The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  I cannot relate them all; I’ll recount one of them.

  For most of his life, Marco had earned his living as a mechanic, and from the mid-Fifties until the early 1980s, especially during the period when he was living with his second wife, María Belver, he owned, as part of a cooperative, a number of garages in the Collblanc district of L’Hospitalet, a city just south of Barcelona. The most longstanding of these was called Auto-Taller Cataluña, but when I visited it with my wife, Mercè, one afternoon in late July 2013, it had changed its name and was now called Taller Viñals.

  I met the owner, David Viñals, in the tiny office at the back of the tiny premises. Sitting in front of an ancient computer, Viñals looked buried under a vast pile of invoices, papers and box files. He remembered the previous mechanic very well, not simply because he remembered buying the repair shop, or negotiating the purchase, but because, much later, he heard talk of the scandal. However, communications between them had been occasional and practical, he told me and, gesturing wearily around at the humming computer and the chaos of the office, said that right now he was snowed under but, come September, he would try to dig out contact details for someone who might have worked with Marco. I thanked him and said I would call in September. He seemed reluctant to see me go empty-handed, and just as I was leaving he added:

  “Like I said, I didn’t have much to do with him, but I thought he seemed like a decent man. I remember him telling me that he was selling the shop because he was giving up working as a mechanic so he could teach at university.” He looked at me, half expecting to be disillusioned. “That was another lie, wasn’t it?”

  I had to tell him that it was. As we stepped outside again, my wife couldn’t contain herself:

  “I’m not surprised Marco invented an adventurous life for himself,” she snorted. “With his imagination, if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have survived twenty years holed up in that tiny workshop. He would have gone insane.”

  In September, I called Viñals. He told me he’d found an address and telephone number for a man named Toni or Antoni, who had been an apprentice mechanic in Marco’s garage; he was now working in one of the Llasax garages on Carretera Real in Sant Just Desvern. “He told me he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Viñals warned, “so if I were you, I wouldn’t try phoning: go and see him, that way at least maybe he’ll hear you out.” I did as he suggested, but I didn’t go alone; on the pretext that I didn’t know how to work the car’s GPS, my son came with me.

  The garage was just outside Barcelona on the road to Sant Feliu de Llobregat. I parked outside the gates and Raül waited for me in the car while I went into the garage—a vast space, with high ceilings and a concrete floor, that seemed to be a hive of activity, with people bustling between glass-walled offices and mechanics with grease-blackened hands rootling in the entrails of dilapidated cars. I inquired with one of the office workers and, after fifteen minutes and a minor misunderstanding—there was a mechanic named Antoni working at the garage, but he wasn’t the man I was looking for—I finally spoke to him, a guy in his late fifties, perhaps sixty, who answered to the name Antonio rather than Antoni, and whom I remember as being gaunt with pale eyes. I introduced myself, I told him that I was a writer, that I was writing a book about Enric Marco; I said that, from what I’d heard, he had known Marco.

  “I know him,” the man said. “But I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “It will only take five minutes,” I said. “It’s only a couple of questions. You can set the conditions; if you don’t want your name in the book, it won’t be there.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to talk about Marco.”

  I persisted. I told him that I also knew Marco, that I was writing the book with his authorisation and his collaboration, and taking my mobile from my pocket, I added that, if he wanted to check, he could call him. The man stonewalled:

  “I’m not going to talk about Marco.”

  I was about to ask him why, but I sensed that this would annoy him and that it was futile to insist. It wasn’t the first time a witness had refused to talk to me about a book I was working on, but it was the first time it had happened face to face; and it was the first time while writing this book. I slipped my mobile back into my pocket and sighed.

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” I said.

  With a curt smile, the man shook my proffered hand.

  “You didn’t bother me,” he said.

  “What did he say?” Raül asked as I sat behind the steering wheel.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What do you mean, nothing? He wouldn’t talk to you?”

  Raül laughed.

  “You’re the best, papi.”

  Still incredulous, I started the car and, as we headed back to Barcelona through the maze of roundabouts and motorways, I told my son what had happened.

  “I don’t think this guy is trying to protect Marco,” I hazarded. “If he was, he would have taken my phone and called to check that I was telling the truth. This guy’s no friend of Marco’s, he doesn’t like him, they obviously didn’t get along. That’s why he didn’t want to talk.”

  “Bullshit,” said Raül. “If they didn’t get along, he’d be itching to talk: to fuck him over, to get his revenge. The reason he doesn’t want to talk is probably completely the reverse.”

  “The reverse?”

  “Not because they didn’t get along, but because they did. Got along really well, I mean. This guy was young when he knew Marco, yeah?”

  “I assume so, he was Marco’s apprentice. He would have known him in the Sixties or the Seventies, certainly not before.”

  “If he was a kid, maybe he believed all the lies that Marco came out with, and now he’s found out it was all lies, he’s so angry that he doesn’t even want to hear his name mentioned. After all, that’s how lots of people must have felt. All things considered, it’s probably better that he didn’t want to talk: if he had, he’d probably have come out with some bullshit; by staying silent, he remains a mystery. And in a novel, mystery is better than bullshit, don’t you think?”

  Raül was right, of course, but this isn’t an ordinary novel, it’s a novel without fiction, a true story, and in a book like that, truthful bullshit is a thousand times better than a fictional mystery. Besides, Raül was wrong: this man had not gotten along well with Marco, at least not always, or at least their relationship ended on a sour note. In fact, as I later learned, his name was Antonio Ferrer Belver, and he was the nephew of María Belver, the woman to whom Marco had been married for several decades in the mid-twentieth century. Ferrer had indeed started out as an apprentice at Auto-Taller Cataluña, but in the late 1970s, when Marco got rid of the workshop, he was unhappy about the business, or unhappy about how it was managed. To this we can add a second, perhaps definitive, reason for his anger: in the mid-1970s, Marco had also gotten rid of María Belver, just as in the early 1950s he had gotten rid of Anita Beltrán, dumped her for a girl more than twenty years his junior. His desertion forever turned the Belver family against Marco, which explains why none of them (or none of those I tried to contact) was willing to talk. Not even Marco’s former apprentice.

  * * *

  —

  The embarrassing incident with María Belver’s nephew brought back all the worries and uncertainties that had haunted me after my encounter with Benito Bermejo in Madrid, when the historian had floated the theory that Marco was a police informant during the period when he was an anarchist leader, and when Bermejo told me that he had abandoned or postponed the idea of writing a book about Marco because of his qualms of conscience: once again I began to wonder whether the book I was planning to write was not only impossible, but foolhardy; I began to wonder whether my goal of writing the true life of Marco was moral, whether I had the right to interfere in the lives of Marco and his family to expose his story (this story which meant poking a finger in
everyone’s eye, this story in which everyone came off badly), whether I had the right to do so and whether it was right to do so, even if Marco had given his permission and was collaborating with me.

  In the ensuing days, I frequently thought of the two analogous and contrasting stories told by the French writer Emmanuel Carrère, author of The Adversary, a novel without fiction, or true story, that tells of an impostor named Jean-Claude Romand, who eventually murdered his wife, his two young children and parents so they wouldn’t find out about his deception.

  The protagonist of the first story is the American writer Truman Capote. In 1960, at the age of thirty-six, Capote decided to write a true story or novel without fiction that would also be his masterpiece. To do so, he chose a chance subject (or perhaps it was chance that chose him): the murder of a farming family in Kansas, in the so-called American heartland, by two complete strangers. Capote went to Kansas and settled in the little town where the crime had been committed; after a few weeks the killers were arrested: they were two young men named Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Capote went to visit them in prison, he befriended them, and for the next five years, during which the prisoners were tried and sentenced to death, he became the most important person in their lives. The last two years of his relationship with them were harrowing. Owing to a variety of appeals, the executions were deferred several times. In the meantime, Capote assured his two friends, his characters, that he was doing everything in his power to save them, including hiring the finest attorneys; but at the same time, the writer knew that the deaths of the two accused was the best possible ending to the story, the finishing touch required for his masterpiece, and so he secretly prayed for this ending and went so far as to light candles to the Virgin so it might come to pass.

  In the end, Dick and Perry were hanged; Capote attended the hangings and was the last person to hug them before they climbed the scaffold. The literary fruit of his moral aberration was In Cold Blood, a masterpiece. Carrère implies that, with it, Capote saved himself as a writer but damned himself as a human being, and the long process of self-destruction through alcoholism, snobbery and spite that followed its publication was the price the author paid for his moral turpitude.

  The protagonist of the second story is the British writer Charles Dickens; the incident must have happened—Carrère does not specify—in 1849, while David Copperfield was being serialised in monthly instalments. In the first pages of the novel, a secondary character appears named Miss Mowcher, who, from all available evidence—she is depicted as scheming, envious and sycophantic, in addition to being a dwarf—is evil personified, and so, since there is nothing readers of fiction enjoy more than a villain, and since Dickens was by then a writer with a considerable readership, all of England was licking its lips in anticipation of the lady’s future misdeeds. Then something unexpected happened. One morning, Dickens received a letter in which a provincial lady bitterly complained that, because of her physical resemblance to Miss Mowcher—the writer of the letter was also a dwarf—the people in her village had begun to mistrust her, they muttered as she passed and sent her anonymous threats; all in all, the lady concluded her letter, she was a good woman, but because of him and of Miss Mowcher her life had become a living hell.

  We know how most writers would have responded to the lady’s letter: they would not have responded at all; or, if so, their response would have been: the problem the lady had raised was not his, but that of those people who confuse reality with fiction and who cruelly and foolishly identify fictional characters with real people. Dickens’ response was very different: he changed the character, he changed the plot of his novel, he changed everything: the book clamoured impatiently for more of Miss Mowcher’s misdeeds, everything had been plotted to accommodate them, but in the following instalment, Dickens transformed his wicked witch into a good-hearted woman who, beneath her unfortunate appearance, was an angel. It is possible that, as he himself admits, Carrère is somewhat idealising Dickens’ motives; it is possible that he is overstating Miss Mowcher’s importance in the novel. The fact remains that David Copperfield was a resounding success, another masterpiece by Dickens, and that in it the writer saved himself not only as a writer, but as a human being.

  This is not the only conclusion that Carrère draws from the two balanced and contrasting stories I have just related; nor the one that most interests me. Carrère says that, when he began writing The Adversary, he wanted to imitate In Cold Blood, the Flaubertian impersonal detachment of the book, Capote’s decision to tell the story of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith while erasing his role in it, erasing his perverse friendship with them and the moral dilemmas that plagued him while the events were taking place; but in the end, Carrère says, he decided not to do so: he decided to tell the story without erasing himself from it, not in the third person, but in the first person, revealing his moral qualms and his relationship with the murderous impostor. And he concludes, “I think it is not an exaggeration to say that that decision saved my life.”

  Is Carrère right? Did he save himself both as a person and as a writer—The Adversary is also a masterpiece—by including himself in the story of Jean-Claude Romand’s monstrous deception? Would I save myself, as a writer and as a human being—being unable to take Dickens’ approach since I could not change or embellish Marco’s story—by not writing in the third person as Capote had, but in the first person, without erasing the doubts and the moral dilemmas I faced while writing it, exactly as Carrère had? Though brilliant and comforting, was Carrère’s argument not false, not to say self-serving? Was it not simply a way of buying moral legitimacy so he could allow himself to do with Jean-Claude Romand what Capote had done with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and what I was trying to do with Enric Marco, and what is more to do so with a clear conscience and with no damage to myself? Was it enough to acknowledge one’s own immorality for it to disappear or be transformed into decency? Should one not simply accept, in all honesty, that in order to write In Cold Blood or The Adversary, it was necessary to lay oneself open to a certain moral aberration and thereby to damn oneself? Was I prepared to damn myself in exchange for writing a masterpiece, always supposing I was capable of writing a masterpiece? In short, was it possible to write a book about Enric Marco without selling my soul to the devil?

  4

  It was Marco’s best kept secret, perhaps because, of all his offences, it was the most shameful: in the early 1950s, Marco was a guest of Franco’s prisons, not as a political activist, but as a common criminal.

  It is something I discovered by chance, not because Marco told me. I found out thanks to Ignasi de Gispert, a labour lawyer who, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was one of a group of middle-class Catalan boys obsessed with Marco, who was not known as Marco at the time, but as Batlle, Enric Batlle. To the rebellious sons of well-heeled families who were just discovering the world, Batlle represented the epitome of the cultivated, revolutionary anti-Francoist, working-class man. One day in late 1975 or early 1976, shortly after the death of Franco, De Gispert had a telephone call from María Belver, who was still Marco’s wife at the time, telling him that our man was being held at Modelo prison and needed his help. De Gispert, who had just graduated as a lawyer, immediately rushed to Modelo prison. There, Marco gave him a rambling, confused story about having been arrested for political reasons while trying to carry out a bureaucratic transaction, and that they had tortured, or attempted to torture him, but De Gispert had a hunch that Batlle was trying to hoodwink him. His hunch was confirmed when he went to the court and discovered that an arrest warrant had indeed been issued against Marco for robbery with violence on the Rambla; fortunately, the offence had been committed in the late Forties or early Fifties and therefore was subject to the statute of limitations, and so, having spent a few nights in gaol, Marco was a free man. Eager to justify the episode, Marco told De Gispert that it had all been a misunderstanding: he had often told De Gispert and his young friends t
hat years ago, in order to avoid being pursued by the secret police, he had taken on the identity of a dead man named Enric Marco; from this unfortunate incident he had just learned that the aforesaid Enric Marco was a common criminal, and the actual perpetrator of the crime for which he had been arrested.

  Obviously, De Gispert did not believe a word that Marco said, because by this time, they had been friends for some years and the young lawyer knew something of his friend’s failings. But the question is: How did Marco come to be a thief in the early 1950s? What turned the man the Beltrán family knew as the perfect husband, father, son- and brother-in-law into a common criminal?

  The seeds of the change in Marco, as the Beltráns suspected, began with his job at Comercial Anónima Blanch. Here, our man discovered a very different life, the nomadic life of the commercial traveller: men in suits and ties who eat lunch and dinner at restaurants, bistros and taverns, go out drinking every night, spend their salaries gambling and frequenting high-class brothels. One night, in one such locale (a place known as Ca la tia Antonia, or Aunt Antonia’s house), Marco slept with a girl named Marina. Two days later he slept with her again, and after two weeks he realised he was in love with her. The girl stopped charging him for her services, but Marco paid the brothel madam so that she slept only—or almost only—with him. Although he was earning a lot of money, he was spending more than he earned and so, in order to supplement his income and carry on living this lifestyle, he began selling the samples he carried, which were the company property. At the same time, his marriage was deteriorating. As I related earlier, one afternoon, his wife caught him coming out of a brothel with two prostitutes and exposed his double life. Some days later, his bosses at Comercial Anónima Blanch discovered that he was cheating the company and began an investigation, deciding to suspend him without pay until the matter was cleared up. Marco found himself with no job, but since he didn’t dare admit as much to his family, he was still forced to leave the house every morning and spend hours and hours wandering around the city in his suit and tie, with his despair and his travelling salesman’s bag, and come back at night or in the early hours as though he had spent the day working.