Numero Zero

Umberto Eco, Richard Dixon

• Publisher: HarperVia
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780544811836
• eBook ISBN: 9780544635098
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The worldwide bestselling novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder from the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery ¶ #1 bestseller in Italy ¶ 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can't resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor's paranoid theory that Mussolini's corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It's the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He's working on it. It's all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, murder—and clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II, from Mussolini to Berlusconi, that will keep readers turning the pages as the novel's thrilling plot unfolds.

9

Friday, April 24

WORK WENT SLOWLY THAT WEEK. No one seemed eager to do very much, including Simei. On the other hand, twelve issues in a year isn’t the same as one a day. I read the first drafts of the articles, tried to give them a uniformity of style and to discourage overly elaborate expressions. Simei approved: “We’re doing journalism here, not literature.”

“By the way,” chipped in Costanza, “this fashion for cell phones is on the increase. Yesterday someone next to me on the train was rambling on about his bank transactions, I learned all about him. People are going crazy. We ought to do a lifestyle piece about it.”

“The whole business of cell phones can’t last,” declared Simei. “First, they cost a fortune and only a few can afford them. Second, people will soon discover it isn’t so essential to telephone everyone at all times. They’ll lose the enjoyment of private, face-to-face conversation, and at the end of the month they’ll discover their phone bill is running out of control. It’s a fashion that’s going to fizzle out in a year, two at most. Cell phones, for now, are useful only to adulterous husbands, and perhaps plumbers. But no one else. So for our readers, most of whom don’t have cell phones, a lifestyle piece is of no interest. And those who have them couldn’t care less, or rather, they’d just regard us as snobs, as radical chic.”

“Not only that,” I said. “Remember that Rockefeller, Agnelli, and the president of the United States don’t need cell phones, they have teams of secretaries to look after them. So people will soon realize that only second-raters use them—those poor folk who have to keep in touch with the bank to make sure they’re not overdrawn, or with the boss who’s checking up on them. And so cell phones will become a symbol of social inferiority, and no one will want them.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Maia. “It’s like prêt-à-porter, or like wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a scarf: they can be worn just as easily by a woman who’s high society or working class, except in the latter case she doesn’t know how to match them, or she’ll only be seen in brand-new jeans and not those worn at the knee, and she will wear them with high heels, and you can see right away there’s nothing stylish about her. But she doesn’t know it and happily carries on wearing her ill-matched garments.”

“And as she’ll be reading Domani—we hope—we can tell her she’s not a lady. And she has a husband who’s second-rate or an adulterer. And there again, perhaps Commendator Vimercate is thinking of checking out cell phone companies, and we’ll be doing him a fine service. In short, the question is either irrelevant or too hot to handle. Let’s leave it. It’s like the business of the computer. Here the Commendatore has given us one each, and they’re useful for writing or storing information, though I’m old school and never know what to do with them. Most of our readers are like me and have no use for them because they have no information to store. We’ll end up giving our readers inferiority complexes.”

Having abandoned the subject of electronics, we set about rereading an article that had been duly corrected, and Braggadocio said, “‘Moscow’s anger’? Isn’t it banal to always use such emphatic expressions—the president’s anger, pensioners’ rage, and so on and on?”

“No,” I said, “these are precisely the expressions readers expect, that’s what newspapers have accustomed them to. Readers understand what’s going on only if you tell them we’re in a no-go situation, the government is forecasting blood and tears, the road is all uphill, the Quirinal Palace is ready for war, Craxi is shooting point-blank, time is pressing, should not be taken for granted, no room for bellyaching, we’re in deep water, or better still, we’re in the eye of the storm. Politicians don’t just say or state emphatically—they roar. And the police act with professionalism.”

“Do we really always have to talk about professionalism?” asked Maia. “Everyone here is a professional. A master builder who puts up a wall that hasn’t collapsed is certainly acting professionally, but professionalism ought to be the norm, and we should only be talking about the dodgy builder who puts up a wall that does collapse. When I call the plumber and he unblocks the sink, I’m pleased, of course, and I say well done, thanks, but I don’t say he acted professionally. And you don’t expect him to behave like Joe Piper in the Mickey Mouse story. This insistence on professionalism, that it’s something special, makes it sound as if people are generally lousy workers.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “Readers think that people generally are lousy workers, which is why we need examples of professionalism—it’s a more technical way of saying that everything’s gone well. The police have caught the chicken thief—and they’ve acted with professionalism.”

“But it’s like calling John XXIII the Good Pope. This presupposes the popes before him were bad.”

“Maybe that’s what people actually thought, otherwise he wouldn’t have been called good. Have you seen a photo of Pius XII? In a James Bond movie he’d have been the head of SPECTRE.”

“But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit.”

“That’s right. Newspapers teach people how to think,” Simei said.

“But do newspapers follow trends or create trends?”

“They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don’t know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let’s not get too involved in philosophy—we’re professionals. Carry on, Colonna.”

“Good,” I said. “Now let me go on with my list. We need to have our cake and eat it, keep our finger on the pulse, take to the field, be in the spotlight, make the best of a bad job. Once out of the tunnel, once the goose is cooked, nothing gets in our way, we keep our eyes peeled, a needle in a haystack, the tide turns, television takes the lion’s share and leaves just the crumbs, we’re getting back on track, listening figures have plummeted, give a strong signal, an ear to the ground, emerging in bad shape, at three hundred and sixty degrees, a nasty thorn in the side, the party’s over . . . And above all, apologize. The Anglican Church apologizes to Darwin, Virginia apologizes for the ordeal of slavery, the electric company apologizes for the power cuts, the Canadian government officially apologizes to the Inuit people. You mustn’t say the Church has revised its original position on the rotation of the Earth but rather that the pope apologizes to Galileo.”

Maia clapped her hands and said, “It’s true, I could never understand whether this vogue for apologizing is a sign of humility or of impudence: you do something you shouldn’t have done, then you apologize and wash your hands of it. It reminds me of the old joke about a cowboy riding across the prairie who hears a voice from heaven telling him to go to Abilene, then at Abilene the voice tells him to go into the saloon and put all his money on number five. Tempted by the voice, he obeys, number eighteen comes up, and the voice murmurs, Too bad, we’ve lost.”

We laughed and then moved on. We had to examine and discuss Lucidi’s piece on the events concerning the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, and this took a good half hour. Afterward, in a sudden act of generosity, Simei ordered coffee for everyone from the bar downstairs. Maia, who was sitting between me and Braggadocio, said, “I would do the opposite. I mean, if the newspaper were for a more sophisticated readership, I’d like to do a column that says the opposite.”

“That says the opposite of Lucidi?” asked Braggadocio.

“No, no, what are you talking about? I mean the opposite of commonplaces.”

“We were talking about that more than half an hour ago,” said Braggadocio.

“All right, but I was still thinking about it.”

“We weren’t,” said Braggadocio.

Maia didn’t appear to be too upset by the objection and shrugged us off: “I mean the opposite of the eye of the storm or the minister who thunders. For example, Venice is the Amsterdam of the South, sometimes imagination exceeds reality, given that I’m a racist, hard drugs are the first step toward smoking joints, don’t make yourself at home, let’s stand on ceremony, those who pursue pleasure are always happy, I may be senile but I’m not old, Greek is all math to me, success has gone to my head, Mussolini did a lot of bad after all, Paris is horrid though Parisians are nice, in Rimini everyone stays on the beach and never sets foot in the clubs.”

“Yes, and a whole mushroom was poisoned by one family. Where do you get all this garbage?” asked Braggadocio.

“From a book that came out a few months ago,” said Maia. “Excuse me, they’re no good for Domani. No one would ever guess them. Perhaps it’s time to go home.”

“Listen,” Braggadocio muttered to me afterward, “let’s go, I’m dying to tell you something.”

Half an hour later we were on our way to Taverna Moriggi, though as we walked there Braggadocio mentioned nothing about his revelations. Instead, he said, “You must have noticed that something’s wrong with Maia. She’s autistic.”

“Autistic? But autistic people keep closed up in themselves, don’t they? Why do you say she’s autistic?”

“I read about an experiment on the early symptoms of autism. Suppose you’re in a room with me and Pierino, a child who is autistic. You tell me to hide a small ball and then to leave. I put it into a bowl. Once I’ve left, you take the ball from the bowl and put it into a drawer. Then you ask Pierino: When Signor Braggadocio returns, where will he look for the ball? And Pierino will say: In the drawer, no? In other words, Pierino won’t think that in my mind the ball is still in the bowl, because in his mind it’s already in the drawer. Pierino can’t put himself in someone else’s position, he thinks that everyone is thinking what he’s thinking.”

“But that’s not autism.”

“I don’t know, perhaps it’s a mild form of autism, like touchiness being the first stage of paranoia. But that’s how Maia is—she can’t see the other person’s point of view, she thinks everyone’s thinking like her. Didn’t you notice the other day, at a certain point she said that he had nothing to do with it, and this ‘he’ was someone we’d been talking about an hour earlier. She was still thinking about him, or he’d returned to her thoughts at that moment, but it didn’t occur to her that we might have stopped thinking about him. She’s mad, I tell you. And watch her as she talks, like an oracle—”

This sounded like nonsense and I cut him short: “Those who play oracles are always mad. Maybe she’s descended from the Cumaean Sibyl.”

We had reached the tavern. Braggadocio got to the point.

“I’ve got my hands on a scoop that would sell a hundred thousand copies of Domani, if only it was already on sale. In fact, I want some advice. Should I give what I’m investigating to Simei or try to sell it to another newspaper, to a real one? It’s dynamite, involves Mussolini.”

“It doesn’t sound like a story of great topical interest.”

“The topical interest is the discovery that someone has been deceiving us, in fact lots of people. In fact, they’ve all been deceiving us.”

“In what sense?”

“A long story. All I have for now is a theory, and with no car I can’t get where I have to go to interview the surviving witnesses. Let’s start with the facts as we all know them, then I’ll tell you why my theory is reasonable.”

Braggadocio did no more than summarize what he described as the commonly accepted story, which, according to him, was just too simple to be true.

So, the Allies have broken through the Gothic Line and are moving north toward Milan. The war is now lost, and on April 18, 1945, Mussolini leaves Lake Garda and arrives in Milan, where he takes refuge in the headquarters of the city prefect. He again consults his ministers about possible resistance in a Valtellina fortress. He’s now ready for the end. Two days later he gives the last interview of his life to the last of his faithful followers, Gaetano Cabella, who directed the last Fascist newspaper, the Popolo di Alessandria. On April 22 he makes his last speech to some officials of the Republican Guard, saying, “If the fatherland is lost, life is not worth living.”

Over the next few days the Allies reach Parma, Genoa is liberated, and finally, on the fateful morning of April 25, workers occupy the factories of Sesto San Giovanni. In the afternoon, together with some of his men, including General Graziani, Mussolini is received by Cardinal Schuster at the Archbishop’s Palace, where he meets a delegation from the National Liberation Committee. The Liberation Committee demands unconditional surrender, warning that even the Germans have begun negotiating with them. The Fascists (the last are always the most desperate) refuse to accept ignominious surrender, ask for time to think, and leave.

That evening the Resistance leaders can wait no longer for their adversaries to make up their minds, and give the order for a general insurrection. That is when Mussolini escapes toward Como, with a convoy of faithful followers.

His wife, Rachele, has arrived in Como with their son and daughter, Romano and Anna Maria, but inexplicably, Mussolini refuses to meet them.

“Why?” asked Braggadocio. “Was he waiting to meet his mistress? But Claretta Petacci hadn’t yet arrived, so what would it have cost him to see his family for ten minutes? Remember this point—it’s what first aroused my suspicions.”

Mussolini regarded Como as a safe base, as it was said there were few partisans in the vicinity and he could hide there until the Allies arrived. Indeed, Mussolini’s real problem was how to avoid falling into the hands of the partisans and to surrender to the Allies, who would have given him a proper trial, then time would tell. Or perhaps he thought that from Como he could get to the Valtellina, where faithful supporters such as Alessandro Pavolini were reassuring him he could organize a powerful resistance with several thousand men.

“But at this point he leaves Como. And try explaining to me the toing and froing of that ill-fated convoy, I can’t figure it out either, and for the purposes of my investigation it’s of little importance precisely where they come or go. Let’s say that they head toward Menaggio, in an attempt to reach Switzerland, then the convoy reaches Cardano, where it’s joined by Claretta Petacci, and a German escort appears that has received orders from Hitler to take his friend to Germany (maybe an aircraft would be waiting at Chiavenna to fly him safely to Bavaria). Someone suggests it’s not possible to get to Chiavenna, so the convoy returns to Menaggio and, during the night, Pavolini arrives. He is supposed to be bringing military support but has only seven or eight men from the Republican National Guard with him. The Duce feels he is being hunted down and that the only option, rather than resistance in the Valtellina, is for him, along with Fascist Party leaders and their families, to join a German column trying to cross the Alps. There are twenty-eight truckloads of soldiers, with machine guns on each truck, and a column of Italians consisting of an armored car and ten or so civilian vehicles. But at Musso, just before Dongo, the column comes upon men from the Puecher detachment of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade. There are only a few of them; their commander is known as ‘Pedro,’ Count Pier Luigi Bellini delle Stelle, and the political commissar is ‘Bill,’ Urbano Lazzaro. Pedro is impulsive and starts bluffing. He convinces the Germans that the mountainside around them is teeming with partisans and threatens to order the firing of mortars, which in fact are still in German hands. He realizes that the German commandant is attempting to resist, but the soldiers are frightened. All they want is to save their skin and get back home, so he becomes increasingly aggressive. In short, after much shilly-shallying and tiresome negotiations, which I will spare you, Pedro persuades the Germans not only to surrender, but to abandon the Italians who were dragging along behind them. And only in this way could they proceed to Dongo, where they would have to undergo a general search. In short, the Germans treat their allies abominably, but skin is skin.”

Pedro asks for the Italians to be handed over to his jurisdiction, not only because he’s sure they are Fascist leaders, but also because it’s rumored that Mussolini himself might be among them. Pedro is not sure what to think. He negotiates terms with the commander of the armored vehicle, Francesco Barracu, undersecretary to the prime minister (of the defunct Italian Social Republic), a wounded war veteran who boasts a military gold medal and who makes a favorable impression on Pedro. Barracu wants to head for Trieste, where he proposes to save the city from the Yugoslav invasion. Pedro politely suggests he is mad—he would never reach Trieste, and if he did, he would find himself alone against Tito’s army—so Barracu asks if he can turn back and rejoin Graziani, God only knows where. In the end, Pedro (having searched the armored vehicle and found no Mussolini) agrees to let them turn around, because he doesn’t want to get involved in a skirmish that could draw the Germans back. But as he goes off to deal with another matter, he orders his men to make sure the armored vehicle actually does turn around—should it move even two meters forward they must open fire. What happens then is anyone’s guess: either the armored vehicle accelerated forward, shooting, or it was moving ahead simply to turn around and the partisans became nervous and opened fire. There’s a brief exchange of shots, two Fascists dead and two partisans wounded. The passengers in the armored vehicle and those in the cars are arrested. Among them Pavolini, who tries to escape by throwing himself into the lake, but he is caught and put back with the others, soaked to the skin.

At this point Pedro receives a message from Bill in Dongo. While they are searching the trucks of the German column, Bill is called over by Giuseppe Negri, a partisan who tells him in dialect, “Ghè chi el Crapun,” the big baldhead was there; that is, the strange soldier with the helmet, sunglasses, and greatcoat collar turned up was none other than Mussolini. Bill investigates, the strange soldier plays dumb, but he is finally unmasked. It actually is him, the Duce, and Bill—not sure what to do—tries to measure up to the historic moment and says, “In the name of the Italian people, I arrest you.” He takes him to the town hall.

Meanwhile at Musso, in one of the carloads of Italians, there are two women, two children, and a man who claims to be the Spanish consul and has an important meeting in Switzerland with an unspecified British agent. But his papers look false, and he is put under arrest.

Pedro and his men are making history, but don’t at first seem aware of it. Their only concern is to keep public order, to prevent a lynching, to reassure the prisoners that not a hair on their heads will be touched, that they will be handed over to the Italian government as soon as arrangements can be made. And indeed, on the afternoon of April 27, Pedro manages to telephone the news of the arrest to Milan, and then the National Liberation Committee comes into the picture. It had just received a telegram from the Allies demanding that the Duce and all members of the Social Republic government be handed over, in accordance with a clause in the armistice signed in 1943 between Badoglio and Eisenhower. (“Benito Mussolini, his chief Fascist associates . . . who now or in the future are in territory controlled by the Allied Military Command or by the Italian Government, will forthwith be apprehended and surrendered into the hands of the United Nations.”) And it was said that an aircraft was due to land at Bresso Airport to collect the dictator. The Liberation Committee was convinced that Mussolini, in the hands of th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Saturday, June 6, 1992, 8 a.m.
• Monday, April 6, 1992
• Tuesday, April 7
• Wednesday, April 8
• Friday, April 10
• Wednesday, April 15
• Wednesday, April 15, Evening
• Friday, April 17
• Friday, April 24
• Sunday, May 3
• Friday, May 8
• Monday, May 11
• Late May
• Wednesday, May 27
• Thursday, May 28
• Saturday, June 6
• Saturday, June 6, Noon
• Thursday, June 11
• Read More from Umberto Eco
• About the Author