The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  That evening, I left Madrid in a state of anguish, and in the following weeks I was plagued by a doubt I had managed to keep at bay from the very moment I decided to begin a serious investigation of Marco’s life. The anguish and the doubt did not relate to the possibility that Marco might have been a police informant, something I thought astonishing but not implausible, but the very act of writing a book about him. Was I entitled to write such a book? Bermejo was right, just as Santi Fillol had been three years earlier: I already knew enough about Marco’s story to know that everyone comes off badly, that telling it would mean being a wet blanket, it would mean poking not just Marco and his family, but the entire country in the eye. Did I want to do that? Was I prepared to do that? Was it right to do it? Was it enough that Marco had given me his permission and was collaborating with me? Did I have the gall to write a book in which Marco’s wife and children would find out that he had had another wife, other children, or that he had been a police informant? What else would they find out, what else would I end up recounting in this book, what else might I discover if I carried on with my investigation? Was I not doggedly trying to write a book that was not simply impossible, but reckless? Was my idea not immoral, not because it would mean playing into Marco’s hands, sanctioning or suppressing his lies (or attempting to absolve him of them), but precisely the opposite, because it would mean putting an end to his lies, telling the truth? Was it not better to give up, to abandon the book, to leave Marco to the fiction that, over the years, had saved him, without bringing to light the truth that could kill him?

  8

  Marco claims he re-enlisted in the Republican army in the spring of 1938, in response to an appeal by the Autonomous Catalan Government for young men to join the ranks. The Civil War was in its penultimate year, and the Francoists had just broken through the Aragon front and were threatening Catalonia, so Marco was sent to the front at Segre, a river almost three hundred kilometres in length that formed the longest line of defence for Catalonian Republicans, and had been the scene of heavy fighting from early April.

  Marco’s memories of this particular phase of the war are more detailed and more abundant than those of earlier periods. He says that he travelled to the front in a truck with boys just like himself, volunteers just as he was, including his childhood friend, Antonio Fernández Vallet, the son of a barber from La Trinidad. He says that, when they arrived at the front, they were divided into various units and, unfortunately, he and Fernández Vallet were not assigned to the same unit. He says that he clearly remembers his unit: third Company of the third Battalion of the 121st Brigade of the 26th Division – formerly the Durruti Column. He says that the unit held positions in the hills of Montsec, the villages Sant Corneli and La Campaneta. He says that he was the youngest soldier in his unit. He says he remembers some of the soldiers in his unit: Francesc Armenguer, from Les Franqueses; Jordi Jardí, from Anglès; a lad named Jorge Veí or Vehi or Pei; a boy named Thomas or Tomás. He also says that he remembers the comisario of his unit, Joan Sants, and obviously Ricardo Sanz, the head of his division and a friend of Buenaventura Durruti. He says that most of his comrades had not been to school and could not read or write and that he wrote the letters that they sent to families, girlfriends and friends, just as he often wrote on the so-called diario moral, a board that offered news of interest to members of the unit. He says that sometimes he dared to do things few soldiers dared to do: sometimes, he said, he wandered deep into no-man’s-land and shouted questions to the fascists, questions that his comrades had suggested that he ask, what town or village they were from, whether they knew some friend or relative of one of his comrades. He says that through such favours he became popular and admired by his comrades in arms. For years, he told another story (though one he did not tell me). What he said was that on the frontlines in Segre he met “Quico” Sabaté, the legendary anarchist guerrilla who fought with the Republican Army for three years and who, after the defeat, continued to wage war against the Franco regime until 1960, when, after twenty-one years spent fighting a personal war against the dictatorship, he was gunned down near the French border. Marco wrote more than once about his relationship with Sabaté. For example, in a letter to the editor of El País in the early 2000s, he wrote: “I met ‘Quico’ personally. It was in the summer of 1938, one day when he visited the trenches held by the 26th Division, the Durruti Column, high up in the sierra de Montsec, and he proposed that a group of boys coordinate guerrilla actions in the fascist rearguard. At the time ‘Quico’ was setting up a guerrilla unit with the 11th Army Corps. We settled on a few boys: Pei, from Poble Sec; Jardí from Anglès, a short, scrawny Salamancan we called Gandhi, Francesc Armenguer, an intelligent, dependable lad from Les Franqueses who was killed some months later while crossing the río Segre between Soses and Torres de Segre, just after being appointed comisario of the unit; and myself. It was exciting to find yourself on ‘the other side’ wearing an enemy uniform, gathering information, cutting communications, helping in the escape of a number of Asturian prisoners forced to build defensive works.”

  Marco also remembers (or says that he remembers) that during his time at the Segre front, he attended the Escuela de Guerra (the army’s war school). He says that attendance meant climbing down from the summit of Sant Corneli and La Campaneta two days a week to the village where the classes were held, Vilanova de Meià, or Santa María de Meià, he does not remember exactly, or he says he does not remember. He says that here he was taught things about which he knew nothing, such as Morse code, and that he remembers a number of his teachers, among them a Capitán Martín. He says that he does not remember precisely when his tuition at the school ended, but he does remember that he graduated with the rank of corporal. He says that the atmosphere in the trenches was poisoned by the civil war within the civil war in which communists and anarchists were embroiled, especially since they had clashed on the streets of Barcelona in May of the previous year, and that those like him who were militant in the anarchist union, the C.N.T., felt constantly under scrutiny by the S.I.M., the intelligence service, which was dominated by communists, who used the organisation as a political police force. He says that, one day, a leaflet arrived from the C.N.T. informing them that, following the signing of a pact three days earlier in Munich by the Western democracies with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, victory was assured for Francoism in the Spanish Civil War, and the same leaflet recommended that, when the war was over, militant union members should go underground and organise a resistance, and offered instructions as to how to go about this. He says that, from that day on, he and his comrades remained in the trenches more out of a sense of camaraderie and duty than out of conviction. He says that, with or without conviction, at some point during that autumn, he and his unit crossed the río Segre and that this offensive – probably the same one that held Seròs, Aitona and Soses on the left bank of the river for several days in November – was intended to alleviate pressure on the Ebro front, where one of the largest, bloodiest and most decisive battles of the war was being fought. He says that he has some memories of the days he spent on the far bank of the río Segre, including Francesc Armenguer dying as he crossed the river, and Jordi Jardí being shot in the arse; he also remembers (or says he remembers) that there was a homosexual adjutant named Antonio, that Antonio was scared to death and that, in the course of a night march, he was lost in the darkness and never seen again. He says that he also remembers being promoted to sergeant during this fleeting Republican advance and, in one of the numerous autobiographical (or supposedly autobiographical) writings in his personal archive – Marco is not only a compulsive talker, but an obsessive writer – he wrote that the commander of his unit promoted him to officer on the battlefield “for repeated displays of valour in the performance of his duties”. But what he most remembers, or says that he remembers, is that one afternoon, during heavy shelling by the enemy artillery, an explosion lifted him into the air and he lost consciousness.

  From this po
int, Marco’s memories of the war become confused. He is unable to give the precise nature of his injury, which, moreover, left no scar on his body; he says only that, from what he knows, it caused internal damage, that it affected his bronchia and his lungs and forced him to take a long convalescence during which he was constantly spitting blood. He says that, afterwards, he was sent back from the front and that one rainy evening he crossed the river, carried on a stretcher over a pontoon bridge, close to a first-aid post where he spent the night. He says that he later spent time in various field hospitals behind the lines, in Manresa, possibly in Agramunt, definitely in the convent at Monserrat where he spent a month, a month and a half, perhaps longer. He says that he barely remembers anything of his peregrinations as a convalescent soldier, except the spitting blood, the constant fever, the whispering voices of the nurses, and the shame of being naked in front of these women. He says that he arrived back in Barcelona in a truck packed with soldiers, shortly before the city was captured by Franco’s troops on January 26, and that he remained there rather than taking the route towards exile as many of his comrades did. He says that, in his case too, the logical thing would have been to go into exile, given that he had been a warrant officer in the Republican army and a militant member of the C.N.T. and as a result would have been exposed to all manner of reprisals from the franquistas, but that he did not leave because he had still not fully recovered, and also so that he could follow the instructions of the union, which recommended remaining in the country and organising a resistance movement. He says that his comrades dropped him off in the centre of the city, on la Diagonal, that he made his own way to El Guinardó and that, when he reached the corner of Lepanto and Travessera de Gracia, he rang the bell of the building where his uncle Anastasio and aunt Ramona lived when he had last been in Barcelona on leave only a few months earlier, just before he received his corporal’s stripes. He says that it was his aunt Ramona who opened the door and who, after her initial surprise, hugged him, smothered him in kisses and ushered him inside. And he says that from that day, he spent a long time holed up in his aunt Ramona’s place, not simply holed up but in hiding, not setting foot outside, allowing rest and Aunt Ramona’s attentions to heal his invisible wounds before plunging into the clandestine armed struggle against the triumphant fascists with the same self-sacrifice and the same courage with which he had fought throughout the war.

  9

  This, in summary, is the story of Marco’s exploits during the war as Marco has always related them, or at least as he has related them since, after decades of silence, he once again began to talk about the war towards the end of the 1960s, when Francoism was crumbling, and Franco’s advancing years made it possible to envisage, or to imagine, an end to the dictatorship. The story, in broad outline, is plausible. Is it also truthful? Or is it merely the fruit of Marco’s self-serving imagination, incited by the death rattle of the Franco regime and the first glimpses of freedom, which were gradually turning the dim and distant fact of having fought alongside the vanquished into a virtue?

  It is very probable that, when I began researching Marco’s life, most people believed – as Benito Bermejo believed – that it was not true that Marco fought in the war; in any event, nobody had located a single document proving that he had. Not even Marco himself, who, as both he and his wife insisted, had searched in vain for his military record in the late 1970s. I now searched for it, but I found no mention of his name in any of the Civil War archives: neither in Salamanca, nor in Ávila, Segovia or Guadalajara. This absence proves nothing, of course, such archives are incomplete and there are people who fought in the war who do not appear in any of them. Marco knew this. What he did not know, or pretended not to know, was that the fact that he was drawing a military pension as a former warrant officer in the Republican army also did nothing to corroborate the account he was so eager to propose in an attempt to demonstrate that he had not invented the story of his war years as he had his time in Flossenbürg concentration camp. And it proved nothing, because in the Seventies and Eighties, after the dictatorship, the new democratic authorities awarded such financial benefits without asking too many questions, and indeed without requiring claimants to provide supporting documentation; all that was required to claim such pensions was the testimony of former comrades in arms, or former officers from the routed army, and these were sometimes falsified. And so, Bermejo was correct: Marco was indeed drawing a Pensión de Clases Pasivas, but he was not entirely correct, or at least his inference appeared to be mistaken: Marco was not drawing a pension as a former police officer – that is to say a police informant – but as a warrant officer of the Second Republic. Or was he doing so both as a warrant officer and as an informant, I wondered. Besides, had Marco genuinely been a warrant officer of the Second Republic? Or had he hoodwinked the authorities in order to receive the pension? Had Marco invented his entire war record for the same reason he had invented his stint in Flossenbürg, to gild his biography with an epic lustre?

  This is what most people believed ever since Bermejo had unmasked Marco; but there were people who had been thinking this for quite some time. In 1984, twenty-one years before the scandal erupted, when the reputation of the great impostor and the great pariah was still intact, or almost intact, his predecessor as secretary general of the C.N.T., Juan Gómez Casas, published a book about the union in which he cast doubt on Marco’s record as a militant anarchist during the dictatorship, and in which he revealed that, although our man insisted he had fought during the war, “given his age” he could not have done so. This was also Bermejo’s argument; an argument that nonetheless has a flaw: though it is true that the last mobilisation announced in 1938 by the Second Republic was the 1941 call-up of those born in 1920, the so-called Quinta del Biberón (“The Baby’s Bottle Call-Up”), and that Marco had been born in 1921 and therefore belonged not to this mobilisation but to the next (It is worth pointing out that the Quinta del Biberón was the second-last, rather than the last mobilisation by the Second Republic: the last was the 1942 call-up, the so-called Quinta del Chupete (“The Baby’s Dummy Call-Up”); but this was not relayed to C.N.T. members until January 1939, by which time the war had already been lost, and few obeyed the order to mobilise); nevertheless, despite this fact, the possibility remains that, as he claims, Marco voluntarily enlisted, though in order to do so, he would have had to lie about his age since, technically, all volunteers had to be over eighteen years old and he was only seventeen. Is this what happened? Did Marco fight as a volunteer? Or was all this a fabrication?

  I quickly realised that this was something that would be very difficult to prove either way, because there were no documents, and there were very few witnesses (or I could not find them); this meant that everything, or almost everything, depended on Marco’s testimony, and on the inconclusive, not to say problematic investigations that I could make, such that in this part of his biography, I resigned myself to remaining in the territory of hypothesis. I did, however, succeed in finding some witnesses. Enric Casañas, for example. Casañas was the young militant anarchist Marco claims to have met on July 19, 1936, during the siege of the Sant Andreu barracks, and who he says immediately became his lifelong friend. Casañas was still alive, and Marco gave me his telephone number, though not before sending him a letter informing him of my impending visit, and reminding him of their friendship and of the explosive events of the memorable day on which they had apparently met. As soon as I had Casañas’ telephone number, I called him. His wife answered, her name was María Teresa. I told her I wished to speak to her husband, and I explained why I wished to talk to him. When I had explained, his wife told me that there was nothing to be gained by talking to Casañas, because he had lost his memory; nonetheless, she did not object to my visiting.

  And so, one afternoon in late September 2013, I visited him in his apartment on the calle Francolí in Barcelona. At the time, Casañas was ninety-four, two years older than Marco, a tall, wiry man with thinning, snow-white
hair, who seemed physically well preserved. He had fought for three years, spent decades in exile in Brazil, and returned to Spain after the death of Franco; he, too, had been a member of both the C.N.T. and the Amical de Mauthausen, where, with his conciliatory disposition and his spotless reputation as a clandestine resistance fighter, an eternal exile, and a libertarian, he had defended Marco when his charade was discovered, something that won him Marco’s enduring gratitude. When I stepped into Casañas’ apartment that afternoon, I discovered that his wife had told me the truth. The elderly anarchist spent most of the two hours I was there poring over a photograph of Marco, a photo from an identity card I had given him in the hope of jogging his ruined memory; it was all in vain: he did not recognise Marco, and though he still had wisps of memory of July 19, 1936, none of these included our man. While Casañas tried to remember, with help from me and from his wife, from time to time I chatted with her. She knew Marco, of course, but she believed that their friendship had been forged during their time in the Amical de Mauthausen, or perhaps in the C.N.T. in the 1970s, not during the war; more than that, in their thirty years of marriage, she had listened countless time to Casañas talking about the war in general and about July 19 in particular, and had often heard him talk about his comrades back then, but, to the best of her recollection, Marco’s name did not crop up in his stories.