The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  “Miralles.”

  “That’s right, Miralles. Doesn’t it ring a bell, what I’ve just said? Now tell me something else: who in Spain had ever heard of historical memory when your novel was published?”

  “You’re not trying to tell me that my novel is to blame for the apotheosis of historical memory? I’m vain, but I’m not stupid.”

  “Your novel and various other things, but your novel is partly to blame. How else do you explain its success? Why else do you think so many people read it? Because it was good? Don’t make me laugh. People read it because they needed it, because the country needed it, they needed to remember its Republican past as though they were exhuming it, needed to relive it, to weep for the elderly forgotten Republican in that asylum in Dijon, for the friends he lost during the Civil War, just as they needed to weep over the things I said in my talks about Flossenbürg, about the Civil War and my friends during the Civil War: over Francesc Armenguer from Les Franqueses; Jordi Jardí, from Anglès . . .”

  “You don’t need to continue, I know the list by heart. And, please, don’t compare yourself to Miralles.”

  “Why not? Do you know how many journalists, how many students came to see me in 2001 or 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005 believing they had found their own Miralles, their veteran of every just war, their forgotten hero? What was I supposed to do? Tell them to fuck off? Tell them that there are no such things as heroes? Of course not: I gave them what they had come looking for, the same thing you had given them in your novel.”

  “The difference is that Miralles was a true hero, and you are not. The difference is that Miralles did not lie, and you did. The difference is that I did not lie either.”

  “Really?”

  “I lied with the truth, I lied legitimately, in the way that novels lie, I invented Miralles in order to talk about heroes, about the dead, to remember some of the men forgotten by history.”

  “And what did I do? I did exactly the same thing as you – no, I did it much better than you. I invented a guy like Miralles, except that this Miralles was alive and he visited schools and talked to children about the horrors of the Nazi camps and about the Spanish inmates there, and about justice and freedom and solidarity, this man was leader of the Amical de Mauthausen, and thanks to him people began to talk about the Holocaust in Spanish schools, thanks to him, people discovered that Flossenbürg camp existed and that fourteen Spaniards had died there.”

  “Yeah, that’s another story I know by heart, how you were working like a novelist; I’ve already mentioned it in the book. The problem is that you weren’t a novelist, and novelists are allowed to deceive, you are not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because everyone knows that the novelist deceives, but nobody knew that you were doing it. Because the novelist’s deception is consensual and yours was not. Because the novelist has a duty to deceive and you had a duty to tell the truth. Those are the rules of the game, and you broke them.”

  “Look who’s talking. Didn’t you break them? How many people did you deceive with Soldiers of Salamis? How many people did you get to believe that everything you said in the book was true?”

  “Like I said, the duty of the novelist is to get people to believe that everything he says is true, even though it is a lie. For God’s sake, do I have to repeat what Gorgias said four hundred years before Christ? ‘Poetry [that is to say fiction, in this case the novel] 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.’ It’s all there. Do you understand now? I don’t have anything more to add.”

  “Well I do. That might be true for ordinary novels, but what about true stories? What about non-fiction novels?”

  “Soldiers of Salamis isn’t a non-fiction novel or a true story.”

  “The narrator says that it is.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that it is. The first thing you have to do when reading a novel is distrust the narrator. The narrator of Don Quixote also said that his story is a true story or a non-fiction novel and that he has done no more than translate it from the original Arabic of someone called Sidi Hamid Benengeli. That’s not true, it’s a joke.”

  “Yes, but in your case there were people who believed it.”

  “There are also people who believe the real author of Quixote is Sidi Hamid Benengeli. And that Don Quixote really existed.”

  “Yes, but in your case there were people who not only believed that Miralles existed, there were people who wrote letters to the clinic where he lived, who believed that you had met him and interviewed him in the same way that all those people met and interviewed me imitating the narrator from your novel. And you did not disabuse them, at least not always. On several occasions you even said that Miralles existed.”

  “He did exist, though I never met him; Roberto Bolaño met him, as I mention in the book, but by the time I was writing it, Miralles was already dead. Besides, that thing about Miralles existing was a joke too, or a manner of speaking: what I meant was that while people were reading the book, Miralles was alive, just as Don Quixote will continue to live for as long as people read Cervantes’ novel. It’s a joke, but it’s true: that is how literature works.”

  “Rubbish: Don Quixote was never alive; and Miralles is dead. He was already dead when you wrote the book, although you didn’t know that and nor did your friend Bolaño. And I wonder if you didn’t know that Miralles was dead, if he might still have been alive, why did you not go looking for him? Why did you not look for the real Miralles, the flesh and blood Miralles, instead of inventing a false Miralles?”

  “Because, in the novel, the real Miralles would have been false, while the false Miralles is the real one. Because I was writing fiction, not a true story.”

  “Bullshit: you didn’t go looking for him because you didn’t give a damn about the truth; all that matters to you is writing a good book so you can line your pockets and get into the limelight and everyone will love and admire you and think you are a great writer and all that stuff: come on, all that matters to me, same difference. Although, thinking about it, rather than talking about Miralles, we should talk about the fortune-teller.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “That’s hardly very fair: you’ve devoted I don’t know how many pages to me, saying whatever you like about me, and in the brief space you allow me to talk about your affairs, you refuse to talk about them. You can accuse me of hiding my past all you like, of not wanting to know myself or recognise myself, of being a Narcissus, but you’re just the same. Or worse. Well, fuck you – at least in this chapter. In the rest of the book you can do what you like, but right now I’m in charge. Talk to me about the fortune-teller.”

  “It’s a disgusting story.”

  “Personally, I think it’s funny. You write a novel in which all the characters are real, except for the fortune-teller on the local television station in Gerona, and the woman who worked as a fortune-teller on the local T.V. station sued you. You see what happens when you mix fiction with reality? People get confused.”

  “All novels mix fiction and reality, señor Marco. Except for non-fiction novels or true stories, all novels do. And as for that woman, she wasn’t confused. She said that she was the character in Soldiers of Salamis, but it was all nonsense: I didn’t know her, I had never slept with her, I had seen her once or twice on T.V., that’s all. That woman tried to take advantage of the book’s success, to steal the limelight.”

  “And she succeeded.”

  “She got her fifteen minutes of fame, that’s true. But the judge acquitted me. In any case, it was a horrible story. We were living in Gerona at the time, it’s a small town, and my family had a terrible time . . . Can we change the subject?”

  “Alright: I’ll do it if we can talk about your son. I like him. He seems like an amazing guy.”

  “He is.”

  “I can understand you not wanting to talk about that story. Can
you understand that there are things I don’t want to talk about, things I want to hide? We all have things to hide, and we all have the right to hide them, don’t we? Now I’ve told them to you because you are putting them in your book, and, you know what? I don’t regret it. Tell them. Don’t try to use them to save me, I don’t need it. Use them to stand up for me. But that’s not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is that you can’t throw the stone and hide your hand: you did exactly the same thing I did, you made historical memory fashionable, or contributed to making it fashionable, you helped to create the industry of memory just as I did, more so than I did; but you were rewarded for it, it made you a famous writer while I was punished for it, it made me a pariah.”

  “It’s a waste of time: I’m not going to agree with you. And you’re not going to make me feel guilty.”

  “But you are, just as I am – maybe more so, because at least I have purged my guilt, you haven’t. This is what I don’t understand: given that we did the same thing, why do you get the glory and I get the shame? And please don’t lie to me again: of course you feel guilty; you always feel guilty. Otherwise, why would you see a psychoanalyst?”

  “I’m not seeing a psychoanalyst.”

  “But you used to.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know a lot more than you think. Besides, it doesn’t surprise me that a weak, neurotic petit bourgeois like you would be constantly troubled by his conscience. I suppose the closest I came to being psychoanalysed was when we were filming “Ich bin Enric Marco” and were trying to find the truth among the lies of my past. That’s what psychoanalysis is, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Among the lies of my past? Nothing.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “What about you? What did you find?”

  “Something small but important, something that I already knew was there. Something grey, grubby, plain, mediocre and ghostly: just enough to be able to lie. That’s the truth, don’t you think? What we need to lie. The truth is unbearable. It is not the lie that is terrifying, what is terrifying is the truth.”

  “Fiction saves, reality kills.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you can’t always live with the lie.”

  “You can’t always live with the truth. You can’t live, but you have to live. That is the problem I could live with the lie. And now, when you’ve finished your book, I will live with the truth, the whole truth. I don’t doubt it. I can live with anything, Javier. Anything. I am Enric Marco. Don’t forget that. When the scandal broke, people thought I would run away, that I would sink, that I would never set foot outside again, that I would kill myself, in fact one son of a bitch told me that’s what I should do. Fuck him! Fuck the lot of them! I’m not going to kill myself, I thought. Let them kill themselves, I thought. Let the bastards who want me to kill myself kill themselves, I thought. I didn’t commit suicide. I stood up for myself. And here I am. It’s true: I made a mistake; we can agree, I should probably not have done what I did. But has no-one else ever made a mistake? What about the journalists and the historians who swallowed my story hook, line and sinker? Didn’t they make a mistake? Is there anyone who never made a mistake? Haven’t you made mistakes? And who was harmed by my mistake?”

  “Millions of the dead. You mocked them. Them and millions of the living.”

  “That’s a lie: I didn’t mock anyone; on the contrary, I made that atrocity public. And I showed that nobody cared about that atrocity, that, in Spain at least, nobody wanted to know about it, no-one had cared about it before and no-one cared about it now. Do you really believe that if they had known anything about it, if they had truly cared about it, my lie would have passed for the truth, that my deception would have been believed? Look, with your novel you proved that many people had forgotten the Civil War and in particular those who lost the war, or at least you made them believe they had forgotten, but with my imposture, I proved that in our country the Holocaust did not exist, or no-one cared about it. Don’t try to tell me I harmed anyone. I did no more harm than you did, I did it the same way you did, using the same tools you used. The difference is that you were acclaimed for doing it and I was made a pariah. That is why you are indebted to me. That is why you have to clear my name.”

  “I am not indebted to you, and I have already told you what I propose to do.”

  “And I’ll tell you again, I don’t need you to save me. Don’t be so arrogant. Or so naive. As for saving yourself, no-one is ever saved, we are all damned. But, who cares? Obviously, I don’t, and I don’t think you care either. I will settle for you standing up for me. And, well, can I tell you something?”

  “Haven’t you already told me everything?”

  “No.”

  “Say whatever you like.”

  “I had a better sense of you before I met you, when I had only read you.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t surprise me: everyone says that. That’s why I have less and less of a social life.”

  “I’m serious. People who don’t know you, people who have only read you, think that you are humble, because you are always self-deprecating, you always mock yourself, especially in your journalism. I don’t believe that. In fact, until I met you, I thought the self-mockery in your articles was a sign, not of humility, but of smugness: he feels so powerful, I thought, he even attacks himself, mocks himself; if he weren’t so arrogant, I thought, if he were more humble, more cautious, less sure of himself, he’d leave the job of mocking him to others.”

  “It’s strange, I’ve never thought of it that way. To me, self-mockery is the most basic form of decency, the minimum honesty you can have, especially if you write for a newspaper: after all, good criticism begins with self-criticism, and anyone who is not capable of laughing at himself has no business laughing at anything else.”

  “Yes, that’s what an arrogant person would say. And that’s what I liked about you when I only knew you through your writings: behind that humble appearance, I could glimpse a terrible arrogance. But, now that I’ve met you, I know that you’re not arrogant at all, though you’re not humble either. You have a typical petit bourgeois mentality: a neurotic mix of guilt and fear. I find your relationship with guilt funny. I remember a scene in a western I saw recently. The town sheriff has just beaten the shit out of a black man, and the whore the black guy worked for says that he’s an innocent man; and the sheriff looks at them, intrigued, and says ‘Innocent? Innocent of what?’ You’re like that: any excuse is good enough for you to feel guilty. You have the morals of a slave; I, on the other hand, have the morals of a free man. I don’t feel guilty about anything, I have overcome my guilt, and you know that and that’s why you admire me. You wouldn’t dare admit it, of course, but you admire me. You’re afraid to admit it, but you admire me. You think of me as your hero, that’s why every now and then in your book, you let slip an ‘our hero’ here and there.”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news: the whole ‘our hero’ thing is ironic; in reality it means our villain. Or at best our hero and our villain.”

  “And are you sure that’s how your readers will understand it?”

  “In the same way they understand that Don Quixote is both a hero and a fool, or that he is crazy and sane at the same time.”

  “You have a lot of faith in your readers.”

  “Of course, I write for intelligent people.”

  “Yes, but even idiots are going to read this book. It’s about me, remember. But do you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “That you’re worried about what your readers will say. You’re afraid.”

  “Afraid? You’re the one who should be afraid: yes, my book is about you, but I am going to tell the truth. What you have told me but also what you haven’t told me. The lies, but also the truths.”

  “Don’t talk such rubbish: I told you everything, and anything I didn’t tell you I implied, or hin
ted at, or suggested how you could find it out. Have you been telling me that you are simply recounting what I told you? Haven’t you had the impression more than once that I was the one who wanted you to discover the truth, that I lived what I lived and invented what I invented so that you could recount it, as Alonso Quixano lived what he lived and invented what he invented simply so that Cervantes could recount it? Why should I be afraid of what you are going to tell? And, incidentally, have you forgotten that I am the great impostor, the great pariah, and when the Marco scandal broke, I was called every name under the sun, so now they have nothing left to call me? I am not worried about what you are going to say; or rather, I will benefit from it, I will be back in the limelight, as you put it. There is no such thing as bad propaganda. Besides, I will soon be ninety-five, do you really think that at ninety-five anyone is afraid of anything? You, on the other hand, are a mere youngster, a youngster of fifty, granted, but a youngster, and you are scared to death. You are afraid of your readers. You are afraid of what they will say about this book. You are afraid that they will notice that you like me, that you admire me, that you would like to be like me, to feel no guilt, to be immoral, or rather amoral, to be able to reinvent yourself at fifty-something like Alonso Quixano, change your life, your name, your city, your wife, your family and be someone else, be able to live novels rather than simply write them, free yourself of this shitty petit bourgeois morality that makes you feel guilty for everything, forces you to respect your miserable petit bourgeois principles of being faithful to truth and decency and I don’t know what all, when what you most desire is to be like me, a Nietzschean hero like me, a guy who knows that there is no virtue superior to life, not truth, not decency, nothing, a guy who, at the age of fifty, having reached the pinnacle of life and when he should be preparing for death, says No to everything and fashions a life to equal his desire and lives it without caring about anything or anyone, neither his stinking moral values nor the stinking opinions of others, as Alonso Quixano does. But you cannot do that, you cannot even admit that you admire me, because I could do it. You feel panicked, your knees tremble and the mere prospect that someone might say: here comes Cercas again; just look at his books: first he defends a fascist, then he defends a psychopath, now he’s defending a liar, a man who mocked millions of the dead. Tell me, how many times have people accused you of defending fascists?”