Grazie a Silvio, anche la nostra immagine nel mondo è sempre più brillante...
The Mussolini of Ass
Sure, you could focus on the corrupt, quasi-fascistic side of Silvio Berlusconi's long reign over Italy. But as his adoring supporters will tell you, that's not the point of "Silvio!" What sustains a nation is the man's dyed hair and shameless libido. Devin Friedman goes in search of the self-appointed dictator of macho hedonistic unprosecutable pleasure
By Devin Friedman giugno 2010 See Berlusconi's government of beauty. There is a place where all the breasts are large. Large, young, tanned, and naked. A place where everyone fucks and fucks and fucks and never dies. Where the men are rich and carefree and the women are beautiful and pliant and young. Where television quiz shows are strip quiz shows. Where sports-talk shows are sports-talk shows bookended by women in bikinis. The women in government, too, are the women of buoyant, ageless breasts. They are members of Parliament. They are the sexiest cabinet ministers in the world. In this place, most schoolgirls hope to get jobs someday doing the special TV shimmy-dance you do by yourself on-camera, and then maybe go on to marry a soccer player or take their place in the parliament of beauty. You don't have to pay taxes in this place, and the laws are only laws until they limit your dreams. This place was invented by one man, a man who changed the world of rationing and punishment into a place that promises you can have everything you want and need never be punished again. This man dreamed up the television, he appointed the ministers, he started the revolution, and he is the greatest living exponent of his vision. A man who never, ever gets old, never goes bald, never gets untan or looks as short as he used to. A man who never, never stops smiling.
In the winter, before the regional elections, the Presidente has booked the ancient Temple of Hadrian for an event for his political party. Rome is the living museum, they say, and this space, made from giant slabs of stone 2,000 years ago, today features a large banner with the Presidente's face on it and a phrase that roughly translates as "Join me, at my shoulder, to defend your desires, your interests, and your freedom." A few minutes before the Presidente enters, a music video plays on a big screen, depicting a huge political rally in the streets of Rome. Violins are struck. The footage of passionate party members holding candles is replaced by a visual of two young men behind a counter, scooping gelato…and one of them begins to sing: There's a great dream / That lives in us. / We are the people of liberty. / Presidente, we're with you. Then everyone in the gelateria sings: Thank God there's Silvio! There are young people in a classroom, on the steps of a government building, serving cornetti at a coffee bar. They sing that they are the people who want to change this dream into a reality. Now the man mixing cement joins in and sings. We are the people who never give up, / Who reach out and encourage each other! Now the girls running on treadmills join in! There are no old people in the video, there are no ugly people, there are no immigrants. There are only strong, passionate young Italians in business-casual clothes, who sing with feeling: Thank God there's Silvio!
Silvio Berlusconi loves this song. He was once a professional singer on cruise ships—this is before he became the third-wealthiest private citizen in Italy and the seventy-fourth-wealthiest man in the world—and often employs a pianist to accompany him in his homes. As the video plays, Berlusconi, the Presidente, enters the room through a side door and then disappears among the party members almost immediately. He appears from time to time with a hand on a woman's shoulder or kissing a man affectionately on both cheeks. Then he bounds onto the stage, sits at a table next to a striking woman with lustrous, shiny red hair, clasps his big hands in front of him, and smiles.
"We are here to disturb you once more," Berlusconi says. "To present one of the many initiatives of the People of Liberty." The People of Liberty is the current name of his party. He changed it from Go Italy! a few years ago, which is what the Italians say when they're cheering for their World Cup team. He wears a navy suit tailored in the Italian-tycoon style, crisp baby blue shirt, navy tie with white polka dots wadded at his neck. His face and hair and teeth are impeccable. His skin is a perfect tawny brown that goes whiter at the neck, where the makeup fades out. His hair isn't identifiable as hair, per se. It's more color than substance, a deep, shiny brown, and it's pleasing. You would never confuse any of it—the hair, the teeth, the skin—for something real. But it doesn't matter. The artificiality has long been acknowledged. It's like a woman who has excellent fake breasts: The image pushes certain pleasure buttons. Sitting there and speaking about the upcoming regional election, he makes a compelling argument for face-lifts.
"The other day the minister brought me this mound of letters," he says. "I think 300 letters, which asked again and again: When are you finally going to ask us to do something useful for our country?" In response, he says, they will be founding a new initiative called Freedom Promoters.
None of this was his idea, he explains. It was the people's idea. And as party leader, he felt he must let the people take to the streets, give more of their time, promote even more freedom. The people of hate accuse him of having become a dictator in the manner of Mussolini or one of the Roman emperors. But they don't understand that he is just a conduit for the desires of the people.
"It is important that the party be democratic—really democratic," he says. "I only execute the wishes of local party members."
For example, it is true that he passed a bill whereby citizens don't vote for actual members of Parliament (MPs) anymore; they vote for a party, and the party picks them. And as a result of that law, Berlusconi's personal criminal-defense lawyer has been made an MP. Several women who used to be showgirls on his TV stations were placed on the party's roster, and another four were on the roster for the European Parliament. Berlusconi's physician is an MP now, as are a number of his former executives. The people aligned for no greater purpose than to bring Silvio Berlusconi down say it is like when Caligula made his horse a member of the Senate. But that's the most vile sort of untruth!
"I never gave the name of any candidate in any election," the Presidente says. "The names that came from the base in the regions were just communicated to me." Including, apparently, the name of his dental hygienist, possibly the leggiest dental hygienist in the Western world, whom the People of Liberty will make a regional councillor in this election.
The party really belongs to the people. People like the woman seated next to him, Michela Vittoria Brambilla. If you want to understand the hunger the people feel for a man like Berlusconi, she's a good example. She's over 40 now, but she hasn't let age diminish her beauty. She was once a contestant in the Miss Italy pageant, and after that she read the news on one of the Presidente's TV stations. When he lost the election in 1996, she was despondent. As the party's movimentista (the official in charge of movements), she was responsible for the party's grass roots, like the activist group the Thank God for Silvio Girls. Later he appointed her undersecretary of tourism and, more recently, tourism minister. She sits on the dais next to Silvio Berlusconi and watches him with consuming admiration as he speaks about wiretaps, another of the great crimes of the people who want to bring him down, the people he calls the Party of Hate.
"This is an election…between a government that is trying to fuel trust, optimism, and a left that is only capable of spreading pessimism and self-infliction," he says. "Every day there are attacks on freedom.… Like your telephone. Whatever we say over the phone that we think is private, not only is it not private, it is published in the newspaper the next day. This is like a bucketload of mud thrown on someone."
The Presidente has a problematic relationship with recording devices. Even in Italy—a land of much corruption and mistrust and a breathtaking volume of taping and countertaping—the Presidente is a special case. Thousands of conversations—his conversations, conversations about him, conversations he's sanctioned—have been preserved, and some of that tape has made it into newspapers. Here he is on tape saying, "It means we will not fuck," after two showgirls failed to show up to entertain him and a former prime minister. And here he is apparently trying to win the majority in the Senate by getting TV jobs for various women thought to be senators' girlfriends. And here he is last year, after the governor of Lazio was photographed in a hotel room with a Brazilian transvestite and some cocaine, allegedly telling the governor it would be smart to pay to make those pictures go away.
Not that any of it has had much political effect on him. Even now the Presidente is by far the most popular political figure in Italy. It's not that he's survived; he is Italian politics. Even those who dread him will admit: There's Silvio Berlusconi, and then there is no one.
Of all the stories that surfaced during summer 2009, the best is the story of Patrizia D'Addario. Even more interesting than the possible dalliance with a 17-year-old girl from Naples; more than the open letter his wife sent to the Italian press, lambasting him for, among other things, putting up bimbos for Parliament; more than the revelations about the series of titty parties he threw at his Sardinian villa. None of these immerse you as fully in the fantasy world of the Presidente as Patrizia D'Addario's story.
Earlier this winter, the former prostitute arrives in Rome for an interview with GQ. Negotiations have taken place. D'Addario lives in Puglia, in Southern Italy, but she refuses to take the train. She'd fly on a budget airline, but her cousin and media handler would have to accompany her. Domenico is his name. They would stay in an inexpensive hotel, but the hotel must be paid for by GQ, and it would be better if it were in the historical center of the city. The interview is conducted in a room at a different hotel, near the Pantheon. (GQ decides on a suite so that the interview wouldn't be conducted in the bedroom, which, you know… How would that look?)
In the early afternoon, the taxi drops Patrizia and Domenico at the hotel where the interview will be conducted. They both wear dark sunglasses and pull rolling suitcases, looking as if they were an infamous prostitute and her cousin.
Even though the interview takes place in front of a tape recorder and there is no photographer present, as soon as she arrives at the hotel room, Patrizia carefully applies eyeliner and concealer and redoes her perfectly straight blond hair, leaving a series of smudged tissues and used applicator brushes on the sink. She sits on her chair with extraordinary posture and maintains that posture throughout four hours of conversation. It's the kind of posture that says: I may be the most famous prostitute in Italy, but I have a great deal of respect for myself. Domenico—a man of probably 50 with receding gums and surgically implanted hair that has been precisely cut and blown dry, wearing a sweater that doesn't do much to hide his small breasts—sits on his suitcase in the next room typing on his laptop.
"He was fun," Patrizia says about the fucking of the Presidente. "If it weren't for the videos I had to watch and the songs we had to sing. And the girls. The girls offering themselves to him. That I didn't care for."
The D'Addario episode began in November 2008, on the night Barack Obama was elected president. Silvio Berlusconi was supposed to attend a party, hosted by an organization that promotes relations between Italy and the United States, in one of the many meticulously restored salons in the center of Rome. The guests were expecting him. The host, an important senator in Berlusconi's party and the head of the foundation, had made promises that the Presidente would be there. He'll come and have a drink, be seen, make easy conversation. He is good company, very generous with his time. "Behave as if you have a ray of sun in your pocket," the Presidente used to tell his salesmen, when he was reinventing the television-advertising industry in Italy. And there seems still to be no greater joy for him than to shine the beautiful sunlight in his pocket onto every man, woman, and child he meets.
There were some prominent American businessmen there and some important figures from the People of Liberty. Hors d'oeuvres were passed; several flat-screen TVs broadcast the American election news; everyone waited for the arrival of the Presidente. But Berlusconi didn't appear. Antonio Polito, the vice president of the organization, approached Berlusconi's senator: Where is the Presidente? The senator said, Be patient. We think he will be here soon. Ten o'clock passed, and then eleven. And then it became clear that Berlusconi would never arrive.
"It was surprising!" Polito said when I visited the office from which he now edits a small center-left newspaper. "He always makes a fuss over his friendship with America. Of course, we found out this was the night he was with the escort Patrizia D'Addario."
A month earlier, in the capital of the southern province of Puglia, Patrizia D'Addario, age 41, possessor of expensively treated blond hair, met a man named Giampaolo Tarantini at a coffee bar. Tarantini was a businessman from Puglia who, it would turn out, supplied girls to Berlusconi for parties in Rome and Sardinia. The meeting had been set up by a mutual friend. There was a real estate project D'Addario was involved in that had been stalled and that she believed, if only she got help from the right people, could change her life. They had something to drink and discussed the project, and then Tarantini said, Come out to my car so we can have a private conversation.
"He said, I can give you a chance to go to Rome and meet the prime minister, but we have to go right away,' " D'Addario tells me through a translator in the hotel room. "I said my fee is 2,000 euros for dinner, and he said, No problem. Money is no object.'"
She arrived by plane later that night. In his hotel suite, Tarantini explained the rules of the party she would be attending. She must wear a black minidress, no stockings, and very little makeup. If the Presidente liked her, she would be expected to stay the night. She told him that she agreed to dinner, not to spending the night, and Tarantini said, "We can talk about this later."
At nine o'clock, Tarantini's car arrived at Palazzo Grazioli with D'Addario and two other women. The police at the gate waved them into the courtyard, where Berlusconi's bodyguards met her and took her by elevator to the apartments on the second floor. This wasn't Berlusconi's permanent residence—he has villas in Milan, Sardinia, Bermuda, the Bahamas—but it's where he stays when he's in Rome. I was in the building this winter; it's a large square building with a courtyard punched into the middle, with halls and elevators that radiate a subterranean cold and a facade stained with centuries of soot. Berlusconi rents it from people who are or used to be dukes—the Grazioli family—and who still live like eccentric, decomposing royalty on the floor below.
When the elevator opened, D'Addario walked into a great salon. There was a piano near one wall and a giant white screen on another side of the room. There were close to twenty women at the party, all identically dressed: minidresses without panty hose and with very little makeup. Besides Tarantini, the pianist, and the butler, there were no other men. After a while, the Presidente made his entrance and took a glass of champagne. Two girls slunk up to him. "We work as a team," they said as they caressed each other, "but since the recession we haven't been working at all." He thanked everyone for coming to this meeting of the Thank God There's Silvio Girls. It is this club that sustained him in his periods of political darkness. And then the movie began, a compilation of highlights from the Presidente's career. Here I am at the White House, going to meet George Bush, he said. And that is when I hosted the G8 summit! At this time I addressed the United Nations. D'Addario says she doesn't wear a watch but that the movie portion of the evening lasted at least two hours. Periodically a little dog would trot up to the Presidente's feet so he could pet it.
"Isn't he cute?" the Presidente said. "A gift from Laura Bush! His name is Frou Frou."
After the movie, the video "Thank God There's Silvio" came on, and the Presidente stood and sang. The women stood up and formed a conga line that snaked through the room, singing along and cheering.
D'Addario says Berlusconi was interested in her right away. He'd been told about her. "He was definitely funny. Charming. He approached me and told me how cute I was. And he asked me about my project. I said, I'm a lonely girl who has problems, and I need these problems to be solved.'"
The Presidente was in a fine mood. He asked D'Addario for a slow dance. Even with lifts in his shoes, he was slightly shorter than she was. Up close, she could see the makeup on his face. After the dance, he picked seats for everyone at dinner. He took D'Addario's hand and said, "My little entrepreneur, come with me. You're sitting with me."
"He noticed that I wasn't at ease," D'Addario says. "So he sat me next to him."
After dinner, he declared he was taking D'Addario on a tour of his apartment. Another girl joined them. They passed through a second grand salon and into his private quarters. In his bedroom, there was an enormous bed ringed in curtains, bigger than any bed D'Addario had ever seen. This is Putin's bed, he said. It was given to me by Vladimir Putin. They are close friends. The fall after this episode comes to light, he'll join Putin in St. Petersburg to celebrate Putin's fifty-seventh birthday. People like to guess what it is that Putin finds so companionable about Berlusconi, or if whatever it is can be deduced from the fact that Putin gave him a five-person bed as a gift.
The Presidente lay on the bed and pulled D'Addario next to him. The other woman was on his other side, and two more women joined them and lay at his feet.
"Do you like this bed?" he asked D'Addario, caressing her hand.
"It's huge," she said.
He said he'd like to take the girls to a spa. All the girls shouted, Yes, let's all go to a spa! After a few minutes of lounging in the bed, he took them to the next room and brought out a book of photographs of his villas. "What if we all went to my villa in the Bahamas for New Year's?" he said. All the girls shouted, Yes, let's all go to the Bahamas! He showed them pictures of ancient ruins at his Sardinian villa. He showed them pictures of rare cacti. D'Addario taped it all with a small digital recorder. In the hotel room, I ask her why.
"I taped every man I was with as an escort," she says. "It started because I was able to get my ex-boyfriend thrown in jail for abusing me. I was only able to do this by taping."
Tarantini told D'Addario that the Presidente had decided he'd like her to stay. But she said she was going to leave. She didn't like the harem vibe. Even when she had been to orgies, she explained, it was still basically one man for every woman. That night, though, "there was just one man with the right to copulate." She would later write this in her book, At Your Pleasure, Presidente. Tarantini docked her 50 percent of her fee for leaving early. Before she left, Berlusconi handed out gifts. There was a room full of them, and he went in and came out with gold butterfly necklaces inlaid with diamonds, which he gave to all of them.
"He gives women gifts," Antonio Polito told me when we spoke in his office. "In Rome there are at least fifteen or twenty girls driving around in green Minis from him."
After that night, Silvio Berlusconi wanted Patrizia D'Addario to come over again and this time stay the night. And so on the evening Barack Obama was elected, as various American diplomats and businesspeople waited for him to come to a party, she slept with him for the first time.
"When I came back the second time, it was the same thing. The same movie, the same songs. He watched it again like he never saw it. It was strange to me, but I guess it made him feel good."
There were only three girls this time. After dinner, the Presidente asked Tarantini to leave with the other two girls, then asked D'Addario if she wanted to take a shower. The next part of the tape she made was leaked to the press.
"I'll take a shower, too," he said. "And then, then you can wait for me in the big bed if you are done with it before me."
"Which bed?" she said. "Putin's bed?"
"Yes, Putin's bed.…"
"Oh, it's so cute…with those curtains."
D'Addario demurs about certain things, but she will say how he performed. "There are some rumors that he had problems because of a prostate operation, but he doesn't have these problems," she tells me. "He had no problems whatsoever. I spent the night, and I didn't do much sleeping. When the story came out, they asked me to give him grades. I gave him high grades."
In the morning, when she woke up, there were journalists in the apartment, waiting to get comments on the election of Barack Obama. The Presidente put a bathrobe over his pajamas and returned to the bedroom after he spoke to them. They had breakfast together. Some of what he said then was also leaked to the press. "I am the only leader in the world who has presided over two G8s, and now I will lead a third," he said. "I am unbeatable!" Around eleven, still wearing her dress from the night before, D'Addario was ushered downstairs by one of his assistants and into an inconspicuous Fiat Panda. Though they left by the back entry, there were still police at the gate. "Don't worry," the assistant told her, "they will pretend not to see you." A few months later, she was told she would be a candidate in Berlusconi's party for an upcoming election in Puglia.
She's angry about the whole affair now, because Berlusconi never came through on his end of the bargain, and the real estate deal languished. This was unconscionable to her. The rest she would have been okay with. In the summer, she found out she wasn't the only person who had tapes relating to her nights with the Presidente. She was called in by a magistrate who had stumbled onto the situation while investigating Tarantini for corruption. The magistrate took her deposition, but before her story could be leaked, she gave the interview to La Repubblica that made her famous. She says it was the best way to protect herself.
"The cognoscenti knew he was having sex," Antonio Polito told me. "We have many young girls in Parliament that he placed, and we knew about them." There was little evidence but a lot of fuss about one minister, Mara Carfagna. (A comedian named Sabina Guzzanti has been banned from television—and is being sued for libel by Carfagna—after saying at a rally in Rome that Carfagna, who is now minister of equal opportunity, got her job "by sucking the president's cock.") "Everyone in Rome knows that they were lovers," Polito said. "But what we didn't know for sure is the use of professional escorts."
The D'Addario scandal was the grand finale of the Summer of Presidente Love, which started last May when the story of Noemi Letizia broke. Noemi, a girl from Naples, had been at one of the parties at Berlusconi's Sardinian villa, and Berlusconi had gone to her eighteenth-birthday party, where he gave her a gold-and-diamond necklace.
"I dream of being a showgirl," she told a reporter in Naples. "I am also interested in politics." When the reporter asked her if she'd run for office in the upcoming regional elections, she said, "I'd rather have a place in Parliament. Papi Silvio will decide."
The Presidente's wife, Veronica Lario, made a public announcement soon after, saying she couldn't "be with a man who consorts with minors" and that he is "not well." She filed for divorce. Not long after, pictures taken at Berlusconi's Sardinian villa were published in a Spanish newspaper. There are lots of women in the photos, some of them topless. There was also a photograph that received considerable attention, of an older gentleman strolling naked on the pool deck, past two bare-breasted women, with what appears to be a partial erection. This man was Mirek Topolanek, the former prime minister of the Czech Republic. Then, in June, D'Addario's story broke in the papers, along with photographs some of the women at the party took of themselves in the Presidente's bathroom.
How exactly Berlusconi is able to survive such events—not just survive, but somehow emerge from every wounding stronger, like a shorter Italian version of Wolverine, with a face-lift and elevator shoes—is one of the great mysteries of world politics.
"People accuse him of taking care of his own business," one of his closest aides says, talking about Berlusconi's penchant for passing laws that have the effect of keeping himself out of jail or in power, "but the problems he has are the same for all Italian businesses, all Italian people.… Out of the personal bad thing, we make reforms for the common people."
There is a handsome coffee bar inside the Parliament building where the aide has agreed to answer a few questions. He looks a certain way, this aide, and speaks a certain way, but I am forbidden from revealing these things, because this is not the kind of aide who speaks publicly. The coffee bar is just outside a long corridor called the Transatlantico. This is where much of Italy's high-level political schmoozing takes place, and it's where prominent politicians meet with journalists to explain how exactly their Viagrist in Chief has managed to survive for so long. It got its name because it was designed in the manner of ocean liners in their golden age. The ceilings are about 4,397 feet high, and the floors are lined with long red carpets and sitting-room sofas. At ten o'clock in the morning, the chamber is preparing for a vote. There is a steady traffic of Italian men in nearly identical blue suits, plus a smattering of female MPs in short black pencil skirts and black patent leather stilettos. It's a breathtaking building to be in, the Italian Parliament, with its enormous and dimly lit reading room, its Byzantine-marble hallways lined with offices containing who knows what kind of gilded Roman treasures.
But how has he survived? I ask his aide. I remind him of all the books that have been written about the Presidente, about his suspected Mafia connections, about how the seed money for his first big real estate project came from a mysterious Swiss bank account. There are several books just about his sex scandals.
"It's not many books. It's one book over and over and over: The Dark Legend of Berlusconi."
What Patrizia D'Addario wrote about—isn't it more than a dark legend?
"That was a false scandal, raised by the opposition."
Paolo Bonaiuti, Berlusconi's spokesman, here making his rounds at the Transatlantico, has his Presidente talking points ready when he takes me into a small office in one of the corridors reserved for parliamentary officials. "You have a big tornado," Bonaiuti says in an ornate English. He's in his seventies and walks stiffly on calcifying hips. Today he's in a smart glen plaid jacket. "We have to wait until the dust settles.… If you try to catch the sex scandals in their reality, it's tiny."
Santo Versace, the brother of Donatella Versace, walks by the doorway just then in a blazer and a creamy lavender turtleneck, having just cast his vote. In a few minutes, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce, will take the same path in a lovely silk dress.
"Every morning we risk a volcanic eruption," Bonaiuti says when I ask him about the resilience of the Presidente. "So many wiretaps that are irrelevant, totally irrelevant. For instance, about sexy adventures."
In the following days, I make a tour of the Talking Heads of Rome and ask some version of the same question over and over: How does the Presidente remain so firmly in power, despite the septuagenarian banging and the corruption scandals, etc.? Some people say it's because the opposition is weak. Some people say it's because the Presidente bangs hot escorts while people like the governor of Lazio bang weird-looking Brazilian transvestites. Everyone has a theory. Bonaiuti points out that he has never technically (arguably!) been convicted of a crime. Vittorio Feltri, the editor of the right-wing newspaper owned by Berlusconi's brother, speaks with me at his office in Milan. He smokes a cigarette and sits forward comfortably in his desk chair, in tortoiseshell glasses and a tweed cashmere blazer. Behind him is a bust of Mussolini, which he says serves as a "provocation."
"Part of the Italian mentality is that no one is demonized for their private life," he says. "You can't solve the problems by looking under the sheets of a politician. I have all the vices, so I can't judge anyone."
I ask him if people are impressed by a 73-year-old man sleeping with a woman half his age.
"It seems as if he doesn't just sleep with them!" Feltri says.
And the Italian people don't get mad that while he's hosting the Thank God for Silvio Girls, the GDP has basically stagnated during the past ten years?
"The Italians are rich," he says. "They eat well, they have nice houses. Even in the south of Italy, which is trash." Italians, he says, "cry a lot. But they fuck a lot."
When Berlusconi lost his job as Presidente the first time, in 1996, he hired two brothers named Crespi to help him regain office. It was their idea to do something called "the Contract with the Italians," which Polito says Berlusconi keeps in his bathroom so he can be reminded of his duty to the people even when he's on the toilet.
They've since parted ways. "We've been cured of Berlusconismo," one of the brothers told me. They work out of an office in the center of Rome now, as pollsters for other right-wing politicians. The genius of the operation seems to be Luigi Crespi, who looks a little like Karl Rove, if Karl Rove had charming facial hair and smoked cigarillos. When I visited them, he and his brother pointed out an illuminating trend in the Presidente's numbers. The Summer of Older Love did in fact do some damage to Berlusconi. But do you know what caused a bigger change? they say. This winter, during a campaign rally in Milan, a mentally unstable man threw a plaster replica of the Duomo at the Presidente. It broke his nose and two teeth and lacerated his face. (It was when he was getting his teeth fixed that he met the leggy hygienist/soon-to-be regional councillor.) Immediately after he was hit by the statue, Berlusconi's bodyguards hustled him into his little blue Audi. Before they sped away, though, the Presidente reemerged and climbed on top of the car. He stood there, in the cold streets of Milan, for a long, melodramatic moment, his head tilted upward and a beautiful expression of pride on his face, bleeding from the mouth, among a crush of people and television cameras. After that, his numbers skyrocketed. Because he instinctively knows how to appeal to the soap-operatic sensibilities of the Italian public, like a character on one of his own shows.
There's a documentary about Berlusconi called Videocracy that was made by a Swedish-Italian director named Erik Gandini. When I ask him how he understands the Presidente's political vision, he says, "He loves the idea of having fun. Fun is the mantra of Berlusconi. The politicians before him, they were just the brain. Just the head and mouth was moving, and the body didn't exist. Berlusconi is very physical. Just like Mussolini. Very virile. The smile. The body. The idea of having fun is so, so crucial. And he could make people dream. That's the typical side of the narcissist: Where I am, there is paradise."
If there's a distillation of that fun, an image that, along with the proud, bleeding face, explains why the Presidente survives, it is the famous old-man penis from the Summer of Love, the penis belonging to the former Czech prime minister. It is a normal penis, white, either semitumescent or caught in an upswing so that, captured there in the air, it looks semitumescent, perched above a pair of legs that are not the legs of a young man—a little skinny, a little short. But here in the world provided by the Presidente, this penis is allowed to swing in the bright Mediterranean sunlight, for once freed from the suit pants of respectable early old age, happy and carefree and unashamed, surrounded by friendly women in thong bikinis who love and accept this penis for what it is. You can be that penis, Italy. You don't have to pretend to be young or virile or world-beating; you can just be you, an aging, graying, stagnating nation, and still thrive in the world of fun.
In the weeks after I visit Rome, Berlusconi's party will overcome a vast sex-for-government-contract scandal that involved 350 women, a Nigerian gigolo, and the government's most effective administrator and win the regional election. There will be another, smaller scandal brought to light, sparked by a newspaper's publication of wiretaps of the Presidente telling the supposedly independent telecommunications administrator to personally intercede to get an anti-Presidente show off television. A high-profile Berlusconi-related bribery case will be thrown out, because a court will decide that the statute of limitations should have been applied to an earlier date. The Presidente will pass a law stipulating that he doesn't have to stand trial in two other big criminal cases—cases that have been plaguing him—until 2012. His term will be up in 2013, when he's 76. No one is able to imagine an Italy without him. Literally not a single person I spoke to. It's as if he's defeated the Italian imagination.
"We don't know what will happen when he dies," Antonio Polito says. "We don't even know if his own political movement will stay alive without him."
You can think of Italy as Berlusconi's lover. Sometimes she is his ex-wife, Veronica Lario, romanced and married and then set up in a private villa to fend off humiliation and age. And sometimes she is Patrizia D'Addario, manipulated into giving herself up in exchange for something she never gets. The wife never knows where the husband is, the girlfriend spends her life waiting for him, and he shows up late to one and then the other with beautiful gifts, like a gold-and-diamond butterfly necklace. It's the kind of relationship in which, if you're the woman, something is always being done to you—seduced, neglected, danced through beautiful salons high on champagne—and you have the power to do nothing. But someday a whole nation will wake up, and there will be only an imprint in the sheets where the Presidente has been. I bet he'll have left a rose, or maybe a little note scented with cologne. But then it will be time to get up, see if there's anything for breakfast, think back on the night before. And the people of Italy will then have to decide if they've been made love to or merely fucked.
DEVIN FRIEDMAN is GQ's senior correspondent.
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