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Subject: Oriana Fallaci, Forever At War; After a Life on the Front, the Writer Faces an
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 04:42:49 EST
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Oriana Fallaci, Forever At War; After a Life on the Front, the
Writer Faces an Enemy Within<By Paul Hendrickson<Washington Post
Staff Writer=

 Because she is Fallaci, which is to say drammatica to the
toenails, her cancer has become in her mind not just some insidi-
ous unthinking thing, but an alert and breathing and plotting
thing. He is so evil, this cancer. If she could strangle him, she
would. She'd pay to spit in his face. His mother is a whore and
his father is a worm and all his children are hideously deformed.
Hell hath no curse that this 95-pound wan and not-well spitfire
of a world-famous Italian journalist hasn't already made up in
her head.

 Who knows, maybe it's working. Maybe the bile she feels for him
is what's keeping her alive, giving her sustenance in some primi-
tive, inexplicable way. Which is sort of a description of Oriana
Fallaci herself - a primitive, original, inexplicable woman.

 "I feel I have a creature, an animal, inside," she says, her
voice liquid and guttural, so Mediterranean-rich. She's leaning
in close, as if confiding a secret. She has hold of your arm.
She's nodding. "Ah, si, it's an intelligent thing. And he knows
what I think. And so I cannot hide to him what I'm thinking, that
I am pessimistic."

 You've been waiting for nearly the whole lunch for the collera
to come out - all the way out. It's been here earlier, but in
fits and starts. Not anymore. She's speaking of him, the alien,
as if he were perched at the table, atop the tape recorder, a
grinning buzzard.

 "After the surgery, I said, 'I want to see what you've taken
off.' And they said, 'Oh, come on, nobody does it, it's terri-
ble.' I said, 'It's my stuff, I want to see it.' So they came
with this thing. Heh-heh. It was this big piece of Oriana. They
came and I said, 'I want to see him.' And him was this little
long white thing. I started talking to him: 'You bloody bastard.'
Oooh, I hated him. I was insulting him. 'You don't dare to come
back. Did you leave any children inside me? I will kill you! I
will kill you! You will not win!' These doctors, they could not
believe. They said, 'Oh, my God... .' " The last part of this,
and some earlier choler too, has come out loud enough for diners
at nearby tables to begin glancing over: Who is this five-foot
Florentine fireball roiling the climatized air of the Madison
Hotel's main dining room?

 Fallaci's surprisingly large hands are twisted at her breast.
She holds them there, as if in pantomime. The trademark fire-red
nails seem to be attacking the flesh of something that cannot be
seen with an ordinary eye.  Such a diminutive terror - in her
black runner's watch and plaid cape-dress.  Such a perfect rage
radiating from this weakened body.

 The fury subsides.  It's as if the thing has left the table, for
now. In fact, Fallaci laughs - is she laughing at herself? Can't
tell. It's time for a smoke. She reaches inside her large black
bag for her beat-up pack of Larks. Fallaci has cancer but Fallaci
smokes. She eases backward in her seat. How many Larks have been
lit up so far today? She cups her hand and takes flame from her
yellow tube lighter. She flicks ashes off the starched white ta-
blecloth. She's fooling with her huge tinted glasses. The suede
beret sitting atop the helmet of light brown hair makes her ap-
pear almost comic - as if the hat were a lid atop a wizened cook-
ie jar.

 Except that very little here seems comic.

 Fallaci the writer, not the journalist, is thinking.

 "I cannot divide myself anymore from reality and imagination,"
she says. "You see, I am silently writing this novel between me
and the cancer. He is an alien creature, and he's inside of me."

 A little earlier, in a different tone, one more sorrowful than
seething, telling of the daily painkillers and the "radiotherapy"
and all the seeming utter nonsense the seriously ill must endure,
she'd said: "They have taken off this cancer, but I am waiting
for it to come back. The doctors say that my reaction is suici-
dal. ... I would like it not to be. ... Deep inside I feel I'm
not going to last too long. ... I have this feeling I'm not going
to last."

 She said it shaking her head.  The Latest Battle<

Oriana Fallaci is 62. The most celebrated political interviewer
of our age has breast cancer. The lioness is deep in winter. The
author of "A Man" and "Interview With History" and "Nothing, and
So Be It" and other books of both fiction and nonfiction has had
intimations of the other side - which, since she's an atheist,
must be like peering into nothing, niente.

 She'd like there to be something on the other side. But she is
not a hypocrite. And so she declines to get on her knees and
pray. And yet lately, she has been ... wondering. About the idea
of God.

 Her mother, her father, one of her siblings have all died of
various kinds of cancer. Her mother lasted two years. Her sister
lasted six months. A younger sister had the alien but she kicked
him.

 In July, in Italy, surgeons took out a big chunk of her breast.
She'll show you the spot. "It was right up here, near the rib,"
she says, and you wonder if she's going to take your hand and
guide it to the slack flesh.

 One of the reasons she's consented to do a modified book tour
for the American publication of her latest gargantuan novel -
it's called "Inshallah" and is about the war in Beirut and 100
other things - is because the activity deludes her. That things
are as they were.

 The woman who goaded Kissinger, and prodded Ali Bhutto, and
stunned Gen. Giap, and discomfited Nguyen Van Thieu, and asked
Indira Gandhi (in the first question of the interview) why so
many people thought of her as cold and icy, and inquired of
Yasser Arafat, he of the "swollen, obese stomach," whether he
found living with a woman at his side a repugnant idea, seems
these days almost - almost - a figure of pathos.

 This is the histrionic and hot-blooded woman about whom journal-
ist Robert Scheer, after he'd interviewed her for Playboy in
1981, said: "For the first time in my life I found myself feeling
sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Gadhafi, the Shah of Iran and
Kissinger."

 "On every professional experience I leave shreds of my heart and
soul," Fallaci once wrote of the people she's interrogated in a
career going back almost five decades. (She started on Italian
papers at 16.) "So I did not go ... with the detachment of the
anatomist or the imperturbable reporter. I went with a thousand
feelings of rage, a thousand questions that before assailing them
were assailing me."

 But now there's an alien inside.  When she first felt the lump
(it was last winter), she was in the midst of translations of her
new novel - first, for the French editions, later for the Ameri-
can ones. She felt the bulge and said immediately in her fatalis-
tic way, " 'Okay, that's a tumor. I'm finished.' But I decided
not to tell it because if I tell it, everybody would say, 'Oria-
na, you must go to the doctor.' I could not go to the doctor. I
had to finish the translations of 'Inshallah.' I lost six pre-
cious months."

 She finished work on the American translation this past summer,
flew immediately to Milan, went under the knife in something like
24 hours. "The doctor said, 'Fallaci, your diagnosis is precise.
It's a bad one. Tomorrow morning we open it.' "

 She tells this with a certain grandness, as is her way, and then
makes a bouquet with her fingertips. It's earlier in the day, at
the start of The Fallaci Experience. The poet in her, not to say
the rage, seems just beginning to peek out.

 "I feel, what woke up this thing in me was the black cloud in
Kuwait," she says. On "cloud," her hand opens and the finger-
tipped bouquet blossoms - you might say mushrooms.  What she's
talking about are the oil fires of the Persian Gulf War. She
feels certain that her exposure to those sooty pillars of smoke
that towered up two years ago were what lit the cancer fires in
her. In one of her dispatches from the gulf, she wrote: "From
this war I'm coming back with a wound that's invisible."

 That sentence haunts her now.

Fatalism and Figures<

 So much of her life has been spent in the zones of war. Maybe
this is why she's fatalistic. At 11 she was a runner for her fa-
ther, who was a gifted cabinetmaker but became a leader of the
local Resistance in Florence. "There is only one thing," Fallaci
once said, "that when the danger is over and nothing has happened
to you, you feel twice alive." In "Inshallah," she writes that
nothing reveals man as much as war, "nothing exacerbates with the
same strength his beauty and his ugliness, his intelligence and
his stupidity, his bestiality and his humanity, his courage and
his cowardice: his enigma." She hates war but loves soldiers.

 Maybe the fatalism has to do with being a woman and having grown
up poor. "When you are a woman, you have to fight more," she once
explained.

 The new novel was inspired by the 1983 suicide bombing of the
American and French marine barracks in Lebanon. It has some
ghastly scenes: A child jammed upside down into the drainpipe of
a toilet - "like the cork of a bottle sinks inside the neck of
the bottle." A soldier rocking and sobbing and cradling the hel-
met of his best buddy. Except that it's not just a helmet he's
cradling - the decapitated head of the buddy is inside.

 These are from the opening pages.

 "I must say, I've been accused it's too strong a scene," she
says, grinning, speaking of the helmet passage.  "I asked my edi-
tor. She said, 'For the Americans, peanuts.' "

 "Inshallah" has 103 characters in an incredibly dense 599 pages.
"Well, listen, 'War and Peace' has a lot more - 187. I have 100,
more or less. With the extras. The main ones, only about 60."

 A trifling.

 The book sold 600,000 copies in Italy. (It was published there
two years ago.) "Number 1 - it did not move," she says, meaning
that "Inshallah" went to the top of the bestseller lists, with a
bullet. Doubleday reportedly has printed something near 50,000
copies for the American edition and hopes for a New York Times
bestseller. Fallaci certainly has her following here. But this is
hardly minimalist fiction. With Fallaci, nothing has ever been
minimalist.

 Almost no reviews have appeared in the United States yet. Many
of the reviews in Europe were ecstatic, though some contemptuous.
Her books have always had visceral hot-cold reactions. Said one
European reviewer: "The journalist Oriana Fallaci is a splendid
example of le violon d'Ingress: When someone famous in one area
mistakenly turns to another." Said another: "If a nun appears,
you know that she's to be tortured and sodomized." But raved Le
Nouvel Observateur, "Balzac, of course, Proust, exciting novel,
'Inshallah.' You have to read all of it, because you can't parti-
tion a universe."

But the hell with reviewers anyway, they're a cancerous lot.

The Middle East, terrible and fertile inspiration ground for her,
cannot compare to Vietnam, nothing can compare to Vietnam, Viet-
nam is the Proustian remembrance of all Fallaci battlegrounds
past. "I can tell you one thing," she says. "When I hear a hel-
icopter over my house in Florence, or my country house in Tus-
cany, I get the shivers, I go back to Vietnam. I tell you another
thing. I smell a pineapple, I'm walking the streets again of
Saigon." Oriana Fallaci is not an impoverished woman. War zones
and international celebrity have had their remunerations. Besides
the abodes in Florence and Tuscany, she owns a four-story brown-
stone on the East Side of Manhattan - on one wall of which hangs
her rucksack and water flask and camouflaged helmet from Vietnam.
The rucksack has a yellowed note in it advising what to do with
her remains - except that it wasn't her fate to be a KIA or an
MIA, it was her fate to come out of Nam with her faculties intact
and write more punishing books, do more punishing interviews.

 She hates writing, she says. "Each book leaves me so worn out.
Each time I finish, I say, 'This is the last time.' I tell you,
it's the physical nausea. It's cruelty. It's like Dracula for me
- it sucks my blood, from my body, from my mind. ... Number one,
it's the robbery it does of your brain, of your soul. ... A book
is a kind of child, your child. It devours you."

 Ah, but she loves writing. There is such magic in writing. You
never know "why the egg of your mind gets fertilized by the sper-
matozoa of an idea."

 You ask if she thinks of herself as a lusty woman. This seems to
throw her.

 "Lusty, Lusty. I'm very cerebral. It's very curious. ... My
loves are and have always been cerebral.  Not lusty. Cerebral.
I'm the most cerebral person you can find in your life.  for
life, I have this obsession of death, the fear of death, and the
love for life."

The Riddle of Oriana<

 When she interviewed Golda Meir, Fallaci wrote: "Above all, she
reminds me of my mother, whom she somewhat resembles.  My mother,
too, has the same gray curly hair, that tired and wrinkled face,
that heavy body supported on swollen, unsteady, leaden legs."

 When she interviewed Henry Kissinger, Fallaci wrote: "This too
famous, too important, too lucky man, whom they call Superman,
Superstar, Superkraut. ... This incredible, inexplicable, unbear-
able personage."

 This incredible, inexplicable, unbearable woman is talking right
now about the profession of journalism, and why she considers
herself shed of it. It's like an old love that has disappointed
you for the final time. A waiter has just dropped out of the
ceiling to light her latest cigarette. Fallaci didn't seem to be
noticing him, so deep was she into her soliloquy, but then sud-
denly leaned over so the man could flick the flame. She held his
wrist, nodded at him, never broke stride in the talk.

 Yes, it's true, journalism "gave me what I cannot live without.
Adventure. Adventure. I am an adventurer. I cannot live without
adventure." And yet journalism increasingly became a handcuff.
"You know the handcuff, it's very short, the chain of the hand-
cuff. You cannot write handcuffed. I need to do like that."

 The arms spread wide - like an owl banking in a turn.

 "I need to reinvent the truth." Which is what literature af-
fords.

 The field is so tawdry now. Journalism is arrogant, egotistical,
cruel, fabricated. It's "the lack of precision of truth" that so
deeply bothers her.

 She never invented so much as a sentence, she insists. On the
other hand she has acknowledged to reporters in the past that
"objectivity exists only in mathematics," and that she is not a
stenographer, and that she prepared her Q&A interviews for publi-
cation as "a movie director makes a film - eliminating, cutting,
splicing." "I am the judge," she once said. "I am the one who de-
cides. Listen: If I am a painter and do your portrait, have I or
haven't I the right to paint you as I want?"

 Painting is one thing; spading dirt is another. "With what
right, with what right, you journalists go and persecute Mr. So
and So? It could be Clinton, it could be the other one - you
remember, the one who was candidate and had passed the weekend
with that girl?"

 Gary Hart?

 She thumps the table.

 "Gary Hart. That story of Gary Hart drove me crazy with rage.
... And who goes to scrutiny the weekends of Mr. John Smith? Huh?
You tell me. I don't give a damn with whom Gary Hart sleeps. I
want you to administrate me well, to administrate well the coun-
try.  For Christ's sake, Napoleon was (expletive) all the (ex-
pletive) in the streets, just to say one. ... I do not understand
this scum bag journalism, you understand what I mean?"

 Oriana Fallaci swears beautifully.

 She's been hurt a lot by her fellow journalists, she says. These
would-be Fallacis who came so sweetly to profile and then did
their fang-jobs. "When I find people who want to do with me what
I did with Gadhafi, I get angry. I say, innocent, Gadhafi is
not.' "

 The riddle of Oriana.

 Because several minutes later she's saying this: "I am missing
the children." She's looking down. She has grown soft. She seems
ready to cry. "I am missing the children.  Physically. All the
time."

 She means her own. The ones she was never able to have.

 "You don't need Freud to understand me," she says. "When I speak
of writing, I speak of pregnancy. When I speak of my books, I
speak of my children. ... This new child of mine. This hides a
tremendous, desperate nostalgia for the flesh children I did not
have. It's not my fault. I lost them. I wanted one."

 One of Oriana Fallaci's most moving books is titled, "Letter to
a Child Never Born."

 How many children did she lose, she is asked.

 "Now I don't want to answer this question."

 Her body defeated her when it came to childbearing. "This has
been my drama. ... It is terrible. I mean, people who don't want
them, get them. And have the tragedy of abortion and everything.
I never had the problem of abortion. I had the other problem.  I
wanted to make the children, not to lose them."

 She has had "marriage without certificate," she has had "divorce
without certificate."

 How many marriages, how many divorces?

 She shrugs.

 Her most celebrated marriage without certificate was to Alexan-
dros Panagoulis, the Greek Resistance fighter whom she inter-
viewed in 1973 and addressed posthumously in her 1980 novel, "A
Man." When she met Panagoulis in Athens, "That day he had the
face of a Jesus crucified ten times."

 She turns it: "Do you have children?"

 "Ah," she says sadly, nodding, upon hearing the answer. "Then
when you will die, you will not die. When I die, I really
die."<02:18 11-24C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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