The Vengeance of Rome (20 page)

I had enough remaining sense to murmur of commitments—minor business in the US and so on (actually, I needed time to catch my breath) and he was generous. Again the grave nod, the assurance of that gesture, and I was given until 1 January. Who could now deny my destiny?! That date was my birthday, both as a man and as a Fascist.

Once again his firm hand was placed in mine. The interview was over. Mussolini walked with deliberate, thoughtful pace, back towards the great house, a pale shadow in the deepening mist.

Margherita Sarfatti, her usual riot of scents and scarves, clutched excitedly at my arm. ‘You made a wonderful impression. He likes you. He normally doesn't give
me
that amount of time these days. He trusts you. He believes in you. You have come at exactly the right moment. You bring him exactly what he needs: a machine which will overawe our enemies and reduce our casualties. We have taken another major step towards the establishment of a truly Fascist world. We shall harness all that is good about our modern age and place it in the service of the ideals and traditions of our noblest ancestors.'

Rather foolishly, I mentioned to Margherita I needed to find a toilet. Apparently my entire system wished to void itself at one burst. She smilingly told me to use the lake. She would keep guard. A little self-consciously, though hidden by mist and bushes, I relieved myself into the freezing waters of the ornamental pond. Before I could pull up my trousers against the near-zero chill, Signora Sarfatti was upon me. Did I feel grateful, she asked, for what she had done for me? I was indeed very grateful. She pressed close to me, her breath smelling of violets and Turkish tobacco, her dyed hair escaping from under her fur.

I was horribly conscious of who she was. Surely Il Duce's mistress would not consider jeopardising everything for a sordid, carnal moment? The place was suddenly silent. I heard a car driving away.

He has gone, she said. She sounded angry, disgusted. He has to get back to his wife and family. He had found an excuse to be free of his peasant brood for a few hours. My private parts in her heated hand, I stood beside the freezing water with my trousers down. Then I found myself turning suddenly to vomit. I heard her crooning behind me. I heard her telling me it was all right. Meanwhile, her hand held tight to my genitals as she stroked and whispered and at last let me raise my trousers and accompany her to her waiting car.

‘We'll need a couple of hours,' she said. ‘You can tell them whatever you like.' She spoke in a rather detached, casual way, as if to a relative. ‘But we'll need at least two hours.' She flung herself back into the cushions of the limousine, scratching her prominent stomach. I was glad that she favoured dim lighting. Yet part of me really did love her at that moment. She was the medium through whom my dream had come true.

However, no matter what I told myself, no matter how I found ways of making Signora Sarfatti attractive, there was one terrible obstacle to my ever achieving a state of lust sufficient to satisfy her. That obstacle would not leave my mind. It informed every action involving my benefactress. Even as she took me back to her extraordinary apartment, which she shared with children and servants, all of whom stared at me from hiding as we arrived, the knowledge kept pounding in my head. I was about to enjoy sexual congress with the ‘uncrowned Queen of Italy', whom some called the new Lucretia Borgia, my hero's long-established paramour, the mistress of a superman. A superman, I believed, who would not be entirely sympathetic to my circumstances and would take appropriate Italian action if he ever found out.

It occurred to me, as Margherita settled herself upon me without bothering to take off most of her clothes, that I had become a character in a Greek drama. The irony did not console me.

I became reconciled to my destiny.

My last thought before that extraordinary, fleshy scarecrow began her unusual and somewhat terrifying ministrations was ‘What happened to Fiorello?'

I could only hope that Signora Sarfatti's passion would fade with her act of conquest. I was in a state of silent exhaustion when she returned me to my friends' flat at around two in the morning. To my dismay, they were all waiting up for me. The Christmas tree candles had gone out, but the fire was high. Billy, in a dressing gown which could have swaddled Africa, made me a hot toddy. Ethel carried off my street clothes, commenting sympathetically on their condition, while Maddy murmured comfort and enquiry.

My silence was taken for weighty thought. Ethel told her husband to be quiet and suggested we all needed sleep. We could talk, if necessary, in the morning. Billy, with his journalist's nose for news, was, of course, the most eager. But he was a gentleman through and through, the best kind of old-fashioned American, so his courtesy triumphed over his curiosity.

Grateful for this, I allowed Maddy to lead me to bed. Insistently, since Margherita's conflicting scents filled my own nostrils, I stumbled into a bath. From there I remember almost nothing. I awoke in the pink haze of a perfect afternoon with a few soft clouds in the pastel sky and two slender poplars framed in the window whose curtains a smiling Maddy drew back for me. I smelled coffee and croissants. I was filled with an emotion I can only describe as untranquil well-being. My elation at meeting my hero and discovering his respect—indeed his need—for me was almost overwhelming, as was the knowledge of the price I had to pay La Sarfatti for my good fortune.

Bluntly, I felt as if I had been fucked by a demon. None of this can be said, of course. She is still alive, still spending the fortune she has made from selling the degenerate paintings she spirited away when she fled into exile. After she fell out of favour and was revealed as a Jewess, she ran off to America. She now lives, I understand, in Trieste, where all our histories
began. D'Annunzio's noble act of individualism, after all, provided the inspiration for the March on Rome. They now claim the march never took place, that every aspect of Mussolini's career was a circus, an illusion, a further step into grotesque fantasy, but you only have to look at the buildings to know who was fantasising and who was not. Mussolini demanded an architecture which was powerful, brutal and stark—a tough, Fascist architecture. If it did not exist, why is it still being copied around the world, especially in London?

Maddy Butter was grave as she settled her warm little body beside me. Pushing back her pretty curls, she did her best not to seem eager. While I ate from my breakfast tray, she read from the newspaper. She had looked, she said, for some hint of my activities last night, but unless I had been called to help a dog which had somehow climbed a tree in the Via delle Sette Chiese on Christmas Eve and had been stuck for twenty-four hours, howling the whole time until shot by a local
squadristi
, there was no clue. Of course she was quivering with curiosity and, because of my circumstances, I was able to be deliberate, cautious and cryptic in my replies. The philanderer's perfect situation! Unfortunately I was not the perfect philanderer and had no enthusiasm for the rôle. I swore Maddy to secrecy before telling her that Signora Sarfatti had been the intermediary between me and a very important figure indeed.

‘Mussolini!' cried Maddy, eyes shining. I neither confirmed nor denied this. I went on to say how I'd been offered a job doing what I could do best as an engineer. A job which satisfied my ideal for practical altruism. At last my talents were to be put to the public service. I had longed all my life for just such a chance. My eyes filled with sudden tears as I thought of my mother, of Esmé and my loved ones in Kiev. I wished they were with me now to share in my glorious fulfilment. Maddy Butter interpreted my tears as tears of joy. This allowed her to echo the supposed emotion, weeping for my success as I wept for my lost loved ones whom she, no matter how sweet, could never replace.

When I had finished my breakfast, Maddy cut us some lines of cocaine. ‘There have been phone calls for you from Tom Morgan of United Press, Signora Sarfatti, who sent her best regards, and Signor Merletti who, I believe, is a tailor. Clearly, things are hopping.' And she paused.

I laughed. ‘Maddy, my dear, if I were not discreet I would not have been asked to go where I went last night and last night I would not have been asked what I was asked. Be assured, I have been called to a noble task. One for which God has trained and tempered me over the past decade. All that
has happened to me has prepared me for my destiny. I shall be able to rise to the occasion.' I promised that all would soon be revealed.

‘Quite,' she said, in an affected English way. ‘I'm really not being boring, darling. Do you want me to phone anyone back for you? Billy and Ethel have had to go out—taking their kids to see her aunt, who's French but living in Tivoli. What do you want to do? Go home?'

At that moment I could take no further reminders of Margherita Sarfatti's exotic and bizarre tastes. I elected to remain where I was. ‘What did Tom Morgan want?'

‘He said to say, “Welcome aboard.” Does that mean anything to you?'

I remembered Il Duce speaking of the Fascist Inner Council and its international membership. The gathering of the great and the good dedicated to the task of bringing to reality the Fascist dream. I had already heard it rumoured that Morgan, a great womaniser and spendthrift with a string of mistresses as well as a family to maintain, not to mention a drinking problem and a lifestyle spent with the Italian
haut monde
, earned a good salary advising Il Duce on American and press matters. His critics said he found it expedient to become a card-carrying Fascist. Only then could he, as a foreigner, be completely trusted. A cynical view. Even when it was discovered to be true and his office fired him, nothing was ever made of it. He continues to work in the US, a successful correspondent, to the present day. I saw him a couple of years ago, when he was covering the coronation, and he had no doubts. ‘Mussolini was the best thing that ever happened to Italy,' he said, ‘and Hitler was the worst.' His argument was that Mussolini was a great man responding to his nation's needs but that Hitler was a fanatic, responsive only to his own appetites and mindless lust for power. We have argued this case many times. ‘Mussolini created Hitler,' claims Morgan, ‘and Hitler destroyed him.' It is a persuasive point of view.

By late afternoon I was dressed. I called Morgan first. He was not available, so I left a message with his desk. Then I called the tailor, who told me that he understood I needed an urgent appointment. Mystified, I agreed. I was expected tomorrow at 11 a.m. The tailor gave me a fashionable address near the Ponte Palatina. Not for the first time I began to sense that I was in a carriage being winched rapidly up to the top of a very high roller-coaster. I knew that at any moment I might find myself hurtling forward at a momentum I could not control. Like all men, I am moved by the tides of history. My curse is that I am aware of it. I know what is happening, but I have no means of controlling it. As Margherita Sarfatti herself later said, my curse is to be eternally conscious. She was a ghoul but she was not a fool.

She was, it emerged, a possessive ghoul. When I arrived at the tailor the next morning I was greeted with as much servile enthusiasm as if I had been the Pope himself. A horde of little boys and girls began helping me off with my clothes, measuring me in every conceivable place. And as I stood before the mirror wearing only my undershirt and boxer shorts, feeling secure, I suppose, in what was after all a traditional male preserve, I caught a sound behind me, a fulsome drone of greeting and a vast wave of odours struck me almost physically, announcing the entrance of the woman who was in more ways than one my mistress.

‘My darling,' she said in her husky English, ‘you are so beautiful in your underwear. Those legs! Ah! Perfection.' And she sat herself down in a chair, attended by almost as many little tailors as I, to light a Turkish cigarette which she inserted in an iron holder, the latest Fascist fashion. I felt like a whore as she watched, in amused relish, the process. Now cloth was brought—a fine, black wool—and laid upon my person in various places. Chalk marks, further measurements, and Margherita Sarfatti, my patroness, smoked and chatted. ‘I saw Tom Morgan this morning. He said he telephoned you, my darling. But you weren't up. You cannot be so lazy from now on. Fascists are expected to set a good example. I looked through your cuttings. They were fascinating.'

‘Cuttings?' I became a little alarmed.

‘Tom got them from the Service. We needed to check up on your credentials and make sure you are who you say you are. After all, sweetheart, you now have responsibilities and we have to know if we can trust you.'

Naively I had not realised that such checks would be made. Not all my press had been positive. I asked, casually, what she had learned from my ‘Press Kit'. She smiled, a teasing travesty of coquetry, and said that what they had learned must have been good, because here I was.

She had not understood I had played such an important part in politics. I had been far too circumspect. A Klansman! She and Mussolini had seen
The Birth of a Nation
three times when it first came to Milan. So romantic, so daring. Just the kind of hero for the New Italy.

I decided that the faint note of mockery in her voice was permanent and not especially directed at me. With it she protected herself in a world which, in the intensity of its vendettas and cruelty of its judgements, was far worse than any political world. The world of the international art scene. The budgets of small nations were spent on art, especially by Americans like Hearst and J.P. Morgan, and the power struggle was intense.

She had read some of my speeches. And I had told Mussolini he had
no American equivalent! The course of United States history might have taken a very different turn if I had been in power. But she could tell I was a dreamer, a poet-engineer, who had no interest in ordinary political power. There was only one d'Annunzio. My combination of experience and innocence was very touching. She came over to where I stood, draped in black cloth, and made a few murmured suggestions to the tailor, touching my figure with a kind of casual, abstracted intimacy I might have found degrading if I did not have so much inner pride.