Of Love, Pain and Death

A LETTER to a murdered lover, A Man is as overwhelming as mourning and as painful as its sorrow. "You weren't wrong; I was to discover this after your death," the narrator incants as she traces the life of her lover, a Greek freedom fighter. In painstaking detail, she relates to him what she has learned since his brutal death--what was coincidence, what was inevitable. Part survivor, part vindicator, the narrator mentions herself infrequently and addresses the reader just once. This is no one's story but her lover's, a story so great, teaching a lesson so timeless, that Oriana Fallaci uses classical Greek tragedy as her literary foundation. Full of prophecy, fatalism and resigned sadness. A Man mourns the inexorability of both love and destruction.

But it is hardly a novel. Rather it is a chronicle--day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute--of the final years of Alexander Panagoulis. And Alekos is not "a man," but a revolutionary consumed by his cause. He swears in the face of his torturers as they probe him with electric shocks; days after finishing five years in prison, he resumes dangerous underground activities; to embarrass the government, he begs the jury hearing his case to punish him with a death sentence. In his moral perfection, Alekos transcends us all, just as he transcends his biographer, leaving the reader humiliated, numb, outside.

It was not Fallaci's intention to involve the reader emotionally in Alekos' experience; A Man is not a human drama but a lesson--a lesson that torture is a reality; a lesson that individuals who will not surrender to society will by destroyed by it; a lesson that evil corrodes the left as well as the right; a lesson that freedom is a dream. Fallaci has addressed these in the past, raising them as issues during her interviews, but here she illustrates them in grisly detail: the knitting needles up the urethra, the backstabbing by old friends, and the corruption at every turn. All in urgent prose and laced with love.

Were it not for the book's frequent powerful and moving passages, it would be difficult to finish A Man. The first 200 pages are a relentless description of gruesome torture--the Greek secret police had captured Alekos after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the dictator, and they shuttle him from torture center to torture center until they reach his place of captivity, a cell only large enough for two steps in one direction. When he is released, he meets the narrator, a character clearly based on Fallaci herself, an international political reporter who has covered revolutionaries from Bolivia to Vietnam. While imprisoned, Alekos had spent hours teaching himself Italian (he went on hunger strikes to obtain the books) so he could translate her works into Greek (more hunger strikes to obtain these as well).

Their meeting changes the tone of Fallaci's writing--for several chapters she loses her cynical tone and conveys the terror and attraction this man raises in her. "It would be disastrous to accept your love and love you: I knew that with certainty, in an instant," she says after she first meets Alekos. But loving him was inevitable "because it overpowered the instinct of survival and the ambiguous snare of happiness."

In another, more painful passage, she describes Alekos' anger when spies observe them at their "refuge"--a vacation house in the woods. Each night, just after the lovers get into bed, the spies beam a bright light into their bedroom, leaving it on until the morning. After a week, Alekos can stand it no longer and runs outside to confront them. When she tries to stop him, he fights her, and in the battle hits her in the stomach, killing the child in her womb. Realizing what he has done, for the first time Alekos cries out for forgiveness, saying that he has had enough suffering. She remembers "that mad monologue, sweet, wondrous, heart-rending, as the blows of the knife increased in number and intensity and remorse for not having told you before you silenced me, the remorse for not having realized that a child would have been the only rival for your fate..."

FALLACI'S INSIGHT in these more dramatic moments of epiphany and change speak far more eloquently of Alekos as a compelling, compelled man. We remember these passages, not his beatings, when he marches arm-in-arm with his former torturers, when he attempts, once again, to assassinate the Greek ruler, and when he sets himself up for his own murder by publishing classified government documents. These brilliantly written digressions enlarge Alekos' character from the single-minded revolutionary to more human dimensions, and his story evokes frustration and anger. But these passages are over-shadowed by pages and pages of electric shocks, of filthy cells, of long days and nights in the dark.

"Greeks are obsessed by tragedy. Since we invented it, we see it everywhere," Alekos' bodyguard tells the narrator the day that she meets the recently freed prisoner. "But what kind of tragedy are you talking about?" she asks him. "There is only one kind of tragedy," he responds, "and it is based on three elements that never change: love, pain, and death." And so she too grows to see tragedy in love, pain and death. Like a Greek tragedy, A Man at once raises and dismisses all questions.

Why did Alekos die? Because he had to. Why are governments so evil? Because all men are evil. And Alekos? He was the exception. This is Fallaci's point--that the exception cannot exist for long. He embarasses us, he scorns us, and he cannot touch us.