The Impostor
Page 10
So ends the tissue of lies.
11
And the truth? The truth, from what I discovered as I peeled away layers of onion skin from Marco’s biography, is that this tissue of lies was naturally moulded around truths.
It is true that, when he arrived in Barcelona, Marco sought shelter in the house or rather the porter’s lodge of his aunt Ramona, that this was located on the corner of Lepanto and Travessera de Gracia, and it was perhaps as Marco describes it; but it is not true that his aunt Ramona lived there alone: she shared the house with a girl four years Marco’s senior, named Ana Beltrán Ribes. It is true that it was some time before Marco set foot outside, but it is a lie that he was wounded; he was doubtless shattered, demoralised and terrified as only those are who return from the front having lost a war, but he was not wounded. It is true that those like him, who had been a warrant officer in the Republican army, and a militant in the C.N.T. besides, had good reason to avoid the attention of the victors and to fear reprisals—at the very least, three years’ military service, perhaps a penal battalion, perhaps prison or the death penalty—but it is not true that his dignity prevented him from regularising his legal status with the victors, nor that his disgust and his shame at the triumph of the Franco regime were greater than his fear: there isn’t the slightest doubt that his fear was much greater. It is true that he got a job as a mechanic in the workshop of a man named Felip Homs, on the corner of calle París and Viladomat, but it is very unlikely that, having been a Republican, Homs would have congratulated Marco on being an anti-fascist volunteer in the Republican army: firstly, because after the war, no-one talked about the war, certainly not those who were defeated (the most important thing after a war is to forget the war); and secondly out of fear. It is possible that, like almost every young man in almost every age, Marco was by nature impulsive and reckless, and that like many working-class young men in Barcelona before and during the war he had been an impassioned anarchist with revolutionary ideals, but it is certain that, like all or almost all of the vanquished soldiers, he was profoundly changed by the horrors of the front and the desolation of defeat, making him entirely capable of enduring the humiliations of the victors without the slightest protest: just as professions of bravery belie the coward, the romantic tales Marco tells of his prodigious escapes and his heroic refusal to raise his arm and sing “Cara al Sol” and submit to the brutality of Falangists in blue shirts with pistols tucked in their belts makes one think of all the times that Marco imagined they might arrest him, all the times he was humiliated by the victors, all the times, in cinemas, in the streets, in the hovels of the regime, when he had no choice but to raise his arm and sing “Cara al Sol.” It is true that in Barcelona immediately after the Civil War, any normal life was a semblance of normal life because—this, too, is true—the city was starved, prostituted and trampled by the twin tyrannies of the Church and the Falangists, economically and morally corrupt, debased and despoiled by the greed and arrogance of the victors, but it is a lie that Marco lived a clandestine existence rather than a normal life or a semblance of a normal life or what we have mysteriously agreed to call a normal life, and, though it is true that the same idealistic, impassioned people who, for three years, had fought for their freedom with a courage admired all over the world had been forcibly turned into a broken, servile, cowardly, destitute people, a people of empty baskets and lowered heads, of petty crooks, collaborationists, delinquents, informants, blackmailers and masters of the black market, but it is not true that, exiled in his inner world, our man felt alien to them: Marco may be many things, but he is no fool, and with what little sense he still had as he faced the complete collapse of the country he knew, he must have known that he was a part of it, that he was like the others, that, like the vast majority of the defeated, he too was accepting the barbarous, abject, claustrophobic life imposed by the victors, that he had surrendered to terror and folly, that he did not feel proud of his actions, and was consoled or comforted by nothing other than that which consoled and comforted the majority of the vanquished Republican soldiers who, like him, had neither the strength nor the heroic mettle to carry on the struggle, and who had not stayed in their country with the fearless aim of joining the armed underground resistance but with the prosaic, jaded, spontaneous aim of passing unnoticed so they might avoid reprisals and thereby try to survive this catastrophe. Lastly, it is true that Marco is a symbol of that moment in history; but it is not true that he is a symbol of exceptional decency and honour in defeat, but of everyday indecency and dishonour.
This is the truth. Or this is the truth about this period of Marco’s life: a truth that proved to be almost the exact antithesis of the saccharine, dishonest tales of romantic adventures that Marco told, with himself in the starring role as a champion of freedom. It is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; it is, let us say, the essential truth (or what seems to me to be the essential truth), but here are other truths. I will proceed to sum them up.
* * *
—
As I have already said, on his return from the front, Marco did not find himself alone in Aunt Ramona’s house: a girl named Ana Beltrán Ribes was living with her; I haven’t said, on the other hand, that Ana (or Anita, as her family called her) had a baby and had just left her husband. I’m not at all clear why these two women were living together; in fact, neither Marco nor Anita’s family is clear. All of them remember that, some years earlier, Anita had run away in order to marry, but some of them believe that, after she and her husband separated, Anita’s parents, good Republican Catholics, wouldn’t allow her to come home and this is why she sought refuge with Aunt Ramona; others, however, claim that, in spite of their Catholicism, and the fact that she had run away from home, Anita’s parents took her back and that she ended up with Aunt Ramona simply because in Ramona’s house there was no shortage of food in the last months of the war. As for Aunt Ramona, it’s likely she knew Anita because she lived in the neighbourhood—she had lived there all her life, both with her parents and with her recently abandoned husband—and took pity on her, and also saw in the girl’s distress or her hunger a means of easing her own widowhood and the loneliness she had felt since the death of Uncle Anastasio. Whatever the case, the fact remains that for several months Marco, Aunt Ramona, Anita and her baby lived in harmony: every morning Anita set off for the fabric merchant on the calle Caspe where she worked, Ramona took care of the shopping and kept the house tidy while Marco looked after the baby. The harmonious atmosphere broke down when Marco and Anita fell in love, or when Aunt Ramona discovered that Marco and Anita had fallen in love. Aunt Ramona may have been libertarian like her late husband, but she still had the traditional principles of a matriarch and didn’t consider her nephew suited to a girl burdened with a child, and one who was four years older than him, and so she did everything in her power to get Marco to see sense and break up with Anita; Marco did not see sense, he did not break up with her, so Aunt Ramona decided to evict Anita, who went back to live with her parents.
Marco quickly followed her. Anita’s parents lived in a single-storey house on calle Sicilia, near the junction with Córcega, next to a bar and a pelota court. They were a humble family and much loved in the neighbourhood: the father worked in a textile factory, as a scrap dealer and as barman in a cooperativa on calle Valencia, of which he became chairman; the mother was an orphan raised by nuns as a strict, traditional Catholic. Neither parent ever recovered from the death of their only son at the Battle of Ebro during the last days of the war, but it is possible that Marco’s presence in the house helped them to cope with their loss. This may partly explain why the mother was prepared to ignore the strict moral code by which she had been raised and allow Marco and her daughter to live together under the same roof without being married, in their overcrowded house where two other daughters and a son-in-law also lived. This improper situation—improper at least according to the strict Catholic precepts of Anita’s mother—didn�
��t last long: Marco and Anita were married in church on August 10, 1941 (Anita’s previous marriage proved to be no obstacle, since the Franco regime didn’t recognise civil marriages performed during the Second Republic). The wedding took place in the church of the Sagrada Família; only Anita’s family were in attendance, Marco’s family were not present since by now he had fallen out with most of them, including his father and Aunt Ramona, from whom he had cut himself off. By now, Marco had a new family, Anita’s family; or to be more precise, by now Marco had managed to captivate Anita’s family, who considered him intelligent, cultivated, hardworking, practical, cheerful, entertaining and charming, a young man who was unfailingly affectionate to his wife, ever ready to help his parents-in-law, to advise and protect his sisters-in-law, to do a favour for anyone who needed it, an ideal husband, an ideal and unexpected substitute for the son and brother taken from them by the war (and a saviour to Anita, whom he rescued from the dual stigma of being a separated wife and a single mother). It was a close-knit family, they worked hard during the week and spent Sundays at the beach or in the mountains, or, more often, in the cooperative on the calle Valencia, where the father served behind the bar and the children played cards or chess and staged little plays, and where Marco stood out as a champion table tennis player, an occasional singer and a passionate reader of the books in the library. And so at this point, with the memory of war still blazing and everyone or almost everyone trying to put it out, trying to come to terms with the new situation, Marco was not a hero or a rebel or a resistance fighter, but he was likely a happy man, or what we have mysteriously agreed to call a happy man.
Or almost. Because—as Faulkner says—the past is never dead; it’s not even past; the past is merely a dimension of the present. And for Marco, as for others in 1941, he could only extinguish the blazing past that was the war if he regularised his situation by accepting the fraudulent legitimacy of the victors. Did he? Did he attempt it? Marco has always said no, that self-respect prevented him and that for two years he lived on the margins of the law, but the fact is—as I have already warned—he lied about this, and if he hadn’t regularised his situation, or at least attempted to do so, he wouldn’t have been able to live the normal life or the semblance of a normal life he led at the time.
It was by chance that I discovered Marco lied to this degree; by chance or because chance afforded me another small miracle. A double miracle, this time. The first miracle: an announcement published on July 23, 1940, in La Vanguardia (actually, La Vanguardia Española, as the newspaper was called after the war); it reads, “The enlisted sailors below should report urgently to the office of the Comandancia Militar de Marina”; there follows a list of thirteen names, the second to last of which—as you will already have guessed—is Enrique Marco Batlló [actually Batlle]. What does this mean? It means that a year and a half after Marco came home from the war, the military authorities had already sent numerous orders to his home, or what they believed was his home, insisting that he report to their offices for conscription: to sign up, undergo a medical examination and prepare for military service. And it means that, despite the orders for him to attend, Marco had not done so: the publication of this announcement was probably their last resort before declaring him a draft evader. Well, did they declare him a fugitive? Did Marco eventually report to the authorities or not?
I found the answer to both these questions in another notice, similar to the first, which also appeared in La Vanguardia, almost a year later, on April 2, 1941. This is the second minor miracle. “The office of the Comandancia Militar de Marina,” the announcement reads, “requires that those enlisted sailors of the 1941 call-up named below immediately report to be issued with their cartilla naval”; there follows a list of four names, the penultimate of which—as you will also have guessed—is Enrique Marco Batlle. What does this second notice mean? It means that, although Marco had every reason not to report to the military authorities, after the first ultimatum he had clearly done so, and that the military authorities hadn’t investigated his past as an anarchist and a Republican officer, or had investigated and found nothing, or had found out the truth and thought it irrelevant, because Marco wasn’t sentenced to any of the punishments reserved for Republicans, and his conscription was in keeping with the process legally set down for all Spanish citizens. As such, given his age, Marco would have been called up to begin military service in 1941, and this second notice in La Vanguardia—this second ultimatum—proves that, his situation having been regularised, by April of that year, the military authorities had been sending requests to him for some time, demanding that he report to the Comandancia Militar de Marina to collect his cartilla naval, the military service card issued to those about to join the navy; it also proves that Marco had still not reported to the authorities, forcing them, for the second time, to issue this notice as a last resort before declaring him a fugitive.
This, I believe, is what can be gleaned from the two ultimatums published in La Vanguardia: that Marco was a reluctant conscript but not a draft evader.
I spoke to Marco as soon as I worked out the significance of the notices; confronted with the truth (or with his own lie), our man told me the truth, or a fundamental part of the truth. The truth is that one day early in 1940, Aunt Ramona showed up at Anita’s parents’ house, where he was now living, and handed him an official notice requiring him to report to the Comandancia Militar de Marina to be conscripted. Marco knew what this meant and, though he was hesitant and afraid, he decided to play it cool, assuming that the military would forget about him. They did not forget. In the weeks or months that followed, Marco received further notifications that were similar or identical, but certainly more insistent and more worrying, and in the end he decided it was better to take the risk of reporting to the authorities than being declared a draft evader or going into exile. The fact is that, one morning, Marco presented himself at the headquarters of the Comandancia Militar de Marina on the Rambla and, after a brief interview, emerged unscathed and enlisted, without being crushed by the weight of his onerous record as an anarchist and a Republican officer. How did Marco do it? Did he manage to hide his true past behind a fictitious past? If he failed to hide it, did he manage to persuade the military to attach no importance to his true past? What happened that morning at the headquarters of the Comandancia Militar de Marina? I do not know precisely—Marco doesn’t remember, or says he doesn’t remember—but I will offer a hypothesis that now seems to me irrefutable: Marco is essentially a conman, a shameless charlatan, a peerless trickster, and he managed to dupe the military authorities, to convince them that his past was blameless or inoffensive and that he was an inoffensive, not to say irreproachable, young man.
If my hypothesis is correct, it would have been an extraordinary ploy; but whether or not it is correct, the outcome was that, by regularising his situation, Marco managed to disperse the ominous clouds looming on the horizon. At least in the short term; in the medium term it wasn’t so simple, for although he knew he wouldn’t be subjected to reprisals from the victors, he also knew that at some point in 1941 he would be called up to do the fifteen-month military service required of him as a Spanish citizen. The prospect wasn’t as distressing as prison or a penal battalion, but nor would it be pleasant, the proof being that the majority of young men of military age did everything they could to avoid it. Marco had always sided with the majority, and this time was no exception. He attempted to avoid military service: though he did comply with the second ultimatum published by the military authorities and reported to the Comandancia Militar de Marina to collect his cartilla naval, in the months that followed, as he waited, heart in his mouth, to be called up to join the navy, he searched for a way out of this dilemma.
In early autumn, he found it. Towards the end of August of that year, on the 21st to be exact, the Spanish and German governments signed the “Hispano-German Accord concerning the dispatch of Spanish workers to Germany,” an agreem
ent that had four principal objectives: to settle the debt of 480 Reichsmarks that Hitler was demanding of Franco for the help he had given during the Civil War; to provide cheap manpower for German industry to make up for the millions of young German men who, since 1939, had been called up and dispatched to the front lines of the World War; to strengthen the ties between the German Reich and a Spanish regime that was fascinated by the Nazi successes in the first three years of war; and, last and also least, to afford some relief to the faltering Spanish economy by exporting those without jobs and thereby to alleviate the enormous problem of unemployment.
In October, the Spanish government published the employment requirements for Spanish workers in Germany, and Marco seized the opportunity. From this point, his story, as we know it—from discovering the tempting job offer in the newspaper to his departure from Barcelona in a train packed with Spanish workers, having visited the offices of the Deutsche Werke Werft on calle Diputación or possibly calle del Consejo de Ciento—conforms, in the main, with the truth. By which I mean this is the truth that Marco used to shore up his lie. By which I mean things almost certainly happened more or less as Marco recounted them in the second version of his departure from Spain, with the exception of the fantasy that in 1941 he was a resistance fighter with Franco’s police hot on his heels who had no other choice but to get out of Spain. Of course—let it be said in passing—the idea of a draft evader like the character Marco describes travelling to Germany as a volunteer worker is not only implausible, but absurd (and it is unthinkable that it could have passed for the truth): implausible because, in order to secure a contract, a worker’s papers had to be in order, and the Office of Statistics and Employment, attached to the National Delegation of Unions, the official organisation where candidates were required to register before signing a contract with one of the German companies, would not have accepted a draft evader without papers, certainly not for a job as coveted as this; absurd because it’s nonsensical to think that anyone with even a token spirit of resistance or a trace of anti-fascist sentiment would be prepared to travel to Germany and contribute to the war effort of the country that was ravaging Europe and plunging it into fascism (which is why what feeble opposition still existed within the dictatorship did everything in its power to dissuade Spanish workers from going). Does this mean that Marco had already ceased to be a committed anarchist and become a committed fascist? No, though in the wake of the Civil War, he wouldn’t have been the first nor the last to change sides overnight. The fact is that, before signing their contracts, workers were routinely categorised according to their support for the regime, and many applicants made a virtue of having fought with Franco’s forces or their passion for the cause, just as it is true that newspapers published numerous photographs of the first convoys leaving for Germany that are striking in their ideological zeal, featuring trains bedecked with huge swastikas and carriages of fervent workers leaning out the windows to give the fascist salute; but it is no less true that, beneath the deceitful veneer of propaganda, the reality was that the vast majority of these men were not leaving in order to help the Nazis win the war, but fleeing the poverty of Franco’s Spain out of sheer necessity.