Three Works, Three Lives
The Impostor: A True Story, by Javier Cercas,
Translation by Frank Winne
A Borzoi Book, Published by Alred A. Knopf, 2017
Garbo the Spy, a documentary
Produced and directed by Edmon Roch
In English, Spanish and Catalan, 2011
The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura
Translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2014
Thanks to three narratives of three very different kinds — a work of literary non-fiction, a documentary film, and an historical novel — I recently came in contact with three accomplished impostors from Catalonia. All three were born in Barcelona between 1912 and 1921, all fought — well, in one case, avoided fighting — on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and all three became historical figures of the 20th Century — well, in one case, claimed to be such a figure — by means of stunning acts of trickery and deception. These three lives, and the works that portray them, raise important questions about how we as humans respond to truth and lies, fact and fiction.
The first of these men (and as of this writing, the only one still living) is Enric Marco Battle, a working-class Barcelonian who gradually embellished his life story — the life of a survivor, eventful and picaresque if not particularly honorable — into a tale of heroism appropriate to his personal magnetism and tireless energy. Late in life, Marco found fame as the leader of an organization of the Spanish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, despite the fact that he himself had only visited the camps as a tourist, decades later.
Juan Pujol García, the second impostor, came from a different social stratum of the same city: he was the son of a factory owner in Barcelona. During World War II, Pujol offered his services as a spy to both the British and the Germans. Pujol soon became one of the Allies’ most important double agents, not by doing the normal work of a spy (the revelation of secret truths), but instead through the creation and dissemination of extravagant falsehoods.
Finally we have Ramón Mercader del Río, another son of the Catalan bourgeoisie, who achieved infamy by a crime far more serious than mere imposture. Mercader left the front lines of the Spanish Civil War — recruited by his mother for a new assignment — to undergo training in Russia for a secret mission. After three years of preparation — and so deeply undercover that his false identity had a false identity — Mercader murdered Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1940.
The irony is that now, roughly a century after these impostors were born, the one whose deception was most insignificant has become the one most reviled by public opinion.
