The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  This is precisely what happened. I write this in mid-2014, when few people in Spain still remember so-called historical memory and when any mention of it, or what remains of it, occurs only very occasionally in newspapers, on radio or television. The fashion for the past passed yet again and, especially after the financial crash of 2008, the country ceased to worry about the past so it could focus its fears on the present, as though the past were a luxury it could no longer afford. The so-called Law of Historical Memory was quickly revealed for what it was: an inadequate law, indifferent to victims, conceived by Socialists less to put an end to the problem of the past than to keep it alive for as long as possible and use it against the right. In any case, it hardly matters, because it is some time since the law has been enforced, because there’s no money to enforce it, according to the current right-wing government, and many of the associations that flourished in the previous decade only to become quickly entangled in byzantine arguments and impenetrable internal struggles have vanished or are rusting in dry dock, no funds, and perhaps no future, as happened to the Amical de Mauthausen. As for Judge Garzón, he truly believed it was possible to achieve his goal, but he was wrong: in February 2012, he was barred from the legal profession for eleven years and removed from the bench, in theory because he ordered wiretaps on an organisation paying off politicians within government, but more especially because he attempted to investigate the crimes committed under the Franco regime, because he’d made too many powerful enemies, and, ultimately, for sticking his nose where it did not belong. Meanwhile, the corpses of the dead still lie in mass graves and in ditches—the so-called Law of Historical Memory didn’t handle the exhumations, it simply subsidised them, and the subsidies have dried up—the victims will not be fully compensated and this country will never break with its past if it doesn’t make any effort to face it or stamp out the lie which was the root or the foundation of everything. Spain will never recognise or know itself for what it was, or in other words what it is, and we the Spanish will not have our Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Or at least not until the past comes around again. Except that when it comes back, it will already be too late, at least for the victims.

  That is how things stand. The industry of memory proved fatal to memory, or that which we call memory and is little more than a craven euphemism. This may have been the last opportunity, and we missed it. Nothing is worse than thinking you can save yourself because you have saved yourself: perhaps fiction did save us for many years just as for many years it saved Marco and Don Quixote; but in the end only the truth can save us, just as in the end it saved Don Quixote, turning him back into Alonso Quixano, and perhaps it will save Marco, turning him back into the real Marco. Assuming we can hope for salvation, obviously: Cervantes saved Alonso Quixano and perhaps, without realising, or without recognising it, I am doing my utmost in this book to save Marco. The question is: Who will save the rest of us? Who, at least, will do their utmost to save us? The answer is: no-one.

  5

  Now we come to the man who, for many people, is the hidden villain of the story, the man who unmasked Enric Marco, our hero’s Nemesis: now we come to Benito Bermejo. From the moment the Marco scandal erupted, people have said all manner of things about him, almost as much as they’ve said about Marco himself. There have been pronouncements from journalists, historians, politicians, trade unionists, writers, businessmen and workers more or less familiar with the industry of memory. Below are some of the things that have been said about him.

  It has been said that Bermejo exposed Marco because for many people Marco embodied the movement for the recovery of so-called historical memory in Spain and that, in destroying Marco, Bermejo was attempting to destroy this movement. It has been said that he personally resented Marco and the Amical de Mauthausen and destroyed Marco in the hope of destroying the Amical. It has been said that he wanted to destroy the Amical because it was the largest Spanish association of deportados and was based in Barcelona and that he wanted to move it to Madrid and seize control of it. It has been said that he wanted to wrest control of the Amical to make it part of the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, which is part of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. It has been said, inversely, that Bermejo wanted to damage the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and its secretary general, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who was prime minister at the time. It has been said that he acted out of pure malice, or sheer opportunism, or an overwhelming desire to be in the limelight. It has been said—said in the throes of the scandal by no less a figure than Jaume Álvarez, a Mauthausen survivor and Marco’s successor as president of Amical, and widely reprinted in the press—that Bermejo, who was born in Salamanca, exposed Marco as an act of revenge for the so-called Salamanca papers, a collection of documents confiscated from the Catalan government by Francoist forces in the last days of the Civil War and stored in an archive in Salamanca, documents that the left-wing Spanish government, after repeated appeals by Catalonia, had agreed to return in spite of fierce opposition from all right-wing parties, some of the left-wing, and by the City Hall and the University of Salamanca. It has been said that Bermejo is not actually a historian but an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, or that he is a historian hired by Mossad or by the Spanish secret services on behalf of Mossad, in short that he is an individual paid by the Israeli government to punish Marco for a remark made in a speech given to the Spanish parliament on January 27, 2005, in the presence of the Israeli ambassador to Spain, as part of an homage to the victims of the Holocaust, a remark he had previously made in all or almost all of his countless talks: that concentration camps had not disappeared, but still existed in various parts of the world, including Palestine.

  I’ll stop there. Though I could carry on: many more things have been said about Bermejo, all or almost all as bizarre as those listed above. The reason is that Marco is a consummate storyteller, but he doesn’t have a monopoly; in fact, what Marco did was simply exploit our incurable penchant for fiction, one all the more palpable given the damning evidence that we can hide behind it, and all the more useful given it allows us to shirk unpleasant responsibilities. Because it is extraordinary that no-one stated the obvious, that Bermejo is a serious historian and, as such, a sworn enemy of the industry of memory, just as a serious artist is the sworn enemy of the entertainment industry: on principle, both battle deceitful narcissism; both seek out knowledge—knowledge or self-knowledge, knowledge or acknowledgement of reality; both wage war on kitsch, or—it amounts to the same thing—lies. Bermejo didn’t simply expose Marco’s deception, he also exposed—or so felt many who sought to turn him into the villain—the culpable credulity and the lack of intellectual rigour of those who fell for Marco’s deception.

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  While he is a serious historian, Bermejo is also a marginal historian: a man who lives on the sidelines of the academic and university system. He isn’t a professor at a university or institution, and at the time the scandal erupted, he hadn’t even presented his doctoral thesis, an indispensable requirement for anyone wishing to pursue an academic career. In fact, he didn’t pursue any form of career in academia, though he took his degree in history in Salamanca, the city where he had been born into a middle-class family. Perhaps there was something about the Spanish university system, with its intractable hierarchies, its frenzied in-breeding, its cursus honorum, encrusted with rhetorical rigidness and prudish pantomimes, that was anathema to the typically sober and reserved Castilian character of Bermejo, because he certainly never fit in; though to tell the truth, I doubt he tried very hard. Nonetheless, it’s worth wondering why it was someone outside the groves of academe who dared to unmask Marco and give a poke in the eye to the industry of memory which had benefited so much from academia. Bermejo is a maverick: he doesn’t give classes, he doesn’t write for newspapers and, though he has a wife and two young daughters, he has no permanent post and earns his living in an ad hoc fashion. He lives i
n a modest apartment on calle García de Paredes in the district of Chamberí in Madrid.

  Despite the fact that he didn’t pursue an academic career, when he completed his history degree, Bermejo presented a thesis to the University of Salamanca on the subject of propaganda and the control of social communications in the early years of Francoism and, in 1987, thanks to a research grant, he moved to Madrid. It was in part thanks to another grant that he spent two years in Paris, doing research at the Sorbonne. It was in Paris, at the Librairie espagnole, 72 rue de Seine, that he first heard about Spanish deportados being imprisoned in the Nazi camps, many of whom knew the bookshop manager, Antonio Soriano; however, he only became truly interested in the subject in the early 1990s. At this point no academic historian had conducted serious research into the fate of the deportados; there had been books by writers and journalists like Pons Prades, Montserrat Roig or Antonio Vilanova, but none of them had the technical tools or the methodological rigour of historiography. At the time, Bermejo had just begun to work with the National University of Distance Learning on a series of documentaries about the Spanish exiles of 1939, and, as part of his exploration, got in touch with a number of deportados, with two of the big exile associations—the French chapter of the Amical and F.E.D.I.P. (Spanish Federation of Deportados and Political Prisoners)—and with the only organisation within Spain, the Amical de Mauthausen. In the late Nineties, while researching a documentary about Francesc Boix, the Spanish photographer of Mauthausen who had given evidence at the Nuremberg trials, he began working more closely with the Amical in Barcelona and found himself needing to use its archive. He was allowed in, though this created friction with the Amical and a number of its members, particularly Rosa Torán. The film about Francesc Boix was broadcast on television in 2000; two years later, Bermejo published a book based on his documentary. By this time, he had personally known Marco for some months.

  The first he’d heard of our hero was in late 2000, or perhaps early 2001. Margarida Sala, curator of the Museu d’Històrie de Catalunya and member of Amical, mentioned him. She told Bermejo that one of the members of Amical, a man named Enric Marco, was a survivor of a Nazi camp and, more than a survivor, he was a historian. Bermejo was very interested by this news: firstly, because, although he’d spent more than a decade gathering information about the deportados, speaking to them, delving into their lives, no-one had ever mentioned Marco’s name; secondly because, although he knew a number of French deportados who were both camp survivors and historians, he knew of no-one in Spain who fulfilled both criteria. Later, searching his memory, or going through his papers, Bermejo realised he’d been mistaken: obviously, he was very familiar with Pons Prades’ book about the deportados, now it occurred to him that the Marco he’d read about there, and perhaps in some other books, was the same man Sala had been talking about.

  Shortly afterwards, the two men met. It happened on November 6, 2001, at the Amical tribute in honour of Montserrat Roig at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. It was a brief encounter; at the end of the tribute, Bermejo, having been invited by Rosa Torán, went over to a table where the Amical were selling various books; Marco was there, packing the books away. They introduced themselves. Marco’s youthful appearance must have confused Bermejo, given everything he had read and heard, because he asked whether Marco was the son of the camp survivor; no, Marco replied, it was he who had been a prisoner in Flossenbürg. That was the extent of their conversation. The crowds and the commotion that followed the event made it impossible for them to carry on, or Marco made the most of the confusion to cut things short. Nevertheless, the brief exchange piqued Bermejo’s curiosity. He knew that there had been very few Spaniards in Flossenbürg concentration camp, and until now all his attempts to locate one had proved futile (though he had managed to track down and interview a French survivor from the camp). Needless to say, this made Marco even more valuable to Bermejo as a witness.

  The second encounter between the two men wasn’t accidental, and the historian arrived well prepared. It took place in Mauthausen during the celebrations commemorating the liberation of the camp, which took place every year on the weekend following May 5. Bermejo, a regular visitor at such events (which were useful for his work, since they allowed him to meet with deportados and gather information), suggests it took place in 2001, but that is impossible since at that time he hadn’t yet met Marco; it must have been in 2002, or perhaps even 2003. Bermejo was still intrigued by Marco, though his suspicions hadn’t yet been aroused, despite the fact that the three accounts of Marco’s life he’d read—in The Kommandant’s Pigs, in the magazine Tiempo de Historia, and in A Memoir of Hell which had just been published—did not match up: Bermejo was well aware that it was typical for various accounts by a single survivor to contain discrepancies and attributed those he noted in Marco’s accounts to errors made by the interviewers, Marco’s failing memory, or a combination of both. That day at Mauthausen, Bermejo twice spoke to Marco about his experience in the Nazi camps. The first time was in the camp itself, 200 metres above the Danube, before the ceremony took place. Bermejo asked Marco about his dual status as camp survivor and historian; Marco offered a nebulous response, he was evasive, he said something vague about having studied history at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, said that he had worked with Josep Fontana and together they had set up a research team to explore the subject. The second time they spoke was during lunch. They were now back in the city of Mauthausen and in the company of Rosa Torán—who may have gone to the camp with Marco or met with him there. The three chatted over a lunch organised by the descendants of the hundred or so Spaniards who had elected to stay on in Austria after the camp was liberated, and who met every year on the same date. There were some thirty or forty diners, most of them Austrian, but Bermejo engineered things so that he could sit opposite Marco; Rosa Torán was sitting next to Marco.

  What happened over lunch proved very disconcerting for Bermejo. As he had planned—it may have been something he always did when he first met with a camp survivor—he asked Marco to talk about the time he had spent in Flossenbürg; Marco cut him off before he had even voiced his request: told him he didn’t feel talking about the matter would lead anywhere, told him not to bother with such things, told him there were much more important subjects, then he immediately took a photograph from his wallet and showed it to Bermejo. It was a photograph of Marco himself, stripped to the waist, his back and his hips mottled with bruises; Bermejo did not know—he couldn’t have known—that this was one of the photographs Marco had had taken on September 28, 1979, while secretary general of the C.N.T., after he’d been beaten by police attempting to break up an anarchist demonstration calling for amnesty for the accused in the Scala Affair; but more importantly it was documentary evidence that he, too, had been a victim, a resistance fighter, a hero. This is what you should be investigating, Marco peremptorily informed Bermejo. Not the other thing. There was a tense silence, or so Bermejo remembers; he also remembers that Torán, who was sitting on the other side of the table, seemed tense and uneasy. She looked worried. Marco’s message was clear: don’t go down this road; perhaps Marco hoped to present this as an academic suggestion—you should choose a different path: not the victims of the Nazis but those of the Franco regime—but Bermejo took it as a piece of personal advice, even a veiled threat. He was thunderstruck. He had often encountered camp survivors who didn’t want to discuss their experiences, because they were still traumatised, because they wanted to forget, or because they found it painful to remember; Marco, however, was completely different: at the time he would have already been president of Amical, or at least a member of the board of directors, and for years now he had been giving talks, granting interviews, talking endlessly about his experiences in Flossenbürg. How was it possible that Marco was prepared to talk about the subject to anyone but him?

  It would take Bermejo some time to clear up the matter. That afternoon in Mauthausen, he didn’t
ask Marco anything else about his past, but our man’s behaviour had sowed the seeds of suspicion.

  In the months that followed, his suspicions continued to multiply. In October 2003, there occurred a scene similar to the one I’ve just described, though it didn’t take place in Mauthausen but in Almería, and the protagonists were not Marco and Bermejo but Marco and Sandra Checa, another straight-shooting historian interested in Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps. The incident took place at the funeral of Antonio Muñoz Zamora, an Amical member and survivor of Mauthausen; Checa, who had attended the service as a friend of Muñoz Zamora, told Bermejo about it in a phone call shortly afterwards.

  Among the mourners, Checa told Bermejo, were Marco and Antonio Pastor Martínez, a phoney camp survivor they were trying to unmask at the time: Pastor had been at the funeral though he’d only been a vague acquaintance of the deceased; despite this, he said a few words during the service; Marco had been there as president of Amical. Checa told Bermejo that, at some point, she approached Marco, introduced herself as a historian, and said that she would be very interested in talking to him. Marco’s response was identical or almost identical to the one he’d given Bermejo in Mauthausen: though he didn’t show her the photograph of the bruises, he told her to forget the matter, that it would lead nowhere, that she should find a more interesting subject. This was the extent of her conversation with Marco, but not of her phone conversation with Bermejo. Among the veteran Republicans, camp survivors and friends of the deceased in attendance, she told Bermejo, was Santiago Carrillo—the almost nonagenarian former secretary general of the communist party forced from his post some twenty years earlier, a wily old fox with a gift for detecting impostors honed by decades of exile and Stalinist interference—and after the funeral, he made some sarcastic or ironic comment about Marco and Pastor. Only a few of those present overheard and Checa had forgotten or didn’t remember exactly (or perhaps it was Bermejo who forgot or didn’t remember exactly), but effectively he suggested that the two men were not to be trusted.