“Perhaps this explains why Santiago Fillol and Lucas Vermal have given more or less this title to a documentary about Marco released this week: ‘Ich bin Enric Marco’. The film has many virtues, but I have space only to highlight two of them. The first is its humility: Fillol and Vermal make no attempt to exhaust all the complexities of the character; it is this restraint that gives the film its power. The second virtue is no less essential. As any good liar knows, a lie will prevail only if it is buttressed by truth; Marco’s lie was no exception: it was true that he had been in Nazi Germany during the war, but it was not true that he was there as a republican prisoner, rather he was one of Franco’s volunteers; it was true that the Nazis imprisoned him, but it was not true that they imprisoned him in Flossenbürg concentration camp, but rather in the city of Kiel, nor was he imprisoned for antifascist resistance but probably for simple defeatism. Fillol and Vermal have the good sense to lead Marco to lies via the truth, rather than the reverse, and in doing so, they show him not only struggling fiercely with his lies, but struggling to justify the truth of his lies, struggling to vindicate himself as a victim, struggling for himself. Struggling. He is a fascinating character. It is a fascinating film. Go and see it.”
4
Since his mother was committed to an asylum, Marco’s childhood involved constantly moving from one family to another, from one home to another, which meant that he had neither family nor home. His father, Tomás Marco, had moved to Barcelona from Alfaro in the province of La Rioja, “city of storks and freethinkers”, Marco would invariably add whenever it was mentioned. He was a libertarian, a mason and a printer, and although he consequently belonged to the cultural elite of the working class (or perhaps precisely because of it), he was a member of the union of graphic arts, a part of the C.N.T., the anarchist organisation. He was not a demonstrative man, or at least Marco does not remember him as such: he does not remember his father ever taking his hand, ever showing a sign of affection, ever buying him a toy (in fact, he remembers having only one toy: a cardboard horse which was later given to a female cousin). The only thing his father had in the house were books and magazines, and this explains how Marco became such a precocious and omnivorous reader.
But it only partly explains it. Marco’s father lived with a woman whose name was Teodosia, though she obviously did not like the name and had people call her Felisa. Marco remembers her as a coarse, violent woman who did not think twice about hitting him, fighting with his father, or whipping out a pair of scissors in an argument with the neighbours; he also remembers her as an alcoholic. Marco loathed her with every fibre of his being because, he says, she made his childhood a nightmare. He says that she would spend whole days lying in bed, ordering him to run down to the taberna on the corner to fetch the wine or the aguardiente she drank in outrageous quantities. He says she was illiterate and that, having no other form of entertainment, she would ask him to read to her from the books in the house, and so at an early age he was reading books by Cervantes, Rojas, Vargas Vila, Hugo, Balzac, Sue, books that often he did not fully understand, or did not understand at all. Sometimes he would read to his stepmother in the bedroom she shared with his father while, from the bed, she would listen, or laugh, or comment on his reading; at other times he would read to her in the dining room, a small, dark room lit only by a Petromax, wreathed by the smell of burning paraffin. But he says she was always drunk, and that he was afraid of her. She would frequently beat him, humiliate him, insult him, and more than once, tired of being mistreated, he left the house, slamming the door behind him, and went to the offices of Editorial Sopena, where his father worked, sat outside the door and waited for him. When his father finally emerged, minutes or hours later, Marco would tell him what had happened, and from that point, the same sequence would invariably be played out: the two would go home and he would stand in the doorway, waiting, as he listened to his father and his stepmother screaming, in the hope that this argument would end in a happy separation.
The break-up never came, or at least he never witnessed it. His father and stepmother remained together for many years. In their own way, perhaps they loved each other: at least he remembers hearing them at night, laughing and screwing; or perhaps, as he tends to think now, so many years later, this horrible woman suited his father: she cooked his food, washed and darned his clothes, managed the house. Despite all this, the house was always terribly untidy, and on one occasion the neighbours reported his stepmother’s beatings and a magistrate was obliged to intervene. This marked the beginning of his wanderings as a Dickensian orphan, from one family to another, from one home to another. The families were the families of his aunts, for the most part his father’s sisters. He insists that they all treated him much better than his stepmother, but adds that for most of his childhood he could not shrug off the mortifying sense that he was not wanted anywhere, that everyone wanted to be rid of him. He lived in various neighbourhoods in Barcelona: in Los Corts, with his father and his stepmother; with his uncle Francesc and his aunt Caterina in La Trinidad, where they had a grocer’s shop, and where he felt more at home than he did anywhere else. It was here that he also spent his summers with his uncle Ricardo, his father’s brother, who was a militant member of the socialist U.G.T. union, in the historic district of the city (on the calle del Tigre and the calle de la Luna) and also in Ensanche (on the calle Diputación, between Aribau and Muntaner). It was here that he was caught up in the so-called “unrest” of October 1934, when, in the midst of a nationwide uprising by the Spanish left against the right-wing government of the Second Republic, the autonomous Parliament of Catalonia, the Generalitat, declared a Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic. The uprising, quickly quelled by the army, failed almost immediately, but not before causing forty-six fatalities, an unknown number of casualties and the imprisonment and subsequent prosecution of more than three thousand people, among them the President of the Generalitat and his entire cabinet.
Of these days, Marco retained two vivid memories. The first is rather confused. The Catalan uprising occurred while he was staying with his uncle Ricardo, who at the time worked for La Humanitat, a publication based on the calle Tallers near the Rambla; La Humanitat was the newspaper of the Republican Left of Catalonia, the party of the rebel government, and so the offices were shut down and the staff interned on the prison ship Uruguay. Marco did not live far from the newspaper offices and, hearing rumours of what was happening there, and spurred on by his innate anxiety and the audacity of his thirteen years, he rushed out into the street to look for his uncle. From this point, Marco’s memories, in addition to being confused, are fragmented: he says that on some of the streets he saw barricades, or the remnants of barricades; he says that he managed to make it as far as plaza Universidad and there stumbled on several machine-gun emplacements manned by soldiers who refused to let him pass; he says that he retraced his steps and attempted to take a roundabout route, taking the Rambla de Catalunya as far as the plaza de Catalunya and the Rambla, and that he saw people from Estat Català, the pro-independence party, being arrested outside a café called Oro del Rhin on the corner of the Gran Vía and the Rambla de Catalunya; he says that he does not remember how longed he spent wandering the streets but that, try as he might, he could not reach the calle Tallers and was eventually forced to go home without news of his uncle.
The second memory is more brutal and less vague. It related to an incident that must have occurred days or hours later, still in the midst of the warzone that gripped the city during those bloody days. With his uncle Ricardo incarcerated aboard the prison ship Uruguay, his relatives sent the boy to the house of his uncle Francesc in La Trinidad, perhaps hoping that the violence would not reach the suburbs; the evidence shows that it was a vain hope. Early one morning, the family were woken by the noise of screams and gunfire. The noise was coming from the house next door, inhabited by a father and his daughter, a young woman who tutored Marco every evening since he could not go to school while in La
Trinidad; he had to help his uncle in the grocer’s shop. Marco leapt out of bed and raced to his teacher’s house and found her in the yard, in the darkness, sobbing bitterly as she cradled her dead father in her arms. Marco maintains that the teacher’s father was shot by officers of the Guardia Civil, he assumes because the man was a militant Catalanista; he also says that he loved his teacher and that he remembers standing there, devastated and motionless in the yard, oblivious to the crowds of people milling around them, spellbound by the tears, the inconsolable grief of this goodhearted woman. And he says that it was incidents such as this that kindled his militant anarcho-syndicalism at an early age.
It is impossible to determine whether the dramatic memories of Marco I have just recounted are true or a product of his imagination – there are no surviving witnesses to attest to these events, I have not managed to locate a single corroborating document, and very much doubt that they exist; all I can say for certain is that, although Marco’s imagination tends towards the dramatic, these particular events fit with the general history of the period. For the rest, it is unnecessary to bring up such brutal events as the death of his teacher’s father to understand Marco’s political affiliations. He was from a working-class family, grew up in working-class neighbourhoods, was put to work early – firstly, as I have mentioned, in his uncle Francesc’s shop, later at the workshop of a tailor he remembers as red-haired and forbidding, and later still at a laundry, the Tintorería Guasch, where he was a delivery boy. His father and various other members of his family were militant C.N.T. members, and he received a sporadic but dutiful liberal education at various schools, cultural associations and anarchist cooperatives; furthermore Barcelona had more C.N.T. members than any other Spanish city – the union was an overwhelming presence in the areas when he grew up. But, according to Marco, what definitively converted him to the cause of anarchism was none of these things, but rather the influence of one of his hated stepmother’s brothers.
His name was Anastasio García, and he was the closest thing to a father Marco had in his life, and perhaps an idol or a role model. Again, according to Marco’s version of events, in the 1920s, Uncle Anastasio had been a man of action, he had been a member of – or had links with – Los Solidarios, the legendary anarchist group run by Buenaventura Durruti, Francisco Ascaso and Juan García Oliver – “the finest terrorists of the working class”, as García Oliver himself once called them – and had worked with them in Spain, in France and in South America. So Uncle Anastasio was clearly a tough guy, although by the time Marco had any dealings with him he had become domesticated, not to say diminished and possibly alcoholic: he was living with a woman, Aunt Ramona, was working as a painter for Transmediterránea, a Barcelona-based shipping company dedicated to transporting cargo and passengers, and had become a member of the shipping branch of the C.N.T. He had no children and, when he met Marco, not only did he become fond of the boy, he also gave him a home for long periods, perhaps to protect him from the abuses of his sister.
Uncle Anastasio and Aunt Ramona lived on calle Conde del Asalto, next to the Palacio Güell and almost opposite Edén Concert, a music hall that hosted the most glittering stars in the artistic firmament at the time, and where Marco sometimes says he managed to see Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier, though at other times he says he did not see them in the fabled dance hall where he may never even have set foot (after all, shortly after the war it was converted into a cinema), but coming and going from the nearby Eden Hotel, where his aunt Ramona worked and where he spent his days lazing about, lured by the scent of opulence and the shimmer of celebrity. The fact remains that Uncle Anastasio adopted Marco; he also taught him: at this point Marco had completed his autodidactic education as an indiscriminate reader taking classes in French, music, theatre and Esperanto in school, cultural associations and libertarian cooperatives, and in the home of the unfortunate teacher in La Trinidad; now his uncle Anastasio forced him to learn penmanship, typing and shorthand. He wanted to turn him into a useful citizen, but mostly he wanted to turn him into a good libertarian: and so began instilling in him a rationalist, anti-political, violent, self-righteous, egalitarian, redemptive, anachronistic, puritanical, public-spirited and sentimental idealism of a particular variety of Spanish anarchism; and this is why he took him everywhere with him. And this is also why when, on July 18, 1936, as he had been expecting for months, a group of military units staged a coup against the government of the Second Republic and the following day a libertarian uprising erupted in Barcelona to face them down, Uncle Anastasio and Marco joined the fight; and, a few short weeks later, joined the war that was to devastate the country for the next three years.
5
By early 2013, four years after I met Marco and having abandoned, for the second time, the idea of writing a book about him, everything had changed for me. The previous autumn, I had published a novel with fiction entitled Outlaws, and since that time I had done little other than travel in Spain and the United States. I felt reasonably happy in my own skin. A few months earlier I had told my psychoanalyst to go to hell and I felt as though fiction had healed me; or perhaps it was simply that I had become accustomed to life without a father. For her part, my mother had resigned herself to life without a husband. My wife and my son, finally, seemed happy, particularly my son.
Raül had been ten years old when the Marco scandal first broke; he was now about to turn eighteen and thought himself a bit of a tough guy. In the past fourteen months he had lost twenty kilos. He was strong and healthy and constantly playing sport. Next year, he would go to university, though he was still not sure whether he would take a degree in film studies or in something else. But his greatest love was cars, and what the two of us enjoyed more than anything, was to climb into a car – our own or rented – and drive for miles, listening to music, and talking about everything under the sun, but especially about our ultimate idols: Bruce Willis and Rafa Nadal.
One day in early January, while Raül and I were aimlessly zigzagging along the winding roads of Ampurdán, he asked me whether I had started writing my next book. This was an unusual question, since Raül did not read my books, nor did we generally talk about them, and in that moment I suddenly realised that I had spent almost six months not writing and that, against all logic, I was not remotely worried. I told him the truth.
“You’ve been a bit lazy lately, haven’t you?” Raül said.
I looked at him for a moment: he was staring out the windscreen, his lips curled into a sardonic smile.
“You take care of your own affairs,” I advised, turning back to the road, “and I’ll take care of mine.”
“O.K., man, don’t get mad at me,” he said, satisfied that he had managed to put me on the defensive, “I was only asking out of curiosity, O.K.?”
As I’ve said, my son was a little full of himself, to use a polite expression. But, perhaps because there was a jokey competitiveness to our relationship and I wanted to prove to him that, if I had not started writing again, it was not for want of inspiration but because I did not want to write or had not found the right moment, I began to reel off possible subjects for my next book, and when I mentioned Marco’s case, summoning it from the limbo of my abortive projects, Raül interrupted me.
“That’s a good subject,” he said.
“You remember Marco?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course,” he said. “The old guy who said he’d been in a concentration camp but it turned out he was a liar, yeah?”
“Exactly.”
“Interesting guy,” he mused. “You can’t be that much of a liar and not be interesting.”
Although he was playing the tough guy again, I thought, he was right. Marco was extraordinary, I thought. Suddenly I felt that, though I had twice given up on the story, it had been through a lack of courage, because I sensed that in the old man something was hiding that interested me, or that profoundly concerned me and I was afraid to discover what it was. Raül said something that I did
n’t hear; I asked him to say it again.
“I said I could help you.”
“Writing a book about Marco?”
“Sure. You’ll have to talk to Marco, won’t you? I mean, so he can tell you his life story. Well, I can film you guys while you’re talking. That way you only have to worry about what he’s saying, and you’ll have the whole thing on tape and you can watch it whenever you like. And this way, I can see whether the whole cinema thing is cool or not.”
I pretended that I appreciated his offer, though in fact I was thinking that not only had I twice given up on Marco’s story because I sensed it involved deeply personal issues that I was afraid to investigate, but worse, I had given up because of a fear I could barely admit: the fear that I would be accused of playing into Marco’s hands, of trying to understand him and in doing so, to forgive him, of being complicit with this man who had mocked the victims of the worst crime in human history. I remember Teresa Sala’s cautionary words: “I do not think we need to understand the reasons for Señor Marco’s deception”; I also remembered Primo Levi’s words “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify.” More than once in the previous four years, while I was writing my novel with fiction, I had thought about both quotes, particularly what Primo Levi had written and the manifest incoherence that he should have written this while at the same time he had spent his whole life attempting to understand the Holocaust through his books (to say nothing of the fact that he had also written things like the following: “For a secular man like me, the essential is to understand and to make others understand”). To understand is to justify, I thought every time I remembered this phrase. Should we forbid ourselves from understanding, or did we rather have a duty to understand? Until one day, a few days or weeks before my conversation with Raül, I accidentally came across Levi’s phrase again and found the solution.
The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9) Page 4
