I had the impression Braggadocio would have truly enjoyed being involved in that macabre transportation: his necrophilia had prepared me for anything.
“Shock, horror, newspaper headlines,” he went on, “police searching everywhere for a hundred days, unable to trace the fetid remains, despite the trail of stench that must have been left along the route they’d taken. But the first of the accomplices, Mauro Rana, is caught after just a few days, and then the others, one by one, until Leccisi himself is arrested in late July. And it’s determined that the corpse had been hidden for a short while at Rana’s house in the Valtellina, then, in May, handed over to Father Zucca, the Franciscan prior of the Convent of Sant’Angelo in Milan, who had walled it up in the right-hand nave of his church. The problem of Father Zucca and his assistant, Father Parini, is quite another story. There are those who saw them as chaplains to a high-society and reactionary Milan, involved with neofascist circles in trafficking forged banknotes and drugs, while for others they were goodhearted friars who couldn’t refuse to perform what was the duty of every good Christian — parce sepulto, to spare the corpse. I have very little interest in all this, but what does interest me is that the government, with the agreement of Cardinal Schuster, orders the body to be interred in the Capuchin convent of Cerro Maggiore, and there it remains, from 1946 to 1957, eleven years, without the secret ever getting out. You must realize that this is a crucial part of the story. That idiot Leccisi had risked dragging out the corpse of Mussolini’s double, not that it could have been examined in that state, yet for those pulling the strings in the Mussolini affair, it was better to keep things hushed up, the less said the better. But while Leccisi (after twenty-one months’ imprisonment) sets out on a glorious parliamentary career, the new prime minister, Adone Zoli, who had managed to form a government thanks to the votes of the neofascists, agrees in exchange to allow the body to be returned to the family, and it is interred in Mussolini’s hometown of Predappio, in a shrine that even today is a rallying point for diehard old Fascists and young fanatics, black shirts and Roman salutes. I don’t think Zoli knew anything about the existence of the real Mussolini, so he wasn’t worried about the cult of the double. It may have happened differently, I don’t know. Perhaps the business of the double was being handled not by the neofascists but by others much higher up.”
“Wait, what’s the role of Mussolini’s family in all this? Either they don’t know the Duce’s alive, which seems impossible, or they agreed to bring home a bogus corpse.”
“You know, I still haven’t worked out the family situation. I think they knew their husband and father was alive somewhere. If he’d been hidden away in the Vatican, it would have been hard to visit him — none of the family could walk into the Vatican without being noticed. Argentina is the better bet. The evidence? Take Vittorio Mussolini. He escapes the purges, becomes a scriptwriter, and lives in Argentina for a long period after the war. In Argentina, you understand? To be near his father? We can’t be sure, but why Argentina? And there are photos of Romano Mussolini and other people at Ciampino Airport in Rome saying goodbye to Vittorio on his departure for Buenos Aires. Why give so much importance to the journey of a brother who before the war had already been traveling as far as the United States? And Romano? After the war he makes a name for himself as a jazz pianist, also playing abroad. History certainly hasn’t concerned itself about Romano’s concert tours, and who knows whether he too had been to Argentina? And Mussolini’s wife? She was free to move around, nobody would have stopped her taking a holiday, perhaps in Paris or Geneva so as not to draw attention, and from there to Buenos Aires. Who knows? When Leccisi and Zoli create the mess we’ve seen and suddenly bring out what’s left of the corpse, she could hardly say it belonged to someone else. She makes the best of a bad job and puts it in the family vault — it serves to keep the Fascist spirit alive among the old guard while she waits for the real Duce to come back. But I’m not interested in the family story; this is where the second part of my investigation begins.”
“So what happens next?”
“It’s past dinnertime, and a few pieces of my mosaic are still missing. We’ll talk about it next time.”
I couldn’t figure out whether Braggadocio was a brilliant narrator who was feeding me his story in installments, with the necessary suspense at each “to be continued,” or whether he was still actually trying to piece the plot together. I preferred not to insist, however, for in the meantime all the comings and goings of malodorous remains had turned my stomach. I went home.
15
Thursday, May 28
“For issue number 0/2,” Simei announced that morning, “we need to think of an article about honesty. It’s a fact, now, that the political parties are rotten, everyone’s after kickbacks, and we have to make it known that we’re in a position, if we so wish, to initiate a campaign against those parties. We have to come up with a party of honest people, a party of citizens able to talk a different kind of politics.”
“We’d better tread carefully,” I said. “Wasn’t that the idea behind the postwar movement that called itself the Common Man?”
“Ah, the Common Man, that was swallowed up and emasculated by the Christian Democratic Party, which at that time was powerful and extremely cunning. But the Christian Democrats today are on their last legs — no more heroes, they’re a bunch of jerks. In any event, our readers don’t remember a thing about the Common Man,” said Simei. “It’s the stuff of forty-five years ago, and our readers don’t have a clue what happened ten years ago. I’ve just been reading an article celebrating the Resistance in one of the main newspapers, and there are two photographs, one of a truckload of partisans and the other of a group wearing Fascist uniforms and giving the Roman salute, who are described as squadristi. But no, squadristi were the squads of the 1920s, and they didn’t go around dressed like that; those in the photo are Fascist troops of the ’30s or early ’40s, as anyone my age would instantly recognize. I’m not suggesting all journalists have to be people my age who have witnessed such events, but I’m perfectly capable of distinguishing the uniforms of the bersaglieri of La Marmora from the troops of Bava-Beccaris, though both of them died out well before I was born. If our newspaper colleagues have such poor memories, then why count on our readers to remember the Common Man? But let’s go back to my idea: a new party, a party of honest people could trouble a great many.”
“League of the Honest,” said Maia with a smile. “That was the title of an old prewar novel by Giovanni Mosca. It would be interesting to reread it. It’s about the union sacrée of decent people whose task it was to infiltrate the ranks of the dishonest, expose them, and convert them if possible to the path of honesty. But to be accepted by dishonest people, members of the league had to behave dishonestly. You can imagine what happened. The league of honest people gradually turned into a league of crooks.”