The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  After agonising months of relentless struggle, in the end it was he who collapsed. Or so he says. What he says is that, seeing himself ruthlessly relegated to the rank of great impostor and great pariah, at some point he sank into depression. That may be true, though I have trouble believing it, because a guy like Marco never sinks into depression, he never sinks, full stop. Nevertheless, it’s true that there came a point when he stopped fighting and sought refuge in the bosom of his family, with his wife and two daughters, and from time to time with a friend, although Marco was always a lone wolf and never had many friends. This hiatus, always assuming it was a hiatus, didn’t last long, and afterwards Marco became what the scandal had made him, became what he was when I met him and, thinking about it, what he’d always been: a great impostor and a great pariah but chiefly a self-publicist, a man on a war footing, devoted to the cause of his own defence. He no longer gave public talks, but he accepted every opportunity to explain himself that was offered, beginning with interviews about his own case and cases similar to his (although Marco always fixed it so that he talked mostly about himself, seeming not to care that he could defend himself only by defending another charlatan). He attended public functions where he encountered former colleagues from his time at the C.N.T. and FaPaC; some had liked him, others had disliked him, some had admired him, others had loathed him or were indifferent to him, but all of them had followed the news of the scandal, were incredulous, indignant or embarrassed on his behalf, and now either didn’t speak to him, behaved as though nothing had happened, or managed to avoid him.

  Marco also attempted to recover his position at Amical. On several occasions he sent letters requesting a meeting in order to explain himself, to give his former colleagues his version of the Marco affair, to try to redeem himself in their eyes and renew his ties with the organisation; and every time he found new documents that confirmed his status as victim of the Nazis (after travelling to Germany to film Ich bin Enric Marco with Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal, for example), he would send copies to the headquarters of the Amical on calle Sils as proof that his version of the facts was correct, that he hadn’t lied as much as people thought. The Amical de Mauthausen did not respond to any of his letters, despite the fact that Marco resorted to every possible reason for them to readmit him, including those of the shameless charlatan and peerless trickster, suggesting that his former co-workers should help him recover his good name so that no-one would be able to criticise them for allowing an impostor to be president of Amical. On one occasion, however, he did meet with them again, or with many of them. It was at the funeral of Antonia García, who had been in what was called Convoy 927 or the Convoy of Angoulême, a train filled with Spanish Republican exiles that left the French city of Angoulême in June 1940 for Mauthausen. Marco attended the funeral because he’d had a warm relationship with the deceased, and perhaps also because he saw it as a possibility to be reconciled with his former colleagues. But if it was for the second reason, it didn’t work; although some shook his hand or seemed happy to see him again, most of the members of the association were embarrassed that he attended the event, and more than one refused to acknowledge him. It’s likely that no-one really understood why he was there.

  Marco has spent recent years living in a perpetual state of self-justification. He has said a thousand times that he doesn’t want to be rehabilitated, but that is precisely what he wants: he wants to stop being a pariah, to stop being the impostor and the liar par excellence; he wants to resume, if not his role as champion or rock star of so-called historical memory—Marco is well aware that historical memory scarcely exists now, and that his case contributed to its demise—at least his role as civic hero or exceptional individual; he wants to be allowed to contribute to the betterment of his country, and to speak to young people about truth, justice and solidarity; he wants it to be recognised that he, too, was a victim of Francoist and Nazi barbarism, someone who fought against them, and that his lie was a beneficial lie, one so insignificant that it is barely, or barely deserves to be considered, a lie; he wants it to be admitted that society as a whole treated him unjustly, that he was unfairly, spitefully, savagely abused by the media; he wants everyone to accept once and for all that he is not Alonso Quixano but Don Quixote.

  And he will not rest until he succeeds. Or so he says, and I believe him. In this, the final quest in his life, Marco works alone, whenever the opportunity presents itself and with the means at his disposal, his gift with words, his talent as a charlatan, a charmer and a trickster, qualities that, despite the ravages of his ninety-three years, are largely intact; on occasion, he works with others, or has attempted to, because he doesn’t spurn help from anyone and because he is aware that, having lost all his credibility, he must try to take advantage of the credibility of others, even if they don’t realise it (or especially if they realise it). It doesn’t matter who they are: journalists, filmmakers, writers. It makes no difference. What matters is that they have an audience, that they allow him to step into the limelight, and above all that he can persuade them to defend him, to champion his cause. The first great rehabilitation he attempted, some years after the scandal broke, was a long article entitled “The Story of a Lie,” published in the magazine Presència; its authors were two good journalists, good people who had known him since their youth, who had admired him and who, despite their disappointment on discovering his deception, continued to consider him a friend: Carme Vinyoles and Pau Lanao. The second vindication he attempted, in 2009, was Ich bin Enric Marco, the film by Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal. The last, it scarcely needs to be said, is this book.

  EPILOGUE

  The Blind Spot

  1

  In the spring of 2012, when after many years I was about to stop refusing to write this book, the newspaper Le Monde asked a group of writers to choose the word that best defined what we wrote; we were also requested to write a page in support of our choice. I immediately chose my word: No. And I wrote what follows.

  “What is a rebel?” Albert Camus asked. “A man who says No.” If Camus is right, most of my books are about rebels, because they are about men who say No (or who try and fail to do so). In some of my books, this is not very apparent, in others, it is impossible to miss: Soldiers of Salamis centres on a Republican soldier who, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, must kill a fascist leader and decides not to kill him; The Anatomy of a Moment centres on an act by a politician who, at the inception of the current Spanish democracy, refuses to lie on the ground when the members of a final Francoist coup ordered him to do so at gunpoint. The words of Dante (Inferno, III, 60), that serve as an epigraph to The Anatomy of a Moment, might serve as an epigraph to most of my books: “Colui che fece […] il gran rifiuto.” He who said the great No: Dante is referring to Pope Celestine V, who abdicated the papacy, but centuries later, Constantin Cavafy understood it as referring not to a single man, but to many of us. “For some people there comes a day when they have to say the great Yes or the great No.” This is what most of my books are about: the day of the Great No (or the Great Yes); that is to say, the day when one knows once and for all who one is […]

  What about this book? What about this book that, for so many years, I didn’t want to write, and am now about to complete? Is there no-one in this book who says No (or who tries and fails to do so)? Is it simply the story of a man who always said Yes, a man who was always with the majority, always in the middle of the crowd, a man who is no-one, or one who will never see the day when he knows once and for all who he is? In his talks and his public statements, Marco emphatically insisted that heroes do not exist, but by now we know all about emphasis (particularly Marco’s emphasis), and we also know that in saying that heroes do not exist, what Marco wanted to say is that he was the hero. So, in this book about a false hero, is there no true hero?

  Of course there is. We all know that there will always be men capable of saying No. They are very few, and besides, we im
mediately forget them or hide them away so that their resounding No doesn’t expose the silent Yes of everyone else; but we all know that they exist. They are here in this book: Fernández Vallet and his comrades in the U.J.A., a handful of boys from the suburbs of Barcelona who, in early 1939, when Franco’s troops had already taken the city, the war was lost and everybody was saying Yes, said No, who refused to give up, who refused to surrender, who refused to meekly endure the opprobrium, the indecency and the humiliation that was the lot of the defeated, and in doing so learned once and for all who they were. They are here. After more than seventy years of obfuscation and amnesia, they are here one last time. Honour to the brave: Pedro Gómez Segado, Miquel Colás Tamborero, Julia Romera Yáñez, Joaquín Miguel Montes, Juan Ballesteros Román, Julio Meroño Martínez, Joaquim Campeny Pueyo, Manuel Campeny Pueyo, Fernando Villanueva, Manuel Abad Lara, Vicente Abad Lara, José González Catalán, Bernabé García Valero, Jesús Cárceles Tomás, Antonio Beltrán Gómez, Enric Vilella Trepat, Ernesto Sánchez Montes, Andreu Prats Mallarín, Antonio Asensio Forza, Miquel Planas Mateo and Antonio Fernández Vallet.

  Who else? Is there anyone else in this book who said No? Of course: Benito Bermejo. The hidden villain of this story is actually its hidden hero, or one of its heroes. Although perhaps the word “hero” is inaccurate; more than a hero, Bermejo is a just man; one of those who work in silence, with humility, integrity and tenacity, one of those men whose sense of duty, when the decisive moment comes, instils enough courage in him to say No, and if necessary to be a wet blanket and poke people in the eye, as Bermejo did when he exposed Marco at the height of the funereal celebration of memory, when the funeral industry of memory was working at full strength.

  Anyone else? Let me go back to Albert Camus. The most famous quote by the French writer was something he didn’t write; he said it in Sweden on December 12, 1957, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize. In its most common (and categorical) form, it runs: “I believe in justice, but if I have to choose between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” Although he was bitterly attacked for his statement, in actual fact this is not precisely what Camus said, nor did it have the general sense that his enemies attributed to it. But that doesn’t matter to me, at least not today. Today, I’ll stick to this, which is more important—when the Marco scandal broke, his wife and two daughters, who must have suffered as much if not more than Marco, clung, in their way, to this quote: between an abstract principle and a man of flesh and blood, they chose the man of flesh and blood. In those end-of-the-world days for Marco, these three women stuck by him, the three of them shielded him, none of them asked for any further explanation than he was prepared to give them. More than that, on the day after the scandal broke, Ona, who was twenty-one at the time, unexpectedly called in to a morning programme on Catalan television in which her father was being attacked, and, a little later, wrote an article published in El País in response to an open letter written by a former member of the board of Amical, criticising her for her defence of Marco on television. Between truth and her father, Ona Marco chose her father; between truth and her father, Elizabeth Marco chose her father; between truth and her husband, Dani Olivera chose her husband. None of them relented at the time, none of them has relented since; in the many years that Marco has been the great impostor and the great pariah, no-one has heard a word of reproach from them against him, or witnessed any gesture that was other than affectionate. Fuck the truth: honour to the brave.

  Is that everyone? Are there no other heroes lurking? Just a minute: What about our hero? What about Enric Marco? Is he merely a false hero? Did he never say No (or at least try and fail to do so)? Can he not be both a false and a true hero, a hero and a villain, in the same way that Don Quixote is both ridiculous and heroic, or both sane and crazy at the same time? Is it possible that the visible great villain of this book is also its invisible great hero? Is it possible that the man of the great Yes could also be the man of the great No? And, speaking of Don Quixote, who, at the age of fifty, rebelled against his lot as a country gentleman with no glory, and in order not to know or to recognise himself for what he was, and not to die like Narcissus staring into the shimmering waters of his own terrifying reflection, gave himself a hero’s name and reinvented himself completely so he could live the heroic novels he had read—is there not something of similar grandeur in Marco? Did Marco not rebel too? Is his revolt against the meagreness, the narrowness and the wretchedness of life not a maximum form of rebellion like that of the rebel in Camus, the total rebellion of the man who says No and who, having crested the peak of his life, wants to carry on living when he isn’t supposed to live, or more precisely, who wants to live still, in spite of everything and everyone, all that he hasn’t yet lived? Is Marco’s lie not a Nietzschean vital lie, an epic, totally asocial and morally revolutionary lie because it places life above truth? Did Marco not have to choose between truth and life and, flouting all the moral rules, all the norms of coexistence, all that we consider sacred and respectable, choose life? And is this resounding Yes not a resounding No, a definitive No?

  2

  On Friday April 5, 2013, I had a long conversation with Marco in my office in the Gracia district of Barcelona. Some months earlier, I had given up resisting writing this book and, since then, had been working on it full time. The day before I’d had a meeting in my office with Joan Villarroya, one of the most knowledgeable historians on the subject of the Civil War in Catalonia, trying to clarify what was truth and what were lies in Marco’s account of his war, and on Wednesday I’d spent the day at the offices of the Amical de Mauthausen on calle Sils, looking through their archives and talking to Rosa Torán and other members of the association.

  It was there that I arranged the Friday meeting with Marco. At a certain moment, overjoyed and overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of documents about our man in the Amical archives, I asked Torán whether I could photocopy them in order to study them calmly; Torán said that I could, assuming I had permission from Marco. I immediately picked up the phone and called him. I did so with some trepidation, because Marco and I had still not gotten beyond the initial phase of our relationship, when I tried my best to disguise the mixture of suspicion and displeasure I felt and Marco still wanted but didn’t want me to write this book and was trying to charm me as he defended himself from my assaults, entangling me in the web of this shameless charlatan and peerless trickster, agreeing to our meetings only sparingly and doing everything in his power to control what I might find out. And so, as I dialled Marco’s number to ask permission to photocopy the documents at Amical, I was afraid that he wouldn’t grant it without first examining them himself.

  I was wrong. Marco told me to photocopy whatever I liked; then we chatted briefly. I don’t know how long it had been since our last meeting, because he was still in the process of telling me his life story, but I do know that in the past few days I’d been pressing him to meet and he’d been fobbing me off with excuses, so I made the most of this call to tell him that on Monday I was going to Berlin, where I would be spending four months as guest lecturer at the Free University; however I was careful not to tell him that, in those four months, I would be back in Barcelona from time to time, in the hope that my false long absence might trigger his cyclical desire for me to write this book and persuade him to grant me the interview I’d been requesting. The ruse worked: Marco suggested we see each other before my departure, and I seized the opportunity.

  We made an appointment for Friday afternoon.

  If my records are accurate, it was the fifth session we recorded, the last of the initial series. I filmed it myself. My son, who had recorded the first sessions, but had given up because he was too busy with his studies to carry on helping me, had shown me how to do it. The recording lasted three hours. When it was made, there were still many things I had yet to discover about Marco, and many others of which I was unsure. As far as I remember, I hadn’t yet become obsessed with the
bizarre idea that I had to save him. Let me say now that nothing extraordinary occurs or is said in this recording, or no more so than in the many other hours I filmed with Marco (during which many extraordinary things occurred or were said)—except for in the last few minutes, when Marco’s story has arrived at its chronological conclusion, that is to say, the present, or what was then the present, and I’m helping him to recap and interpret some of the episodes he’d recounted during previous sessions, there is a moment when we both seem to cast aside our roles as persecutor and persecuted or besieger and besieged, and, for the first time, we establish a sort of genuine dialogue or communication. It’s a strange, almost magical moment, at least for me, a sort of step change in my relationship with Marco, which is why I don’t want to finish this book without recounting it, or rather without transcribing the conversation we had, in the hope that the words we exchanged might give some small glimpse of that magic.

  On the video, Marco is sitting in a white Ikea armchair, and is visible only from the shoulders up; I am not visible since I’m sitting opposite him, with the camera mounted on a tripod next to me. Marco is wearing a white shirt, a blue polka-dot neckerchief knotted around his throat and a blue sweater (on his chest, out of frame, he probably has a pin emblazoned with the flag of the Second Republic); as always, his moustache is dyed, but not his hair, which is grey and thinning. Behind Marco is a bookcase filled with books and, to left and right, two windows through which the light streams morning or afternoon. But at the point of the interview I’m talking about, daylight has faded and we’ve turned on the lights on the bookshelf; next to Marco is a floor lamp which is also lit. I would add that, rewatching the footage, there are three things that catch my attention. The first is Marco’s tiredness, unsurprising for anyone who has been talking for three hours straight as he has, but surprising for Marco; now it occurs to me that perhaps his tiredness explains not only why Marco has let me talk more than usual, but also, at least in part, the curious atmosphere of complicity or understanding that seems to pervade the scene, the feeling in that moment that I got Marco to take off his mask and show his true face. The second thing that surprises me, at least in the final minutes of the recording, is that I address Marco by the familiar tú; he has been addressing me as tú almost from the beginning but, as far as I remember, it was some time before I allowed myself to be familiar with him; this may have been the first day I did so. The third thing is, in the entire conversation, Marco doesn’t once say the word “truthfully.”