Dawn was just breaking. Rossi, who had lost his jacket and his coat, was freezing. He approached the barracks where the sailors, who were just getting up, seemed friendly. They gave him some food and lit a fire for him to warm himself; they listened to his story, but then handed him over to the carabinieri.
It took Ada several weeks to discover that he too was now in the Regina Coeli. She was told that all the ‘Milanese dynamiters’ were in solitary confinement and had been turned over entirely to OVRA. Rossi coped by keeping himself fanatically neat in jail and insisted on polishing his shoes, something he later said stopped him from contemplating suicide.
Bocchini’s men had been quick to realise that the unassuming Ceva, alone in his cell, was defenceless and trusting. They played on his sense of guilt and loyalty and soon managed to persuade him that he had told them enough to incriminate the others, and that they intended to portray him in court as a traitor. The lonely days passed obsessively; to distract himself, Ceva solved mathematical problems in his head. Late on Christmas night, he decided that he could bear it no longer. He broke his spectacles, ground up the glass, mixed it with some mints and citric acid, and swallowed it; he died the next morning, in agony, soon after 7 o’clock. From his nearby cell, Rossi listened to his groans.
Ceva was a devoted husband and father. Before dying, he wrote two letters. The one to his wife Elena was long, full of memories and regrets and advice about how to bring up their two children. ‘My angel . . . forgive me. Not for what I am about to do, but because I was blind, lacking in judgement, unthinking over things that one should not take lightly. I didn’t realise . . . No one should mourn me.’ To Police Inspector Nudi, Ceva wrote that he had committed no crime, that his conscience was clear, and that he had been inspired only by ‘an overwhelming love of liberty’. ‘I never had, living my happy peaceful life, a sense of the reality of things . . . or of the perils towards which I was walking.’ But, he added, he feared being manipulated by the prosecution into incriminating del Re, a man he considered his friend.
Umberto Cevo with his youngest child
Ceva died still believing in del Re’s honesty but the others were quickly disabused. In Milan and Paris rumours of del Re’s treachery spread. On the walls of the prison yard in the Regina Coeli, Rossi used a bit of chalk to write: ‘Del Re is a spy for the regime.’ Elena Ceva was besieged by sympathetic visitors, among them Benedetto Croce and Toscanini. Bauer and Rossi, perceived as the ringleaders, were now in great danger of being executed by firing squad, and Carlo and Salvemini launched an international campaign to save their lives. In their letters and articles for the newspapers, Carlo referred to his two friends as ‘my brothers’, and Salvemini spoke of del Re as an ‘agent provocateur’. The Manchester Guardian published an appeal signed by thirty European intellectuals, from Arnold Toynbee to Thomas Mann, asking that the trial be held, not before the Special Tribunal, but in an open court. Only Bernard Shaw refused to sign, saying that though he did not agree with everything the fascists did, he still admired their work. Carlo tried to persuade some of his highly placed Conservative friends to bring pressure on the British government to advise Mussolini to behave with moderation. As Salvemini pointed out, criticism from abroad ‘was hitting him precisely at his weakest point’.
What became known as the ‘Trial of the Intellectuals’ opened in the Palace of Justice in Rome on 29 May 1931. The accused were in an iron cage. Women were banned from attending, which meant that neither Elena Ceva nor Rossi’s mother Elide was present. Not long before, Rossi’s much-loved sister Serenella had committed suicide, pushed over the brink by the horrors of his arrest. At three that same morning, Michele Schirru, an anarchist who had confessed to planning to murder Mussolini, and who, when caught, shot and wounded several policemen, had been executed. It was the first time that an intention rather than an act had been punished by death, and sent a clear message that this was the fate intended for those in the dock.
It quickly became apparent that Bauer and Rossi took full responsibility for every aspect of Giustizia e Libertà in Italy – though not, of course, for the Milan bombing. The remains of the explosives, retrieved from the Brembo with del Re’s help, were produced in court. Rossi gave an account of del Re’s perfidy, describing himself again as ‘distinctly and decisively anti-fascist’. Bauer, as he had in the Savona trial, turned the proceedings into an attack on the fascist regime. He had felt it his duty, he said, to try to break the cycle of violence and subjugation into which Italy had been plunged. Liberty, he declared, had been reduced to a ‘putrefying cadaver’, but he was convinced that the days of freedom would one day return. The thought of freedom alone would comfort and accompany him in the loneliness of his cell. His words were long remembered and quoted. There were brave cheers in the court, and even the president admitted that his speech had been ‘noble’.
Bauer and Rossi’s obvious moral honesty and courage paid off, and the campaign waged by Carlo and Salvemini clearly helped. The two men received prison sentences of twenty years each. Traquandi was given seven years. Parri, for whom no evidence of involvement could be proved, was absolved, but since he was deemed ‘capable of committing further acts’, he was ordered back to Lipari, where conditions had deteriorated further and TB was now rife. He begged to be allowed to go somewhere near a library and where the pains from the frostbite he still suffered after his first stay on Lipari might be treated. His request was refused. ‘The island’, a prisoner had written not long before, ‘is turning into a cemetery.’ The other fifteen people in the dock received short sentences or were freed for lack of evidence.
The Trial of the Intellectuals was considered a great coup for Bocchini. Mussolini used the occasion to announce that the Special Tribunal would be renewed for another five years. For the antifascists, 1931 had been a lethal year: 519 people had, between them, received sentences totalling 2016 years. Del Re was given 44,000 lire and a new name; in terror of retribution, he caught a boat for South America.
Ada was sacked from her teaching job in Bergamo and gave herself up to planning Rossi’s escape. Rossi’s mother Elide told Salvemini that she had never felt the need to appear strong so keenly, for Serenella and Ernesto had been very close and she feared what the solitary confinement in which he was being kept might do to her son. To a friend, she wrote: ‘I am so unspeakably sad that every moment is an effort’; when praised for her powers of resistance it seemed to her ‘almost like irony’. On one of her few permitted visits, she found her son in tears, but he asked her to say to Salvemini and Carlo that he thought about them all the time and that their friendship gave him courage. ‘Only my resignation and my serenity’, Elide said to Salvemini, ‘can save him.’ Forbidden to write anything, he had taken to scrawling on his window with a bar of soap until that too was taken away from him. It was Rossi who famously said, referring to the soup served in prison: ‘After the third worm, stop.’
On one of her own visits to Rossi, Ada suggested that they get married. The ceremony was performed by the local podestà on the anniversary of her own parents’ wedding, and they hoped to be as happy. She managed to get him moved to a prison in the north, which made visits easier. With the help of Carlo, who sent her money and a false passport, she explored the possibility of getting him out through the prison sewers. When that proved unworkable, she used the money to bribe a compliant guard and a helpful garage mechanic, but that too failed. When Rossi was abruptly transferred back to the Regina Coeli, she resigned herself to preparing courses in algebra, trigonometry, psychoanalysis, the classics and American literature, which she took to him in prison, and which he then shared with the others. Study kept them sane.
In January 1931, even as del Re’s machinations were continuing to unfold around him, Carlo found a new flat at 5 Place du Panthéon on the Left Bank; he was delighted by the move, saying that Passy was too philistine and he wanted to be near the Sorbonne and the constant bustle of young people in the streets. On 12 March, Marion gave birth
to a boy; they called him Andrea, but he was soon known as ‘Aghi’ or ‘Eghi’. Marion had had two children in less than a year; she was thirty-four, but looked older. When Amelia arrived in Paris soon after the birth, she found the household in disarray. As Carlo wrote to Nello, it was all ‘assai pasticciato’, a bit of a mess; whenever either of her sons were in difficulties, they sent for Amelia. An informer reported to Rome that Marion was ‘very depressed, with bad heart troubles. She will soon die of a heart attack.’
On 14 April, elections in Spain brought a republic to power; King Alfonso XIII abdicated and left for France, where there was much rejoicing among the exiles. ‘The Spanish revolution moves and elates me!’ Carlo wrote to Nello. ‘Maybe in Italy too dawn will break.’ As the head of Giustizia e Libertà in Paris, he told his brother, he believed that he had ‘magnificent duties’ to go at once to lend solidarity to the new leaders, but these clashed, he admitted, with the ‘sacred duties’ he owed his family. ‘Nellino,’ he wrote, ‘help me and above all understand me . . . I am so happy to see a chink in the grey horizon.’
The magnificent duties prevailed; it was too exciting a moment to miss. Leaving Marion recuperating in a hotel in Cap d’Antibes with Mirtillino, and his mother in charge of the two younger children in Paris, Carlo took off for Barcelona. Tarchiani and Bassanesi went with him; Carlo, who loved speed and had no respect for highway laws, did the driving. At Perpignan he lost the car keys, but when new ones had been cut and they had hastened on to Barcelona, he found it all ‘majestic’. After the grey and lowering worries of Paris, he loved the light and the countryside and the fervour of the new republic. In Madrid, he had meetings with Manuel Azaña, architect of the new socialist-republican alliance, and a celebrated pilot called Ramón Franco. Carlo was hoping to win support and backing for new flights over Italy, but at dinner one night he quarrelled with Bassanesi, who suggested that they drop not leaflets but bombs over Piazza Venezia. What, he asked sharply, about the innocent civilians below? His letters to Marion were excited. Madrid, he told her, was ‘frantic and feverish’ and he longed for the day when he would see the same in Italy. A bullfight had first disgusted then entertained him. The Prado was magnificent. ‘Rest,’ he told her, ‘grow strong and above all be calm . . . Addio, dear little thing.’
Marion’s answers, perhaps not surprisingly, were curt. ‘I envy you your lack of preoccupation with those far away . . . I wish that I loved you a little less so as not to suffer quite so much when you are materially and spiritually absent . . . A kiss from your Marionellina, who has become old old and is the mother of three children.’ She was having constant palpitations, and Amelia told Zia Gì that the doctor had said they were due at least in part to her nervous state; he ordered her to stop taking her temperature. Contrite, Carlo begged her to be patient. With their friends in jail, having made so many sacrifices, how could she not see that it was his ‘tragic and imperative duty’ to battle on? Marion too was now contrite. Her health was better and she and Mirillino were going back to Paris. It was just that she felt cut out of everything and she wanted so badly to be part of it all. And if ‘for two days I don’t hear from you, then the world goes black’. They made it up. Admitting that his visit to Spain had yielded little, he wrote: ‘We love each other too much. I love you.’ Spain, he told her, was ‘delicious’ but ‘extremely Latin’.
At 8 o’clock on the evening of 3 October 1931, a snowdrift of 400,000 white leaflets floated down from the sky above the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini was sitting in council. For almost half an hour the little plane circled 300 metres above central Rome, down the Corso, past Palazzo Chigi and then over the Spanish Steps and the gardens of the Quirinale. It was still just light and the streets were crowded with people going home from work: they picked up the leaflets and read appeals for them to abandon ‘the most tyrannical and corrupt of governments’. And then the plane flew off, never to be seen again. The only mention in the Italian papers was that it was the work of ‘una carogna’, a skunk.
The Pegasus, as the plane was called, was flown not by a member of Giustizia e Libertà, but by a twenty-nine-year-old poet and dramatist, Lauro de Bosis, best known for Icarus, his verse play about the man who dreamt of a new world in which all would be free and equal. As a boy, de Bosis had been inspired by D’Annunzio and had later worked for the Italian American Society in New York, peopled increasingly by fascist supporters. But, as with Carlo and Nello, Matteotti’s murder had changed the course of his life. Having got to know Salvemini and Don Sturzo, and become the lover of the American actress Ruth Draper, he had founded the Alleanza Nazionale with friends, writing pamphlets calling on ‘men of order’ to bring back a more honest Italian government. He was in America when his friends were arrested, tortured and given long prison sentences. When a photocopier was discovered under her bed in Rome, the fascists also arrested his sixty-six-year-old American mother for helping with the pamphlets. Asked why she had done so, she reminded them that Mussolini had declared Italy to be a country of 40 million good sheep ‘ready to give their wool to the regime: and I am not a sheep’. De Bosis decided to ‘bear a message of liberty across the sea to people in chains’. The three plagues of Italy, fascism, monarchy and the Vatican, he told Salvemini, ‘must all be eliminated, one by one’.
Though friends begged him not to, de Bosis moved to Paris and cycled every day to an airfield near Versailles, where he learnt to fly. He made friends with Dolci, who described to him Bassanesi’s flight over Milan. De Bosis was a solitary figure, with something childlike and innocent about him. He bought the Pegasus in Germany, and took off for Rome from Corsica. The weather was good, the temperature 25 degrees, and the meteorological office reported clear skies all the way. A last photograph taken of him leaning against his plane shows a good-looking man in a suit, bow tie and white shirt. He probably never believed that he would survive; there was fuel enough for only part of the way back. Before leaving Corsica, he wrote a six-page testament and left it with a friend. The problem, he wrote in ‘The Story of My Death’, was that no one took fascism seriously. ‘This is a mistake. It is necessary to die. I hope that after me others will follow and rouse public opinion . . . they will reap what I have sown.’ To Ruth Draper he wrote: ‘Be happy for my sake! not only proud but happy . . . I could not have wished for a happier solution to my wish to serve my country and my ideals.’ It was later thought that the Pegasus had gone down 40–100 kilometres from the coast of Corsica. De Bosis’ testament was published in Le Soir in Brussels, the Sunday Times in London and the New York Times. Mussolini was reported to be enraged; several airforce officers lost their jobs.
Carlo followed de Bosis’ adventures with interest. Though the republicans in Spain had not followed up their goodwill with any practical help, he was still pushing ahead with plans for a new flight of his own, spurred on by the increasingly over-excited Bassanesi. This time, the idea was to fly from Konstanz in Germany over both Turin and Milan, where giellisti would organise demonstrations of support. A highly dubious German former army officer, Viktor Haefner, who had been jailed on various occasions for selling military secrets and for fraud, volunteered to produce a plane. Carlo paid 9,000 marks for a second-hand Junker Junior and at the end of October he and Tarchiani set out for Konstanz with 350,000 anti-fascist leaflets in the boot of their car.
There was almost nothing about the plan that was sensible. Bassanesi, who had taken to adopting the most improbable pseudonyms, was by now well known to informers and police forces all over Europe, as were Carlo and Tarchiani; de Bosis’ flight had put security at airports on alert; and news had already been sent out by Bocchini’s men about a possible flight by Italian exiles. On 11 November the conspirators met at the airstrip and loaded the leaflets on board. It had been raining hard, and the ground was not just covered in thick grass but very muddy. With the still inexperienced Bassanesi at the controls, the Junker lumbered its way down the airstrip, narrowly missed the terminal, and crashed into a ditch. Undaunted,
they unloaded the leaflets, put them back in the car, and decided to try again the following day. But in the morning the police were waiting. Bassanesi was arrested as he approached the plane; Carlo and Tarchiani, observing what was happening, took off in their car unseen, but the French secret services put out an alert for a ‘yellow-brown, 4 door Ford Cabriolet, with 2 spare wheels’. At Freiburg, near the border, it was spotted by a sharp-eyed youth, who reported the foreign number plate to the police, who quickly linked it to the botched Konstanz flight.
‘Bin in haft aber gesund Brief folgt.’ ‘I am well but in jail. Letter follows,’ Carlo cabled Marion.
In Konstanz prison, Carlo’s cell was warm and clean. Meals were sent in by a local restaurant. As ever, he was cheerful, uncomplaining and optimistic. ‘No candidate for martyrdom this time,’ he wrote to Marion, asking her to send pyjamas, socks, toothpaste and German books so that he could ‘take up the broken threads of my intellectual work’. Marion noted dryly that she was enjoying being useful and pleased to discover that ‘the stupid life I lead has neither rusted nor put me to sleep’. On 16 November, Carlo celebrated his thirty-second birthday with a loving telegram from Amelia. Requests arrived in Paris for more books and deliveries of the Corriere della Sera, the Manchester Guardian and Le Temps. To Mirtillino, Carlo wrote that prison was not at all bad and that he was going to bed every evening at the same time as the children. With so many of his friends in jail in Italy, he said that he was enjoying a rare sense of communion. ‘When I am free,’ he wrote lovingly to Marion, ‘we’ll have a second and a third honeymoon.’ But Marion, after her initial burst of revolutionary energy, had fallen into loneliness and anxiety. ‘No one writes to me any more,’ she commented sadly when letters failed to come from Nello and Amelia. Carlo begged her not to let herself be led astray by ‘distorting fantasies’. She said that she was dreading the coming winter, but taking comfort from five-year-old Mirtillino, to whom she was extremely close, and whose intelligence, she said, ‘resembles an explosion’.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 34
