The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  “I told you, I write for intelligent people.”

  “And I told you that even idiots read you. Idiots and one-dimensional moralists, as your mentor Ferraté calls them. And even the sanctimonious hypocrites who had the gall to defend your little friend Vargas Llosa. And you are afraid of them. My God, you’re afraid. You are terrified that, because you spend your time defending liars, they will feel they are entitled to lie about you. About you and your family. That they have the right to eviscerate you and your family, especially your family. When all’s said and done, in Spain, people like nothing better than watching some guy ripping the guts out of another, right? That’s happened to you before, right? But that’s not the only thing you’re afraid of. Mostly you are afraid of damning yourself. You are afraid of damning yourself by telling my story just as Truman Capote damned himself telling the story of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood. That’s what you are really afraid of: you’re scared shitless. You’re terrified of ending up like Capote, ravaged by spite, snobbery and alcohol. You are afraid you’ve made a pact with the devil in order to be able to write this book, and you don’t have the guts to just make a pact and take the consequences, the way Capote did . . . Now I think about it, I know why you want to save me.”

  “Why?”

  “To save yourself, the way Dickens saved himself by saving Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. It’s childish. It’s pathetic. But the idea that you might damn yourself throws you into a panic. A terrible panic. And there is something else that makes you panic: the idea that people might find out that you, too, are a liar, a fraud. A liar as good as I am – or almost, and a fraud who is much better, because I was exposed but you have not yet been unmasked. Both of these things frighten you equally. Or almost. Or perhaps what frightens you is that this is the price you have to pay the Devil to tell my story, rather than Capote’s snobbery, his spite and his booze. That people will discover that you have spent your whole life deceiving everyone. Discover that you are the impostor, as your friend Martínez de Pisón told you at Vargas Llosa’s house in Madrid. Remember? Clever guy, the man from Aragon. He truly had the measure of you, he truly realised who you were, that what terrified you was the thought that people would discover you are not what you seem, and so you make a superhuman effort to try to convince people that you are what you are not, a good writer, a good citizen, a decent person and all that respectable drivel. God, the effort you make, your life must be excruciating, much worse than mine, or what people believe mine was like before I was exposed: getting up every morning at first light, spending all day writing to keep up the imposture, so they do not catch you out, so no-one realises, reading what you’ve written, that as a writer you are a farce, a writer with no talent, no intelligence, with nothing to say, spending every day pretending that you are not a puppet, a brainless moron, a pathetic human being, a completely antisocial creep and an utter bastard. Doesn’t it make your head spin? Aren’t you tired of pretending that you are something that you’re not? Why don’t you just confess, like I did? You’ll feel calmer, I can assure you, you’ll feel relieved. You will be able to know or recognise yourself, you will no longer be hiding from everyone behind your writing, you will finally be able to be who you are. I know that this is what you want. I did not want it, but you do. Otherwise, why are you writing this book? I understand that you did everything you could not to write it, that for years you refused to write it, that you postponed the moment for as long as possible; it is only natural that you were afraid to face the truth. But now, you have almost finished it and you have no choice but to face it. Besides, deep down, you have known the truth from the first, the very moment the scandal about me broke; that was precisely why you did not want to write about it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tell me something, why did you title your article in El País ‘I am Enric Marco’”?

  “Because the film by Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal was called “Ich bin Enric Marco”, which is German for ‘I am Enric Marco’.”

  “Bullshit: you called it that because you knew from the beginning that, like me, you were a charlatan and a liar, that you have all my flaws but none of my virtues, and that I am your reflection in a dream, or in a mirror. And that is why I am asking you to defend me, to forget about saving me and defend me, because neither you nor I can save ourselves, but in defending me you defend yourself. That is the truth, Javier. The truth is that you are me.”

  9

  The uproar surrounding the Marco scandal far surpassed the most pessimistic predictions of Marco, who, with wilful naivety, had expected a discreet scandal limited to the community of deportados, perhaps deportados and historians, or at worst the Catalan community. In reality, the scandal echoed across five continents. It was inevitable: firstly, because his deception had been astounding, secondly because anything related to the Holocaust has a universal dimension. Besides, the headline could not have been more gripping, it wrote itself and, despite minor variants, it was universal; it was also inevitable, true and devastating: “The president of the Spanish association of Nazi camp survivors was never in a Nazi camp”.

  But, although the shockwave from the media earthquake reached the furthest corners of the planet, its epicentre was in Spain, particularly in Catalonia, where, as the editorial in Avui noted, Marco was a “beloved figure”. Many other newspapers devoted their editorials to Marco, including those with the largest circulation: El País, La Vanguardia and El Periódico. There was probably not a single media outlet in Spain that did not pick up the story, did not publish an article, a feature, an interview, a statement or a joke about Marco, nor a single talk-show host on radio or television who did not offer an opinion on the case, nor a single columnist who did not write an article about him or mention him in some form, nor a “letters to the editor” page that did not feature a letter about him. Most of the comments were disparaging; besides impostor and liar, Marco was called every name under the sun: swine, scoundrel, bastard, crook, traitor, scum; at least two articles opined that the best thing he could do was take his own life; in Barcelona, Neus Català, a former inmate of Ravensbrück and a member of the Amical, said that Marco had mocked the memory of the dead, while, in Paris, Ramiro Santisteban, president of F.E.D.I.P. (the Spanish Federation of Deportados and Political Prisoners), suggested that Marco deserved to be tried and sentenced by the Spanish courts. Marco’s former enemies at the C.N.T., who, even after twenty-five years had not forgotten the turmoil caused by the internecine struggles within the union, resurrected the old accusations about their former secretary general, that he had been a government or a state collaborator, perhaps a police informant, perhaps one of those was behind the Scala affair and the collapse of the C.N.T., which caused a number journalists, as young as they were bloodthirsty, and ignorant of the political squabbles that had triggered the decline, dutifully to follow this sensational lead, attempting to uncover the only part, or almost the only part, of Marco’s past that had not yet been exposed. In short: during these turbulent days, Marco was thrust into the limelight more than he had ever imagined, but not for the reasons he had imagined. In short: Marco had managed to become a beloved figure, a civil hero, a champion or a rock star of so-called historical memory, but in a few short days he became the great impostor and the great pariah.

  This is what he has been ever since. In spite of that, from the beginning, Marco had his defenders. Not all of those who defended him did so to be contentious, to draw attention to themselves or to set themselves up as non-conformist conformists; some seemed to be genuine in their defence of him. Among them, there were those who rehashed the arguments used by Marco himself, particularly the argument that his lie was a good lie, or at worst a venial sin, since it had contributed to publicising truths that needed to be known, or that he had done so because the genuine camp survivors were no longer able and someone needed to step in for them. But there were also those who defended Marco by arguing that the press was engaged in an auto-da-f�
�, a shameful bloodletting intended to hide the true culprit for the deception, which was not Marco but the press itself, which had accepted, exploited and broadcast Marco’s lies; according to this interpretation, the “Marco affair” was actually the affair of those gullible, opportunistic, incompetent journalists who felt they had been ridiculed and swindled by Marco and were now avenging themselves by pillorying him with savage cruelty. There were also people who appended to this a further argument, whereby there were impostors who were much worse than Marco, whose lies triggered wars, suffering and death and whose crimes went unpunished, great liars whom the media did not dare criticise, who were revered and treated with kid gloves by everyone. There was no shortage of those who tried to argue that we are all impostors and that, in one way or another, we all reinvent our past, and hence everyone is tainted with Marco’s guilt.

  At the Amical de Mauthausen, the Marco affair triggered the worst crisis in the 43-year history of the association. As acting president, Rosa Torán attempted to control the situation and minimise the damage by giving press conferences, holding meetings and distributing statements refuting false information and defending the actions of the board of directors; and also by sending letters to every possible authority, soliciting their compassion and their support and assuring them that, despite the scandal, the work of the association was continuing. Torán had no more success than might be expected. Although the authorities feigned compassion and continued to provide financial support, and although there were some who joined the association in an attempt to buttress the teetering organisation in the midst of this earthquake, the fact is that respect for the organisation suffered so much that many wondered whether it would survive. The problems did not all come from without, but also (perhaps especially) from within. Members’ meetings degenerated into pitched battles: there were screams, insults, doors slammed, violent scuffles; there were innumerable attacks on the board, in which they were accused of every imaginable wrong, of having poorly managed the scandal, having known for some time that Marco was an impostor and hidden the fact for spurious or unspeakable reasons; some resigned from the board and some resigned from the association; some declared that the Amical was dead and it was necessary to rebuild it. In an attempt to finance the association, on June 5, almost a month after the Marco scandal broke, members held the first and only extraordinary general meeting of the Amical in Barcelona, at which they elected a new board, and a new president, Jaume Álvarez, a camp survivor and founding member of the association. It had no effect: although the Amical survived the Marco affair, it was mortally wounded and its subsequent history has been one of gradual decline, as has that of the so-called movement for the recovery of historical memory.

  But the person who suffered most from the Marco affair was Marco himself. As I have said, the magnitude of the scandal far exceeded his worst expectations; his response to it, however, was exactly as he had planned: he put up a fight, defended himself by attacking or attacked by defending himself. In the days when the character he had spent his life creating seemed to be collapsing on top of him with an apocalyptic rumble, Marco stood firm against the avalanche of public condemnation and abuse, and, to judge by his actions and his words, at no point did he consider running away or hiding, at no point did he think of retreating or surrendering, still less committing suicide, at no point did he refuse to face the consequences. However one judges him from a moral standpoint, this in itself is astonishing, especially considering that he was an old man of eighty-four. It is no less astonishing that, rather than hole up in his house for ever, or seek exile in an igloo in Lapland, or simply put a bullet in his head, Marco gave countless interviews to the press, radio and television, interviews in which he was routinely accused of being a liar and an impostor, in which he was mauled half to death. All of this simply served to magnify the scandal, which continued to grow, but Marco did not seem to care. One might conjecture that Marco’s mediopathy felt a secret jubilation at this overexposure in the media; that may be true, but what is certain is that he was humiliated and insulted beyond endurance and his pride took such a knock that it is incredible that he did not go under.

  It is incredible, but that is how it was. Marco did not avoid a single meeting with a single journalist. In every interview, with minor variations, he trotted out the handful of arguments which he had contrived or cobbled together in the days before the scandal broke and which, gradually, as the days passed, he developed, polished and improved, incorporating new arguments and perfecting the old ones. There were interviews in which Marco appeared to be penitent and others where he did not seem to repent; in most of them he seemed simultaneously penitent and unrepentant. In some of the first interviews he granted – I am thinking of one that was conducted on the day the scandal broke, on Catalan public television, by Josep Cuní, one of the most influential journalists in the country – Marco seemed at times to be nervous and indignant, almost on the brink of tears. Gradually, however, he settled down and regained his composure; gradually, without abandoning his original tenets – he had not lied, he had simply distorted the truth; if he had lied, then it was a good lie, a noble lie, he could have claimed with Plato, a beneficial lie he could have alleged with Montaigne, a salutary or vital lie he could have excused himself with Nietzsche; a lie thanks to which he had exposed the horrors of the twentieth century to the young and had given voice to the voiceless; he had been a prisoner in Nazi jails as the deportados had been prisoners in Nazi camps and therefore he had a right to speak on their behalf, etcetera – influenced perhaps by some of his defenders, he began to present himself as a victim: a victim of spiteful, bitter journalists, a victim of the failure to understand or remember his virtues as a civil hero and a champion or rock star of historical memory, a victim of general intransigence, ignorance and ingratitude, a victim of Benito Bermejo and his war against the Amical or against his co-workers at Amical, a victim of the Spanish right wing who were fed up with historical memory, a victim of Mossad Jews fed up with his denunciations of the situation in Palestine, a victim of everything.

  This defensive campaign (or this offensive disguised as a defensive campaign) was not merely a public, but a private campaign. When the Marco scandal first broke, but especially as it was beginning to fade from the national media, our hero unleashed upon the world an avalanche of letters comparable only to the avalanche of accusations and insults he was receiving or had received, using writing as any writer does: to defend himself. Marco wrote to the board of Amical, to the members of Amical, to politicians at municipal, autonomic and state level, to celebrated journalists and others who were practically anonymous, and to the editors of newspapers he had vainly tried to meet with in person the day before the scandal so he could give them the statement acknowledging his imposture; he wrote to public figures with whom he had some connection, to former colleagues at the C.N.T. and at FaPaC, to current friends and acquaintances and to friends and acquaintances he had not seen in years, to universities, cultural associations, old people’s homes, penitentiaries, institutes for adult education and to groups of every kind where he had ever given a talk; in particular, he wrote to the countless secondary schools he had visited. In some schools, no doubt because his talk had had an electrifying effect, the discovery of his deception also had a electrifying effect, to the point where some of the teachers who had invited Marco to speak to their classes felt obliged to explain to their pupils that, although the old man they had been so impressed by and that some had seen as a hero was actually a liar, nothing that he had told them was a lie. Marco’s letters were an often bewildering torrent of excuses, self-defence and self-justification to which he sometimes appended documents that proved or were intended to prove his past as an anti-Franco resistance fighter, like the photographs of his body mottled with bruises after his beating by the police on September 28, 1979, during a protest march in favour of the defendants in the Scala affair, or paperwork appearing to prove that not only had he been tried by a Nazi court (which was
true), but that he had been an anti-Nazi agitator (which was false), for which Marco sent the prosecutor’s report in which he was accused of high treason but not the judge’s sentence dismissing the original denunciation and exonerating him of the charges. In fact, Marco’s defence of himself was so meticulous that it even included symbolic gestures. Two days after the scandal broke, Marco presented himself at the office of the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia and handed over an envelope containing the Creu de Sant Jordi, the certificate, and a letter addressed to the Chief of State apologising for having lied about being a deportado, and adding a brief account of his usual justifications. This was not the only thing that Marco returned. Although at the time, Marco was accused of having grown rich from his deception, the only monies our man had received as a false deportado was 7,000 euros compensation from a foundation based in Switzerland for German companies who had profited from the use of Nazi prisoners during the Second World War; in the wake of the scandal, Marco returned the money only to have it sent back to him some months later with the explanation that, although he had not been a prisoner in a Nazi camp, he had been used as slave labour by the Nazis.