The Impostor
Page 27
Finally, on April 6, 2003, at a meeting in Sant Boi de Llobregat—the town outside Barcelona where his mother had spent thirty-five years in a sanatorium—Marco was elected president of the Amical de Mauthausen. He succeeded Joan Escuer, a former inmate of Dachau who had been president of the organisation for ten years. Escuer, by then, was almost ninety years old and in failing health, and Torán remembers that, one afternoon, shortly before the meeting at Sant Boi, he invited her and Marco to his house to ask them to see to the continuity of the Amical and he urged Marco to take over as president, because, he said, he had total confidence in him and believed he had the qualities needed to modernise the association. The scene is plausible; it’s also likely that, if the members of the Amical were privately asked now about the period of Marco’s presidency, most of them would say it was the best in the history of the association. This wasn’t entirely due to Marco, of course: his presidency coincided with the rise of so-called historical memory in Spain, with a period of enormous interest in the recent past and in the remembrance and vindication of its victims; it also coincided with a radical change in the Amical board of directors, which opened itself up to younger members, among them Rosa Torán, who was appointed one of its vice-presidents. However, it would be cruel, and indeed false, to deny that Marco played a decisive role in the revival of the association.
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Revitalised and thriving, the Amical de Mauthausen reached its apogee during Marco’s presidency. Just as he had been at the C.N.T. and at FaPaC, Marco was a shambolic manager who hid his confusion and administrative incompetence behind a flurry of frenzied activity, ceaseless chatter and countless working hours; nevertheless, under his aegis, the Amical went from being an association that did little more than unite and advise former Spanish deportados and their families to one that also served as a centre documenting and disseminating their memories and their histories: during these years, the Amical reached out to other, similar organisations, catalogued its considerable archives, its library of books and periodicals, hired new staff, organised trips and conferences, secured substantial grants from government and signed important agreements with it, and was able to give up the attic office on calle Aragón and move to more spacious offices in a building on calle Sils, in the historic quarter of Barcelona. These and other changes also meant that, in a short time, the Amical de Mauthausen went from being virtually unknown to becoming ubiquitous and influential, at least in Catalonia.
Marco played a decisive role in this change. He was the most visible face, the very embodiment of Amical, not simply because he was president or because, being retired, he devoted himself to the organisation body and soul as he had done with the C.N.T. and FaPaC, but because he gave talks anywhere and everywhere: at universities, cultural centres, retirement homes, prisons, adult learning centres and sundry associations, and particularly at secondary schools. In 2002, Joan Escuer had signed an agreement with the Catalan government which agreed to finance or jointly finance some twenty-five talks a year, which members of the Amical were to give at Catalan educational institutions; Marco reviewed and expanded this agreement every year, and became the principal and almost only speaker. After the scandal broke it was often said that our man made money from these conferences; this is garbage: leaving aside the fact that the Catalan government paid the princely sum of between €76 and €80 each for these talks—monies paid directly into the coffers of Amical, which in turn covered only travel expenses—Marco didn’t give these talks for the money, but for a variety of reasons, chief among which is that he wanted to be Don Quixote rather than Alonso Quixano; that is to say, he wanted every schoolchild in Catalonia to love and admire him, he wanted them all to think him a hero.
He almost succeeded in his quest. He enjoyed giving these talks so much that, as he spoke, he grew younger, as though they weren’t speeches but blood transfusions. Marco presented himself in these talks with the same mixture of lies and truth (“My name is Enric Marco, and I was born on April 14, 1921, exactly ten years before the proclamation of the Second Republic”) and then launched into his tale, continuing and enhancing this mixture of lies as he blended almost a century of his country’s history with his own story, the story of a man who was a personification or a symbol or a digest of his country’s history, a man who had been everywhere and met everyone (Buenaventura Durruti and Josephine Baker and “Quico” Sabater and Salvador Puig Antich), and who, from the age of fifteen, had spent his life fighting for freedom, solidarity and social justice, the story of a tireless activist who had fought to defend the Second Republic, fought against fascism, confronted the Franco regime and even the Nazis and had refused to be broken by the war, by the concentration camps, by the Francoist police, who had suffered all manner of punishment without ever ceasing his fight for a better world, the story of a veteran of every war, or every just war, who, in old age, had resolved to tell his story so that the things he’d witnessed and experienced would never happen again, so that the youth of Spain might be spared what he’d suffered, and what others were suffering all around the world, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Kosovo, in Guantanamo Bay, in Sierra Leone, and this was why it was crucial that the youth of Spain should be just and free and honour the memory of the victims and above all be loyal to the past—“Forgive, YES; forget, NO”—to their own past and that of others. This was why, when he concluded his talk, he often urged them to go and see their parents and their grandparents, to talk to them, to tell them that the time had come to end the silence and the concealment, to demand that they face the truth, the shame and indignities that they and their country were hiding, that the time had come for them to know themselves or recognise themselves for who they were, because first and foremost one must be true to oneself and to one’s own past, however difficult and terrible, shameful and humiliating it might be.
This or something like it is what Marco would say to the schoolchildren (and often to adults), because his talks weren’t simply about history and politics, they were, or at least to him they were, moral lessons: by evoking the memorable occasion when he refused to get to his feet and sing “Cara al Sol” in a Barcelona cinema despite the blue-shirted Falangist with the pistol in his belt, or the even more memorable episode when he risked his life by winning a chess match against a ruthless SS officer in Flossenbürg, Marco was telling them or trying to tell them that a man may be humiliated, brutalised, treated like an animal, yet, in a moment of madness and supreme courage, he can reclaim his dignity, though it should cost him his life, and such moments were within the reach of everyone, and that it is these moments that define and save us; in reliving his long years as a pitiless adversary of dictatorship, hiding in the shadows, organising the clandestine struggle, running from the Francoist police who were constantly at his heels, Marco was telling these schoolchildren or trying to tell them that the human animal can survive the most terrible ordeals and the most harrowing conditions if he can retain his freedom, his dignity and his solidarity. Marco invariably told stories taken from his own invented experience, always used himself as an example, and in doing so earned the palpable admiration of his young audience and the covert reinforcement of the character he’d created, embedding the character within him as deeply as Alonso Quixano embedded Don Quixote.
The talks were a spectacular success. Over the years, the Amical de Mauthausen received dozens of letters from teachers, pupils and managers of educational institutions effusively thanking Marco for giving the talk, for his generosity, his humanity, for everything. One such letter is signed by a history teacher named Sofía Castillo García, from the Abat Oliva de Ripoll, and addressed to all the members of the Amical de Mauthausen; it is dated May 28, 2002, before Marco became president, and it reads:
To whom it may concern:
You are to be congratulated that you have people of the stature of Enric Marco in your association.
Yesterday, he gave a magnificent talk to our
students. A lesson in history, but more importantly in humanity and courage and the defence of freedom.
May we continue to enjoy his talks for many years to come.
You may count on the History Department here, and on me personally for anything you might need.
Yours faithfully
The letter I have just transcribed (or rather translated from Catalan) is noteworthy; the one that follows will give you goosebumps. It is written by a schoolboy whose name I have omitted and whose age I don’t know; I know only that he lives or lived in Anglès, a town near Gerona, and that he dated his letter June 12, 2002. It reads:
Señor Enric:
I am writing to let you know that your visit to our school—for which I would personally like to thank you—moved many people enough for them to change their minds about principles and concepts. On a personal level, I would also like to thank you because you gave me much to think about. I have problems at home, but thanks to you I have realised that we often unthinkingly exaggerate our everyday problems.
Sometimes, the problems I have mentioned made me think of committing suicide. Now I believe it is the worst mistake I could make. The other day, after your talk, I was thinking: here I am, with trivial problems, thinking of taking my own life, and here is this man who has had to struggle to survive.
All this has meant that I have changed the way I look at the world. I do not pay as much attention to things that once seemed very important to me, and already I have noticed that I feel better. I think people should only worry about things that really matter. Perhaps this was not the conclusion you were hoping to communicate in your talk, but I believe that, for me, it was worth it.
Once again: thank you.
Yours sincerely.
But it was the media that finally turned Marco into a hero, a champion of so-called historical memory, a bona fide rock star. Marco had long been a mediopath, but now his mediopathy sky-rocketed because, though it was an illness, for Marco it was also a drug: the more you take, the more you need.
In the years that saw the apotheosis of so-called historical memory, Marco had all he could wish for. Aside from the talks here, there and everywhere, our hero seemed to be constantly on television, on the radio, in the newspapers recounting his experiences as a prisoner of the camps, almost always to the soundtrack of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, or Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Journalists loved him, they went crazy for him, they fought to interview him. It’s not surprising. The other prisoners or exiles or veterans of the Second Republic, the other stars of so-called historical memory, were mostly elderly and frail, their memories were failing, interviewing them was a chore: you had to wheedle information, coax their stories from them, constantly repeat questions, even pause the interview to give them time to go to the bathroom, to stop coughing or to find the thread of what they were saying. Marco was the complete opposite. Journalists were immediately impressed by his physical appearance, he was nothing like the geriatrics they were used to but a man who looked much younger than his eighty-odd years, with his powerful, senatorial profile, his black hair, his luxuriant moustache, his piercing eyes, his gravelly voice and his silver tongue. It was this last that was crucial: Marco remembered everything and recounted everything, he poured forth a torrent of words, a blend of colourful anecdotes, heroic, harrowing or heartbreaking stories, poignant and edifying reflections on the solidarity and honour a human being is capable of in the most terrible circumstances, each illustrated with examples from his personal experience and told with such narrative structure and coherence that, as they left, the journalists often felt—especially when compared to the stories of other survivors—that Marco had done their work for them, that far from being the subject for a short press or television interview, here was a man who merited an entire book or a documentary. Furthermore, Marco appealed to their vanity: interviewing this extraordinary character, this veteran of every war, or every just war, the journalists saw themselves as fearless investigators unearthing a forgotten chapter of the past about which no-one dared to speak, the most interesting, the most noble, the most furtive chapter of their country’s past, and in doing so they felt as though they were righting a miscarriage of justice and, through Marco, paying homage to all the victims who had been silenced, not only by Franco but by the democracy that followed the Franco regime. Marco triggered such a dependency among journalists, or at least Catalan journalists, that they even included him in a television programme about Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women only. “The thing is, he’s also a historian,” the researchers might have claimed if anyone had asked what the hell Marco was doing on the programme; the less dishonest might admit: “Look, the truth is that he’s such a wonderful storyteller, so evocative, so effective, that we wanted to have him on.”
It was the media who ultimately turned Marco—in Catalonia, though not just in Catalonia—into a rock star, a champion of so-called historical memory, a character who was known and recognised, a genuine hero, the epitome of all the virtues of a country that, thanks to him and a handful of others like him, was finally reclaiming the memory of anti-Francoism and anti-fascism that Spanish democracy had brushed aside and bringing them to the fore after a long silence. It isn’t surprising, in fact was inevitable, that Marco would also become an apostle of the truth, in particular of historical truth. It was one of the fundamental themes he talked about in his interviews and his writings, in his endless talks to teenagers and adults. Marco believed that the country was living a lie and blamed this on the way the transition from dictatorship to democracy had been managed. The Transition, he believed, had been founded on a lie and on a Pact of Forgetting: in order to build a democracy, the country, incapable of knowing or recognising itself and ensuring justice, had decided to forget the horrors of Civil War and dictatorship, with the result that it was a false democracy founded on a false reconciliation, because it was built on lies, injustice and amnesia, on the sacrifice of victims and the sacrifice of truth, since the guilty parties during the Civil War and the dictatorship had not been punished nor their victims compensated. In short: “Forgive, YES; forget, NO.” This is why Marco continued to say the things he did. For example, in an article published on June 8, 2003, in La Vanguardia about the survivors of Mauthausen—not only had he never been a prisoner there, but he hadn’t even claimed to be a prisoner—he said: “We [camp survivors] have never had any public acknowledgement from the Spanish state, beyond a memorial plaque or a wreath: they need to recognise the reasons for our struggle, which were no less than freedom itself. […] It is clear to me that we are the price paid for the Transition: this country founded its reconciliation on a pact of forgetting.” And this is why, on December 18, 2002, just before he was elected president of the Amical de Mauthausen, Marco signed a manifesto at the Museum of Catalan History calling for the recovery of so-called historical memory and the creation of a Truth Commission that would compel the country to finally face up to its recent past.