Numero Zero

14 Wednesday, May 27

One morning, as she woke up, Maia said, “But I don’t much like him.”

By now I was ready for her synaptic games.

“You’re talking about Braggadocio,” I said.

“Of course, who else?” Then, almost as an afterthought, “How did you figure that out?”

“My dear, as Simei would say, the two of us know a total of six people in common. I thought of the one who’d been the rudest to you and hit on Braggadocio.”

“I could have been thinking about, I don’t know, President Cossiga.”

“But you weren’t, you were thinking of Braggadocio. And anyway, for once I’ve caught your train of thought, so why do you want to complicate matters?”

“See how you’re beginning to think what I think?”

And, damn it, she was right.

“Queers,” announced Simei that morning at the daily editorial meeting. “Queers are a subject that always attracts attention.”

“You don’t say ‘queer’ anymore,” ventured Maia. “You say ‘gay,’ no?”

“I know, my dear, I know.” Simei was irritated. “But our readers still say ‘queer,’ or rather, they think it, since it disgusts them even to say it. I know you don’t say ‘Negro’ any longer but ‘black.’ You don’t say ‘blind’ but ‘visually impaired.’ But a black is still black, and a visually impaired person can’t see a lucifer, poor thing. I’ve nothing against queers, same as Negroes, for me they are absolutely fine so long as they mind their own business.”

“So why write about gays if our readers find them disgusting?”

“I’m not thinking about queers in general, my dear, I’m all for freedom, everyone can do as they please. But some of them are in politics, in parliament, and in government. People think queers are just writers and ballet dancers, yet some are in positions of power and we don’t even know it. They’re a Mafia, helping each other out. And this is something our readers might like to know.”

Maia wasn’t prepared to give in: “But things are changing, maybe in ten years a gay will be able to say he’s gay without anyone batting an eyelid.”

“All sorts of things can happen in ten years, we’re all aware that morals are declining. But for the moment this is a matter of concern to our readers. Lucidi, you’ve plenty of sources, give us something on queers in politics — but be careful, don’t name names, we don’t want to end up in court, we just want to float the idea, the specter, create a shiver, a sense of unease...”

“I can give you plenty of names if you wish,” said Lucidi. “But if, as you say, it’s just a matter of creating unease, according to what I’ve heard, there’s a bookshop in Rome where high-ranking homosexuals meet unnoticed, the place is mostly visited by normal people. And for some it’s also a place where they can get a bindle of cocaine. You pick up a book, take it to the counter, and the assistant will slip in the bindle along with the book. It’s well known that... well, mentioning no names, one was also a minister, and a homosexual, and he is given to snorting coke. Everyone knows, or anyone of any importance. It’s not a place for your garden-variety butt boy, nor the ballet dancer who’d camp around and attract too much attention.”

“It’s fine to talk about rumors, with a few spicy details, just a bit of color. But there’s also a way of introducing names. You can say that the place is totally respectable since it’s frequented by eminent personalities, and there you can throw in seven or eight names of writers, journalists, and senators of impeccable character. Except that among these names you include one or two queers. No one can say we are libeling anyone, because those names appear as examples of people of integrity. Indeed, we can include a card-carrying womanizer whose lover’s name we know. Meanwhile we’ve sent out a coded message for those ready to listen, and someone will have understood that we could say much more if we wanted.”

Maia was shocked. She left before the others, motioning to me as if to say, Sorry, I have to be alone tonight, I’m taking a sleeping pill and going straight to bed. And so I fell prey to Braggadocio, who continued regaling me with his stories as we strolled off and, by pure coincidence, ended up in Via Bagnera, as if the somber air of the place suited the morbid nature of his tale.

“So, listen, here I seem to be running up against a series of events that go against my theory, though you’ll see it’s not quite like that. Anyway, Mussolini, now reduced to offal, is stitched more or less back together, and buried with Claretta and the rest of them in the main Musocco cemetery, but in an unmarked tomb so no one could turn it into a place of Fascist pilgrimage. This must have been the wish of whoever had let the real Mussolini escape, to minimize talk of his death. They certainly couldn’t create the myth of Barbarossa hidden away in a cave, which might work well for Hitler since no one knew what had happened to his body or whether he had actually died. But while letting it be thought that Mussolini was dead (and partisans continued to celebrate Piazzale Loreto as one of the magical moments of the liberation), they had to be prepared for the idea that one day the deceased would resurface — as new, as good as new, as the song goes. And there’s no way of resurrecting anything from patched-up pulp. But at this point that spoilsport Domenico Leccisi appears on the scene.”

“He was the one who snatched the Duce’s corpse, wasn’t he?”

“Exactly. A twenty-six-year-old goon, the last firebrand of Salò, full of ideals but no ideas. He wants to give his idol a decent burial, or at least create a scandal to publicize the resurgence of neofascism, and he puts together a band of crazies like himself to go to the cemetery one night in April 1946. The few watchmen are fast asleep. He goes straight to the grave, obviously he has inside information. He digs up the body, now in a worse state than when it was boxed up — after all, a year had gone by, and I’ll let you picture what he must have found — and pitter-patter hush-hush he carries it away as best he can, leaving a scrap of decomposed tissue and even two bones lying along the cemetery path. I mean to say, what idiocy.”

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.