General Della Rovere tells a fable set in the tattered ruins of an Italian city occupied by the Nazis. The protagonist is Emmanuele Bardone, a handsome, affable, skirt-chasing, lying, swindling, gambling nonentity, an unscrupulous rogue who extorts money from the families of anti-fascist prisoners with the lie that he’s using it to alleviate the captivity of their relatives. Bardone is also a chameleon: to the Germans he is an enthusiastic supporter of the Reich; to the Italians, an undercover adversary of the Reich; he employs all his seductive gifts on both sides, manages to convince both that there’s no one more important than them and that he is ready to do anything for their cause. Bardone’s destiny begins to change when, at a routine roadblock, the Germans kill General Della Rovere, an aristocratic and heroic Italian soldier recently returned to the country to coordinate the resistance against the invader; for Colonel Müller — the commanding officer of the occupying forces in the city — this is terrible news: had he been taken prisoner, Della Rovere could have been of some use; dead, he has none. Müller then decides to spread the news that Della Rovere has been taken prisoner, and very soon Bardone, whose acting talent the colonel has come to know not long before and whose shady dealings with a corrupt official he soon unmasks, offers him the chance to take advantage of this hoax: Müller proposes to save him from the firing squad and offers him freedom and money if he agrees to pass for General Della Rovere in jail, trusting he’ll be able to use his presence there in the future.
Bardone accepts the deal and is taken to a prison crowded with anti-fascist prisoners. From the first moment the unscrupulous rogue plays the part of the left-wing aristocrat with aplomb, and everything he sees or feels in prison seems to help his interpretation, shaking his conscience: the very day he arrives he reads the posthumous messages of executed partisans on the walls of his cell; the prisoners place themselves under his orders and treat him with the respect the man who for them personifies the promise of a liberated Italy deserves, ask him about relatives and friends who fought in units under his command, joke about the unhappy fate awaiting them, beg him wordlessly to instil them with courage; one of the prisoners who frequents Bardone commits suicide rather than turn informer; later, to establish Della Rovere in his role, the Germans torture Bardone himself, which almost sets off a riot among his fellow prisoners; later still Bardone receives a letter from the Contessa Della Rovere in which the general’s wife tries to comfort her husband by assuring him that she and his children are well and think only of being worthy of his courage and patriotism. This continuous series of impressions begins to cause a subtle, almost invisible metamorphosis in Bardone, and one night something unexpected happens: during an allied bombing raid that provokes cries of panic in the prison Bardone demands to leave his cell; he is trembling with fear, but, as if the general’s character had momentarily taken over his person, standing in the corridor of the political prisoners’ wing and, invested with the grandeur of Della Rovere, Bardone calms his comrades’ fear by raising his voice in the midst of the thunder of battle: ‘Friends, this is General Della Rovere,’ he says. ‘Show some dignity and self-control. Be men. Show these scoundrels you’re not afraid of dying. They’re the ones who should tremble. Every bomb that falls brings them closer to the end, and brings us closer to freedom.’
Shortly after this episode fate offers Colonel Müller the opportunity he’s been waiting for. A group of nine partisans captured in a raid are sent to the prison; one of them is Fabrizio, the leader of the resistance, but the Germans do not know which one: Müller asks Bardone first to identify him and then betray him. For a moment Bardone hesitates, as if Bardone and Della Rovere are fighting it out within him; but Müller reminds him of the promised money and liberty and adds the bribe of a safe conduct with which to escape to Switzerland, and finally breaks Bardone. He hasn’t yet managed to identify Fabrizio when a high-ranking fascist authority dies at the hands of the resistance; in reprisal, Müller must shoot ten partisans, and the colonel understands that this is the moment to facilitate Bardone’s task. The night before the execution Müller locks twenty men in a cell, ten of whom will be the expiatory victims; sure that at death’s door Fabrizio will make himself known to Della Rovere, Müller includes Bardone and the nine prisoners caught in the raid. Müller is not mistaken: over the long night awaiting execution, while the prisoners look for strength or consolation in the valiant company of the false General Della Rovere, Fabrizio reveals himself. Finally, at dawn, when the men come out of the cell, Bardone is one of them, but Fabrizio is not. They walk out to the firing squad formed on the patio of the prison, Müller stops Bardone, separates him from the line of the condemned, asks him if he’s managed to find out who Fabrizio is. Bardone stares at Müller, but says nothing; he needs only to say one word in order to be set free, with enough money to carry on his interrupted life of gambling and women, but he says nothing. Perplexed, Müller insists: he’s sure that Bardone knows who Fabrizio is, sure that on a night like that Fabrizio would have told him who he is. Bardone does not take his eyes off Müller. ‘And, what do you know?’ he finally says. ‘Have you ever spent a night like this?’ ‘Answer me!’ shouts Müller furiously. ‘Do you know who he is?’ In response, Bardone asks Müller for a pencil and paper, scribbles a few lines, hands them to him and, before the colonel can see whether they contain the real name of Fabrizio, he asks him to see that they get to Contessa Della Rovere. While Bardone orders a jailer to open the gates to the patio, Müller reads the paper: ‘My last thoughts are with you all,’ it says. ‘Viva Italia!’ The patio is covered with snow; tied to posts, ten blindfolded men wait for death. Bardone — who is no longer Bardone but Della Rovere, as if somehow Della Rovere had always been within him — takes his place beside his comrades and, just before falling under the bullets of the firing squad, speaks to them. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘In these final moments let us dedicate our thoughts to our families, our nation and His Majesty the King.’ And he adds: ‘Viva Italia!’
Chapter 4
It’s likely that the metamorphosis of Adolfo Suárez into the man who had somehow always been in him and who scarcely bore any relation to the former provincial Falangist upstart began the very day the King named him Prime Minister, but the reality is that it only started to become visible many months later. The reception afforded his appointment by public opinion was devastating. No one summed it up better than a cartoonist. In a Forges cartoon two Franco devotees in a bunker were commenting on the news; one of them said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? He’s called Adolfo’; the other answered: ‘Indeed.’ That’s how it was: apart from rare exceptions, only the far right — from the old shirts of the Falange to the soldiers and technocrats of Opus Dei, along with the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey — celebrated Suárez’s ascent to the premiership, convinced that the young, obsequious and disciplined Falangist represented new wine in old barrels, the palpable demonstration that the ideals of 18 July still prevailed and the best guarantee that Francoism, with all the cosmetic changes that circumstances demanded, wasn’t going to die along with Franco. Beyond the far right, however, there was only pessimism and fright: for the immense majority of the democratic opposition and the regime’s reformers, Suárez was just going to be, as Le Figaro wrote, ‘the executor of the low manoeuvrings of the far right, determined to torpedo democratization by any means’, or, as El País insinuated, the spearhead of ‘a machine that turns out to be the authentic immovable bunker of the country’, and which ‘embodies the traditional way of being Spanish according to its darkest and most irascible legend: economic and political power allied in perfect symbiosis with ecclesiastical fundamentalism’.