Allan Massie reviews The Imposter by Javier Cercas
There are many questions and no easy answers in this masterly portrait of Enric Marco, a once revered figure in Spain who lied about being a concentration camp survivor
Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. As President of the “Amical de Mauthausen”, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi camps, he spoke eloquently about the evils of Fascism. In a speech given to the Spanish Parliament in 2005 his account of his experiences in a concentration camp had the children of deportees in the gallery in tears. This wasn’t all. He had fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, been persecuted by the Franco regime and then, as Secretarygeneral of the CNT (the Anarchist trade union) been influential in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy. Quite a life! What a hero!
But then came exposure; he was unmasked. He had never been in a concentration camp, though he had
been in Germany during the war as a volunteer worker. His anti-fascist credentials were soon questioned. If he had lied about the concentration camp, why should he be believed about anything? Yes, he had been a magnificent and compelling speaker about the horrors of Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain, but he was still an impostor, mocked and reviled.
Anyone who has read Javier Cercas’ novels – especially Soldiers of
Salamis and Outlaws – will recognise that Marco’s is a story made for him. These books explored the unreliability of memory and personal testimony and of what may have been generally accepted as historical truth. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to write about Marco, despite the urging of friends, among them the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He had met Marco and found him even in his nineties to be unstoppably loquacious and fertile in denial, selfjustification, and self-pity.
Happily he went ahead. The book is written as a”novel without fiction,” with Cercas’ own feelings and reflections always to the fore. This was the method of his remarkable account of the failed military coup of 1981, Anatomy of a Moment. It worked then; it works now.
Cercas has immersed himself in the archives, talked with historians and journalists who have covered the Marco story, interviewed his acquaintances, friends, former admirers, and spent hours, days, weeks listening to the old man – well over 90 by now – and trying to make sense of his life. In some of his memories or claims, those relating to the Civil War, there would appear to have been an element of truth amidst exaggerations and even impossible assertions. There were puzzles not easy to resolve. Why for instance did he have a civil servant’s pension? Was this, as some said, because he had perhaps been a police informer in at least the early Franco years? Or was there some other not discreditable explanation?
Did he merely want to be famous? To be admired and loved?
The central question, never to be satisfactorily answered, concerns Marcos’ motive for the big lie, his claim to be a survivor of the Nazi camps, a lie that was for years accepted seemingly uncritically, the lie which made him not only a celebrity but the voice of national, even more than national, conscience. Did he merely want to be famous? To be admired and loved? To present himself as having been the noble and inflexible rebel against the Fascist regime? Did he even know he was lying, or had he convinced himself that he had indeed been what he said he was for so many years? Was he a conman or a fantasist?
Cervas probes this mysterious and extraordinary life with uncommon patience, uncommon skill and uncommon sympathy. He reminds us that he is himself a novelist and that novelists tell lies as a means of pointing to some sort of truth. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Grasset thought that one way of understanding an individual’s life was to see it as a novel in the making. Is this the key to understanding Enric Marco: that he made a novel of his life? Or was he just an unscrupulous liar who would say anything to be loved and famous?
Cercas is too good a novelist to find a definite answer to his quest; readers of this fascinating book, admirably translated by Frank Wynne, are invited to make their own judgement. Cercas has given us the material to do so.