The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  This was Bermejo’s fact. As to his suspicion, it had to do with Marco’s role in the C.N.T., the anarchist union of which he became secretary general in the mid-seventies, during the shift from dictatorship to democracy. That day, in Madrid, Bermejo mentioned—initially in his house, and later in a bar in the Chamberí area where he took me for lunch—the testimony of numerous anarchists who, long before Marco was unmasked, had publicly and privately, verbally and in writing, cast doubt, not only on his clandestine resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, but also on his conduct after the arrival of democracy while he was secretary general of the union. As Bermejo explained:

  “From a completely reliable source, I discovered that Marco was drawing a type of pension—known as Pensiones de Clases Pasivas—generally drawn only by civil servants or by those who had fought in the war (though it is also paid to victims of terrorist attacks and similar incidents). Marco says that he fought in the war, though I doubt it, for various reasons, including the fact that he was born in 1921 and those drafted in the last conscription by the Second Republic, the Quinta del Biberón—the Baby’s Bottle Call-Up—were born in 1920.”

  This was in mid-February 2013, I had spent barely a month and a half immersing myself in Marco’s life, so I said:

  “Was Marco a civil servant?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Bermejo, “unless…”

  Bermejo trailed off, and I stared at him, unable to work out what he was getting at. Eventually, he finished the sentence:

  “Unless he is drawing the pension as a former police officer.”

  “You’re saying Marco was a snitch?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Bermejo corrected me. “A lot of other people have said as much, including some of his old comrades; or at least they have insinuated it. And I’m not saying it’s true: I’m simply raising the possibility. A possibility that, incidentally, would help to explain some of the disasters that befell the C.N.T. in the 1970s, and almost destroyed what had been the most powerful union in the country during the Second Republic and became an inconvenient factor in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Just imagine the damage a police informant within the union could have done to the anarchists back then. But, all in all, this is simply conjecture; maybe you can confirm it.”

  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 moment I decided to begin a serious investigation of Marco’s life. The anguish and doubt didn’t 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 in the eye not just Marco and his family, but the entire country. 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 other soldiers: 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 couldn’t 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 he ask, what town or village they were from, whether they knew some friend or relative. 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 didn’t tell me). He said 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 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 doesn’t remember exactly, or he says he doesn’t remember. He says that here he was taught things such as Morse code, and that he remembers a number of his teachers, among them a Capitán Martín. He says he doesn’t remember precisely when his time at the school ended, but he does remember that he graduated with the rank of corporal. He says
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 organise a resistance underground, 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) a homosexual adjutant named Antonio who was scared to death and who, in the course of a night march, was lost in the darkness and never seen again. He says 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 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 point, 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 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 didn’t 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. 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, to rest and allow 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 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 to demonstrate that he had not invented the story of his war years as he had his time in Flossenbürg concentration camp. 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. Had Marco genuinely been a warrant officer of the Second Republic? Or had he hoodwinked the authorities in order to receive the pension? Could Marco have 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: 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 was born in 1921 and
therefore belonged not to this mobilisation but to the next (the Quinta del Biberón was the penultimate 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 Pacifier 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, the possibility remains that, as he claims, Marco voluntarily enlisted and lied 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 would be very difficult to prove either way, because there were no documents and very few witnesses (at least I couldn’t find them); this meant everything, or almost everything, depended on Marco’s testimony, and on the inconclusive, not to say problematic investigations that I could make, such that I resigned myself to remaining in the territory of hypothesis in this part of his biography. 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. His wife told me there was nothing to be gained by talking to Casañas, because he had lost his memory; nonetheless, she did not object to my visiting.