The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  This sort of factual error is much more important than it might appear, because a single fabricated “fact” turns a true story into a fiction, and just as a single germ can result in an epidemic, that “fact” can contaminate all the stories that follow with fiction. But that isn’t the key point. The key point is that Marco’s account would have been a complete fiction even if, hypothetically, he had flawlessly researched his subject and his stories didn’t contain even the slightest factual error. First and foremost because all of his stories are based on a crucial earlier lie: his time in a Nazi camp, and his actions during the Civil War and afterwards. And, secondly, because even if all the factual data Marco presented were true, his approach is pure kitsch, in other words a lie; or to be more precise, because Marco is pure kitsch.

  What is kitsch? First and foremost, it is an artistic term that implies a debasement—or at least a significant devaluation—of genuine art; but it is also a negation of everything that is unacceptable in human existence, by veiling it behind a façade of sentimentalism, superficial beauty and affected virtue. Kitsch, in short, is a narcissistic lie that hides the truth of horror and death: in the same way that aesthetic kitsch is an aesthetic lie—art that is in fact false art—so historical kitsch is a historical lie—history that is in fact false history. This is why the novelistic and garish past that Marco propagated in his stories of Flossenbürg and of the war and the post-war period in Spain are pure lies (or pure kitsch); narratives larded with sentiment, with theatrical effects and melodramatic moments, unsparing in their bad taste but oblivious to the complexity and the ambiguity of truth, starring a papier-mâché hero capable of coolly maintaining his dignity when faced with a Nazi brute, or a Falangist brute, willing to beat the former in a chess match despite knowing it could cost him his life, or to remain seated when the latter orders him to stand, salute and sing “Cara al Sol.” Just as the established entertainment industry feeds on aesthetic kitsch, which offers the consumer the illusion of appreciating genuine art while sparing him the effort such appreciation requires, together with the intellectual and moral risks that it entails, so the modern industry of memory needs to feed on historical kitsch, which offers the consumer the illusion of understanding genuine history while sparing him the effort, but most of all, the ironies, the contradictions, the anxieties, the shames, the terror, the nausea, the giddiness, the disillusionment that such understanding entails. Few in Spain have rivalled Marco in providing sickly toxic kitsch (the “poisonous sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience” I wrote about in “I am Enric Marco”) of such purity and profusion, and this may explain the enormous success of his stories. Kitsch is the spontaneous style of the narcissist, the tool he uses in his assiduous attempt to hide reality so as not to know or recognise it, so as not to know or recognise himself. Marco was a peerless producer of kitsch and, therefore, falsehoods constantly passed his lips; historical falsehoods, but also aesthetic and moral falsehoods. Hermann Broch observed that kitsch presupposes “a determinate attitude in life since kitsch could not, in fact, either emerge or prosper without the existence of the kitsch-man.” Marco embodies this individual better than anyone. This is why he is pure kitsch.

  6

  In order to hide the reality of himself (or to hide himself), Marco reinvented himself many times throughout his life, but twice in particular. The first time, in the mid-Fifties, he did so because he had no choice: he changed his job, his city, his wife, his family, even his name; he ceased to be a travelling salesman and went back to working as a mechanic, abandoned Barcelona for L’Hospitalet, abandoned Anita Beltrán and the Beltrán family for María Belver and the Belver family, ceased to be Enrique Marco and became Enrique Durruti, or Enrique the mechanic. Marco’s second great reinvention came in the mid-Seventies, shortly after the death of Franco when the way was opening up for democracy, but this reinvention was deliberate and, more importantly, it was more successful. The fundamental reason for this is that Marco discovered the power of the past: he discovered that the past is never dead, and that at least his past and that of his country was not even past, and he discovered that he who controls the past, controls the present and the future; consequently, in addition to once again changing all the things he had changed in his first great reinvention (his job, his city, his wife, his family and even his name), he decided he would also change his past.

  It began a decade earlier. Let’s say 1967 or 1968. At that time, not only was his life different, the country itself was very different. Spain had left behind the starving, stifling, Nationalist, Catholic, economic self-sufficiency of the immediate post-war period and—from an economic standpoint at least—life in the country had improved almost as much as Marco’s own life: Francoism, however, seemed more entrenched than ever, the savage repression of dissidents of the early years had relaxed somewhat, allowing for the rise of a burgeoning opposition comprised mainly of workers and non-conformist students. In the summer of 1967, or perhaps it was 1968, Marco met two of these students. Their names were Ferran Salsas and Mercè Boada and they were engaged. Both were at university studying medicine, both had just turned twenty, both hailed from the middle classes—the great silent majority who, willingly or unwillingly, said Yes to Franco and who, at home, never talked about politics or the Civil War. Though Salsas and Boada had never been members of a clandestine organisation or a union, they were seething with social anxieties, they were loosely anti-Franco, they felt the pull of politics (Salsas in particular) and, armed with the idealism and rebelliousness of their twenty years, they were eager to create or to help create a better country than the one in which they believed their parents had resigned themselves to living.

  They were fascinated by Marco. He was almost thirty years their senior and not only did he become their friend and mentor, he also became their idol, their hero, almost their guru. They had never met anyone like him. In their eyes, Marco personified the best of their country’s vanished past, and the best of its future; he was the epitome of the cultivated worker and the professional revolutionary. His real name, he told them, was not Enric Marco but Enric Batlle: Marco was merely an alias he was forced to use to elude the Francoist police who had ruthlessly hounded him for his political activism, and who had arrested, jailed and tortured him on countless previous occasions—especially comisario Creix, the most fearsome police officer in Barcelona. Marco also talked to them about his libertarian activism, his relationship with Buenaventura Durruti, his exploits during the Civil War, his political exile in France after the war, his time in Nazi jails for his indomitable resistance and a thousand other things, although he never mentioned that he had been in a Nazi concentration camp—perhaps at the time the Nazi camps did not yet have the terrible prestige they would come to have later, or perhaps because Marco didn’t yet know that almost nine thousand Spaniards had spent time in the camps. It goes without saying that he never gave precise details about his clandestine activities—certainly not about his current clandestine activities—but Salsas and Boada imagined that he withheld this information for their protection, in order not to implicate them, and they were convinced that, after visiting him at the garage, or having a coffee with him at the Bar San Juan a short distance from the workshop on Travessera de Les Corts, or lunch or dinner with him and María Belver in their apartment on calle Oriente, Marco would shrug off his mechanic’s disguise, and plunge into the treacherous, perilous, shadowy world of anti-Francoists, a world of strikes, acts of sabotage, graffiti, mimeographed pamphlets and secret meetings in smoke-filled basements.

  Marco was best man at Salsas and Boada’s wedding. This was in 1969. By this time, there were more students who considered Marco to be not just their maître à penser but their magister vitae. Perhaps he was a catalyst in their revolt against their families, against their social class, against the state of their country under the dictatorship, as though, unbeknownst to him, Marco had become an artist capable of exposing—through his expe
riences both real and invented, through the understanding gleaned from his autodidact’s reading, with his overwhelming oratory, or through his mere existence—the historical, political and social lies that had, until now, deceived them, or that they had allowed to deceive them. In Marco’s house, for example, a number of these scions of the law-abiding Catalan bourgeoisie experienced the revelation of a hitherto unknown reality: during Christmas and New Year celebrations in the Belver family, where Marco was the undisputed master of ceremonies, in the midst of the hullabaloo of screaming and swearing and unimaginable delight, some realised that these penniless immigrants from southern Spain who had been flooding into Catalonia since the Fifties were completely changing the face of the country, that they were much more complex than they had imagined. This revelation doubtless persuaded some to take up social and political activism.

  Between 1967 and 1972, while studying medicine, Boada and Salsas earned their living through an academy they had set up to prepare secondary school students for university entrance exams. In the early days, they held classes in their home, later at the Academia Mallorca, at 460 calle Mallorca, and eventually at the Academia Almi on calle Valencia, near the Sagrada Família market where they rented a few classrooms. Salsas and Boada taught there from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. every evening and also employed other teachers, like Quim Salina, an elderly Republican butcher who had a stall in the Sagrada Família market and was an authority on art history, or Ignasi de Gispert, a lad from a good background who was active in the banned Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, who would later become a close friend of Salsas and Boada and also of Marco and who, in late 1975 or early 1976, having just earned his law degree, would secure Marco’s release from prison where he was being held for a crime committed twenty years earlier. Our man also began to teach classes at this informal academy. Occasional rather than regular, they were wide-ranging master classes in which Marco talked a little about whatever he liked, history, the Civil War, his experience during the war and in exile, politics in general, and also about himself. His occasional classes at Salsas and Boada’s academy, together with the coffees or the drinks that followed, were enough for Marco to mesmerise the most committed and the most politicised of his students, and acquire a group of admirers who were as loyal and as dazzled as Salsas and Boada—by his illusory past, his fictitious clandestine present, his silver tongue and his charisma, or what everyone took to be his charisma.

  Marco may have been dazzled by himself, by his own ability to dazzle. Because over the course of these years he made a number of discoveries that would prove decisive to his future. Marco had always known, or had long known, that he needed an audience, that he needed to be admired, to be a star; now he discovered, perhaps to his astonishment, doubtless to his deep personal satisfaction, that he could make himself heard, respected and admired not only by poor, uneducated families like the Beltráns and the Belvers, or displaced farmhands like his co-workers in the barracks in Kiel, or his apprentices at Peirós’ garage and his own workshops, but also by intelligent, educated young men from wealthy, or at least middle-class, families, not to mention by pretty young girls, the sort of people who, he surmised, would rule the country in the future. And he also discovered, with the same pleasure, that he was capable of leading them, and that his talents as a charmer, as an actor, his eloquence and his imagination or his ability to weave imagination with reality meant that these young people considered him not simply an exceptional person, but a genuine hero. Above all he discovered, now Francoism was crumbling or beginning to crumble, that his past as an anarchist and a Republican, about which he had said nothing for decades since it was dangerous to talk about, might become his staunchest asset, provided that he could learn to use it to his advantage, provided that he could work out how to manipulate it, transforming cowardice into bravery, mediocrity and corruption into virtue and heroism and, more generally, transforming the succession of Yes’s in his life into a series of No’s; in other words, provided that, in order not to recognise himself, like Narcissus, and not to allow others to know or recognise him, he managed to hide reality behind fiction, his true life behind a false life, the genuine history of his country behind a kitsch version of history. It was at this point he realised that, if he was going to falsify personal experience, he needed a deep understanding of the collective experience, and he made a pivotal decision: enrolling at university to study history.

  A curious document survives from this period, from April 4, 1970, to be precise. A day earlier, Josep Carner, perhaps the finest Catalan poet of the twentieth century, had returned to Barcelona after three decades in exile. It was a major event. La Vanguardia (which was still called La Vanguardia Española since Franco was not yet dead) put two large photographs on its front page: the first foregrounds Carner, elderly, dignified, gaunt, doffing his hat, having come back to his homeland to die, or before he died; in the second, he’s barely visible, because he is getting into a car, surrounded by a cheering crowd. But on one of the inside pages, there is another photograph of the great poet. He is wearing his hat, his back is to the camera, and he looks as though he is just getting out of the car; once again, he’s surrounded by a group of people, though it is smaller, or seems smaller, and they aren’t applauding now but trying to touch or even to hug him. And there, in the foreground, is Marco, beaming, unmistakable, animated, wearing his mechanic’s overalls. He is touching the poet’s face with the fingers of one hand, as though he were one of the family, as though he knew him, or at least was a trusted friend, but the truth is that he doesn’t know him from Adam, he has barely even read his work; nor does he know anyone who knows him. In fact, he went to greet him with María Belver, who neither speaks nor reads Catalan and doesn’t even know who Carner is. But what Marco does know is what will make the news, because he has just begun to develop his supreme talent for hogging the limelight, a narcissistic syndrome that will stay with him for the rest of his life. You might call it an addiction to being in the media. One might even call it mediopathy.

  Marco’s assumption was correct. Some of the middle-class students he bewitched in the late Sixties and early Seventies did end up in important positions in the country. Such was the case with Ferran Salsas who, having flirted with the idea of becoming seriously involved in clandestine politics, and even the armed struggle during the death throes of the Franco regime (the result of Marco’s influence, according to his wife, or the image he had of Marco), held positions of responsibility in the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (P.S.U.C.) and did much notable work in the field of psychiatry before dying in 1987 at the age of forty-one. By this time, his wife, Mercè Boada, was on her way to becoming what she is today: one of the leading specialists in neurodegenerative diseases in Spain. As for Ignasi de Gispert, he has long worked as a labour lawyer in the judicial service of the Workers Trade Union of Catalonia (U.S.O.C.). However, neither they, nor any of the other middle-class kids in Marco’s entourage of admirers, went on to play a role as important as Marco himself played in later years.

  Having decided to study history, in 1973 our man enrolled in an access course at a university for mature students. He was still living with María Belver, but while he was attending classes here, he would meet the woman who was to be his third and last wife. We have already met her: Dani, Danielle Olivera. Besides being much younger than Marco, Dani was charming, pretty, well-educated, and half-French, and at the time was preparing to take a degree in Catalan language and literature. They immediately fell in love and began to date, and in the three years that followed, Marco divided his time between Dani and María. I don’t know any intimate details of their romance, and if I did I wouldn’t relate them; suffice to say it was a long, convoluted affair, not least because of the deviousness of Marco and the misgivings of Dani, who was reluctant to see Marco end a twenty-year marriage to a woman who was utterly devoted to him. In order to seduce Dani, Marco used every well-oiled weapon in his arsenal, in particular the one guaranteed to sa
p the resistance of this young anti-Franco activist: his fictitious political activism.

  At least two notable testimonies to his one-sided battle still exist. They are two texts typed by Marco, one in Spanish, the other in Catalan, the first untitled, the second, echoing Verlaine, entitled “From My Prisons”; both are signed from the Modelo prison in Barcelona, one bears the false, handwritten date “September 1974,” the other is undated, although both were written during Marco’s courtship of Dani and were doubtless inspired by his brief spell in the Modelo in late 1975 or early 1976 for petty offences rather than political crimes. Despite this fact, both purport to be accounts of the incarceration of a political prisoner and, replete with the melodramatic, sentimental flourishes typical of Marco’s biographical writings, relate the fictional experiences of this character and his prison comrades, along with the author’s thoughts. The first of these texts modestly presents itself as “jottings from a dungeon, with no more proof than the true wound of lived experience. I fear that even writing a clean draft it will lose its thick, filthy atmosphere. It does not smell of heroism, but of the sweat of suffering and of damp, of dirt and disinfectant.” With no less modesty, the second text begins by listing the now classic injustices that posterity visits on anonymous heroes (not mentioning anyone in particular) and the disdain this inspires in those same anonymous heroes (not mentioning anyone in particular), given they are indifferent to future honours as well as any form of worldly recognition (I’m still not mentioning anyone in particular, but I’m starting to get a little nervous), and concerned merely with squaring their actions with their own conscience (of course, my love, I’m talking about me! Who else? I was starting to think you were an idiot). Marco writes: “All those who suffer or lose their lives while engaged in a conscientious struggle or an act of desperate rebellion eventually secure a privileged place in the memory of the people or in history yet unwritten. Whether they are considered misguided or martyrs, the satisfaction of knowing they have done their duty compensates for everything.”