The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  Well, not everything. At least not in Marco’s case; particularly not in his case. In the course of these two biographical texts cunningly crafted with the sole intention of winning the heart of a woman, she is mentioned only once (“I think of you, of your tender eyes that gaze in wonder upon life. I do not yet know what will come of this, but the memories of you will help me through the nights here”), but what is true is that Marco, who by this time was a peerless seducer, achieved his objective, and in 1976, he left María Belver in L’Hospitalet and went to live with Dani Olivera in Sant Cugat. By now, Franco was dead and Marco had spent a year dividing his time between María and Dani, between his garage on Travessera de Les Corts and the History faculty at the Autonomous University near Sant Cugat, where students waited with feverish excitement for Franco’s death and where Marco, with his need to play a starring role, his way with words, his energy and his gifts for persuasion, was beginning to get himself noticed in classes and meetings. One day in late February that year, when Franco had been dead for three months but the shift from dictatorship to democracy had not yet begun, a classmate gave Marco a leaflet announcing a meeting intended to relaunch the C.N.T.

  Marco was in a daze. The C.N.T., the cradle of Buenaventura Durruti, of his uncle Anastasio, of his own father, his ideological home in his homeless teenage years, the foremost union during the Second Republic, the communal hero of the anarchist uprising that gripped Barcelona during the first days of the war, the great revolutionary organisation razed and destroyed during the Franco regime, was suddenly rising from the ashes. An elated Marco realised that, now Franco was dead, anything was possible. The following day, the same classmate told him that the meeting was to take place on Sunday the 29th, in the parish of Sant Medir in the district of Sants, and gave instructions on how to get there without revealing the existence of the meeting. At about 9:00 a.m. on the appointed day, Marco arrived in Sants and tried to do what he had been told but, when he noticed gangs of people hanging around plazas that were normally deserted early on Sunday morning, and shady men in trenchcoats whispering directions on every corner of the labyrinthine streets, he felt as though unwittingly and unwillingly he had stumbled into a Marx Brothers movie, into a scene where everyone is heading for a secret meeting that everyone knows is not a secret.

  The meeting began at 10:00 a.m. and it was historic. For the first time since the Civil War, representatives of the two exiled branches of the C.N.T. (the Paris-based Frente Libertario and the C.N.T.-A.I.T. from Toulouse) were meeting in Catalonia with various libertarian groups and factions from within the country. The hall was jammed; according to estimates, 1,500 people were present. Over the course of five hours, a series of measures was passed, intended to reconstitute and relaunch the union; the final speech brought a lump to the throats of many: this was the first time in forty years that the C.N.T. had held such a meeting in Spain, the chairman reminded them. “So it is important,” he added, “that we not conclude this session of the Catalan National Assembly without fondly remembering all those comrades who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom, in social battles, in the trenches, and facing the firing squad. We pay tribute to each and every one, from the first to the last libertarian executed by the dictatorship, Salvador Puig Antich.”

  In the long years of the Franco regime, Marco did not join the C.N.T. in the struggle for freedom or in its social battles. He did not meet with the union (or with any other competing union, party, group or faction) either in exile or in Spain. In fact, Marco—as I have said—hadn’t heard a word from the C.N.T. for almost four decades, nor had he wanted to hear from them. And yet, within a few months of this foundational meeting at Sant Medir, our man became secretary general of the Catalonia branch of the union and within two years he was Secretary General of the C.N.T. in Spain. How could this have happened? How did Marco manage to hoist himself to the top of this legendary organisation in such a short space of time? How did he become the leader of what had been, and still was, much more than a union, an organization that many people hoped—or feared—would regain the social and political pre-eminence it had enjoyed before Franco? And, above all, how could he have done it given who he was—someone who had spent forty years giving the union in particular and the anti-Franco movement in general a very wide berth, someone who had spent more than half of his fifty years holed up in a car repair workshop?

  I’m not at all sure how Marco managed such an unexpected and meteoric rise, but what I am completely sure about is that only someone like him could have done it.

  7

  To return to Claudio Magris, or to the title of Claudio Magris’ article about Marco, “The liar who tells the truth”; to go back to Vargas Llosa who insists that all novels tell a truth by telling a lie—a moral or literary truth through a factual or historical lie—and who, in his own article about Marco, claims that our man is a brilliant storyteller, welcoming him to the guild of novelists: Are Magris and Vargas Llosa seeking to absolve Marco as some have accused them? Is Marco a novelist, and are his lies and truths not historical but novelistic? And if Marco is a novelist, what kind of novelist is he? It’s impossible to attempt to answer such a question without first answering an underlying two-pronged question: Is a novel a lie? Is a fiction a lie?

  From Plato to Bertrand Russell, a whole school of Western thought has accused writers of fiction of straying from the truth, of propagating falsehoods, which is why Plato banishes them from his ideal Republic. Of course, a falsehood is not a lie—a lie is worse—but, fed up with being considered enemies of the truth, and perhaps fed up with the lies told in the name of truth, many artists, at least since Oscar Wilde, have defiantly embraced their standing as liars: in “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde asserts that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art,” while Orson Welles, at the end of F for Fake, says: “What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I’m afraid the pompous word for that is ‘art.’ ” Picasso himself said it: “Art is a lie, a lie that helps us to see the truth.” So, when Vargas Llosa gives the title “The Truth of Lies” to an essay that is actually a theory of the novel—perhaps echoing an autobiographical story of Louis Aragon, “Le mentir-vrai,” which is also in its way a theory of the novel—he is simply joining a large and illustrious tradition of dissidents. Whatever the case, this multi-faceted and cheerfully paradoxical expression has prompted many criticisms, some a little simplistic. “Only through a novel is it possible to arrive at the truth,” says Stendhal, and no-one, or almost no-one, doubts the fact that fiction offers a truth: a truth that is timorous, profound, ambiguous, contradictory, ironic and elusive, a truth that isn’t factual but moral, not concrete but universal, not historical or journalistic but literary or artistic. Many simply reject the idea that fictions are lies. Their arguments can be summarised in two points. Firstly: unlike lies, the facts that occur in a fiction are not verifiable and therefore it is not possible to prove whether they are true or false. Secondly: unlike lies, fictions make no attempt to fool anyone. On the face of it, both arguments seem convincing; in fact neither of them is. We know that Don Quixote and Emma Bovary did not exist (or at least that they didn’t exist as they appear in Don Quixote and Madame Bovary), and, at least in theory, this can be verified by data documenting that no-one like Don Quixote lived in Spain in the sixteenth century just as no-one like Emma Bovary lived in France in the nineteenth century. Cervantes and Flaubert, therefore, are advancing a falsehood; but not just that, they are fooling us, they are deliberately using all the wiles and talents of charlatans to get us to believe that people who never existed actually existed and things that never happened actually happened. Two thousand four hundred years ago, Gorgias, quoted by Plutarch, said it better than anyone: “tragedy [meaning fiction] is a deception, wherein he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.” I stress the word “honest”: the moral duty of the fiction
writer is to deceive in order to construct the timorous, ambiguous, elusive truth of fiction; I stress the word “wiser”: the intellectual duty of the reader or the spectator is to allow himself to be deceived, in order to capture the profound contradictory, ironic truth that the author has fashioned for him. Fiction is a lie, therefore, a deception, but, at heart, reveals itself to be a particular variant of Plato’s “noble lies” or Montaigne’s “altruistic lies”; it is a lie or a deception that, in a novel, does not seek to harm the reader who, only through believing this lie or deception, can attain a particular truth: the truth of literature.

  Is this the nature of Marco’s lies? Is Marco actually a storyteller? Vargas Llosa’s article is entitled “Monstrous Genius” because the Peruvian novelist feels that Marco has a sort of monstrous genius as a novelist. He makes it clear that Marco works like a novelist and that, in a certain sense, the result of his work is identical to that of the novelist; also he intuits that the urge that prompts Marco to invent and the origin of his lies are the same as those of a novelist.

  His intuition is correct. Literature is a socially acceptable form of narcissism. Like the mythical Narcissus, like the real Marco, the novelist is utterly unsatisfied with life, not only his own life, but life in general, and this is why he refashions it according to his desires, through words, in fiction. For Narcissus, for Marco, for the novelist, reality kills and fiction saves, because more often than not fiction is a way of disguising reality, a way of protecting oneself from it or curing oneself of it. Like Marco, the novelist invents a fictional, hypothetical life, in order to hide his real life and live a different one, to process the humiliations and the horrors and the inadequacies of real life and turn them into fiction, to hide them, in a sense to avoid knowing or recognising himself; just like Narcissus, he must avoid knowing himself if he wishes to live to old age, in accordance with the prophecy blind Tiresias makes to his mother Liriope. Like Marco, the novelist doesn’t create his fiction out of nothing: he creates it from his own experience; like Marco, the novelist knows that pure fiction doesn’t exist and that, if it did exist, it wouldn’t be remotely interesting, and no-one would believe it, because reality is the fuel that drives fiction: and so, like Marco, the novelist creates fiction by painting and distorting historical or biographical truth, by mixing truth and lies, what actually happened with what he wished had happened, or what would have seemed interesting or fascinating if it had happened. Like Marco, who studied history, listened carefully to its central figures and assimilated their stories, the novelist knows he needs a foundation for his lies and this is why he researches thoroughly, so that he can thoroughly reinvent reality. Marco, moreover, has all the qualities required of a novelist: energy, fantasy, imagination, memory and, more than anything, a love of words; almost more so for the written than the spoken word, which to the novelist is merely a substitute for the written word: from the first, Marco has not only been an indiscriminate reader, he has also been a compulsive writer, author of countless stories, poems, articles, biographical fragments, manifestos, reports and letters of every kind that clutter his archives and have been sent to countless people and institutions. Vargas Llosa is right: Marco is a genius because he succeeded for many years at what great novelists only partly achieve in their novels, and even then only for as long as it takes to read them; that is to say, he deceived thousands and thousands of people, making them believe he was someone he wasn’t, that what is actually a lie is in fact the truth. But Marco’s genius, of course, is only partial. Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishly sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch; unlike Marco, great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth fashioned from lies—a truth that doesn’t hide reality, but reveals it—to know and recognise the real, to know ourselves and recognise ourselves, to gaze into the reflecting waters of Narcissus without dying. So, if Marco is a genius, is he also monstrous? And if so, why?

  The answer is obvious: because the rules of a novel are different from the rules of life. In novels, it is not only acceptable to lie, it is obligatory: the factual lie is the path to literary truth (and this is why Gorgias says that he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive); in life, on the other hand, as in history or in journalism, lying is “an accursed vice,” to quote Montaigne, a baseness and an act of violence, a lack of respect and a violation of the first rule of human coexistence. The result of mixing a truth with a lie is always a lie, except in novels, where it is a truth. Marco deliberately confused fiction and life: he should have mixed truth and lies in the former, not the latter; he should have written a novel. Perhaps if he had written a novel he would not have done as he did. Perhaps he is a frustrated novelist. Or perhaps he is not, and perhaps he couldn’t settle for writing a novel and instead turned his life into a novel. This is why he seems monstrous: because he didn’t accept who he was and had the audacity and the effrontery to invent himself out of lies; because lies are a bad thing in life, whereas they are a good thing in novels. All novels, except for those without fiction, the true stories. All novels other than this one.

  8

  The question was: How is it possible that Marco was president of the C.N.T. during the transition from dictatorship to democracy? How is it possible that, in a few short months after the death of Franco, a man who, during the regime, hadn’t had any contact either with the C.N.T. or any anti-Franco movements, a man who had spent forty years not lifting a finger to bring down Franco or to improve the working conditions of labourers, became secretary general of the Catalonia chapter of the C.N.T. and, a couple of years later, of the C.N.T. throughout Spain? How is it possible, at such a decisive moment, for such a man to take control of a decisive organisation, an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist union that had been banned for forty years under Franco, that had dominated the unions before the dictatorship and aspired to do so again? The answer to these complex questions is very simple: because he was the ideal person to do so.

  * * *

  —

  When Franco died, anarchism in Spain was broadly divided into two large blocks: those in exile, and those who had remained in Spain. The largest and most powerful section of the exiles, based in the French city of Toulouse, was comprised of veteran anarchists who had fought during the Civil War and had been exiled from Spain for forty years; almost inevitably, all or most of them had a utopian idea of Spain, an antiquated notion of political struggle and an inherited concept of the union, of which they considered themselves the standard bearers. The anarchists who stayed in the country, on the other hand, many of whom had been part of the anti-Franco struggle, were much younger working men with an altogether more realistic vision of the social and political complexities of contemporary Spain. These were the anarcho-syndicalists. Among them were also what might be called counter-culturalists, heirs to the subversive spirit of May ’68, with its joyful emphasis on anti-authoritarianism, personal growth through drugs, sexual liberation and alternative lifestyles. (There was a C.N.T. splinter group among the exiles as well, though they were not particularly relevant: called Frente Libert-ario, based in Paris.)

  In short, between the exiled veterans and the young anarchists in Spain there was a generational and ideological rift, just as between the young anarcho-syndicalists and the young counter-culturalists there was an ideological gulf that was also a cultural (and often class) rift. As if this were not enough, to add to these twin rifts within the C.N.T., there were three others. The first was between the purists and the posibilistas* or realists: the purists advocated a return to the fundamental values of anarchism before the Civil War, in other words they would have no truck with politics and negotiations like other unions; the posibilistas or realists, on the other hand, advocated concrete improvements for workers even at the cost of renouncing princip
les which, moreover, they considered obsolete or impractical. The second rift separated those who considered the C.N.T. to be merely a union, responsible for fighting for the rights and welfare of workers, and those who considered it to be a libertarian movement whose aim should be a popular anarchist revolution. The third rift separated those who advocated violence from those who rejected it. There may have been other rifts, but it hardly matters. What is important is that, to many C.N.T. militants in 1977–78, Marco could easily seem the ideal leader, the only one capable of bridging these unbridgeable gulfs, or at least some of them, and as such the only man capable of resolving the contradictions at the heart of the anarchist union. The astonishing thing is that, in a sense, he may have been.

  Marco resolved the fundamental contradiction of the C.N.T. because, in 1976, having just turned fifty-two, he filled the most obvious gap in the union brought about by four decades of Franco: the lack of activists of intermediate age. He was neither as old as the exiled veterans nor as young as those who stayed in Spain. Unlike the veterans, Marco understood the country’s realities, including employment; unlike the young activists in Spain, Marco had fought in the Civil War and had a command of the language and culture of the C.N.T. during both the war and the pre-war period. It’s true that the exiled C.N.T. members, who had never met him, distrusted Marco, but it’s also true that they distrusted anyone outside their circle and they distrusted the young activists even more than they did Marco. It’s true that Marco was more than thirty years older than most of the activists in Spain, but it’s also true that he connected with their dishevelled, dynamic energy and that, thanks to his friendships with Salsas, Boada et al., he knew them well and knew how to charm and to lead them; it’s equally true that, from his physical appearance, his energy and his manner, he might easily have been mistaken for one of them, or at least he passed unnoticed. Marco possessed the best characteristics of the young, their strength and their understanding of the country, and he contrived the best traits of the veterans, a past of epic feats of war and anti-Franco resistance: this is one of the reasons he embroidered his war record, adding heroic incidents like his fictional relationship with “Quico” Sabater—to the young activists, a figure almost as mythic as Durruti or Che Guevara—and this is how he later managed to pass for an anti-Franco resistant, especially among the young. In April 1978, when he was proclaimed secretary general of the C.N.T. in Spain, the magazine Triunfo, the most important magazine of the Spanish left at the time, presented him as an activist who, during the Franco regime, had been involved “in every clandestine struggle and in the confederal organisation,” while in his memoirs, José Ribas, the editor of Ajoblanco, the most popular magazine among young libertarians at the time, wrote that Marco was known among his comrades “for having suffered in the dungeons of Francoism.” All of these things stood in Marco’s favour as a potential leader of the C.N.T. He also benefited from the fact that he was a member of the metalworkers union, which experienced greater growth in Catalonia than any other union in the years after Franco’s death. This may have proved to be a decisive advantage, alongside the fact that as a member of a cooperative—this was the legal status of his garage—he could spend more time working for the union than most of his comrades. There were a number of personal qualities in his favour, too: his powerful speeches, his frenetic activism, his extraordinary gifts as a performer and his lack of any serious political convictions—in fact, Marco’s only real goal was to be in the limelight, thereby satisfying his mediopathy, his need to be loved and admired and his desire to play the leading role—which meant he was capable of saying something one day and the opposite the very next, telling each side exactly what they wanted to hear.