It was at this point that he began to commit small crimes. On one occasion, he stole jewellery from the house of a creditor who had not paid him. On another, he tried unsuccessfully to prise open a client’s safe. These are the two offences Marco remembers, or is prepared to admit (or that he remembered and was prepared to admit when he discovered that, thanks to De Gispert, I had found out the truth), but it’s likely that there were more. His victims reported him and he had to suffer the humiliation of having the police visit his house, having to go to the police station and explain what had happened, to give back the jewellery and agree to report to the police station regularly. This is what happened the first time he was arrested; the second time, he was sent directly to jail. He was released shamefaced and shaven-headed. For a few days, he endured the glares of people who, until recently, had thought him the perfect husband, the perfect father, son- and brother-in-law. But the morning after the wedding of his only unmarried sister-in-law, he could bear it no more, and he left for good.
* * *
—
The weeks that followed must have been agonising. Knowing Marco, it’s likely that his decision to abandon his family was thought through, that he planned his departure to some extent; it’s possible that his plans may even have included Marina, the prostitute he’d been more or less supporting financially who had brought him to this point. Whatever the intention, all of Marco’s plans failed, and he suddenly found himself with no family, no job and no home. He spent the days wandering the streets and at night he slept on the benches along the Rambla and the plaza de Cataluña among prostitutes, beggars and thieves. When he failed to report to the police station, he was declared a fugitive from justice and added to the list of common criminals to be detained and arrested. (Parenthesis: this, incidentally, explains a number of things including the arrest in late 1975 or early 1976, when De Gispert had to get him out of prison; the fact that during the post-war period he didn’t register anywhere under his real name, until he eventually took advantage of De Gispert’s intervention to regularise his position; the fact that many years later he could claim without lying—or without believing that he was lying—that throughout the post-war period he had lived a clandestine life being hounded by the Francoist police.) It seems likely that he committed other crimes during this period, but I don’t know exactly what he did or how far he went, and I would almost rather not know. What is clear is that he hit rock bottom.
This terrible time cannot have lasted long: a few months at most. He was saved from the pit by a man named Peiró, who knew Marco vaguely, but clearly respected him because, as soon as he discovered the situation Marco was in (or as soon as Marco told him), one day when they met by chance, he invited him home and told him he could probably find him work. Peiró lived with his family on calle Campoamor in L’Hospitalet—a district that, at the time, was growing at a dizzying rate because of the flood of migrants arriving from southern Spain—and one of his brothers, Paco, offered to let Marco refurbish two army trucks he kept in a lock-up garage. It was a trifling job, one for which Paco didn’t propose to pay him, but Marco accepted without a second thought.
This was the beginning of a new life. At first, Marco slept at Peiró’s house and every day went to work at the garage at 144 calle General Sanjurjo (now calle Martí i Julià) in Colblanc, a neighbouring district in L’Hospitalet. Later, however, he moved into the garage, where, in exchange for his work, the Peiró family brought food and let him sleep in the cab of an old Hansa-Lloyd. According to those familiar with it, the garage was a hovel, a leaky pigsty; as for the Hansa-Lloyd, it was not so much a car as a pile of scrap metal. Nothing about his surroundings inspired optimism, but Marco didn’t let himself be beaten down. He worked hard—morning, noon and night, Saturdays and Sundays included—and within a short time he had not only restored Paco Peiró’s two trucks but, with the family’s permission, he had turned the lock-up into a working garage where he serviced and repaired cars, trucks and taxis for the Peiró family and for other people in the neighbourhood. Having more than enough work and not enough time and manpower, Marco hired an apprentice, and then another, both poor boys from immigrant families whom he paid little and taught much, because by now our man was a skilled mechanic with many years’ experience. Marco treated his apprentices well and they respected him: they called him Enrique, but they believed his surname was Durruti, like the legendary anarchist leader, and although at the time Marco never talked about war or politics, they assumed (because he allowed them to assume, or encouraged them to assume) that he had some sort of connection with clandestine organisations and the police were after him. They considered him a highly intelligent boss and a silver-tongued devil capable of selling shampoo to a bald man; but they also considered him to be generous and loyal, except when it came to women: on that score, they knew that their boss was merciless.
Marco spent three or four years holed up in the Peirós’ garage. After that, in order to work more efficiently, he rented a workshop, or part of a workshop on calle Montseny, and later still he opened his own repair shop: Talleres Collblanc. By now, he was living with María Belver, an Andalusian girl he met in a bar near the Peirós’ lock-up where he often went for breakfast or for dinner. When he took her to visit the garage, she convinced him to leave this hovel and found him a room to rent with a husband and wife who lived nearby on Ronda de la Torrasa. Later, he rented an apartment at 57–59 calle Oriente, a cheerful little street filled with shops, studios and bars; it was here that he lived with María, who divided her time between taking care of Marco and working privately as a seamstress. (Second parenthesis: María sewed for the Puig Antich family, the parents of the famous anarchist executed by Franco in 1974, and Marco sometimes went to pick her up at their house; this was Marco’s only connection to Puig Antich, not that this stopped him from portraying himself as a close friend in an article published in 1988, when being a close friend of Puig Antich was almost synonymous with being an anti-Franco resistant.) In moving from Anita Beltrán to María Belver, Marco did not simply swap wives, he swapped families or rather he swapped clans; the Catalan and Catalan-speaking, staunchly Catholic, poor, well-mannered Beltráns were replaced by the Andalusian, Spanish-speaking, agnostic, dirt-poor, rambunctious Belvers as María’s many relatives poured into L’Hospitalet from Almería, fleeing the poverty of the south. In spite of their many differences, the Beltráns and the Belvers shared a common trait, their limited education, and so Marco, an indiscriminate reader, a shameless charlatan, a man who could boast about leaving Spain and living in Germany, sparkled among the Belvers as he had sparkled among the Beltráns, becoming the centre of attention, becoming the leader and the patriarch to whom everyone listened. This, at least, is how he felt, and how those who attended the Belver clan get-togethers felt.
Marco was also admired and respected in the Collblanc neighbourhood. Everyone knew him as Enrique the mechanic, a cheerful joker who was always ready to do a favour for anyone in need. This was a prosperous period for Marco: Talleres Collblanc expanded to become Auto-Taller Cataluña and moved to larger premises at a better location on Travessera de Les Corts, near the Barça stadium; this economic upturn made it possible for him to get in touch with his first wife and his children, to help them out financially, though he kept them secret and at arm’s length, and it also allowed him to get a mortgage on an apartment on Calafell beach, where he went during summers and on various weekends. (Third and final parenthesis: like all of the other properties he owned or rented, Marco put the apartment in the name of María Belver because, although no-one in his circle was aware of it, he still appeared on the police lists of wanted criminals.) Marco, however, was not the only one to prosper; his prosperity in the 1960s was mirrored by the whole of Spain, a country that, in the midst of the grey, sheep-like silence imposed by Franco’s regime, was beginning to enjoy unprecedented comfort even as it struggled to forget the atrocities and the poverty of the Civil War and the
post-war period. It is likely that Marco was struggling to forget as well, longing to free himself of the past. Not only the collective past, but also his personal past: the orphaned child, the homeless libertarian teenager, the soldier defeated in war, the broken, disheartened loser, the collaborator with Franco and with the Nazis, the prisoner in a German gaol, the unscrupulous salesman, the absent husband and father and the common criminal. But we know it’s impossible to leave behind the past. The past is never dead—as Faulkner says—it’s not even past, it is merely an aspect of the present. Something that, in the late Sixties or early Seventies, Marco, like the rest of the country, was beginning to realise.
5
When the scandal broke, countless allegations were levelled against Marco; some claims were made in his defence. The main allegation was untenable, as was the principal claim in his defence.
The main allegation scarcely needs to be refuted. It argues that Marco’s deception provided the perfect fuel for revisionists—i.e., those who maintain that the Nazis weren’t truly evil, that Auschwitz wasn’t an industrialised slaughterhouse, that the almost six million Jews massacred are an invention by Zionist propagandists. In Spain, almost everyone who commented on Marco’s case raised this argument; a chastened Marco even raised it himself, believing that the worst or the only real damage caused by his deception was to embolden revisionists. In fact, long before he was unmasked, Marco was already insisting that his foremost crusade as president of the Amical de Mauthausen—giving talks and conference speeches, writing articles, organising tours and events, creating libraries and archives—was to wage war against the legion of Holocaust deniers, here and elsewhere, who were threatening to erase from memory the victims of the worst crime in human history.
This is arrant nonsense. The horrors committed by the Nazis are among the most well known and best documented in modern history, and by the early twenty-first century are repudiated only by a handful of idiots who are easily identified and about as dangerous as those who insist that the earth is flat or that man did not land on the moon. Such people do not need fuel: they spontaneously combust. Moreover, as far as I am aware, revisionists have attempted to use Marco’s case to their advantage only once. In March 2009, at the high court in Barcelona during the trial of Óscar Panadero—the owner of the Kali Bookshop charged with leading a neo-Nazi movement and of selling books denying the Holocaust—Panadero refused to answer a question from the barrister representing the Amical de Mauthausen on the pretext that Marco had been president of the organisation; it was an absurd pretext; as absurd as if he had refused to answer a lawyer because it was raining or because the sun was shining; as absurd as believing that doubt can be cast on the crimes committed by the Nazis simply because one person who claimed to have been a victim of those crimes had not actually been a victim; as absurd as believing that doubt can be cast on the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers simply because Tania Head, a former president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, was an impostor who was not even in New York on 9/11. In reality, these days, the furore over Holocaust denial is dead, or at least dying (as it was in 2005 when Marco’s scandal erupted): to claim that it is still alive betrays an ignorance of the realities of the Holocaust and the debate surrounding it; or, as in the case of Marco and many of those who battle against Holocaust denial, a desire to exaggerate the struggle by conjuring a powerful illusory enemy.
The principal claim made in Marco’s defence when the scandal broke is equally incoherent, though slightly more sophisticated. There is a logic to this sophistication: Marco’s wrongdoing is so flagrant that any serious plea in his defence would seem to be the preserve of cynics, sophists, non-conformist conformists, or particularly audacious (or perhaps foolhardy) minds. It is true, goes this argument, that Marco was never a prisoner in Flossenbürg and that he is a liar; but he is a liar who told the truth: his small lie served to disseminate the great truth of Nazi crimes and as such is not blameworthy, or not as blameworthy as others. It goes without saying that, when the scandal broke, this was one of the principal claims advanced by Marco himself. Nonetheless it is worth remembering that the claim was made not only by Marco, out of desperation, but by intelligent men like Claudio Magris, who felt no such desperation.
The claim, as I have said, is untenable, although it requires more effort to refute than the first. First and foremost because it presents at least two problems that are interrelated. The first is momentous, but can be briefly stated: is it morally acceptable to lie? On this, thinkers throughout history have divided into two broad camps: relativists and absolutists. Contrary to what one might suppose, since thought tends inexorably towards the absolute, most are relativists. Some, like Plato (who in The Republic talks about “gennaion pseudos”: a noble lie), or like Voltaire (who, in a letter to his friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot in 1736, wrote: “Lying is only a vice when it harms; when it does good, it is a very great virtue”), argue that a lie is not always morally wrong and is sometimes necessary, or that whether a lie is good or evil depends on the good or evil consequences it produces: if the result of the lie is good, the lie is good; if the result is evil, the lie is evil. Absolutists, on the other hand, argue that a lie is morally wrong in itself, irrespective of its consequences, because it constitutes a lack of respect for the other and is, essentially, a form of violence, or as Montaigne puts it, a crime. But even Montaigne, who abhorred lying and considered the truth to be “the first and most perfect degree of excellence,” in his essay “A Trait of Certain Ambassadors”—perhaps echoing Plato’s “noble lies”—nevertheless defends “mensonges officieux,” diplomatic or altruistic lies told for the benefit of others.
As far as I am aware, only Immanuel Kant takes the absolutist principle of truthfulness to its logical conclusion and, in a dispute with Benjamin Constant in 1797, argued that the prohibition admits no exceptions. Kant addressed a famous example: imagine that a friend seeks refuge in my house because he is being pursued by a murderer; suppose that the murderer calls at the door and asks whether or not my friend is in the house; in this situation, Kant affirms, my moral duty, as in any other situation, is not to lie but to tell the truth: my duty is not to tell the murderer that my friend is not in the house in an attempt to avoid him forcing his way in and killing him, but to admit that he is here, even at the risk that the man will enter and kill him. This is Kant’s position, and he has no lack of arguments to support it; the most important arising from the categorical imperative, according to which one should act only according to that maxim whereby one can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. Applied to the previous example, this would mean that, while in the short term my lie might result in the small good of saving my friend’s life, nevertheless since society is founded on mutual trust, in the long term it would result in a greater evil by fostering absolute chaos. The logic is unimpeachable, though few people—even among Kantians—seem inclined to agree with Kant. In fact, there is no shortage of people who consider his view lunacy, or attribute it to the depredations on his mental faculties wrought by his sixty-three years; there are even some who consider it a joke by the philosopher. It is possible that Kant’s commendable reasoning admirably demonstrates that logic tends towards the absurd. Commenting on the debate, De Quincey, in an essay on “Casuistry,” rails “…by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant’s principle would be held a particeps criminis—an accomplice before the fact.” I would be interested in the opinions of Kant’s friends on the subject.
Be that as it may, whether or not they were aware of Kant, Marco’s defenders scorn the philosopher and claim that Marco’s were noble lies, as Plato calls them, or altruistic lies, in the words of Montaigne; in short, they assert, as Marco himself does, that, yes, he was an impostor, but, because no historical falsehood passed his lips, his fictions helped to communicate the reality of twentieth-century barbarism urbi et orbi and as such his were good lies, inasm
uch as the consequences were good. So then—and this is where the second problem arises—is it true that no historical falsehood passed Marco’s lips? What I mean is, leaving aside for a moment the reasons that led Marco to lie; let’s suppose for a moment that his lies were altruistic and didactic and well intentioned, that Marco did not lie in order to be a hero, to be loved and admired, to hide the fundamental abjectness and mediocrity of his life behind a flattering fantasy constructed of delusions of grandeur. Let’s focus on the consequences of his lies, not their cause. In which case the question is: did Marco’s lies tell the truth? Or, to put it another way: did Marco tell the truth about history (the history of the Nazi camps and, more generally, the history of the war and the post-war period in Spain) even if he invented his place in it and the role that he played?
Absolutely not. Though he did his best to thoroughly research his lies, reading history books and immersing himself in the written and oral accounts of survivors, Marco often included mistakes or inaccuracies, such that his stories are invariably a mixture of truth and lies, which is the most sophisticated form of lying. It’s true that, in relating his own experience, Marco deliberately combines actual data with fabrications, while in recounting the collective experience (which frames and seeks to provide a veneer of truth to his personal experience), he does so accidentally, out of ignorance or carelessness, but the result is the same. I’ve already given numerous examples of how Marco embeds lies into his personal experience, and I could give several examples of how he does so when recounting the collective experience; here is just one, which is as concrete as it is conspicuous. In his account of the liberation of Flossenbürg published in May 2005 in the historical review L’Avenç, Marco states that there was a gas chamber in the camp, as there was in other concentration camps; I don’t know how many times he mentioned this in his talks and his conference speeches, but it is false: there was no gas chamber in Flossenbürg.
The Impostor Page 17
