(2 of 2)
Often Oriana rouses her subjects to introspective eloquence. "Women today," said Jeanne Moreau, "tend so much to minimize the gift of giving themselves and to belittle the woman who gives herself. In French novels of the last century one often reads this phrase, which I find so right, 'I gave myself.' Today it's no longer a gift, it's more like abandonment, prompted by outside factors such as a pleasant evening, a momentary closeness, holidays, sunshine, whisky, a movie."
Inside Is Better. When Oriana's subjects read the result of the interview, they often complain that she has fabricated the quotes. She denies it. But she does take a few liberties. "I transcribe the whole interview," she says, "then I make it into what I print in the same way that a movie director makes a film—eliminating and cutting and splicing." This makes her a kind of impresario of interviews, which she freely admits. "Of course I'm an actress, an egotist. The story is good when I put myself in."
Oriana learned to be daring as she grew up in Florence under Mussolini. Her father, a onetime socialist politician, was in and out of jail because of his anti-Fascist activities, and she herself studied English in school in order to assist Englishmen and Americans in the underground. Influenced by her uncle, Bruno Fallaci, founder of the magazine Epoca, she started reporting at 17 while attending medical school at the University of Florence. Ultimately, she says, "I gave up what I loved, medicine, for what provided money. Journalism is my Pygmalion." It also became her love; her heart is in her work for the picture magazine L'Europeo, and apparently not anywhere else. "To get married," she explains, "only means that later you have to get a divorce."
Sometimes she gets more involved in her stories than even she would like to be. During last month's rioting in Mexico City, she was shot twice in the leg, once in the back. With her usual self-dramatization, she wrote a piece for L'Europeo that was entitled "The Night of Blood in Which I Was Wounded." No body wounds Oriana without paying for it. When the Mexican police were taunting her while she was awaiting help in the hospital, she reported that she shouted at them: "You better play God now, because if I live I will shower filth on Mexican cops all over the world." Even the Spanish matador El Cordobes admitted that she frightened him as much as an angry bull. "Why?" she asked. "Because you use words like the horns of a bull."