The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  This, then, is what Marco is: the man of the majority, the man of the crowd, the man who, despite being a loner – or perhaps because of it – refuses to be alone on principle, who is always where everyone is, who never says No because he wants to be liked, to be loved and respected and accepted, hence his mediopathy and his fierce need to be in the spotlight, the man who lies to hide what he is ashamed of, what makes him different from other people (or what he believes makes him different from other people), the man guilty of the profound crime of always saying Yes. And so, the ultimate enigma of Marco is his utter normality; and his absolute exceptionality: Marco is what all men are, but in a form that is larger than life, bigger, more intense, more visible, or perhaps he is all men, or perhaps he is no-one, a vast container, an empty set, an onion whose layers have all been peeled away until there is nothing, a place where all meanings converge, a blind spot through which everything is visible, a darkness that illuminates everything, a great eloquent silence, a pane of glass that reflects the universe, a hollow that shares our form, an enigma whose ultimate solution is that there is no ultimate solution, a transparent mystery that is nonetheless impossible to solve, one it is better, perhaps, not to solve.

  6

  In mid-October 2013, I visited Flossenbürg with my son. It was I who had suggested the idea some time earlier, because I needed an assistant on my visit to the camp, and a cameraman to film it; but we had discussed the project several times and several times postponed it, and in the end it was Raül who set the date.

  Things had changed considerably for him since the beginning of that year or the end of the previous year when I had begun working on this book and he had recorded my first conversations with Marco. He was still strong and healthy, he still loved cars, sports and movies; in his way, he was still a bit of a tough guy, even if he was going through a bad patch. In summer he had passed the university entrance exam, but had given up on the idea of taking film studies and decided to study something else. Now, however, having spent several weeks attending lectures, he was plagued by doubts: he was not sure whether he really liked the subject, he did not know whether he had the aptitude, the stamina or sufficient interest to carry on with it. He was unsettled, a little demoralised, so to blow away the cobwebs and get his thoughts in order, he suggested we make the trip to Flossenbürg we had been talking about for months. I had not yet begun writing this book, but by now I had pieced together all or almost all of Marco’s story, had drawn up a detailed structure of how I planned to tell it and, now heavily pregnant with it, with my waters about to break, I thought this was the perfect time to visit Flossenbürg: firstly, because I needed to do some final cross-checking that I could do only in Flossenbürg; secondly, because I remembered Santi Fillol’s suggestion that I visit Flossenbürg and I sensed or hoped that maybe there I would discover something or experience something that would round off my book or give it some new or unexpected meaning, or make all the pieces fit; and thirdly, because I had come to the conclusion that Flossenbürg was the place where I should end this book: after all, this was the place where Marco had constructed his great fiction, the location of the fiction that for so many years had saved Marco, not that of the reality that might have killed him.

  We left Barcelona first thing on Thursday morning and that night arrived in Nuremberg, an hour and a half from Flossenbürg, having driven all the way across France and part of southern Germany, through Montpellier, Lyon, Freiburg and Stuttgart. Obviously, the car journey gave us time to talk about everything; about everything or almost everything: having been eighteen myself, I knew that a boy of eighteen does not take advice from his father, or at least not explicit advice, so my plan for the trip was not to talk explicitly about Raül’s confusion unless he brought it up, but to make the most of any opportunity to talk about it implicitly. I remember for example that we talked about “A Good Day to Die Hard”, the latest Bruce Willis movie that had just been released, though we hadn’t enjoyed it quite as much as “Live Free or Die Hard”, we had liked it because it makes the first appearance of John McClane’s son, who was almost as much of a brute as his father and who helped him save the world again, rescuing the good guys and killing the bad guys; and I remember saying to Raül while we were talking about Bruce Willis (or John McClane), that the Marco that Marco had invented was the anti-Francoist, anti-fascist Bruce Willis (or John McClane). I also remember we talked about Rafa Nadal, for whom things had changed almost as much as they had for Raül, but the other way around: at the beginning of the year, when my son was full of energy, Nadal seemed worn out, he was recovering from a long-term injury, had dropped several places in the official rankings of the A.T.P., and looked as though he would never be the man he was; but now, only a few short months later, everything had changed: Rafa was playing his best tennis, he had won a heap of tournaments including Roland Garros and the U.S. Open and was once again the world number one; I said to Raül that the Marco that Marco had invented was the Rafa Nadal of so-called historical memory, but I particularly remember that, while we were still talking about Nadal, or while it seemed as though we were still talking about Nadal, I told Raül that life has lots of ups and downs, that the most intelligent thing ever written on the subject was by Montaigne, who said it was “undulating” – sometimes up, sometimes down – and that all you could do was accept victory and defeat in the same spirit, understand that success and failure are simply two phantoms, or two impostors just like Marco, and afterwards quoting something from Archilochus, and I was about to quote Rafa Nadal, who in a recent interview had recommended not dwelling on moments of great euphoria or great drama, when I realised that I had become explicit, because Raül cut me short:

  “No need to freak out, Papi.”

  We arrived in Nuremberg at half past nine that evening and stayed in a hotel in the centre of town. Early the following day, we set off for Flossenbürg. It was a cloudless, sunny morning, and for fifty minutes we drove along the motorway. Then the sky began to cloud over, and by the time we turned off the motorway it was completely overcast. While I dictated descriptions of the landscape I planned to use in the book to Raül, and he took notes on his iPhone, we drove down a narrow road that snaked between tiny isolated hamlets, green meadows and autumn trees until eventually we arrived in Flossenbürg, an idyllic little village nestling between rolling hills and lush woodland. It did not take us long to find the former camp. We parked in a car park near the entrance, next to a grey stone building with a red roof that, we found out later, had been the former command centre. Only then did Raül start to film. The initial footage was shot here, in the car park, in which I can be seen describing the journey we have just made. I’m wearing jeans and a brown jacket over a white shirt and a thick jumper. It is a cold, grey day; it looks as though it is about to rain. Behind me, you can see a group of old people entering the camp via a tunnel through the former S.S. headquarters.

  Raül and I also enter via this tunnel. The Memorial was under repair, and while we looked for the archives and Raül filmed me, I told him about the camp: I told him that it had been opened in 1938 and had been liberated in the spring of 1945, that about one hundred million prisoners had passed through the gates, at least thirty thousand of whom had died, that there were various subcamps, that it was not an extermination camp but a concentration camp – and I had to explain the difference between the two – and that what we could see today, the Memorial to the camp, was only a small part of the original installations, and other things like that. We reached the Appellplatz, the centre of the camp, the place where a roll call of the prisoners was taken every morning and evening, and where punishments, torture and executions were carried out; at either side of the square stood the two most important buildings that had survived, the camp kitchen and the laundry, which were now used to house exhibitions. We left the exhibitions for later and carried on, but, seeing the houses behind the former kitchen, so close they almost touched, Raül remarked:

  “I don’t know how peo
ple can live here, close to where so many people were killed.”

  “They’re not close, actually,” I said. “That was part of the camp too, it’s where the prisoners’ barracks stood.”

  “Ugh.”

  We visited the Jewish Memorial and the chapel, and then walked down the Square of Nations, where memorial plaques commemorate the dead of each country; the Spanish plaque was emblazoned with a flag in red and gold under which there was an inscription in Spanish: “14 españoles asesinados en el K.Z. campo Flossenbürg”.

  “Only fourteen?” said Raül.

  “That is what Marco thought,” I said, “and that’s probably why he chose this camp: because he thought that few Spaniards had been here, so no-one would be able to expose him. And it’s true that there were not many Spaniards who ended up here, but there were more than he thought. We now know there were at least one hundred and forty-three, of whom at least fifty-one died. This stone was probably laid very early and they decided not to change it.”

  We passed the Pyramid of Ashes, entered the crematorium and walked through without uttering a word. When we emerged, as we were climbing the stone steps towards the cemetery, I spoke. I don’t remember what I said at the time, but it is there on Raül’s recording, and I’m afraid it is part of the implicit advice or the sermons or harangues I had been subjecting him to ever since we had left home, although in this case I don’t think my son noticed. I began by telling him how, on a trip to Poland, I had visited Auschwitz, and then I said:

  “When I visit these places, I don’t feel depressed; on the contrary, I feel a sort of joy.”

  “Joy?” said Raül.

  “Something like it,” I said. “Have you read If This Is a Man?”

  “No,” he said.

  “It was written by a guy who was a prisoner in Auschwitz, who recounts what happened there,” I said, “Primo Levi, his name was.”

  “It rings a bell.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of him,” I said. “He’s a very good writer, and that book is one of the best I’ve ever read in my life. There is one particular scene I’ve never forgotten, at least I’ve never forgotten my memory of it, which probably isn’t very accurate. Levi talks about how the prisoners in the camp had to queue at mealtimes so they could be served soup. And he says it was a vital moment, the most important moment of the day: if the person serving you dipped the ladle into the bottom of the vat and brought up a piece of solid food, everything was fine; but if he ladled from the top of the vat and only served you liquid, it was a disaster. The prisoners were constantly hungry and their survival depended entirely on a stroke of luck, on the reflex gesture of the guy serving them soup. Can you imagine? Ever since I’ve never been able to serve myself soup or watch someone serve it to me without thinking of Levi.”

  We had now reached the cemetery and were walking between the graves back towards the Appellplatz.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am,” I went on after a pause. “My father and mother lived through a war. And my grandfather and grandmother. And my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. And so on. But I haven’t. People always say that football is the great European sport, but that’s a lie, the great European sport is war. For a thousand years in Europe we did nothing but kill each other. And then I come along, I am the first, part of the first generation of Europeans who have never known war. I can’t believe it. There are people who say that that’s all over now, that war between us is impossible, but I don’t believe it . . . You see this place, people like you and me dying in their thousands like dogs, in the most disgusting, the most despicable way possible. It’s ghastly. And Marco took all this and used it to dupe people, to step into the limelight. You know what? I don’t even think he did it with any bad intention, actually I’m sure he didn’t. It was sheer egotism. Me, me, me, me, me! Pure ignorance, pure mindlessness. If Marco had really known what this means, if he had truly understood, he would never have done what he did.”

  Back at the Appellplatz we went into the former camp kitchen, where there was a temporary exhibition about the camp after the camp, meaning the history of the camp from its liberation to the present day. On the walls and in the display cases visitors moved between there were all manner of things: personal items, press cuttings from newspapers and magazines, television screens with looped projections of films, news reports, official documents. Although Marco had visited the Memorial quite frequently in the early years of the twenty-first century, there was, naturally, no trace of him in the exhibition. Leaving the former kitchen, we crossed the Appellplatz and went into what had been the laundry, which housed the permanent exhibition. The former laundry had two floors and a basement: on the upper floor there was a history of the camp from its establishment to its liberation; the ground floor and the basement were more or less devoted to the prisoners. We began our visit in the basement. There, in among the photographs of prisoners of various nationalities – including one Spanish man in a sailor’s uniform named Ángel Lekuona, who had been murdered on April 10, 1945, thirteen days before the camp was liberated – there was a metal lectern with a huge tome lying open on it, where, in alphabetical order, one could read the names of all the prisoners who had so far been identified. Leafing through the book, I found the name I was looking for; next to it there was a date, 15.08.1900, and a number: 6448. I pointed to it.

  “That is the prisoner number that Marco appropriated,” I said, then I pointed to the name next to it, “and that’s the name of the guy who he usurped.”

  “Moner Castell, Enric,” Raül read aloud, then said, “Enric Moner sounds like Enric Marco.”

  “Exactly,” I said, “That’s why he chose him.”

  We went upstairs. There, in a glass case, there was a notebook open at a page on which there was a handwritten list of names; to the left of each name, there was a number and the name or an abbreviation of the name of a country, to the right, there was a series of jottings.

  “Right,” I said, “this is what we came to see.”

  “What is?” Raül asked.

  I nodded to the book and, while he filmed it, I said:

  “It is one of the camp registers. In here, the Nazis wrote out by hand the names and some information about each prisoner who arrived in Flossenbürg. Although this can’t be the original, it has to be a facsimile, because the original books are in the National Archives in Washington. OK, now look at this.”

  From my pocket I took a folded piece of paper, opened it out and held it up to the camera, which now shows a close-up of the document.

  “You know what this is? It’s a photocopy of one of the pages in the register. It’s not the page you can see in the case, which runs from prisoner number 13661 to number 13672, while this runs from 6421 to 6450. And now,” I said pointing my index finger to what was written next to the number 6448 on the photocopy, “read this.”

  “Span.,” he read, and then abruptly turned the camera away (on the recording, the image makes a sudden, uncontrolled swipe), and then looking at me, he screamed, “Fuck, it says Marco!”