The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  But what eventually tipped the balance was the Scala affair. It happened on January 15, 1978, when Marco was still secretary general of the Catalonia chapter of the C.N.T. The union had organised a protest in Barcelona against the Moncloa Pact, an agreement proposed by the government of Adolfo Suárez and signed three months earlier by the main political parties, unions and business associations, eager to allay the social unrest in the country and to establish a process for regulating the economy during the transition from dictatorship to democracy; the protest was a success: some ten thousand people took part. But, towards midday, after Marco had brought the demonstration to a close on the plaza de España and the crowds had dispersed, four Molotov cocktails exploded in the Scala nightclub. Four workers died in the blaze. Although two victims were members of the C.N.T., suspicion for the attacks immediately focused on the union and its entourage, and also (at least within the union itself) on police infiltrators acting on orders of the government, who were seeking to discredit the only major union opposed to the process of the political transition because they considered it to be contrary to workers’ interests. Although the two theories were contradictory, both proved to be accurate. In December 1980, a court convicted six people with connections to the C.N.T. for the Scala bombing, but two years later, a police informant named Joaquín Gambín was also convicted of instigating and organising the attack. There can be no doubt that the government was interested in discrediting or even destroying the C.N.T., but it is impossible to rule out the idea that the most traditionalist, inflexible factions within the organisation—notably the exiled veterans who didn’t want to be investigated by their comrades at the next congress and were seeking to regain complete control—had sought to radicalise the union by resorting to violence, thereby distancing the C.N.T. from the realist, posibilista path it had been following until then, and side-lining Marco and the young anarcho-syndicalists. The goals of the government and of the extremists within the union were compatible, and both achieved their aims.

  The Scala affair proved fatal to the C.N.T. This unexpected flare-up of violence frightened off many anarchist sympathisers: the massive influx of members came to a grinding halt, and many members decided to leave; also the fashion for libertarianism more or less faded. This frantic retreat was a victory for the government, which succeeded in stigmatising the C.N.T. in the media, associating it and the libertarian movements with mindless radicalism and with terrorism at a moment when terrorism—particularly from the Basque separatists, E.T.A.—was responsible for countless deaths; but it was also a failure for the C.N.T., which proved incapable of contesting the government strategy, and allowed the contradictions it had heretofore kept under control to flare up. The Scala affair split the union down the middle. On one side, the young anarcho-syndicalists who supported Marco demanded that the union roundly condemn the use of violence, though they didn’t rule out helping the C.N.T. activists caught up in the attack, or denouncing police infiltration and government-orchestrated attempts to discredit anarchism; on the other side were the exiled veterans and the young, radicalised counter-culturalists, who flirted with violence or let it be thought they flirted with violence, and were prepared to condemn the government, but were not prepared to condemn violence in the abstract or the Scala attack in particular, just as they committed to unfailingly support the suspects accused of committing it. In principle, this was an ideological battle: the young anarcho-syndicalists were realists, reformers, possibilists and opposed to violence; the veteran exiles and the young counter-culturalists, on the other hand, were purists, idealists, radicals and, at the very least, had not resolved the eternal debate about the necessity and the legitimacy of using violence. In the end, it resulted in an all-out power struggle, duly disguised as a debate over principle, that left the union preoccupied with internal troubles and completely cut it off from the concerns of workers.

  It was a fight to the death and one that the exiled purists—who had never truly relinquished control of the union—were destined to win. Faced with the congress proposed by the young anarcho-syndicalists, the exiles drew up a plan to purge the union of their adversaries who might otherwise compel them to give an account of their actions during the dictatorship, take control of the congress and, with it, take power. The first thing they did was to demonise the young anarcho-syndicalists, accusing them of being revisionists, collaborators, reformers and heterodox Marxists; the second was to expel as many of them as possible from the union; the third was to resort to insult, intimidation and violence. Realising that the young anarcho-syndicalists on whose support he had thus far relied were about to be expelled from the union, Marco distanced himself from them and attempted to mediate between the two factions and put himself forward as a sort of intermediate option, a third way, warning that if things did not change, the C.N.T. was headed for disaster: “A process of disintegration and collapse has taken effect in the C.N.T.,” he wrote on March 5, 1979, in Solid-aridad Obrera, “one that, if it is not stopped now, will destroy us to the benefit of our common enemies: capital and the state […] Either we act quickly, or it will be too late. The struggle for control of the C.N.T. will result in there being nothing left to control, and that in short order.”

  This was no exaggeration. It must have been a difficult period for him, yet at the same time it must have been intense and thrilling, a glorious period in its way, or at least a period that produced one of the most glorious moments in his life, or one of the moments whose glory he most exploited. It happened on the evening of September 28, 1979, in the centre of Barcelona, where a number of anarchists had chained themselves together and blocked traffic on calle Pelayo, calling for an amnesty for the accused in the Scala affair; Marco happened to be there and, as the protest was being dispersed, he was beaten and arrested by the police. In his statement, our hero insisted that he had done nothing more than remonstrate with the officers beating the protestors who were chained together; for their part, the officers testified that Marco had not remonstrated about anything, but had called them “murderers, bastards, sons of bitches, etcetera” while they attempted to unchain the protestors: this, they claimed, was why they arrested him. In any case, Marco was released that same evening, and lost no time having photographs taken—two in profile, and two from the back—showing the bruises left by police truncheons and rifle butts on his back and his ribs, photographs that, from this moment on, he always carried with him. For Marco, they were crucial. There are witness statements from the period when he was leader of the C.N.T. that attest that our man was capable of acts of bravery when confronted by the authorities or by police who were still Francoist or unable to shake off their Francoist mentality and behaviour, but Marco immediately realised that no witness statement was a match for these photographs. At last, he had succeeded in becoming the man who, for years, he had dreamed of being or imagined being, certainly the man he had always claimed to be, the man many people believed him to be. These photographs were the proof. Clear and unequivocal, in black and white. Now, he too was a victim of the Franco regime—or what remained of it. He too was a resistance fighter. He too was a hero.

  Marco managed to arrive at the C.N.T. congress as national secretary general and leave having been all but expelled. “I was treated better at the police station,” he declared at the time in the libertarian magazine Bicicleta. Once again, he was not exaggerating, or at least not much. The congress took place in early December 1979 at the Casa de Campo in Madrid, and it was a pitched battle—the ultimate or penultimate battle in the ultimate or penultimate war between anarchists—during which members witnessed everything, from tricks and procedural irregularities, to shouts, insults, threats, beatings and people brandishing guns. Predictably, the young anarcho-syndicalists, most of whom had left the party or been expelled, were defeated, as was Marco: he could not be a consensus candidate or an intermediate alternative, and though he stood for re-election, he was far from garnering the votes required to remain in office
. With the indestructible Federica Montseny controlling remotely from Toulouse, the veteran exiles, who had never trusted Marco, swept all before them and succeeded in imposing their agenda, and their candidate, José Buendía.

  The rest of the story is also sad, or perhaps sadder, both for Marco and for the C.N.T., more so perhaps for the C.N.T. In the two years that followed, our man clung to his reputation and his role as a union leader in an attempt to regain his influence within the C.N.T., or within the trade union movement. Hardly had the congress at Casa del Campo ended than he founded the C.C.T. (Confederación Catalana del Trabajo), allied to the C.N.T., and with others who had lost at the congress, attempted to challenge the results, but he succeeded only in getting himself expelled from the union in April 1980 for “his blatant attempts to foment splits within the Confederación,” declared the Organising Secretary of the C.N.T. in Solidaridad Obrera in June, and for colluding with the government in undermining the reputation of the union and seeking to destroy it, according to the Coordination Secretariat in a denunciation in late May, also quoted in Solidaridad Obrera. These slanderous rumours accusing him of being a traitor, an infiltrator and a collaborationist—the result of the bitter clashes and the paranoid infighting within the C.N.T. at the time—have haunted Marco to this day, but, shortly after they began to circulate, he abandoned all hope of returning to a senior role in trade unionism. His decision came in 1984, when his old comrades, the young anarcho-syndicalists who had been defeated at the Madrid congress with him, formed the C.N.T.–Valencia Congress in conjunction with various other C.N.T. splinter groups and, doubtless remembering that Marco had distanced himself from them when they most needed him, they distanced themselves from him.

  Marco was left alone: this ends his career as a trade unionist. It is true that, by this time, the union that had played such an important role in his life was also beginning to wane. In 1989, after a court decision determined they could no longer use the initials C.N.T., the young anarcho-syndicalists—by now, no longer young—renamed themselves the C.G.T. (Confederación General del Trabajo), which is now the third largest union in Spain, while the C.N.T. has long since been reduced to an irrelevancy. As for Marco, in the early Eighties, he gradually disappeared from the newspapers and retreated to his private life, to his wife and daughters and his degree in history, which he completed during this time; meanwhile, he carried on working in his garage, though not for long since, in 1986, he reached retirement age. It is possible that he was a little bruised by his turbulent time in the C.N.T., a union he joined in a moment of euphoric chaos and left at a moment of dismal chaos, whose leadership he took up when it seemed the union was destined for success and abandoned when it was nose-diving towards abject failure. But it is undeniable that, though he had tasted bitter gall, his time in the spotlight, where he was heeded, respected, admired and recognised as a leader, meant that Marco could no longer live without the attention. And so, still possessed of a boundless, youthful energy at the age of sixty-four or sixty-five, he immediately set about looking for some way to return to that kind of life.

  It did not take him long to find it.

  * posibilistas. The name relates to Libertarian Possibilism (posibilismo libertario), a political current in the twentieth-century Spanish anarchist movement.

  9

  In my article “I am Enric Marco,” I compared Marco to Don Quixote because both are formidable liars who “cannot reconcile themselves to the greyness of their real lives and so invent and live out a fictitious heroic life.” The comparison still seems valid to me, but I now believe there are many other reasons to make it.

  Don Quixote is the story of a simple nobleman named Alonso Quixano who, shortly before his fiftieth birthday, having led a mediocre, tedious, unfulfilling existence holed up in a one-horse town in la Mancha, decides to throw everything to the devil and reinvent himself as a knight-errant, setting off to live the life of a hero, an idealistic life brimming with courage, honour and love; Marco’s is a similar story: a simple mechanic named Enrique Marco, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, having led a mostly mediocre, tedious, unfulfilling existence holed up in a car repair shop in Barcelona, decides to throw everything to the devil and reinvent himself as a civic hero, setting off to live an idealistic life brimming with courage, honour and love. But there is more. Alonso Quixano is a narcissist, who invents Don Quixote so as not to know himself or to recognise himself, so as to conceal, behind the epic grandeur of Don Quixote, the crass pettiness of his past life and the shame it inspires in him, so that, through Don Quixote, he can lead the noble-minded, tumultuous life he never lived; in Marco’s case, his narcissism led him to invent first Enrique Durruti, or Enric Batlle, or Enrique Marcos, implacable working-class libertarian and tireless opponent of Franco, then later Enric Marco, former prisoner of Flossenbürg concentration camp, president of the Amical de Mauthausen, and tireless opponent of the Nazis, so as to hide behind this heroic mask the mediocrity of his past life and the shame it inspires in him, so that, through Enrique Durruti, or Enric Batlle, or Enrique Marcos and later through Enric Marco, he can lead the great, noble-minded, tumultuous life he never lived. Shortly before his fiftieth birthday, Alonso Quixano gave up the prosaic name Alonso Quixano and adopted the poetic Don Quixote de la Mancha, he abandoned the quotidian affections of his housekeeper and his niece for the dazzling, unattainable love of Dulcinea, he left the bland routines of home for the appetising uncertainties of the byways and taverns of Spain, and left his pitiful life as a nobleman for the adventurous life of a knight-errant; likewise, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Marco gave up the name Marco and adopted the name Marcos, he abandoned an ageing, uneducated immigrant from Andalucía for a young, educated, elegant half-French girl, he left a working-class suburb of Barcelona for a middle-class suburb, and cast aside the tedious life of a mechanic for the thrilling life of a union leader and champion of political freedom, social justice and historical memory.

  More? Like Marco, Don Quixote is hungry for fame and glory, anxious that his exploits should be graven in the memory of the world, eager that men and women should talk about him, love and admire him, consider him an exceptional and heroic individual; like Marco, Don Quixote is a mediopath, addicted to being in the limelight. He is also a compulsive reader and, like Marco, has many of the fundamental qualities of a writer or novelist: energy, fantasy, imagination, memory and a love of words; it is even possible that, like Marco, he is a frustrated novelist: if Alonso Quixano had written a book of chivalric deeds, perhaps he would never have been Don Quixote, because he would have invested his incomparable talents as a storyteller in his fiction and, through it, vicariously led the life he wished to live, just as the real Marco might perhaps not have created the fictional Marco if he had dreamed up his adventures and lived them vicariously by writing fiction. Above all, Alonso Quixano is an actor: from the age of fifty almost until his death, he plays the role of Don Quixote, just as, from the age of fifty to this day, the true Marco has been playing the fictional Marco. This is central. What defines Don Quixote, just as it defines Marco, is not that he confuses dreams with reality, fiction with reality, or lies with truth, but the fact that he wants to make his dreams a reality, transform lies into truth and fiction into reality. What is extraordinary is that both succeed: one of the things that distinguishes Part One of Don Quixote from Part Two is that in Part One, Don Quixote imagines the adventures that happen to him, mistaking windmills for giants and taverns for castles, while in the second volume, the adventures truly happen, or so he believes, winning the hearts of pretty maidens, being shipwrecked, hearing enchanted heads speak and jousting in single combat with other knights-errant; similarly, particularly in the late Seventies, when he was secretary general of the C.N.T., Marco finally got to live the life he imagined, he became a working-class leader, confronting the police and being beaten by them, spending at least a few hours in a police cell for political—or politically related—reasons. Bu
t there can be no doubt that though first and foremost an actor, Alonso Quixano was not play-acting the role of Don Quixote; he was Don Quixote: he was so deeply immersed in the role that he believed himself to be the character he portrayed, so much so that it would have been impossible to persuade him that he was not Don Quixote but Alonso Quixano. The same was true of Marco, and it’s partly for this reason that, after the scandal broke and his deception was unmasked, he did not acknowledge his mistake, did not stay silent, did not know or recognise himself for who he was but refused to accept his true identity and actively defended himself in the press, on the radio, on television and on film. He rushed to defend his imaginary I, the heroic I people were trying to kill, and he tried desperately to shore up the existence of this teetering fictional character with elements of his real past.

  Thus Marco is Don Quixote, or a particular version of Don Quixote. In a certain sense—as my son pointed out when he met him—he is a better, more accomplished Don Quixote than the Don himself because, unlike Don Quixote, who has almost no past, Marco has a past and moreover knows that the past is never dead, it is merely an aspect of the present and—as Faulkner says—it’s not even past; as a result, as well as reinventing his present, Marco reinvented his past (or reinvented his present by reinventing his past). And he is a better, more accomplished Don Quixote than the Don himself because he succeeds where Don Quixote fails: while Alonso Quixano never succeeded in fooling anyone, everyone knew he was just a poor fool who believed himself to be a gallant hero, Marco convinced everyone that the fictional Marco was the real Marco and that he was a civilian hero. Having said this, some will object that, despite the similarities between Marco and Don Quixote, there is a decisive difference that separates them: Don Quixote is mad, while Marco is not. I don’t think this objection is watertight. It’s true that Don Quixote is utterly mad, but it’s equally true that he is completely sane, and, after a fashion, this is also true of Marco: just as Don Quixote talks gibberish only when speaking about the knight-errant, Marco talks gibberish only when speaking about his exploits as an anti-fascist hero. Marco, too, has a collection of chivalric books: they are his own past.