The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  The paradox, however, is specious, because the emphasis on truth betrays the liar: in his denunciation of a country that hid the truth in order not to know itself or recognise itself, and his defence of the memory of the deportados, or simply of so-called historical memory, Marco, who had spent his life hiding the truth so as not to know or recognise himself, finally found a cause equal to his ambitions, the cause that would turn him into a popular hero and put the finishing touches to his plan to hide the truth about himself and his own past. The anarchist leader who made up for his lack of policy with his frenetic hyperactivity and the charming, funny, but rather insignificant old man at FaPaC were far behind him now; at Amical, or during the time he spent at Amical, Marco attained a different, superior stature. At an institution that literally lived off the past, because the past not only imbued everything with meaning but was its principal asset, its principal source of prestige and its principal instrument of power, an institution where no-one had a past to rival his, to say nothing of his youth, his energy and his gift with words, an institution that had made heroes of victims, Marco felt he was untouchable, he abandoned the wariness that had thus far informed his deception and lapsed into a vice that had thus far eluded him: arrogance. Betrayed by his insatiable need to play the starring role, feeling that he was now beyond harm, convinced that he was the character he had completely internalised over the course of hundreds and hundreds of talks and public speeches, believing himself armour-plated by virtue of his social status, his political prestige and his aura of hero, martyr and secular saint, from time to time, Marco could not resist launching into a subtle battle of egos with the elderly deportados; disparaging or looking down his nose at his co-workers at the Amical or his comrades in the cause, and, if the situation required, crushing them beneath the unassailable weight of his past as omnipresent demi-god in the history of the country; inventing new anecdotes that were utterly implausible, such as his conquests and sexual adventures in Flossenbürg camp; or even daring to dramatise for television incidents that, until now, had been no more than a few discreet sentences in a book and used in public only in his talks with schoolchildren, like the life-and-death chess match with the SS officer. Now he had no fear of saying anything because he believed that, whatever he said, people would unquestioningly believe him; now he no longer listened to anyone around him because he no longer considered anyone around him to be his equal. Arrogance was his downfall; arrogance and, ironically, forgetting the past: Marco forgot that the past is never dead, it is only an aspect or a dimension of the present, that it is not even past, as Faulkner says; it always returns but it does not always return to save, as, transformed into fiction, it had always or almost always saved him; sometimes, transformed into reality, it returns to kill. Because fiction saves and reality kills, or that is what Marco believed and what I believed, but the past sometimes saves and sometimes kills. And this time it killed him.

  4

  In the years when Marco was the public face of the Amical de Mauthausen, when he was transformed into a champion or a rock star of historical memory, Spain was experiencing the apotheosis of so-called historical memory; in fact it had reached its apotheosis all over Europe, but few countries experienced it as intensely as Spain. Why?

  The expression “historical memory” is ambiguous and deeply confusing. At heart it entails a contradiction: as I wrote in “The Blackmail of the Witness”, history and memory are opposites. “Memory is individual, partial and subjective,” I wrote, “history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective.” No-one capitalised on this insoluble antithesis better than Marco. Maurice Halbwachs, who developed the concept of historical memory, says that it is “borrowed memory”, in which we remember not our personal experiences, but those experienced by others and related to us; Marco practised this impossibility to the letter, fashioning his speeches from the memories of others (which partly explains why, in his talks, he would casually shift from “I” to “we”). Although in theory he did so to reclaim the memory of the victims, in practice he simply laid bare the futility and the lethal risks entailed in using this concept that is as absurd as it has been successful. If this were not enough, in Spain, aside from being an oxymoron the expression “historical memory” was a euphemism; so-called historical memory was in fact the memory of the Republican victims of the Civil War and of the Franco regime, and recovering or vindicating it entailed demanding redress for these victims and demanding truth and justice concerning the Civil War and the Franco regime in order to finally move beyond this terrible past.

  It was a perfectly just demand. Marco was both right and wrong: he was right when, in his speeches and his interviews, he said that Spanish democracy had been founded on a big collective lie; he was wrong when he said that it was founded on a pact of forgetting. It is a contradictory truth, or so it seems, but the truth often seems, or is, contradictory. Spanish democracy was founded on a big collective lie, or rather on a long series of little individual lies, because, as Marco knows better than anyone, during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, people constructed a fictitious past for themselves, lied about their true past, or embellished or embroidered it, the better to face the present and prepare for the future, eager to prove that they had always been democrats and, during the Franco regime, had been clandestine opponents, official pariahs, silent resistants, dormant or active anti-Francoists, all hoping to hide the fact that they had been apathetic, cowards or collaborators (and therefore, in this period of massive reinvention, Marco was not the exception but the rule). We do not know whether this was a necessary lie, one of Plato’s noble lies, one of Montaigne’s altruistic lies, one of Nietzsche’s vital lies – one of the fictions that saves from the reality that kills – nor do we know whether democracy could have been established in any other way, whether it could have been built on truth and the whole country have recognised or known itself, without dying, like Narcissus, when faced with its own reflection. The only thing we know is that it was a lie and that it is there, at the source, at the origin of everything.

  As for the pact of forgetting, it is not so much a falsehood as a cliché; that is to say, a half-truth. It is not true that during the Transition, memory was deactivated and people forgot the war, the post-war period, or even its victims; on the contrary, although the expression “historical memory” was not in general circulation at the time, the recent past was very much the fashion, one that was particularly beneficial to Marco, and, at the age of fifty, allowed him to build a new life for himself. In fact there was a great interest in history, or at least in that particular period of history: numerous books were published, numerous articles were written, films were made and conferences held about the Second Republic, the Civil War, the Republican exile, the Francoist courts-martial, the Francoist prisons, the anti-Franco guerrillas, the opposition to Franco and a thousand other subjects in an attempt to satiate the public’s obsessive thirst for information about a period that had hitherto been hushed up or distorted by the dictatorship; on the contrary there was a pact of remembering, which explains why, during the Transition, all or almost all the political parties came together in order not to repeat the mistakes that, forty years earlier, had triggered the Civil War, and which also broadly explains how it was possible to make the death-defying leap from dictatorship to democracy with no war, no bloodshed and without unleashing a reckless conflict. This was an implicit pact that forbade using the recent past as a weapon in political debate; had that period been forgotten, such a pact would have been irrational: it worked precisely because everyone remembered all too well.

  So, where is the truth in the half-truth that is the pact of forgetting? Aside from being a cliché, the pact of forgetting is another euphemism, a way of naming one of the principal failings of the Transition without naming it, it refers to the fact that there would be no thorough investigation into the recent past, no prosecution of the crimes of the dictatorship and no compensation for its victims. The first two of t
hese could probably not have been done at the time without undermining the democracy, or was believed by all or almost all the parties and all or almost all the people of Spain who chose not to pursue justice in exchange for building a democracy; as for the victims, it is not true that nothing was done, but it is true that not everything that should have been done was done, whether from a moral, material or symbolic point of view. In this, Marco was also right: although he was not among them, the victims of the dictatorship were the price paid, or an important part of the price paid for the Transition.

  And so, strictly speaking, the great myth of the “silence of the Transition” is just that, a myth; in other words, a mixture of truth and lies; in other words, a lie. In fact, the silence came later, in the Eighties, when the right-wing that grew out of Francoism, now in opposition, still had no desire to talk about the past because it only stood to lose by doing so, and the socialist left, now in power, was no longer interested in doing so because it had nothing to gain. As for the rest of us, we were too busy enjoying our pristine, brand-new future as rich, civilised Europeans to concern ourselves with our sordid recent past as impoverished, fratricidal Spaniards. This is the reality: we did not assimilate the past. This is what happened: the fashion for the past passed. At times, the past itself seemed to pass, or seemed to be past. But we know that, even if it seems so, the past is never dead, it cannot lapse, because – as Faulkner says – it’s not even past.

  And the past, inevitably, returned. In the second half of the Nineties, while throughout Europe the obsession with the cult of memory continued to thrive, in Spain the right won the elections and the left discovered the power of using their past during the Civil War and the Franco regime against them, since they were the heirs of Francoism and had never completely disaffiliated themselves. Something else happened at precisely the same time. A new generation of Spaniards was coming of age who, perhaps because they barely had an individual past or were barely conscious of it, had not been interested in their collective past, or not particularly: this was the moment they began to take an interest. These were the grandchildren of the Civil War, those who had no personal experience of war, and scarcely any memory of the Franco regime, but suddenly we discovered that the past is the present or a dimension of the present. The convergence of these two factors changed everything completely.

  This was the beginning of the apotheosis.

  In October 2000, a group of people who, three months later, would go on to found the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory excavated the bodies of three republicans murdered at the beginning of the Civil War and buried in a mass grave in El Bierzo, León. It was not the first time something of the kind had happened – in 1980, for example, a similar discovery took place in La Solana, Ciudad Real – but this incident garnered sufficient media attention to make it seem symbolic. In the years that followed, a movement began to emerge in Spain, particularly in Catalonia, Madrid and Andalucía, one that, in a short period, cultivated towns and cities with associations and foundations devoted to reviewing the past and vindicating the memory of the victims: in late 2003, there were some thirty organisations, but by late 2005, there were almost one hundred and sixty. These three years coincided with the three years when Marco was president of the Amical de Mauthausen and with the upsurge of so-called historical memory. During this period and in the three or four years that followed, mass graves were excavated, corpses exhumed, and attempts were made to trace the desaparecidos – estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Conventions, memorials, assemblies and seminars were held, theses were written, countless novels and books about the recent past were published and numerous films and documentaries were released, projects were devised to collect testimonies while political and institutional initiatives of every kind were launched, the most important of which was the Law of Historical Memory, which was first proposed when the Socialists regained power in 2004, and whose full title says all that needs to be said: “Law to recognise and extend rights and to establish measures in favour of those who have been victims of political persecution or violence during the Civil War and the Dictatorship”.

  The past had returned. It had come back stronger than ever. There is a German word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which can be translated, or which the writer Patricio Pron has translated as “the process of coming to terms with the past through its constant revision”. It describes a process begun by the Germans in the late Sixties, a quarter of a century after the end of the Nazi regime, with the purpose of facing up to their Nazi past; in 2001, a quarter of a century after the death of Franco, all signs point to the fact that Spain was beginning a similar process. The worst thing is to think / that you are right because you were right, says the poet José Ángel Valente; it is possible that in the late Seventies, just after the dictatorship in Spain, investigating and prosecuting its crimes and even compensating its victims would have made democracy impossible, and therefore, in the immediate aftermath of Franco’s death, it was as difficult for the Spanish to face up to the past, to recognise or know themselves and to see justice done as it was for the Germans in the immediate aftermath of the death of Hitler; but twenty-five years later, with democracy firmly rooted in the country, and the country firmly rooted within Europe, this was no longer the case, and the apotheosis of memory seemed to be a signal that Spain was about to repay its debt, the price it had paid for a bloodless transition from dictatorship to freedom: the symbols of Francoism that still lingered on the streets and the plazas would be eliminated, the dead would be buried with dignity, a record would be made of the desaparecidos, the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship would be fully compensated.

  All of these things were not simply reasonable, they were necessary. However, many things later began to seem suspicious; even I, who believed all these things were necessary (or perhaps because I believed it) began to find them suspicious. The proof being that, on January 2, 2008, after the so-called Law of Historical Memory was finally passed and Judge Baltasar Garzón requested information about those who disappeared during the war and the post-war period, intending to open an investigation into the crimes committed during the Franco regime, I published an article in El País entitled “The Tyranny of Memory” in which, having suggested that we forbid the use of the expression “historical memory” and speaking out against the dangers of the abuse of memory, especially the analogous and much greater danger that memory might come to be substituted for history, I praised the objectives of the movement in support of victims; but then qualified:

  *

  “It is a very different matter for the government to enact a law in order to do something it should long since have done without needing to pass a law, especially a law that has no teeth and one which, to cap it all, the authorities now seem reluctant to enforce: I do not find it remotely acceptable to have the government legislating about history, let alone about memory – just as I would not find it acceptable if it began to legislate about literature – because history is made by historians, not politicians, and memory is made by each of us, and because a law of this kind is embarrassingly evocative of the methods of totalitarian states, which know that the best way to control the present is to control the past; but the law is there to be enforced and, once ratified, it should be immediately and rigorously enforced. Nor is it acceptable that a judge has been tasked with doing something that – as I have just said – the government should already have done: Adolfo Suárez could not have done it, had he tried, La Moncloa would have been bombed; Felipe González did not do it; nor José María Aznar – it would have been good if he had, since it would have proved that the right had truly distanced itself from Francoism; and now since José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is all bark and no bite and reluctant to enforce, it is a good thing that Judge Garzón is prodding him a little (he will go no further, Garzón knows that what he is proposing is impossible).”

  *

  But there was something much more suspicious, and much more dangerous,
and this was the fact that what had started out as a deep-seated need in the country had quickly become a passing fad. Perhaps no-one realised this sooner or more acutely than Sergio Gálvez Biescas a member of the Department of Historical Memory at the Complutense University of Madrid: “At the intersection between associations, institutional initiatives and the work being carried out by investigators,” Gálvez Biescas wrote in 2006, “the Recovery of the Historical Memory of the victims of Francoist oppression has entered a competitive market that has turned these elements into both a powerful marketing tool and an instrument of control of the present in the service of political interests.” Interests, marketing, market, competitive: this was the transformation of historical memory into the industry of memory.

  What is the industry of memory? A business. What does the business produce? A pale imitation, a devaluation, a prostitution of memory; and also a prostitution, a devaluation, a pale imitation of history, because in an era of memory, memory takes up much of history’s space. To put it another way: the industry of memory is to genuine history what the entertainment industry is to genuine art and just as aesthetic kitsch is the product of the entertainment industry, so historical kitsch is the product of the industry of memory. Historical kitsch; in other words: a historical lie.