A Civil War (148 page)

In Bergamo ‘no one has ever given any thought to the work women should be doing, through the usual incomprehension', and if anything the
ceto medio
had been approached, not the factories or country areas.
¹⁵⁸
In Padua, to support his appeal ‘to put a stop to bourgeois and Fascist prejudices' against women, a party envoy felt compelled to recall that women are gifted with ‘admirable reserves of energy' and constitute ‘50 percent of the human race'.
¹⁵⁹
Another leader urged: ‘
Compagne
, react against the Social Democratic tendencies of some of your comrades who still can't conceive that Italian women are worth as much as the women of the Soviet Union and the Balkans.'
¹⁶⁰

‘I don't do woman's work', was how a Communist answered a woman comrade who had asked him to wash the dishes: ‘Gina was saying to him, “From now on you can stop calling yourself commander because you don't deserve it”, when I, a member of the ferocious bourgeoisie, turned up and did the job for her.'
Artom, who was there on the scene, declared his sympathy for Gina, even if he was keen to make it clear that ‘she has the fanatical mentality common to women who busy themselves with politics'. Nevertheless, Artom was at least scrupulous enough to ask himself whether this view of his stemmed from misogyny or anti-Communism.
¹⁶¹

Rarely then was there coherence between the solemn declarations of women's rights
¹⁶²
and relations between the sexes as they were actually practised. At times a simple adjustment to common practice prevailed, which an Umbrian partisan has expressed in the following words: ‘What can you do, do you want to check every man? If one wants to go about nitpicking …'
¹⁶³
The old practice of transposing into play what rigour denied in principle could moreover show its face again. The rigid Tersilla Fenoglio tells of the game, played with the ‘boys', of ‘rape trials. What wild laughter there was!' Once, when, in the clutches of a ‘colossal Lombard', she was screaming ‘he's raping me!', in came the political commissar, who, when informed about what was going on, ‘ruled
omnia munda mundis
[to the pure all things are pure] and went off like an old priest'.
¹⁶⁴

But there were also relations between men and women inspired by a higher morality which repudiated both asceticism and laxity, and gave a glimpse of the conquest of love as a choice freely made. Anna Cinanni has spoken of the discussions about free love made in the ‘Fronte della gioventù' during the period of clandestinity.
¹⁶⁵
There is some indication of this in the letter in which ‘an Italian woman' accuses Fascism of having reduced her to ‘an instrument of procreation', and in the condemnation of ‘bourgeois prejudices that would have the woman either as a beast of burden or a lapdog'.
¹⁶⁶
A similar formula – woman as ‘an instrument of pleasure or an instrument of luxury' – is stigmatised in the manifesto of one of the minor parties.
¹⁶⁷

In the Resistance there were also traces of that tradition of the rebel woman which, although broken after the Paris Commune had, at least partly, acquired a new lease on life among the women factory workers.
¹⁶⁸
The struggles waged by
women workers since before Fascism may in fact be seen as a connecting link with the Resistance struggles.
¹⁶⁹
And these struggles were interpreted even by a partisan commander as ‘an act of rebellion against national tradition and the moralistic mentality of our country'
¹⁷⁰
– a tradition and a mentality which had a death camp survivor compelled to hear these words addressed to her by her husband and nephew: ‘If you hadn't got yourself involved in certain things no one would have come to get you', and ‘You asked for it; if you'd stayed at home knitting …'.
¹⁷¹

On one point sexual morality and political morality came face to face: that of how women who had relations with the enemy were to be judged, not only in the sense of sexual relations but also in the other sense that any contact they had with the enemy was to be classed as both treason and impurity.

Attitudes varied widely here. An enlightened Gappist, Elio Cicchetti, prevented two girls from being executed only because they flirted with the Germans (though later they were executed because they were found to be spies): ‘Certainly they deserved to be given a thick ear as a lesson in dignity, but we didn't want our mission to sink to the level of moralistic exercises, which seemed rather more the task of the vice squad than of a formation of combatants.'
¹⁷²

An Action Party pamphlet said: ‘For women who keep accompany with Germans, unworthy of the name either of woman or of Italian – contempt and humiliating, exemplary punishments.'
¹⁷³
La Voce delle donne
, organ of the ‘Gruppi di difesa della donna' denounced the ‘brazen females who sink so low as to fall into the hands of our tyrants … Does it not occur to these wretches that the hands that caress them are still stained with Italian blood?'
¹⁷⁴

The enemy's women could only be whores – this was a view widely held by partisans and Fascists alike. A Garibaldino document speaks of an ‘ardent Fascist … notorious also for her private conduct, who denounced people in the
questura
'.
¹⁷⁵

The partisans often associated sexual corruption with Nazi-Fascist ferocity. When Rosanna Rolando was arrested and taken to the Sitea hotel in Turin, headquarters of the RAU (Reparto arditi ufficiali), she recalls that ‘in front of my
bedroom there was the night-club; they were up until two in the morning drinking and dancing with their mistresses'.
¹⁷⁶

Head-shaving became the act that symbolically summed up the punishment to be inflicted on the woman enemy. There was nothing new about this practice. The paratroopers of the Royal Army had adopted it for the young men they regarded as draft-dodgers, in order to emphasise and humiliate their effeminacy.
¹⁷⁷
The RSI Fascists did no less: they shaved the head of a girl who had danced with the partisan ‘Pillo' (Paolo Spriano).
¹⁷⁸
There seem to have been cases of girls shaved twice – first by the Germans, then by the partisans.
¹⁷⁹
Quazza recalls the head-shaving inflicted on four female spies (given the accusation, a mild enough punishment) and on four young men and four women ‘for having relations with the Germans'.
¹⁸⁰
Two Veneto parish priests justified, as ‘harsh lessons', the complete head-shaving of women who had gone to bed with Germans.
¹⁸¹
As early as 15 December 1943 the Rome edition of
L'Unità
was announcing that the few women who kept company with the Germans were coming to the North with their heads shaven down to nothing.
¹⁸²
In the days of the insurrection mass head-shaving became a practice above all against the women auxiliaries of the Fascist army.
L'Unità
published two photographs side by side with the caption: ‘Our combatant comrades and the so-called auxiliaries', also defined as ‘ausiliarie-spie'.
¹⁸³

Attitudes towards sexual morals also indicate a more general way of living the Resistance experience, revealing as they do profound and differentiated tendencies.

At a meeting of Communists at the 3
^rd
Lombardia Aliotta division, a trial was improvised against Italo, who frequented ‘the house of a certain “mamma” with girls'. His prosecutors were the elderly and rigid militant Riccardo and the neophyte intellectual Albero. Albero warned: ‘The Communists must give an example concerning everything, and therefore
dongiovannismo
[Don Giovanni-ism] as well. If we set a bad example, how will we be able to reprimand the
Garibaldini?' Italo was backed by Piero, according to whom, ‘when the men are off duty it doesn't do to be excessively moralistic'. Italo was accused of being too light-hearted and flippant, and on this point his defence was: ‘I don't take the mickey, but I have fun; life should be taken merrily', to which another who was present, Mascheroni, retorted: ‘Being merry is often the cause of inconclusiveness at meetings. One needs to be serious.' But Italo was not to be beaten: ‘Even at meetings you can joke and laugh. And besides, I'm not the only one.'
¹⁸⁴

This expostulation and reply gives some idea of the relationship between
severità
and
allegria
, whatever might have prompted the latter, in a situation that permitted no slackening of tension. The commissar Michele reprimanded commanders who participated in dances and ‘little parties'.
¹⁸⁵
Alongside the appeal to reasons of security, there appears at times, in these reproaches, the tendency to involve in the condemnation of rich people who were living it up in the midst of tragedy, those who, among the partisans, did not seem equal to their role. At work in these cases is the memory, in a new guise, of the age-old conviction that the poor have been deprived even of the possibility of enjoying life: this fact should be a cause for pride at a time when they were struggling to reverse this state of affairs. Witness the contempt with which what was going on in the hotels of Madesimo was denounced, where ‘the pleasure-seeking folk of Milanese and local high society had got together, and, in utter disregard of the sufferings of the population, were living it up.'
¹⁸⁶

Also linked to the question of the personal dignity of those invested with a noble mission was the reproof of ‘ferocious bickering even over access to drinking water', of down-market bravado, of useless ‘multi-coloured ribbons and frills', of personal dirtiness, inadmissible ‘even if one's clothes are in tatters and one's feet are bare'.
¹⁸⁷

‘It is not dirtiness and slovenliness', says another document ‘that distinguishes the partisan – a conscientious combatant of the people and of liberty – from the Fascist mercenary, but the care and propriety of his person, even in the difficult situation he is in, which attracts prestige and general respect.'
¹⁸⁸

All the same, it would be mistaken to conclude that the ideal of the perfect partisan was embodied in a type of human being rigid and severe to the point of
surliness. What I have in mind here are not the numerous and well-documented somewhat mannered invitations to be good-humoured, which smack rather too much of the ‘santa allegria' of Catholic moralism. Nor do I mean to stress the gap (a hallmark of the Communists, but present in the Actionists as well) between the man of today – the severe and inflexible militant – and the man of tomorrow, who alone will be allowed to enjoy a life in joyous expansion. My purpose, rather, is to recall the theme of the ‘Resistance for man's happiness' (the formula that Simone de Beauvoir, in
The Mandarins
, puts into the mouth of one of her characters) – a happiness that can be partially anticipated insofar as the cost of conquering it is in itself a bearer of hope and even of gaiety. ‘I wish to make it known that there is no melancholy among the partisans' – these words appear written on a mural newspaper.
¹⁸⁹

Roberto Battaglia, in his book of memoirs, put this point well. On the eve of his wedding, a partisan blows up a factory commandeered by the Germans. His reply to the question ‘Why did you do it?' is: ‘Just like that … for fun … I was about to get married.' Battaglia speaks of the ‘light-hearted and jokey wind of folly' that was rustling through the partisans, and remarks: ‘Almost as if the Italian need to reacquire, after so much indifference or meanness or selfishness, a mobile and light childlike spirit before reality so as to know how to live and die without emphasis.'
¹⁹⁰

The literature about the free zones has brought to light how a sudden and almost incredulous
joie de vivre
broke forth in those zones. In the precocious zone of Visso, in the Marche, Battaglia found an inebriating atmosphere; he felt ‘cheered by the environment', invested with a ‘new warm-heartedness'.
¹⁹¹
Ada Gobetti, during the first occupation of the Val Germanasca, was caught up in a climate of
allegra complicità
, almost holiday-like and almost playful, a climate of normality and serenity.
¹⁹²
In the Republic of Montefiorino, the Catholic Gorrieri was struck by the excessive number of dances and of women, which seemed to him to be dangerous phenomena, comparable to the ‘flaunting of red'.
¹⁹³
In the
free zone of Cascia (February 1944) the festivities that were taking place inspired a Dutch colonel who had taken refuge there to remark: ‘This is how we should live, given what is befalling us.' Portelli observed (though his comment cannot be taken as generally applicable): ‘A liberated zone, like a festivity, is a protected space where new relations flourish; an upside-down world where workers and peasants feel they have power (and the fear that it is precarious only reinforces its festive connotation).'

A partisan fighting in the same zone remarks in turn: ‘We can't always be thinking in terms of shooting'; merry-making is necessary ‘especially for the young, to soothe their spirits … otherwise one might go barmy'. Before the indecision of the inhabitants of Leonessa, another small town which had been liberated, Portelli's observation is this: ‘The very gap between the facts and the version we are given of them gives voice to the dream of the free zone as a fragment of a future already achieved.'
¹⁹⁴

The
resistenti
experienced their connection both with anti-Fascism and with Fascism as a relationship between generations.