The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

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  One last thing. Earlier, I said that perhaps Don Quixote and Marco are frustrated novelists and that, if they had written down their dreams, they might not have tried to live them; I also said, or implied, that Don Quixote and Marco do not seek to turn reality into fiction, but fiction into reality: not to write a novel, but to live it. The two hypotheses are not incompatible, but the latter seems to me much more convincing than the former.

  Don Quixote and Marco are not frustrated novelists, they are their own novelists; they would never have been content to write their dreams: they want to play the starring role in them. At the age of fifty, Don Quixote and Marco rebel against their natural destiny, which is, having reached the pinnacle of their lives, to be satisfied with the lives they have lived and to prepare for death; they refuse to acquiesce, refuse to resign themselves, refuse to surrender, they want to carry on living, they want to live more, to experience all that they always dreamed of but never lived. They are prepared to do anything to achieve this; and “anything” means anything: including duping the whole world, persuading everyone that they are the great Don Quixote and the great Enric Marco. Between truth and life, they choose life: if lying brings life and truth kills, they choose lying; if fiction saves and reality kills, they choose fiction. Even if choosing fiction means refusing to acknowledge that there are things one can do in novels but not in life, because the rules of novels and the rules of life are different; even if choosing lies means flouting one of the basic principles of our morality and lapsing into Montaigne’s “accursed vice,” into a baseness, an aggression, a lack of respect and a violation of the first rule of human coexistence which requires that we tell the truth. Like the bird in T. S. Eliot’s poem, Nietzsche observed that humankind cannot bear very much reality and that often truth is injurious to life; this is why he despised our petty, petit-bourgeois morality, the narrow-minded ethics of respectable people who respect the truth or believe that the truth is respectable, and praised the great lies that sustain life. Insensible to remorse and to bad conscience, Marco and Don Quixote seem like Nietzschean heroes: neither immoral nor amoral but extra-moral. Are they? Is this the unexpected and spectacular means by which Marco transforms himself into a hero? Is Marco a moral or an extra-moral hero, like Lucifer, a rebel railing not simply against the strictures of bourgeois morality, but the strictures of reality? Is this how, having spent his life saying Yes and siding with the majority, Marco finally, unexpectedly said No and sided with the minority?

  I would like to say yes. I say: yes, but only in part. Marco invented a past for himself (or embellished it or gilded it) at a moment when, all around him in Spain, almost everyone was embellishing, or gilding, or inventing a past; Marco reinvented his life at a moment when the entire country was reinventing itself. This is what happened during the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain. With Franco dead, almost everyone began to construct a past to better face the present and prepare for the future. Politicians, intellectuals and journalists of the first, second and third rank did it, but also people from all walks of life, left-wingers and right-wingers, eager to prove that they had always been democrats, that during the Franco regime they had been clandestine opponents, official pariahs, silent resistants, dormant or active anti-Francoists. Not everyone lied with the same skill, shamelessness and insistence, obviously, and few succeeded in inventing a whole new identity; the majority were content to titivate or embellish their past (or to finally lift the veil on a private life fearfully concealed or opportunistically hidden until now). But whatever they did, they did so with no moral qualms, or few moral qualms, knowing that everyone around them was doing much the same thing and therefore everyone accepted it or tolerated it, certainly no-one was interested in delving into anyone’s past because everyone had something to hide: in short, in the mid-Seventies, the whole country was carrying the burden of forty years of dictatorship during which almost no-one had said No and almost everyone had said Yes, a regime with which almost everyone had collaborated by choice or by force and from which almost everyone had profited, a reality that they tried to hide or mask or embellish just as Marco hid or masked or embellished his. The country invented a fictitious individual and collective past, a noble and heroic past in which very few people in Spain had supported Franco, in which most had been resistance fighters or anti-Franco dissidents including those who had never lifted a finger against the regime or those who had worked side by side with it.

  This is the reality: at least during the years of transition between dictatorship and democracy, Spain as a country was as narcissistic as Marco; it’s also true, therefore, that democracy in Spain was built on a lie, whether an enormous collective lie or a long series of individual lies. Could it have been built any other way? Can democracy be built on truth? Could the whole country honestly have recognised itself for what it was, in the horror, the shame, the cowardice and the mediocrity of its past, and forged ahead regardless? Could it have recognised or known itself, like Narcissus, and yet not died of an excess of reality like Narcissus? Or was this great collective lie one of Plato’s noble lies, one of Montaigne’s altruistic lies, one of Nietzsche’s vital lies? I don’t know. What I do know is that, during those years, Marco’s lies about his past were not the exception but the rule, that he did no more than take to extremes what was a common practice at the time: when the scandal broke, Marco couldn’t defend himself by saying this, but he must surely have considered it. I also know that, though no-one dared to take their deception as far as Marco took his, perhaps because no-one had sufficient energy, talent and ambition, in this, our man—in part, at least in part—sided with the majority.

  10

  Marco is utterly incapable of keeping still. In the mid-Eighties, after he had been pushed out of the C.N.T. and realised he had no future as a union leader, our man became a director of FaPaC, a progressive organisation that brought together most of the state school parents’ associations in Catalonia. Marco had joined the C.N.T. at a moment of great political mobilisation after the death of Franco, when people, excited by the promise of the new democracy, were rushing to join trade unions and political parties; Marco joined FaPaC at a moment of great political demobilisation that resulted from a general disillusionment with democracy or the workings of democracy (or simply the stabilisation of democracy), when people were deserting political and trade union activism in favour of returning to their own lives, or taking shelter in the community activism of organisations. Marco joined the C.N.T. at the kind of moment of crisis and confusion, not to say chaos, in which he thrives like no-one else; the point at which he joined FaPaC wasn’t very different.

  At the time—this took place in 1987—the second left-wing Spanish government in forty years was preparing a general educational law, the so-called L.O.G.S.E., which many socialists considered not very socialist, because they felt it benefited private schools to the detriment of state schools. This disagreement triggered protests and demonstrations. It also triggered the fall of the directors of FaPaC, who were socialist, as was the left-wing government; or perhaps the leaders of FaPaC were simply pro-socialist or were accused of being pro-socialist, certainly they were accused of collaborating with the socialist government or not being sufficiently combative in opposing the socialist government’s law. What is certain is that, at the Annual General Meeting of FaPaC at Cocheras de Sants, in Barcelona, there was a revolt against the leadership, which, after only a few months—at an Extraordinary General Meeting at the Centro Cívico de La Sedeta in Barcelona—resulted in the socialist or pro-socialist board being replaced by a communist or pro-communist board, an understandable change of political direction since this was a grass-roots movement that had immediately been taken over by the communist party. Marco attended both meetings as a representative of his daughter Elizabeth’s school (Ona, who was two at the time, wasn’t yet in school) and although he was not communist or pro-communist and was no
t among the leaders of the revolt, he was there during its gestation, spurred it on, and manipulated events such that, in the midst of this confused mutiny, he managed to get himself elected to the board. He would not leave the board until thirteen years later, when he was forced to step down because his daughters were no longer of school age and he could no longer play a role in FaPaC. At this revolutionary or post-revolutionary E.G.M. in La Sedeta, dozens of others were also elected to serve the board, most of whom would gradually give up their posts. Marco did the reverse; gradually, through hard work and perseverance, he made himself indispensable and quickly rose to become vice-president and FaPaC delegate for Barcelona.

  This was the post he held when my sister Blanca met him in the late Eighties, when she joined the board of FaPaC. And so, when I seriously began work on this book after years of hesitant fumblings, I asked Blanca to talk to me about Marco again. I say “again,” because she had already spoken to me about him shortly after the scandal broke, at the dinner I’d organised at my house with my wife, my son, and two colleagues from the university—Anna María García and Xavier Pla—but since that day we’d barely spoken on the subject. Now I asked if we could go back to it, there was no hurry, and one Saturday afternoon in early February 2013, while we were having a beer in a bar near my mother’s house in Gerona, we talked about Marco. Though Raül wasn’t there because he was running in La Devesa park, my wife Mercè, who from the outset had shown as much interest in Marco as Raül, was present; unlike Raül, Mercè hadn’t personally met Marco, though she could easily have encountered him—in the late Seventies when she was active in the C.N.T. as a pretty young libertarian fascinated by elderly libertarians like Marco. As for my sister Blanca, she is a woman of iron, who survived two brutal separations, a motley crew of lovers and two potentially fatal illnesses—hepatitis C and ulcerative colitis—that resulted in a series of painful, life-threatening operations and long stays in the hospital.

  “For about ten years, I was constantly in touch with him,” Blanca began that afternoon. The three of us were sitting around a table on the terrace of the bar: on either side of us were groups of people chatting and sipping aperitifs and, in front of us, on the plaza Pau Casals, young parents and their children were playing on the swings and enjoying the dazzling winter sunshine; the Chinese family who managed the bar bustled about serving customers. “Constantly. And we got along well, to be honest,” Blanca continued. “Especially after I was appointed vice-president and Gerona delegate for FaPaC, the same position Marco held in Barcelona; his opposite number, if you like. After that, we saw each other regularly and talked on the phone almost every day. People can say what they like, but I always thought he was amazing, he had an extraordinary energy, he was entertaining, funny, charming. He was forever telling jokes. He tried to charm everyone, especially the women. I’ve always liked men who like women, but I’ve never met one who liked them as much as Marco. Though what Marco really liked was to be the centre of attention.”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, “Marco is fond of the limelight.”

  “Fond of it? No, he’s obsessed with it.” Blanca laughed. She took a sip of her beer and said, “He had a lot of power within FaPaC. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t handed to him on a silver platter: those of us with positions on the board worked there in our spare time, because we were all volunteers so we had to earn a living elsewhere; not Marco, he was a volunteer too, but he had retired and could give a hundred per cent of his time to the organisation. He was never president, though it seemed like he was because he was the only one with an office in the FaPaC building and even a parking space at the Ministry of Education, the only one with a direct line to the Counsellor, he talked to her all the time. Besides, he took care of the day-to-day running of FaPaC, he was the manager and the president’s right-hand man. Actually, I think that for outsiders who had dealings with FaPaC but weren’t members, Marco was FaPaC. Not for those in the organisation, obviously. We thought of him more as a bit of a rogue, a colourful character; and I’m not saying he wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have power or didn’t play an important role in FaPaC. That’s the way I see it. Although, if you’re going to write about this, you should talk to other people who worked with him at FaPaC.”

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  “If you like, I can talk to a couple of people who were members of the board at the time. I’ll suggest we get together and you can join us.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Tell me something else: did Marco talk much about his past? I mean…”

  “All the time,” Blanca interrupted me, “about his time as a soldier during the Civil War, about being an anti-Franco resistance fighter, about his time as head of the C.N.T., about his past as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and I don’t know what else. It was the basis of his authority, his way of getting attention, of asserting himself, of shutting other people up, or trying to at least, and he used it whenever necessary. Wasn’t it around this time that he started giving talks in schools about the Nazis?”

  “I think so,” I said, “I think it was around the time when he was about to leave FaPaC but hadn’t yet joined the Amical de Mauthausen.”

  “He was a charmer,” said Blanca, “and he charmed a lot of people. He portrayed himself as a hero, and there were people who thought he was. I think at some point he became untouchable, and not just within FaPaC. He got along well with politicians and leaders. The members of the Generalitat adored him, and he loved them; I remember he used to say to me ‘Listen, Blanquita, even though they’re right-wing and we have different points of view, we still have to get along with them.’ You get the idea: he wasn’t a radical, he was a reasonable guy and reasonably effective, which, now that I think of it, seems pretty strange given he was the most disorganised and unsystematic person I’ve ever met in my life. I don’t know. When the scandal broke, I heard a lot of people say they’d seen it coming, they sensed Marco was a phoney, they’d never believed him, but I think that’s garbage: the truth is that Marco fooled everybody, and everyone swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Or almost everyone. Obviously there were some things that jumped out at you: the fact that he was desperate to hog the limelight as you put it; but it’s not as though Marco even tried to hide that. Not that he could have, even if he’d wanted to.”

  Then Blanca recounted an anecdote. I don’t remember the exact date she said it happened, but I remember the place: the corner of calle Pelayo, in the centre of Barcelona, where a protest march was about to set off protesting against L.O.G.S.E., the education reform bill that the left-wing government had been debating for several years and finally ratified in October 1990. The demonstration had been organised by a collection of various educational groups, including FaPaC, and before it got started, the leaders of those organisations were discussing precisely where they and the politicians and the union leaders joining them should be on the march. They argued about it for a while. By the time they reached a decision, Blanca and her colleagues from FaPaC realised Marco was no longer with them, and started looking for him in the crowd, shouting his name. Finally they found him: he had paid no attention to the decision and was calmly standing at the front of the crowd, clutching the banner meant to lead the march as though afraid someone else would take the privileged position he wasn’t prepared to give up for anything.

  Blanca ended the story with a loud laugh. I smiled and thought about Raül’s comment, “He’s the fucking master!”

  Mercè’s expression was inscrutable. “Poor guy,” she said.

  “That’s not the way everyone sees him,” I said, eager to contrast her view with ours, or at least to get her to talk. Then, remembering the meal we’d organised at home when the scandal first broke, and the judgement passed on him by Anna María García, I added, “In fact most people think he’s despicable.”

  “Well I still think he’s a poor bastard,” said Mercè.

 
“I don’t remember him as being despicable,” Blanca admitted, “and I bet no-one in FaPaC thinks of him like that. I’m not saying that what he did wasn’t despicable, but he wasn’t despicable. At least during the time I knew him, he never did any harm to anyone. He wasn’t out for money, and he wasn’t a social climber. He just wanted to be famous. But, I don’t know, whenever there was a workers’ dispute at FaPaC he always sided with the workers. Someone despicable wouldn’t do that.” She picked up her almost-empty glass of beer, and as she raised it to her lips for a final sip, she looked at me and said, “Now that I think of it, you know the word he used most often?” She drained the glass. “Truthfully,” she said. She laughed again. “Truthfully,” she said again, “I always associate that word with him.”

  I realised Blanca was right, but I didn’t say so. I said:

  “Me, I associate him with Don Quixote. Raül did too when he first met him. Marco is like Don Quixote because he lived a grey, boring life until he decided to invent a new identity, a new life, to turn himself into a hero, to live it up and experience all the things he hadn’t been able to experience until then. More or less what Don Quixote did.”