The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  This was the only thing I learned in that abortive interview. Some days later, Casanas’ wife telephoned to say that she had inquired about Marco from her husband’s brother, Rogeli, who was two years younger, but that, like her, he had not heard his brother mention Marco’s name in his stories of the war. At the time, I had read all, or almost all the interviews given by Casañas and consulted the historians who had interviewed him when he still had his memory; Marco made no appearance, no-one had heard Casañas speak of him, just as Casañas was not mentioned in the war stories that Marco had written and which had been published while Casañas remembered enough to confirm or deny them. In this way, I realised that this was likely an example of the way in which Marco usurped other people’s pasts, or inserted himself into them: the chances are that Marco was not at the Sant Andreu barracks on July 19, and in order to “prove” that he was, he sought corroboration from an authentic witness who, as in the case of his friend Casañas, was no longer in a position to refute his story.

  Marco’s July 19 epic was undoubtedly a fiction, but had he had an Uncle Anastasio, and had he been who Marco said he was? Had he fought in the war in Majorca and in Huesca, and had Marco been with him? It was impossible to know, or at least I was unable to confirm it: during my research I searched for his uncle Anastasio on the internet, in libraries, periodicals and archives, and while there was no reason to doubt that he existed, I could find no documentary evidence that he was an anarchist, nor a friend or acquaintance of Durruti, nor a former Republican solider. This fruitless search, however, is not enough to dismiss the possibility that Uncle Anastasio was all of these things, or some of them, nor that Marco had been with him during the Battle of Majorca, or fought with him on the Huesca front, though at the time he would have been little more than a child, and his memories of both incidents are vague, confused and generic, as was apparent to the members of Ateneu Llibertari Estel Negre – the Black Star Libertarian association of Majorca – who, in late February 2004, a year before Marco was unmasked, invited our man to give a talk about his experiences of the invasion, and many of those in attendance came away with the impression that Marco had not set foot in Majorca in 1936, since he scarcely gave any concrete details of what happened there. This, too, does not prove that our man did not take part in the operation; after all, he was trying to remember something that had happened almost sixty years earlier, and such a long period can blur and erase everything. Furthermore, I mentioned earlier the chaotic and unplanned nature of the Majorca operation, and the fact that some of those who participated were mere boys, something that explains why many reliable historians find it easier to accept the notion that Marco travelled to Majorca at fifteen than the notion that he fought on the Segre front at seventeen and was elevated to the rank of warrant officer.

  Did Marco truly fight on the Segre front? As I have said, compared to the details he gives of his time in Majorca and Huesca, those of his time in Segre are much more plentiful and precise, or that, at first, was my impression. This impression began to crumble when I discovered that, right up to the moment when his deception was unmasked, various historians had spoken to Marco to glean information about the battles fought there, and not only did their questions elicit nothing, or almost nothing by way of answer but, like the members, or some of the members, of Estel Negre in Majorca, they left Marco with the unsettling impression that he had not lived through the events in question. For my part, knowing Marco (or the form and the purposes of Marco’s fictions) I would bet that the episode with the legendary “Quico” Sabaté is a lie from beginning to end. There is no doubt that Sabaté did indeed fight on the Segre front at the end of the war; but that is where the truth ends (at least I believe so). In fact, Marco never spoke to me about his supposed meeting with the guerrillero, perhaps because he was afraid that, at this point in our relationship, or my knowledge of him, I would not believe him. The entire incident, it hardly needs saying, is characteristic of Marco’s novelistic imagination, just as the high-flown and sentimental tone of his letter to the editor of El País is that of his fictions (“Quico spilled every last drop of his blood and much more besides to win men greater freedom and to transform society”); and the goal of the text is no different to that of Marco’s other fabrications: in it, he appears to be defending the figure of the indomitable anarchist when in fact he is vindicating himself as a comrade of the indomitable anarchist, and doing so at an opportune moment; the letter was sent to El País in January 2000, shortly before the great craze for so-called historical memory in Spain, so that his connection to a hero of the anti-fascist resistance might burnish Marco with some of that heroism and furnish him with moral and political capital.

  Lastly, what can be said about the wound caused by the exploding shell which, according to Marco’s account, had him sent back from the front lines at Segre and forced him to endure an itinerant convalescence at various field hospitals behind the lines before returning him to Barcelona, where he spent months recovering? In this case, the incident seemed to me to be suspicious, not to say implausible from the outset (and not simply because of the dubious vagueness of Marco’s account). Firstly, there is no mention of it in any of his biographies, even the most exhaustive – the one he dictated to Pons Prades in 1978, the one dictated to Jordi Bassa in 2002 – and this detail seemed to me inexplicable, because a war wound is too important to leave out, especially in stories intended to vindicate the military past of the protagonist. Secondly, almost all those I managed to interview who knew Marco as a young man – including his first wife’s only daughter, her sister and brother-in-law – knew or believed they knew that Marco had fought during the war, and yet none of them had ever heard of him returning injured from the front. Thirdly, the injury itself: was it likely that a wound from an exploding shell could leave not the slightest scar, yet render the victim semi-conscious and forced to recuperate for such a long period? In an attempt to answer this question, I spoke to doctors and consulted contemporary medical books, and those of the period, and from this I concluded that, if the injury were real, it could only have been caused by the rupture of an internal organ, almost certainly the stomach, which would would leave no scar and could be caused by a powerful explosion near the victim. But I also concluded that it was very unlikely that anyone could survive such an injury at the time and in the conditions Marco claimed: if he were not to die of an internal haemorrhage or peritonitis, the patient would have required an operation, something that Marco himself insists was not performed and which, had it been performed, would have left a scar; moreover, such a procedure would have been exceedingly complex in the chaos and confusion of the front lines during the final weeks of the war in Catalonia. To recover from an injury of this nature without surgery would have been almost a miracle, and I do not believe in miracles.

  This, in more or less these very words, I explained to Marco one day on the veranda of his house. It was in September 2013, we had spent hours discussing details of his life, and, after a bitter war of words, a dispirited, reluctant Marco eventually accepted that perhaps he had not returned from the war wounded. In that moment I realised that, assuming our man had fought on the front lines, and had come home during the winter of 1939, at some point in the retrospective process of forging a glorious biography for himself, he decided that the idea of not going into exile after the war, of remaining in Barcelona did not square with his hero’s journey, even though he stayed in Barcelona or claims that he stayed in Barcelona motivated by the fearless aim of joining the armed underground resistance and certainly not, as with most republican soldiers, motivated by the prosaic, jaded, spontaneous aim of going unnoticed, avoiding any reprisals and surviving their defeat. No: the heroic fictional character Marco created needed a very good reason for not choosing the path of exile, and the best his creator could come up with was a serious war wound.

  *

  So, did Marco fight in the war? Or was it all lies from beginning to end? This, certainly, is what I thought for a long
time and, although I do not believe in miracles, it took a miracle to convince me that I was wrong.

  A miracle, or something that, when it happened, seemed to me a miracle. Or almost. What happened was that, one day, I stumbled on the photocopy of a news item published in La Vanguardia on September 29, 1938, the point at which Marco said he had been on the Segre front; it was brought to me in my office one afternoon in April 2013 by Xavier González Torán, my assistant in Barcelona. The article gave an account of two acts of “civico-military confraternity”, two celebrations in two different locations on the Republican front which, for obvious reasons in time of war, were not named: the first was a festival “organised by the first radio company of Communications Battalion of the Eastern Army”; the second was held “to mark the end of training at the Officers Field School of the 121st brigade”. According to the anonymous reporter, this latter party, which included the children of the town, began with a football match, which was followed by a meal peppered with speeches from the leader and the comisario of the brigade and concluded in the evening with movies and music. Before this, and after the meal and the speeches, there was a reading of the full list of aspiring officers at the school. The news item gave the names, the battalions and the grades of the top five graduates; the first among them, I read, belonged to the third battalion and achieved a grade of 85.33. His name was Enric Marco Batlle.

  LA VANGUARDIA ESPAÑOLA 29 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 1938

  ACTS OF CIVICO-MILITARY CONFRATERNITY

  In a villa in Catalonia, a festival was organised by the first radio company of the Signal Brigade of the Eastern Army.

  Señorita Pepita Bonet, representing the anti-fascist women of the area, presented the leader of the aforementioned company, capitán don Mario Fusero, with a splendid pennant. To the strains of the National and Catalan anthems, the first radio company marched in strict formation, accompanied by the townspeople.

  At the Town Hall, the band of the XVIII C. E. played various pieces chosen from their select repertoire. Afterwards there was a recital of sardanas and toasts were drunk.

  In the afternoon, great crowds attended a dazzling ball, with music provided by the dance band of the same regiment.

  In the evening the band of the XVIII C.E. performed with Cecilia Gubert, Rosa Llopis, Emilio Vendrell and Manuel Abad, which delighted the audience.

  Present at the festival were don Santiago Herrera, the commandante of the Signal Brigade; commanders and officers of the XVIII C.E., other military personnel, the town council as well as political and union representatives.

  – To celebrate the end of training at the Officers Training School of the 121st Brigade, a charming ceremony was held, to which the boys and girls from the local civilian population were specially invited. It began with a football match between teams from the field training school and the Medical Corps of the 120th Brigade.

  Afterwards, there was a meal to which all the trainees and the children were invited. It is worth mentioning the presentation of a bulletin board, made by the schoolchildren.

  The guests of honour at this act of confraternity, the commandant and the comisario, gave speeches highlighting the excellent morale of the troops and their selflessness in training the soldiers.

  Later, the grades of the trainees were read out, of whom the top five were: Enrique Marco Batlle, third battalion, 85.33 points; Enrique Cabrellez, second battalion, 77.91 points; Ramón Benaiges, fourth battalion, 72.84 points; Jaime Prat, second battalion, 68.14; Pedro Riera, second battalion, 57.88 points.

  In the afternoon, there was a broadcast of phonograph records, and in the evening a cinematographic presentation.

  I gave a start, and cried out. It was true: Marco had fought in the war, more than that he had fought, just as he claimed, with the 3rd Battalion of the 121st Brigade of the 26th Division – the former Durruti Column. It was true: Marco had been a corporal in the Republican army (indeed it was possible that he ended the war a sergeant; on the other hand it is sheer fantasy that he ended it as a lieutenant, though Marco claimed as much in one of the numerous supposedly autobiographical texts he sent to the Amical de Mauthausen after his deception was unmasked in an attempt to prove that, if he had not been in a Nazi concentration camp, he had nonetheless been a valiant fighter against fascism). It was true and it was unbelievable. As I read the article, I remember the suspicion Marco’s account had inspired in historians of the Battle of Segre, and I thought about the fragility of memory, about the war, and about Fabrice del Dongo and Pierre Bezukhov, the protagonists of The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace, who fought at the battles of Waterloo and Borodino yet barely realised what was happening around them, and would have been able to recount as little of these battles as Marco of the Battle of Segre. And once again I thought that every great lie is constructed from small truths, it is formed from them. But I also thought that, in spite of the unexpected documented fact that had just appeared, the greater part of Marco’s war exploits were a lie, another invention of his monstrous egotism and the insatiable desire for fame. Now, much later, I still think the same thing: Marco was not at the Sant Andreu barracks on July 19, he did not fight with the Columna Roja at Huesca, he was not one of “Quico” Sabaté’s guerrillas fighting in enemy territory, nor was he wounded at the Battle of Segre. This is what I think. Although I also think that I cannot be certain that Marco did not travel to Majorca in the summer of 1936, with his uncle Anastasio, or that I cannot be any more certain than the historians of the Battle of Segre were that Marco had never set foot on the front lines there. I think about this, and I think about the moment when, as though I were about to peel away the last onion skin of Marco’s heroic biography, the last layer of fiction clinging to his imaginary character, I explained, also on the veranda of his kitchen, that I did not believe he had travelled to Majorca with his uncle Anastasio, and asked him to admit the truth. Marco was sitting opposite me, elbows on the table, fingers interlaced; as I remember it now, this may have happened on the same day he admitted he did not come home wounded from the war, perhaps shortly after he confessed it. The fact remains, on hearing my words, Marco buried his face in his hands in a gesture that, though melodramatic, did not seem melodramatic to me; then he pleaded: “Please, leave me something.”

  I leave him this.

  10

  What did Marco do after the war? Or what does he say he did?

  As I have already related: when he arrived back in Barcelona from the Segre front in the winter of 1939, just as the war was ending, Marco sought refuge in the home of his aunt Ramona, a porter’s lodge the republican authorities had given her husband, Uncle Anastasio, to compensate him as a disabled serviceman. The house was on the corner of Lepanto and Travessera de Gracia in the district of El Guinardó; though it had two floors, it was tiny: downstairs, in the porter’s lodge itself, were a cramped kitchen and dining room in addition to a cubicle where the porter could sit to regulate the comings and goings of neighbours; upstairs, almost on the terrace of the building, were two bedrooms, also tiny. I have likewise explained that it was some time before Marco set foot outside. On the one hand, he says he needed to recuperate from his war wound, he had no papers, and no desire to regularise his legal position, since his dignity would not allow him to accept the Franco regime, and because reprisals against people like him (a warrant officer in the losing army who had also been a militant in the C.N.T.) could be very harsh; on the other hand, he was overcome, he says, by a mixture of fear, disgust and shame. For an idealistic young rebel like him, who had come through the libertarian revolution, had fought in a war and was prepared to carry on fighting to overthrow the Franco regime, his disgust and shame were greater than his fear.

  The porter’s lodge was located next to the Lepanto barracks and, during the first weeks or months, Marco confined himself to spying on life from his window, according to one of the autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical texts he sent to the Amical de Mauthausen after his imposture was uncovered. He spied on
the military parades, spurred on by the strains of the victors’ anthems and led by the pennants and the flags of Francoism that, only recently, he had seen fluttering against luminous morning skies on the far side of the trenches; he spied on the processions, the stations of the cross, the worship of the religious symbols abolished during the Second Republic, between lines of kneeling men and women wearing mantillas carrying tall burning candles, and spied on the legion of arms making the Roman salute amid the crowds thronging the streets; lastly, he spied on the comings and goings of people in a city, starved, prostituted and trampled by the twin tyrannies of the Church and the Falangists, economically and morally corrupt, debased and despoiled by the greed and arrogance of the victors, a city where, scarcely three years earlier, the people had taken up arms and crushed a military uprising, and this same proud people that, throughout the war, had fought for freedom with a courage and a dignity admired all over the world was now broken, servile, cowardly, destitute, a people of empty baskets and lowered heads, of petty crooks, collaborationists, delinquents, informants, blackmailers and masters of the black market, a people exiled in their own city, a city where Marco knew that he would drown because he could not accept the barbarous, abject, claustrophobic life the new regime wanted to impose, a city where, despite everything, he was determined to stay to fight for justice and dignity as he had always done, steadfast to the libertarian ideals of his youth.

  This he did, or this is what he has always said he did. Hardly had he recovered from his war wound than he began to venture out and, to hide his clandestine activities behind a innocuous façade – and in passing help Aunt Ramona pay the bills – he quickly found a job in the workshop on calle París, at the corner of Viladomat. The owner, Felip Homs, an elderly Republican who needed an apprentice because his son was engaged in one of the endless military service programmes that the victors used to punish the vanquished soldiers, took on his new trainee without asking any questions or requesting any documents and, later, on discovering he had been an anti-fascist volunteer in the Republican army, congratulated him. Thus Marco began to build a life for himself that was normal, or almost normal. Though he did his utmost to control himself, by nature the lad was impulsive, often reckless, incapable, in any case, of meekly enduring the humiliations of the victors, with whom he became embroiled in constant confrontations. He went to the cinema as often as he could, but, so as not to have to stand, right arm extended in fascist salute, as the Falangist national anthem played before and after the film, he would go in after the movie had started and leave just before it ended. He was not alone in practising this minor form of defiance, and perhaps because of this, one day the film was unexpectedly stopped in mid-reel, the houselights came up and the first chords of “Cara al Sol” blared out, in order to force the audience to stand and salute. This ruse caught Marco unawares, sitting in the middle of the cinema, next to the aisle, but he did not move; he sat motionless, glued to his seat, while all around him, as the music boomed, the crowd rose to its feet, sprouting a forest of arms. Then, without taking his eyes off the blank screen, Marco felt a presence in the aisle next to him; before he turned, he knew it was an army officer. In fact, it was a sergeant. He stared at Marco. “Aren’t you going to stand?” asked the sergeant. Marco held the man’s gaze; as he did so he noticed that the music had stopped, the place was silent, all eyes were trained on them. “No,” he replied. The sergeant glowered at him for a few seconds longer and then turned on his heel and left. As for Marco, he says that he did what he did that day without thinking; contradictorily, he also says that he did it for himself, to preserve his own dignity, but mostly for the others, to preserve the dignity of everyone.