The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

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  What did Marco do on his return from Germany? What sort of life did he lead during the never-ending Spanish post-war period? Did he go back to Spain to resume a normal life, or the semblance of a normal life he had lived before travelling to Germany? Was this the point at which he began to lie about his past in order not to know himself, not to recognise himself, in order to save himself through fiction? Or was this the point when, having endured the terrors of the trenches of Segre, the ruins of vanquished Barcelona, the prison in Kiel, he mustered sufficient courage to exhume the political ideals buried since the victory of Franco and launch himself into the clandestine struggle for those ideals even as Franco’s regime imposed its iron will upon the country?

  According to most of those who knew him, and those who wrote about him—at least before the scandal broke—our man spent the post-war period as a tenacious opponent of the dictatorship in addition to being a tireless visitor to its prisons, police stations and dungeons; furthermore: for many people, Marco seemed to have embodied the innate rebelliousness of the Spanish (or at least the Catalans) and the passion for freedom that prevented them from meekly submitting to forty years of Franco’s tyranny without a fight. Marco’s own statements on the subject leave little room for doubt: in 1978, he told Pons Prades in The Kommandant’s Pigs that, after his alleged stay in Flossenbürg in the mid-1940s, “I once again joined the clandestine struggle in Spain,” and that what saved his life was “immediately plunging back into the [political] fray” (in case this wasn’t clear enough, he adds that “the underground resistance in the confederate militia [meaning, the anarchists] in Spain in the late 1940s was thrilling”); in 2002, in A Memoir of Hell, he told Jordi Bassa that when he returned to Spain in 1945, he “carried on the clandestine struggle until 1975”; then, in May 2005, just as the Marco scandal was breaking, in an issue of the history magazine L’Avenç devoted to the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, our man published an article recounting his fictional memories of the liberation of Flossenbürg in which he claimed that he left Germany in 1945 to return to Barcelona, “to do the only work [he] knew how to do: to live for life and to do so fighting for freedom,” and if this is still not clear enough, he added that “the thirty years of clandestine struggle that followed were the only way to pick up life where [he] had left off.” Finally, in September 2001, when awarding Marco the Creu de Sant Jordi, its highest civil decoration, the autonomous Catalan government specifically cited among his virtues his years of struggle against the Franco regime.

  The phrases that I am quoting are curious. On the one hand, it’s obvious that our man is attempting to evoke a past as a staunch anti-Franco resistant; on the other hand, they are as nebulous and vague as all his references to his political commitment during the dictatorship: Marco uses the word “struggle,” he uses the word “clandestine,” he uses various other abstract terms, but he never mentions what precisely this struggle entailed, which specific organisation, or party or underground movement he belonged to, nor the specific names of those who joined him in the “clandestine struggle.” It is true that the biographical and auto-biographical accounts of Marco’s life focused chiefly on his time in the Nazi camps, while his struggle against Francoism was mentioned only in passing, perhaps because that was not the point at issue, or more likely because it was taken for granted, as though it were impossible that a Spaniard like Marco would not have opposed the dictatorship. It is also true that, on occasion, Marco did reference a specific event: in January 2006, for example, he wrote an (unpublished) letter to the editor of La Vanguardia in which he mentions a supposed confrontation, initially verbal and later physical, with Luis de Galinsoga, a Franco sympathiser who edited the newspaper during the 1950s, famous for uttering a thoroughly stupid phrase that caused a scandal and eventually cost him his job: “All Catalans are shit”; and in March 1988, in an article published in the newspaper Avui, Marco presented himself as one of the only people who, one morning fourteen years earlier, gathered outside the gates of the prison of Modelo de Barcelona waiting for the remains of Salvador Puig Antich, a young anarchist executed by garrotte during the dying days of the Franco regime by order of a military tribunal. But even in these rare cases (and assuming they can genuinely be considered acts of resistance), everything in Marco’s account is vague and insipid, from the way in which he presents the events to the precise role he played in them. This nebulous collection of vague stories has led many of Marco’s friends and acquaintances to see the post-war period as the most shadowy and mysterious part of his life.

  Is this true?

  Absolutely not. Here, as so often within and without Marco’s life, what is mysterious is the desire to see a mystery where there is none. In fact, it’s much more difficult to piece together Marco’s life before his return from Germany than afterwards, not least because there are numerous living witnesses to this latter period who are in a position to corroborate or contest, to complement or clarify Marco’s claims, which partly explains his reticence and his evasiveness. There is no mystery, there are no shadows: for more than thirty years, from his return from Germany in 1943 until the death of Franco in 1975, or to be more precise, until the early years of democracy, Marco was not active in any political party or trade union, he had no dealings with the clandestine struggle, nor did he oppose the Franco regime in any way. He was not a frequent guest of its prisons or police stations, he was never arrested for his political beliefs nor did he encounter any problems with the authorities—or at least no real or remotely serious problems. Before now, Marco had always sided with the majority, and through the years of the Franco regime he continued to side with the vast majority of Spaniards who, willingly or otherwise, meekly accepted the dictatorship and whose deafening silence in no small part explains why it lasted forty years. It is that simple. It is that easy. Once again, this is no reason to reproach Marco; no-one, as I have said before, is obliged to be a hero; or to put it another way, it would be as facile as it would be unjust to reproach Marco for the fact that, like the vast majority of his compatriots, he didn’t have the courage to defy a dictatorship capable of jailing, torturing and executing dissidents. No: there can be no reproach. None, but for the fact that, many years later, he sought to occupy a place in the past he had not earned, attempting to persuade people that throughout the Franco regime he had belonged to the tiny, valiant minority who said No, rather than to the millions of fanatics, rogues, cowards, the indifferent masses who said Yes.

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  And so, during the post-war period, Marco lived a normal life or a semblance of a normal life or what we have mysteriously agreed to call a normal life, but this does not mean that his actual biography is uninteresting; quite the reverse, it is much more interesting than the trashy legend of intrepid adventures that he attempted to palm off as his real life.

  On his return from Germany, Marco moved back into his in-laws’ overcrowded house at Sicilia 354 with his wife, his son, his wife’s sisters and a brother-in-law. In the eyes of this humble, tight-knit, sprawling family that worked hard during the week and spent weekends at the beach, in the mountains, or in the cooperative on calle Valencia, he once again became the intelligent, cultivated, hardworking, practical, cheerful, entertaining and charming 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; but now his heightened prestige as a traveller and a man of the world turned him into something akin to the leader or the centre of the clan. He returned to work in Felip Homs’ car repair garage on París near the corner of Viladomat, opposite the Industrial School, and there were only two problems that troubled the happy and prosperous future his innate optimism sketched out before him. One: he was in Barcelona on leave and was scheduled to return to Kiel when his leave was over, something he had no wish to do. Two: if he arranged not to return to Kiel, he w
ould have to fulfil the military service that he had avoided precisely by going to Kiel.

  He did not go back to Kiel, he stayed in Barcelona and he did not do his military service. How did he manage to shirk both his civil obligations in Germany and his military obligations in Spain? I don’t know. It’s true that, in the late summer and autumn of 1943, with the course of the war marching inexorably towards Hitler’s defeat, the Spanish authorities reached the conclusion that sending workers to Germany had been a bad deal and one that should be cancelled as soon as possible, so it is likely they made little fuss if one of the workers didn’t return to his post. On the other hand, while Marco was in Germany, the Spanish military authorities had written to him, demanding that he fulfil his outstanding obligations, but his family replied that he was in Germany as a voluntary worker—a fact confirmed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs—so the military had no reason to know that Marco was now back in Barcelona and therefore no reason to contact him. This may be what happened: perhaps everyone forgot about Marco, or ceased to care about him; perhaps Marco duped everyone yet again; perhaps it was a fortuitous combination of all three. Whatever the case, our man doesn’t remember, or says that he doesn’t remember. What is certain is that, in the midst of this double or triple misunderstanding, Marco, a master of confusion, eluded the twin swords hanging over him, and the future opened up before him.

  On June 25, 1947, Marco’s first daughter, Ana María, was born. At the time, though he didn’t know it, he was preparing to embark on a new life. By now he had left Felip Homs’ workshop and, having spent some time working in a furniture factory and later as a mechanic (mostly repairing and overhauling taxis, trucks and cars), he got a job as a travelling salesman with a car parts company called Comercial Anónima Blanch. It was a very different job to any he had done previously; it was also much better, or that, at least, is how he and the family saw things: he would leave home in a suit and tie and, between his salary and his commission, he was earning a lot of money, certainly much more than he had earned in any of his previous jobs. For Marco, this new position did not simply represent a financial gain, but also an advancement in his prestige and a more varied and intense social life. Marco’s circle of friends changed and he began to drink and to go out at night. His wife quickly noticed he was no longer the affectionate, attentive husband he had been, and began to feel that he was strange and distant. Anita confided her fears to her sister Montserrat, eight years her junior, and one evening, her sister suggested they follow Marco.

  Sixty-four years later, now more than eighty years old, Montserrat Beltrán still clearly remembers what happened that evening, and related the story to me in her apartment in Ciudad Badía, on the outskirts of Barcelona. She and Anita had posted themselves outside the offices of Comercial Anónima Blanch and saw Marco emerge with two colleagues. They didn’t approach them directly, but followed the trio at a distance for some time, losing sight of them when they came to calle Sepúlveda. Confused, they decided it was best simply to wait, confident that Marco couldn’t have gone far and would reappear sooner or later. So it proved. After a while, Marco emerged from a nearby building. He wasn’t alone. He was accompanied not by his co-workers, but by two women who were walking arm in arm with him. The sisters instantly realised that the building Marco was leaving was a brothel and these two women were prostitutes. Montserrat says that, in a flash, before she could do anything to stop her, her sister rushed over to Marco, pushed between him and the women, grabbed his arm and said: “I can take your arm too, can’t I?”

  In the years that followed, Anita often repeated that part of the story. She and her family tried to forget the incident, putting it down to the dubious company he was keeping and the demands of his new job, but that proved impossible. At least it was impossible to ignore that Marco had fundamentally changed, he was no longer the perfect husband, son-in-law and brother-in-law he had been. In fact, from this point, things went from bad to worse. In 1949, Marco attempted to emigrate to Argentina with his family, though in the end he abandoned the project, possibly because he couldn’t get the necessary documents to leave the country. Shortly afterwards, he was accused of theft and the police came to the house looking for him. Failing to find him there, the officers took his father-in-law to the police station where he had to make a statement. Marco made a statement that day or perhaps the following day and managed to wriggle out of trouble almost unscathed, with just a promise not to reoffend and to report to the police station once a fortnight. The Beltrán family were shocked, but even so they didn’t ask Marco for an explanation, or they were satisfied with whatever vague excuses he offered. However, some days or weeks later, Marco was back at the police station, and this time he wasn’t as lucky: he was held for several nights at the Modelo prison and came out with his head shaved, a stigma the Francoist police sometimes used to humiliate common criminals. The wedding of his wife’s only remaining unmarried sister, Paquita, was a few days later. Marco attended the ceremony, but the following day, with no explanation or word to anyone, he left, never to return.

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  Marco’s disappearance was a complete catastrophe for the Beltrán family; his wife sank into depression. It would be seven years before they had word of Marco again. A friend of his turned up at the Beltráns’ door one day to say that Marco was sorry for what had happened and that he was prepared to help his wife and children. From that point, Marco began to pay some of the family expenses, such as the school fees of his daughter, Ana María; from time to time he would pick her up outside the school gates, and sometimes he would give her a present or a little money, as he did her brother Toni. This, however, was the extent of his relationship with his first family. Anita and her children were all too aware that Marco had erected an almost impenetrable barrier between them and his new life, about which they knew nothing; his children telephoned him at his new home now and again, but they had to introduce themselves as his godchildren. In the early 1960s, Anita asked him for money to put a down payment on an apartment in Badalona, and Marco gave it to her. In 1968, he walked his daughter down the aisle. In 1969, he became godfather to his first grandson. In 1974, having just given birth to her third child, Ana María called him at home and he told her that his telephone was being tapped by the police and not to call again. She didn’t call again. Once again, she and her brother stopped seeing him.

  Almost twenty years passed, during which they heard about Marco only in the newspapers, on the radio and the television. One day, Ana María went to see him at the offices of FaPaC, the confederation of school parents’ associations of which Marco was now vice-chairman. She found him and they had coffee together. This is how she discovered that her father was living in Sant Cugat, that he had remarried and had two daughters, meaning that she had two half-sisters. In September 1999, Marco’s first child and his only son, Toni, died, but the news of his death didn’t reach him until much later, when he accidentally bumped into one of his sisters-in-law while strolling along the Rambla. The years that followed saw Marco’s meteoric rise to media stardom, something the Beltrán family watched with growing unease: his wife, Anita, couldn’t understand why Marco claimed to have been in a concentration camp when she knew he had never set foot in one; Ana María’s children, Marco’s grandchildren, didn’t understand why he kept his first family a secret; his daughter, Ana María, pretended that she understood in order to pacify her mother and her children, but in fact she didn’t understand at all. And when the scandal broke and the whole world discovered that Marco was an impostor, Ana María felt both pity and shame for her father. It was only at this point that she wanted to meet her half-sisters. Marco didn’t object to introducing them, perhaps because he knew he couldn’t prevent them from meeting sooner or later (or simply because the scandal had broken down his defences). First, though, he had to tell his current wife and daughters the truth: that he had been married in the 1940s and that he had another family—a w
ife, a daughter and several grandchildren. This was how Ana María Marco came to meet Elizabeth and Ona Marco, who were her half-sisters though they were young enough to be her daughters, and this was how Marco came to divorce Anita, who in the intervening half-century had not remarried nor had any known partners. Anita died in January 2012. Ana María is still alive. She is a passionate, cheerful, staunchly Catholic woman; her father abandoned her when she was three years old, but it is impossible to get her to say a single word against him.

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  During the many months I spent researching this book that I’d been so reluctant to write, quite a few strange things occurred, or at least they seemed strange to me when they occurred.