Javier Cercas

> In 1989, my first novel had been published; (...) the book was met with utter indifference. What followed was a prolonged depression and the breakdown of my marriage, until, coming to the rescue of the failed writer, arrived the sensual Conchi and the miraculous story of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. The former was a fortune-teller, > who was crazy about dating a journalist (an intellectual, she called him) and who danced singing > Land glorious to my heart,/blessed land of scents and passion,/(...) Alas, what sorrow,/as I part from you, Spain,/for they tear me away from your rose garden. The episode, both famous and incredible, is set in 1939 at the end of the Civil War. The Republican army, retreating toward France, took with it a group of Falangist leaders to execute them by firing squad. Sánchez, founder of the Falangist movement and later a Francoist minister, managed to escape and survive, fashioning around this ordeal his aura of an immortal hero. Cercas imagines that our failed writer comes into possession of a notebook in which Sánchez had jotted down what had happened: the name of the peasant family that took him in and a reference to unspecified "friends of the forest." Fragmentary accounts, contradictions between differing versions, and the very condition of the notebook, which appeared forged, led the aspiring writer to assume that everything was false: > a colossal fabrication meticulously concocted by Sánchez Mazas's imagination, (...) to redeem himself from his reputation as a coward, to conceal some dishonorable incident from his strange wartime vicissitudes. The investigation of archival documents and in the field leads to validating the entire affair: the execution and the escape truly occurred, and the "friends of the forest" are three draft dodgers who had been hiding in the undergrowth and helped Sánchez; a presence expunged by the Falangist leader so as not to admit that he had been aided by brave young men who were not fascists—he, the great poet of the Fatherland. There remains an episode which, who knows why, the aspiring writer does not explore further. In a narrative that seems drawn from *Una nobile follia* by Ugo Igino Turchetti, which likely inspired Fabrizio De André's *Canzone di Piero* (see the review on this site), our aspiring writer describes the event thus. > The soldier is looking at him; Sánchez Mazas stares back at him, but his tired, myopic eyes cannot interpret what they see; beneath the locks of wet hair and the broad forehead and dripping eyebrows, the soldier's gaze expresses neither compassion nor hatred, nor even contempt, but a kind of secret or fathomless joy, (...) and at a certain point he shouts into the wind without ceasing to stare at him: "There's no one here!". To truly become a writer, our protagonist must discover who this soldier was: the narrative leaves mere chronicle behind, gains momentum and mystery, and reveals a truly discreet hero in the service of Freedom and Spain, an account of real events, with real people. It is pointless to object that every novel is real to the reader and that one might as well invent characters about whom nothing is known. Unlike Carrère, who, to write about Limonov, draws heavily upon the biographies of the Russian writer and politician himself (see the review on this site), Cercas conducts an investigation like a good journalist. Too bad that when he writes a factual account, however brilliant, the narrative flattens, becomes tedious, and the reader wonders why bother when we already have historians. On the contrary, on all the pages where the writer relies on imagination and mystery (think of the figure of Conchi and the discovery of the soldier-hero), the story changes tenor, becoming intriguing and engaging. In the end, one senses the passion when the writer comes out into the open and extols the soldier-hero. We ought to find a boundary between fiction, chronicle, and historiography; we live in the present and process the past through the facts of the present, yet the representation of the past conditions our vision of reality and must therefore be handled with care, pursuing the "truth" on the basis of historical research methodologies. The prose flows smoothly and with slight mischief. The author creates an almost unreal atmosphere, so that the events, even the dramatic ones, and the characters dance to the tune of the celebrated song. Its merit lies precisely in a narrative style far removed from the journalistic, capable of making us dream. Its main defect is the plot, confused and repetitive. Why read it? The story is interesting, and some pages are truly beautiful.

From 1975 to 2005, Spain was deceived by a great impostor. Enric Marco, the obscure owner of an auto repair shop, fabricated a past as an anti-Francoist, claiming he had been deported for it to the Flossenbürg concentration camp alongside eight thousand other Spanish Republicans sent to Germany to die in the extermination camps. Capitalizing on the halo bestowed upon him by his forged past, Marco served first as secretary general of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, and later as president of the Amical de Mauthausen. Thanks to an obscure historian, Marco's colossal lie was uncovered just days before he was due to speak at a ceremony in Mauthausen before the Spanish prime minister. Vargas Llosa dubbed Marco «appalling and brilliant». When Cercas meets the man for the first time, he cannot help but cry out > a horror! A genuine horror!. What held him back from writing a book about him were not merely the outrages committed by Marco, from the grief inflicted on other deportees and their relatives to the countless young people who had listened to him, captivated and trembling; Cercas feared becoming ensnared in the tentacles of the sublime liar, wondering whether he was willing > to write a book about Enric Marco without making a pact with the devil. (...) why not attempt to redeem the great impostor and the great damned soul, that consummate scoundrel who has already been condemned more than enough?. Those who have read *Soldiers of Salamis* (see the review on this site) know that Cercas tends to exploit these hesitations of his about excavating the «truth». Here too, Cercas overcomes his moral scruples, easily forgetting what Primo Levi once said—that to understand is already to justify; with the usual dedication of an investigative journalist, he sets out to reconstruct the murky events and insidious deceptions that led Marco to dominate the national stage during the post-Franco years. We leave it to the reader to delve into the details of a convoluted story that traverses Spain's recent history. Let us simply say that Cercas traces the root of Marco's success to a blend of small truths, historical facts, personal charisma, and brazen lies. It is true! Marco was indeed a villain; yet just as Limonov was for Carrère and Don Quixote for Don Alonso Quijano (see the reviews of both books on this site), Marco > gave himself (...) a new identity and a new, heroic life, (...) having passed the zenith of life, he wants to go on living when it is no longer his turn to live, or rather he wants to live on, against everything and everyone, all that he had not lived until then. Is he not like a writer permitted to lie in order to tell the truth? Poor Cercas! Little does he know that this indulgence toward deceit is a breach into which Marco will ruthlessly wedge himself, recalling that the final character in *Soldiers of Salamis*, the obscure soldier-hero, was merely a fiction of the writer; a fiction with which Cercas deceived countless readers who, after reading the novel, wrote to the nursing home in Dijon where the author had claimed the obscure hero lived. And therefore Cercas, too, is an impostor: > you are a player and a liar, possessing all my flaws and none of my virtues, and I am your reflection in a dream, or in a mirror. (...) This is the truth, Javier. The truth is that you are me. The novel's focal point is the interview that the author declares to be imaginary, for once. In a lengthy dialogue between Marco and Cercas, the latter's certainties crumble before the relentless arguments of the impostor, intoxicated by the role of inquisitor assigned to him by the Spanish author. The only explicitly fictional pages seem to upend the entire narrative. Where lies the boundary between invention and truth in historical memory? And why should lies not be accepted if they serve to illuminate the dark chapters of history, forging conscientious minds? But in doing so, as in *The Brothers Karamazov*, are we left merely to bow before the mystery of the past, hoping it to be a just and righteous mystery? (see the review of *The Brothers Karamazov* on this site). The novel's fundamental merit lies precisely in Marco's story, which tells itself, so incredible it is. Cercas layers over it a meandering and prolix plot, one that often turns in on itself, weighed down by digressions that make for heavy reading. Offsetting the narrative's convolutions is the author's characteristically fluid, lucid phrasing: a prose style that smacks perhaps a bit too much of journalism. Why read it? The story is intriguing.