Bowled Over by Ben

"Read this letter as if it were my love testament," wrote pert Clara Petacci to her paramour, "because it is the last one that you will get ... If sometimes I felt in me the desperate attempt to free myself of this amorous vise--remember how you hurt me--those were waves of revolt . . .

against you who did not understand me, against your incurable lechery . . . Now is really the end."

Alas for poor, weak, indecisive Clara, it was nothing of the kind. Her love and her letters continued to pour forth for the benefit of masterful Benito Mussolini, right up to the time in April 1945 when the two of them were hung together by the heels in death in Milan's Piazza Loreto. Clara never learned to forgive her dictator, his indifference, his violence or his infidelities, and never learned to forget him.

Trinkets in Triplicate. Before leaving her villa on Lake Garda to join Mussolini on their final journey, La Petacci entrusted the whole agonized portfolio of her stormy love to two friends, Carlo and Caterina Cervis, who shared her villa. The dossier, inventoried in triplicate by the methodical Clara, included most of the "Dear Ben" letters she had written to Benito, plus recordings of her lover's own speeches and copies of his letters, a trunkful of trinkets and keepsakes, and volumes of diaries, including one kept on toilet paper during her imprisonment by the Badoglio government.

The Cervises hid the whole bundle, but later they forgot their trust long enough to hand over the toilet-paper diary to a Milan newspaperman. Its publication in 1946 put the police, the press and Clara's relatives (selfexiled in Spain to avoid embarrassing investigations at home) in hot pursuit of the rest of her possessions and revelations.

For four years the hunt turned up nothing. Then an anonymous letter to a Milan newspaper offered a tip. The police responded, and in Clara's old garden they dug up a trunk, four suitcases and three wooden boxes, all crammed with Petacci mementos.

Arbitrary Act? In time, the government returned to the Petaccis most of Clara's tangible assets, but the letters and diaries it claimed as documents of state. Writ followed court writ as the Petaccis tried to reclaim their property. Italy's best jurists pulled their chins over the puzzling problem of whether or not a dictator's mistress "carries out functions which can be compared to those of a public official." Last week the Petacci lawyers filed what they hoped was a final brief. "It is absurd," they said, "as argued by the state, that the loves of dictators are carried out in the service of the state." But the court was not so sure. It gave the government two more months to think up a good answer.

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