Numero Zero by Umberto Eco Page A

of the De Maria family, take Mussolini and Petacci, drive them to a lane in Giulino di Mezzegra, where he orders them out. It seems that Mussolini first imagines Valerio has come to free him, and only then does he realize what awaits him. Valerio pushes him against the railings and reads the sentence, trying (he would later say) to separate Mussolini from Claretta, who remains desperately clinging to her lover. Valerio tries to shoot, the machine gun jams, he asks Lampredi for another, and fires five bursts. He would later say that Petacci suddenly moved into the line of fire and was killed by mistake. It’s the twenty-eighth of April.
    â€œWe know all this from Valerio’s account. Mussolini, according to him, ended up as a husk of humanity, though legend would subsequently claim he pulled open his greatcoat shouting, ‘Aim for the heart!’ No one really knows what happened in that lane apart from the executioners, who would later be manipulated by the Communist Party.”
    Valerio returns to Dongo and organizes the shooting of all the other Fascist leaders. Barracu asks not to be shot in the back but is shoved into the group. Valerio also puts Marcello Petacci among them, but the other condemned men protest, they regard him as a traitor, and it’s anyone’s guess what that individual had really been up to. It is then decided to shoot him separately. Once the others have been shot, Petacci breaks free and runs off toward the lake. He’s caught but manages to free himself once again, dives into the water, swimming desperately, and is finished off by machine-gun fire and rifle shots. Later Pedro, who refused to let his men take part in the execution, arranges for the corpse to be fished out and put onto the same truck as the others. The truck is dispatched to Giulino to pick up the bodies of the Duce and Claretta. Then off to Milan, where on April 29 they are all dumped in Piazzale Loreto, the same place where the corpses of partisans shot almost a year before had been dumped—the Fascist militia had left them out in the sun for a whole day, preventing the families from collecting the remains.
    At this point Braggadocio took my arm, grasping it so firmly that I had to pull away. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m about to reach the core of my problem. Listen carefully. The last time Mussolini was seen in public by people who knew him was the afternoon at the Archbishop’s Palace in Milan. From that point on, he traveled only with his closest followers. And from the moment he was picked up by the Germans, then arrested by the partisans, none of those who had dealings with him had known him personally. They had seen him only in photographs or in propaganda films, and the photographs of the last two years showed him so thin and worn that it was rumored he was no longer himself. I told you about the last interview with Cabella, on April 20, which Mussolini checked and signed on the twenty-second, you remember? Well, Cabella notes in his memoirs: ‘I immediately observed that Mussolini was in excellent health, contrary to rumors circulating. He was in far better health than the last time I’d seen him. That was in December 1944, on the occasion of his speech at Lirico. On the previous occasions he had received me—in February, in March, and in August of ’44—he had never appeared as fit. His complexion was healthy and tanned, his eyes alert, swift in their movements. He had also gained some weight. Or at least he no longer had that leanness that had so struck me in February of the previous year and which gave his face a gaunt, almost emaciated look.’
    â€œLet’s admit that Cabella was carrying out a propaganda exercise and wanted to present a Duce in full command of his faculties. Now let’s turn to the written account given by Pedro, who describes his first encounter with the Duce after the arrest: ‘He’s sitting to the right of the