In Europe (44 page)

There was yet another way in which Fascism did not resemble National Socialism: unlike the Germans, the Italians were not particularly enamoured by the phenomenon of ‘the state’. From the sixteenth century, Italy had been exploited almost incessantly by Spain and Austria. In addition, the country's spirit had long been held in the iron grip of the Vatican, which had skilfully succeeded in stifling all joy in the Renaissance and the baroque. For three long centuries, in other words, the Italians had been learning to hate the state. To the average Italian, the state was an alien, an oppressor, usually corrupt, always inefficient, an institution that should best be avoided unless one could somehow profit from it. What is more, no distinct entrepreneurial class had ever developed in Italy: trade and industry had always remained closely intertwined with politics and the state, every business was part of a system of protection and preferential treatment, every businessman had some political connection, sometimes reaching even as far as the president himself. Against this background, the family was the most important place of refuge, the only alliance one could truly trust.

The Italian image of the state, based as it was on suspicion, was the polar opposite of the Prussian one, within which a central position was reserved for total surrender to ‘the fatherland’. Hitler, therefore, was a very different kind of leader than Mussolini. The former had access to a finely tuned government apparatus of which the latter could only dream. Hitler led a movement of frustrated military men and merchants, while Mussolini, at least in the early years, had recourse largely to gangs of angry farmers. The roots of the National Socialist movement lay in the city. Those of Italian Fascism lay in the countryside.

In the film
Novecento
, Donald Sutherland played the definitive Fascist: big hands, nasty eyes, ugly teeth, a villain through and through. One encounters no such wonderful Fascists in Predappio. These days it is largely seventeen-year-old boys who press their noses against the shop windows and
politely excuse themselves for reaching past you to pick up a copy of
Mein Kampf
or
The Fable of Auschwitz
.

For 150 euros here you can buy a Waffen-SS jacket, for 20 euros you have a brand new black shirt, but it will cost you twice that much for a cap and a Sam Browne belt to go with it.

One can also visit Il Duce himself. Mussolini's crypt is close to the church. He lies in a big sarcophagus, topped by a bust of his own massive head, handfuls of candles at his feet, two dozen fresh bouquets all around, amid a constant stream of visitors.

To his left and right lie his mother and his wife. ‘He liked sturdy women,’ his widow, Rachele Mussolini, announced after the war. ‘Today I can tell you that Mussolini's conquests were just as numerous as those of the average Italian man who is attractive to women.’ She insisted, however, that the truth be told: her husband had always slept at home, except when he was travelling. So when and where did he do it? ‘Where? I think I know: at his office, where he had a sitting room, without a bed, but with a sofa on which to rest. And when? In-between times, of course.’

As individuals, Hitler and Mussolini were each other's polar opposites as well. The former was an unmarried artist, a vegetarian terrified of disease, the latter a family man with five children and any number of mistresses. The former displayed all the frustrations of the failed painter, at the age of thirty the latter was already the successful editor-in-chief of one of the biggest daily newspapers. In the eyes of the European elite, Hitler was always viewed as an erratic madman. Even before the First World War, Mussolini was seen as a promising politician. When Mussolini turned his back on socialism, Lenin sorely blamed his fellow party members in Italy for letting him go: in Moscow's view, he would have been the perfect leader for a great socialist revolution in Italy.

Today, sixty years later, the myth lives on. Four boys with shaved heads are taking pictures of each other. One of them asks me in a whisper whether I would mind taking a group snapshot, to put on Il Duce's tomb. On the prie-dieu lies the big guest book with a thousand inscriptions of ‘Thank you, Il Duce!’ Touring cars full of senior citizens roll up into the car park many times a day. ‘Il Duce, you live on in our hearts!’

Outside I talk to the woman selling souvenirs. ‘Today everyone here
in the village is a communist,’ she sighs, standing amid her collection of Iron Crosses. ‘But in the old days they adored him.’

A little boy stands in line to pay for three postcards: one showing a woman kissing the Fascist banner, a recruitment poster for the Italian SS legion and one on which Stalin and Uncle Sam join hands across the Atlantic: ‘
Le Complot Juif
’. The woman cries after me as I walk away: ‘That's just like the Italians! They never recognise a great leader!’

THE NEXT EVENING I STAY AT MONEGLIA, A DESERTED TOURIST VILLAGE
on the seaside not far from Genoa. These are the days of depression. The wind tugs at my van, the rain clatters on the roof and only Café Derna offers warmth and safety.

The village is dominated by a highly unusual access road: a narrow strip of asphalt along the coast, consisting almost entirely of tunnels. All traffic, in both directions, must obey traffic lights that provide an opening to the outside world only three times an hour, down to the minute. The lights, therefore, determine the rhythm of village life as well: ‘Hurry up or you'll miss the green light at 3.45!’

This strange road, they told me at the café, was all that was left of a railway line that had been built along the coast with great difficulty in the early years of the century. A huge job, but one which would serve for generations to come. The railway, in reality, was in use for scarcely twenty-five years. Then came yet another rail connection a little further along, electric, with two sets of tracks. Built, once again, for all eternity.

Elsewhere I had seen the same thing: railway trestles, escarpments, built to last for all time, abandoned in the countryside. During the last half-century this continent has been criss-crossed and ploughed through with tunnels, bridges and concrete flyovers, an incredible amount of work. The Roman aqueducts did their work for centuries. Tomorrow, the twentieth-century tunnels and flyovers will already be antique. Never before has progress worn so thin so quickly.

I drive on through the rain, along the coast, past Nice and the French Riviera. At Aix-en-Provence the mistral is chasing newspapers and plastic bags across the asphalt like little phantoms. Someone once told me that
old women sometimes faint from agitation when the mistral blows: now I can imagine it, vividly. Nothing stays put, everything whips and foments in the face of this noisy wind: branches, leaves, birds, thoughts, moods.

In the days that follow there are the comforting, colourful hills of southern France, the odours of earth and sun. At Perpignan I turn right into the Pyrenees. I drive past sleepy village squares with old men and tall plane trees, after that along a narrow road, a fifteen kilometre climb, and arrive at last in the southernmost of all French villages.

‘Every valley,’ an economist wrote about the Pyrenees in 1837, ‘is a still little world that differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Every village is a clan, a sort of state with its own patriotism.’ Villages hated each other for all perpetuity, and collectively they hated the nobility, the city and the state, for anything which came from that direction could only mean misfortune.

Lamanère was just such a village. The hamlet consists of a handful of houses scattered along the sides of the valley. About 500 people lived here in the 1950s, today there are only thirty-six. I stay with friends. We go to visit the neighbours, Michel and Isabelle, a cheerful couple in their late forties. In their warm oak kitchen they tell the unswerving story of all little European villages: a local school, lively shops, all gone within twenty years. ‘There were two little espadrille factories here as well,’ Michel says. ‘When they closed down around 1970, the whole village just packed up and moved down into the valley, the young people leading the way.’

‘But we were poor, too,’ Isabelle says. ‘Toadstools, blueberries, we ate anything the earth gave us. And we tried to trap any animal that moved.’

Michel: ‘Everyone went hungry from time to time. We smuggled pigs across the mountains. My mother made espadrilles, too, six francs for a dozen.’

‘And half of everything the land produced,’ Isabelle says, ‘went to the landowner. If you had two pigs, one was for M. Cassu. It was still that way in the 1960s. We worked like slaves.’

‘Goats go up the hill, girls go down’ was always the saying around here. To escape a life of servitude ‘up the hill’, thousands of nineteenth century French farm girls saw to it that they became pregnant, then left
for the city to serve as wet nurses to the children of rich families. In some regions, like the Morvan, that even became a major source of local income after the first railways were built. Later, girls began working as maids, or ended up in a factory, which was better in any case than working in the stable. Masons from the Creuse, woodcutters from the Tarn, plumbers from the Livradois, all worked and lived together as fellow countrymen, in little communities, their only goal that of supporting the family farms back home. Yet, without meaning to, they fell under the city's sway. They grew accustomed to greater comfort, to better lighting, better pay and more favourable working hours. In the Creuse someone wrote: ‘The workers’ disobedience grows in proportion to their contact with the emigrants.’ It was not that there was suddenly so much reason for discontent, Eugene Weber wrote in
Peasants into Frenchmen
, his study of rural France at the turn of the last century, ‘it was that there had never before been any reason to hope for a change. What the homecoming worker taught his comrades first of all was that things were different elsewhere, and that change was not entirely impossible.’

‘All the parents in Lamanère,’ Isabelle says, ‘pushed their children to go to work for the post office, the customs department, the police or the army. The young people were simply chased out of this village. Becoming civil servants, moving to the valley, that was the only way to escape feudal life. After that came the city folk and the hippie farmers. They enjoyed life here for a while, invested nothing, then left again. The people who were born here, they still love the land, and the old trees. But money ruins everything.’

I look out at the snowy peaks. The silence here is unbelievable: this exists only at Europe's outer reaches. At night you can hear the beat of an owl's wing. The starry sky makes you dizzy. It is as though all this has existed since time began, the endless forest, the village, the quiet breath of the land.

I talk to another neighbour, Patrick Barrière. Like all farmers, he starts off with stories about his animals. ‘One of my calves died last week,’ he says. ‘I thought: here comes one of those hang-gliders. It was an eagle. It stood there beside that dead calf, it was the size of a big sheepdog. After that came the foxes and the lynxes: within three days, that calf was picked clean.’

Then he talks about the land, says there is nothing eternal about it. ‘Oh, Monsieur, these woods never used to go on like this. In my father's day this valley was full of people, and every piece of land was put to use. It was a mixed landscape: woods, but also lots of pastureland and little fields. Not long ago there was a forest fire here. You saw all those old terraces reappear. Yes, the old folks worked their fingers to the bone. And for what? Poverty and a little food and shelter, that was all.’

Eugene Weber compared these farmers’ views of the world to the look in the eyes of terrified men in desperate circumstances. In their eyes the village was ‘a lifeboat struggling to stay afloat in heavy seas, its culture a combination of discipline and reassurance designed to keep its occupants alive. Insecurity was the rule, existence consistently marginal. Tradition, routine, vigorous adherence to the family and the community – and to their rules – alone made existence possible.’

The big turnaround came to Lamanère in about 1940. While the rest of Europe's farmers were turning to mechanised agriculture, in these mountains there went on working with oxen and their own bare hands. There was no way they could compete. The farm children were driven into the factories like lambs to the slaughter. The
coup de grâce
came when the government offered them an attractive price to take over their land and turn it into forest. Within ten years, half the farms, gardens and orchards had disappeared. Today, backed by piles of European cash, a monotonous layer of ‘new nature’ is being laid across the land. Old oaks and chestnuts are being chopped down without mercy. Varieties of trees that have never grown here before are being planted, trees that grow quickly and efficiently. Patrick Barrière has almost no neighbours these days. That, too, is something about which these families knew nothing: loneliness.

We drink another pastis, and talk turns to history. ‘I've always found bullets lying around the countryside here,’ Patrick says. ‘There were some goings-on around here, let me tell you! In winter 1939 a couple of hundred thousand Spaniards actually came across those mountains. They had lost the civil war and now they could choose: run or die. Over in Prats-de-Mollo it was just like Kosovo: they had to pay for everything, the farmers around here took those rich Catalans for everything they
could get. A loaf of bread cost one gold piece. Lodgings for the night cost a painting.’

‘I'm a grandchild of one of those refugees,’ Isabelle said.

Patrick's grandfather saw it all first-hand when thousands of republicans crossed these mountains into France after the fall of Barcelona. The head of their diplomatic service, José Lopez Rey, talked later about how he had pocketed the key to the last republican ministry of foreign affairs – a village school on the border – and stumbled into France dizzy with scurvy. During his last six months in Barcelona, all he had had to eat was dry rice.