Benito Mussolini: A Private Life, Salò 1944

The uniform is laid out by the orderly as it is laid out each morning, and I put it on, and the putting-on is the first act of a day in which the acts will resemble government and will not be government. The collar is looser than it was. The body has gone down inside the cloth, the stomach taking what it takes, the old trouble that no diet on this lake has settled, and the cloth is taken in by a tailor who understands that the figure the cloth makes must not be seen to shrink. The figure dresses, and is photographed dressing, and the photograph goes out, and the photograph is the part of the state that still functions.

The decrees are on the desk and I sign them. A decree of the republic carries my signature and goes from this desk to the ministries the republic still keeps, and on its way it passes, though the document does not say so, the desk of the German liaison, whose concurrence is the concurrence that decides. A decree he does not want does not come back to me refused; it comes back delayed, requiring study, awaiting coordination, and the delay is the German no spoken in the only language the arrangement allows. I sign what comes back. The signature is mine and the pen is mine and the act of the hand is government, and the government is a layer of paper over an arrangement in which the decisions are made in another office, in another language, by the men who guard the gate of this villa.

I tell the ministers, and I half tell myself, that the liaison's concurrence is the courtesy between allies, the coordination any joint enterprise requires, and the half-telling is the work the mind does to make the desk bearable. An ally does not station his men at your gate and route your telephone through his exchange and read your communiqué before you do. The men at the gate are not honour and the reading is not coordination. But the word that would name it correctly is a word I do not use, because to use it is to sit at a desk that signs nothing, and a man cannot sit at that desk, so I use the word that lets the hand keep signing.

The reports come to me through the republic's channels, and the truth comes through the German one, and they do not match. The republic's reports say the divisions hold and the levies fill and the people wait for the new order; the German reports, which I see in fragments, say what the front actually is. The fragments are the truth and the republic's reports are the performance reporting on itself. I read both. I act on neither, because there is no act this desk can take that the gate will permit.

There is an order in the day's folder concerning the rounding-up in the cities, the lists of those to be taken, conducted under the German authority and stamped, where a stamp is wanted, with the republic's stamp, so that the republic is the hand that marks what the occupier directs. The stamping is administered through this desk like any other paper, and I administer it. The people taken are real. The stamp is the republic's contribution to a thing the republic does not command and will not be spared the record of.

In the afternoon there is the radio. The studio is arranged, the time is cleared on the wire the Germans keep open, and I speak to the country in the voice the country knew, and the voice still does the thing the voice did, fills the room, carries. The carrying goes out over a country half of which is held by the men who arranged the broadcast. The address is written and the address is mine and the address commands nothing. It is the figure speaking, the figure that dresses and signs and broadcasts, and the figure is the last working organ of the state.

The lake is grey at the window, and the guards are German, and the telephone is German, and the stomach is its own occupier, and the day goes through its acts, the uniform, the decrees, the reports that do not match, the order I stamp, the broadcast, each act resembling government, each act passing through the gate the other office keeps. I do not say at the desk that the office is empty. I dress it, and sign it, and broadcast from it, and the dressing is the work now, the performance of a power held in another building, and the doing of it is reported, by the republic's channels, as government.