Possess the Air, page 21
“Fortunately, I have now found a magnificent German machine, capable of ten hours of flight, so I will no longer have refuelling problems,” he writes to his friend Giorgio La Piana at Harvard. Rome is within his reach. “For me, no joke, it’s a thousand times better, in every sense, to break one’s neck succeeding, then save it by giving up. From now on [Rome] has become for me like Cape Horn for the Flying Dutchman.”
Ruth, unable to refuse her lover, provides the money to buy the plane.
Friday, September 4
Ruth is ensconced in yet another small hotel. This one is in Starnberg, a town in the Bavarian lakes district, thirty kilometres southwest of Munich. She has had a few good weeks with Lauro this summer, entire days when she has been able to forget about his plan. During the day they would go on long bicycle rides in the Black Forest; in their room at night, they would take turns reading aloud, Lauro from a biography of the Risorgimento statesman Count Cavour—a hero for his role in unifying Italy—she from a collection of P.G. Wodehouse’s short stories. But now, her lover’s obsession is pushing her to the breaking point. He’s planned his flight for the following Monday, when the moon will be waning, but a problem with the release mechanism has forced him to put it off. Now he is often absent, splitting his time between Munich, Starnberg, and other small towns, hoping that constant movement will throw off any Fascist pursuers.
“I’ve gotten so superstitious,” she writes to her friend. “The delays and things that happen are fantastic and fate seems to mock us—illness of friends who promised to help—miscarriage of letters—fears of detection—bad weather—all added to my increasing fear and nearly exhausted patience. He is so wonderful—I bow before his spirit and nerve—and I cannot leave him. I can’t speak of the awful thoughts that nearly overwhelm me—I don’t see why he isn’t unnerved by the lack of faith and optimism and courage in me—so I fail in hiding it—but I still feel my presence helps—so I stay.”
On the rare nights they are together at Starnberg, Lauro continues to perfect the wording of the National Alliance leaflets, and writes to his friend in Brussels for advice on which airfield he should use in the south of France. (Ferrari replies with a coded telegram, cabling “Louis” to indicate Marignane, twenty kilometres north of Marseilles.)
Lauro also adds the final touches to an article he first started in June. It’s one he plans to mail to the world’s leading newspapers on the eve of his flight.
The title, which he hasn’t shared with Ruth, is “The Story of My Death.”
Monday, September 21
Lauro’s frustration continues to grow. The take-off has once again been delayed. The previous Thursday, Böhning and another pilot from the flying club, Max Rainer, successfully landed Pegasus at the airfield at Marignane. There, Lauro decided to have magnesium flares installed on the wingtips, which would provide the illumination necessary for a night landing. Without Lauro’s permission, the German pilots decided to test the flares, lighting up the airfield over Cannes, the very place from which the first Pegasus had left on its ill-fated flight to Corsica. Then a problem developed with the plane’s electrical-ignition system, forcing the pilots to fly back to Germany for repairs. Lauro returns to Munich, where he checks into a hotel near the central train station.
In Munich, at least, there is one piece of good news. The new run of his leaflets is complete. In August, Lauro approached a local publisher to ask Georg Hirth, AG, a fine-art typographer established by a founder of Germany’s Art Nouveau movement, to do a small print job for him. There are four separate texts. One is addressed to his “Majesty,” the King of Italy, entreating him to declare once and for all whether he is on the side of liberty, or of the oppressors who have made the Italian people into “servile sheep.” Another is addressed to members of the militia and the balilla, the Fascist youth movement, and urges the mothers of Italy: “Do not allow your sons to be torn from you at the age of eight years in order to be made into cannon fodder.” Two other leaflets enjoin Italians to imitate the Spanish, who have recently thrown off their oppressors by declaring a Republic, and to follow a ten-point program of resistance to the regime. The leaflets are six-by-eleven-centimetre rectangles, printed on translucent stock as thin as the paper used to roll cigarettes.
Neither the publisher nor the printer can speak Italian, but they are happy to accept money from this well-dressed Englishman, who, as the publisher later reports, “speaks German very badly.” After hastily reviewing the texts, Lauro packs 400,000 leaflets into a large suitcase. Back at the Fränkischer-Hof Hotel, he phones the German pilots, arranging to meet them at the Marignane airfield Friday of the following week.
Friday, October 2
At four in the afternoon, Lauro puts Ruth on a train to Cannes at the Gare Saint-Charles, Marseilles’ main train station. They have spent ten days together in Geneva and the French Alps, waiting for good weather and a dark night best suited for the flight. From Cannes, Ruth will travel to Paris to await news in a friend’s apartment.
Lauro walks down the stairs that cascade from the train station towards Marseilles’ old port, and checks into the Hôtel Terminus with his suitcase full of leaflets. At seven in the evening, he receives a call from Böhning, who has arrived with Rainer in Cannes after an uneventful flight. It is too late, he tells the Germans, for the take-off to happen that day. Lauro urges Rainer to arrive at Marignane the following morning: “Make sure the machine is here about ten o’clock!”
In his room that night, Lauro writes two letters to Ruth. The first he dispatches to Paris as soon as the ink is dry: “I have still on my lips the perfume of yours, and if I close my eyes I feel you so close as if I might hold you in my arms. I think I could live 100 years on the sweetness accumulated these days. What a bewitcher you are! If only Flaubert had known you!... I burn to go and be through with this thing. I feel absolutely sure of this success, and am not even excited about it. It has become almost a matter of ‘routine.’”
The second letter, though, he sends in care of Ferrari. His friend in Brussels is instructed to mail it only in case Lauro fails to return.
“You wanted me to play a role in the life of my country,” he writes to Ruth, “I can assure you that not even in 50 years of successful work I could have attained such a role. Wait and see! Not right away but I will become a symbol and achieve 100 times more this way than if I were alive… Be happy and continue your glorious life not as if something had been taken away from it, but as if something had been added… be happy. ‘Sta allegra’… and please love somebody else. I will consider it indirectly as love to me.”
Late into the night, he works on the final draft of “The Story of My Death,” which will be mailed to Ferrari the following morning. Like the youthful Icarus on the eve of his escape from Crete, he exults in the glory of the coming deed:
“Pegasus—my airplane’s name—has a red body and white wings; although it is as strong as eighty horses, it is as slim as a swallow. Drunk with fuel, it can leap in the sky like its ancient brother, but if it wants, at night, it knows how to glide through the air like a ghost… its former master is going to bring it to me on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, truly believing that it will serve the leisure hours of a young Englishman. My bad accent has not awakened his suspicions: may he forgive my ruse!”
As Icarus scorned the tyrant Minos, he condemns Mussolini and his regime:
“One cannot both admire Fascism and deplore its excesses. It can only exist because of its excesses. Its excesses are its logic. For Fascism, the logic of its existence is to exalt violence… they say that the murder of Matteotti was a mistake; from the Fascist point of view, it was a stroke of genius. They say that Fascism is wrong to use torture to extort confessions from its prisoners; but if it wants to live it cannot do otherwise. The foreign press must understand this. One cannot expect Fascism to become peaceful and human without desiring its complete annihilation.”
And, again like Icarus, who has been forewarned by his father Daedulus not to fly too close to the sun, Lauro is aware of the risks he’s taking:
“Though I have only done seven-and-a-half hours of solo flying, if I fall it will not be from lack of experience. My plane does only 150 kilometres an hour [sic], whereas those of Mussolini do 300. He has nine hundred of them, and they have all received the order to bring down at any cost, with machine-gun fire, any suspicious airplane. However little I may be known, they must know that after my first try, I have not given up. If my friend Balbo has done his duty, they are now there waiting for me. So much the better: I will be worth more dead than alive.”
He addresses the envelope to Ferrari, with instructions that, in case of his death, it is to be published in Le Soir in Brussels.
Saturday, October 3
It is a good day for flying, the German pilots agree, as they walk back to the Marignane airfield after a hearty lunch. A band of high pressure has passed, visibility is excellent, and the skies are brightening over the western Mediterranean. There is even a slight tailwind, which is good news for “Mr. Morris,” who leaps from a taxi at the airfield to greet them with a smile on his face. In the hangar, Lauro seems nervous as he empties several small bags of printed material into the front cockpit. Rainer, who goes off to look for a can of oil, attributes his agitation to the fact that it’s been three weeks since his last flight. He advises him to make at least one trial flight before setting off for Barcelona.
“I have no time!” Lauro tells him. “It will be all right.”
Böhning, meanwhile, inspects Pegasus. He estimates that, with the reserve tanks on the wings, the plane has an eight- to nine-hour range, plenty of time to circle Barcelona and fly back to Nice, which Lauro has told them is his final destination. He gives the Germans one thousand francs, about $40, enough for food and train tickets. He will meet them in Nice that evening, and they will enjoy a nice meal together.
“Don’t forget pumping the gasoline from the wing tank to the main tank in time,” Rainer urges Lauro. “Otherwise the engine will stop.”
Lauro seems calm as he straps on his silk parachute and lowers himself into the cockpit. He is wearing a rumpled business suit with a carefully buttoned vest, a neat bow tie, and goggles, and carries a glass bottle full of coffee. Rainer hands him a flashlight, a last-minute gift, and Lauro chuckles when the punctilious German advises him once again to pump the wing tanks.
Böhning and Rainer push Pegasus out of the hangar with the help of the taxi driver. Rainer turns the propeller by hand. When the engine catches, he shouts to Lauro: “Good bye, good luck and auf Wiedersehn at Nice tonight!”
Their client’s take-off, the Germans agree, is most excellent: rapid and smooth. They watch Pegasus rise, until it turns into a dot in the blue Mediterranean sky, and then set about packing their belongings into the taxi. They are not particularly worried about the airfield officials, who have been told their client is merely out for a pleasure spin. It is just after three o’clock. If all goes well, in a few hours they will be toasting his success with a late-night bottle of champagne.
PART IV
“I know of no other bomb than a book.”
–Stéphane Mallarmé
19
Bombarding the Boss
The weather in Rome on the evening of October 3, 1931 was gorgeous, indeed miraculously so. The sky, according to the bolletino meteorologico in the evening papers, was cloudless and “sereno,” with the mercury that afternoon rising to twenty-six degrees centigrade. It was warm enough that many were calling it an “estate di San Martino”—a St. Martin’s Summer—after Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier in Gaul who was said to have made the heavens clear, and the summer heat return, after giving his cloak to a shivering beggar. Though life was now hard for many—a million out of work across the country, the price of bread at an unheard of 2.25 lire a kilogram, twice what the unemployed received in benefits per day—the people of Rome were still able to enjoy the timeless pleasure of the passeggiata. Families were out on their evening strolls, inspecting the windows of the elegant shops on the Corso, or staring at the live she-wolf, the symbol of Rome, that paced in a cage midway up the stairs leading to Michelangelo’s piazza atop the Capitoline.
Even for an unseasonably warm Saturday, the streets were unusually busy. Since the previous afternoon, columns of blackshirted teenage boys—the so-called “rapid divisions” of the Fascist Youth—had been pouring in from the six regions of central Italy through the city gates, after crossing the campagna on motorcycles, horseback, and racing bicycles. They would assemble over the next few days at the “Campo Mussolini,” a tent city set up on the vacant land between the Vatican and the new Fascist sports complex rising on the right bank of the Tiber. The climax of the event was to come the following Thursday, when Il Duce himself would address forty thousand members of the Fasci giovanili on the first anniversary of the movement’s founding. While they waited, the boisterous youths thronged the bars and cafés, and made the piazze echo with choruses of “Giovinezza.”
Outside the Palazzo Venezia, the piazza beneath Il Duce’s balcony resounded with the fall of the pick-axes of labourers, busy reducing another nineteenth-century tenement to rubble. The work continued the “isolation” of the Vittoriano monument, part of the newly announced Master Plan of 1931, which set out to erase “the stain of material and moral misery” by creating new neighbourhood-clearing boulevards to serve a city with a projected population of two million, double its current size. The demolitions—which could continue on weekends now that unions had been outlawed—were done without the benefit of dredges or steam shovels, all part of Mussolini’s aim to boost employment by favouring hand-labour over costly mechanization.
On Via Nazionale, the broad avenue leading from the Piazza Venezia to Termini Station, crowds were lining up outside Palazzo delle Esposizioni, where two days earlier, the first Mostra d’arte coloniale had been inaugurated. For the occasion, the neo-classical palace had been transformed into a showcase for the art of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Italian Somaliland, and Italy’s other colonial possessions in Africa. Beneath the arches of the portico, the zaptié—native gendarmes dressed in hooded red burnoose—stood at attention with unsheathed sabres raised. Within, the palazzo’s rotunda had been turned into a replica of a Bedouin tent, and visitors wandered through a simulation of an African souk, where dark-skinned natives squatted around hookahs and fez-wearing weavers laboured over looms. Mussolini and the king had been given a lengthy tour, pausing before paintings of bare-breasted maidens and lingering in the Futurist room, which featured African-inspired works by Marinetti’s wife, Benedetta Cappa. The exhibition made Fascist Italy’s vision of North Africa as a colonial dependency of the Third Rome abundantly clear.
Also present at the inauguration was Lauro’s old friend Italo Balbo, recently returned from his successful seaplane raid on Rio de Janeiro. As Under-Secretary for Air, he had welcomed “the natural marriage between chemical weapons and the sky” in Africa. Within two years, he would be named Governor General of Libya, where he would go on to oversee the aerial deployment of poison gas over the holy city of Kufra. Fascism, having consolidated its hold over the Italian peninsula and chased out or banished its Communist and Socialist enemies, was ready to renew the most shameful project of nineteenth-century Liberalism: the subjugation of the people of Africa for material gain.
For most Romans, though, it was just another Saturday, a day of leisure to wander the streets or escape their cares for an hour or two in one of Rome’s sixty movie theatres. Most of the movies were German or Italian productions, preceded by mandatory newsreels from the state film institute Luce extolling the latest Fascist triumphs in aviation, city-building, and engineering. Exceptions were made for a few of Hollywood’s lighter diversions. At the Modernissimo in the Corso Umberto I, people were humming along to the talkie The Big Pond—retitled “La Conquista dell’America” for Italian audiences—featuring Maurice Chevalier as a Venetian tour guide who sings his way into the affections of an American heiress and ends up working in her father’s chewing-gum factory. At the Cinema Vittoria in Testaccio, women admired Rudolph Valentino as he glowered beneath a fur cap as a lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Guard in The Eagle. And at the Excelsior in Via Cavour, Mussolini’s favourite comic duo, Laurel and Hardy, were mugging and simpering their way through a pair of two-reelers.
On the Janiculum Hill, a few fellows from the American Academy had joined couples and families who had wandered up from the streets of Trastevere to watch the sun set over the Alban Hills. The Depression was taking its toll on enrolment at the Academy, which had fallen from a high of 66 fellows and students in 1929 to its present low of a few dozen. Those that had chosen to cross the Atlantic were unnerved by growing evidence of xenophobia in the streets; excursions into the city were made less appealing by the challenging stares of swaggering Fascist youth and the conspicuous eavesdropping of waiters. Some chose to remain in their studios, or, as on this pleasant evening, confine their walks to the serpentine streets around the Academy.
Those who had adventured out looked with interest at the dot that appeared in the western sky. Aircraft had lately become a rare sight in the skies over Rome, as Balbo had temporarily suspended night patrols to spare the air ministry’s budget after the previous month’s intensive manoeuvres.
