David Brendan O'Meara

Leer en español

The Impostor: A True Story, by Javier Cercas,
Translation by Frank Winne
A Borzoi Book, Published by Alred A. Knopf, 2017

A Catalan who writes in Spanish, Javier Cercas is a novelist who subjected himself, for this book, to a special rule: The Impostor: A True Story would be a “novel without fiction.”  It’s an interesting idea: not a work of journalism that uses the narrative techniques of fiction, but a novel in which the author has deprived himself of an essential tool, one might say the defining tool of his craft: the license to invent, to make things up, to adjust the details of the narrative world for no other reason than to make the story better. Why restrict himself so? Because his principal subject, Enric Marco Battle, was an impostor, an inveterate liar, who had already invented a personal history so full of falsehoods that Cercas concluded that his job as a storyteller — his duty — was to discover the awkward truth hidden behind the stories invented by Marco.

These new rules — to tell only the truth, never make things up, find the facts behind the lies — seem to have been quite a burden for Cercas, one which he shares quite openly (and perhaps excessively) with the reader. Throughout The Impostor, Cercas spends page after page reflecting on the differences between the real and the fictional, as well as meditating on his own worth as a writer and his own motivations for telling this story.  He also worries endlessly over the ethics of the relation between author and principal character, the question of just who was seducing whom: Enric Marco, his dishonored anti-hero, was a charming con-man, but even as Cercas resisted the manipulative games of the impostor, he was wondering if his own role might turn out to be one of betrayal. As an interviewer, Cercas worked hard to build a kind of friendship with Marco, knowing full well that if he wrote the best book he could write — the one with the most dramatic story and the most penetrating analysis — it might, on publication, destroy the man and his family. 

There’s so much metanarrative quibbling that it sometimes seems that Javier Cercas himself has become the protagonist, that the tag line of The Impostor should be: a middle-aged novelist works through a professional identity crisis by writing a book about an impostor. Ultimately, though, Javier Cercas, both as a character and author, succeeds in his quest: he finds the facts behind the lies and writes a fascinating book and tells the sad, troubling story of Enric Marco Battle, a energetic, intelligent and charismatic man who desperately wanted to be the protagonist of a better story than the one he actually lived.

Enric Marco turns out to be an ordinary guy who lived through chaotic times, and who faced extraordinary adversity from the very beginning of his life. The verifiable facts of that life, as presented by Cercas, include:

• His birth in an insane asylum, where his mother, diagnosed with schizophrenia, had been abandoned.
• His childhood with relatives. 
• His work, during his adolescence, in a factory managed according to anarcho-syndicalist principles.
• His enlistment, at the age of fifteen, in the Republican Army and his presence at the edge of several battles. 
• His passive return to Barcelona after the Falangist victory. 
• His work as a mechanic.
• His success, for a few years, in avoiding getting drafted into the armed forces of the dictatorship. 
• His decision, during the Second World War, when facing the immediate prospect of service in the Spanish Marines, to take a job in a German factory, in voluntary support of the Nazi war effort. 
• His arrest in Germany, possibly for bragging about his actions during the Spanish Civil War. (The Nazis couldn’t tell the difference — or had no desire to tell the difference — between an anarchist and a communist.) 
• His stay of several months in an ordinary German jail. 
• His inexplicable (or at any rate, unexplained) liberation from the jail. 
• His return to Spain just before the end of the war. 
• His work after the war as, once again, a mechanic.
• His marriages — or, to be more specific — his habit of finding a new woman, adopting her family and  getting himself adopted by her family, only to suddenly leave them all behind.
• His brief career in the 1950s as a travelling salesman, dressed in suit and tie, frequenting nightclubs and spending money with prostitutes.
• His arrest for stealing from his company to pay for this lifestyle.
• His return to the working class after a stint in jail, this time in a new neighborhood, with a new wife  and a new adopted family.
• His tranquil life in the 1960s.

In the early Seventies, during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship, Marco found himself at the center of a circle of young admirers, university students who regarded him as an authentic intellectual of the working class. He allowed them to think that he was a member of the still-active resistance, always hurrying off to secret meetings of which he could say not a word and which in fact never took place. After Franco’s death, amid the beginnings of a new era in Spain, he rose rapidly to the leadership of the CNT, the recently re-legalized anarcho-syndicalist union, his ascent helped a great deal by his fame, among the young people, as a partisan who had continued operating in Spain through decades of mortal danger, unlike the vast majority of CNT activists, who had waited out the dictatorship in France. Today, there are videos on YouTube of Marco addressing thousands of supporters in a Barcelona plaza, but his career as a union leader would not last long: he would soon lose his position in an internal power struggle. 

A short while later Marco discovered a new outlet for his talents and energies. With a new wife and young family, he found himself a retired man with school-aged children, and he made the most of the situation by volunteering at the Federation of Associations of Parents of Students in Catalonia (FAPAC). Many people who interacted with the organization got the impression that Marco was the president (or something), while in fact he was just a pensioner with a lot of free time, a volunteer without an official position, the guy who did everything around the office.

From the 1960s through 1990s, the lies that Marco told were like that: an exaggeration here, a hint of something important over there: tiny deceptions that, on the whole, were nothing compared to the good he was doing. His jail time in the 1950s, which might have branded him as untrustworthy, was a private secret, unknown to his current friends and family, almost as if it never happened. 

In 1999, with his daughters grown and his role at FAPAC ended, he took a trip to Germany. There he learned just how little remained of his stay during the war: the factory where he had worked was gone, as was the jail where he had been incarcerated. Later, in a tourist visit to the concentration camp in Flossenburg — a camp in which there had been very few Spaniards — he saw a name in a list, identified it as his own, and blamed the difference of several letters on the poor skills of the Nazis in writing Spanish. From that moment on, he began to construct a new personal history, one more suited to his appetite for the spotlight, a story that blended details from his detention in a common German jail with images and scenes borrowed from books and films about the Holocaust. 

Before long, Marco was applying his energy and charisma in a new organization, the Amical of Mauthausen, a group of Spaniards who had survived deportation to the Nazi camps, especially the one in Mauthausen, Austria. Unlike the camp in Flossenburg, Mauthausen had been filled with Spaniards, Republicans who had fought in the French Resistance and were captured after the fall of France.  When Marco joined the Amical, most of the other members were about 90 years old, while he himself, about a decade younger, was far more energetic. He quickly rose to a position of leadership. In the following years, Enric Marco would receive all the attention he desired: prizes, articles, meetings with politicians and solemn ceremonies. 

The spotlight continued to shine until 2005, when an historian published his discovery that Marco had never been in the camp at Flossenburg, except as a tourist, and his fame suddenly burst into scandal.