The Club della Fuga on Lipari
Dour and severe with those who did not know him, Lussu was warm with his friends, a brilliant talker, entertained by everything. Since he had had four years’ experience as an officer with the Arditi, and the Arditi, as he told the others, could do anything, he volunteered to take charge of the logistics of their escape. From his terrace, he studied the moon’s cycle and where and at what hour it cast its light. He had become friends with the fourteen-year-old daughter of an anti-fascist trade unionist, who had arrived with his family on Lipari in 1926. Bruna Pagani often joined him on his walks and was soon known to the confinati as ‘la signorina di Lussu’. She would soon play her part in the plan, but for now Lussu, a natural teacher, described life on Sardinia to her, talked about French history and nature. One day he taught her to sing Sardinian songs. ‘You must become an educated Signorina,’ he told her.
Dolci took the part of an eager young draughtsman, intent on spending his sentence on improving himself. He got permission to sketch the island, and soon completed a series of detailed drawings. Together they identified an excellent spot where a boat might approach the shore, a rocky cove at the far end of the port, little guarded and just outside the beam of Vulcano’s searchlight. Nitti studied the daily routines of the naval patrols, the rocks, the reefs, the coast, ‘as though we were deep-sea mariners’.
Carlo and Marion decided to build up an image of a contented, settled family. This was not altogether a fantasy: Carlo spoke of ‘this unexpected gift of happiness’. He played the piano a great deal, tended the vegetable garden, and was always deferential and genial with the guards. In his letters to Amelia, knowing that they would be read, he described a long-term plan to install a pump to bring more water to the house. There was a momentary alarm when he was suddenly arrested, taken off to Palermo and questioned, but Marion hurried over to Sicily, and was able to persuade the authorities that they had confused his identity with that of someone else, though it was never clear what it was about. Carlo returned to Lipari. One day they were given permission to take a picnic up into the hills. While Marion and Mirtillino played, Carlo and Dolci drew maps. Carlo had taken on the job of navigator and was busy studying the tides.
Their tactics were paying off. On 6 October, the director, Cannata, informed his superiors ‘The colony is secure . . . from Lipari not even the flies think of escaping.’
Music brought Edoardo Bongiorno into their lives. He was an islander in his late forties, a passionate musicologist, a socialist, a man of great sympathy and discretion, much liked by his fellow islanders, who referred to him as ‘Don Eduardu’. He had been the leader of the local band until, obliged to play ‘Giovinezza’ on all public occasions, he had resigned and now devoted himself entirely to his shipping agency, giving Carlo music lessons on the side. A Liparese by birth, Bongiorno knew every inch of the coastline and after their lessons Carlo would go home with nautical maps hidden in the score of L’elisir d’amore.
The Club della Fuga had grown to six people, of very different political and religious ideas: there was the Jewish Carlo, Nitti, who was Protestant, and Lussu and Dolci, both Catholics; their helpers were Bongiorno, another Catholic, and Paolo Fabbri, a Marxist. When not doing the confinati’s laundry, Fabbri studied French. He was a farmer from Molinella, a resourceful, dry, humorous man with rather large ears and small deep-set pale eyes, who had been extremely brave in the agrarian battles against the fascists. The others were very fond of him.
In Paris, the plans for the rescue were moving ahead. Tarchiani went to London to discuss them with Salvemini, who was now living in England. A boat, the Sigma N, was bought and Marion’s friend Mrs Peacock agreed to reconnoitre the canals and waterways for its journey down to the Mediterranean. The Sigma N set forth from northern France, ultimately bound for Tunis, and then on to Lipari. Progress was slow; hours were wasted negotiating locks. Raffaele Rossetti, never an easy man, became arrogant and bossy. There were repeated minor disasters. Having only now realised that there were 300 locks between Marne and the river Saône alone, Tarchiani decided that they would do better to put the boat on a trailer and drive. Since time was passing, they agreed to travel through the night, but while Tarchiani was napping, the hired driver fell asleep and the car and trailer plunged into a field. When the boat finally reached the coast, its engine, specially ordered by Rossetti, was found to be ailing. No spare parts could be found. A new engine was ordered. Rossetti was irritable and silent; Tarchiani fretted. Nothing augured well for a 600-mile round trip between Tunis and Lipari.
Everything that could go wrong continued to do so. When the group reached Marseilles, they discovered that a general strike had been called and the port was closed. The mechanic they had hired lost his nerve and disappeared, saying that he was terrified of drowning. Eventually, two months after leaving Paris, the Sigma N and its crew crossed the Mediterranean and reached Tunis, where Tarchiani and his wife were to wait for the boat to return from the rescue operation. The boat had been registered as a pleasure craft in the name of Mrs Vandervelde, the wife of a Belgian ex-minister. There was trouble with customs. The new engine went wrong.
All these delays were relayed to Lipari in secret ink or coded messages in newspapers, letters, cards and books, but they sometimes took weeks to be delivered. Fourteen-year-old Bruna had become their courier. One day she was approached by a sailor in the port asking her whether she was ‘la signorina di Lussu?’ He then gave her a folded newspaper to give to Lussu. On another, she was called into the grocery shop, run by a Sardinian woman, who gave her a packet and told her to tell the ‘onorevole’ that a parcel had arrived for him. Lussu sent her back to collect a special Sardinian cake, covered in bright decorations. It contained a pair of binoculars, which Lussu hid in a cupboard, telling Bruna that if the carabinieri should ever come to search his house, she should take them, climb over the terrace and hide them somewhere. One day he asked her to help him dye some clothes dark green, which would not show up in the dark – they all refused to wear the fascist black – and there was much laughter as the vat boiled over and green dye splattered the room.
A plan was now in place. On a given day, Carlo, Nitti, Lussu and Dolci were to gather on the beach by the rocky cove behind a sea wall. They would go into the water around dusk when the sun had dipped to the point that a swimmer would barely be visible. They would swim out about 150 metres from the shore and tread water, sending a message by torch to the Sigma N. In case of disaster and no boat showing up, they would still have time to make it back to their houses before the curfew.
The date was set for the night of 17 November 1928, Carlo having calculated that it was a week after a full moon, so that it rose late in the evening. The weather was grey, the sea cold and choppy. That morning Carlo had received a coded telegram from Marion, who was back in Paris, which told them that the Sigma N had left Tunis. Towards dusk the four men, in their dark-green clothes, met on the rocks and swam out. Dolci had drunk most of a bottle of cognac against the cold. There was no boat. For thirty minutes, their teeth chattering, they swam round and round. Finally, knowing that there were just minutes left before the curfew, they turned back to shore, clambered out of the water and ran for home.
Carlo had scratched his glasses, and in the dark tripped over a barbed-wire fence and fell into a spiny bush. He raced past a terrified little girl and when he got home, found that his face was covered in blood. Next morning, he told the neighbours that he had fallen over in the garden; knowing Marion to be away, they looked at him suspiciously. The Sigma N, he later learnt, had indeed put out to sea from Tunis, but huge waves had soon driven the boat back. Then the rope attached to the tender carrying the spare fuel had snapped and they had lost it. The mission had been aborted. On Lipari, the four men felt crushed. For half an hour, said Lussu, he had felt like a free man, his ‘whole soul bent on the open sea’. Winter was setting in and there would be no further chance of escape for many months.
What was
crucial, however, was that the entire event had passed unnoticed.
Recovering from their acute disappointment, Carlo and the others resumed their orderly lives; Lussu and Bruna took their walks; Nitti and Dolci returned to their calculations. Then there was a announcement that a number of confinati were to be pardoned early: Dolci was one of them. They realised that this would be a great help. Dolci planned to return to Rome, then sneak over the border and make his way to Paris, where he would be able to give the others a complete picture of Lipari, and then help pilot a new boat. A new date was set: July 1929. There had been nothing wrong with their plan, and there was no reason not to try it again. It was the Sigma N which had been a doomed boat, and it continued to be jinxed. Transported back to Marseilles to be sold, it slipped out of the net swinging it to shore from a trawler and crashed heavily into the sea. The French authorities decided that Tarchiani’s licence had not matched the true weight of the boat and issued a fine. By now Tarchiani was out of funds. He took the few francs he had left and went to the casino in Monte Carlo. And here his luck changed. He placed all he had on a single number: it won. He did the same again, and won again. He emerged with enough money to pay off all their debts.
On Lipari, the winter of 1928 was bitterly cold. It rained incessantly and one day it even snowed. Waves pounded the islands. Winds rattled the ill-fitting windows and blew so hard under the doors that the rugs on the floor flapped. When Dolci left, Nitti moved in to live with Lussu, but at the same time he rented a room from Bongiorno giving directly on to the cove they intended to use again, with stairs leading down to the rocks. The dull, monotonous days crept by. The militia, bored and frustrated themselves, endlessly provoked and humiliated the confinati. Many new petty rules were imposed. Carlo sat in his little house and played Beethoven and Chopin, read Marx, worked on his new political theory. There were days when he found it almost a relief not to have to think constantly about escape.
Finally it was spring again. The Club della Fuga resumed its plotting. The almanac showed that the lunar phase would be at its best on 5, 6 and 7 July, and again on the 26th, 27th and 28th. A new and better boat had been found, the Dream V, belonging to an Egyptian prince, Djelal Edine. Grey above the line and red below, it had two powerful motors of 90 horsepower each and could do 26–30 knots – which made it faster than the Italian naval launches. Through Salvemini and Ernest Cave, it was bought for 115,000 francs and registered to Cave. Oxilia, with Dolci’s help, was to be the captain and more useful charts had arrived in Paris from Bongiorno. Tarchiani was continuing to plot and plan but was laid up in bed with sciatica. The usual coded messages went backwards and forwards between France and Lipari, where Lussu, Carlo and Nitti continued to meet, to talk, to pick feverishly over arrangements.
What none of them knew was that rumours of an escape from Lipari had reached the authorities in Rome. Spies had reported that Marion was smuggling letters in and out on her regular visits. There was talk of the French ex-consul to Ljubljana being in some way involved. A telegram sent by the Ministry of the Interior to the prefect of Messina on 3 March was uncannily accurate: a rescue was being planned by motorboat, to take place at night. Carlo’s name was mentioned and surveillance was increased. At the end of April came a flurry of telegrams urging constant vigilance. A spy in Paris intercepted a letter which spoke of a boat being bought in Spain. Another mentioned Tunisia. A watch was put on Tarchiani. But then the director, Cannata, returned from his holidays and reassured the ministry in Rome that Carlo’s behaviour was not that of a man planning to escape. On the contrary, he was leading a settled domestic life. ‘Rosselli model confinato’, he cabled his superiors. ‘Wish they were all like him.’
News that the boat would take the men off from Lipari in the first fortnight of July arrived written in invisible ink in the pages of Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, sent from Paris to Marion, who was on one of her periodic visits to the island. She was again pregnant, and Mirtillino was not well. Making much of both facts, mother and child left Lipari. Carlo fretted about them. ‘I feel oppressed and extremely worried,’ he wrote to Marion on 30 June. Meanwhile he continued with his calm and regular life, played the piano, and went swimming. A mandolin player and a tuneless choir, which struck up nearby in the evenings, were, he said, driving him mad. In London, Marion met the women running the Italian Refugees’ Relief Committee, who helped her transfer the money for the boat and carried letters to Salvemini in Paris.
Now that a date had been set Carlo tried again to persuade Parri to go with them, but Parri still anticipated repercussions against his family. Parri, said Carlo, was ‘my second conscience, my elder brother’. His melancholy friendship had taught Carlo how pure, high-minded men felt alone and sad, and not, as he had always believed, ‘abstract and rhetorical’. Parri was also devoted to Carlo, saying later that he considered him to be the most energetic, determined and impressive of leaders, and he feared only that he would wear himself out young. Injudiciously, Carlo now invited the Grand Master of the Freemasons to accompany them, but Torrigiani refused, saying that his eyesight was too poor and his health too frail. This could have cost them all dear, for informers got wind of his words and hastened to report them to Cannata, but the director, constantly bombarded by the gossip of the malicious, venal and untrustworthy spies, decided to ignore them. In his letters to Amelia, Carlo, knowing that every word was scrutinised by Cannata, described his calm life, his visits to his friends, his schemes to improve his house.
At the beginning of July, the Dream V reached Tunisia. In the end, Raffaele Rossetti had backed out and Tarchiani had been too ill to accompany them. Oxilia, Dolci and a new mechanic, Paul Vonin, ate a lobster to celebrate their progress. They prepared to leave for Lipari.
On the evening of the 5th, Carlo, Lussu and Nitti made their way stealthily to the rocky cove, swam out 150 metres and trod water. The sea was calm, the sky clear. No boat came. They waited 30 minutes, then swam back to shore ‘like whipped curs’. Nitti was the most despondent. ‘It’s our destiny to die either in prison or on this island,’ he told the others. ‘This obsession with dying free men is absurd.’ Carlo paced his terrace trying to work out what might have happened. A coded telegram the next day explained that there had been a sudden storm and trouble with the motor. The 6th and 7th were impossible. The next date was 26 July.
Carlo resumed work on his manuscript and wrote contented letters; and he smiled at everyone all the time. He told Marion that he had lost ten kilos and that he was happy about the coming baby, even if it meant that he would have to spend ‘a pretty solitary winter’ all alone on Lipari. The 23rd was their third wedding anniversary and he wrote her a loving letter. Would they ever have, he wondered, a life ‘definitively together’? Early on the 25th, he wrote again to say that the sea was flat, and there was a slight breeze. He had dreamt about a lion chasing him down an escalator. Lussu said it was a good omen: a lion meant Africa. Carlo felt tense, ‘melancholic, not bitter . . . questions, doubts, vast new horizons, dreams and hopes, even ambitions, but not of an ordinary kind’.
On 26 July, the three men swam out, waited, grew frantic, returned to shore, tried to work out what could have happened. There were just two possible days left.
On 27 July, Carlo lunched with the Parris and asked them to keep and hide a copy of his manuscript. He played with the Parris’ young son Dodo, gave him rides on his back, and said to him: ‘When we meet again, you and Mirtillino will be friends.’ He seemed particularly cheerful and laughed like a young boy. As he shut the garden gate, he looked back and waved. Later, Esther Parri would remember the expression on his face: ‘Anxious and happy, sure of himself.’ Nitti spent the day giving his usual Italian lesson to two young anarchists and took pleasure in setting them an essay with the title ‘He who sleeps does not catch fish.’ Then he went to a café and sat talking to friends.
Dusk fell and Fabbri, who had volunteered to help, met Nitti in the cove. There was no sign of Carlo or Lussu. At 9.15 p.m
. the faint purr of a motor was heard and a black shadow slipped out of the dark. Fabbri swam out to make contact with the boat while Nitti set off to look for the others. In his haste, he tripped over a hen coop. The chickens squawked, a woman rushed out and shouted ‘thieves’ and two militiamen appeared. Nitti ran back to the rocks and swam out to the boat. Minutes passed. The boat began to drift in the direction of the well-lit port, where a group of militia and policemen were sitting drinking in a café. The curfew sounded and there were now just ten minutes left before the patrols began their rounds.
Fabbri swam back to shore to see what was happening. There was still no sign of Lussu or Carlo.
To calm the militia who came to investigate the squawking chickens, Fabbri went up to them and apologised, saying that he had been rather drunk and had foolishly tripped. This diverted the two men and allowed Lussu and Carlo, who had been hovering behind a wall, to slip past and swim out to the dangerously drifting boat. Arms reached out to help them on board. The boat was now so close to shore that they felt themselves brilliantly lit up. They could hear every syllable uttered by the police in the bar.
Oxilia fired up the engines, the sound of the motors explosively loud in the silent air. Putting it on full throttle, he turned its prow out to a ‘glassy sea, leaving behind a white sparkling wake on water as smooth as oil’. From their house near the port, the Parris listened as angry shouts rose up.
The Dream V sped past Vulcano. The moon got up, huge and yellow, casting its light on Lipari as it faded gradually from sight. Carlo, Lussu and Nitti changed into dry clothes their friends had thoughtfully provided. They drank brandy and could not stop talking; laughing, they pictured the scene they had left behind. Carlo’s job was to keep the petrol tank full, Lussu’s to puncture the empty canisters and throw them overboard so that they filled with water and sank, leaving no trace. As the petrol was consumed, the boat became lighter and faster. They passed an Italian merchant ship, whose captain would later say: ‘They were going like the devil!’
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 27
