Love, Death and the Written Word : The Lonely Passion of Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci adores the exclamation point. “Ho! Ho! Bravo!” she’ll bark when pleased, a wonderful, deep-chested exhalation, cigarette smoke swirling. Disappoint her, and you get mini-explosions issued in quintuplicate: “No! No! No! No! No!” When she is angry, she shouts, “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” with her arms swinging like a windmill. Occasionally, Fallaci will plant her palms at her ears, rocking back and forth as if she’s so riled she might be forced to take her own head off and throw it at the numskull who’s wormed his way into her presence. In her latest novel, “Inshallah,” a suspenseful morality play set in Beirut, even her characters’ questions are often punctuated like this: !?!

Bold and frenetic has always been the Fallaci way--the journalist-novelist as maximalist, racing off to cover wars and revolutions, going toe to toe with the biggest tyrants on the globe, producing articles and books and speaking out undaunted by anything. But there is something foreboding beneath all the noise and bluster these days. Now there’s a noticeable hitch in Fallaci’s stride, and her voice sometimes falters. At 62, she feels misunderstood, besieged by her own reputation. And she has fallen ill. Even her body, it seems, has betrayed her.

Fallaci was at the height of her powers when I first met her 12 years ago. She entered rooms like a dervish, and it was difficult to squeeze in more than a few words between her interlocking stories and distended declamations. She had rattled into San Francisco to promote “A Man,” the fictionalized biography of her late lover, Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis.

“Argh, argh! No questions! No questions! All the questions, all the questions! If they had read my book there would be no more questions!” were the first words she spoke. But she sat talking for several hours anyway, rolling her hair to the top of her head, bunching her skirt beneath her thin legs and then spreading it out along the couch in her hotel suite and rolling her hair again in a hyperactive, rhythmic cycle.

Seeing her now, on this November night, is a study in contrast. “You haven’t changed at all. I have changed--a lot ,” she murmurs. Fallaci lays herself out on another San Francisco hotel couch, leaning back and speaking in a guttural whisper. Gone, for the moment, is the sharp-boned tiger of a decade ago. In her place is a petite woman in a black dress, her light brown hair, flecked with gray, falling straight to her shoulders. She slips high heels from her tired feet, but her hands stay in motion, long fingers fidgeting with what must be her 40th cigarette of the day as she talks about “ ‘Inshallah,’ my child, this book.” But she keeps circling around to the passages about dying. “I am obsessed with death,” she admits. Her face is immobile, a lined mask filled with anguish.

For months, Fallaci has been confiding to acquaintances that she is engaged in a struggle with breast cancer and that the prognosis is dire. Benjamin C. Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, has known Fallaci for decades. “She’s a very dramatic, ballsy lady,” he says, “full of lust for life and energy and courage, and now she’s sick as hell. She’s rattled, by disease and by intimations of mortality.” But when I broach the subject of her illness, she bristles.

“Ill. What ill? Ill of what?” Fallaci employs an entertaining dodge, launching into a description of her unhealthy and quirky work habits, trying to distract me with a few jokes. Then she drops her shoulders and grips the strand of black pearls draped loosely around her neck, holding them tightly at her throat. “I don’t want to speak about being ill. It’s my problem. I don’t want to be pathetic. I don’t want sympathy. That’s the last thing I want.”

It’s vintage Fallaci, offering up tantalizing bits of herself for the world to examine, then pulling back, trying to withdraw inside a tight cloak of privacy. “Oriana is an open book,” she quotes her sister Paola as saying. “An open book, that is, written in Chinese or Sanskrit.”

FALLACI WAS IN SAN FRANCISCO, AT THE INVITATION OF CITY ARTS & LECTURES, for a rare reading and onstage interview. The previous night, she had walked onstage at the Herbst Theater clapping frenetically, pumped up like a boxer prepared to enter the ring. This was the combative Fallaci her fans expected. She leaned over the podium to read an excerpt from the book, sinking into the text con brio , eyeglasses slipping down her nose, her bass voice massaging the words. When she was done, she sat primly, right leg crossed over the left, smoke pouring from her nostrils, as if bracing for a tussle. But host Orville Schell’s questions were more philosophical than threatening, and Fallaci was obliged to respond in kind. She sighed and put down her exclamation points for a moment to reminisce about her childhood.

What she disinterred, under Schell’s probing, was a formative memory of her childhood during World War II. She remembered huddling in a bunker with her family while American bombs dropped on Florence. She recalled being terribly frightened and crying--but not sobbing, she was quick to say as she ran a long finger where the tears had crossed her cheek. She also remembered her beloved father, angry at seeing those tears, delivering “a tremendous slap” along with the firm admonition: “ A girl does not cry! “

The day after her appearance, Fallaci’s eyes narrow, and a shadow falls when I repeat the story. “What was the lesson of that early slap?” She leans back against the couch cushions, as if retreating from the question, shocked: Isn’t it obvious?

“Strength! Strength!” she asserts. As the eldest child, she experienced the strictest treatment of the family’s three girls. She shrugs: “That’s the way, everywhere.” She is not complaining, like some whiny Californian in therapy over the anguish of childhood. “No! No! No! No! No! Oh, they were very tough. I’m very grateful that they were tough on me. Tremendously grateful.

“Life is a tough adventure,” Fallaci lectures. “And the sooner you learn that, the better. I must admit that I am not generous with weak people. It’s not in my nature or in my personality. My parents were not generous with weak people, see? I never forgot that slap. It was like a kiss.”

The kiss of her father’s slap shaped one of the most interesting chroniclers of our time. At age 11 during World War II, Fallaci was a messenger for the Italian Resistance and became a newspaper reporter by the time she was 16. After years as a workaday journalist in Florence, she graduated to a raft of celebrity interviews with the likes of Dean Martin, Hugh Hefner and Julie Christie, which Fallaci is too embarrassed to discuss now. “Old news. Old! Old! Old!” (One early sample has Fallaci describing Twiggy as “ethereal, celestial--it is quite pointless to discuss whether she is feminine or masculine.”) Finally, after paying her dues, she was given a shot at more important labors.

Fallaci became a star internationally in her 30s for her widely published confrontations with the world’s most powerful leaders. Beginning in the ‘60s, she found fame in Italian magazines Epoca and l’Europeo by exposing the underside of the Vietnam War (interviewing American POWs imprisoned in North Vietnam as well as warring leaders from North and South Vietnam), staring down Yasser Arafat, coaxing Indira Gandhi to open up, tearing off the chador in front of Ayatollah Khomeini (a “stupid, medieval rag,” she thundered), and getting shot in the back covering the repression of the Left in Mexico City. Fallaci made trouble for Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s secretary of state, when she got him to say that political leaders didn’t need to be intelligent so long as they had courage. Though he would later deny the words, Fallaci says he characterized himself as a “cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.” The Shah of Iran revealed to her the mystical apparitions and religious visions that governed his policies.

Fallaci’s expansive, generous side, evidenced in thoughtful conversations with German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, drew less notice than her fiery clashes with powerful men. She threw her microphone at Muhammad Ali when he belched repeatedly, called Norman Mailer “a vain little starlet” and angered filmmaker Federico Fellini so much that he referred to her as “that rude little bitch.”

Fallaci often played up her reputation as a dangerous seductress, even likening a good interview to coitus. But it was her instinct and ability to ask the essential and truculently impolite question that distinguished her work. In an interview with Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, she asked, “Do you know why you are so unloved and unliked?” “I am not loved by those who . . . are against freedom,” he replied. And this was her “pickup” line when she first met Lech Walesa: “Has anybody ever told you that you resemble Stalin? I mean physically. Yes, same nose, same profile, same features, same mustache. And same height, I believe, same size.”

“It happens that you have a very authoritarian style, a typically dictatorial one,” Walesa protested. “And as I do too, we have a problem. . . . So let’s make a deal. From now on, I will be nice with you and you will be nice with me, OK?” The interview continued.

Fallaci was widely reprinted, no small feat for an Italian reporter, and 14 of her best interviews were collected in a 1974 book, “Interview With History.” Her incisive, take-no-prisoners approach--and her luxurious venom--became known as the Fallaci Treatment. She was lionized, the doyenne of a generation of new journalists, the scourge of the Establishment.

Fallaci’s success carried a price. In the early ‘70s, she wrote “Letter to a Child Never Born,” a meditation about motherhood, miscarriage, abortion and the burdens of a career. In it, Fallaci grappled with the difficult choice faced by women of her generation: public achievement or private happiness? She explained her wildly contradictory impulses, plumbing her grief about miscarrying a baby (“I feel humiliated because what good is it to fly like a sea gull if you don’t produce other sea gulls that will produce and still others who may fly?”). But she also railed against romantic love as a “mysterious rapture” that threatens “freedom more than anything else.”

Still, in 1973, something provocative happened to the woman who had until then resisted romance: At age 43, she fell in love. When Alexandros Panagoulis, a dissident who’d been tortured and jailed for trying to kill Greek dictator George Papadopoulos, was released from prison, she flew straightaway to Athens for an interview. At that meeting, a three-year-long affair began. It lasted until 1976, when Panagoulis died in a suspicious automobile accident that Fallaci believes was an assassination. Fallaci exorcised her grief by closeting herself for three years to produce “A Man,” which was an international bestseller in 1979 and 1980.

“It was like putting a knife in a wound for three endless years,” Fallaci told me at the time. “I feel kind of empty now. And when people ask me, ‘What is your next book,’ I have to win over the irritation that this provokes in me. The need of jumping on them, saying, ‘Go to hell, mind your own business, what do you want, get out of here.’ I’m like a well that was full of water, and all that water has been pumped. And now I have to wait for water to fill it again.”

WATCHING CNN LATE ONE night in 1983, Fallaci learned that more than 400 U.S. and French soldiers had been killed in two kamikaze truck-bomb attacks in Beirut. She left immediately for Lebanon, not knowing why she was going or what exactly she would write; for more than two years, she had produced little while she searched for her next big project. She returned to Beirut repeatedly, interviewing, observing and taking piles of notes. But no journalism emerged. Instead, over six years, she “got pregnant” with her ninth book.

Set in Beirut, “Inshallah” is, like its author, complicated, layered and frenetic. She calls it, at 599 pages and with more than 100 characters, a “miniature Iliad.” Suspenseful, full of action, drama and reflection, it is an anti-war tale about the soldiers sent to Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping force. When the other contingents were withdrawn in the wake of the attacks on U.S. and French headquarters, the Italians soldiered on, alone, caught in the cross-fire between Christian and Muslim militias. Fallaci focuses on these troops, imperiled by the bad luck of being employed in a lost cause. In the end, the characters come to believe in fate, in destiny, in inshallah, an Arabic word meaning “as God wills it.”

Fallaci has witnessed most of the wars in her lifetime, and her narrative betrays an abiding affection for grunts. “I love soldiers. They are my kids, they are my children,” Fallaci confesses. (If you talk to Fallaci long enough, you’ll learn that lots of things--her characters, her books--symbolize the children she never bore.)

The novel’s roots are in Vietnam, with many vignettes drawn directly from her own experiences in the earlier war: a soldier’s severed head inside a helmet, a young child blasted skyward. “I never overcame the trauma of Vietnam,” she admits. The book underlines her revulsion for war but also betrays her lifelong obsession with it. “Nothing, unfortunately, reveals us as much as war,” Fallaci writes in “Inshallah.”

Even so, Fallaci believes she pulled plenty of punches with the novel. “I had to restrain myself not to tell how bad it is, because I knew I already had a heavy hand,” she confesses. “You saw the war in Vietnam on television every night, so you think you have a familiarity with war. But I promise you, anybody who has done what I have done all my life, as a war correspondent, will tell you that the war you see on TV (and that you think you know because of TV) is not the war. The war is a much more brutal thing. Because all the brutality--the horror! the macabre!--that war causes, they don’t show on TV.”

The novel’s tone is leavened by comic moments, but Fallaci does not camouflage her devastatingly bleak message. Most of “Inshallah’s” characters die spectacularly or are gruesomely injured. Between its covers, love turns evanescent, friendship dies, religion proves empty, and the corrupt and insane forces that drive the war in Lebanon aim, inevitably, toward apocalyptic ends. Only courage remains.

“It is the mainspring of life, courage,” Fallaci writes two-thirds of the way through, as if urging her readers on. “And courage has many faces. The face of generosity, of vanity, of curiosity, of necessity, of pride, of innocence, of recklessness, of hatred, of joy, of desperation, of rage and also of fear (to which it remains joined by an almost filial bond). But there exists one kind of courage that has nothing in common with those: the blind, deaf, boundless, suicidal courage that comes from love.”

“Inshallah” has met with tremendous popular acclaim. In Italy alone, 600,000 copies have been sold, and the book has been published in 21 other countries. In the United States, 50,000 copies were released in the first printing and a second printing is planned. The reviews, on the other hand, have been mixed--worshipful superlatives amid brickbats. “Balzac, of course, Proust, ‘War and Peace,’ etc.--that’s the proper company for Oriana Fallaci’s exciting novel, ‘Inshallah.’ You have to read all of it, because you can’t partition a universe,” wrote Jean-Francois Deniau in Le Nouvel Observateur. An Egyptian novelist writing in the Washington Post accused Fallaci of having “contempt for Arabs as a whole and Muslim Arabs in particular.” Abbas Milani, in the San Francisco Chronicle, called the book “a work of high ambition and monumental pretension. . . . Reading ‘Inshallah’ in these days of presidential politics, one is tempted to say: I know Homer, and Ms. Fallaci, you are no Homer.”

TO CREATE “MY CHILD, THIS BOOK,” FALLACI WITHDREW FROM THE OUTSIDE world, locking herself away “like in a grave.” She labored over the novel with her usual obsessive energy, working on it incessantly, except for a brief sojourn to report on the Persian Gulf War for Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper. (“That one wasn’t a real war,” she says snippily. “It was an expensive made-for-TV movie. Expensive both in money and in lives.”)

While writing, she missed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the Chinese democracy movement and Tian An Men Square. “I nourish this rancor for the book that was taking me away from life, from the adventure of being there when history happens,” she admits. Fallaci, holed up in her Manhattan apartment, refused to eat or go out for long stretches, smoked 60 cigarettes a day, by her own account, and fell in love with her characters one by one. A real-life friend hammered on her door one afternoon, fearful that she might be dead inside. Fallaci answered with tears streaming down her face.

“What’s wrong?” the friend asked, and Fallaci began sobbing uncontrollably. (Sometimes a girl does cry.)

“It’s Bilal. I’ve just killed him.”

Even on the rare occasions when she briefly climbed out of the “grave,” Fallaci took her obsession along. A year or so into the writing, she remembers being “desperate, desperate” to talk about what she was doing. So she outlined her plot over dinner with two visiting mathematicians.

As Fallaci tells it, one of the mathematicians turned to the other, saying, “She is writing about Boltzmann’s Formula.” Fallaci latched on--”Who is this Boltzmann!?!” she shouted. Ludwig Boltzmann, it turned out, was an Austrian scholar who a century ago developed the equation S = ln W, a formula representing life’s end. (Boltzmann ultimately committed suicide.) “When I finally began to understand the formula of Boltzmann, I shouted, ‘But this is the Formula of Death! The Formula of Death,’ ” Fallaci recalls in triumph.

Into the novel the whole story went, with her own exclamation now placed in the mouth of a character named Angelo, a soldier-mathematician. Angelo works through Boltzmann’s calculation while involved in a torrid love affair with the novel’s key female character (who commits suicide, of course). Angelo decides that the existence of a formula for death means that there must be a formula for life--so he sets off in a quixotic search for it.

As she worked on the book, Fallaci created her own Formula of Death, twice. She grew weak toward the end of the six-year odyssey of writing; she was having trouble breathing. Her doctor prescribed oxygen. To avoid having to take a break, Fallaci had the tanks and a respirator delivered to her apartment. The doctor warned her about the danger of smoking while being hooked up to the oxygen--she could have set off a tremendous explosion. But Fallaci claims to have forgotten this injunction. For the final six months of the book, she wrote, smoking all the while, with the tubes from the tank wrapped around her neck.

As in “Inshallah,” such a miraculous near-miss provided no guarantee of a happy ending. She sneaked past the danger of explosion, but couldn’t dodge the knife. While working on the translation of the novel into French and English earlier this year, Fallaci noticed a lump at the base of her breast beneath her left arm. “I thought, ‘Ah! There it is!” she says, as if she’s describing a search for a lost earring, as if she expected to find it all along. Like many women who suspect they have breast cancer, Fallaci at first delayed seeking treatment.

“I had a choice,” Fallaci says flatly, her voice faltering. “If I’d stopped then, I never would have finished the English translation. So, I was a little irresponsible to myself. But I had to be responsible to my child--that is, to the book. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic. But that is the way I feel.” Last summer, Fallaci had surgery and radiation therapy, and she is now scheduled for more treatment. Beyond that, she doesn’t want to talk about the details.

She portrays the cancer as a crisis of will more than as a medical challenge. “I am trying to exorcise this thing. That’s why I go on smoking,” Fallaci says, sounding like a child who’s been admonished by a parent. “I go on smoking because I need to think that life goes on as before. I must not give in to the idea that anything has changed. I know it has changed. But I don’t want to accept it.”

Fallaci’s parents and one sister have already died of cancer. With the oxygen tanks and the lit cigarettes, she risked self-immolation. She didn’t make it to the doctor for several months after discovering the lump. And throughout her life, she has always been drawn to conflict and peril. But ask the obvious question and Fallaci insists, somewhat stiffly, that there isn’t a suicidal bone in her body.

“The question doesn’t make me angry,” she says icily. “I never had suicidal instincts. Maybe in the future I will have this impulse. I will be very surprised if I did. I love life too much. As shitty as it is, it’s the only thing we have.”

WITH THE PUBLICATION OF “INSHALLAH,” FALLACI BELIEVES SHE HAS SHED her old skin. She wants to be known now as a writer who once practiced journalism rather than as the famed Kamikaze Interviewer. In fact, each time her corpus of interviews is mentioned, she tsk-tsks and sighs. “I don’t think I was a very good journalist,” she mutters. And she adds that she doesn’t think much of her contemporaries either.

Fallaci once called journalism “an extraordinary and terrible privilege,” but now it seems to her terribly debased. Perhaps her revisionist thinking comes from finding herself on the receiving end in interviews. “Each time you are interviewed, you give away your soul,” she complains. When the Washington Post revealed her cancer last November, she was enraged. Fallaci has been known to threaten lawsuits against writers who have dared to write about her in a way that displeases her; she points out that journalists are capable of the basest cruelty without taking responsibility for the pain they cause. Her sister Paola is a reporter in Italy, and Oriana has refused even her repeated requests for an on-the-record audience. “I can’t sue her, right? So I can’t give her an interview!”

With a wave of her hand, Fallaci erases her past in favor of her present: “The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel is far greater than what you can give through journalism,” she says expansively.

In addition to putting journalism behind her, Fallaci also has been shedding the political history that distinguished her earliest work. The public realm that attracted her furious energy, it turns out, has been a disappointment to her, too. Fallaci describes herself now as an anti-ideological anarchist, equally dismissive of the Left and Right. She even claims that she never was attracted to socialist ideas. “Never voted socialist! Never! No sir! No sir! No sir!” she insists. “The problem is that there is no party in which I recognize myself.”

Reminded of remarks she made in 1980, when she told me that she regularly voted for the Socialist Action Party (of which her father was a member) and even considered running for the Italian senate on the party line, Fallaci flushes. “Socialism,” she had said then, “was a beautiful dream.” Now she expresses disbelief and is momentarily caught speechless at hearing the words read back to her. She’s such a stickler for the truth, and here she’s been caught in a contradiction.

She gulps, backs up and takes a characteristically ferocious run at the subject. “I regret to have accepted--I was young--this division between the Right and Left. Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” She is shouting now. “I am a more free person now. Much more free now than you can imagine me 10 years ago. And I’m not about to be blackmailed sentimentally and intellectually by the so-called Left. We should never make declarations after which you wish to withdraw. But I honestly think that, philosophically speaking, my radical temptations are over.”

One tenet of Fallaci’s philosophy, though, has not altered a jot. Her radical individualism is intact--and her gloomy view of romantic love is as fierce as ever. “Are all the ties that bind oppressive in your life?” I asked in 1980, mindful that she’d just published a book whose purpose was to make her own lover, Panagoulis, a “little less dead,” as she put it. Instead of a sentimental reflection about love, though, the question provoked an onslaught from Fallaci about the perils of romance. “Of course any tie is oppressive, but no tie like the tie called love!” she shot back. “I have just written a preface for the Italian edition of a book that I adore, ‘Call of the Wild’ by Jack London. My interpretation of ‘The Call of the Wild’ is very different from the others, because to me the book is a great hymn to freedom.

“In it, Buck the dog finds love in the person of a hunter, who loves him back dearly. He just has to live with the hunter and he becomes--you should read this little masterpiece!--he becomes very fat. He eats quietly, he passes the night to look with adoring eyes on his master, to lick the hand, to do whatever the hunter wants whenever he wants. He becomes free only when the hunter is killed in the wilderness. First the dog kills the Indians who murdered the hunter, and you can’t believe his fury! No more a noble animal! A beast, and he commits revenge, attacking the Indians, killing all of them. And then he escapes and looks for freedom. In fact, he becomes a sort of legend, shouting ‘Whooooo!’ in the night. And what I say in this preface is that no chains to freedom are as heavy as the chains of love.”

Today, Fallaci’s stark view of the price paid for friendship or love (apparently to be celebrated in one’s fictional characters, but avoided in real life) has not softened. She still casually refers to love as slavery, claiming the damage “starts with the parents” and splashes over into other affairs. “Once your heart--your person and your sentiment--are engaged with a creature, whether it’s a man, a woman, or an animal,” Fallaci says, turning her palms up, “you’re f-----. F------! You are! It’s a fact!”

WHEN ORIANA FALLACI SUDDENLY STOPS DECLAIMING, YOU NOTICE. THE MUSCLES in her face slacken, and her bravado vanishes. Words no longer tumble forth; they are doled out. Her hands cease gyrating and come to rest in her lap. She becomes muted, strangely vulnerable, even childlike.

She imagines she could have done a million things besides becoming a writer. She could have been an archeologist or a doctor or perhaps a ballerina. “If I had been wise,” she says darkly, “I would have chosen another life.” She seems genuinely flummoxed about the way things have played out. What if she’d married? What if she’d had children? What if she’d been born rich? She laughs. “Ah, if I was born rich, I would not have done anything!”

But then, her arms wrapped around her torso, she deflates. She seems small and spent, grappling all at once with the idea of fate, contemplating her own destiny. Will she measure up, for example, when it comes to demonstrating her own courage? “I have a tremendous preoccupation: To die with dignity,” she admits softly. “My life has not been the coward’s life, you must admit that. I do not believe I will die in a cowardly way.”

Her reverie about dying leads Fallaci eventually to tote up the stories she knows about heroism--tortured dissidents, brave priests, rebels like Panagoulis. Her collection of such heroes is Fallaci’s version of prayer beads on a string. She fingers them. And there’s one memory that particularly rivets her. It’s a World War II story: Toward the end of the war, the Nazis arrested 10 people in an Italian village. The Nazi soldiers made a cruel offer. If one villager would offer himself for execution, the 10 who’d been arrested would be released. A young carabiniere , just 21 years old, stepped forward to offer himself up.

“All my life, I have been asking myself, ‘Would you do it in his place? Would you do it?’ ” Fallaci says, stiffening her chin. “You know, I’ve never been able to say yes. But my admiration for that man! That is a good way to die!”

Fallaci is mindful, too, of her father’s death. Edoardo, an anti-Fascist Resistance fighter during the war, was a cabinetmaker--and his daughter’s profoundest influence. Fallaci still vividly remembers his arrest and the first time she saw him after he was imprisoned by Mussolini. “His features were completely distorted by the beatings,” she said, her voice quavering. “I didn’t recognize him when I saw him. And when I finally recognized him, he said to us, ‘Don’t worry. You will see. You must be optimistic! They will not execute me. They will send me to a concentration camp in Germany.’ As if being sent to a concentration camp in Germany was the best of luck!”

Four decades later, Edoardo died of cancer while Oriana was in the midst of writing “Inshallah.” “My father died in my arms,” she recalls, closing her eyes. “And he knew he was dying. I had to say something to him. I was so desperate. It was a matter of seconds! He was suffering, terrible pains”--and here Fallaci coughs, her face rigid--”and then I had an enlightenment. I said to him: ‘For Christ’s sakes, what a marvelous man you are, what a courageous man you are! You--dammit!--how courageous you are. You’re great! Bravo! Bravo!’ And he opened his eyes and looked at me, and he had a smile. And he died.”

It’s dark outside, and a cruel wind is whipping against the hotel windows. Fallaci huddles back against the couch cushions, utterly alone in the faint glow of a lamp. “I hope,” she says at last, “I die like he did.”