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One of the reporters on Domani, named Braggadocio, tells Colonna he’s got a scoop: apparently, it wasn’t Mussolini but his body-double who was executed in 1945. The Duce himself spent the next several decades hiding in Argentina, or possibly the Vatican, while a conspiracy of ‘stay-behinds’ plotted to bring him back as a Fascist mascot. Braggadocio, with his ghoulish interest in corpses, doesn’t sound very convincing, and it’s not until the hapless hack is found dead that Colonna begins to think that he might have been on to something.
Whatever one makes of the various versions of Mussolini’s death (or survival) at the hands of Italian partisans, followed by the public humiliation of his (or his double’s) body, his shadow does seem to hang over postwar Italy, particularly the anni di piombi, ‘years of lead’ (1968–82), marked by terrorism and political instability. By having an unreliable narrator recount those events, Eco puts his reader on guard, exposing history as a soft science.
‘News doesn’t need to be invented,’ Colonna quips to his colleagues. ‘All you have to do is recycle it.’ Despite all the sinister theories featured in Numero Zero, yesterday’s news always makes one laugh, especially when read two decades after it happened. Domani’s investigations are all hilariously cold potatoes; horoscopes are given more attention here than prostitution or the Mafia. As for the style, when it’s suggested that misleading clichés such as ‘the eye of the storm’ should be avoided, the world-weary Colonna explains that, having taught the reader the meaning of the phrase in journalese, the press has to follow its own rules. At a news conference, the editor dismisses a piece on mobile phones, deeming them ‘a fashion that’s going to fizzle out in a year, two at most’, something that’s ‘useful only to adulterous husbands, and perhaps plumbers’. Once the editor of Avanti!, Mussolini must be turning in his (marked, yet not-quite-confirmed) grave.
Because you read about book review
Also by Anna Aslanyan
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