The twentieth century is a graveyard of well-intentioned heroes and unrealised dreams. When they talk about their mythical Six Million they never consider the real victims of Socialistic Reductionism: the magnificent, golden visionaries, the clear-eyed fighters for Order and Justice, the tireless, selfless Knights of Christendom who, from Denikin to Rockwell, took up the sword against Bolshevism only to be cut down by cowards, deceived by traitors, betrayed by followers who lost their nerve at the crucial moment. They dragged poor Mussolini to a black tree and hanged him. The mob, the very men and women who had worshipped him, tore at his body, ripped him to pieces, and years later they sold scraps of his clothing to tourists in the Via Veneto and St Peter’s Square. Mussolini should not have trusted the Pope and his Cardinals. They pretended to support him, then as soon as the British and Americans began to win the War, they turned against him. Mussolini’s nation was ironically the ultimate Roman Catholic state, more a product of its Church than any passing political fad.
If it had not been for Hitler, who took everything too far, Italy would now be the world’s most advanced nation. But Hitler went mad. He turned against the Church. His hatred of Bolshevism, worthy of itself, clouded his judgment. His attempts to compromise with Stalin lost him those of us who had up to then supported his policies. The forces which conspired against him also conspired against me. Benito Mussolini was one of the many who recognised me for what I was. It was little, jealous, creeping people, whispering together, laying despicable petty traps, making miserable plots, who undermined the very rock on which our visions were founded. Those are Bolshevism’s heroes: pale, mean faces with squinting eyes which never saw the light of the sun. I hear them whining outside the shop on Saturday mornings and I drive them off. They scatter and squeal like the cowardly vermin they are. I hear them sniffing round my windows at dead of night, scuffling behind my doors, scratching on my walls. They melt away when I challenge them to display themselves. Would Mussolini or Horthy, Mosley or Hitler melt at my challenge?
It was important to leave Rome and get to Paris as soon as possible, before Kolya went on his way to America or Berlin, but the city was like a possessive mother. Every time I gathered up the willpower to go, she found something new to astonish me, to distract me from my purpose. One morning, for instance, after we had spent half the night discussing how best to reach Paris, we were making our way from the Hotel Ambrosiana to the Café Montenero just across the river in the Trastevere quarter where we had arranged to meet Laura, who lived there. Along the main street and heading for the bridge came a great double-decker tram of the old ‘Imperiale’ class, with two more single-deckers connected behind her, rolling smoothly and very slowly in the direction of the eastern suburbs. A triple-coach tram was not a particularly unusual sight in Rome, though the double-deckers were more characteristic, I was to learn, of Milan and London, but these were painted a jet, shining black, the only colour on them being their brasswork which was polished to gleam like gold. The sides and the rims of the following cars were rich with multicoloured flowers, forming wreaths, vines, loops, while inside, dimly seen behind half-open black curtains, were the weeping mourners, also in black. I had never seen anything like it, but I realised it was a modern funeral procession, with the coffin, also covered in great masses of flowers, clearly seen on the upper deck of the leading vehicle. The trolley pole hummed and crackled in a rather light-hearted way, considering the gravity of the occasion. The driver sat, in a special black uniform, stiff and sombre at the front (the ‘Imperiales’ had only one driving seat and one set of stairs, at the back). I was virtually mesmerised by the sight, removing my hat and paying homage rather to the miracle of up to date technology than to the poor corpse within. How readily, with so little fuss, did Italians adapt themselves to and advance the course of twentieth-century thinking! When I told Laura and her friends about the procession they were amused by my excitement. Apparently the funeral trams were a regular service in many parts of Italy and elsewhere. I was realising how drastically cut off from genuine culture I had been during the Civil War and my sojourn in Turkey. In my enthusiasm for Rome’s forward-thinking transport system I did not this time forget to mention our urgent need to reach Paris. I asked Laura if there was work I could do. I still had some money, but I should feel happier if I had earned what I needed for our first-class train fares. She told me she would consider the problem. That little square in Trastevere, just off the Piazza di Santa Maria, was an oddly quiet corner of the city, away from the crash and clamour filling Rome’s main streets. The houses were like those one found in the country. Their walls were painted a faded, peeling pink or blue or green. The awnings of the cafés were like ancient parchment; they might have been there since the reign of Caesar Augustus. On many roofs were gardens so unkempt they appeared totally wild, while the faces of the inhabitants were faun-like. One felt one had been removed in time to a pagan past. Almost the whole of Rome had something of that same mellowed, sun-bleached quality, particularly in the early morning sunshine, or at twilight. When one was able to see the surrounding hills one could easily imagine oneself protected forever from all mundane problems obsessing the rest of Europe. From Trastevere it was possible to wander across a crumbling bridge to the Tiberina Island. On that tiny strip of land in the green-brown waters of the river stood a building (I think it was a monastery) apparently built up over the centuries. It contained fragments of the architecture of the past thousand years. Here Romans fished, tied up their boats and simply lounged on weedy slabs of stone, smoking and regarding those rooftops, like the dome of St Peter’s, which could be seen beyond the trees. A few wild cats lived here, and presumably the monks (though I never saw them). Even the cats had a subtly different appearance to those which stretched their muscular little bodies in the sun falling on the ruins of the Circus Maximus. If Constantinople were a city of dogs, then Rome was a city of cats. You might easily have expected to find a Temple to Bubastes somewhere nearby. One rarely saw a building without a cat on a step or window. Orange, black, grey, brown, white, marmalade and ginger, they washed themselves, slept, made love, utterly uninterested in the swarming human beings, merely watching with neutral eyes those which came close, displaying wary curiosity if there was a chance of someone feeding them. They prowled over marble which had been flooded with the blood of martyred Christians; they defecated on granite carved to the satisfaction of the Imperial ego; they copulated beneath columns erected to the glory of Gods and Goddesses, and in some ways they symbolised the enduring spirit of the city and her population. Esmé found them fascinating. There were days when she would spend most of her time watching them with much the same expression as they watched others. Her eyes fixed, her little chin in her perfect hands, she breathed slowly, languorously, with unfathomable contentment. It was not only I who noticed. Laura would often look at her and frown, at once understanding and mystified. Even Fiorello the Futurist, full of his own eloquence and self-absorption, would sometimes spare her a curious glance and smile at me in bafflement at the ways of femininity. Yet I was not myself baffled; I felt I knew what she experienced. Perhaps I merely imposed my own imagination onto her, believing her capable of profundity of feeling which was in fact non-existent. She was, I admit now (though I would have denied it vehemently then) at least in part my creation: the apparent fulfilment of my deepest desires. A little of this occurred to me then, when she would look up suddenly and brighten with a smile as if in response to my unspoken command. But I refused to consider such implications. They were extremely distasteful to me. They remain distasteful, but I am not one to avoid the truth for long.