The idea of including on this site a reflection on Oriana Fallaci comes from a question I am often asked: what was so special about Oriana Fallaci? I must admit that I have always found it impossible to ignore or underestimate what she would have said or written in her statements, especially in regards to my political beliefs.
By his, I do not mean to claim that I have always shared the views expressed by Oriana. I think that it was rather an affinity or a more general and profound political sharing, which was independent from the Politics-Party type, and rather it identified with that political mindset which targets and fights every Power that aims to subdue with force or by any other means to bend the people to its will: wherever this power may manifest itself, and it does not matter the forms and ways it takes, or the skin color or the style of outfit it wears from time to time, or its secular or what religious ideal (so to speak) it refers to.
For Oriana – she repeats it often – everything is political; enough to claim that: “The journalist is a historian who writes history while it takes place.” Of course Oriana (like each of us), was formed in the character and in her beliefs throughout her life experience …. mine will be an attempt to understand, to the possible extent, Oriana and her inner world concerning the ‘visceral’ relationship, as she called it, with the man she loved, Alekos Panagulis; and also to understand while talking about him, her (their?) way of perceiving and analyzing human relationships, namely political. Hence the decision to go back to Oriana’s literary masterpiece: “A man.”
She herself declared that A man is a complex book … a book full of books. And, about the literary genre, the novel could be seen in many ways: ideological-political, a true-crime novel, or about Power and anti – Power, a classic or modern novel, built with elements of the Greek tragedy … The truth – she concluded – is that a novel has its own life and it becomes what others see in it …
Pressed by the reporter that interviewed her, she said that for her it was a book about the loneliness of an individual who refuses to be categorized, schematized, pigeonholed by fashion, ideologies, by societies, by Power … A book about the poet’s tragedy who does not want to be a mass-man … a book about the hero who fights alone for freedom and truth, never giving up …
All this is certainly true, but in my opinion it does not go to the heart of the novel A Man; i.e.: the nature of the relationship between two very strong personalities with a very strong ego and with prickly characters, and for whom the love relationship cannot be separated from their political engagement. Therefore, this is the relationship between Oriana Fallaci and Alekos Panagulis: two very complex personalities, with individual stories that Destiny (Oriana says; Chance I would say) brings together, and lasts for about three years.
The facts: Oriana intends to write a “piece” about what happened in Greece, and goes there to interview one of the protagonists of the fight against the tyranny of “colonels” that seized power; a fight that at last brings democracy to the country. The story is well known: Panagulis with few followers had organized an attack to kill Papadopulos, the head of the Greek dictatorship. He fails and is arrested. The torture he suffered, and to describe them makes us shudder, are narrated in the book A Man. They torture him incessantly and in different places to find out everything on the assassination attempt, but Panagulis will never speak. Finally, one of the regime’s leaders enters the torture room, and with a gesture he silences all: “Enough – he says – do not touch him anymore. It’s useless to insist, he will not speak. It just so happens that once in a hundred thousand times one does not speak. And this is the case. ” So approaching Panagulis reduced to a mass of bruised flesh and broken bones, “I will shoot you”, he says.
But things will be otherwise … In the meantime, in fact, internationally the public opinion had mobilized against the Greek dictatorship, and many governments of democratic countries had taken steps to ensure that things would change in Greece. So the same dictatorship in order to survive (not successfully), will make several attempts to give itself a seemingly more “humane” face… Oriana Fallaci met Panagulis in 1973, when pardoned, although having refused to seek pardon, he was released from prison.
She has just arrived at Panagulis’ house to interview him: an interview among the many and important ones done by Oriana in every part of the world, both to the “powerful” as well as to the “heroes” like Alekos Panagulis. Microphone on the table, Oriana starts talking, of course she had documented herself on Panagulis …
“ You remind me of a brazilian monk, Alekos” – “Padre Tito de Alencar Lima”-“ How did you know that?!” – “ I know. I know his letter, the one you published. I was hoping you would do the same for me.” – “ I’ve never done anything for you” – “ It doesn’t matter. Now you’re here. “ You put down the pipe, you clasped both my hands, you pressed them hard, piercing my eyes with yours. “You’re here, we’ve found each other.”
It was awful. Because suddenly everything was clear, and understanding it was the same as making rational the presentiment that had gripped me on my arrival in Athens, admitting that in this room … I not only had to add up my ideals and my moral commitments, with what you represented or what I wanted you to represent, but I also had to face a duel, the meeting between a man and a woman that also led to a love for each other, the most dangerous love that exists: the love that mixes ideals and moral commitments with attraction and emotions. I withdrew my hands, I hid them under the table. With the cowardice of a snail…
However, the things you recounted, the tortures, the trial, the death sentence, the hell in which you had lived for years without losing your faith, without renouncing your individuality, brought me back to you a wind that sweeps away even the will. And behind that wind there was that voice, there were those eyes, those fingers that stubbornly continued to seek me . In the end I gave way. I stopped avoiding your gaze, I allowed my eyes to sink in it, I put my hands back on the table so that you could find them each time you wanted to press them, and the interview went on like that …
The sun was high when we began… Then the sun became twilight, the twilight darkness, an old woman dressed in black came in and lighted the lamps, but not even this distracted us. The fear that had dissolved came back suddenly when I asked you what politics meant for you, not the politics that is made in secret, underground, but the politics that goes on in freedom, and first you answered me that you had never engaged in politics, but had flirted with politics, in the style of Garibaldi not Cavour, then you shut yourself up in an unexpected silence, and in that silence, you slowly moved your fingers closer to mine. Very slowly you clasped them. And very slowly you said in my language. “ I like flirting, but I prefer love. Love with love.”
As if stung by a wasp I stood up. I said I had to leave you and go find a hotel. “You’re not going anywhere. You stay here.” Then limping on the foot broken by the clubbing… you headed toward the old woman dressed in black, who was shuffling about the kitchen. It was night by now and the visitors, disappointed by your abandonment, had left the house…
The supper was harmless … You appeared in high spirits, you described Boiati (the prison-hole where Panagulis had been locked up for years – editor’s note) as a super deluxe holiday hotel, heated swimming pool, golf course, private movie theatres, and restaurants… and you never gave me a look that was too intense, made a gesture too intimate, never did anything that could rekindle the prophetic fears… So at a certain point I concluded that the play of hands, the looks, had been a simple display of friendship, the pronouncement about love had become a political statement of great acumen. If I wanted I could easily accept your hospitality and leave the next afternoon: little by little the house had filled again with acquaintances, people who wanted to say hello to you… (Then the speech falls on Papandreou, the official representative of the left in exile. Panagulis resizes its role, he argues that he is only an opponent of an operetta ndr)… This confirmed your libertarian personality, the ideological independence which I had recognized as my own during the dramatic hours of the interview, and confirming it could explain the mysterious transport that had upset me, could reduce it simply to an ideal brotherhood. Yes I could stay, I thought reassured…
So she stays, and she is offered to sleep in the living room separated from the corridor by a frosted door. During the night Oriana suddenly wakes up, and sees the shape of Panagulis walking up and down the corridor; then he comes to the door as if wanting to come in … but retracts and returns to his room. No, he’s not looking for a fling with Oriana, he wants true love … .So at their second meeting in Athens, what both knew would happen, does happen. At the end of his days, Panagulis will tell her: “You’ve been a good companion. The only possible companion. “
The book A man is one of the masterpieces of world literature. Its reading enlightens and helps understand the human fauna behavior in a political context. It also stimulates deeper reasoning on the meaning of human existence; such as, for example, some verses written by Panagulis with his own blood and minute characters on a piece of paper in the prison-hole Boiati where he had been locked up; and I will focus on those lines at the end of my writing.
Oriana’s first problem will be to convince Panagulis, now released from prison, to leave Greece where the men of the regime, not yet fallen, threaten him of death. He agrees, however, to return to Greece in disguise to organize demonstrations against the regime. Finally, the day of victory for democracy will come. But then other problems and troubles will begin that will see moments of falling out in the relationship between the two. However, called by Panagulis, Oriana, although around the world where her job as a journalist has led her and as a writer called to give lectures, will inevitably come back at his side, until his death.
So Panagulis convinced by Oriana goes for the first time to Italy; Nenni, the old Socialist leader they meet at his home in Formia, describes in his own words Panagulis’ political nature as follows …
“ He reminds me of a boy from Turin I loved very much, a socialist who died in the Spanish Civil war. His name was Fernando De Rosa. Actually he was more an anarchist than a socialist. Just like him (Nenni turns to Oriana in Italian speaking about Panagulis there – editor’s note), Like him he made an unsuccessful assassination attempt… “I sense that you want to say something in rebuttal, but the grand old man goes on talking: of utopia, of realism, of doubt. The doubt that assails you, for example when we wonder if the men like you and like De Rosa are right or whether it’s those like him, who act in the name of common sense and sweet reason; that doubt that torments us when intelligence poisons the optimism of the will, and we realize that men do not correspond to the idea of Man, that people do not correspond to the idea of People that Socialism does not correspond to the idea of Socialism, and we discover that being rational means being pessimists. Here he stops and says: “But you will have time to ponder these things too, now that you are in exile” (Then when in Greece there will be the chance to vote again, Nenni will be the only politician to get busy with his comrades of the Italian Socialist Party to put together a sum of money for Panagulis needed to support his electoral campaign – since he refuses to bind with the major parties – for the election to the Greek parliament)
Oriana portrays the character of Alekos Panagulis in the ways we have said: the hero who fights for freedom and truth, never giving up; his loneliness because he refuses to be categorized, schematized, pigeonholed by ideology; the poet refusing to be a mass-man … This is undoubtedly true; but it seems to me that Oriana’s “visceral” love for Alekos comes rather from memories and experiences she acquired during her political education and character in her infancy and childhood.
I will recall only two episodes: a young Oriana accompanies her mother to the prison where her partisan father is held arrested by the Nazi-fascists. In the interview room there are other people. Two of them are waiting in anguish … Suddenly a man with a tumefied face approaches them, saying: don’t you recognize me? It’s Oriana’s father. In the interview that follows, he says quietly: “I have not spoken …”. The second episode concerns Oriana’s mother’s behavior, when she forcedly reprimands a woman who started spitting and beating up the German soldiers tied up on a truck of the Allies after the liberation of Florence. Oriana’s mother’s words modeled those uttered by Panagulis, when with the advent of democracy in Greece, the tyrants, as well, will be tried. A woman shouts at them in court: Executioners, murderers, disgusting worms, to the gallows! Panagulis who is following the trial leaves the courtroom and will never return. “Why, Alekos, did you behaved like this?” Oriana asks. “Because I have experienced such embarrassment, such shame. God knows if I insulted them, I threatened them and cursed them, but at that time they were the masters and I was in chains. You do not offend a man in chains. Never. Even if before that he was a tyrant. “
Panagulis’ political ideals are even better specified in an interview with Oriana, she gives us an account of his speech (here I will report only some excerpts), when he is tried by the military Court during the dictatorship. The prosecutor wants to show not only that he is the gunman who tried to assassinate Papadopulos, but also a criminal, a mercenary, a thief, a violent! Finally he was allowed to speak …
“I was always, and I am a fighter in the struggle for a better Greece, a better Tomorrow, a society, in other words, that believes in Man. If I am here today is because I believe in Man. And believing in man means believing in his freedom. Freedom of thought, of speech, of criticism, of opposition: everything that the fascist coup of Papadopulos eliminated a year ago…
Contrary to the nonsense offered by my torturers, I do not love violence. I hate it. I do not like political assassination either. When it happens in a country where there is a free Parliament and the citizens are granted the freedom to express themselves, to oppose, to think in a different way, I condemn assassination with disgust and anger. But when a government is imposed with violence and with violence prevents citizens from expressing themselves, from opposing, even thinking, then the use of violence is necessary. In fact, imperative…
I knew the dangers awaiting me. Just as now I know the sentence you will inflict me. I know, in fact, that you will sentence me to death. But I will not draw back, gentlemen of the Court Martial. Indeed I already accept this sentence. Because the swan song of the true fighter is the death rattle he emits when shot by the firing squad of a tyranny.”
We know that Oriana’s father was a militant partisan in the ranks of “Justice and Freedom” (and Oriana herself a courier for this organization of partisan fight in Italy, a role that at the end of the war will be acknowledged by the Italian State); well Alekos Panagulis’ words certainly express those ideals recalled by the militants of the “Justice and Liberty” movement. This leads me to say, in short, that Oriana’s de facto “subordinate” condition towards Alekos (Sancho Panza – like in his relationship with Don Quixote, as she will often say), and her “visceral” love for him (which, nevertheless, will live moments of crisis), seems to me entailed in this: for Oriana Panagulis embodies the life experience and the political and human roots she was brought up in since a very young age, following the example of her father and mother. In an ideal-political sense, it could be argued that for Oriana, Panagulis is flesh of her flesh. I cannot explain otherwise Oriana’s behavior towards Alekos.
Another episode reported in the book, which recalls the Panagulis-political thought. As I said, after the insistence of Oriana he gives in and comes to Italy. In those years in our country the acts of violence committed by terrorists are a recurrent and common routine. It is not totally clear how the misunderstanding arises between them: perhaps Oriana fears that Alekos wants to return to Greece …
I was answered by a savage cry: You don’t understand me at all. Not at aaaallll! How dare you insinuate I have something in common with those altar boys of fanaticism, those bureaucrats of terrorism, those irresponsible killers who shoot like John Wayne on the convenient territory of democracy, bad but still democracy, sick but still democracy, those dogmatists who aren’t risking the tortures and the firing squads of a dictatorship? I’m no terrorist! I never have been! I believe in democracy! I fight against tyrants, have you forgotten that? I forbid you to confuse me with those wretches who shed blood to apply the ideological formulas of their abstractions! Those fascists dressed in red, those pseudo-revolutionaries!” And the phrase pseudo-revolutionaries was to become from that day on one of your favorite slogans…
The fact is that Oriana finds it hard to understand the once again freed Alekos’ behavior, likewise his personal and improvised initiatives (on some I’ll come back) against the fascist regime not yet fallen; which although it had pardoned him, obviously had a thousand eyes on him …
Everything about you represented a challenge to reason, a revolt against common sense, a slap in the face of logic: the blind, deaf, exaggerated ardor with which you hurled yourself into an adventure; the exaggeration and the rhetoric with which that ardor was expressed; the caprice with which you bestowed it or imposed it on your fellowman ignoring his arguments or making fun of them; the lust to wear yourself out in constant danger, incessant strain, continual struggle. Not the struggle to gain a specific goal, but struggle for its own sake, as if the goal didn’t matter or were only an excuse, a mirage that is called freedom, a mirage of windmills, and therefore is pursued in vain, merely to live. Because to live means moving, and stopping is tantamount to dying. Loving you, or rather accepting you, really meant putting on the costume of Sancho Panza, who follows Don Quixote and sings his poetic, mad falsehoods…and all the time wondering whether deep in his heart he doesn’t know that they are only poetic, mad falsehoods, so at every crossroads feeling anew the impulse to flee, which would always mar yet also seal my relationship with you…
Now that you had regained your confidence in crossing the streets… and you limped less and less on your broken foot, even those who had ignored you before wanted you now. Fascinated, I observed the phenomenon , seeking also in it a key that would open the doors of your character: if men and women fell so desperately in love with you, why did you remain so alone, why could you find no one who would lend a hand in fighting the dictatorship in the way you wanted? And why didn’t you adjust a little to reality, why didn’t you act from within an organized movement, a recognized political group, why did you stubbornly insist on changing things by yourself…It would take me a long time to understand that it was here that your great intuition lay, as rebel and artist, your great coherence…
Three incidents reported in the book struck me; because they had an important influence on Panagulis’ behavior. The first: when the military dictatorship took power, he insisted a lot with his brother George, an army officer (finally managing to convince him), to desert and to flee abroad. His brother later died, probably by jumping into the sea during the voyage of the ship that brought him back to Greece as a prisoner. A dream haunts Panagulis who “sees” his brother die; but he will never say he feels responsible for his brother’s death. However, it is impossible not to connect what happened to his brother to the bitter reflection that he will make at the end of another episode. This is the death of the child that Oriana is carrying, the fruit of their union. What had happened was that those who did not cease to persecute him wherever he went, finally succeeded (it does not matter now to know through which links in Italy), in identifying the country house where Alekos and Oriana spent the moments of intense happiness. To provoke Alekos, those individuals, in the evening send beams of laser light through the windows of the house; as if to say: Look out, we know where you are! Alekos wants to go out to face them, Oriana does not agree, and there comes a violent scuffle between them … When a few days later she shows up with the bundle containing the fetus to bury he says distressed: “I carry death with me and I spread it around … “.
The second episode recalls a central figure of the novel, who appears both in the initial part where Alekos was arrested and tortured, and after the fall of the fascist regime, when democracy established itself. His name is Hazizikis, “the only torturer you would never forgive”. This is How Oriana presents him: “The true inquisitor never hits you. He talks, intimidates, surprises. The true inquisitor knows that a good interrogation doesn’t consist of physical tortures but of the psychological torment that follow the physical tortures. He knows that when the victim’s body is noth8ing but a mass of sores he will be happy to take refuge with someone who torments him only through words. The true inquisitor knows that after so many sufferings, nothing will sap the victim’s physical and moral resistance as much as the calm announcement of further sufferings…”
Later the true nature of the “grim, painful, stubborn” hate will be understand, the one that nourishes Alekos towards the tormentor-inquisitor Hazizikis. With the advent of democracy, even Hazizikis will be among the defendants in the Tribunal named to judge the crimes committed under the fascist regime. But Alekos has no doubts that Hazizikis will pull through, because he is convinced that he is hiding a dossier involving some men of the new democracy in Greece … And all this will happen in one of Oriana’s painful moments of reflection about the love relationship with Alekos; a love that except for few brief periods, she admits in her heartfelt and yet lucid inner reasoning, was never true love. (However, when he will ask her for help and intervention, she will continue to stand by his side as a true fellow fighter). Oriana’s bitter reflection about their love inevitably involves the relationship between love and politics, but once the final point has been reached, she will do so through memorable pages on the political fight, that Oriana opens as follows (Part Five, Chapter 1): ” All banners, even the most noble, the most pure, are filthy with blood and shit … “.
But I will go back on that point. Now I want to capture the two moments of the confrontation between Alekos and Hazizikis.
After the attack to the dictator Papadopulos, Panagulis who organized things in an improvised way, is immediately arrested. Earlier during the torture they mistake him for his brother, the “deserter” army officer. In his lucid moments he realizes that the longer he endures the more he will give time to the men who helped him to escape. He adopts a tactic: he will answer offending his captors, so they will turn against him with greater violence until he faints. This will allow his body to recover a little, before they restart … The offenses that they exchange always have a sexual component (when I first read the book, I thought they were a result of a strongly patriarchal mentality): Coward, you tremble with fear ! It’s you who is afraid, damn eunuch! Everybody knows that you’re like a castrated eunuch. And in response they strike him and torture him with the torture tools. Again: You’re the deserter who fled from the ship! Damn fagot! Fags wear the uniform of a major just like you! Sold! Mercenary! Bitch! and so on … And then sexual abuse; Oriana writes about it …
You would never tell me what tortures, specifically, if I asked you precise questions you would turn pale and lock yourself up in silence. Yet, you made no mystery about one of them: the needle in the urethra. They would strip you, tie you to the cot, grope your penis until it was erect, and when it was hard, they would stick an iron needle into it, about the size of a knitting needle. Then they would heat it with a cigarette lighter, and the effect was exactly like electroshock. To make sure you didn’t die, there was a doctor in attendance with a stethoscope…
Soon the inquisitor-Hazizikis will make his appearance into the scene. Now he knows everything about Alekos Panagulis, of the assassination which he organized and of his accomplices: he is missing some details and he wants him to confess them to him …
“Do you feel better, Alexander? Or should I call you Alekos?” And you stared at him, unable to answer yes or no. But the words wouldn’t come out of your mouth, as if they had cut off your tongue…It was his offensive self-confidence, his contemptuous condescension, the detachment with which he treated you. They (the torturers) were human in their bestiality: so human that they were afraid of you and became angry. He, on the contrary, was not angry and he was not afraid of you: he sat there behind the desk, with his beautiful hands and his impeccable clothes, he calmly removed his eyeglasses, wiped them, looking at the lenses and not at you, he replaced them, hesitating with a slight cough; he behaved as if he ran no risk at all. In fact he had not wanted anyone there to guard you. He had ordered you handcuffs removed, had offered you a chair, and now he spoke in the tone of a man conversing at a bar, not interrogating…
The inquisitor asks him if he is thirsty, and offers him a drink. As soon as one of the captors holding a glass of water reaches him, Alekos grabs it, smashes it on the table and pounced on the Inquisitor to hit him, but he manages to dodge it. They are all on him until Alekos faints from the beatings and the resumption of torture. The next day the inquisitor is still there: “Well, now let’s talk.”
That’s what he always said: “Now then, let’s have a talk”. He said it for two and a half months. For two and a half months without interruption they continued tormenting your body and soul… But you never talked. You opened your mouth only to insult them or to say: “Yes, I did it. I failed, and I’m sorry. If I don’t die, I’ll do it again.” The others talked. One by one all of them had been arrested, noy a day went by that they didn’t this one or that one to you, , hoping to make you give way, to make you understand that your resistance was useless. With their swollen faces and their gazes that had lost all willpower, the others would say to you: “Stop, Alekos, it’s no use anymore. We couldn’t hold out. We told them everything.” And you tied to the cot or hanging from the ceiling, would answer;” Who is this man? What does he want? I don’t know him.” At the end of September, exploiting what the others had said, the persecutors prepared a confession and asked you to sign it. A signature and nobody would torment you anymore. You refused… They whipped you with the metal lash, and afterward they tried once more… You kept refusing. You would have died under their tortures if he hadn’t appeared one night…
As I said, at that point one of the leaders of the dictatorship personally intervenes and says: enough he will not speak, we will shoot him. Nineteen days later the trial began. I also summarized Alekos’ speech to the judges of the Military Court; these judges will feel some embarrassment towards the aggressor, after hearing him declare that he is opposed to all forms of violence in a free and democratic country; Conversely violence is legitimate when it comes to bringing down a dictatorship. However, he is sentenced to death. But the inquisitor Hazizikis does not give in and goes back to Panagulis who is in chains; perhaps he wants to take the ultimate satisfaction and annul him psychologically. “Go away, Hazizikis”- “Not before asking you some questions …”. Alekos does everything to hold back the tears, finally, he can no longer hold them back and bursts out with uncontrollable anger …
Then you turned and showed him a face straked with tears.” Hazizikis! I won’t die, Hazizikis! And one day I will make you cry, Hazizikis! And while you’re in prison, I’ll fuck you wife, Hazizikis! I’ll fuck her and fuck her again until she pisses blood, until her guts fall out, Hazizikis! And you won’t be able to do anything about it but cry, I swear it.” “Impossible, my dear clap. I’m not married, as you know. But tell me if…” “ Hazizikis, I’ll kill you Hazizikis!” “ All right, I’ll go. I’ll pass my questions on to others who don’t mince matters. You have to die anyway…”
During the following twenty-four hours nothing happened. The next morning…they took you to the island of Aegina where you waited three day and three nights to be shot…
However the Greek fascist regime in difficulty in international relations will not shoot him; he will be closed up in the prison-hole Boiati … But what about Alekos’ outburst? As I re-read his words against Hazizikis, I was reminded that, despite Oriana’s insistence, he had always refused to go into details about the sexual violence suffered (except the torture on the penis described before). It is as if in the relationships with the torturers who tortured him, he was able to stand up to them provoking them even with offenses of the same sexual content, and so showing them that his dignity had not been the least tarnished by the torture of all kinds inflicted on him: in short, he had not been reduced to a “human subject”, he was and remained a Man! (Then with the advent of democracy, when his torturers will find themselves behind bars, one of them will start shouting words of admiration at Panagulis, who had been the only one who had never talked! The only one that had not given in!). The relationship with the inquisitor-Hazizikis was different, though, who, personally, had never even laid a finger on him, but who for Alekos will always be the maker of everything that he had to suffer!
It seems to me, therefore, that Alekos sees in the persecutor-Hazizikis the personification of Power; he who uses torturers to both foil threats and parry blows against him, more generally to create a climate of intimidation and persecution against the population and keep it subdued. What’s more, when, with the advent of democracy Hazizikis is called to court to answer for the acts committed under the dictatorship, to Alekos the signs come clear that he will be safe, because he knows that he is in possession of a dossier involving the same men who intend to prosecute him. So what matures in him is the certainty that this is the Power that will survive also in Democratic Greece, certainly using other methods and means to establish itself; and against that Power, which Alekos sees embodied in Hazizikis, he is determined to continue to lead his battle. To this end, he decides to enter into politics; but as always he will act in a very personal way; and concerning an initiative that he seeks to finalize against Hazizikis, he will do so in a way that deeply offends Oriana’s dignity …
Now before reaching the conclusion, I will mention the third episode which I believe also had an influence on Panagulis’ character, and which also holds a negative judgment, if not contemptuous, on the attitude of the people (and one might also claim of all people) when a dictatorship takes power. (A judgment that I disagree with in drastic and simplistic terms in which it is formulated, and which I shall return to). The fact is: at some point Panagulis manages to escape from the prison-hole Boiati; Obviously he cannot go to his home in Athens because it would have been immediately searched. But he is sure that a thousand houses would be ready to host him. Let’s take Oriana’s words …
Whose houses? The ones of those who always come forward when the risk is past? When freedom has been regained, the big talkers, the cowards who as soon as they are put to the test melt like candles in a fire? Some wouldn’t even open their door. “Who is it?” “ It’s me, Alekos, I’ve escare, let me in.” “Go away, you must be coking, get out!” Others opened a crack, with the chain on, and were panic-stricken at the very sight of you: “I can’t it’s too dangerous, I can’t!” Even a girl who said she loved you drove you away like a beggar covered in leper:” Get out fast! You don’t want me to end up at the ESA on your account?”…
Then he remembers the address of a person he believes is a trusted comrade, and that lets him immediately enter the house …
“Who’s there?” “A friend” “Don’t you live alone?!” “No, but don’t worry. He’s a real friend, a comrade” “What’s his name, what does he do?” “ His name is Perdicaris, he’s a student” …You woke him upand confronted him firmly: “I’m Panagulis. I’ve escaped from Boiati. No false move, understand?” After a moment of amazement, he jumped from the bedand answered you with kisses, hugs, oaths of loyalty. “Alekos-you’ve-got-no-idea-how-much-I-admire-you. Alekos-I’d-lay-down-my-life-for-you…”What did I tell you? Don’t worry! You’re among comrades, for heaven’s sake, you couldn’t have struck a better place,why didn’t you come here right off? Now rest, eat, tell us how you managed, you devil!”…
At the end the two ‘comrades’ will betray him as well, pocketing the reward that the fascist regime had put on Panagulis’ head. The experience of this event, the indifference of many and even worse the betrayal of people who he believed friends, will make him pen some very bitter verses on herd people, written from the prison of Boiati where he will be brought back after being arrested; verses on the herd people that Oriana recalls in another context; that I will report after a brief interlude, which is also significant as it portrays Alekos’ character.
Let’s go back to Italy, where he is in the country house with Oriana and always engaged in planning demonstrations in Greece against the junta; by means of a small circle of people who comply with him. His last action: it’s about bombs that were to explode in Athens without casualties. This was Alekos’ categorical order. Unfortunately, two bomb disposal experts busy trying to defuse a bomb that had not exploded, were killed … It is not clear by what means, however, he goes to Athens to figure out what went wrong, and then he returns to Italy to Oriana …
Soon you came to, and the waking was a heartrending weeping, tears and sobs that stifled you, broken words that filtered through the wet handkerchief in a monotonous refrain. “Go away, they said to me, go away! Away! Away! Away!” “Who said that to you? Who?” “They did. Go away they said to me, away!” “ It took all night before I understood what had happened in Athens, that, after the five bombs and the death of the two bomb disposal experts, nobody had the courage to approach you. Only two agreed to a meeting on the beach, not to listen to what you wanted to say, but to tell you that this was a good-bye: your kind of struggle didn’t interest them, so they had decided to join a party, and they would join it. Good luck and so long…
I tried to console you: “On the next trip, Alekos – “ You interrupted me. “ There won’t be a next trip. From today on I am really in exile. So much the better, because I don’t believe in bombs anymore, in explosions, in arms. Any imbecile can squeeze a trigger, set fire to a fuse, kill two men… it isn’t by strewing corpses about that you make the world a little more bearable. It’s with ideas! The real bombs are ideas! Oh all the years I have wasted! It’s time I started thinking. The trouble is that I am tired. Terribly tired.”
It was the first time you said to me: The real bombs are ideas, any imbecile can squeeze a trigger…I looked at you, amazed. When had you began to understand this, what had sparked a conclusion so contrary to your personality? Had it been the death of the two men, had it been the trauma of seeing yourself rejected by your scant army, or had those episodes made a seed that had always been dormant in the back of your conscience suddenly blossom? What a victory, if you would really start reflecting, give form to the intuitions that until today you had expressed only through brief statements or poems!…
From that moment Alekos gives his all to writing: these are interesting reflections on politics reported in A man; a book of his poems gets also published; he travels a lot and has contacts in Europe with prominent people of the democratic political world, and … finally the big day of the defeat of the dictatorship in Greece arrives, and the waving of multi-colored flags of democracy!
With great skill Oriana Fallaci opens the chapter of the return of Alekos Panagulis to Greece. I’m speaking not only of her writing mastery but also her ability to connect legendary events that constitute the roots of Western culture to human contingencies. This is how Oriana introduces the chapter of Alekos’ return, as a hero of a Greek tragedy …
In the legend of the hero it is the return to the native village that justifies the sorrows undergone and the exploits performed in the realm of the impossible: without this return his long absence would lose all meaning. But the return is also the most bitter experience that he has to face, a grief that rends him more than he was rent by the battles sustained in the period of the great tests, and not only because up to the very gates of the village he is opposed to the gods, who never tire of trying him or tormenting him, but also because returning among common mortals he must endure their ingratitude, their indifference, their blindness…
Your renunciation of your secret trips, after everyone had rejected you… had been born also from the definitive confirmation of the ingratitude of people, their indifference and blindness; your lingering in an exile that with the fall of the junta no longer had any reason was also derived from the awareness of the new solitude that would engulf you on your return. Right and left, ideologies, parties, conformities, cards for the computer. What you didn’t know, what you didn’t even suspect, was the disappointment that would assail you on your landing in Athens. “Will there be a lot of people waiting for you?”. “Imagine the crowd!” You hadn’t the slightest doubt that at the airport you would be given a triumphant welcome. Neither did I. In periods of transition from one regime to another any occasion is an excuse to cheer, I repeat to myself as I was Flying to New York; for heaven’s sake, they had come by the thousands to receive that Karamanlis who for eleven years had lived comfortably in Paris, that Papandreu who for seven years had stayed easily in Canada; by the thousands they had shouted themselves hoarse for the petty victims of the dictatorship or for the timorous who abroad had done nothing but wait for better days; there was no telling what would happen on your arrival…
I wonder how the newspapers would underline it…your decision to return on the anniversary of the day you had tried to restore dignity and freedom to the country. But when I called you from New York, your words hit me with the weight of a bludgeon: only a couple of newspapers had carried the news, in a few lines so hidden that few people had noticed them, and those who had noticed didn’t get excited. In fact the sparse group waiting for you beyond the gate of the customs area was made up of friends, acquaintances, girls eager to take you to bed, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces, first and second and third cousins, people collected by a few frantic phone calls, come-let’s-make-sure-he-finds-a-few-people-there…
The day after Oriana call him again: “But were some people there, or not?” You exploded like a bomb: “The people! The good people that is always absolved because it is exploited, manipulated, oppressed! … As if the soldiers of the firing squad that had to shoot me weren’t sons of the people!”. “Calm down Alekos.”… “As if freedom could be murdered without the consent of the people, without the cowardice of the people, without the silence of the people! What does the word “people” mean?!? Who is the people?!? I’m the people! It’s the few who struggle and disobey, the people!…They’re herd, herd, herd!” And you hung up.
Then I wrote you a letter…Didn’t you already know certain things? Wasn’t your poem about the heard written in Boiati? “Always without thinking/without their opinions/one time shouting Hosanna/and the next, kill him, kill him” Hadn’t we discussed at length this people who always goes where it is told to go… victim of every ism, every fashion, absolved of all guilt and cowardice by the demagogues who care nothing about it and in absolving it aim only at enslaving it further to exploit it more? Hadn’t we concluded that for those demagogues the people is a numerical abstraction, a concept to separate the individual from his identity and his responsibility, whereas the only real fact is the individual, and every individual is responsible for himself and for the others?…
From that moment Oriana calls frequently to find out from Alekos what he has decided to do … He replies that now that the elections are close, they are all looking for him: from Karamanlis to Papandreou, from the Communist to the Centre Union. “The voice sounded almost festive – says Oriana – obviously the trauma of the first day had been forgotten.”
He explains he wants to get into parliament like Ulysses who enters the city of Troy with his wooden horse. So I need a wooden horse; that is, a party. “With which party of the left?” Asks Oriana, who still does not seem convinced, though, of his choice of doing politics through a party. “With who do you think I would present myself, I chose the blackmail that seemed less of a blackmail, the party that seemed less a party: the Centre Union….”
How his relationship with the politics-party will end is easy to imagine now that we know the man better. Finally after several disputes he will resign from the Center Union (to remain as an independent deputy of the left), he will go to Parliament to get some air, of his presence in Court in the trial of the men of the fascist regime I have already mentioned … But everything was clear from the start : as a Member of Parliament he intends to expose and fight the attempts of the past power to perpetuate itself in the present; and the person he knows well and targets is Hazizikis with his dossiers which according to him expose also men of the democratic regime. He appears to be obsessed in his fight against Power …
(This reminds me that I have read that Oriana in the conference held in the United State experienced something similar, being criticized by someone because they could see in her writings a kind of obsession against Power. “No – she said – mine is an obsession for freedom “).
The chapter opens with a profound reflection on political struggle in general, which in my humble opinion lives up to the famous Shakespearean ‘To be or not to be’ (of course keeping the matters object of this reflection very distinct).
All banners, even the most noble, the most pure, are filthy with blood and shit. When you look at the glorious banners displayed in museums, in churches, venerated as relics to kneel before in the name of ideals, dreams, have no illusions: those brownish stains are not traces of rust, they are dried blood, dried shit, and more often more shit than blood. The shit of the defeated, the shit of the victors, the shit of the good, the shit of the bad, the shit of heroes, the shit of man. Who is made of blood and shit. Where there is one, unfortunately there is the other, one needs the other. Naturally much depends on the amount of blood shed, of shit spattered: if the former surpasses the latter, they sing anthems and raise monuments; if the latter surpasses the former, they cry scandal and celebrate propitiatory rites. But to establish the proportion is possible, since blood and shit in time take on the same color. And in appearance the majority of flags are clean: to know the truth we would have to question the dead slain in the name of ideals, dreams, peace, the injured and outraged creatures who were defrauded on the pretext of making the world more beautiful, from such testimony then compose a statistic of infamy, or barbarity, of filth sold as virtue, clemency, purity. There exists no enterprise, in the history of man, that did not cost a price in blood and shit…
I had come back to Athens without enthusiasm…something in me had snapped…I had grown tired of walking in your desert, alleviating your loneliness without lessening my own; too often the figure I loved had disintegrated into other figures, perhaps to be recomposed in an inexplicable, unrecognizable individual. You no longer wrote poems, you leafed through books instead of reading them, you got by on facile slogans instead of facing debates, you no longer bothered about Parliament, which you mentioned in an absent or ironic tone: nothing interested you now except your promise…You spoke only of him, of the evidence to be collected against him, ignoring any other problem, any other reality…
(The long excerpts from the book that I have taken are of course choices that take into account my way of ‘seeing things’, of interpreting and understand them; in addition they are functional to the final reflections I will share. It is clear that a literary masterpiece must be read from the first page to the last: everyone thinks with his own head).
It began like this: “That scorpion. He wasn’t a man, that one, he was a scorpion.” “Who are you talking about?” “ I’m talking about Hazizikis… He would thrust out his sting, stick it into my soul, and wham! He had injected his poison into me.” “Alekos! Why are you thinking about these things again, Alekos” “ And the way he mocked me after they had sentenced me to death…I wanted to cry. And the more I told myself not to cry, not in front of him, no, the more the tears swelled in my eyes.” “Alekos! What does that have to do with anything now, Alekos?” “ And at a certain point I couldn’t restrain them no longer. And it was a terrible thing to cry like a baby in front of a scorpion … I lost my head. I shouted at him: I won’t die, Hazizikis, and one day I’ll make you cry because you’ll end up in prison, and while you’re in prison I’ll screw your wife, Hazizikis, I will screw her and screw her until she pisses blood, until her guts fall out, and you won’t be able to do anything about it… except cry the way I am crying now” “Alekos, please!” And he started laughing. He answered that he wasn’t married. “Alekos, do you want to tell me why all of a sudden you’re thinking again about these things?” “Because…I realized at the trial…his lawyers behaved too insolently. Always threatening revelations, waving papers they then didn’t submit … So I conducted a little investigation and I found out that in jail he was treated with special consideration. Radio, TV, visits from relatives… including a billionaire who finances the fascists. And each of the visitors came with packets of photocopies of the ESA files… They are the documents I want”. “Ah!” “And I’ll get them.” “ Do you know where he keeps them?”… “His wife” “You said he wasn’t married.” “He wasn’t then. He is now. Married and in love. A beautiful girl it seems.”…”Do you know her?” “No never saw her” “ Well then?” “Well then it’s simple. I’ll get to know her.” “And if she doesn’t want to get to know you?” “She will, she will”. “ If she doesn’t want to tell you where she keeps the documents?” “She’ll tell me, she’ll tell me. A speech is missing … from Sartre’s play: a prick sinks into shit and blood easier than hands do” “ Alekos!” “Which translated into clean language, means: nothing is unworthy when the end is worthy.” “Alekos!” “ Exactly what Sartre’s character means.” “Alekos!” “Uhm. I’ve got a fine job ahead of me, yes. I’ll say this to you: there’s only one thing that worries me about this job: not having transportation, to be able to move when I have to, instead of always having to rely on taxis or borrowed cars. Even your Don Quixote never went on foot. So I need a horse, I mean a car. Will you give me a car?”…
“Will you give me a car?” Nothing had happened that would allow you to guess what an earthquake you had provoked inside me. Without answering you, I had lain there staring at a spot on the ceiling, a damp stain that soon became a smear of slimy sperm, and for a few minutes I was only able to think: it looks like a smear of slimy sperm. Because that too, I forgot to say, is on the banners soiled with blood and shit, on the glorious flags displayed in museums, in churches: the sperm of the heroes who fight for freedom, for truth, for mankind, for justice. In the name of those beautiful dreams, of those beautiful words, one lowers his pants and out comes the sperm. Guess how many creatures have been outraged, wounded, killed like that? There are those who have written history like that. Then I got up abruptly, avoiding your gaze which was questioning me, puzzled, I started talking about things that had nothing to do with automobiles or the ESA files. I went out on some pretext. For a couple of hours I wandered at random through the city, trying to calm myself, to persuade myself that such a reaction was excessive, unsuited to a modern woman: we had had the conversation about dirty hands after all, I had seen your torment… as you explained again your hatred for the scorpion. But reasoning, wandering, served only to indicate to me the only possible choice: leave. I had to leave and in the meanwhile I had to avoid being alone with you. So as not to argue…
Coming back she finds two journalists talking with Alekos. He must go to Parliament, so they agree that they will meet at six and dine together. Once he leaves, she calls to see if there is a direct flight to Rome; no, but there is a flight which stops in Athens and depart for Rome at the exact scheduled time of Alekos’ return home. She leaves the house keys on the bed, she takes her things and goes to the airport. Meanwhile, she does not stop, thinking about and pondering the relationship with Alekos (hoping that the plane arrives and leaves for Rome on schedule; but Alekos having noticed the keys on the bed and having understood her intentions, will run to her at the airport … )
Paradoxically I was not in love with you. I never had been , not even during the seven days of happiness or in the period of the house in the wood, at least not in the sense this word usually has. I am talking about that physical desire that glazes the eyes and stops the breath at the very sight of the beloved… I knew these symptoms, but honestly I couldn’t say that I had ever felt them at any moment with you. Your body didn’t attract me, I didn’t understand the women who considered it handsome…Those little eyes…That thick oily hair… And how many things about you irritated me!… And your exaggerated vitality, you avid, growling sexuality, which attacked me with feline outbursts, arousing in me an impulse to flee: I had to control myself, lie, so you wouldn’t know my participation was a cerebral act, sustained by a mysterious tenderness, heartrending, lacerating, a transport born I don’t know from what but not surely from the senses…It would have been dishonest to say your passion had aroused mine, and afterward it had been the same: In our wild or sweet embraces it was not your body I sought but your soul, your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams, your poems. And perhaps it is true that a love almost never has a body as its object, often we choose or accept a person for the inexplicable spell he casts on us, or for what he represents to our eyes, our convictions, our morality; however, the vehicle of a love relationship remains the body, and if that doesn’t seduce you, then something else must seduce you. The character, for example, the way of living or of behaving. And with time I had discovered that I didn’t much like your character either… But then why I had that impulse to rush after you, embrace you, feel you moustache against my cheek, why now did I have to clear my throat and repress the tears?…
For the third time I looked at my watch: six o’clock. An intuition told me that the debate really had ended at six and you were heading for the house…Once I had written that love doesn’t exist, and if it exists it’s a fraud: what does it mean to love? It meant that what I was feeling now as I imagined you turning to stone, for heaven’s sake, with the same look of a dog kicked after having peed on the carpet, for heaven’s sake! I loved you so much that I couldn’t bear the idea of hurting you… I loved you with a love stronger than desire… I could no longer conceive a life without you. You were as much a part of it as my breathing…and giving you up was giving up myself, my dreams which were your dreams, your illusions which were my illusions, your hopes which were my hopes, life!…
In other words my problem was insoluble, my survival impossible, and escape achieved nothing. Nothing? I raised my head. It did achieve something: It saved my dignity! You can’t say to a person who loves you and whom you love: I’ll screw the wife of so-and-so, I’ll screw her and screw her until she pissed blood and her guts fall out, for this job I need a horse, will you give me a car? And all your heroism, your desperation, your genius, your poems would not suffice to erase the disgust I had felt on hearing you repeat the dusty old slogan nothing –is- unworthy-if-the-end-is- worthy. The tired old talk of necessity. The necessity invoked by generals who send their soldiers to be slaughtered in order to take a railroad junction… The necessity claimed by the revolutionary who empty pistols into anyone…The necessity always allowed men who struggle and who in the name of the goddamn struggle can perform any perfidy… Anyhow breaking a woman’s heart, cutting open the belly of another, are trifles in the face of History and the Revolution, aren’t they?… Suffering paralyzes, extinguishes the intelligence, kills. And with you I had really suffered too much. Except for little oases of joy, brief hailstorms of gaiety, our union had been a river of anguish, danger, madness, neurosis: Being with you was like being in the front line. It was a constant rain of rockets, grenades, napalm, an endless digging of trenches, wounding and being wounded, yelling, sobbing, calling the stretcher bearer, pass me the ammo, Captain, I can’t make it. No one can stay at the front forever, live forever in drama. Finally one loses a sense of proportion.
Six thirty. The loudspeaker crack led, a soft voice announced that the plane form Bangkok had landed. Good soon we would be boarding for Rome and even if you thought of looking for me here, you wouldn’t have time to find me. Or would you?…
I pretended I hadn’t seen you…But like war trumpets, the keys I had left on the bed angle at my ear and your voice rose hoarse: “ What did I do?” Immediately I raised my head to seek your gaze…”Tramp. I don’t need your automobile, I…I don’t need anything or anyone. And stand up when I talk to you!” I remained seated, staring at you…You went pale. You aimed the ring of keys at me:”If you move, if you take that plane, I’ll kill you.” Then I stood up…Then I turned my back on you, I headed for the gate and I was a few paces from my flight group when a violent fist struck me in one lung:” Stop right here”. I went on, and immediately the second fist arrived, in the same lung, so sharp this time, murderous, that my breath failed…so a few seconds passed before I could say those two words. In the end I said them: “Drop dead.” And with this wish I left you, not turning back.
Eight months later when I entered the morgue to look for your body and my torment was a wounded animal’s incessant repressed cry, the memory of having wished death for you, even in a trivial remark, rent my consciousness and stunned it and from that moment on it began tormenting me like a leaking from a dripping faucet:” Drop dead, drop dead, drop dead, drop dead”. Naturally there were other accusations, other condemnations, with which I lashed myself…But that “drop dead” summed them all up…I asked myself the question; why had I so exaggerated that day, leaving you and denying you any explanation? Could the candid announcement of your plan and then the ingenious request for an automobile possibly have driven me to such an excessive and definitive reaction? Unable to absolve myself, but at the same time pressed by the need to do so, I gave myself answers, and denied them immediately afterward…
It’s extraordinary the invention you thought up to catch me again, to use me as instrument for your death. Afterward I was to ask myself, incredulous, through what fit of idiocy had I let you hoodwink me so thoroughly. Especially since, better than anyone else, I knew your cleverness, your gifts as an actor capable of every kind of histrionics. And putting an ocean between us had not brought regrets: everyday New York reinforces my determination to tear you definitively from my existence: there I worked, there I met people from a world that belonged to me and that excluded you… The dawn of my seventeenth day of escape was breaking when the telephone rang: “hello! It’s I. It’s me!”
He is the airport of Madrid and fears that he will be arrested because of a false passport; the dialogue between them is intense and should be enjoyed by reading the pages that at the end will bring Oriana back to Rome where she will meet Alekos in a hotel. She is very irritated and will throw at him whatever she grabs a hold of; finally the waters calm down when he tells her how things are really like: the initiative that he is carrying out in Greece to make the truth known about the plotting of the men of the former dictatorship is creating very serious problems:“ I have the impression, yes, that I’m being specially watched, I often have someone after me who knows what I am doing. A bad business.” “ And you plan to go through with it anyway?” “Of course. That isn’t the problem. The problemi s that I can’t count on anybody, not even on the party, and I’ll be more alone than ever.” At that point all my bitterness vanished. …I surrendered again to the role the gods had chosen for me before we met: to be the instrument of your fate, and thus the accomplice of your death…
Oriana like a thriller writer, in this case ‘political’, allows us to share the way Alekos finally comes into possession of the incriminating documents for the men of the former regime; so he is subjected to various threats and telephone insults; they ransack his office, they want to make his life impossible …
“How do you plan to defend yourself, Alekos?” “In no way. What has to be, is. What has to come will come. I’ll simply try to see this business through.” And it was then that my love for you revive completely… The last twenty-eight days the gods granted us…
Hazizikis’ files were now in your hands, and the cruel enterprise had been concluded in a cruel way, when you realized that in the politics of politicians there was no room for you and your worst mistake had been joining a party. An individualist with imagination and dignity cannot belong to a party. For the simple fact that a party is an organization, a clique, a mafia, at best a sect which does not allow its adepts to express their own personality, creativity, imagination. On the contrary it destroys them or at least it twists them…
For millennia we have pursued the mirage, weeping, crying, dying, yet we find ourselves always at the same point, perhaps with one more union or party, one more ideology or technological discovery, to weigh down the luggage of our perfidy and our stupidity. To remain where we were a hundred thousand years ago… The only thing to do was turn your back on the politics of politicians… And you did just this. You renounced all support, you recovered your independence. But you thus restored yourself also to the solitude that would make you vulnerable, bring you to the logical conclusion of your legend: to be physically and morally killed by all, at the hands of mercenaries from this side and that…
As we shall see, Alekos will hand to Oriana his writings concerning his personal history and political reflections which she has suggested to him. Of course Oriana’s political ideal is in tune with Alekos’; but we will never know how far her level of agreement goes regarding the above mentioned considerations on political parties, trade unions and the world that for thousands of years has not changed, expressed in such a radical way, and that in my opinion deserves a more balanced and in-depth analysis, that I will go back to briefly in my conclusions.
Alekos finally agrees with a publishing company to publish Hazizikis’ reserved documents now in his possession … Soon after, and without warning he arrives in Rome, to Oriana: “Things have to be taken further, I must explain why a man who began with bombs ends up fighting with paper…I have a story to tell, an incredible story, and I have not written it, yet! So I packed my bag and here I am: to go to Florence…”. “…Alekos I didn’t know you were coming and I have some appointments” “ You surely won’t let me go alone?” What if I need advice, suggestions?” “ No, of course not. But what sense does all this haste have?” “I can’t wait; it’s burning me up…”
So they return to the house in the woods. Alekos is so completely taken by his story that he begins to write with a tiny handwriting and with very few corrections. Oriana who allegedly can follow, as much as possible, her work commitments from there, supports him in everything thus putting him at ease. One evening she asks him if he wants to go to dinner at a local restaurant, since he has always liked to be among people. But he refuses: he is too focused in his work.
(I will not tire of repeating it: the book must be read from cover to cover. Now I would just like to go to the content of the last page that Alekos writes, following one of his dreams, he remembers when they beat the living daylight out of him in the cell at Boiati; which was followed by total darkness. At that point, Oriana intervenes to have her say …)
It was the scene of your death, a sit was to happen a month later on the Vouliagmeni Road , when your lungs and liver and heart exploded all together, in the impact, and you would close your eyes forever. I stammered: “It’s a death scene.” You nodded. “I know.” “Is this really what happens during a beating?” “I don’t think so, it doesn’t seem so to me” “Then why did you write it?” “I don’t understand. At a certain point the words came on their own. It’s if if my fingers were moving independently of my will.” “Croos them out and go on.” “Impossible” “I’ll help you.” “It wouldn’t do any good. The dream ended there too.” “But you’re not writing a dream, you’re writing your own story!” “Maybe my story will end like this”. Then you got up and went to the terrace… But it was clear that you didn’t care about being seen now because you knew that the end wasn’t awaiting you here but elsewhere, and there was no way you could oppose events, fate. Fate is a river no dam can arrest as it flows to the sea. It doesn’t depend on us. The only thing that depends on us is the way we navigate it, fight its currents, not letting ourselves be carried along like an uprooted tree. “Ah well” “Ah well what?” “You’ll write it for me. We already talked about it.” “Stop Alekos!” “You’ll write it for me, promise!” “Stop Alekos!” “Promise me!” “All right I promise.” “Good. Where shall we go and eat together? I want a nice restaurant full of noise and crowds. And I want to drink wine, lots of wine”.
Alekos gets drunk that night in the worst way possible… Then they decide to go back to Rome, from where he will return to Atene. But before leaving the house in the woods …
“We were well here. We were alive” “ We’ll be here again, Alekos, come on. Let’s go.” “Yes let’s go.” But you said those three words, as I would understand a month later, with the tone of the ill person who knows he has reached the end and answers yes to those who say – You’ll get well, dear, you’ll get well – with the tone of a soldier who knows he’s going into battle from which there is no return and replies yes to those who say – You’ll make it, you’ll make it…
Then lastly at the airport in Rome….
You clasped me in a long, intense, silent embrace. You kissed me on the mouth, on the forehead, on the temples. You took my face in your hands: “Yes a good companion. The only possible companion.”… The last image I have of you is a moustache standing out black against a marble pallor and a pair of gleaming, steady, overpowering eyes that stare at me from afar. Penetrating mine. I would never see you alive again.
Fatal accident in Athens: a witness tells of three cars chasing each other, hitting and flanking each other, driving into each other … whether they used the gas gun or not, identical to the one that the investigating judge filed, firing narcotic or hallucinogenic …. a car crashes into Alekos’ car at high speed … enough to make it inexorable fly down the chute that descends to the garage … a roar … and then total darkness …
After his death, millions of people physically followed the funeral of Alekos Panagulis; and thanks to the television, the whole of Greece was present that day …
The disobedient. The misunderstood and solitary. The poets. The heroes of senseless fables but without which life would have no meaning and to fight knowing that to lose would be pure madness. And yet for one day, that day that counts, that salvages, that often comes when you’ve given up hoping, and when it comes it leaves in the air a microscopic seed from which a flower will bloom: even the flock understood this, bleating within its river of fleece, No longer a flock, that day, but an octopus that strangles and roars zi,zi,zi! Alekos zi,zi,zi! Alekos lives, lives, lives! This is why you were smiling so mysteriously now that you were descending into the grave…
* * *
THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK:‘A MAN’
All dictatorships claim and impose around them dead calm: the obsequious or quiet acquiescence of people, with orchestrated moments of collective subscriptions to the regime. Of course not all people agree, but … if … what should be done? Then a guy who grabs a rock and throws it into the pond jumps up, thus stirring the stagnant water, and cries out: I’m not up for this! I demand my freedom to think whatever I want! The people around the pond are also agitated; many want to imitate him. Immediately the regime reacts to eliminate the intruder. But now it’s like a seed thrown into the air, falling on the ground it shall be bound to flourish …
These people who suddenly act like that, have very different personal stories, also for their character and behavior. And one can feel excited or even criticize them for what concerns them; but before anything else, true democrats should feel the duty to manifest to those same people their deep gratitude; for they defended, at the risk of their own lives and almost always losing it, the most valuable assets for Man: dignity and freedom.
That said, I tried to understand the Panagulis-political thought (capturing some more significant excerpts in which he has spoken to that effect); I shall summarize it: the man is at the center of all things. About this and always in a nutshell, Oriana is certainly tuned to the same ideal- polical wavelength of Alekos; and this for the reasons that they date back mainly to her political experience as a youth; reasons I have mentioned before and that I find very convincing.
As always, the problem is how to achieve a political ideal.
Calling the attention to two key words: borderline and compromise. Two words that in political terms Alekos shows to ignore. He, as an independent of the left, expresses, of course, a position that I would call, based on his words, democratic and liberal socialism; but the old socialist leader Nenni, whose valuations leave no doubt, also hits the nail on its head: Alekos with his behavior has crossed the borderline beyond which one enters anarchism. His exaggerated individualism, the inability to compromise with the political forces and not only … In a time of Alekos’ political crisis (and his desire of wanting to quit), Oriana says: “… what a victory if you really start reflecting, give form to your intuitions … “. So if on the one hand it seems that Oriana wants to curb Alekos’ rampant individualism, we must say that in other cases one gets the feeling that she also throws her heart beyond the limit …
Let me explain myself. Alekos’ outburst is understandable, having escaped from prison he does not only have trouble identifying the people who can hide him, but when he finally finds them, they betray him; from here then his poem on the herd people. But then Oriana as well returns to insist on the term “herd people”’. Well, sometimes you get the impression that she is the one to put words into the mouth of Alekos: “a party is an organization, a clique, a mafia, at best a sect which does not allow its adepts to express their own personality, creativity, imagination. On the contrary it destroys them or at least it twists them… and also: “For millennia we have pursued the mirage, weeping, crying, dying, yet we find ourselves always at the same point, perhaps with one more union or party, one more ideology or technological discovery… To remain where we were a hundred thousand years ago…” Concluding: “the only real fact is the individual, and every individual is responsible for himself and for the others…”.
I have already expressed great admiration regarding Oriana’s deep and brutal reflection on political struggle in general. What she claims is true! But that does not mean – despite Man is made of blood and shit – that dignity and human freedom have not advanced in the world over time, albeit with great difficulty, and setbacks …; the point remains on how to move forward in the right direction. My book “The dynamic compromise”, speaks extensively about this subject as well as of the relationship between leadership and individual. (The book is available to all: just click on this web site on the cover of the book itself).
Of course there were people who betrayed Alekos when he managed to escape from prison, but it is equally true that there were other people that he involved in the attack and that suffered tortures and risked their lives; as well in the demonstrations organized in Athens by Alekos, there were still people who risked their necks; so if they fell out with him, it’s not because they preferred to become part of the ‘flock’: they simply no longer agreed with his methods of political struggle, and they enrolled in the great mass organizations. And it is undeniable that it was precisely those organizations (parties, unions, cooperation, associations …) to bring to the advance over time (even among many contradictions) the overall conditions of the people in the ideal-political direction sought after even by Alekos and Oriana.
Then with the return of democracy in Greece, it is quite natural that people follow the great political leaders from the very moment they set foot in the country again; because the country’s future will depend on their political programs. But then why the consideration that they would be a herd people, the one that goes to the airport to welcome the leaders? Simply because: these are the rules of the game of the restored democracy which call such behavior of the people.
However, when Alekos dies, the people so-called herd shows to know very well – with the great participation of millions and millions of people at the funeral – the one who actually ranks first in the history of regained democracy in Greece.
And still, if Man, as I believe, is a collection of blood and shit, then the problem also concerns the ruling groups: how they are formed, how they relate to the social base they represent, and the democratic debate within their respective organizations …
So when we speak of the relationship between dictatorship and herd people, we cannot ignore the question: how did the dictatorship impose itself on the people? I do not know in Greece; but, for example, regarding pre-Fascist Italy I expressed my point of view on this same website: The fascist dictatorship was also the result of the inability of the ‘leadership’ of the reformist Socialist Party to take a stand in favor of the government coalition proposed by the liberal leader Giolitti; and even by the blind opposition to such a hypothesis of pseudo revolutionary maximalism (which Alekos would call: fucking revolutionaries) present in both socialism as well as maximally in communism. Now, I’d like to know, why should the errors of the political leadership always fall upon the so-called herd people?
Finally regarding the democratic Italy, I limit myself to two examples: the first is a memory of mine (I was a little more than a child), of a distant soldier relative returning from the front in Yugoslavia, who told me as if talking to himself, that we Italians behaved there like the Germans at the Fosse Ardeatine against the partisans of that country and against civilians accused of having supported them. But, however, he claimed insistently, never against women, children and the elderly (a memory that came back to my mind when, as a trade unionist, I returned to those areas and talked to an elderly woman who had lost her son shot by Italian soldiers); The second example is one that I have already mentioned, and relates to the ‘historic’ delay of the missed Europeanization in a social-democratic sense of the Italian Communist Party, which in my opinion is the mother of the underlying problems that afflict our country today.
So enough once and for all with rhetoric! because Oriana is right: all flags are filthy with blood and shit! The point is that such awareness should encourage us to reflect, to overcome past mistakes and to consider us, as Pope Frances says, as one people inhabiting this planet. A universal ideal expressed by the Pope, which should commit Member States, some still with their flags, but in the case to be admired without reservation if the States themselves would promote coherent policies in this direction. Unfortunately countries are light years away from even considering such a working hypothesis. And even within the European Union things do not march in the right direction; quite the opposite…
* * *
I have already expressed the desire to conclude with a comment, or rather with a reflection on some verses written by Alekos in his cell-hole of Boiati, where he was locked up by the fascist regime of the colonels. Verses which he wrote with his own blood, using a piece of razor blade and a small scrap of paper:
I do not understand you God / Tell me again / You are asking me to thank you / or to forgive you?
Now if these verses were read bearing in mind the torture and ill-treatment Alekos was subjected to, and the few square meters of the hole-cell in which he was forced to live for years (after Alekos’ death Oriana wanted to visit the cell and she stayed there for a bit alone … but she could not resist), well then I think we would be overwhelmed by the ordeal experienced by Alekos; and therefore, it would be impossible to grasp in those verses even the universal value which I believe they express.
Of course everyone thinks for themselves. I had to keep them in mind for a bit of time before being able to write the few lines that follow.
Well, in the forms of the artistic and cultural expression, some poetry manages more than any other form of expression to sum up the feelings with rationality. It consists above all in this, my love for poetry, when it is good poetry. In this case, the poet expresses the meaning of human existence, calling upon God; and his questions are rationalizations formulated ironically on an insoluble theme for unbelievers. So it seems to me that there are two key words that can help us penetrate the poetic expression of Alekos: doubt and irony. (However, if absurdly I considered myself God, I would smile benevolent to the irony of Alekos’ questions: since only God and no human being can dispel any doubt. But this can only happen in the Hereafter).
On this matter Hans Kung in his latest book: To Die Happy? at one point makes a statement on the meaning of human existence, and therefore of God, which I fully endorse: “The thought that after death man vanishes into thin air seems absurd just like the idea that the big bang comes from nothing … “(Hans Kung is worth listening to. I do not understand the Church: in fact, beyond the dogmas – the divinity of Jesus – in my opinion it should facilitate, and not prevent, the debate among all the faithful over issues such as, for example, euthanasia, or birth control pills. A debate that should certainly be well prepared, with documentation of arguments for or against, exposed in a clear and simple manner to the faithful. But this is a different kettle of fish …).
Oriana Fallaci in a conference held in the United States, also spoke of her meeting with Pope Ratzinger: “… a Pope who loves my work since he has read ‘Letter to a Child Never Born (another worldwide literary masterpiece – editor’s note), and that I deeply respect since when I started reading his clever books. “
But it was the final part of the meeting reported by Oriana that impressed me: when she acknowledges that the pope made no attempt to “convert” her, but simply said, “Act as if God exists.” Now the God of the Catholic Church preaches universal love; which we translate into laic terms with the value-word solidarity. A value which is a fundamental part of the ideal-political heritage which even Oriana and Alekos referred to ..
So we now are back to the point: how to gradually assert the ideal values espoused by the left of the political reality described by Oriana through a dynamic compromise; which not coincidentally is the title I have given to my book.
Mario Mezzanotte