Their friends were equally generous. For the first week of our stay in Rome virtually our only expense was the hotel. We went every day to the Via Catalana and from there would be taken on to restaurants, night clubs, private parties. The Roman bohemians were eager to hear my tales of the Civil War, of the Turkish nationalists and life in Constantinople. With these stories, sometimes just a little embroidered, I paid for our suppers and wine. If I had too much to drink, I might also draw on Mrs Cornelius’s first-hand knowledge of the leading Bolsheviks. I continued to borrow her name, since it was on our forged British passports. I did not wish to risk confusing the authorities and I still could not be sure, in that company, who might be a police spy. There was always bound to be at least one in any group.
Our new companions, for all their apparent carelessness, did not take the fate of their country lightly; they could become furious, near hysterical, aggressive, violent with one another over the most obscure points. Every shade of anarchism, monarchism, socialism and nationalism was represented. Few Romans were fascists. Fascist! in those days meant merely ‘a bundle’ or ‘a bunch of flowers’; that is to say it was slang for a group. It was left to the Bolshevik press to give the word its sinister connotation. Many of Fiorello da Bazzanno’s friends, like Kolya, possessed an obsession with the future which mirrored my own; they gave words and pictures to my ideas. My scientific rationalism and their poetry formed a perfectly balanced combination.
Fiorello insisted, one warm evening beneath burning strings of coloured electric bulbs on Mendoza’s terrace, that the old warring families, the Borgia and the Orsini, had their contemporary equivalents in the makers of motor-cars. ‘Soon it might be necessary to declare one’s loyalties, my dear Max, and if necessary fight for them.’ He jumped up, pushing his hat away from his thin, dark hair, striking a pose with his cane. ‘Avanti! I am Count Fiorello da Bazzanno, henchman to the Ferrari!’ This amused him so much that, his lips curling back over his yellow teeth as he laughed helplessly, he had to sit down again.
‘And who will be the next Pope?’ Laura patted his back. She spoke in her usual quietly sardonic tone. ‘A Lancia? A Fiat?’
Fiorello gasped at this, shaking his head violently, controlling himself long enough to get to his feet and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He could be a foreigner. There’s already a movement in the Vatican to elect a Ford. But the French support the Peugeot Cardinal.’ He leaned forward in mock-seriousness. ‘For my part I’m behind the dark horse. The Infant Cardinal.’
‘Who’s that?’ We all bent our heads towards him.
‘Why? None other than the Baby Rolls-Royce, my friends. Mark my words, you’ll hear more of him in a year or two. He has stolen your plans, Max. He means to lift St Peter’s closer to heaven. The whole papal city is to be seated on a massive dirigible, floating free of the Earth, no longer bound by temporal ties, removed from all petty politics. And when the Pope flushes his toilet, his piss will fall on Catholic and Protestant alike!’
‘And Turks,’ I begged. ‘Let it fall on Turks as well.’
He was generous. ‘They shall have the entire Vatican sewer. And with their land covered in such holy shit, they’ll perforce grow nothing but Christian food. Thus they’ll be converted, as our own ancestors were converted, through their bellies.’
When she was drunk, Laura was inclined to become a little sombre. ‘I think Ford and Austin are already sufficiently powerful to do as they please.’ She also tended, in this condition, to take a disapproving view of Fiorello’s flights of fancy. ‘It’s cash in the end which impresses people. Buy their oil and so give them enough money to buy our cars.’
‘The triumph of trade!’ I, too, responded perhaps more earnestly than was necessary. ‘Trade makes all men friends. A wealthy world is a peaceful world.’
Laura began to scowl. ‘But who’ll have the greatest share?’
‘That issue’s being decided in Russia at the moment.’ The little man did not want to be brought down to earth. ‘When the result is announced, we’ll all know how to proceed. What a sublime clarifier is Lenin. Perhaps we should ask him to be Pope? Then everyone will feel much easier about him.’
I, too, became anxious to counter Laura’s socialistic pieties. ‘We’ll simply move the flying Vatican City to Moscow!’
‘But what about the Patriarch of Constantinople?’ asked one of their friends from over Fiorello’s shoulder. ‘Where will the poor old fellow go?’
Fiorello raised his cane. ‘I have the answer. A triumvirate: Pope Henry Ford, Patriarch of the Greeks and Romans Vladimir Lenin, and Dictator D’Annunzio. Ist es gut so? All shades of authoritarianism represented. A holy compromise.’
Esmé was utterly fascinated by his strange little face, his animated movements. From time to time she would burst into giggles at completely inappropriate moments; or she would sit staring at him, her face a combination of uncertain expressions, her eyes wide, like a child at the play. She loved his comic poses, his melodramatic gestures, his trilling eloquence; applauding his braggadocio for its own sake. I felt no jealousy. He was a natural clown and I wanted nothing more than for Esmé to be happy. This company and its attendant ambience had consolidated her good health, I knew, and I was grateful. I prayed we would find similar friends in Paris and London, for this was my natural habitat and, ideally, Esmé’s as well. Here ideas and money, politics and art, science and poetry all mingled. Amongst such people I must inevitably find those who would appreciate my inventions and help me make them reality, just as Kolya would have done if he had been allowed more time in government. (This is why I am convinced Lenin was personally responsible for my frustration and misery, because Kolya fell when Kerenski was overthrown.) Now, however, in Rome and elsewhere I foresaw a future where these young men could truly build Utopia. They would plead with me to be its architect. Fiorello’s rhetoric further inspired me. He spoke of ‘the violence which powers the engine’. Society would have to accept violence if it wanted progress. ‘Can a train run without the flaming energy in the boiler of the locomotive? Can steel be forged without a furnace? Can the aeroplane fly without consuming oil? Ich glaube es nicht! And, by the same reasoning, a nation cannot be hammered into perfection without blood and bayonets. Out of violence comes forth order! That wonderful tranquillity which falls on us after the battle. My Russian friends, I give you “Peace Through War!” and “Order Through Struggle!’”
As we cheered his histrionics we could not know he was the genuine herald of a vigorous and realistic new age. That glorious reawakening of Italy’s pride would be marked only two years later by Mussolini’s March on Rome. ‘You must stay with us, my dear Cornelius!’ With one hand Fiorello lifted his wine bottle, with the other his hat. ‘Stay with us and help us create -’ He fell back again, giggling. ’Excusez-moi, Der Motor ist uberhitz!’ And he put his head into Laura’s tolerant lap, falling into sleep with a series of immense snores. Delighted as I was, I did not really take him seriously, yet his poetic vision was to prove splendidly accurate. Under the guiding hand of her remarkable Duce Italy began her glorious celebration of all that was vital, noble and modern. Mussolini’s only failing was his willingness to believe in the worth of turncoat friends. I would eventually identify with him even more than with D’Annunzio. The engineer of a brilliantly reborn nation, his dream was uncannily close to mine. I am the first to criticise the excesses of Hitlerism. The tragic injustice was that Benito Mussolini came to be tarred with the same brush. Sometimes the blackjack and the bottle of castor oil must be displayed, as a dog is shown the stick. He was martyred because he could not see the evil in his allies, in men who called him Master while plotting his downfall. It heartens me in England today when many people at last begin to realise the virtues of those leaders. Even the thankless defender of his nation’s pride, Sir Oswald Mosley, is finally accepted for the honourable patriot he always was: a man whose intellectual powers and imaginative instincts rivalled my own. But he must feel horribly bitter, sitting out his lonely exile in that rural French chateau, seeing all he warned against coming to pass. I was able to shake his hand only once, at a dinner given for Pan-Europeans in the late forties. It struck me then that a simple physical factor might have turned his destiny. As he thanked me for my support there were tears in his eyes; but what I noticed most, to my eternal discredit, was his hideously bad breath. I wondered if anyone had ever pointed it out to him. I spoke to his loyal lieutenant, Jeffrey Hamm, suggesting that an ordinary commercial mouthwash, if used daily, might seriously enhance his leader’s fortunes, I was misinterpreted. Hamm ordered me thrown from the room. He told me if I ever returned he would see me beaten black and blue. So much for good intentions. Together, Mosley and myself might have saved Britain from her steady slide into socialistic fantasy. Mussolini did not have a breath problem, or if he did I did not notice it, since the heavy use of garlic and olive oil in the Italian cuisine (not to mention tomato paste and so forth) makes everyone smell the same. Hamm’s anger did not stop me voting for Mosley in 1959 when he stood for this district as Member of Parliament, but by then the rot had set in. The negro vote won the day.