The Impostor Read online

  “But Javier!” he roared, suddenly excited, his hair tousled, jabbing two peremptory arms towards me. “Don’t you get it? Marco is one of your characters! You have to write about him!”

  I was flattered by Vargas Llosa’s spirited comment, but for some reason I didn’t understand it then. I also felt uncomfortable; to hide my self-conscious satisfaction, I carried on talking, suggesting that Marco was not only fascinating in himself, but for what he revealed about others.

  “It’s as though we all have something of Marco in us,” I heard myself say, caught up in the moment. “As though to some extent we are all impostors.”

  I trailed off and, perhaps because no-one knew what to make of this statement, there was a long, awkward silence. It was then that it happened. Among the guests at this dinner was Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, a friend of mine and a writer known among his acquaintances for his fearsome Aragonese bluntness, and he broke the spell with the devastating quip:

  “Yes: especially you.”

  Everyone laughed. I laughed too, though less heartily: it was the first time in my life I had been called an impostor; though not the first time I had been linked to Marco. A few days after the story broke, I read an article online in the newspaper El Punt which did precisely that. It bore the headline “Lies,” and the writer, Sílvia Barroso, said that Marco’s case had caught her unawares while reading the last pages of one of my novels in which the narrator announces his decision to “lie about everything, but only to better tell the truth.” She added that I often explored the boundaries between truth and lies in my novels and that on one occasion she had heard me say that, sometimes, “to get to the truth, it is necessary to lie.” Was Barroso bracketing me with Marco? Was she insinuating that I too was a fraud, an impostor? No, thankfully, because she went on to say, “The difference between Cercas and Marco is that the novelist has a licence to lie.” But that night at Vargas Llosa’s house, I silently wondered, What about Pisón? Was his comment tongue-in-cheek, intending only to make us laugh and defuse the awkward silence, or did his quip betray an inability to hide his true feelings behind the screen we call politeness? And Vargas Llosa? What had he meant when he said Marco was one of my characters? Did Vargas Llosa think I was an impostor too? Why had he suggested that I write about Marco? Because he thought there is no-one better than an impostor to write about another impostor?

  After the dinner was over, I spent hours tossing and turning in bed in my hotel room in Madrid. I was thinking about Pisón and about Sílvia Barroso. I was thinking about Anna María García, Teresa Sala, Primo Levi and I was wondering whether, if to understand is almost to justify, anyone had the right to attempt to understand Enric Marco and thereby justify his lies and feed his vanity. I thought to myself that Marco had already told enough lies and therefore it would be impossible to reach the truth about him through fiction but only through truth, through a novel without fiction, a rigorously true story without the slightest trace of invention or imagination, and that any attempt to fashion a story from Marco’s history was doomed to failure: firstly because I remembered Vargas Llosa had written, “the true story of Marco will probably never be known” (Claudio Magris had likewise written “we shall never know the private truth about Enric Marco, his need to invent a life for himself”); and secondly because of something Fernando Arrabal said, a paradox I also remembered: “The liar has no history. No-one would dare tell the history of a lie or present it as a true story. How could one tell the story without lying?” So it was impossible to tell Marco’s story; or at least impossible to tell it without lying. In which case, why tell it? Why try to write a book that could not be written? Why set oneself an impossible task?

  That night, I decided not to write this book. And in making the decision, I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders.

  2

  His mother was insane. Her name was Enriqueta Batlle Molins and, although Marco always believed that she had been born in Breda, a quiet little village in the Montseny massif, in fact she was from Sabadell, an industrial city near Barcelona. On January 29, 1921, she was admitted to the Sant Boi de Llobregat insane asylum for women. According to the asylum records, this was three months after she had separated from her husband, who had abused her; during this period, according to the records, she earned her living going from house to house doing domestic work.

  She was thirty-two years old and six months pregnant. When the doctors examined her, she seemed confused, she contradicted herself, and she was plagued by paranoid thoughts; her initial diagnosis read: “Persecution mania with degenerative symptoms”; in 1930 this was changed to “dementia praecox”: what nowadays we know as schizophrenia. On the first page of the dossier there is a photograph of her, possibly taken on the day she was admitted. It shows a woman with long, straight hair and strongly marked features, a generous mouth and pronounced cheekbones; her dark eyes are not looking at the camera, but everything about her radiates the dark, melancholy beauty of a tragic heroine; she is wearing a knitted black cardigan, and her back, her shoulders and her lap are covered with a shawl that she gathers into her hands over her belly, as though she were trying to conceal her inconcealable pregnancy, or trying to protect her unborn child. This woman does not know that she will never again see the outside world that has abandoned her to her fate, locking her away and leaving her to become utterly engulfed by her madness.

  There is no less dramatic way to say it. In the thirty-five years that Marco’s mother spent in the asylum, the doctors examined her only twenty-five times (typically once a year, but after her initial admission, eight years went by without her being examined), and the only treatment they prescribed consisted of forcing her to work in the laundry, “with excellent results,” according to a note from one of the doctors treating her. There are many such notes; though not all are as cynical, all are curt, vague and heartbreaking. In the beginning they record that the patient is in good physical condition, but they also record her self-centredness, her hallucinations (particularly auditory hallucinations), her sporadic violent outbursts; later, her deterioration gradually affects her physically, and by the late 1940s the notes describe a woman who is bedridden and has completely lost all sense of direction, her memory and any sign of her own identity; she is reduced to a catatonic state. She died on February 23, 1956, as a result of “angor pectoris,” according to her file. Even this diagnosis was inaccurate: no-one dies of chest pain; it is likely that she died of a heart attack.

  Marco’s mother gave birth to him in the asylum, on April 14, according to him; this is the date that appears on his identity card and his passport. But it is false: Marco’s fiction begins here, on the very day he came into the world. In fact, according to his mother’s case file and his own birth certificate, Marco was born on April 12, two days earlier than the date he would claim. Why lie then, why change the date? The answer is simple: because, after a certain point in his life, this allowed him to begin his talks, his speeches and his living history classes with the words “My name is Enric Marco, and I was born on April 14, 1921, exactly ten years before the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic,” which in turn made it possible for him to present himself, implicitly or explicitly, as a man of destiny who has witnessed first hand the major historical events of the century and encountered its principal protagonists, as an emblem, a symbol or the very personification of his country; after all, his personal biography was a mirror image of the collective biography of Spain. Marco claims that the purpose of his lie was merely didactic; it is difficult, however, not to see it as an ironic wink at the world, as a blatant way of implying that, since his date of birth coincided with a momentous day in the history of his country, the heavens or the fates were signalling that this man was destined to play a decisive role in that history.

  From the dossier in Sant Boi asylum, we know one more thing: on the day after he was born, Marco’s mother watched as her son was forcefully taken from her and given t
o her husband, the man she had fled from because he abused her, or because she said that he abused her. Did Marco ever see his mother again? He claims he did. He says one of his father’s sisters, his aunt Catherine—who breastfed him, since she had lost a child a few short weeks before he was born—took him to see his mother once or twice a year when he was a boy. He says that he clearly remembers these visits. He says that he and Aunt Catherine would wait in a huge bare white-walled room with the families of other patients for his mother to appear. He says that after a while his mother would emerge from the laundry rooms wearing a blue-and-white-striped apron, her eyes staring vacantly. He says that he would give her a kiss, but that she never kissed him back, and that in general she did not address a word to him, to his aunt Catherine, to anyone. He says that she often talked to herself, and that she almost always talked about him as though he were not there in front of her, as though she had lost him. He says that he remembers at the age of about ten or eleven, his aunt Catherine pointing to him and saying to his mother: “See what a handsome lad you have, Enriqueta: he’s named Enrique, after you.” And he says he remembers his mother fiercely wringing her hands and saying: “Yes, yes, he is a handsome lad, but he is not my son”; and, pointing to a two-year-old boy scampering around the room, he says she added: “my son looks like him.” He also says that at the time he didn’t understand, but that in time he realized his mother said this because her only memory of him was when he was no more than two or three years old, when she still had a vestige of lucidity. He says that he would sometimes bring her food in a lunch box and that sometimes he managed to exchange a word or two with her. He says that one day, after eating what he had brought in the lunch box, his mother told him that she worked hard in the laundry, that it was gruelling work but she didn’t care, because they had told her if she worked hard, they would give her back her son. He says he doesn’t remember when he stopped going to visit his mother. He says it was probably when his aunt and uncle stopped bringing him, perhaps when he reached adolescence, by which time the Civil War had already begun, perhaps earlier. In any event, he says, after that, he never again visited her, never again felt the slightest desire to see her, never worried about her—he forgot her completely. (This is not entirely true: many years later, Marco’s first wife told her daughter Anna María that she persuaded Marco to go and see his mother at the asylum after they were married; she also told her that they visited once or twice, and that all she remembered of these visits was the woman smelled strongly of bleach and did not recognise her son.) He tells me that he knows his mother died in the mid-1950s, but cannot even remember attending her funeral. He tells me that he cannot understand how he could have left her in an asylum for more than thirty years, how he could have left her to die alone, although he adds that there are many things from that period he doesn’t understand. He says he thinks about his mother often now, that he dreams of her sometimes.

  3

  I did not reconsider writing about Enric Marco until four years after the scandal broke. I had just finished writing The Anatomy of a Moment, a true story or a novel without fiction that had nothing to do with Marco, and, with the help of my psychoanalyst, I had reached the conclusion that I was an impostor, remembering my friend Pisón calling me an impostor in Vargas Llosa’s house in Madrid. At the time, I was in a terrible state and I felt that what I needed to get through it was a fictitious rather than a true story—fiction saves, reality kills, I told myself over and over—and that my account of Marco could only be a true story, because Marco had already told enough lies about his life and to add fiction to these fictions would be redundant, irrelevant in literary terms; I also remembered the reasons with which, four years earlier, during a sleepless night in a hotel in Madrid, I had convinced myself to abandon my book about Marco before I had even begun. But I also remembered Vargas Llosa’s flattering enthusiasm at his house in Madrid, and it occurred to me that perhaps he was right, perhaps Marco was one of my characters, perhaps only an impostor could tell the story of an impostor and that, if I truly were an impostor, perhaps no-one was better placed than I to write Marco’s story. Besides, in the four years I had spent writing the book that had just been published, I had never completely forgotten Marco, never forgotten he was there, in the background, disturbing, mesmerising and dangerous, like a grenade that, sooner or later, I would have to throw so it would not blow up in my hands, like a story that, sooner or later, I would have to tell in order to be free of it. I resolved that now was the moment to make the attempt; or at least that it was better to try than to carry on trudging through the slough of despond.

  My resolve barely lasted a week, the time it took once again to become engrossed in the story and—thanks to the internet—to discover, to my surprise, that no-one had written a book about Marco, but also, to my disappointment (and my private relief), that a film about him had just been released. Ich bin Enric Marco was the work of two young Argentinean directors, Santiago Fillol and Lucas Vermal, and had been premiered at a film festival. My disappointment was the result of a sudden certainty: if someone had recounted Marco’s stories in images, it made no sense for me to do so in words (hence my relief). In any case, I was interested to see the film, and I realised that one of the directors, Santiago Fillol, lived, like me, in Barcelona. I managed to get his mobile number, I called him, we met.

  The meeting took place in a restaurant on the plaza de la Virreina in the Gràcia district. Fillol turned out to be a short, swarthy, unkempt man in his thirties sporting a sparse moustache and intellectual glasses; he was also one of those Argentineans who seem to have read every book, seen every film and who would rather have his hand cut off than use a cliché. He brought me a copy of his film on DVD While we ate, we talked about the film, about the mechanics behind it, of living cheek by jowl with Marco for several weeks. Mostly we talked about Marco. It was not until we came to dessert that Santi asked if I was thinking of writing about him. I told him I wasn’t.

  “You guys have already told the story,” I argued, savouring my flan and nodding towards his film. “Why would I tell it again?”

  “No, no,” said Santi, hurriedly contradicting me. He had passed on dessert and ordered coffee. “We just shot a documentary, we didn’t tell the whole story of Enric. That still remains to be done.”

  I was about to say that perhaps it was impossible to tell the whole story of Enric and to quote Vargas Llosa, Magris and Arrabal. I said:

  “Yes, by this stage I thought at least a dozen Spanish writers would have written about Marco. Yet from what I can see, no-one has.”

  “Not that I know of,” Santi confirmed. “Well, I think one of them made an attempt, but got scared. Are you surprised? I’m not. Everyone in Enric’s story comes off badly, first and foremost Enric, followed by the journalists and the historians and lastly the politicians: basically, the whole country. To write Enric’s story would mean poking people in the eye, and no-one wants that. No-one wants to be a wet blanket, am I right? Least of all Spanish writers.”

  Santi must have been worried that my reaction would be patriotic or show solidarity with my compatriots because he immediately offered a vague apology. I told him he had nothing to apologise for.

  “No, I know that, it’s just…Well”—a mischievous smile played on his lips beneath the thin moustache that was stained with coffee—“you know what? I love literature, I read a lot, but to be perfectly honest with you, Spanish writers these days seem a bit insubstantial, not to say chicken: they don’t write from their gut, they write what they think they should write, what they think will please the critics, and the result is that they never get past style and snobbery.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was no better than my colleagues, realising just in time that if I did so, he might feel obliged to lie, to tell me I was different. Santi encouraged me to watch his film so I would see that my book was not incompatible with it, and offered to give me the documentation he had amassed durin
g the shoot, and any help I needed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, having thanked him for his generosity. Then I talked to him about the book I had just published, about my true story, and I apologised: “To be frank, I’m tired of reality. I’ve come to the conclusion that reality kills and fiction saves. So right now I need a little fiction.”

  Santi gave a loud laugh.

  “Well, with Enric you’ll tire of it soon enough!” he explained. “Enric is pure fiction. Don’t you realise? Everything about him is a fiction, worse still, a fiction embedded in reality, he is fiction incarnate. Enric is like Quixote: he couldn’t resign himself to a mediocre existence, he wanted to live life on a grand scale; and since he didn’t have the wherewithal, he invented it.”

  “You talk about Marco as though he were a hero,” I pointed out.

  “Because he is: he is both hero and villain; or hero and villain and picaresque character. That’s how complicated the story is, and how fascinating. I don’t know if your other fictions can wait, but this one can’t: Enric is eighty-eight. He might die any day, and his story would go untold. Anyway,” he concluded, “do what you want. I hope you like the film.”