The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  I came across it in a book by Tzvetan Todorov. In it, Todorov argued that what Levi meant (and, I extrapolated, what Teresa Sala meant) was only valid for Levi himself and the other survivors of the Nazi camps (including, presumably, Teresa Sala who, though not a survivor, was the daughter of a survivor, and therefore a victim of the Nazi camps): they did not have to try to understand their executioners, Todorov said, because understanding relies on some degree of identification, be it partial or temporary, with the perpetrator and that could be highly damaging. The rest of us cannot spare ourselves the effort of understanding evil, particularly extreme evil, because, as Todorov concludes, “Understanding evil is not to justify it, but the means of preventing it from occurring again.” And so, I thought as I drove through Ampurdán with Raül, pretending to think about his offer, to understand Marco was not to justify him, but, at most, to acquire the means to prevent the emergence of another Marco. Besides, I was now intrigued to discover what it was in Marco that so affected me it frightened me, and in that instant I knew that I felt strong enough and brave enough to try to find out. Was it possible to find out? Was it possible to tell Marco’s story? And was it possible to tell it without lying? Was it possible to present an account of Marco’s lie as a true story? Or was it impossible, as Arrabal probably thought. Vargas Llosa and Magris had supposed that we could never know the profound truth about Marco, but surely this was the best reason for writing about him? Was this not knowing, or this difficulty of knowing not the best possible reason for attempting to know? And, even if a book about Marco was an impossible book, as Arrabal – and perhaps Vargas Llosa and Magris – thought, surely that was the perfect reason to write it? Surely it is the impossible books that are most necessary, perhaps the only ones truly worth trying to write? Was this not what Vargas Llosa had really meant when he said I had to write about Marco, that night at his house in Madrid? Is noble failure the best a writer can aspire to?

  “He might be dead,” I said to Raül.

  “What?”

  “Marco might be dead,” I said. “When I met him he was nearly ninety, and that was four years ago.”

  “And we didn’t hear that he died? After everything he did? Not very likely.”

  That very afternoon, I telephoned Marco from my mother’s house in Gerona, where we spent most weekends. He was alive. Not only was he alive; he still seemed possessed by the same agitation, the same feverish logorrhoea he had four years earlier. He talked about our only meeting, about Santi and about my sister Blanca, but mostly he talked about himself, about the injustice he had suffered, about his tireless solidarity, about everything he had given to so many people only to get nothing in return. As I listened, I was reminded of the talent of Santi and Lucas Vermal and I wondered whether, like them, I would be able to put up with this never-ending self-justifying torrent, but I told myself I could not give up at the first hurdle and, plucking up my courage, I managed to interrupt him: I told him that I had decided to resume the idea of writing a book about him.

  “Oh, really?” he asked, as though there might be some other reason I was calling him. “I suppose we did leave things up in the air, didn’t we?”

  Before he had time to go on the attack again, I asked whether we could meet to talk about the idea. Without a flicker of hesitation, Marco agreed. It was Friday. We agreed to meet on Monday.

  Convinced that Marco would agree to my writing a book about him – because his vanity would trump all possible reservations about the project – that night, I printed out Vargas Llosa’s article, my own, and an article published in El País by José Luis Barbería, and gave them to my son.

  “I’m seeing Marco on Monday,” I said. “It’s just an initial meeting, to get back in touch and explain what I want to do. Next week, we start recording, assuming that he accepts. If you’re going to do it, you’d better read up on him.”

  Raül took the pages and, after dinner, lay on the sofa in the dining room and started reading them. I sat in an armchair, with him on one side and my mother on the other; I was vaguely listening to my mother, who was holding my hand, and watched the news on television while glancing at my son out of the corner of my eye. When he had finished reading, he smiled.

  “The guy’s insane,” he said, letting the pages fall onto the rug.

  I did not ask who he was referring to; I asked:

  “You think so?”

  “Who are you talking about?” my mother interrupted.

  “Just some guy.” Raül raised his voice to compensate for his grandmother’s deafness. “He claimed he was in a concentration camp, but it was a lie.”

  My mother stared at him blankly, then she looked at me. I summed up Marco’s story, though I had not even finished when she asked:

  “And you think all that lying could be true?”

  Raül laughed. I told my mother that this was precisely what I planned to try and find out. My mother squeezed my hand, as though she approved of what I had said, and Raül went on.

  “Marco lives in a fantasy world, one that’s more interesting and more fun than reality. That’s the definition of being insane, surely?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “It’s like Don Quixote. Although Don Quixote is also sane. What I mean is, he’s mad as a box of frogs, but he’s also the most sensible man in the world. Except on the subject of books about chivalry.”

  “And Marco is like him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if he has books about chivalry. That’s something else I have to find out. Or rather that we have to find out. If all goes well, we’ll start next week. Pay attention while you’re filming, and afterwards you can tell me what you think of him. Alright?”

  Raül shifted on the sofa, put a cushion under his head and pulled a face that to me seemed sceptical, though perhaps it was not.

  “O.K.,” he said.

  On Monday, at the appointed hour, I showed up at Marco’s house in Sant Cugat. I was on my own; Marco and his wife greeted me. At first glance, I could see no difference between the Marco I had met four years ago and this man; perhaps he was a little shorter, a little more wrinkled, but he still looked like a man of sixty, not one who was over ninety. As though he could read my thoughts, one of the first things he said was that his health had deteriorated, that he had heart trouble. “I thought I’d make it to a hundred,” he said, his voice hoarse and anguished, “but I know now I won’t get there.” Then he launched into a torrent of self-glorification, showering me with the usual mixture of vindication and victimisation: he had had an amazing life, had been everywhere, met everyone, he had been a defender of the republic, a fervent anti-fascist during the war, a clandestine resistance fighter during the Franco regime, a regular victim of the prisons of dictatorship, a union leader, a civic leader, a campaigner for justice, liberty and historic memory; it was true that at the end of his life he had made the mistake of passing himself off as a survivor of the Nazi camps, though deep down it had not been a mistake, he had not lied but merely distorted the truth, and moreover he had distorted it in a good cause, to expose the horrors of the century; what had happened to him when the scandal blew up was unforgiveable, he had been insulted, slighted, trampled, lynched, as though he were vermin rather than a great yet humble man who had given his life for others, as though it were he who was indebted to the world when in fact the world owed him a debt . . . I let him ramble on while his wife bustled about the house and though she was not interested in what Marco was saying, or had heard it many times, meanwhile I was wondering what she thought about my idea of writing a book about her husband. When I realised that Marco was not going to stop talking unless I interrupted him, I tried to do so. I almost had to shout to interrupt his peroration to say that I had come to see him because I wanted him to tell his whole story, but all in due time.

  “If you tell me everything now, there will be nothing left to tell!” I all but shouted. Marco fell silent; it was like a miracle. We were sitting on the veranda, facing each other, separated
by a large, rectangular wooden table; behind the table were shelves filled with books, magazines and box files. His wife had just appeared by his side, silent as a cat. Returning to my usual tone of voice, I asked: “Would you like me to tell you about my project?”

  I told him. I said again that my idea was to write a book about him. I assured him that, in order to write it, I would need his help. I repeated that, in the first instance, I would need him to recount his life in detail from beginning to end. I told him that, if he did not object, my son would film our sessions and that, if he preferred, we could film them right here, in his house.

  “No, not here,” he said peremptorily, “I am me and my family is my family.”

  “In that case, we can film in my office,” I said. “We won’t be disturbed there.”

  I told him that, although I was a writer of fictions, I was proposing to write an absolutely accurate account, a novel without fiction and, although I did not explain this, among my other motives, I wanted to do so because he had already added enough fiction to his life. I added that, aside from what I had just said, I could not give him any advance idea of how the book would turn out once it was written.

  “All the same,” I warned him, “you should not expect it to be a defence. I am not going to pull the wool over your eyes: you shouldn’t expect either rehabilitation or exoneration from me; but nor should you expect a condemnation. What I want is to know who you are and why you did what you did. That is what I want: not to rehabilitate you, but to understand you.”

  Marco looked at me with his dark, sunken, inquisitive eyes; I held his gaze. I repeated that I had no doubt that he could help me with my project: it was enough to know what he had done and to spend five minutes in his presence to be certain that he was a man who would prefer people to speak ill of him than not to speak of him at all. And I was about to go on to say, with hypocritical magnanimity, that if he did not wish to accept the arrangement, I would completely understand, when he spoke up.

  “Truthfully, I do not need anyone to rehabilitate me,” he said, although I was convinced that there was nothing he longed for more than rehabilitation. “All I need is for someone to listen to me. To make me understood.”

  “I will listen to you,” I assured him.

  Marco continued to stare at me; his wife stared too.

  “I read an article about myself in El País,” said Marco, and in that moment I regretted having written the article. “It was not well-informed.”

  I looked at his wife, then back at him and once again resorted to hypocrisy (or sarcasm).

  “Were there errors in it?” I asked.

  “No,” Marco said. “But it was not me. Honestly, I am much more complex.”

  “I am sure you’re right,” I said, this time sincerely, taking the way out he offered. “That is precisely why I want to write the book: to give a portrait of you as you are in all your complexity. And for that, we need to talk, you need to tell me your life story. Later, you will be able to help me in other ways: you could provide me with documents, accompany me to places where you lived, give me phone numbers and addresses of people you knew . . .” I turned back to his wife and said, “One day, I would also like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” his wife said. She smiled and got to her feet as though she had heard all she needed to hear. “But on condition that you don’t film me. I am only Enric’s wife, and you heard what my husband said: he is he, and his family is his family.”

  For a moment, Marco gazed, entranced, as his wife left the veranda. I made the most of his silence to ask:

  “What do you say we start tomorrow?”

  We started three days later. During the intervening period I again immersed myself in Marco’s case, I re-read everything I had read about him and searched the internet for new information, where I discovered countless articles, recordings, interviews and comments. On the eve of our first session, I almost suffered a panic attack.

  “Shit,” I said to Raül, “we can’t film in my office.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because there’s no lift. How do you expect a ninety-two-year-old man to climb the stairs to the third floor?”

  I immediately telephoned Marco, thinking that, if we could not film in my office or in his house, we would have to postpone our first day’s work, which seemed to me a bad omen. Marco was irritated by my call.

  “You take care of your side of things, Javier,” he said. “The stairs are my concern.”

  I think this was the first time he called me by my first name, and for a very uncomfortable second I felt as though Marco were talking to me the way I talked to my son.

  The following day, before 4.00p.m., Raül and I were in my office in the Gracia district waiting for Marco. The previous evening, my son had shown me how the camera worked – he had to leave late in the afternoon and we needed to be sure I knew how to operate it after he left – and now he set it on a tripod and set the tripod next to me, facing the armchair where Marco was to sit. At about four thirty, the doorbell rang. It was Marco; he had come with his wife. Although she was almost thirty years his junior, Marco was first to reach the top of the stairs, determined and panting for breath. I don’t remember what his wife was wearing; as for Marco, the footage we shot that day shows him wearing a dark flat cap, a striped shirt and a spotted jumper with the sempiternal republican flag pinned to it. Marco greeted me and began talking to Raül; I chatted to Dani. Once the preamble was over, I had Marco sit in the armchair facing the camera, Dani sat on a chair, Raül perched on a seat behind the camera and I sat in my office chair facing Marco. Next to me on the desk I had a notepad filled with questions for him, but in the first half-hour I was barely able to formulate a single one since Marco filled the time with a classic vindictive harangue full of self-congratulation and complaints. We listened patiently until, thanks in part to the intervention of his wife, I managed to get him to start recounting his life from the beginning.

  It was at this point that the first interview really began. It ended some three and a half hours later, shortly before eight o’clock. By this time, Marco and I had been alone in the office for some time; Raül and Dani had left, first Dani, then Raül. That night, over dinner, my wife, my son and I talked about Marco. I asked Raül what he thought of him, what impression he had made, whether he still thought the man was crazy.

  “He’s crazy and he’s not crazy,” he said without stopping to think, without looking up from his plate, and I guessed that this was not a spontaneous response. “He’s like Don Quixote, he plays the fool, but he’s no fool. And he’s not like Don Quixote. He is much better.”

  I waited for him to explain why, but he was chewing a piece of food, or perhaps mulling over his idea; it was my wife, unable to contain her impatience, who asked for an explanation.

  “It’s obvious,” said Raül, as he finished swallowing or finished thinking or both. “Nobody takes Don Quixote seriously, he doesn’t manage to fool anyone; but Marco, he fooled everyone.” He finally looked up from his plate and looked at his mother. “Don’t you get it? Everyone!” Then he turned to me with an excited gleam in his eyes, pointed the fork at me and said, “He’s the fucking master!”

  6

  The bloodiest battle fought during the first days of the Civil War took place in Barcelona, on Sunday July 19, 1936. On Saturday, news had reached the city of a military uprising in Morocco and all day the streets and the cafés were filled with rumours. The air was thick with eve-of-war tensions. In the afternoon, Lluís Companys, the President of the autonomous Generalitat de Catalunya, refused to give weapons to the workers but the C.N.T., the anarchist union that represented the majority of workers in the city, refusing to accept this refusal, looted the army depots, armed its members and prepared to fight.

  At dawn the following day, the war broke out. In accordance with the strategy devised by those planning the coup d’état, a number of rebel columns armed to the teeth began to stream fr
om the major barracks in the city – from Pedralbes, from calle Tarragona, from Travessera de Gracia and Sant Andreu – converging on the city centre, on the Plaza de Catalunya and the Rambla, but the operation was so poorly organised and met with such fierce resistance from armed workers, especially those from the C.N.T., and detachments of the Guardia de Asalto, that the rebels never reached their target, or reached it only to be forced to surrender: they were hampered by barricades of paving slabs, by sniper fire, by home-made grenades launched from rooftops, by suicide trucks crashing straight into them. By midday, the whole city had become a battlefield, there were people fighting on every corner, there were corpses everywhere, and most of the churches and the convents were ablaze. In the afternoon, the tide of the battle shifted towards the anti-fascist forces: the local leader of the rebels, General Goded – who had arrived by hydroplane from Majorca at noon – surrendered unconditionally and was forced to put out a call to his men to lay down their weapons; at about 2.00 p.m., after some hesitation, the guardia civil pledged their loyalty to the legitimate government; at more or less the same time (perhaps a little earlier or a little later), on Avenida Icaria, a group of workers managed to convince rebel soldiers from the Regimiento de Artillería de Montaña No. 1, armed with a battery comprising two 75mm cannons, that their leaders had lied to them, and persuade them to turn their guns on their own men, and from this point, the rebel forces, which had seen occasional defections to the enemy since morning, began to desert en masse. By nightfall, the rebels held only the Atarazanas barracks near the port and the barracks at Sant Andreu some kilometres from the centre, in which the largest cache of weapons in Barcelona was stored.