The Body of Il Duce Read Free Page B

legislature of 1948–53, the weeklies lambasted Walter Audisio and Cino Moscatelli as the incarnation of Communist perversity, superficially democratic but bloodthirsty at heart. In the cartoonish prose of the pro-government press, the Resistance heroes became the “junior officers in an army of death.” 12
    The more sophisticated anti-Communist journalists depicted the infamous Colonel Valerio as an instrument—in his infinite moral and physical degradation, the partisan hero was the personification of evil, and therefore as necessary to the designs of Providence as the terrible Sanson immortalized by Joseph de Maistre in The St. Petersburg Dialogues. Nantas Salvalaggio, a young journalist writing for Il Borghese , cast Mussolini’s executioner as a scapegoat, condemned to suffer for the gap between his personal mediocrity and the grave historical role he had been assigned. Salvalaggio’s Audisio was a man who returned to his filthy apartment in Via Pavia in the dead of night, a fretful insomniac, haunting rooms where no crucifix hung. In the mornings, he had to skirt the newsstands to avoid the covers of the illustrated weeklies, red as they were with the blood he had spilled on the shores of Lake Como. In vain he tried to take out life insurance. When Audisio’s friends dragged him to the amusement park he was unable to hit the bull’s-eye because he always saw himself back at the Villa Belmonte aiming at Mussolini, and the gun would fall from his hand.
    Salvalaggio wrote about Audisio with a pathos absent from the illustrated weeklies, but the popular press’s inclination to caricature what was made their depiction so successful. The parliamentary reporter for Oggi , Ugo Zatterin, worked harder than any other writer to spread the cliché of Audisio as a silly man, certainly as silly as he was dangerous. Mussolini’s executioner was not merely an expert on the use of the machine gun, wrote Zatterin, he was also the party’s “wine expert,” surprisingly knowledgeable about the differences between Freisa and Grignolino. He was a man so foolishly taken with his role as Il Duce’s executioner that he gleefully accepted the gift of a little golden gun sparkling with diamonds from some Tuscan Communists. Thus even the more measured portraits of Audisio in the anti-Communist press took on laughable outlines, as damning as outright sensationalism. In the Thermidor era of the French Revolution, the anti-Jacobin press had depicted their targets in the same way: at once frivolous and bloodthirsty, murderers who would drink the wine from their victims’ cellars and polish off roast chickens they had slaughtered with tiny guillotines.
    In May 1949, one illustrated weekly, Settimana Incom, explicitly wrote of the “Thermidor butchery of Piazzale Loreto” when it seemed that the debate over Colonel Valerio’s misdeeds might be the prelude to a trial against Audisio. Nevertheless, the article warned of the danger of criminalizing the Resistance. The hanging of Mussolini and company in Piazzale Loreto showed what kind of society the Socialists, Communists, and Action Party had in mind: a world where habeas corpus was superseded by habeas cadaver, Settimana Incom said. But putting Mussolini’s executioner on trial would mean putting four years of Italian history on trial, including, of course, Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi.
    This article marked the limits of the pro-government press’s campaign against Audisio. It was one thing to take verbal aim at Colonel Valerio, another to assemble the evidence to drag him into court. To accuse Audisio formally of inflicting Mussolini’s mortal and postmortem wounds would put in question all that had come after, including the role played by centrist politicians. A trial against Audisio risked becoming a trial against Italy’s republican institutions.
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    â€œSEND HIM TO prison,”