In the masculine, Fascist vision it is always right for a man to have any woman he can. “I don’t let anything slip by,” says one of Antonio’s friends. Women are objects. “But your uncle’s wife?” protests another. “The ass makes no exceptions… start having scruples, and the others’ll be mounting her with both shoes on!”

Sex, then, is a competition, a free for all. Getting laid is success and not getting laid is failure or, worse still, somebody else’s success. Again and again the book deploys an imagery that links sexual and military prowess, even sex and killing. But in the Christian scheme of things, of course, repeated sexual conquest is sin, betrayal is sin. The unchaste man, like the killer, is going to hell.

Both schemes, however, have their internal contradictions. When the philanderer is asked what happens if someone mounts his sister or mother, he shouts: “Don’t talk about my mother and my sister! My mother and my sister have got nothing to do with it!” “But aren’t they women too?” replies his friend. For the church, and the upright community in general, despite all St. Paul’s teaching about the superiority of celibacy, chastity ceases to be a virtue in marriage. However piously her parents may have brought her up, however rigorously they have protected her innocence, Antonio’s rich in-laws want their daughter Barbara to have a child, to give the family a future, to provide an heir to their accumulated fortune.

Marriage, of course, is par excellence an image of fusion, reconciliation of opposites, resolution of contradictions. Sexual potency finds a kind of chastity in what the church considers a sacrament; female modesty may be relaxed in the monogamous marriage bed. And, of course, sex and property are fused together in marriage. The wife brings her dowry as well as her body. The man offers protection, income.

For Fascism too, despite the Duce’s notorious promiscuity, the institution of the family was to be supported at all costs. The nation’s vitality would express itself in its high birth rate, its production of young men and women prepared to live and die for Italy. In what he called “The battle for births,” Mussolini introduced cash prizes for the women who had most children and a “bachelor tax” on men over twenty-five who did not marry. In typically aggressive and ambiguous rhetoric, the Duce spoke of his determination to give the nation “a demographic whipping.”

But after three years of marriage, Antonio’s beautiful wife is still not pregnant. In fact, as her scandalised parents discover, she is exactly as she was the day they gave her away in marriage, a virgin. To put it bluntly, the beautiful Antonio can’t get it up. When the news finally breaks it causes a greater scandal, greater confusion, than even the bombs that will soon be falling in wartime. It is as if every tacit compromise and hypocrisy that allows society to go on functioning had been exposed.

Antonio’s impotence must become public because Barbara, or her family, will not accept the idea of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, they want the marriage annulled, declared never to have taken place, so that Barbara can marry again in church to a rich and corpulent nobleman. What is marriage then? Does it really cease to exist “for the mere fact that man and wife do not indulge in carnal acts,” those same carnal acts that the church is “constantly bothering us” by preaching against. Certainly Antonio loves Barbara, and she used to love him, till her maid told her what sex really was. In any event, if the marriage is to be annulled, if Barbara is to make a more lucrative marriage elsewhere, Antonio’s failure as a man will have to be declared before a church tribunal. “Antonio didn’t have the stuff of the real Fascist,” the local deputy party secretary subsequently writes to Antonio’s one important political contact in Rome.

Any notion that a man might be an individual, whole unto himself, is now swept away in a storm of ridicule, speculation and scandal. Antonio’s “failure” is experienced as the failure of his whole tribe. Both father and friends feel obliged to embark on orgies of fornication and adultery to demonstrate that they remain untainted.