The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  This he did, or this is what he has always said he did. Hardly had he recovered from his war wound than he began to venture out and, to hide his clandestine activities behind an innocuous façade—and in passing help Aunt Ramona pay the bills—he quickly found a job in the workshop on calle París, at the corner of Viladomat. The owner, Felip Homs, an elderly Republican who needed an apprentice because his son was engaged in one of the endless military service programmes that the victors used to punish the vanquished soldiers, took on his new trainee without asking any questions or requesting any documents and, later, on discovering he had been an anti-fascist volunteer in the Republican army, congratulated him. Thus Marco began to build a life that was normal, or almost normal. Though he did his utmost to control himself, by nature the young man was impulsive, often reckless, incapable of meekly enduring the humiliations of the victors, with whom he became embroiled in constant confrontations. He went to the cinema as often as he could, but, so as not to have to stand, right arm extended in fascist salute, as the Falangist national anthem played before and after the film, he would go in after the movie had started and leave just before it ended. He was not alone in practising this minor form of defiance, and perhaps because of this, one day the film was unexpectedly stopped in mid-reel, the houselights came up and the first chords of “Cara al Sol” blared out, in order to force the audience to stand and salute. This ruse caught Marco unawares, sitting in the middle of the cinema, next to the aisle, but he did not move; he sat motionless, glued to his seat, while all around him, as the music boomed, the crowd rose to its feet, sprouting a forest of arms. Then, without taking his eyes off the blank screen, Marco felt a presence in the aisle next to him; before he turned, he knew it was an army officer. In fact, it was a sergeant. He stared at Marco. “Aren’t you going to stand?” asked the sergeant. Marco held the man’s gaze; as he did so he noticed that the music had stopped, the place was silent, all eyes were trained on them. “No,” he replied. The sergeant glowered at him for a few seconds longer and then turned on his heel and left. As for Marco, he says that he did what he did that day without thinking; contradictorily, he also says that he did it for himself, to preserve his own dignity, but mostly for the others, to preserve the dignity of everyone.

  According to Marco, such incidents were common at the time; by which I mean common for him. (Marco remembers another: one summer afternoon, in a train station, while he was in line to buy a ticket to the beach at Castelldefels, a handful of Falangists in red berets and blue shirts tried to elbow their way in front of him in the line; Marco resisted and they ended up coming to blows, he ran for his train, melted into the crowd, and spent his trip to the beach popping his head out the window at each station and watching as the bastards got out and searched for him among the alighting passengers.) It was at this point that Marco was arrested for the first time. One afternoon, a group of men came into Felip Homs’ workshop asking for him. They asked for his papers, and since he did not have any, they handcuffed him and turned the place upside down; they found nothing, other than some of his writings, a handful of leaflets from the British Consulate and the B.B.C., of which he was the principal distributor in Barcelona, and a scrawl on the bathroom wall behind the toilet that read: “Arriba España! Viva Franco! When you’re done, pull the chain and flush it away with the shit!”

  They detained Marco and Felip Homs, took the cashbox and closed the workshop. There wasn’t room for everyone in the strangers’ car, so two of them hailed a taxi, bundled them in and gave an address on plaza Lesseps. Up until this point, Marco had assumed the men were police officers; now he realised his mistake: some days or weeks earlier, a group of Falangists had burst into his home, looking for him, and having searched the house in vain, informed his aunt Ramona that her nephew had to report to an address on plaza Lesseps, doubtless the very address where they were now headed. Marco confesses that, when he realised that his captors were Falangists and that they were taking him to one of the offices of the Falange, he felt terrified, or rather the terror he already felt escalated, and he decided to escape at the first opportunity. This presented itself almost immediately, at the junction of Travessera de Gracia and Mayor de Gracia, where a city police officer was directing traffic. As they reached the junction, Marco threw himself from the moving car, rushed over to the officer, yelling that he was being kidnapped; a group of bystanders crowded around them, and though the Falangists showed their badges and their Movimiento Nacional identity cards, the officer decided that this was a police matter and it was up to the police to resolve it.

  The officer took Marco to the nearest comisaría on the calle Rosellón. The Falangists followed, and on the way they continued to threaten Marco with the beatings and punishments that awaited him when they got him alone. Fortunately for him, they never got him alone. The inspector at the police station told the Falangists that Marco was a prisoner and as such would be dealt with by the judicial system, and that he would take care of everything, including the indictment and the report, and thanked them for their cooperation. After the Falangists left, the inspector was silent for a moment, studying Marco; finally he asked how old he was. Marco answered; the inspector reminded him that he was only a boy and told him that, were he his son, he would have thrashed him for being a witless, brainless idiot. Having said this, he went out, leaving Marco in his office, and did not come back for several hours until he was sure the Falangists would have grown tired of waiting outside. “Beat it,” the inspector said to Marco, pointing at the door, “and don’t let me clap eyes on you again!”

  He did not sleep at his aunt Ramona’s house that night, Marco says, neither that night nor those that followed. Nor did he go back to Felip Homs’ workshop. He was convinced that the Falangists were hunting him and, if he continued this normal life, or this semblance of a normal life, sooner or later they would catch him. And so he decided to escape. First he turned to an old comrade from the C.N.T., a member of the metalworkers’ union he had met when he worked at the Ford factory before the war, who offered him a bolthole on the roof of a little house tucked away next to Vallcarca bridge. There Marco spent several nights, after which his comrade disappeared and Marco realised that the place was no longer safe. And so he began to move around, sleeping in deserted houses, in parks, in stairwells; he spent many nights on the benches of the plaza de Cataluña, and the rented chairs on the Rambla, and many mornings and afternoons aimlessly riding the trams from one end of the city to the other. In his writings and statements, Marco remembers this as a difficult time for him, but he also remembers, with satisfaction, that he felt proud of himself, that he was consoled and comforted by the thought that he had not given in to the institutionalised brutality of the victors, that he had not surrendered to terror and folly, and that he felt he was a symbol, because he was still standing, still had his decency, his honour, his self-esteem, just as in a sense the whole population was still standing.

  In fact, he did much more than this. What I mean is that, from what he says, it wasn’t enough for him to avoid the savage assaults of the franquistas; in his own fashion, with his limited means, he assaulted them. Marco cannot precisely place the incident: sometimes he seems to suggest that it happened shortly after his return from the front, perhaps in the spring of 1939; at other times, that it took place in the summer or autumn of 1941, shortly before he left Spain. The fact remains that one night, Aunt Ramona told him that his grandmother Isabel, his father’s mother, had died, and he was expected the following day at the funeral, which was taking place in La Trinidad, the neighbourhood in which he had spent the best part of his childhood, where he had not set foot since the first days of the war. The vigil took place in the former Ateneo Republicano, transformed, after Franco’s victory, into a parish centre. There, during the ceremony, he met up again with relatives, friends and acquaintances he hadn’t seen in a long time, among them Antonio Fernández Vallet, the boy with whom, in the summer of 1938, Marco had enlisted to fig
ht on the front line at Segre.

  More than simply friends, Marco and Fernández Vallet were inseparable. They had spent their childhood sharing games, adventures, books; they also shared libertarian ideals, although Marco enrolled with the C.N.T. and Fernández Vallet with Juventudes Libertarias (Libertarian Youth). It is hardly surprising, then, that after the pleasure of meeting again and the sorrow of the funeral, Fernández Vallet would take Marco aside and show him a pamphlet in which an organisation called the U.J.A. (Union of Anti-fascist Youth) called for a struggle against the victors. Marco had not heard of the U.J.A., and so, brandishing the pamphlet, he asked Fernández Vallet who they were. His friend told him that the U.J.A. was an organisation of young resistance fighters, that it had just been formed, that he was a member of the group, that it had been born and was well established in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, but that there were also members in Sant Andreu, La Trinidad, La Prosperidad, Verdún, and various other working-class suburbs of Barcelona, that most of its members were of the same age and similar pasts to theirs, because many of them had fought in the Republican army, though not all of them were anarchists like them: there were also communists and socialists. Marco claims that at this point he interrupted his friend. He told him he wanted no truck with such an ideological muddle, nor did he like the idea of being in an organisation with communists, who had ruthlessly hunted people like him during the war and doomed the revolution to failure; he added that he no longer lived on the outskirts of Barcelona, but some distance away, in Barcelona itself. These were feeble, almost perfunctory, objections—Marco was worried at the thought of emerging from his isolation and transforming his personal rebellion into an organised struggle—and therefore Fernández Vallet effortlessly refuted them: he said simply that this was no time to repeat the divisions of the war, but to unite against a common enemy, and the fact that there wasn’t a branch of the U.J.A. in Barcelona was not a hindrance, but an incentive for Marco to start one.

  Again, according to Marco’s account, he devoted most of his energy to this task in the weeks or months that followed. The first thing he did was recruit a group of boys like himself, as courageous, as selfless, as idealistic as he was, or almost: a certain Francesc Armenguer (from Les Franqueses), a certain Jordi Jardí (from Anglès), a certain Jorge Veí or Vehi or Pei, a certain Thomas or Tomàs, and also a certain García and a certain Pueyo, maybe one more person. The second thing he did was find a place where he and his comrades could meet; he found it almost immediately in a cafeteria, on the corner of calle Peligro and Torrente de la Olla in the Gracia district, where he managed to rent a space recently vacated by a cycling club, with a few forgotten trophies in display cabinets and on shelves. Here, he and the group began to meet and, with a minimum of equipment (a revolver, two pistols, a box of cartridges, a typewriter, several reams of white paper, a few sheets of carbon paper, a pair of scissors and two staplers) they set to work: they wrote, printed and distributed pamphlets calling for resistance throughout the city, they scrawled graffiti, now and again they threw a firecracker, constantly arguing over the best way to overthrow the regime. This didn’t last long, a few uncertain weeks at most, because the enthusiasm of these idealistic boys did not make up for their innocence, their complete lack of experience and their utter ignorance of the rules and procedures of clandestine struggle. One afternoon, Marco found himself waiting for a contact near the monument to Jacint Verdaguer at the intersection of Avenida Diagonal and Paseo de San Juan; this was a safety precaution, possibly the preliminary (Marco doesn’t remember exactly, or says that he doesn’t remember exactly) to a meeting with other members of the group. What he does remember is that his contact was late, and only appeared when Marco was beginning to think that he should leave because something had clearly gone wrong. Flustered and frantic, the contact told him that something had indeed gone wrong: police had arrested the secretary of the U.J.A. that morning, they’d found lists of names and addresses, a handful of members were now in custody and the police operation was still going on, he needed to get to safety. Before the contact had even finished speaking, Marco set off at a run, heading for the headquarters on calle Peligro and Torrente de la Olla. There, he found two of his comrades and gave them the news, helped them to hurriedly gather their belongings, and raced out of the coffee bar without looking back.

  This was the end of the U.J.A. Marco never met up with his comrades in the group again; nor, obviously, with Fernández Vallet and the people in Santa Coloma, who, from snippets of news in the following weeks, he discovered had all been arrested, convicted, and given harsh sentences. Marco drew two conclusions from the demise of the U.J.A. (or so he says): the first is that it was suicidal to become part of a clandestine organisation, at least at that moment, and that in future he would confront Francoism alone; the second was that he could not confront Francoism alone, that his situation was desperate and that, with no home, no work, no friends and the police hot on his heels, the best thing he could do—perhaps the only thing he could do—was to leave Spain.

  At this point, Marco’s story diverges; or rather the discovery of his imposture obliged Marco to diverge. Before the Marco scandal broke, the story he told was essentially as follows:

  Determined to go into exile in France and there continue his struggle against fascism, in the autumn of 1941 Marco got in touch with a cousin who was doing military service and who had friends and acquaintances working on the docks (in another version, this happened not in the autumn of 1941, but in the winter of 1942). After some negotiations, Pepín, for this was the cousin’s name, managed, by bribing a customs guard, to have Marco taken aboard a merchant ship that plied the route between Barcelona and Marseilles (in another version, it was not the customs officer, but the captain of the ship himself that Pepín bribed). Marco made the journey as a stowaway. In theory, a member of the C.N.T. would be waiting for him in Marseilles; in practice, no-one was waiting for him and, while searching for his contact in the dive bars along the port, he was arrested by officers of Pétain, the elderly French Marshal the Nazis had appointed to lead the nominal government of the country’s unoccupied zone (in another version, he names the C.N.T. member who had been supposed to meet him in Marseilles—a man called García—and insists that he wasn’t arrested at the port but as part of a police inspection). After various interrogations, Pétain’s police officers handed Marco over to the Gestapo, who held him in Marseilles for a month before sending him to Metz, where he was imprisoned in a convent and later sent on to Flossenbürg concentration camp (in another version he doesn’t mention being handed over to the Gestapo and claims that, before being sent to Flossenbürg, he was held in Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany). It was here, in Flossenbürg (or in Kiel), according to this first account, that Marco’s German adventure began.

  The second account—that is to say, the account that Marco gave after the scandal broke in May 2005—is simpler, has fewer variations, and if the beginning is similar to the first, the ending is very different, if not diametrically opposed; essentially, it is as follows:

  Determined to go into exile in France and there continue his struggle against fascism, in the autumn of 1941 Marco got in touch with a cousin who was doing military service and who had friends and acquaintances working on the docks. After some negotiations, Pepín, for this was the cousin’s name, managed to speak to a customs officer who offered to talk to the captain working the Barcelona–Marseilles route who, for a considerable sum of money, was supposed to allow Marco to travel as a stowaway on his merchant ship. Marco and Pepín met with the customs officer several times in a bar called Choco-Chiqui near the plaza del Pino, but, when they had raised the necessary money—a thousand pesetas, a fortune at that time—the customs officer claimed that the risks had increased, that the captain had misgivings and, in order to allay them, he needed twice the agreed amount. Although he knew he could never raise such a sum, Marco started looking. He was desp
erate. One day, while reading the newspaper, he saw another solution (or glimpsed it): an offer of work in Germany. The offer was attractive from every angle, including the financial, since it offered the possibility of buying a house in Spain in exchange for three years’ work in Germany, but this didn’t matter to Marco: all that mattered to him was getting out of Spain. It’s also true that, although the work was being offered by a German company (the Deutsche Werke Werft), the offer was the result of an accord between Spain and Germany, between Franco and Hitler, and was intended as a contribution to the war effort of the country attempting to impose fascism across Europe by fire and sword, but this didn’t matter to Marco either: all that mattered to him was getting out of Spain. And so that very day he presented himself at the Barcelona offices of the Deutsche Werke Werft on calle Diputación (or possibly Consejo de Ciento) and applied for a job. Shortly afterwards he found out that he had been given a post, and in late November or early December 1941 Marco set off on a train full of Spanish workers from Estación del Norte for Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany. This, according to the second account, is how Marco’s German adventure began.