The Two-Headed Eagle

There was also the condemned man’s last letter to be disposed of, handed to the official of the Military Procurator’s department, on the morning of the execution. Normally this would have been forwarded un­opened to the dead man’s relatives: even in 1916 Austria still had enough decency left to observe the proprieties in these matters. But now, since the condemned man had not been shot after all, it was felt proper to open the fat, triple-sealed envelope. It was found to contain detailed drawings for Carraciolo’s memorial, to be erected after the war on the site of his execution on the ridge above Trieste. Meticulously drawn during his last days in prison, it would certainly have been a most impressive sight if it had ever been built: a sort of wedding-cake structure of naked figures— mostly young women—in white marble with the top tier bearing a statue of the man himself in his death agony, radiant as Our Lord arising from the tomb, while his Austrian tormentors fell back blinded and confounded on every side. The inscription was to have read “Giovenezza, Giovanezza, Sacra Primavera di Bellezza!”—“Youth, Youth, Sacred Springtime of Beauty!”—which I thought frankly was a bit thick, coming from a man who was nearing forty-five at the time of these events.

That was not in fact the last that I saw of Major Oreste di Carraciolo, that September morning as his aeroplane climbed away into the Adriatic sky. It was in the year 1934 I remember, when Polish naval business took me once again to the port of Fiume to visit the former Ganz-Danubius shipyard at Bergudi, now rechristened the Cantieri Navale di something- or-other. There had been many changes since I had last seen the city where I had once been a pupil for fours years at the Imperial and Royal Naval Academy. I was now a grey-haired commodore approaching my half­century, charged with the task of organising the Polish Navy’s infant sub­marine service. As for Fiume, it was now at the very easternmost edge of Mussolini’s Italy. The years had not been particularly kind to either of us; but on balance I considered that Fiume had come off worst, as I surveyed the shabby streets of this once busy city. From being the principal— indeed only—seaport of the Kingdom of Hungary, Fiume had been re­duced to the status of a ghost town, straddling the bitterly disputed fron­tier with Yugoslavia and split in two by a hideous rusting fence of barbed wire and corrugated iron.

Politics had done most of it, and the Great Depression had done the rest. My business in the town was to inspect the old Danubius shipyard, which was tendering to supply a number of submarines to the Polish Navy. I had concluded that in just about every conceivable respect the other tenderer, the Fijenoord yard at Rotterdam, offered the best bargain to the Polish taxpayer. So, having written out my report in my room at the old Lloyd-Palazzo Hotel on the waterfront—and having thereby added my two-pe

“Never go back” is a sound rule for life, I have always found. The prosperous city where I had spent four happy years in my youth was now a poor bedraggled ghost of what it had once been: a living graveyard where grass grew in the streets and mangy dogs scavenged among the rubbish; a necropolis peopled by cripples and beggars and imbeciles of a horror equal to any port in Italy or the Levant, but still perversely stuck on to the fringe of Central Europe: the slums of Naples without the gaiety. Increasingly depressed, I returned from the old Marine Academy—now a tumbledown “public hospital” of the kind that serves only as a sorting-house for the cemeteries—and stopped for a drink in a cafe that I had once known on the Riva Szapary, now rechristened the Via Vittorio Emmanuele or some­thing. As I stood at the bar I heard a voice from behind me.

“Tenente, non si me ricorda?” I turned around. I was quite unable to recognise him at first, this wretched creature with the eyepatch and the missing teeth, sitting at a table over a stagnant coffee with a crutch resting beside him. “Tenente, surely you remember me: your old enemy Oreste di Carraciolo, whom you helped escape that morning from under the rifles of the firing squad.”

I bought him a grappa, since he was quite clearly in great poverty. He gulped it greedily, then began to tell me what had happened in the years since we last met.

He had served with distinction for the rest of the war, he told me, scoring another eight victories, and had then returned to the studio after the Armistice, doing a wonderful trade for some time as the cities and towns of Italy vied with one another in the splendour of their war memorials. However, a measure of boredom had set in, and he had entered politics. He had returned to Fiume in 1919 with the poet-aviator Gabriele d’A

This had advanced his career as a sculptor no end: for five or six years he had been effectively artist-in-residence to Il Duce. But then, in the early 1930s, as the residual wartime idealism was replaced in the Fascist move­ment by blackjacks and castor oil, he had quarrelled with the leadership and finally been thrown out of the party. He had refused to be quiet, so in 1932 he had been summarily arrested by the Blackshirts and so sav­agely beaten up that he had lost an eye and been permanently lamed. Six months later they had released him, tipping what was left of him back on to the street. Since then he had been a non-person, avoided by everyone who cared for their health and deprived of all pensions and royalties. By a nice irony, his only source of income was a small monthly payment from the Austrian Republic, which had expropriated some family property in 1919 and was now paying compensation. He was understandably bitter about it all.

“Before the war,” he said, “our slogan here in Fiume was ‘Give us Italy or death.’ ” He swallowed at his drink. “And now do you know what we have? Italy and death.”

That was the last I ever saw of him. I read many years later that he had not let up in his denunciations of Mussolini and his followers, whom he believed had stolen and misdirected the Fascist movement. In the end they lost patience altogether. In 1942 I understand that he was arrested one night and taken to the concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Molata. Very few people ever came back from that dreadful place, and di Carraciolo was not among those who did.

Often I think that perhaps it would have been better if we had let them shoot him there that morning. His marvellous white-marble monu­ment would have been built, and each generation of Italian schoolchildren would now be taught about him as a great artist and patriot who died nobly for his people, not as a great artist and patriot who died miserably at the hands of his own people, after having helped bring to birth the cause which eventually devoured him.

13 LA SERENISSIMA

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