Italy's Bad Dream

by GEORGE DE SANTILLANA

1

HERE,” said Paolo, “is where we get off.” Disreputable yellow tenement sections and broken pavements have yielded to dirt roads and truck gardens. These are the city limits. We clamber off our jeep and set out on a country lane in the limpid Roman dusk.

At a bend of the road a boy of fifteen in a blue short-sleeved sweater gets up casually. “Hey, where you going?”

“I got a word for Augusto,” says Paolo. His hand is firmly in his coat pocket.

The boy hesitates for a second, then says, “All right.” There is a rustle in the foliage behind him. I get a glimpse of a sub-machine gun covering us.

“By day,” says Paolo, “you can come and go as you like, but this is near curfew time. After that it’s a better idea to keep away altogether.”

He looks hardly older than a boy, with the rounded face of a sophomore — soft features and fresh, turned-up nose. But his eyes are too hard. He is the only man I know of who escaped the torture chambers of Via Tasso by killing his SS guard. A few days later he was back on the job and blew up a munitions train in Ostiense Station. His handiwork is still there for all to see.

He has kept good contacts with the underground. “They made wonderful killers,” he explains. “I never was able to kill a man in cold blood. By now they have gone off into all sorts of private enterprise. Some of them raid Allied garbage dumps. They scrape the remains out of the cans and press them together into other cans for resale. New-style Russian salad. Others go in for more high-class jobs.”

The road now goes down steeply. At a turn we find ourselves overlooking a shallow vale, full of widely spaced hovels. This is Shanghai Village. Why Shanghai? Nobody knows. A Hooverville where walls of tufa combine with old planking and tin plate, it is a cross between Southern shacks and adobe huts. A dirty rivulet runs across the main street, in which dirty children play.

Augusto’s house is just another hut. But in addition to the usual straw mattresses, there is a bed. Augusto, alias Ertinea, has the right of requisition over womenfolk. He’s a swarthy, athletic-looking tough. “How’s business?” Well, not so bad. After courteous greetings Augusto sits down heavily on the bed. He taps with his heel on a heap of a dozen tires lying all unconcealed under bedsprings, more than ten thousand dollars’ worth at present prices.

But things have not always been easy. A short time ago a carabineer nabbed a couple of the boys, and the village had to rescue them. It took an hour’s shooting, and they had to use mortars. That was not so good, because after that the police decided to put on a big show with tanks, armored cars, and what not. They rounded up two hundred men.

“What happened to them?” Well, didn’t we read about that revolt in the Rome jail, where they set fire to the central building? Togliatti, the Communist, who is also Minister of Justice, — a regular guy, — went down to harangue them. Most of them were able to get out. But these troubles are not good for business.

“Gas?” Sure, he had some gas for us. Ten dollars a gallon, as usual. No, no trouble at all. They were going into Rome next night to collect some more. As for the police — if they really decide to get tough with the village, there will always be a way of bringing up those from Primavalle. There is another Communist group down there — why, those boys have got land mines, hand grenades, even anti-tank guns. No danger really.

Here again is an old classmate of mine, who is a high school teacher. He used to have some money, a nice house. The house now looks strangely bare. Is he moving out? “No,” he replies with a grin, “it’s moving out on me.” The story is the usual one that I have found everywhere. It takes a hundred dollars a month for each person in a family. His salary is slightly less than one hundred — every employee from high to low is practically on that same level. He has to find another three hundred dollars through trucking or borrowing. That leaves no margin. The children needed shoes, so the bureau had to be sold. Then there was sickness in the family and the Persian rug went. The radio will have to go next. But they still have some reserves — there are the bed sheets.

The ration is still that of a year ago — half a pound of bread daily, a third of a pint of oil a month. Everything else has to come from the black market. “And we have to have meat from time to time,” he says. “I teach fifty hours a week. We have learned how to live beyond our means.”

“Die beyond your means, my friend — that’s what it looks like to me.”

“We can’t afford to die,” he says gravely. “Too expensive. But we have certainly given up any thought of the morrow. All of us are either thieves or receivers of stolen goods. Did you see anyone not smoking American cigarettes, which cost two-eighty a package? We just let things slide. The labor situation is choked with unemployment, but try to find a good worker. He will have discovered that he can make more money on the black market. If fathers are selling their daughters — I’ve seen it happen — why shouldn’t teachers sell grades, employees sell permits, or judges hitherto unbribable sell justice? What hope can we have from this government that cannot govern?

“And yet,” he adds after a pause, “do you know, this is a wonderful country. It’s a waste land — betrayed, disillusioned, left to itself — yet there is very little violence. There is only as much chiseling as is strictly necessary, and lots of understanding all around. The country runs itself without a police force. It works its way through. Where there is no way, it follows its own unwritten laws. A strange country. It seems to expect of us only that we should live reasonably and meet our death calmly.”

2

THE food situation is obviously crucial. Here are some relevant facts on a zone of central southern Italy, among many that I came across or tracked down. The peasants are not only hiding their grain: they are hiding their cattle as well. The heaviest, most publicized penalties have not brought out more than 10 per cent of the quota to be delivered at ceiling prices. It is no use arguing with them, for what will buy them black-market shoes and clothing except black-market food? How can you scour the countryside without a reliable police? But fodder is growing terribly scarce.

True, some provinces like Rome and Cassino, which have been emptied of cattle by the Germans, have fodder available. But what prefect would dare allow the precious cattle to move from his province? It is a reserve against worse times. Bonomi sponsored the policy of provincial blocs. So the peasant slaughters cattle for himself and moves what he can to the city, on stolen trucks operating on stolen gas, rolling on stolen tires. He bribes inspection on the way and the meat reaches the black market. With tires and gas the price they are, and the risk of Allied MB’s confiscating your tires, leaving you jacked up for keeps by the roadside, meat will not go below two dollars a pound.

Only a few food trucks venture on the roads, while the railroads are still almost wholly for Allied use. Meanwhile, the hungry Italian watches the interminable flow of Allied transport and joy-riding soldiers, and draws his own disconsolate conclusion. Few trucks mean great numbers of unemployed truck drivers. A short time ago in the province of Ancona, a delegation from them brought heavy political pressure on the prefect for the expulsion of all truck drivers not natives of the province. The prefect called the hapless aliens together and told t hem they must get out. The aliens, used by now to direct action, simply closed in on the prefect and beat him up thoroughly. The damaged prefect notified Rome that that measure, like so many other measures, was unenforceable. Could anything be done?

Why, yes, thought the Minister of Transport. Maybe we can borrow from the Army 4000 trucks that it is supposed to get from the Americans. But the Army in its turn had run into difficulties. United States authorities had agreed to release trucks only if the Army showed coöperation by recovering its own trucks liberated by the population during the months of chaos.

The Army wanted to know how it was expected to do it. That’s simple, said the Allies; we’ll give you a few hundred jeeps to go gather them in. Several squads of police sallied forth in the jeeps. Trucks that had once belonged to the Army were seized and their loads dumped unceremoniously by the roadside. In no time at all, trucks all over the country had vanished — they were hidden in barns or taken to the woods, dismantled, and buried. Transportation was at a standstill. Under threat of famine the order had to be revoked.

Thus things stood when Japan sued for peace. Soon the Allies announced they were going to release 22,000 old trucks. The Minister of Transport promptly got in touch with the Industrial Committee and asked them to submit a plan for quick repairs. But the industrialists stalled. The fact was that they were in no hurry to resume work so long as shops were saddled with three distinct committees: the Union Committee of Workers, a mixed executive committee on administration, and an overall liberation committee. Their pleas for resuming full control having failed, they just sat back and waited. At least their leaders did. So did the Minister of Transport.

“Why,” said an incautious correspondent who had dropped in, “don’t you just go ahead and requisition the Fiat works?”

“We couldn’t think of it,” replied the official in astonishment. “Good God, we’d have a deadlock in the Cabinet and a political crisis on our hands.”

He was entirely right, for the so-called leftist parties, who are not overinterested in promoting a revolution, must at least show participation in the government by blocking decisions, and they have several departments and a vice-premiership in their hands.

At last the Minister of Transport decided to appeal for bids from all the small repair shops throughout the country. This was announced as a return to private initiative. But apart from the difficulties it entails of insufficient equipment, of delays, of pooling of trucks to be cannibalized, it means a chance lost to set up a yardstick in transportation, for stock will slide into the hands of new capitalists who are blackmarketeers. They can buy all the permits they need, for they know the addresses of the obliging officials.

Thus the country’s life takes care of itself in total anarchy. From this single strand, picked out of an inextricable mess, one can surmise that it takes all the inexhaustible boondoggling genius of the Italians to keep alive at all.

It is true also that the situation is beyond any planning. A country, however impoverished, can always scrape together some produce to load on ships and funds to exchange against urgently needed things. But Italy has no shipping. It was confiscated by the Allies down to fishing boats with auxiliary engines. The Allies have no intention of giving it back. They are not lending any of their own either. Everything has to come from theft or charity.

3

WHICH were the real Allied mistakes? Even in the wisdom of hindsight, most of them appear pardonable in their inception. Snafu is the unavoidable result of two years of dragging, ruinous war and military control. Against that there is the prodigious job done by the engineers of AMG in technical reconstruction. The one unforgivable error, one would say, lay in retaining the King, I mean the American error, for on the part of Churchill it was clearly done in malice prepense. Our public opinion saw it as an error even then, but one must come to Italy to realize the staggering effect of that one decision.

In September, 1943, Italy was undergoing actual rebirth. Even Naples, that most unheroic of cities, staged a truly heroic, if doomed, insurrection. Italians look back to those months as the one really beautiful period of their lives. Those were months of starvation and terror, but also of companionship in risk and sacrifice, of great deeds and shared trust, of hopeless duty obscurely done, of tenderness and mutual respect. Even the thieves of Shanghai Village, who might have profited greatly from the Germans, accepted the leadership of a Jeffersonian Paolo.

On this new life, struggling to be born, the Allies dumped the sinister, leaden figure of one whose record as it emerges now into history puts him among the chief war criminals. The people in their unerring instinct decided long ago that Mussolini was only an incidental character, and a tragic one at that, an adventurer in the throes of necessity. All their hatred is reserved for the King, the man who in their eyes had a free, easy choice between retaining his integrity and becoming a traitor, the man who chose to betray his constitutional trust and deliver them over to Fascism. As soon as the people realized that the business of retaining him had been officially fixed, public opinion slumped into cynical apathy and has not recovered since.

Having laid proficiently the groundwork, the Allies felt that a democratic gesture was needed. They suggested a broadly representative government.

What was the upshot, as we can see it now after two years of vicissitudes and false starts? The Allies had actually unloaded on the anti-Fascists the political administrative responsibility, while refusing them executive facilities. They had prescribed an “institutional truce” which did not allow for even the most urgent reforms, and left the decaying corpse of monarchy to poison the air. That point was made explicit when an investigation of the responsibilities of surrender was quashed by order of the Allies. General Roatta, one of the worst war criminals, was snatched away from a firing squad, and turned up a few days later in Lisbon, where he presumably went by bicycle, since the British claim they know nothing about his escape.

Political parties were allowed to develop no action by which people might judge them. They were allowed no initiative, only talk, irresponsible talk. They were handed the useless machinery of a powerless state to run. The amazing thing was that they accepted. The result could have been foretold, given the state of southern Italy and the old tradition of papal Rome. Hordes of politicians swooped down on that machinery and clawed it to pieces in their haste to get good jobs. One party grabbed banks; another insurance companies; another public works; and so on.

Six party caucuses sat by and watched to see that the spoils should be evenly distributed. Then in a grand spree of purging, some top Fascists were thrown out. With them went vast numbers of executive and service personnel — drivers, secretaries, janitors — whose Fascist responsibilities would have been hard to discover. Into the void thus created there poured a flood of new patronage: ex-Fascists turned Communists, ex-profiteers turned democrats, ex-protégés of Poletti turned something else, and the unavoidable monarchist clique — all the rag, tag, and bobtail of a demoralized, spavined, betrayed, plundered country scrambling for the safety of job protection from its own past.

Having found a berth and being wholly ignorant of his new functions, everyone was concerned not only with doing as little as possible in order to avoid giving himself away, but also with checking any attempt at action from anyone above or below who belonged to a rival party. In this atmosphere even excellent men who had been drawn in were stultified, and experienced public servants who remained held their breath and refrained from word or deed, lest the purge descend on them too.

This was the Bonomi adminstration, of which we read vaguely in our press as a hopeful sign of democratic birth. Bonomi himself had been picked by the masters of the hour to succeed Badoglio because of his well-established reputation as a dud.

Then came the liberation of the north. Short of civil war, there was nothing that could be done by the capable northern group to dislodge the self-appointed, thoroughly discredited Roman outfit. After many attempts at bluffing, the politicos in Rome did the expedient thing. They asked the north for a prime minister, hoping resourcefully to turn him in time into the king pin. So it was that Ferruccio Parri, patriot leader of the north, the legendary General Maurizio, was made Premier.

Parri is no fool. He accepted the job warily and in a sacrificial spirit. He has set his mind on steering the country into its first elections and preventing dangerous monkey business or an explosion in the north until then. But he is checked in turn by a cabinet a large part of which is united only in sabotaging his initiative and putting off decisions. He can only play off the unreliable, unctuous maneuvering of the Christian Democrats against the tub-thumping double-talk of Nenni, Vice Premier and Socialist leader, who acts already as if he were Parri’s successor. He can expect at any time the double cross from the Communists, who are playing fast and loose with Nenni in order to disrupt any orderly political activity.

The Communists are strong and well organized. They have piled up huge armaments: they have even hidden tanks and flame-throwers in the mountains. They are tied up with terrorist bands of so-called partisans, mostly former Fascists turned bandits, whom all real partisans would like to clear out. But Parri has no police to disarm them. He would not think of calling in the King’s army with its unmentionable generals. He would much rather rely on the widespread aversion of the Italians towards revolution, and on their distrust of bosses. He also knows that a few shiploads of raw materials would deflate any extremist threat. He still has faith in the Allies.

Meanwhile, however, Parri works himself to death on picayune problems, with the economic life of the country shrinking, falling apart into smaller and smaller units which withhold or steal reserves from each other. The ship of state is foundering, and the Fascist mentality is rampant again everywhere, while the last good men are using up their credit in vain. There is a point beyond which you cannot stretch the fabric of a civilization and still hope for a comeback.

“Parri, tell me what are you doing here.” The Prime Minister smiles sadly. Under a shock of silver-white hair his face is long, gaunt, sallow, and deeply creased around the mouth. Were it not for that sensitive mouth, he would look like one of Cromwell’s colonels. His style is that of a simple, unbending Puritan, but behind him there is a traditional Mazzini. “You know,” he replies, “I would much rather have been shot by the Gestapo the time they arrested me. I am a soldier on sentry duty — a soldier without a gun.”

Parri has a flicker of an impish smile that may be saying, “Perhaps I have side arms.” He has strange gray eyes with very wide pupils that do not seem to focus on the outside world — the eyes of an ascetic. His face is a mask of deathly weariness, but he is not tense. When he has to answer urgent questions on the phone, he does so in a quiet, competent manner, almost relaxed.

As I wait, my eye is caught by a slip on his desk. “Inspector A begs to submit again for impelling reasons his request for a pair of trousers.”

Parri looks my way. “Yes, that’s the kind of thing. You don’t know the difficulties of doing anything when all effective authority is in the hands of the occupant. But the real problem is getting something shipped to us — never mind too little, never mind too late; so long as body and soul still hang together there is a chance. But by November we shall be at the end of our rope. We need at least a billion dollars’ worth of stuff in order to get back to work. Of that, we can pay for about half. The rest has to come by way of loans. I hope the Allies will understand in time.”

“Let’s put it before American opinion,” I suggest.

“We should,” he says with great earnestness, “and out loud. We cannot get anywhere without democratic support from abroad. I think I can hold the country together until election time. I intend to do it. After that —”

Parri knows only too well the difficulties of the task. By November, food stocks will be gone. Inflation will be added to other problems. The country is already bracing itself for authoritarian putsches from the right or the left. If the Allies don’t help soon, there will be grave trouble in Italy.