A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  Their surveillance continued. Bellavia, spy no. 353, reported to Rome that he was trying to rent a room in the house opposite the Rossellis, where he would station someone with a camera; he wanted to find a woman, with a cover story of having a lover, ‘nothing unusual in a country where morality is of little interest’. Another spy noted that many of their visitors were Russian, and that Carlo was beginning to think of himself as a ‘second Lenin’. When they did not know the names of his callers, the spies described them: fat, short, small, well-dressed, black hair. In Carlo’s French dossier, kept by the Parisian police, someone wrote: ‘They say that he is very lucky.’

  Though Marion often found it hard to prise Carlo from his desk, she forced him out to hear Toscanini – to whom she sent flowers on behalf of the appreciative Italian exiles – conduct I vespri siciliani. When Amelia came to stay, they went to the theatre to see Cocteau and Giraudoux, and to a little cinema on the Left Bank to watch Eisenstein’s films. The Rossellis often dined with the Nittis; Dolci, who had remained one of Carlo’s closest friends, had become engaged to Nitti’s daughter Luigia. In their hospitable house Carlo met many of the leaders of the French left; the historian Élie Halévy became a friend, as did André Malraux and Julien Benda and the Noufflards, who invited them to their house at Fresnay in Normandy. Though he did not always share their views, Carlo’s warm nature endeared him to everyone. He worried constantly about not having enough time for the children, but when he was home he would gather all three of them on to his big leather armchair, with Aghi on his knee, and make up stories for them. The two little ones had new nicknames, Mea and Meo. He told Amelia that he was always running, always short of time, that he could never stop, not even for a minute. Giustizia e Libertà had opened a new office not far away in Rue Val-de-Grâce, but many meetings took place in the Rosselli flat, or spilled over into the Café Saint-Sulpice, lasting long into the night in a haze of cigarette smoke. Some of the more impoverished contributors slept in the office.

  For Carlo, as Marion pointed out to Amelia, holidays were always a problem. The seaside bored him, for Marion could neither swim nor play tennis, though he made an exception for Cap Ferrat, which he described to Amelia as an ‘idyl to end idyls’, telling her that he had been to visit Amendola’s grave and that his sense of anguish had been lessened by that ‘triumph of light and colour’. A visit to Antibes ended with his early return to Paris. Another, to Royan, went better for it was close enough for him to go backwards and forwards. But the best of all was when their friend Paul Desjardins had summer gatherings of European intellectuals in a twelfth-century abbey and Salvemini came to join them. Very occasionally, and then always arranged in code, there were brief holidays, usually somewhere close to the border, with Nello and his family, and Amelia came as often as she could to Paris.

  Early in 1935, Marion’s health seemed to worsen. Leaving to go into a clinic for an operation, she wrote to Carlo that her life had become a nightmare, and that there seemed no limit to her despair and exhaustion. They decided reluctantly to send the two younger children to spend some months with Nello and his family in Florence, so that she could get more rest, and Carlo, constantly worried about her, turned down an invitation to give a series of lectures in the US, telling the man who had issued the invitation that his duty lay with his ‘companion of many years, who has shared my efforts, setbacks, adventures’. Mirtillino, who was always conscious of being his mother’s favourite, stayed in Paris.

  Marion, Mirtillino and Carlo on a rare holiday

  Nello and Carlo with two of their children on a beach in France in the early 1930s

  In Evian, where she went to convalesce, Marion reflected on her ‘physical decline’. It was no longer possible, she concluded, to fool herself that she would ever completely recover; that hope had gone. ‘And if, in order to exist, I need so much comfort and so much looking after, would it not be better to give up? But then I think of the intolerable pain of leaving Carlo and Mirtillino.’ When the weather was fine, she sat on her terrace at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs reading War and Peace; Pierre reminded her of Carlo. Writing to Zia Gì about the children, she said that only Melina, of the three, had been born ‘ugly’; Andrea was ‘very presentable’, but Mirtillino, with his golden hair and eyes of blue porcelain, ‘was a beauty’.

  Left in Paris with Mirtillino, Carlo took him on expeditions, sometimes joined by Salvemini, who was charmed by the little boy’s liveliness and intelligence. Mirtillino had been given a canary, which he called Taguine, and together he and Carlo invented a bird club, keeping a list of all the birds they saw. When Mirtillino thought about his father in later life, he would remember this large man, always active, always enthusiastic, always loving, who brought energy and excitement to everything; and who, in the evenings, played Bach and Beethoven on the piano – the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth had become the hymn of Giustizia e Libertà – and took him on imaginary journeys with an atlas, or read him passages from Plutarch. On Mirtillino’s ninth birthday, 9 June 1936, Carlo and Marion took him to a Chinese restaurant, where he used chopsticks for the first time. As a present, according to a report written by a spy and filed in Marion’s dossier in Rome, they gave him a bicycle.

  Though Melina and Aghi arrived in Florence speaking little Italian, they quickly took to their cousins and to Italian food. Melina, they all thought, looked exactly like Carlo. She was shy, and clung to Amelia. Her temper remained unpredictable. Amelia told Zia Gì that there was something ‘violent and primitive’ in the little girl’s nature, attributing it to the constant change in governesses and to the fact that no one had taken a firm hand with her. Slowly, Melina’s moods grew calmer. There were walks in the countryside on Sundays, occasional outings to the cinema and holidays in the mountains. In the evenings, after the children had done their homework, they all played games: not Monopoly (about money) or cards (remembering their grandfather Joe’s gambling) and never anything to do with weapons. Writing to Marion from Vienna, where she had escaped on a brief holiday with Nello and Maria, Amelia wrote that her happiness with them was like ‘sunshine’. ‘Otherwise, tell me, how would we go on, with all this blackness around us, and in our hearts.’ She had decided to write her memoirs.

  In July 1936, Carlo and Marion went to Morzine in the Haute-Savoie to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. A loving telegram came from Amelia, Nello and Maria in Florence. Marion was happy because Carlo had promised to spend an entire month with her. They had barely arrived when news came that civil war had broken out in Spain. After a week of frantic telephone calls, Carlo hastened back to Paris. ‘The vile Hebrew Rosselli’, reported a spy to Rome, ‘refuses to accept that he is beaten.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Free Man Again

  On 17 July 1936, generals in the Spanish army launched a coup against the democratically elected Popular Front, which had been fatally weakened by the global economic crisis and the strikes and anarchist violence that had broken out between workers and employers. It was backed by the Guardia Civil and the Catholic Church. Two days later, General Franco, head of the Army of Africa in Morocco, asked Mussolini to lend him aeroplanes to ferry his soldiers across the Straits of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Ciano, newly elected foreign minister, agreed and, having sent the planes, he went on to send weapons and men. Though the Spaniards came to dislike their Italian allies, calling them quarrelsome, bullying and despotic, Italy would soon become Franco’s major contributing foreign power. Some areas of Spain supported the rebels, others the Republican forces; the civil war spread, as did atrocities on both sides. Nationalist commanders spoke of carrying out limpienza, ‘cleansing’. Bodies of executed Republicans were left on the streets to inspire terror. The Republicans burned down churches and murdered priests.

  It would later be said that in the Spanish Civil War, people saw what they chose to believe: a fight between good and evil, between bosses and workers, between Church and state, between enlightenment and the forces of d
arkness. For Carlo it was perfectly simple. Abyssinia had been a disastrous defeat for the anti-fascist movement and it had greatly strengthened Mussolini. Spain would be the place where the anti-fascists redeemed their past failures and returned democracy to its rightful place. A victory in Spain would decide the fate of Europe. What was more, Carlo was feeling bruised by a fresh attack on him by former colleagues, who dismissed Giustizia e Libertà as a band of useless agitators, bombastic and impotent. Carlo had never felt more isolated. Spies reported that he was dejected, confused, out of sorts.

  But not defeated; Carlo did not countenance defeat. He called a meeting in the Giustizia e Libertà offices in Paris and set about raising men and material to support the Republicans, despatching the anarchist Camillo Berneri ahead to Barcelona to get a feel for what was happening. His mood quickly turned to one of elation. With the Spanish war, he was discovering a talent for stirring prose, his words moving and exultant. It was, he told the men who came to Rue Val-de-Grâce, like the Risorgimento all over again, a great light burning over the horizon. ‘We declare,’ he wrote, ‘not in the febrile excitement of an hour, but calmly . . . that the Spanish revolution is our revolution, that the working-class Spanish Civil War is the war of all anti-fascists, that the place of all revolutionaries is in Spain.’ He was looking for volunteers to go with him to Barcelona, in the name of the 2,000 people killed in recent years by the fascists in Italy, and the 3,000 more who had been jailed or sent to the confino. Only his giellisti, the republicans and the anarchists were ready to listen; for the moment, the socialists and the communists hung back. To his great relief, Amelia had agreed to come to Paris to be with Marion and the children while he was away. To Gina Lombroso, Carlo wrote: ‘The peace of Europe is hanging by a thread.’

  Most of the pilots in Spain had gone over to Franco; what the Republicans needed most were technicians, planes and men who could fly them. Carlo provided money from his dwindling resources for the squadron of volunteers planned by André Malraux. Since Malraux himself was not a pilot, a French reserve officer was put in charge; the first forty-seven men were soon on their way to Spain. They intended to carry out their two daily sorties without parachutes, to leave more room for bombs. In the evenings, there were vast gatherings of supporters for the Spanish republic in the Vélodrome d’Hiver.

  In Paris, the spies were following Carlo’s frenetic activities closely. Bellavia reported that he was acting like a ‘real Jew’, ‘a little Lenin, a daddy’s boy’, and that the weapons he was getting hold of would surely later be used against Italy. He had been spotted talking to the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg; his telephone was tapped and his intercepted letters were examined under a special quartz lamp which could pick out invisible messages. Antonini wrote that Carlo was bored with domesticity, and that Spain was providing him with a purpose to his life. He was right.

  Carlo was now a portly, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties; as Salvemini said, he looked like a bookish intellectual, not a fighter. Nothing, however, was going to prevent him going to war, not even the fact that the Spanish Republicans were saying that they needed not men but weapons. Borrowing a white beret from Marion and wearing workmen’s clothes, he left by train for Spain. By 19 August he was in Barcelona, in the infantry barracks of Pedralbes with some 130 Italian comrades, training to join the anarchist syndicalist Colonna Francisco Ascaso, under the auspices of the Catalan government. Though the barracks were in a grim and forbidding rococo castle, with vast halls and a tower, they were full of cheerful men and women of every age and political hue, wearing suits and overalls and berets, red and black scarves wound around their necks, clutching rifles and revolvers and pistols. More were arriving all the time, by car and bicycle and on foot, from Belgium and Switzerland, Algeria and Argentina. The leader of the militias was an anarchist intellectual called Santillan, who looked distinctly unmilitary. It all reminded Carlo of a university during a break between classes. ‘I felt’, he wrote later, ‘a free man again, with a true sense of dignity.’

  As a veteran of the Italian Alpini, Carlo was made joint commander of the Ascaso, in charge of 40 riflemen. The 90 machine-gunners were led by his friend from Ustica, Mario Angeloni, the Tuscan republican notary; Berneri was appointed their political commissar. Most of the men were distinctly middle-aged and had served in the First World War. They were told that they would find weapons waiting for them at the front line in Aragon. A few days later, they marched to the station to catch a train – not in line or in step, since none of the men cared to be seen as regular soldiers and the anarchists were instinctively opposed to discipline; but they sang and raised their fists in salute. Some wore suits, but had taken off their ties; others were in overalls, as if they had just come off the factory floor. As they straggled along, passers-by cheered them on. Carlo’s myopic friend Aldo Garosci was there, having come straight from his studies on Cézanne in Paris, as well as the writer and critic Umberto Calosso, a stout, pipe-smoking forty-two-year-old with spiky hair and a long nose, who had happened to find himself in Spain when the war broke out. Calosso’s old Ford was loaded on to a wagon at the back.

  At 1 o’clock in the morning the train paused at the station of Terrassa, and a crowd of cheering people climbed on board, bringing melons, ham, wine, bread and cheese. Next morning the Italians woke to the dry, burning plain of Aragon, its earth ridged, parched and stony. In the baking afternoon they were dropped off at Grañén, where the temperature had just touched 52 degrees. Carlo had always hated the heat. Of the three lorries sent to fetch them for the last lap of their journey to the front, two immediately broke down. The men walked the 18 kilometres in silence. The militia headquarters in Vicién had no beds for them, but gave them soup and bread and some straw to lie on. Carlo and Calosso slept in the Ford. They found themselves laughing: here they were, a respectable writer and a retired university professor, released from the monotony of their everyday lives, young once again, ‘authors and actors in our own destinies’.

  Next morning, cannon fire could be heard coming from the town of Huesca, six kilometres away. The Ascaso column had been given the task of cutting the road linking Huesca to Zaragoza. Rebel forces were dug in both to the right and to the left. ‘Posizione sandwich,’ noted Carlo. He followed a patrol of half-naked militiamen up to the crest of a hill, passing abandoned hovels cut into the rock, panting as he scrambled over the hard, furrowed ground; then he went to swim in a nearby lake. ‘The sun and the earth’, he thought, ‘command in this war.’ In the distance could be seen two great pillars of rose-coloured rock ‘like the entrance to hell’. Carlo had started a diary. ‘Not a tree’, he wrote, ‘not a blade of grass . . . not only my feet but my shoes are on fire. Nausea is making things worse.’ Since they had no cover, the men had to dig deep trenches in the packed earth. ‘Extraordinary experiences,’ he wrote to Marion, ‘unforgettable . . . I am so happy to be here.’ He had already fallen in love with this ‘primitive, young, burning’ land. At night, looking out at the stars which seemed to shine exceptionally bright against the dark sky, listening to the whispers of his companions, he felt a sense of great fondness for the men around him. The wind got up, blowing flurries of grit and sand and he did a round of the men standing guard. An owl hooted not far away. ‘It’s hard’, he wrote in his diary, ‘to take this war seriously.’

  Since it was mid-summer, engagements took place at dawn. Before it grew light on 28 August Carlo was wakened by one of the sentries, who thought he could see signs of enemy tanks leaving Huesca. Carlo posted his men and named their position Monte Pelato, after a mountain on Lipari. The tanks advanced. The Italians, despite being outnumbered six to one and having no artillery and grenades that failed to explode, held their ground. Carlo remained, Calosso said later, totally calm. Four hours passed; seven Italians were killed, among them Angeloni, who died singing the ‘Internationale’ and talking about his family. Finally, Spanish reinforcements arrived. The rebels retreated, leaving behind 150 of their men dead
or wounded, a tractor, a machine gun and two cannons. To the dismay of the Italians, the injured were quickly finished off. One was found to be carrying a noose, intended for any Italian captive. Carlo had been nicked by a bullet, but the wound, he wrote to Marion, was clean and did not hurt; at the bottom of the letter, Calosso added a postscript: the injury ‘was very very small’.

  With Angeloni dead, Carlo took sole command and directed his men to dig trenches and build shelters, while he organised food and liaised with the Spanish militia. ‘I am doing magnificently,’ he told Marion, urging her not to make too many ‘alarming mental visits’ to Aragon, and saying that he had become extremely fit, walking for hours in the high mountains without getting tired. Letters were collected and delivered by a motorcyclist who came up to the front twice a week from Barcelona. The Italians’ triumphant stand at Monte Pelato militarily signified little, but their morale was high: they had proved themselves against a vastly larger and better equipped enemy. It rose still further when, a few days later, a night patrol returned at dawn with nineteen nationalist prisoners.

  ‘After the Russian revolution, the Spanish revolution is the greatest epic of modern times,’ Carlo wrote to Marion. ‘A new world is being born . . . I am experiencing moments of beauty and purity such as I have felt only a couple of times in my life, for which it is worth sacrificing the pleasures and even the calm happiness of normal life.’ He would return home, he told her, ‘enriched, fortified, rejuvenated’, and he begged her to believe in the ‘really immense usefulness’ of what he was doing. If Marion had her doubts, she does not appear to have voiced them.

  Léon Blum, now head of the Popular Front in France, had initially agreed to send aircraft and artillery to help the Republicans against Franco’s forces. Coming under pressure from members of his own cabinet, as well as from Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden in Britain, he changed his mind. Representatives from twenty-seven nations met in London to discuss reactions to the war, and, after some bickering over details and terms, a pact of non-intervention was signed. But it contained no proper system for enforcing an embargo on weapons and military support and, behind its slippery declarations, the three dictators, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, were soon stepping up their involvement. While Britain and France sat by and watched, Mussolini strengthened his ties with Germany. Carlo, who had always liked Blum and was grateful to him for helping him stay in France, raged against his cowardice over Spain, saying that the Frenchman had been imprisoned by his ‘usual doubts and timidity’ and that his speech on collective security was ‘nothing but an infernal circle of feebleness and deals’. He wrote crossly to Marion: ‘Our theory that the old socialists are finished, miserably finished, is true.’