands’. One boat brought a dentist, who, having no instruments, was forced to dig out rotten teeth with a nail. The clock in the square, long silent, had been started again by a confinato watchmaker and plans were afoot to bring over a radio from the mainland, the only receiver or transmitter on the island being limited to morse and off-limits to all but the police. And this cooperative prisoner life, first started on Ustica among this band of exceptional men, was beginning to spread to the other penal islands.
Nello was captivated by his companions, particularly Carlo’s friend Bauer, whom he was beginning to regard as another older brother. ‘Everyone is extremely kind,’ he wrote to Amelia. ‘There is a sense of instinctive solidarity between the confinati; all formality has been abolished, and we are friends at once, even before we learn each other’s names.’ When a photograph of Mirtillino, the nephew he had never seen, arrived in a letter, he carried it round on a series of visits. ‘Luckily’, he wrote to Gina Lombroso, ‘we are adaptable people and not at all ill-tempered.’
Nello’s house on Ustica with a crowd of confinati
Best of all, he had received permission for Maria to join him. One of the anomalies of this odd form of punishment was that, providing you had sufficient funds, you were allowed to bring your family to live with you. When not seeking out and making friends with the few women prisoners or the wives of other confinati, so that Maria would have female company, Nello started searching for a suitable home. There were few to choose from, though he was offered plenty of pigsties and chicken coops, hastily cleared out by islanders eager to make money from their new visitors. He settled on the ground floor of a square whitewashed house in the lower part of the village, with a terrace overlooking the sea, a barracks on one side and a woman who raised chickens on the other. To his mother-in-law Luisa, he wrote: ‘I am waiting for my little wife with fantastic impatience.’
‘On a fine autumn morning’, as Nello later described it, Maria arrived on Ustica. It was 12 September 1927. The only way you could tell the seasons apart, he noted, was by a certain freshness in the air, because the trees in the square were evergreen and mild temperatures lasted well into the winter. Maria, now twenty-two, had not been well and had been ordered to rest and take the sun. Having successfully cleared their new house of cockroaches, and come to terms with the fact that the lavatory was in the kitchen next to the stove, she took up a position on the terrace under an awning, or went to sit on the rocks to watch Nello bathe between the permitted hours of ten and eleven, on alternate days, under the watchful eyes of a patrolling boat of militiamen. ‘You might say’, Nello wrote to his mother, ‘that we are still enjoying our honeymoon.’ What Maria made of the women on Ustica is not known, but the community was not without social niceties. As a confinato wrote to his wife and daughter, due to join him shortly, ‘Bring what you have in the way of good and elegant dresses . . . the colony of confinati’s wives does not scorn a certain richness and ostentation in their dress.’ An elderly local woman was heard to say: ‘Ustica has become a little Paris.’
Though herself a suspect, as the mother of convicted antifascists, Amelia remained at liberty. Eager to see Nello and Maria, she requested, and was granted, leave to visit them. No more than her sons, however, did she think of complaining. Accustomed to the care of cooks and maids, she took to the simple life with a kind of humorous pleasure. ‘If anyone had ever told me that I would see mammà with an apron going into ecstasies over four meatballs,’ wrote Nello to their friend Gina Lombroso, ‘I would have thought it a joke.’ Foraging for food in the surrounding countryside was an essential part of the confinato’s life, and Amelia was soon roaming the hillsides in search of edible grasses, keeping an eye out for a fishing boat, which might mean fresh fish. Unlike the confinati, Amelia could go where she liked, but each time she crossed the invisible barriers beyond which Nello could not stray, it reminded her of just what it meant to be so circumscribed. Being sent to the confino, she would later write, was like ‘slipping without noise into a marsh, which slowly absorbs, swallows, suffocates, kills with no other weapon than silence’. Though the three of them, Amelia, Nello and Maria, lived together in amiable, uncomplaining harmony, Amelia did not always share her son’s boundless optimism.
Maria was once again pregnant. She seemed to take well to this harsh exile, though she was always hungry. There being no gynaecologist on the island, one was summoned from Palermo. He arrived so sick from four hours of rough seas that he took to his bed. As Fernande Salvemini, who had taught Maria as a girl, wrote to their mutual friends the Ferreros, ‘It’s surprising how much strength there is in Maria, who seems so fragile – strength, rectitude and goodness.’ Like Marion, Maria was full of resolve. Nello, Amelia wrote to Zia Gì, ‘remains as good-tempered as ever. What wonderful company, this son of mine.’ The weather stayed warm and they had made the house ‘pretty and comfortable’. On the days that the boat was due, she watched its arrival from the terrace thinking about ‘the very thin thread that links us to the world’. On Nello’s twenty-seventh birthday, they celebrated with chocolates sent by Zia Gì, and a ‘disgusting bottle of pseudo horrendous champagne’ and wished each other ‘many hopes and many dreams’. This was, wrote Nello later, a ‘truly happy period of our lives’.
In Paris, Turati was celebrating his own birthday. He was seventy. At the party given for him, he raised his glass to Carlo and Nello, ‘the most worthy, the few still truly alive: they are nostri maestri – our masters’.
However, Ustica was never free of tensions. When the mood was peaceful, sounds of the mandolin and the guitar could be heard coming from the rooms occupied by the Roman and the southern prisoners. But as the island filled up with ever more feisty communist, anarchist and socialist men and women arriving to serve their sentences – to be packed into small, stifling dormitories into which the rain dripped ceaselessly, locked in from dusk to dawn and plagued by lice – tempers frayed. When the dates for transfers or amnesties approached, the confinati gathered in agitated groups in the village square. Because there were so few women, there was a growing number of homosexual relationships, men taking the names of women – ‘Carmen’ and ‘Tosca’ were two of the most common – and being referred to as ‘the criminals’ tarts’. On an allowance of 10 lire a day, always hungry, prisoners used the money to drink instead of eat. Even one of the ad
ministrators admitted that the rations ‘would have made Gandhi lose weight’. There were political rows, fights, jealous tantrums, after which the culprits were punished. With work available for barely 30 out of the 500 or so men, idleness made the others envious and angry. Militiamen were ordered to stay close, listen to conversations, pick up incriminating talk. Nello and Maria, safe in their house with sufficient money, were fortunate.
One of the first directors of the penal colony was a level-headed man called Sortino, who recognised the importance of the school and the classes in keeping people busy. But one day a Roman anarchist, Spartaco Stagnetto, reported witnessing one of the common criminals rob another, and he was knifed in his own mess. Had there been a proper doctor, Stagnetto would probably have survived. As it was, he died, and his funeral became the occasion for open hostility between prisoners and guards, stirred up by the militia, who brought hand grenades with them to the graveside. Sortino, judged too lenient, was removed. In his place came a far more ruthless figure, Michele Buemi, who had little liking for the confinati and took great pleasure in enforcing petty rules. A brutal, thuggish centurion, Alberto Memmi, was appointed to run the militia. One of their first acts was to put in a request for more weapons, including machine guns. The confinati, Buemi complained to the questore in Palermo, were doing ‘exactly as they pleased . . . and boasting openly about being in a holiday resort rather than under house-arrest’. The prefect warned Rome that there were signs of a ‘dangerous common front’ of anti-fascists on Ustica.
What particularly annoyed Buemi and Memmi was that men were now wandering around with books by Hegel and Nietzsche, and that between them the ‘confinati eccellenti’, the educated ones, were running a very efficient settlement. Memmi sent his men to sit in on the classes and listen for seditious talk. Tensions rose further when a chemistry professor was overheard describing how certain substances, when put together, caused explosions. His students had also been heard speaking English and German ‘openly and freely’.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 23
