The Body of Il Duce Read Free

Audisio.
    Although the information sounded “somewhat doubtful” to the Americans, the embassy duly told Washington that word had been passed on to the British secret service and the counterintelligence corps. On April 1, however, U.S. ambassador James C. Dunn telegraphed the State Department in Washington to say that the rally had taken place without incident. 7 Nonetheless, Dunn aired the suspicion that a Communist plot lay behind the De Agazio murder and Audisio’s unveiling, cleverly manipulated by the Soviet Union.
    Within just a few months of the rally, Audisio became a charismatic figure to Communist followers—even a mythic character. There was an especially memorable event on September 7, 1947, in Modena, when Communists came together for the annual Festa dell’Unità. It was celebrated in the way these things were done in the years just after the war: whole families came loaded down with their lunch preparations—men, women, and children with only a few lire in their pockets but enough to buy flags sporting the hammer and sickle. People streamed into town from the countryside to see the allegorical floats, the sack races, and the bookstands, and the chance to see the party leaders up close—Palmiro Togliatti, Luigi Longo, Pietro Secchia, Cino Moscatelli, Giancarlo Pajetta. According to the press, however, it was Walter Audisio who got the most enthusiastic reception. “Va-le-rio, Va-le-rio, Va-le-rio,” the crowd chanted, as if at a football stadium.
    When Longo began to hand out gold medals, the crowd would not quiet down until Audisio received one. “Valerio, there’s still a lot of work to do,” yelled one man. A tiny woman with a red flag pinned in her gray hair managed to climb up on the stage and grab Audisio’s hand. She would never again wash the hand that had touched Colonel Valerio, she declared as she came down, not even if she lived a hundred years. It is hard not to compare these moments to the clichéd vignettes of Mussolini’s rule, to Il Duce embracing workers and the lucky ones pledging not to wash their faces for a month. The Communists appeared to feel the same excitement from contact with Il Duce’s executioner as the Fascist loyal got in the presence of the dictator.
    In 1948, the party national congress gave Audisio his official political investiture. Photographs show Colonel Valerio on the platform of Milan’s Teatro Lirico in highly select company. Beside him are Palmiro Togliatti, and direct from Moscow, Delio and Giuliano Gramsci, sons of Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the party who had died a Communist martyr after being imprisoned by the Fascists. Another guest from Moscow, Vagan G. Grigorian, noted the enthusiasm for Il Duce’s executioner. According to this important member of the Soviet delegation, Audisio “serves as the party’s interior minister.” In his memo to Moscow on the activities of the party congress’s political committee, Grigorian conveyed a unique version of what had happened at Piazzale Loreto, which he attributed to Audisio:
    Colonel Valerio Audisio [sic] … says that some partisans had been hanged in Piazzale Loreto in Milan with a notice saying that they were supposed to remain there until there were no partisans left in Italy. They brought Mussolini’s corpse and some of his men, and overnight took the partisans down from the scaffold and put up Mussolini and the others. So the next morning, the Milanese found Mussolini hanging there instead of the partisans. 8
    Whether this account emerged from a linguistic misunderstanding or from Audisio’s penchant for telling tales, the fact is that three years after the event, the Soviet leadership was spreading a completely imaginary version of what had happened.
    Meanwhile, the anti-Communist press did not hesitate to target Audisio with its sarcasm. A vignette in Candido depicted a tall, proud Audisio at the party congress