WIFE OF A DICTATOR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 303, 23 December 1939, Page 15

WIFE OF A DICTATOR

Donna Mussolini Takes Good Care of Her Benito

yVHAT is it like to be the wife of a major dictator? Do glory and affairs of state worry her much, or does her world still consist of husband, children and domestic cares? Donna Rachele Mussolini could have caviare and delicate cocktail biscuits, but she prefers bread and onions, says Frank Gervasi in Collier’s, U.S.A. For. Donna Rachele has spent much of her life in poverty and humility common to those who stem from the soil of her Italy. She has known back-breaking work and the hunger that comes in the wake of parched crops. The placid, rolling Romagna is stamped on her face. She waddles when she walks, with the short, sure steps of the packburdened peasant. And she still eats onions. Her husband, Benito, has wrought with force or persuasion many changes in the lives of 44,000,000 Italians in the past seventeen years, but he hasn’t changed Rachele; neither her ways nor her diet. Benito has tried. Many have been his dictatorial dictums, wellmeant but futile, to elevate peasant Rachele to the stature of the First Lady of Fascism. But it’s been in vain. Rachele’s only concession to her onion-hating husband has been to exercise wlfeiy prudence to keep at a safe distance after she has eaten the lowly bulb so as not to offend his supersensitive olfactory nerves. To keep at a safe and respectful distance from the man with whom she emerged from the undermost stratum of Italian life, in fact, seems' to be Donna Rachele’s main desire. Her place is in the kitchen, and while her husband spellbinds the multitudes in Rome’s Piazza Venezia from his balcony pulpit, Donna Rachele is washing the dishes or feeding the chickens in the backyard of their high-walled Villa Torionia. If she is aware of the unique job she hcldg as the world's only wife of a major dictator, charged with the care and feeding of one of Europe’s destinyshapers, Rachele gives no sign of that awareness. Rachele cooks, sews, bears children, and is quite happy. The lowly state of women in Italy is probably due to the -*fact that all Italian males are fundamentally Mussolinis. Il Duce finds comfort in stroking the hand of his wife as they sit in the library, watching Romano, aged nine, and Anna Maria, seven, play on the hearth-rug. Mussolini doesn’t like to admit the extent of Donna Rachele’s influence

upon him, and of this author Gervasi has personal experience. He once asked the Dictator if he ever talked things over with his wife before making a new move in the diplomatic chess game. Mussolini roared at him: “No, never!” He looked at him as though he were slightly unbalanced, regarding him pityingly as an inferior sort of male. Women have played an important part in Mussolini’s life. It was Donna Margherita Sarfatti, an auburn-haired and once beautiful Venetian, who is credited with having opened Mussolini’s eyes to art, music and books. He learned French at her insistence. It was Lady Muriel Chamberlain, sister-in-law of Britain’s Prime Minister, who inspired Mussolini to learn English. The bonds that hold Donna Rachele and Mussolini together are those elemental ligaments of mother and father love, of the habits of matrimony. Most trying time of all for Rachele is the Roman summer, hot, humid and depressing, The days are enervating, the nights hot and heavy, with the thick, rich air of the sub-tropics. On such nights the dictator cannot sleep. He wanders fretfully from room to room searching for a cool spot. Rachele hears him prowling about. She rises and tiptoes after him. She watches him discard his pyjama jacket, stand before a window to breathe deeply. Mussolini turns, throws himself upon a couch. Racneie waits until he snores. Stealthily she draws a light silken wrapper over the reposing figurq, her only reward being a mumbled, sleepy “Rachele .. .” She can’t go to sleep. He might awaken, prowl about some more—catch cold in draughts. She must be ready to cover him again.