Lorenzo Silva (Madrid, 1966) returns to his most beloved series, to a new case of Second Lieutenant Bevilacqua and Sergeant Chamorro in La llama de Focea (Destiny), in which he is not afraid to get into the complicated garden of the procés. The new book, the eleventh novel about the two civil guards, deals with the investigation of the murder on the Camino de Santiago of a young Catalan woman, Queralt Bonmatí, whose father is a former politician and businessman linked to independence. A novel in which the pilgrimage -Silva has presented it in the towns of O Cebreiro and Samos, in Lugo- is mixed with the recent and distant history of Barcelona and Catalonia.
From the Russian plot of the process to the rise and fall of a Barcelona in which Bevilacqua now lives the flight of cobblestones and the fires of 2019 after the sentences to the leaders of the independence process, but in which three decades ago he lived in pre-Olympic splendor and that he saw radiant in front of a gray Madrid. "I met another Catalonia," he says, and in the novel he questions the historical origin of the seny and the rauxa, even going as far as Focea, the Greek city in Turkey whose brave inhabitants created Empúries.
Addressing the process in a novel is not getting into a garden?
Yes, but I think you have to go into the gardens. If you enter to sit down, it is reckless, but if you try to show it with a certain diversity of perspectives, with a prudent and rational look, which does not serve to resolve the whole of existence but is very useful for its conflictive areas, and you try to know and understand, it is attractive. approach the precipice. I have been going to Catalonia for more than thirty years and this book is written from the awareness that I am getting into a garden but also from love. The first time I went to Barcelona I fell in love. I went to work, to do an audit, the grimmest thing you can do. And the first impression of the Holy Family of Bevilacqua is mine. One night I went out for a walk, I saw it and it seemed portentous to me. I have lived in Catalonia for a long time, I have married there, I have had children there and whenever I return my gaze is from affection. And I moved it to Bevilacqua. In addition, I am deeply grateful to him: I am a writer from Madrid who nobody paid any attention to for 17 years until I sent a manuscript under a pseudonym to a publisher in Barcelona where I have been publishing for 25 years. I think I should get into that garden.
Bevilacqua says now: "I met another Catalonia".
The Catalonia that Bevilacqua remembers was kinder to outsiders and kinder to itself. And that she is kinder to the outsider is nice for the one who comes, but that she was nicer to herself resulted in that Catalonia being a propitious place for things to flourish a lot. And in the last thirty years Catalonia has stopped being kind to itself and that has reduced its chances of flourishing. I am not a catastrophist, I am going to the worst moment in the novel, autumn 2019, when everything explodes for the worse, from there it can only get better.
Between the Catalonia where I went to live in 2008 and the one in 2019 there is less friendliness, something very consubstantial to civilized peoples, such as Catalan and Mediterranean peoples, and consubstantial to the space that Catalonia occupies in the world. A kindness that is a way of contributing to what is mentioned at one point in the book, citing Santiago Rusiñol, who is the 'crèdit', the credit. When you are nice you gain credit before the client and before the non-client, when you lose it, you discredit yourself.
One of the chapters is titled with that Rusiñol phrase, 'Guard the credit'. Has Catalonia lost it?
This is what the Esteve patriarch says in L'auca del senyor Esteve to his descendants on his deathbed. Catalonia has not lost credit, but part of its political and economic ruling class has. And she has lost it to her own. But a community is more than its conjunctural vicissitudes, it is its wardrobe, and that of Catalan society is culturally robust. Catalonia has not been discredited, but sectors that have made decisions assuming the right to authentic interpretation of the will of Catalonia have lost credit for things as elementally disappointing as deceiving your own and how not facing the consequences.
When you say that Catalonia is less kind to itself, what is your substance?
In the Catalonia where I arrived, the discrepancy within Catalan society itself had a civilized management and I have seen in recent years how it has been managed from violence, verbal, argumentative and even physical. Because when you light someone's garbage container under their house in such a way that the flames start to rise through the façade and the person who lives there has to go down to the street with their child, you are not burning any Spanish invader, but a neighbor's house. And that's not being nice to yourself.
Why has it happened?
One of the characters analyzing what has happened says that it is difficult for so many people to mess up so seriously from so many places at one time. In the procés those who direct it, people who arrive due to consecutive accidents, make reckless decisions, and find themselves in front of the State apparatus with people little aware of what is happening, who do not grant it the importance and complexity that it had. Even so, when the time has come when everything has gone to hell, instead of reacting like a beast, they have measured their steps a bit. Ulster has had autonomy intervened longer than it has enjoyed it. Catalonia was intervened for three months. It was a rather cautious response.
Wasn't the police intervention of October 1 excessive?
To date, some police officers and civil guards remain prosecuted, there are many whose cases have been shelved and there are still none sentenced. A court in Ripoll, Olot or Sant Carles de la Ràpita asks for the images and the investigating judge, who may be pro-independence, does not marry anyone. I have seen images for which I believe that some agent should be separated from the service. A citizen, even if he is resisting a legitimate order, cannot be pulled by the hair or kicked by a seated citizen, that is police excess. But there are not so many of those images. I saw an unfortunate police intervention in its design and its decision, so much so that by mid-morning it had to be undone, because you cannot carry out a systematic confrontation against a movement that puts tens of thousands of ordinary people on the streets because that is going to end badly . But the decision was made poorly, those who had to carry out those orders were instructed to minimize the damage and no one was killed. There aren't many countries in the world where you put thousands of people on the streets and confront them with ten thousand police officers and nothing happens. In Baltimore there are 300 dead.
In the book he talks about the splendor of pre-Olympic Barcelona and a gray Madrid at that time, and how the tables have turned.
I am not one to idealize or terrifying. At the end of the novel, the Barcelona of 2019 appears burning and I was there and I remember Catalan pro-independence friends of mine saying to each other 'we are burning our city'. It's the lowest point and you think something terrible has happened because a city that three decades ago projected a glowing image to the world now has glowing bonfires. But the city has too much energy inside to sink because of that. From Madrid there is a boastful speech of 'he has committed suicide and we are going to eat everything'. A bit of calm. Barcelona has a long game left. And Madrid has prospered a lot. Although so much splendor of Madrid may not be good for Spain and not even for Madrid. That you establish in the center of a country of 500,000 square kilometers a sucker that attracts wealth, talent and everything disappears there like a black hole is not only bad for all of Castile that surrounds it and the peninsular periphery, but for Madrid itself, hypertrophied , where it generates enormous tensions, with people living in ten-meter rooms for 500 euros. The same is necessary to moderate the optimism.
In the novel, Bevilacqua reviews Catalan history through historians such as Vicens Vives and seems to find a lesson in its beginnings in Phocea.
It is a metaphor, a poetic image, that of Focea. As when the procés began I was in Catalonia and someone went from kissing on the mouth with the PP and governing with him to throwing himself into the mountains, the same person, I wanted to understand a little where this discomfort came from. Because deep down it is a malaise of a part of Catalonia with Spain and of Spain with Catalonia. That is seen with intellectuals of all times, including Ramón y Cajal, who says to go to hell now.
I wanted to understand the discomfort and read everything I could. Trying to find the balance scale where I have found it best is in Vicens Vives because it has a more elegant pen, works more on synthesis and goes to useful core ideas. From the outside, he perceived Catalonia as a society similar to the Basque one, with a certain purity of blood, ancestral, genuine. The first thing that Vicens Vives says is that it is a mestizo town, a mixture of people who come from the Carolingian empire, mountain people who come from the Pyrenees, people who welcome when there is a certain stability from the border territories and then the successive alluviums. It is the result of many influences that mix and that probably generate that duality and that contrast that appears so many times in the history of Catalonia and that Vicens Vives points out
A society apparently attached to commerce, to pragmatic calculation, to saving credit, and yet it has experienced 16 revolutions in the last 500 years. These deep contradictions, the way to trace them is to see the historical drag, become aware of that impurity and deep down the remote origin is that Catalonia was the only place on the peninsula where the Greek settlers arrived and established an emporium, which they called Emporion, Empuries.
I wondered who these Greeks were, that 2,500 years ago there were many different ones. Republics, monarchies, tyrannies, expeditionaries, xenophobes. They were expeditionaries but from Asia Minor, who lived under the threat of the Persian. Risky, merchants but warlike, enterprising but cruel, Herodotus tells it. I am not saying that Focea illuminates what Catalonia is, but rather to show, in the face of visions of purity of blood from outside or from within, that the Focea were a bit of contradiction where yin and yang, rationality and fury coexisted, and at the same time In the end, that's what human beings are, and when we ignore that, what usually prevails is fury, rauxa. When we take into account that we are these contradictions, we probably achieve more than rationality prevails, seny prevails, and the conflicts, instead of rotting, are filed away.
Maybe we will always live with a certain discomfort, but it is like when you get older, and Spain and Catalonia are older societies, and you have to accept that something will hurt every morning. You have to live with that and it is done by being aware that the destructive forces are within each one of us and the only way that they do not prevail is by being aware of them and trying to support yourself in the other part of your being. historically Spain and Catalonia have done reasonably well. They are part of the most prosperous, civilized and pleasant part of the world, a world full of places that are neither prosperous nor civilized and very unpleasant to live in. Nor have we done so badly to have the feeling that everything is a disaster. Spain has done well with Catalonia and Catalonia has done well with Spain. The Catalans have contributed many things to the Spanish and Spain a projection to Catalonia, says Vicens Vives, that it would never have had with France. And in the world you can choose between Guatemala and Guatepeor. And Vicens Vives says that the Catalans of the fifteenth century identified that Spain was Guatemala and France, Guatepeor. And I think they were not wrong.
