The Impostor

by Javier Cercas

  Is that it? Is that the goal I truly set myself? And is that not an act of folly? Is it not a way of trying to write an even more impossible book than the one I intended to write? Can a book reconcile a man with reality and with himself? Can literature save anyone or is it as important and as futile as everything else, and the idea that a book might save us ridiculous and obsolete? Did Cervantes save Alonso Quixano, and in so doing save himself? Do I want to save myself in saving Enric Marco? Okay: all these questions are ridiculous, obsolete and absurd, I should be ashamed of even formulating them. And I am ashamed. But—why lie?—at the same time I’m not ashamed. I’m not ashamed at all. Because here and now, I can think of no better way to say No. No to everything. No to everyone. No, in particular, to the limits of literature, to its wretched impotence and its futility; because, yes, the way I see it is: if literature serves to save a man, then all hail literature, but if it serves only as an embellishment, to hell with literature. This is what I think: even if there’s only a one in a million chance that there’s a one in a million chance that my questions are not ridiculous, obsolete and absurd, and that the impossible could become possible, it’s worth the effort to try. I also think that, at this stage, there’s only one way to find out if Marco will be saved, if I will be saved, and that is to finish telling the truth about him, stripping him of everything as Cervantes stripped Don Quixote of everything. In other words: finish telling his story. In other words: finish writing this book.

  4

  In mid-April 2013, two weeks after the interview with Marco in my office in García in which I had the impression that our man had taken off his mask and that the relationship between us was changing, I had lunch with Santi Fillol in Cafè Salambó, a restaurant near my office. We hadn’t seen each other in four years, not since the second time I decided I wanted to write this book and got in touch with him shortly after he’d finished making his film about Marco, and he came with me to Sant Cugat to introduce me to our man. In the meantime, we’d barely exchanged a few emails, but, in late 2012 or early 2013, Santi was one of the first people I told that I had reached the point of no return in my decision to write this book, or to stop resisting writing it. Since then, I’d tried in vain to meet with him to talk about Marco, also so he could lend me the documents, or some of the documents, that he and Lucas Vermal had put together in order to film Ich bin Enric Marco.

  According to my diary, we met on Thursday 18, at 2:15 p.m. At the time, I’d been living in Berlin for almost two weeks as guest lecturer at the Free University, and that day I’d flown back to Barcelona to promote Outlaws, a novel with fiction published the previous year. My flight had landed at 1:30 p.m., which made it possible for me to arrive just on time. I was thirsty, and as soon as I took my seat on the ground floor of Cafè Salambó, facing the door onto calle Torrijos, I tried to attract the attention of a young waitress of Asian appearance and order a beer. I hadn’t been there for more than two minutes when Santi appeared in the doorway with his intellectual air, his intellectual glasses and his unkempt beard, carrying a plastic bag. I waved to him, he saw me, came over and we shook hands. At that moment the waitress brought my beer and Santi asked her to bring another as he set the plastic bag on the floor. I don’t remember what we talked about initially, because I was impatient to talk about Marco and nothing else mattered to me much. I vaguely remember Santi telling me that he had spent some time away from Barcelona, possibly in Buenos Aires, possibly directing a film; I vaguely remember telling him where in Berlin I was living and talking about my lectures. The waitress came back with Santi’s beer and took our food order; as soon as she’d left, Santi said:

  “Right, so you’ve finally decided to write about Enric, is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I knew you’d give in eventually,” he said. “And I bet Enric knew too. Do you remember what he said to you that day we had lunch with him in Sant Cugat?”

  “What was that?”

  “Of course, Javier,” he said, imitating Marco’s voice, “I’ve always known I was one of your characters.”

  Santi laughed. I was stunned.

  “Is that true—did he really say that?”

  “As true as the fact that it’s daytime and we’re sitting in Salambó,” he said.

  “It’s unbelievable. I don’t remember.”

  “How could you possibly remember, man, you were fuming. It was like poor Enric had done something to you.”

  “I lost my temper,” I apologised, “I suppose it wasn’t the right time to write about him. My father had just died, my mother wasn’t well and I was in a bad way myself. I think I got scared.”

  “You told me you were sick and tired of reality, that you needed fiction.”

  “And you told me that Enric was pure fiction. And you were right. That’s why I’m going to write about him.”

  The waitress served the first course. Santi ignored her, picked up the bag he’d set down next to the table and handed it to me.

  “I was thinking about what to bring,” he said as I opened the bag, “and I came to the conclusion that this was the best thing I could give you.”

  Inside the bag was a computer hard drive and a case full of DVDs.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s all the footage we shot for the film,” he said. “Seventy, eighty hours of Enric Marco. Maybe more, I don’t remember. Barrels of crude Enric Marco. That’s everything. Now, tell me about your book.”

  While we ate, I talked to him about my book. He listened attentively, as though his documentary hadn’t jaded him about Marco, as though looking for some excuse to film him again. I explained that I was trying to reconstruct Marco’s real life from beginning to end, from his birth to the moment the scandal broke, or after the scandal broke, I told him about the long sessions we had recorded in my office, about the research I was doing, the people I was contacting to check whether what Marco was saying was true or not, I told him that Marco seemed both to want and not want me to write the book, that his wife and daughters did not want me to write it.

  “That’s what he told us in the beginning,” Santi interrupted, “that Dani didn’t want us to make the film, or his daughters…Bullshit: Enric does whatever he likes; he doesn’t care what his wife or his children have to say. The fact is, this is the only way he can charm you; what he’s really saying is: you’re so intelligent you’ll see right through me; or, you’re so clever that my wife and my daughters are afraid. And so am I. But it’s a lie. Enric wasn’t remotely afraid of us, any more than I think he is of you. Enric is very clever, Javier: he’s a street dog who has to fend for himself, and the minute he sees you, the first thing he thinks is: ‘Let’s see how I can get something out of him.’ That’s how he is. As for his past, the truth is we focused on his time in Germany, we weren’t really interested in the rest. Now, if you want to know my impression, I’ll tell you. My impression is that everything about Enric is a lie: his childhood, the war, the post-war period, the clandestine stuff. Everything.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “But lies are built on truth; plausible lies, I mean.”

  “You’re right about that,” Santi agreed.

  “No-one believes pure lies,” I said. “Effective lies are a mixture, they contain some element of truth. And Marco’s lies were good. And that’s what I’m trying to work out: which bits of his lies are lies and which are truth.”

  “You’re setting yourself a hell of a job,” Santi said, “but I’m sure it’s worth the effort. Enric is always worth it. He is the motherlode that never runs out. Lucas and me, we didn’t tackle the Enric of the war and the post-war years, or the Enric of the Franco regime, although we spent so many hours with him during the shoot, eventually you get a sense of it. And I can tell you, the sense you get is not that he was a resistance fighter, someone who worked with underground movements, nothing like that, you get the sense h
e was an opportunist, a bit of a rogue who lived it up whenever he could, money and girls and lots of nightlife.”

  Just then the waitress cleared away the first course, and as she did, Santi said:

  “Have you noticed how much women like Enric? I’ve never been in a bar with him where the waitress didn’t flirt with him. If he were here, this pretty little thing would already have paid him a compliment or two.”

  The waitress smiled without blushing, perhaps she didn’t understand, and went off without a word. I asked Santi to tell me about the filming of Ich bin Enric Marco, of the time they had spent cheek by jowl with Enric, in Barcelona but especially on the road trip from Barcelona to Kiel, from Kiel to Flossenbürg and the return journey to Barcelona.

  “Have you been to Flossenbürg yet?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s worth the trip. My favourite part of the whole film is the footage we shot in Flossenbürg. That’s where Enric really came into his own. He’d never lived in the camp, but it was like he was at home. Much more so than in Kiel, where he’d actually lived. What’s Pessoa’s line? ‘The poet is a faker/Who fakes with such great zeal/He even manages to fake/The pain he feels for real.’ That’s Enric: a poet.”

  Santi began to recount tales from the film shoot. He mentioned, for example, how in Flossenbürg, the director of the Memorial, whom Marco had met on his first visit to the camp, was prepared to shake his hand, but he wasn’t prepared to accept the reasons Marco put forward to justify his deception. Then he told me a story he’d heard from Pau Lanao and Carme Vinyoles, Marco’s journalist friends who, years before the scandal broke, had published a long article about him in Presència, about how, during a talk Marco was giving at a school, they had seen him convince a neo-Nazi that his ideas were absurd, or they knew someone who had seen it, and he also told me that a friend of his, a film director, had told him that in the Seventies his parents were in financial difficulties and Marco, who was secretary general of the C.N.T. at the time, had helped them get through it.

  “That’s Enric too,” said Santi. “On the one hand there’s the con artist, the impostor, and on the other, there’s the man who’ll bend over backwards to do a favour for anyone. Enric is both: there’s no way to separate them. You either take him or leave him.”

  It was only then that I decided to tell Santi about the last meeting I had with Marco in my office, just before I left for Berlin, or rather about that almost magical moment when I’d had the impression that Marco had taken off his mask, or it had fallen away, and that I was seeing him as he really was and beginning to understand him. I told Santi I suspected that the Marco he and Lucas Vermal had filmed was not the man he was now, that the intervening years had changed him, that he was no longer the same man who constantly needed to justify himself, or was not entirely the same, or had begun to change and was beginning to acknowledge his mistakes and regret what he had done, rather than continuing to defend the indefensible, meaning his imposture. That he’d decided to accept his mistake and apologise; I told him that, deep down, it had probably begun the moment the scandal broke, or just before, when, fed up with lies and tired of being an impostor and leading a false life, Marco had admitted his deception and had voluntarily come clean. And, now that I remember the things I told Santi, I realise that maybe I’d already started to have an inkling of something I only dared to think much later: that Marco didn’t want to continue hiding behind his lies, that he wanted to tell me the whole truth perhaps because he had come to the conclusion that only by telling the truth could he truly rehabilitate himself. More than that, it occurs to me now that perhaps, over lunch with Santi at Salambó, I had the first inkling of the sudden dizzying realisation I was to have months later, one evening in late summer or early autumn, as I drove back to Barcelona from Sant Cugat along La Rabassada having spent the day with Marco and left him at the door of his house, when for a fleeting moment I felt that Marco had never wanted to dupe me, that he had never resisted telling me his story, that ever since I’d seriously begun to study his life he had simply been testing me to see whether or not I was worthy of his telling me the truth and guiding me to it if I could discover what it was, that over the space of almost a century Marco had fashioned the monumental lie that was his life not in order to deceive anyone, or not simply in order to deceive, but so that some future writer, with his help, might decipher it, recount it and share it with the world, 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, and that I was certainly not using Marco as Capote had used Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, it was Marco who was using me the way Alonso Quixano had used Cervantes. I felt all this in a split second as I drove along La Rabassada later that evening. I’m both happy and sad that I didn’t feel it before my lunch with Santi at Salambó, because I would have told him about it. Instead I simply went on talking, increasingly vociferous and vehement, about my most recent interview with Marco, about what I thought I’d seen or glimpsed during it, about how much Marco had changed recently, until I got the impression that Santi’s smile as he listened to me was about to break into a laugh.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly guessing what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” said Santi. We were drinking coffee, having both passed on dessert. “Do you really believe what you’re saying? Oh, Javier, you’ve got it bad. Do you really think that Enric came clean because he wanted to? Enric came clean because he had no choice, because Bermejo had caught him out and, being a smart man, he realised the best thing he could do was tell the story himself rather than let someone else tell it; what I mean is, he realised the best thing he could do was take control of the debate so he could take control of the scandal. That’s what he was trying to do. As it turned out, it didn’t work, because it couldn’t work, because even a liar of Enric’s genius couldn’t fool everyone with nonsense about how he’d passed himself off as a deportado in order to do good and give voice to the voiceless and all that garbage. Enric take off his mask? No fucking way! Enric never takes off his mask. He’s always acting, he’s always reciting whatever speech best serves his interests. The speech he gave us was about being a victim. With you, it sounds like he’s giving a speech about repentance and forgiveness. But Enric doesn’t repent anything, nor does he want anyone’s forgiveness. He simply thinks this is what will work best for him right now. Nothing more.”

  “You think so?” I said, perhaps just to say something, because I was suddenly convinced that what Santi had just said was true.

  “I don’t have the slightest doubt, Javier,” he said. “With Enric, you can never stop thinking. If you stop thinking, you’re fucked. If you come to a conclusion about him, you’re fucked. If you think that you understand him and that he’s taken off his mask, you’re fucked, Enric always has another mask behind the mask. He’s always slipping away. We think we’re putting him in our stories, our films, our novels, but in reality he’s putting us in his story, he’s the one who can do what he wants with us. Enric is a riddle, but a curious riddle: when you solve it, he gives you another riddle, and when you solve the second, he gives you a third, and so on to infinity. Or utter exhaustion.”

  Lunch ended almost immediately after that, because Santi had an appointment and we said our goodbyes at the door of Cafè Salambó. I haven’t seen him since. And it was several months more before I began to write this book, but I have not written a single word of it without thinking about what Santi told me that day.

  5

  What, then, is Enric Marco? Who is Enric Marco? What is his ultimate riddle?

  In the talks and interviews he gave during his time at Amical, when he recounted his fictional heroic, exciting life as an adventurer, Marco presented himself as the incarnation of the history of his country, as a symbol, a summation or, better yet, as a precise reflection of the history of his country; he was right
, though for reasons that were the antithesis of what he believed.

  In the Barcelona of the Second Republic, Marco was a young anarchist when most young working-class men in Barcelona were anarchists, and he continued to be an anarchist at the beginning of the Civil War, when an anarchist revolution won a victory in the city. During the Civil War, Marco was a soldier when most young Spanish men were soldiers. At the end of the war, Marco was a loser who, like the vast majority of those who lost, accepted the sting of defeat and tried to avoid the consequences by melting into the crowd, hiding or burying his wartime past and his youthful ideals. Marco managed to evade military service, something most young men his age longed to do, and during the Second World War he went to Germany, which was a land of opportunity at the time, the country that, according to what people said during those years, was destined to win the war. Marco returned from Germany when everybody was now certain that Germany would lose the war. Marco lived through the Franco regime no differently from the vast majority of Spanish people, believing that the past was past, not taking up arms against the dictatorship, implicitly or explicitly profiting from it as far as possible in order to live the best possible life, sometimes the life of a simple husband and father, sometimes the life of a con artist and an opportunist, sometimes suffering in dire financial straits and sometimes—especially from the Sixties—enjoying the middle-class pleasures of his own car, his own house and an apartment at the beach, something many people began to enjoy at the time. Like almost everyone else, in the Sixties, Marco realised that Francoism would not last for ever, that the past was not past at all, and so he began to exploit it, inventing his forgotten or dormant or buried youth as a Republican, and after Franco’s death, having reached Alonso Quixano’s fifty years, he welcomed the return of freedom like most people and prepared to make the most of it; he became deeply politicised, and completely reinvented himself, falsifying or embellishing or embroidering his past, gifting himself with a new name, a new wife, a new city, a new job and a new life. And in the Eighties, like so many people after the transition from dictatorship to democracy, Marco ceased to be involved in politics, feeling once again that the past had passed and he could no longer take advantage of this, and, like most people, as democracy became established and institutionalised, he returned to his private life and channelled his activities or his concerns, not into a political party, but into a civic association. At length, in the first decade of the new century, the past returned more powerfully than ever, or so at least it seemed, and, like many people, Marco launched himself into so-called historical memory, eagerly joined this great movement, used and fostered the industry of memory and allowed himself to be used by it, apparently seeking to face up to his own past and advocating—in fact demanding—that his country do likewise, when in fact he, and his country, did so only in part, only enough to control without truly confronting the past so it might be used to other ends. And so, deep down, Marco was right to say in his talks that his personal history was a reflection of the history of his country; and yet he was wrong, not because his personal history had only the slimmest rapport with the one he recounted—a glittering, poetic history filled with heroism, dignity and great emotions—but because of the history that he was hiding—a vulgar, prosaic history filled with failure, humiliation and cowardice. Or, to put it another way, if during his talks Marco had related his true history instead of one that was fictitious, narcissistic and kitsch, he would have recounted a much less flattering but much more interesting history: the true history of Spain.