The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  Fortunately, I spent much of that winter travelling. I spent time in Colombia, in Mexico, in Paris, in Brussels, in Trento, and I spent two weeks in Pordenone in northern Italy before settling in Berlin for spring and summer, enabling me to return to Barcelona fresh, full of energy, with no uncertainties but with lots of new ideas about Marco and an urge to talk to him. Naturally, I called him again. Sometimes Marco would answer immediately, but at other times he didn’t answer, or took his time getting back to me, or got back to me to say that we couldn’t meet, offering all sorts of excuses: he was busy, he wasn’t feeling well, his wife and daughters didn’t want him to see me because our interviews unsettled him. At such times, to persuade him to meet with me, I would tell the truth, or a half-truth; for example, I’d say that I was only passing through Barcelona and if we didn’t meet now, it might be months before the next opportunity. My words always had an explosive effect: Marco would immediately change his mind and insist that we meet at my office that very afternoon or the following day. This was how I came to realise that I wasn’t the only one with doubts, and that, as Joan Amézaga had sensed over our dinner with my sister Blanca and Montse Cardona at La Troballa to discuss Marco and FaPaC, our hero was wavering between vanity and fear: on the one hand, he was flattered that I was writing a book about him, on the other, he was afraid of what I would say in that book. This was how things were, at least in the early stages of our relationship: Marco both wanted and didn’t want me to write about him and therefore he wanted and didn’t want to talk to me. Or to put it more clearly: Marco wanted me to write the book that he would have wanted to read, the book that he needed, the book that would finally rehabilitate him.

  From the first, I had unequivocally warned Marco that I had no intention of writing that book, nevertheless, at least in the beginning, he tried to get me to write it, or at least he tried to control what I would write. In theory, Marco not only agreed not to hinder my work, he was prepared to help me with it; in practice, that wasn’t the case. In his house, Marco had an archive comprising hundreds of documents, personal papers and writings of every kind, but when I asked him to let me study them, he flatly refused. He always turned up at my office weighed down with folders stuffed with documents, but these were carefully selected documents that favoured his version of events. Sometimes I asked him for documents and he promised to bring them to me but never did. At other times he’d bring documents and allow me to scan them for a moment only to snatch them from my hands and not allow me to photocopy them. Now and then he’d postpone our meetings with no explanation, and on one occasion he showed up with another person (a young filmmaker who floated the impractical suggestion of filming us while we talked, for a documentary about the process of writing my book or something of the kind), which put paid to the meeting. Needless to say, Marco concealed information from me, deceived me, lied to me, and whenever I caught him in a lie, he’d instantly come up with some explanation and try to pass the lie off as a mistake or a misunderstanding. He often suggested I meet people he had known at different periods in his life who could tell me about him, but he’d wait for weeks or months before giving me their phone number or address and in the meantime call or write to them, warning them that I would be in touch, letting them know my intentions and (at the very least, I imagine) attempting to manipulate them so that they’d say what he wanted them to say. He was cunning as a fox and slippery as an eel, and it didn’t take me long to work out that he wasn’t cooperating in order to help me, but merely pretending to help in order to keep a watchful eye, to control my movements, lead me through a maze of lies and thereby get me to write the book he imagined.

  He didn’t succeed, or I don’t think he succeeded. And not because I prevented him, but because he could not succeed: it’s impossible for anyone to write the book someone else has imagined; besides, my book could only be written based on truth, or based on facts that are as close as possible to truth; moreover it’s impossible to hide a truth like Marco’s if someone is determined to reveal it by any means. Marco is a masterful liar, but, while he was marshalling his lies, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, he could never have imagined that one day a writer would devote himself body and soul to dismantling them, so he didn’t feel it necessary to safeguard them against such an improbable possibility. There is, perhaps, another explanation, or rather another hypothesis, for Marco’s failure, which is that it wasn’t a failure but a success; perhaps Marco realised not only that he couldn’t hide the truth from me and get me to write the book that would rehabilitate him, but perhaps he also realised that the only way he might be rehabilitated was to tell me the truth.

  I’m not sure there ever came a point when Marco reached that conclusion, but I know I made every effort to get him there. This effort began after I’d spent many months pestering him and fighting pitched battles with him, when I had overcome the repugnance I’d initially felt and abandoned the absurd façade of judge or prosecutor or inquisitor or Sunday School teacher, realising that my task was to peel away the lies of his past as one might peel away an onion skin, and that I could do so only by gaining his trust as Capote had done with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. In this, Benito Bermejo—or rather the extremely long and deadly shadow cast by Benito Bermejo—proved very useful. I would say to Marco—without quite lying, but without quite telling him the truth—that Bermejo hadn’t completely given up on his plans to write a book about him, and therefore the book I was writing had to be unassailable, because if it wasn’t, Bermejo would make mincemeat of us, he would demolish us, eviscerate our version of events, and destroy us, him and me. I was on his side and Bermejo wasn’t, I would tell him, so it was better to tell me the truth than leave it for Bermejo to unearth, since he would use it maliciously while I would use it for good. We have to come up with a completely true story, I insisted, irrefutable, candid, not just credible, a story that, even if it weren’t entirely documented (that would be impossible), corresponded as closely as possible to what documentary evidence we did have, and therefore to the facts. This is what I told Marco: Bermejo was evil incarnate, and only I could keep him at bay, but in order to do so, I needed the truth.

  So began a new and strange phase in my relationship with Marco. By this point, I was completely immersed in his life story, I’d heard him recount it from beginning to end, I’d read countless documents about him and spoken to numerous people who had known him. By tracking down documents that Marco himself had never seen, cross-referencing facts and dates, challenging witnesses, I’d discovered many of the truths hidden from Marco’s public biography; more than that, by confronting him with blatant contradictions and obvious falsehoods, I’d succeeded in getting him to admit that some were true and others were lies. The most surprising thing (or what I found most surprising) was that the more lies I uncovered, the more I adapted to the sad, sordid reality he’d concealed behind this magnificent façade for so many years, the more I saw of the true villain hiding behind the fictional hero, the closer I felt to him, the more I pitied him, the more relaxed I felt in his company. I’m lying: I too attempted to conceal the truth. The truth is that there came a moment when I felt affection for this man, sometimes even a sort of admiration that even I didn’t understand and which I found unsettling.

  By the time this happened, Marco had already opened his archives to me and had even arranged for me to meet with his secret daughter, the fruit of his first (equally secret) marriage. By the time this happened, there remained only a few problematic points in his biography, or what we had euphemistically agreed to call problematic points: lies that Marco hadn’t yet acknowledged were lies and which I wasn’t prepared to accept as truth, among other reasons because nobody would accept them—beginning with Benito Bermejo. I remember sitting on the veranda of his house on the morning when the last of these points were discussed, heatedly as always (but there was no longer any tension or bitterness), I trying to get him to admit the truth and he doing his utmost to salvage his lie;
that morning, after Marco had yielded on three of the points, or rather when we’d set them aside because I was convinced he’d given up and would eventually admit the truth (that he hadn’t taken part in the assault on the Sant Andreu barracks on July 19, 1936, the day after the Civil War began; that he hadn’t returned wounded from the front but had regularised his situation after the war and had never been involved in clandestine activities in the post-war period; that he had never been a member of the U.J.A. with Fernández Vallet and his comrades), I gave him the impression that the interview was over.

  “Oh, I forgot,” I said slyly as he was getting to his feet, his guard down, exhausted after several hours talking, or perhaps simply fed up with talking, “there’s another problematic point. It’s the last one.”

  He remained standing as he listened to my explanation, eyeing me with what interest he could still muster: I told him that I didn’t believe he had participated in the Majorca landings with his uncle Anastasio and that, although I couldn’t prove it was false, all indications suggested it was. When I’d finished reeling off the list, he slumped back into his chair, planted his elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands in a gesture that, though melodramatic, didn’t seem so. I heard him whisper:

  “Please, leave me something.”

  We met again two or three days later. That morning, I drove to Sant Cugat early to collect him, and we spent the day wandering the streets and alleyways where he’d spent his childhood and his adult years, through Collblanc, Gracia and El Guinardó, seeking out the streets and the houses where he’d lived, talking to neighbours who had known him and going over episodes from his life, and in the hours we spent together, Marco tacitly or explicitly acknowledged that all or almost all the problematic points I’d raised during our last encounter were not problematic points but truths that had been embellished or embroidered, or simple lies. I cannot say that this admission came as a surprise to me, because by now I was familiar with his strategies in these duels we fought over his past: if the evidence I offered was conclusive (and sometimes when it wasn’t), Marco eventually acknowledged the truth one way or another, though it might take hours or days or weeks before he did so, because he needed to come up with an honourable way out, an explanation for his earlier lie, an explanation or a way out he usually found in the confusion, the uncertainty and the ramblings brought about by old age and his conveniently failing memory. In any event, when I pulled up outside his house in Sant Cugat as night was falling, Marco, who must still have been thinking about the lies he’d just admitted to, said to me with a mixture of sadness and resignation:

  “Truthfully, I feel as though I’m working against my own interests.”

  I understood, and I hurriedly corrected him:

  “No: you’re acting against the interests of the false Enric Marco; and in the interests of the real one.” When Marco didn’t say anything, I clarified: “You’re acting in your own interests just as Alonso Quixano is at the end of Don Quixote when he gives up being Quixote.”

  Marco looked at me curiously, perhaps worried.

  “When he recovers his sanity, you mean?” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said: and in that moment I saw a boy who looked just like him, bald and wrinkled with the same moustache, reading Don Quixote to his alcoholic stepmother eighty years earlier, in a grubby little room by the light of a paraffin lamp; “when he ceases to be the false, heroic Don Quixote and returns to simply being the true Alonso Quixano.”

  A frank laugh banished the worried look from Marco’s face.

  “The Good,” he clarified, “Alonso Quixano the Good. I wonder how many times you need to read that book in order to truly understand it.”

  I don’t remember another word of that conversation, if indeed there were any others. But what I do remember is that as I drove back to Barcelona on the carretera La Rabassada, I felt for the first time that Marco no longer wanted to hide behind a lie, that with me at least he didn’t feel the need to, that he wanted the truth and nothing but the truth, as though he’d discovered that the prosaic, shameful, authentic life story I planned to tell might be better or more useful than the brilliant, poetic and false story he’d been telling, and I particularly remember that, as I crested the summit of El Tibidabo and drove down La Rabassada and watched as Barcelona appeared below, and beyond it the sea shimmering red in the sunset, I thought of that extraordinary passage at the end of Don Quixote where Cervantes has his pen speak (“For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him: it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one”), and for a fleeting second I felt I understood what Cervantes—or Cervantes’ pen—was trying to say, and I had a sudden dizzying realisation: Marco had never wanted to dupe me, Marco had been testing me all this time to see whether or not I was worthy of his truth; I hadn’t uncovered that truth, he had guided me to it. Over the space of almost a century Marco had fashioned the monumental lie that was his life not to deceive anyone, or not simply to deceive, but so that some future writer, with his help, might decipher it, recount it and share it with the world and, in the end, might have his computer speak as Cervantes does his pen (“For me alone was Enric Marco born, and I for him: it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one”), just as Alonso Quixano had created Don Quixote and had him perform his lunatic feats so that Cervantes might decipher them, recount them and share them with the world as though Don Quixote and his pen made but one. In short, I wasn’t using Marco as Capote had used Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, it was Marco who was using me the way Alonso Quixano used Cervantes.

  This thought came to me in a second, as the car coasted down La Rabassada. A second later, I tried to forget it.

  7

  It was perhaps the pinnacle of Enric Marco’s public glory. It was Thursday, January 27, 2005. That morning, precisely sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, the Spanish parliament commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day for the first time and paid tribute to the almost nine thousand Spanish Republicans who had been interned in the Nazi camps.

  It was the solemn act of remembrance Marco and the deportados had long been calling for. It included a religious ceremony during which the Chief Rabbi of Madrid, before the standing congregation, said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead; six candles were lit in tribute to the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, half a million of them children, to the Gypsies and the Spaniards who died, to those who risked their lives to avoid the slaughter and to those who managed to survive it. “We have waited too long to honour them,” said Manuel Marín, the President of the Congress of Deputies, “I regret that.” He was referring to all the victims of the Nazis, but perhaps to the deportados in particular.

  Marco spoke on their behalf. He did so standing, without referring to notes, because he’d given this speech a thousand times, he knew it by heart. He said, for example: “When we reached the concentration camps in those filthy cattle trucks, we were stripped of our clothes and all our belongings were taken, not simply out of greed, but to leave us completely naked, powerless: wedding rings, bracelets, photographs. Alone, helpless, left with nothing.” He also said: “We were ordinary people, like you, but they stripped us, and their dogs bit us, they dazzled us with their searchlights, screamed at us in German ‘Links-Rechts!’ [Left-Right!]. We could not understand anything, and failing to understand an order could cost you your life.” And also: “When the first selection came and the men were put on one side and the women and children on the other, the women formed a circle and protected their children with their bodies, their elbows, the only tools they had.” And also: “We must remember those troubling times. Those nights in the barracks when there came a sudden howl, the cry of a wounded animal. A man who, by day, still had pride and dignity enough to hide his weakness, fell to pieces in the dead of night.” And also: “Never again. Never again should we have to see women cradling their dead babies in their
arms, their empty breasts unable to provide milk.” And also: “The Amical de Mauthausen was founded in order to teach the Spanish who had no country. We did not end up in the camps by chance, but in defending things we believed were worth the struggle. We were defending equal rights, we were defending a Spain that, at the time, seemed open to progress.” And, lastly: “Every year, when we march at Mauthausen, a voice from the stand announces: here come the Spanish Republicans, the foremost defenders of liberty and democracy in Europe. We had no luck during the war. We had no luck when we were liberated from the camps. We did not have a government that was prepared to help us, to take our tattered rags and offer us medical assistance. Nor a country to which we could return. The Jewish people, who suffered so much, were able to create their own homeland. We were not. The time has come for justice.”