The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  It was here that Marco had been for some hours, or here that he says he was. At the time, he had just turned fifteen, he had spent a few days in La Trinidad, helping his uncle Francesc and his aunt Caterina in the shop and, like everyone else, he knew that something was brewing, perhaps the outbreak of the revolution, perhaps a military coup, perhaps both at once. On Sunday morning, as the sirens in every factory in the city wailed, he heard about the military uprising and the pitched battles being fought since dawn, and he received instructions, or he says he received instructions from the workers’ parties and the unions (not just the C.N.T., to which he claims he belonged), instructions telling all those with guns to proceed to the city centre with the aim of stopping the uprising; those without weapons were to go to the nearest barracks to get them, or at least to show the military that the people were opposed to the uprising.

  The barracks closest to La Trinidad was the Maestranza barracks in Sant Andreu, and so this is where Marco went. He does not remember at what time he arrived, but he remembers that when he did, there were already people at the gates prepared to confront the rebels, people not only from Sant Andreu and La Trinidad, but also from Santa Coloma, from La Prosperidad and other suburban districts of Barcelona. He says that among this diverse, angry crowd, he met someone who, over the years, would become one of his closest friends: a militant anarchist named Enric Casañas. He says he does not remember how long he was there, waiting for who knew what, but that at some point a Republican plane appeared in the skies and dropped a rain of pamphlets over La Maestranza while several soldiers fired at it. He says that the plane immediately disappeared, only to reappear over the barracks a little later, this time browbeating those inside to surrender and dropping a few bombs that, he says, produced more dust and noise than anything. But, he says, it was at this point that the barrack gates opened and, as one man, the crowd launched an attack, although what the attackers found inside was not what they had expected: there was nothing but a bunch of drunken, frightened soldiers wandering like idiots through courtyards and through mess halls full of the remains of food and drink, who gave up without a fight. Among other weapons stored in the Sant Andreu barracks that day were 30,000 rifles, and Marco says that people helped themselves to whatever they wanted, and that he ended up with a musket. And this is all that Marco remembers of that day, or all that he says he remembers.

  Of the days that followed, he remembers almost nothing other than the jubilation of the triumphant revolution in Barcelona, but what he does remember or says that he remembers is that three weeks later, in the midst of the exceptional euphoria of that revolutionary summer, his uncle Anastasio took part in the Conquest of Majorca.

  *

  It was one of the most senseless operations in this senseless war. The British historian, Antony Beevor, manages to sum it up succinctly in a single paragraph: “The largest operation in the east at this time was the invasion by Catalonian militia of the Balearic Islands. Ibiza and Formentera were taken easily and on 16 August 8,000 men with the support of the battleship Jaime I and two destroyers invaded Majorca under the command of an air force officer, Alberto Bayo, later to be Fidel Castro’s guerrilla trainer. The invaders established a bridgehead unopposed, then paused as if in surprise. For once the militia had artillery, air and even naval support, yet they gave the nationalists time to organise a counterattack. Modern Italian aircraft arrived and strafed and bombed the invading force virtually unopposed. The withdrawal and reembarkation, ordered by the new minister of marine, Indalecio Prieto, turned into a rout. The island then became an important naval and air base for the nationalists for the rest of the war.”

  What more is there to be said to this analysis? That the operation was utter chaos. That those involved in the operation did not simply include armed militiamen, but also women, old men and children. That although the secretary of the navy gave the order to retreat, no-one had informed him of the operation, just as no-one had informed the minister for war, nor even the president of the Republic. That the expeditionary force lacked medical services, field hospitals and adequate supplies, and that, when they retreated, they left the beaches strewn with corpses and the island in the hands of an Italian fanatic with a thick red beard named Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi, nicknamed “Count Rossi”, who, in his black fascist uniform with a white cross on the collar, spent several months crisscrossing the island in a crimson racing car accompanied by a chaplain of the Falange, ordering the summary execution of workers. And that, in spite of what Beevor calls the “crushing defeat” of the Catalonian militiamen, when they returned home, Radio Barcelona announced: “The heroic Catalan columns have returned from Majorca after a glorious campaign. Not a single man suffered during a campaign that Capitan Bayo, with incomparable tactical skill, managed to accomplish magnificently, thanks to the morale and the discipline of our invincible militiamen.”

  Marco was one of them; by which I mean, one of the invincible militiamen who suffered a crushing defeat. Or so he insists. His memories of this farce, however, are scant and unclear. He claims that he eagerly joined the fight because, despite being barely fifteen years old, he was an impetuous and idealistic youth, very different from boys nowadays, he contends, but just like most boys of the time, caught up in the dream of building a happy and just world, or at least a better world; but he admits that his main reason for joining was following in the footsteps of his uncle Anastasio, who, as an employee of Transmediterránea, sailed every week to the Balearic Islands, where he had friends and acquaintances and who, on discovering that the archipelago had fallen into the hands of the fascists, felt it was his duty to help. Marco says he shipped out on the Mar Negro, which may have belonged to Transmediterránea, and came home on the Jaime I. He says that his principal memory is one of utter confusion and constant improvisation, with everyone giving orders that no-one obeyed. He says that he shipped out clinging to the real protection of his uncle Anastasio and the illusory protection of the musket that he had taken from Sant Andreu barracks and barely knew how to use. He says that, during the crossing, he joined a group of young boys like him who were called the Musketeers, because they wore tricorn hats. He says that he thinks he remembers them, protected by the warship and the destroyers, landing at Son Cervera, but he also says that he barely set foot on land because his uncle forbade him and he spent hours playing war games with the rest of the Musketeers on the deck of the ship. He says that when they arrived they realised they were not the only ones who had come to liberate the islands, and that a similar expedition had set out from Valencia (or had already arrived from there), under the command of an officer from the Guardia Civil named Uribarri. He says that the exhilaration of the first days quickly turned to unease when they began to receive news that the militiamen who had gone ashore had been met, not by people elated at the prospect of being liberated, but by deserted towns and villages whose inhabitants had fled, and that unease turned to disappointment (though not to panic or to a sense of defeat) when the retreat began, a retreat that, to him, seemed no more disorganised than the shipping out and which left the beaches strewn, not with corpses, as I have written in accordance with the accounts of witnesses and historians, but with military equipment. He says he remembers nothing of the voyage home except that everyone aboard blamed the failure of the operation on disagreements between Bayo and Uribarri.

  Back on the mainland, he says, they disembarked not in Barcelona but in Valencia, and he also says that they had to make their way back to Barcelona by train. He says that he does not remember how much time he spent in Barcelona, but that days or weeks later, he and his uncle re-enlisted as volunteers, this time in the Columna Roja y Negra, a column (Marco does not say this; I am saying it) comprising anarchist militiamen who had taken part in the Majorca expedition that, under the command of the union leader, García Pradas, and Capitán Jiménez Pajarero, joined the Huesca front in mid-September. He says that it was here that he discovered what war really was. He says that it was here that he first s
aw a man die, and here, in the midst of a gun battle or an aerial bombardment, while he was lying under a truck attempting to protect himself from gunfire, he saw another man running across the road carrying his intestines in his hands and screaming for someone to help him put them back in his belly, frantically asking for anyone to treat his wound. He says that later the same day he discovered the man had died, and that the scene left him transfixed with horror, but that he quickly grew accustomed to the horror as, he says, happens to everyone during a war. He says that at some point, he does not remember when, his uncle Anastasio was wounded, a minor injury that nonetheless left him with a noticeable limp; and he says that this unforeseen incident triggered the end of his uncle’s war. But it was not the only cause, he says: his uncle was old, he was tired; besides, like so many anarchists, he scorned the government’s disbandment of the militias which resulted in the Columna Roja y Negra being integrated with the 28th Division of the People’s Republican Army. As a result, having voluntarily enlisted in the militias, Uncle Anastasio voluntarily resigned. His nephew did likewise, he said.

  Back in Barcelona, Marco says that he started working as a mechanic in the Ford factory. Since the factory had been collectivised, Marco can justly claim that he contributed to the war effort, mending cars, trucks and vans. He says that he was still a member of the C.N.T. and that he held a position in the union; he also says that he remembers little of his war years in the republican rearguard, except that he was involved in civil defence and that, one day in the spring of 1938, when an Italian bomb was dropped on Gran Vía, opposite the Coliseum cinema, on a truck carrying four tons of T.N.T., he helped to dig out of the ruins of the bombed-out buildings the bodies of almost a thousand victims killed in the blast, including 118 children. As for his uncle Anastasio, when he came back injured from Huesca, he managed to get a job as caretaker of a building on the corner of Lepanto and Travessera de Gracia, in the district of El Guinardó. There, with Aunt Ramona, the elderly anarchist lived for almost two years; he still limped, he was worn out and he drank heavily. He died in autumn 1938. Marco did not attend the funeral, because by then he was once more fighting at the front. Or so he says.

  7

  Is it possible to catch out a liar? The liar is sooner caught than the cripple, so runs the old Spanish proverb, but like so many proverbs – Spanish or otherwise – this is false: the cripple is much sooner caught than the liar, especially a liar as expert as Enric Marco. When the Marco scandal broke, many people assumed that, because Marco had lied about being interned in Flossenbürg, he had lied about everything else. This is a fallacious assumption and one that betrays a spectacular ignorance about the nature of great lies and great liars: great liars do not traffic only in lies, but in the truth, and big lies are composed of little truths; to quote “Ich bin Enric Marco”, “As every great liar knows, a lie can triumph only if it is shored up by truths.” Was the lie about his time in Flossenbürg the only one that Marco told? What were the truths that shored up Marco’s lie or lies, whether triumphant or not?

  For almost a year and a half, I worked full time attempting to identify them; by which I mean: I attempted to reconstruct the real life of Enric Marco. The first thing I did was listen to Marco, giving him my undivided attention, in long filmed sessions which I tried to steer towards my ends, sessions that initially took place in my office in Gracia but were later continued in his house, in conversations in bars and restaurants and on walks through the places of his childhood, his youth and his maturity. Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal loaned me the recordings of the dozens of hours they had spent talking to Marco in order to make their documentary. I engaged two assistants, one in Barcelona – Xavier González Torán – and another in Berlin – Carlos Pérez Ricart – thanks to whom I was able to read countless articles, interviews and news reports published about Marco, together with the documents detailing his life in Spain and in Germany. I watched and listened to innumerable radio and television interviews Marco had given and, after a certain point, I was allowed to consult his personal archive, which contained all manner of things, from articles and documents about him, to letters and autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical writings. I read books about psychology, about philosophy, about sociology, about history – especially about history. I talked with historians specialising in the Civil War, the anarchist movement, Nazi Germany, with former and current members of the C.N.T., of FaPaC, of the Amical de Mauthausen, with former and current neighbours and relatives of Marco, with bar owners, friends and pupils who had known him fifty years earlier, with lifelong friends and mortal enemies, with workers, doctors, lawyers, neurologists, with journalists and police officers. In general, I conducted these investigations alone, but sometimes I was accompanied by my son and also, now and then, by my wife. This was weird: like Marco, as a rule, I kept my family and my work separate; not in this case, the three of us frequently discussed Marco, we argued about him, joked about him. I am incapable of writing a book without it becoming an obsession, sometimes an unhealthy obsession (which is cured only when the book is completed), but I think that I had never before been as obsessed with a character as I was with Marco. There came a moment when everything happening to me had something to do with Marco, or referred me back to him, or contrasted with him. During this period, I regularly dreamed about Marco, and in those dreams, or rather those nightmares, I was arguing with this man, who, to defend himself, constantly accused me of being a liar and a charlatan, of being like him, of being much worse than him, sometimes even of being him.

  Naturally, one of the first people I talked to when I began investigating the life of Enric Marco was Benito Bermejo, the historian who had exposed his deception. The majority of our conversations took place on the telephone, and these calls rarely lasted less than an hour, but on one occasion I travelled to Madrid especially to see him. That day, Bermejo told me many things, including the fact that he had not given up on writing a book about Marco but that, for the moment, he had shelved the idea, perhaps mostly because he had moral qualms: he was tired of being a wet blanket, denouncing a liar was a thankless task, he had already done his work, to continue investigating Marco’s life might do damage to Marco and his family. Bermejo also relayed two important pieces of information, or rather one fact and one suspicion. The fact was that, contrary to what everyone, including Marco’s family, believed, he had not had two wives – Danielle Olivera, his current wife, and María Belver, his previous wife, with whom he had lived for twenty years, from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Seventies – but three. He told me that, some time after the story blew up (or he caused it to blow up), he had been nosing around in the archive in Alcalá de Henares and there, in the documentation of the Spanish volunteer workers sent by Franco to help Hitler in the 1940s, he had found a file on Marco recording his marriage to a woman named Ana Beltrán Ribes. Intrigued, he looked up the name in the Barcelona telephone directory, but he did not find her; he did, however, find a woman named Ana María Marco Beltrán and, thinking that she might be Marco’s daughter, he called her. The woman said that it was true, she was Marco’s daughter; she also told him that her mother and Marco had been married in the Forties, but she said that it was a subject she did not wish to discuss, that for her the matter was closed and no good could come of reopening it; in the end, she asked Bermejo to leave her in peace. He left her in peace. However, the following day, he received a call from a man who said he was the son of this woman and the grandson of Marco and, although this man insisted that he did want to discuss the subject, because he did not understand why his grandfather had hushed up his first family, the historian had decided to let it lie.

  Until now, this was Bermejo’s fact. As to his suspicion, it had to do with Marco’s role in the C.N.T., the anarchist union of which he became secretary general in the mid-Seventies, during the shift from dictatorship to democracy. That day, in Madrid, Bermejo mentioned – initially in his house, and later in a bar in the Chamberí area where he took me for lunch – the t
estimony of numerous anarchists who, long before Marco was unmasked, had publicly and privately, verbally and in writing, cast doubt, not only on his clandestine resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, but also on his conduct after the arrival of democracy while he was secretary general of the union. As Bermejo explained:

  “From a completely reliable source, I discovered that Marco was drawing a type of pension – known as Pensiones de Clases Pasivas – generally drawn only by civil servants or by those who had fought in the war (though it is also paid to victims of terrorist attacks and similar incidents). Marco says that he fought in the war, though I doubt it, for various reasons, including the fact that he was born in 1921 and those drafted in the last conscription by the Second Republic, the Quinta del Biberón – the Baby’s Bottle Call-up – were born in 1920.”

  This was in mid-February 2013, I had spent barely a month and a half immersing myself in Marco’s life, so I said:

  “Was Marco a civil servant?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Bermejo, “unless . . .”

  Bermejo trailed off, and I stared at him, unable to work out what he was getting at. Eventually, he finished the sentence:

  “Unless he is drawing the pension as a former police officer.”

  “You’re saying Marco was a snitch?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Bermejo corrected me. “A lot of other people have said as much, including some of his old comrades; or at least they have insinuated it. And I am not saying it is true: I am simply raising the possibility. A possibility that, incidentally, would help to explain some of the disasters that befell the C.N.T. in the 1970s, and almost destroyed what had been the most powerful union in the country during the Second Republic and an inconvenient factor in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Just imagine the damage a police informant within the union could have done to the anarchists back then. But, all in all, this is simply conjecture; maybe you can confirm it.”