The Rage and The Pride (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio) by Oriana Fallaci
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By now it was quarter past nine. Don't ask me what I felt during those fifteen minutes. I don't know, I don't remember. I was a piece of ice. Even my brain was ice. I don't even remember whether certain things I saw were from the first tower or the second. For example, the people who threw themselves from the eightieth or ninetieth floor to avoid being burned alive. They broke the glass of the windows, they climbed up and jumped out like someone who jumps out of an airplane with a parachute on. They came down so slowly, waving their arms and legs, swimming in the air. Yes, they seemed to swim in the air, never arriving. Around the thirtieth floor though, they sped up. They started to gesture desperately, penitently I imagine, almost as though they were shouting for help. And maybe they really were. Finally they fell like rocks and splat. You know, I thought I'd seen everything in war. I'd considered myself vaccinated against war, and in substance I am. Nothing surprises me anymore. Not even when I get angry, not even when I get indignant. But in war I'd always seen people who died by the hand of others. I'd never seen people who die killing themselves, throwing themselves without parachutes from the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth floor. In war, I'd always seen things that explode. That blow up in all directions. And I'd always heard a huge racket. Those two towers though, didn't explode. The first imploded, swallowed itself. The second fused and melted. It melted just like a stick of butter placed on the fire. And it all happened, or so it seemed to me, in tomblike silence. Is that possible? Was that silence real, or was it inside me?

I also have to say that in war I'd always seen a limited number of deaths. Every battle, two or three hundred dead. Four hundred at most. Like at Dak To in Vietnam. And when the battle was finished, the Americans would gather up and count them. I couldn't believe my eyes. In the massacre of Mexico City, the one where I caught a fair number of bullets myself, they gathered at least eight hundred dead. And when, thinking me dead, they stuck me in the morgue, the cadavers I soon found around and on myself seemed like a deluge. Well, almost fifty thousand people worked in the two towers. And very few had time to evacuate. The elevators didn't work any more, obviously, and to go down on foot from the highest floors would have taken an eternity. Flames permitting. We'll never know the number of dead. (Forty thousand, fifty thousand?) The Americans will never tell, so as not to underline the intensity of this apocalypse. So as not to give satisfaction to Osama Bin Laden and encourage other apocalypses. And anyway the two abysses that absorbed those tens of thousands of creatures are too deep. At most the workers will unearth pieces of scattered members. A nose here, a finger there. Or else a kind of paste that seems like ground coffee but is actually organic material. The residue of bodies pulverized in a flash. Yesterday the mayor Guiliani sent more than ten thousand body bags. But they went unused.

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