Nello, ostensibly free but in fact kept under constant surveillance on the mainland, was also at work on the shape of Italy’s future, only in his case it was a question of getting at it through the lessons of history. Volpe, keen to prove that his young protégé was dedicated only to his studies, had assigned him research in the archives in Rome, Naples and Palermo. Maria loved Rome, and they rented a house in the city centre. Nello had come round to thinking that the seeds of fascism dated from long before the recent right-wing governments. They lay in the nature of Italy itself, its backwardness, its unhealthy, uneducated, illiterate population, its weak infrastructure, its few resources, and its south largely under the yoke of bandits. It was, he maintained, a country independent only in name and rightly regarded with extreme wariness by the rest of Europe.
Working alone in the archives, however, Nello was feeling increasingly cut off. ‘Every flag I see flying in the sun, every little fascist boy in uniform I pass in the street, every poster I read, says to me: you are not one of us,’ he wrote to Amelia. ‘There’s no place for you here. Go.’ To counter this sense of isolation, he told his mother how close to her he needed to feel, how often he wanted to see her. He said that he was thinking of looking for a house in the country, where he and Maria and all their future children could live ‘peaceful, rich, inner lives’. In May he went with his childhood friend Leo Ferrero to Naples and they called on Benedetto Croce, living his secluded, watched existence. Surreptitiously, Nello had also contacted some of the few young anti-fascists still at liberty and there was talk of him contributing to Pietre, one of the last independent magazines not yet suppressed by the fascist government. Given his promises to Volpe, and the fact that he was closely observed, these acts were perilous.
On 11 July, at 2.25 a.m., Maria gave birth to a daughter. The baby was to have been born at home in their flat in Rome, but at the last minute complications arose and Maria was taken, ‘uttering great cries of pain’, to a hospital and the little girl delivered by forceps. They named her Silvia, which seemed to them ‘both intimate and robust and also very Roman’. She weighed three kilos and was ‘pale pink’ in colouring, with small, perfect ears. Nello wrote to give the news to Zia Gì: ‘Pretty? No. Ugly? No. A dear sweet little Silvia, yes.’ Nello’s happiness, Amelia added, was ‘really touching’, and though the baby was indeed charming, her nose ‘occupies rather a large surface on her minuscule face’.
Silvia was thirteen months younger than Mirtillino and she too soon acquired a nickname: Pisellino, little pea. From Lipari, Carlo wrote that for a Jew and a non-believer like himself, only procreation gave any guarantee of ‘relative immortality’. But, he added, thinking over the intensity of his and Nello’s feelings about their mother, and about their wives, ‘perhaps this is why Jews have such a potent and profound feeling about family’. Duty and responsibility, in some shape or form, were never far from their thoughts.
In September, Nello travelled to Udine to oversee the reburial of Aldo’s remains at Timau in a vast cemetery for those who had died in the First World War. Aldo had been dead for twelve years. It was raining hard but Nello walked up towards the pass where his brother had died, past waterfalls and meadows and deep forests. Other families, he wrote to Amelia, had hereditary lands; they would have this grave, which they would all visit together every year. Aldo, he said, was warm and alive in his heart and he would make certain that Silvia would always hear his name mentioned with love. Before leaving, he gave 100 lire to the young soldiers who had dug the grave with such tact, asking them to drink to Aldo.
Not long after Silvia’s birth, Nello and Maria moved to Turin. Nello spent his mornings in the archives, his afternoons in the library; Maria was learning to type so as to be able to help with his research. Nello’s mood was cheerful: ‘Tell my brother that he is a little pig,’ he wrote to Parri, complaining that he had not had a proper letter in many weeks. When Carlo did write, it was in the serious tones of an older brother, telling Nello that he should settle on one subject and make it the focus of his life. They exchanged letters, guarded, cryptic, about the nature of Carlo’s new work, which had received a boost when a pile of notes, left behind on Ustica and confiscated by the police, were mysteriously returned to him.
But Nello had not resigned himself to political inactivity. Despite the very real risks, he met up surreptitiously with Carlo Levi and Riccardo Bauer, recently released from confino, both of them precariously at liberty. They managed to put out one issue of a clandestine paper, and then were forced to accept defeat. But they were not traced or caught.
Nello and his second daughter, Paola
Maria with Paola and Silvia
Though Marion had dreaded the moment when she would have to abandon Carlo, they had always known that, given her heart problems, she and Mirtillino would leave the great heat of the Lipari summer and visit her parents in England. A letter requesting a passport on the grounds of ill-health went off to the Ministry of the Interior in Rome. The note in her file is revealing. ‘A very brave and hysterical woman,’ it says, ‘to be considered as dangerous as her husband or perhaps even more so. Capable of committing desperate acts. Vigilance.’
The passport was granted. But now it was Mirtillino who needed to get away. Though he had thrived during his months on Lipari, and was walking and chattering like a little bird, he had come down with suspected amoebic dysentery. Marion set out immediately for London and Mirtillino went into Great Ormond Street Hospital, where doctors feared typhus. Without news for days on end, Carlo fretted miserably. But Mirtillino recovered and Marion took him for a couple of weeks to a nursing home and then to stay with her sister in West Kirby. Marion missed Carlo so much that she had a constant knot in her stomach. Before returning to Italy, she bought Mirtillino a red coat with a velvet collar and a little suit with leggings, and herself gloves and a leather jacket.
Back in Italy, their train stopped in Turin, where Nello was waiting with a bottle of fresh milk and some cooked apples. The crossing from Milazzo to Lipari was extremely rough and getting on shore from the pitching boat was terrifying. Marion was pleased to be back in this ‘dear intimate life’. Carlo found Mirtillino much changed, ‘interesting, amusing’. He and Marion got used to eating pigeons, but decided that goat, one of the few reliable sources of meat on the island, was too strong. One day they found a large wild turkey strutting around their sitting room; they ate it for supper with the Parris.
The autumn of 1928 was hot and sunny. Carlo worked in the mornings, swam in the midday warmth, collected the post at 4 o’clock, and went early to bed. He was rereading The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace, noting with pleasure that ‘great minds’ write fundamental things. He had got into the habit of continually taking the temperature of his own moods and thoughts and transcribing them in long letters to his mother. The need to pin down, to describe, to analyse and understand, begun in their early childhood, had grown stronger with the years: there was no event, no person, no encounter, no idea that Carlo did not feel the need to communicate. ‘In truth, I regret nothing,’ he wrote one day. Though he would be ‘asphyxiated’ by a life of academia, his earlier university work had been a useful experiment, and he had chosen every subsequent step in full consciousness, never hesitating and never doubting. He was grateful for his present state of safety, but his need to get something done, now, ‘on earth’, was becoming increasingly intense and violent: it ‘fills my time, my space, my world, my reason for being alive’.
For the first time, at the age of twenty-eight, he felt that he really knew himself, knew what mattered and this, he said, gave him great strength. He urged Amelia not to worry about him. ‘I have travelled a long way. But I am not tired. I’ll travel further. I won’t lose myself. I can see the path ahead. I’ll get there.’ And, he added, teasing her, she could at least take pleasure in the sons she had created: ‘We may of course burn up . . . but only because we tried to get too close to the sun.’ For all his happy marriage, there was always a sense
that, with Aldo dead, it was the three of them, Amelia and her two sons, against the world.
Amelia returned to Lipari for another visit. As Nello wrote to a friend: ‘My mother trots from one end of Italy to the other.’ Amelia was now fifty-eight, as upright and beautiful as ever, her posture and manners those of an earlier age, her long hair still piled up elegantly on her head. Carlo told Zia Gì that he was delighted to see that she had put on weight and seemed more cheerful. Late one night, he wrote to Nello: ‘There is no one on earth equal to our adorable mother, persecuted for the last twelve years and confronting it with such nobility . . . Oh Nello, don’t we see ourselves in her? That it is to her that we owe the best, yes the best, in our characters?’ Spending these weeks so happily with her had almost made up for the horrors of 1927.
But then came the sad news that Gabriele had died. Amelia, for whom her brother had provided unfailing comfort and strength her entire life, was crushed. Carlo urged her not to shut herself up in Florence but to go to Turin to stay with Nello. His uncle had taught him, he told her, the importance of holding on to the truth, and never betraying ‘that religion of duty’, of which Gabriele – modest to the point of absurdity, genuinely good, honest almost to excess – had been such a shining example. On his twenty-ninth birthday on 16 November, Carlo spoke of the ‘sad and beautiful destiny of our family’.
Carlo was greatly liked among Lipari’s confinati. People found him friendly, approachable, as interested in the lives of the ordinary families as in those of his intellectual friends. He and Marion continued to gather people for tea in their garden, and sometimes played the piano for them. Carlo handed out little boxes of candied oranges which he made himself. There was something almost childlike in his ready, sunny smile.
On the afternoon of Epiphany, 6 January 1929, he and Marion invited all the children of the confinati to a party. They expected forty; sixty-four turned up, along with their mothers and grandmothers. Carlo had cut coloured paper patterns and hung them around the walls. Games were played, followed by a tombola with prizes of socks, sent by Amelia from Florence; there were sparklers, false noses and balloons and a small present for every child. Nitti made an appearance as a menacing witch. A few fireworks were let off. Then came sandwiches, hot chocolate, biscuits – unimaginable luxuries on Lipari and also sent by Amelia – and Malvasia wine for the adults.
Behind it all, behind the ever amiable and unflappable facade, however, Carlo suffered. He felt trapped and impotent and angry. ‘Monotony, monotony, nothing new . . .’ he wrote. ‘The winter is slow in passing . . . Obsession returns. Escape. Escape. Escape.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Not Even the Flies Escape
There was only one way to leave confino early: complete submission. From time to time, to mark dates on the fascist calendar, Mussolini released people who were prepared to renounce their dissident ways and extol fascism. The confinati themselves, or their families, could also send a subservient letter to the Duce, pleading to be pardoned; but once this became known, they were often ostracised and called traitors. Giovanni Ansaldo, Carlo’s journalist friend caught escaping to Switzerland with Bauer but now eager to profess a new-found fascist allegiance, sought and obtained a pardon after a suitably begging request. On Lipari the others lined the road as he walked to the boat taking him to liberty, staring in disapproving silence. When Parri’s family, unknown to him, petitioned Mussolini for his early release he was furious and cut short further negotiations. ‘You must find the strength never to give in to false illusions,’ he wrote sternly to his mother. ‘To wait; to be patient; to remain sane and serene just as we are.’ True anti-fascists did not capitulate.
This left only escape. But, as the Club della Fuga understood all too clearly, escape was impossible. Lipari had 36 kilometres of coastline, patrolled by three fast naval motorboats with machine guns, and one with a cannon, and they kept watch from a hidden inlet. The guards had radios; and on nearby Vulcano was a searchlight with a powerful beam that lit up Lipari port and its surroundings. On the island itself, between militia, police, carabinieri and Guardia della Finanza, there were now some 500 guards. There were also spies, for the most part squadristi who had committed small acts of disobedience and were trying to win their way back into favour.
Even as the Club della Fuga plotted – a hydroplane sent by friends to pluck them out of the water while they swam? Stealing one of the motorboats? – other confinati seized the initiative. A young Tuscan student, educated in England, joined up with a Venetian workman, a Genoan shopkeeper and Mario Magri and hatched a plan to break out. All four lived in the dormitories inside the castle precinct. One night, having plaited their sheets into a rope and stood on each other’s shoulders to reach the high windows, they let themselves down the walls. Magri was disguised as a priest; one of the other men wore women’s clothes. Their idea was to find a rowing boat. Next morning the alarm went up and locals were given shotguns and drafted in to help track down the fugitives. For five days the men wandered around the mountains, growing increasingly hungry and thirsty. When they could stand it no longer, they approached a farm and asked for help. The farmer was willing but his wife, terrified about possible reprisals, denounced them to the police. They were caught, beaten up, then sentenced to four years in jail in Messina. The farmer, who had failed in his duty to report them, was sent to Ustica for five years’ confino.
In spite of this exemplary lesson, three months later a young Venetian called Spangano stole a canoe used by summer visitors, intending to row himself to the mainland. Almost immediately, the sea got up and he was forced to put back to shore. He left the boat drifting, thinking that it would be washed up and everyone would assume that he had drowned. For a month, he avoided the patrols and was fed by other confinati. Then one day he made his way to Lipari’s second port, Canneto, and managed to climb up an anchor chain on to a German boat loading a consignment of pumice. The captain agreed to stow him away; but his second-in-command handed him over to the carabinieri. Spangano was given a three-year prison sentence.
These failed attempts were studied closely by Carlo and his friends. If anything went wrong, they knew there would be no second chance. All four men – Carlo, Lussu, Nitti and Dolci – were, each in their own way, desperate and impatient. Nitti spoke of being consumed by ‘murderous boredom’. Lussu feared that unless he reached somewhere with proper medical facilities he would not live to see the end of his sentence. He wished to die, he said, not a chained, but a free man. Carlo, who ached constantly for action, and wanted to take his ideas for a future political Italy to a wider audience, fumed and fretted. Lipari, he grumbled, was all right for ‘political old-aged pensioners’ but not for men who wished to fight and to work. To Amelia, in veiled terms, he said that he did not envisage his destiny as a captive, but added, always quick to make fun of himself, that he was not the stuff of martyrs. ‘Have you ever heard of a tall, fat, bespectacled, optimistic, extremely healthy, teacher of economics martyr?’
When they met, which they did every day and often several times a day, the four friends returned ceaselessly to the subject of escape. ‘We dreamed of every kind of ending,’ Carlo wrote later. ‘Drowned. Recaptured. Jeered at, executed. Rarely did our imagination bring us through safe and sound.’ To his surprise, for he had feared her opposition, Marion entered enthusiastically into their plotting.
For a plan to work, they agreed, a number of things had to happen. They had, first of all, to persuade the authorities that they were all four of them model prisoners, totally resigned to their sentences, with no thought of rebellion. Both Lussu and Carlo were watched with especial care, Lussu because of his violent brush with the fascists in Sardinia, Carlo because of Turati’s escape. Then they needed to have a group of friends outside Italy to orchestrate the rescue and buy a fast boat, a task made considerably easier by the fact that Carlo had money. Importantly, they needed to find a way of communicating secretly with these friends, to coordinate timing and place. This wa
s solved by Marion who, on one of her return visits to Lipari, brought with her invisible ink, smuggled in a scent bottle, and chemical reagents in the form of bright green crystals, which she sewed into the hem of a coat of the same colour.
As for the friends outside Italy, there was no lack of candidates: Italo Oxilia, the sailor who had helped spirit Turati to France, agreed to take charge of the boat; Raffaele Rossetti, a member of the former Republican Party and a decorated war veteran, took on the day-to-day logistics; and Alberto Tarchiani, a tall, calm, broad-shouldered man with glasses and wavy hair, editor of the Corriere della Sera until it was taken over by the fascists in 1925, was given the task of putting together the escape plan. All three of these men were in exile in Paris. Letters were now written to Marion’s father in London, who then sent them on to Paris, where the rescue team deciphered the invisible words as they appeared in vivid red.
What none of them realised, however, was the extent to which they were all watched. Even Marion’s father, Ernest, who never left London, was the subject of an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs memorandum. He was a man, it said, ‘professing revolutionary ideas and frequenting meetings of anarchists’. Marion, meanwhile, had been persuaded, with great difficulty, to take no part in the escape, because of Mirtillino.
On Lipari, the four men set about making themselves trusted. Lussu decided that he would construct an image of absolute predictability and orderliness. He mixed little with the other confinati, but took two short daily walks – adopting a frail and somewhat jerky stride – every day at precisely the same time, followed by his two bored guards. In order to feed the idea that he was sickly and tubercular, obsessed by routine, he never left the house without a large coat and a scarf pulled up to his ears. It was soon being said that one could set one’s watch by Lussu’s routine; he himself liked to think of himself as Kant, by whose precise walks Königsberg’s inhabitants had kept time. To prepare himself for what he foresaw might be a long period in the sea, he forced himself to take icy showers; and since he had never learnt to swim, he now taught himself and added daily plunges from the beach to his routine.
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