The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  “And who exactly did Marco hurt by doing that?” asked Mercè.

  “Marco would ask the same question,” I answered. “He says everyone lies and at least his lies were truthful. He claims he never said anything false, which is false. He says he lied for a noble cause. That kind of thing.”

  “Lying isn’t a crime,” said Mercè.

  “Sometimes it is,” I said. “But nobody likes to be lied to.”

  “True,” Mercè admitted. “Look, I can understand that the people who were fooled by him are angry, after all he took them for a ride; I can even understand that most people are a little angry, because he fooled everyone. What I don’t understand is why he gets attacked so relentlessly when this country is full of bastards who have murdered, robbed and done all sorts of disgusting things, and nobody seems to go after them: in fact, people kiss their asses.”

  It was almost 2:00 p.m. By now, Raül would be at my mother’s house, showered and ready for lunch, as would my mother, but despite this I went up to the bar and ordered another round of beers. Back at the table, as I was handing Blanca her drink, she said:

  “I was just saying to Mercè that Marco would love to know that we’re talking about him, but I’m not so sure he’d want to know that she thinks he’s a poor bastard.”

  “And I was saying that I don’t care what Marco thinks,” said Mercè. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s still a poor bastard.”

  “Wait till you meet him,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Blanca, “wait till you meet him.”

  11

  Truthfully, Blanca was right: the word Marco most often uses is “truthfully.” Not “true,” not “truly” but “truthfully.” Truthfully this, truthfully that, truthfully the other. I knew it from the first time I talked to Marco, that day Santi Fillol introduced me to him in Sant Cugat, or perhaps when Raül started recording him in my office as he told me his life story, but I only knew that I knew when my sister said it. In a number of radio and television recordings, as he recounts his fictitious experience in Flossenbürg, Marco uses this word several times in the space of a few minutes, sometimes even a few seconds, as though stuck on it. Especially during his years with the Amical de Mauthausen, the years when he took on the role of hero and champion of so-called historical memory, Marco presented himself as an evangelist of the hidden or forgotten or unheeded truth of the horrors of the twentieth century and its victims. Truthfully, evangelists of truth are not to be trusted. Truthfully, just as an insistence on bravery betrays the coward, an insistence on truth betrays the liar. Truthfully. All insistence is a form of concealment or deception. A form of narcissism. A form of kitsch.

  12

  A month and a half after our conversation about Marco on the terrace of the bar in Gerona, Blanca organised a dinner with the two friends from FaPaC she’d told me about that afternoon. The dinner was at La Troballa, a restaurant near my office in Gracia that I often went to at the time. When I arrived, the three of them were already waiting for me in the inner courtyard.

  Blanca introduced me to her friends. The woman was Montse Cardona, she was small and lively, about the same age as my sister, forty-five; Joan Amézaga was a man in his sixties with white hair and a white beard, and steel-rimmed glasses. Before leaving my office, I’d looked him up on the internet: he was married with two children and for eight years he had been mayor of Tárrega, a small town in Lérida; since the early Eighties, he’d been a member or a supporter of the Socialist Party and was involved in local politics. As for Montse, my sister had told me she was a social worker, that she lived with her father and her son in Agramunt, a town in Lérida even smaller than Tárrega, and that she was a militant, or had been for many years, a member of left-wing parties so extreme that Amézaga and my sister cheerfully made fun of her, or perhaps they were mocking the idea that Montse could be a militant. Whatever the case, as soon as I sat down it was obvious the three were happy to see each other again.

  It took no effort from me to steer the conversation to Marco. In fact, as soon as his name was mentioned, the three of them immediately seized on the subject, and while I listened to their jumbled conversation about Marco’s talent as a people person, his need to charm, to be loved and admired and heeded, about his vanity and his energy and his hyperactivity, his ability to always say precisely what people wanted to hear, his ability to avoid conflict and to sidestep confrontation with anyone, I wondered whether they were talking about Marco because my sister had told them I was interested, whether they talked about Marco every time they met up, whether these meetings were simply an excuse to talk about Marco, or, on the contrary, maybe Marco was an excuse for them to continue meeting up, the secret thread that had kept their friendship alive since the three of them had left FaPaC. I quickly understood why my sister had suggested I talk to them; as she herself had said at the bar in Gerona, her concept of Marco, or Marco’s role within FaPaC, was very different from theirs: none of them had taken Marco particularly seriously, and all three saw him as rather a comic character—which contrasted with the absolute seriousness with which he was regarded by members of the C.N.T. and the Amical de Mauthausen—but whereas Blanca thought Marco had played a decisive role in FaPaC, Amézaga and Montse thought not, or not so much.

  “Enric was vice-president of FaPaC,” Amézaga reminded me. The waiter had brought the first course but I was so focused on the conversation that I don’t remember what we ordered, nor did I write it on the pad where I take notes. I do remember that they’d already slaked their thirst with beer and had moved on to wine, and that I didn’t drink beer or wine. “Vice-president and delegate for Barcelona. While the two of us,” he gestured to Montse and himself, “were simply the representatives for Lérida on the board.”

  “And I was vice-president and delegate for Gerona,” said Blanca. “But, since Marco was the most visible face of FaPaC, and in all the papers, everyone assumed he was president.”

  “And he would have loved to have been president,” said Amézaga.

  “Are you sure?” said Blanca.

  “Absolutely,” said Amézaga. “And he would have been a logical choice, given that he dedicated more time to the organisation and did the most work. After all, he was retired so he had nothing else to do. The problem was he didn’t have the stature to be president; the stature or the ability or the skillset, nothing: one day he’d say one thing and the next day he’d tell you the complete opposite. The fact is, his opinion didn’t matter, in FaPaC or outside it. You know what Enric’s like,” he added, turning to me. “He’s pure chaos.”

  “That’s true,” said Montse. “One of the things I noticed about Enric was his chaotic ideology. He was supposed to be an anarchist, but he would suddenly come out with proposals that were neoliberal, or ultra-liberal. He had no clear criteria, he didn’t even really know what he wanted, he accepted all sorts of crazy things from the administration, he could come out with completely unexpected ideas.”

  “Of course,” said Amézaga, “that’s why he never opposed anyone or got into an argument with anyone; when things got heated, he shut up. He could talk and talk and talk, but no-one knew what he was saying, or he wasn’t really saying anything. He wasn’t even a good manager.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that,” said Blanca. “I think he managed reasonably well. Not as well as the rest of us, obviously, but…”

  The three burst out laughing. I couldn’t join them because I was simultaneously eating and taking notes.

  “No, but seriously,” Blanca said, “I was saying to my brother the other day, Enric was FaPaC, he handled the day-to-day administration, the president and the administrator did nothing without consulting him, he worked all hours, he was constantly talking on the phone to the Minister of Education. Did you know he had a parking space at the Ministry?”

  “No,” said Amézaga.

  “No,” said Montse, “but it doesn’t sur
prise me.”

  “Me neither,” said Amézaga. “But I don’t see the contradiction, Blanca: OK, so it’s true that Enric had power, that for many people he was the face of FaPaC, that he had a finger in every pie; you’d know better than we would, you saw him and spoke to him much more often than we did. But whether Enric’s opinion was respected and heeded and followed within FaPaC is a different matter, and the fact is, his opinion meant nothing. You remember the C.E.A.P.A. meetings?”

  The question was rhetorical, and the three immediately began talking about the meetings of the Confederación Española de Asociaciones de Padres de Alumnos held every year in Madrid; all three had attended on various occasions together with other members of FaPaC, including Marco. No-one allowed Marco to get a word in during the two or three days that the meeting lasted and if, by some miracle, he managed to say something, no-one paid any heed. I interrupted their laughing to ask Amézaga how Marco had come to be at FaPaC, and how he had managed to hold such an important post for so many years.

  “It pains me to say it, hombre, but the truth is you don’t need to be Pericles to be a board member at FaPaC,” he said, and Blanca and Montse burst out laughing again. “It’s a lot stranger that he managed to be secretary general of the C.N.T., don’t you think?”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” said Montse.

  “Though, obviously, given the state of the C.N.T. back then…” Amézaga needled.

  “Couldn’t agree less!” Montse interrupted him.

  This time, all three of them laughed and I noted that we had become the centre of attention on the terrace of La Troballa.

  “But while we’re on the subject,” Amézaga continued, too cheerful or too engrossed in the conversation to notice the looks trained on us, “do you know how Enric ended up on the board of FaPaC?”

  I said I did, or at least I thought I did. We talked about the meeting at Cocheras de Sants and the E.G.M. at La Sedeta in the late Eighties where Marco was elected to the board of FaPaC. Amézaga told me he had been at both meetings, and didn’t contradict my version of events.

  “It was like the storming of the Winter Palace,” he said. “And when you storm the Winter Palace, anything can happen, including someone like Enric ending up on the board.”

  Amézaga’s explanation was so categorical that for a moment, everyone around the table fell silent. They made the most of this to drink their wine, while I finished off my main course, or maybe it was dessert.

  “An angel passing,” said Montse.

  Before any of them could react, I asked Montse and Amézaga the question I had asked Blanca a month earlier: whether Marco had talked a lot about his past. Their response was the same: all the time.

  “But none of us even questioned whether or not he was telling the truth, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Amézaga. “We all thought it was Enric’s business, end of story. Isn’t that right, Blanquita?”

  Blanca didn’t have time to answer; Montse cut in.

  “I never believed the stories Enric told,” she said.

  “OK,” I said, remembering one of Blanca’s objections, “but everyone says that now, now they know he was lying.”

  “OK,” Montse echoed, shrugging her shoulders, “but that’s what I thought back then. You can believe me or not, but it’s true. Listen,” she went on, “back then I had a lot of dealings with old left-wing militants, people who had fought in the Civil War, people who had been in the resistance. And Marco wasn’t like them.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  “He just wasn’t,” said Montse. “He had too much energy, he was too quick to tell his little war stories, too quick to talk about everything. The real veterans didn’t talk much; they were reserved, they were older, they didn’t revel in past defeats. But Marco never stopped talking. I’m not saying I didn’t find his war stories entertaining, because I did, I found them very entertaining. But I took them with a grain of salt; that’s what Joan used to say, when you listen to Enric, it’s like listening to someone telling you the story of a movie. That’s how I saw it: he was like a guy who told stories from the movies to keep us entertained. And he did, my God did he entertain us. But it was nothing more than that. Besides, like I said, politically he was a strange animal: he was supposed to have been a left-wing militant, but he didn’t talk like a left-wing militant, and certainly not like a leader of the C.N.T.”

  “I saw him as a bit of a phoney,” said Amézaga. “A survivor. A hustler, a con artist who’s had to look out for himself ever since he was a kid and knows just how to do it. I hate cheap psychology (and even expensive psychology), but I’ve always gotten the impression that Enric was the sort of guy who was bullied as a child and as a teenager and grew up with such a terrible lack of affection that he’s tried to make up for it any way he can.”

  “He needed people to love him,” Montse agreed, “he needed to be loved and admired. He couldn’t stand being ignored.”

  At this point, Blanca reminded them of the incident she had mentioned to me, which they had also witnessed, when they lost Marco while preparing for a protest march in Barcelona and, having looked for him everywhere, found him clutching the banner at the head of the march, panicked at the thought that he might not be in the limelight. They laughed again, loud and long this time, and in that moment I realised that, like Blanca, they laughed about Marco affectionately.

  “That’s what I was trying to say the other day,” Blanca said when I pointed this out to them, “Enric could always get people to love him.”

  “We all loved him,” Montse agreed. “How could you not? He was charming, he was funny, he was affectionate, he told great stories. He’s like a child, you end up forgiving him no matter what he does.”

  “What Montse is saying sounds weird, I know, but it’s true,” said Amézaga, trying to catch my eye as I took notes. “Let me put it plainly, Javier. As far as I’m concerned, in telling the lies he told, Marco committed a mortal sin, but if he came through that door right now, I’d be delighted to see him, I’d give him a hug and invite him to dinner; whereas someone else might commit a venial sin and I wouldn’t want to set eyes on him again. I remember the day the scandal broke. If it had been anyone else who had done what he did, I would have thought, ‘Evil scumbag, how could he make up that stuff.’ But with Enric, I thought, ‘Fucking hell, what a mess. How is he going to wriggle out of this one?’ Just like that. Of course, to be brutally honest, I wasn’t really that surprised. Not that I suspected the stuff about the concentration camp was a lie, but I wasn’t surprised that it was. Not coming from him. Everything suddenly slotted into place, it almost seemed normal. But that’s how I reacted; I can understand why other people reacted differently. I remember, not long after his deception was unmasked, I met a young guy who had gone with Marco to a meeting or a conference or something like that, and really admired him. This guy stopped me in the street, heart-broken, and told me he couldn’t believe it: ‘I can’t get it out of my head,’ he said.”

  “I remember that day too,” said Blanca. “I remember I called him up at home and said, ‘What the hell is going on, Enric?’ And he said, ‘Listen, chica, I screwed up, but I can explain everything.’ ”

  “I had the same reaction,” said Montse. “I didn’t actually phone him, but it didn’t seem all that strange to me. I know you’ll say it’s easy to say that in hindsight, but I always thought something like that might happen, I sensed it, I was always afraid of how Enric might end up. It’s not just that I didn’t believe what he said, it’s that, I don’t know, he was overblown, larger than life, he was in a position he had no business being in, he had risen too far, like a balloon that might explode at any moment. I felt bad, to be honest. And I felt bad about the way he left FaPaC. I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t get the impression that he left because his daughters had grown up and he no longer had a role there, but because people wer
e fed up with him, they didn’t love him anymore.”

  No-one chimed in with Montse’s observation, perhaps because Amézaga pointed out that we were the only people left on the terrace of La Troballa. Blanca insisted on paying for dinner, and as we left the restaurant, the four of us wandered back towards my office. Only then did Amézaga nod to my notepad and ask whether I was thinking about writing a book about Marco; Blanca and Montse didn’t hear him, because they had walked on ahead. I told Amézaga that I was.

  “Well, don’t publish it while he’s still alive,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, to calm him, “Marco knows I’m going to tell the truth; that was the deal we made. And he knows that I can’t rehabilitate him. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Amézaga said. “Knowing Enric, I don’t think he’d want you to redeem him, among other reasons because I’m sure he’s realised that he damned himself all on his own. No. He doesn’t want you to rehabilitate him, he wants you to write a whole book about him, preferably a big thick book. That would make him happy and, frankly, I don’t think he deserves that happiness.”

  Amézaga fell silent and I remembered the words Anna María García had said to me three years earlier: “The best thing to do about Marco is forget him,” she had said. “That would be the worst punishment for such a monstrous egotist.”

  Amézaga spoke again. “Although, now I think about it, maybe that’s not true: on the one hand Enric probably wants you to write the book, and on the other he’s afraid you will and thinks your book will be the final verdict, the last nail in his coffin.”