With ‘La llama de Focea’ the writer celebrates his happy silver jubilee with his Bevilacqua and Chamorro picoletos. “We teach young people that when they are the strongest, they can crush the opposite without hesitation, and that is terrible”
Lorenzo Silva (Madrid, 1966) has spent twenty-five years telling us who we are through the eyes and minds of the Second Lieutenant of the Guardia Civil Rubén Bevilacqua and the Virginia Chamorro Brigade. He owed Galicia a novel and settles his debt with ‘La llama de Focea’ (Lot). It is the thirteenth in the saga and takes place between the Camino de Santiago, where the brutal rape and murder of a young pilgrim, the daughter of a Catalan nationalist on the radar of Justice, and the burning Barcelona faced with “failure of the ‘trials’ in the fall of 2019. It examines his connections with the Kremlin and denounces the ‘laundering’ of Putin’s criminal plot in Europe.
The political and family revolt and the legacy we leave to our children are core themes of a fast-paced story that largely collects the previous twelve starring his efficient and brilliant picoletos. “It is the greatest journey to the bowels of Bevilacqua and its failures,” explains the writer in Samos, Lugo, near the site of the murder of Queralt Bonmatí, who launches the ‘pilgrim operation’ that will destroy the Russian connections of his father. «When you study failures, and the ‘process’, you say ‘look what animosity they have struck’. And Bevilacqua delves into the professional and vital failures that built it,” explains Silva during a tour of towns such as O Cebreiro, Samos or Triacastela, in the heart of the Camino, along the banks of the Oribio River.
“I didn’t want to make a ‘process’ novel, because I don’t know if it’s too late or too early, but I do want to talk about the commotion it caused,” says Silva, who turned the raging and burning Barcelona “into Fort Apache” after the “process” failed with those of the 1992 Olympic enthusiasm.
“I tell but I don’t judge,” warns the author, reflecting on “past mistakes”, on “children’s rebellion against their parents in search of their own way” and on “that uncertain and contradictory flame that we come to the next generations”. And his analysis is discouraging. “We pass them on few things, a few bad pips that go no further than instant gratification and zero tolerance for adversity, so necessary in life.”
The political legacy is also discouraging. “In international and local politics there is a tendency to crush the dissidents, both from the left and the right, against the independence of Catalonia or to destroy the annoying neighbor who does not submit to his vassals, which Putin is doing to Ukraine.” “We teach young people that if you are stronger than the other, crush them without hesitation, and that is terrible,” he hurts.
The witness that passes from one generation to the next is symbolized in the Olympic flame that arrived in Barcelona in 1992, where Bevilacqua began his career. The same flame that, according to Herodotus, once left the remote and lost city of Focea, in the eastern limits of the Mediterranean, to reach the Catalan coast from the polis and establish at Ampurias, Gerona, the first Greek settlement in Spain. the origin of Catalonia.
Three millennia later, the money from the organized crime linked to Putin’s Kremlin, which showed its leg in the “trials”, is flowing through Europe. “Our economy is drug dependent on criminal money that corrupts it. For twenty years, all of Europe has been laundering the black money from Putin’s criminal plot that became entangled in Catalonia. Here we have provided facilities to access residency and nationality to those who have invested €500,000, and now we are tearing our clothes,” he denounced.
Silva is well aware that his dignified characters have been a blessing. “I’ve always written what I wanted and with complete freedom. I am well aware that a character like Bevilacqua has made me fat,” congratulates the writer, who has sold more than 100,000 copies of ‘El mal de Corcira’ and is now celebrating his happy silver anniversary with the couple.
He says he has “learned a lot” from his duo of vigilantes and clarifies that neither he nor the second lieutenant intends to retire or end the saga. At least three other novels are bubbling in his head. “I don’t have a closed plan. I’ve been writing for 27 years and published Bevilacqua and Chamorro for 24 years,” he says of a series that started in 1998 with ‘El país de los lagunas’ but that has revolved around him since 1994. “Spanish society has developed unpredictably over the years and I’m interested in that. With every novel I deal cards and I’m having a pretty good time. I’ve been free and happy and I want it to stay that way.”
Among the advancements she cites the greater presence of women in all fields, which she reflects in her novel, and among the setbacks, “the loss of the solid and reasonable consensus we had built on differences.” “That impoverishes us and ensures that we are going forward with several sticks in the wheels for years,” he complains. “There are many ideologies of closed rooms falling apart when the windows open,” he says.
Silva reiterates that we will never see the Chamorro Brigade and Second Lieutenant Bevilacqua, who refuses to promote, bedridden. “I’ve never been tempted to do it. I must be very faint. I’m more interested in their complicity than sexual tension,” the writer says. He brings his couple closer to that of Don Quixote and Sancho, “who know each other perfectly and make up for their respective shortcomings.” “Accomplices yes, lovers no”, he concludes by admitting that a love story between the two would have ended the saga.
In ‘La llama de Focea’ we see how Bevilacqua’s son, Andrés, makes progress in his career as a Guardia Civil. He marries another cop and his father worries about the future of a son and a possible daughter-in-law in the deserving body.
«With the police I feel the dichotomy between the mystery and the riddle, which interests me less and less. The most mysterious part, the reasons of the murderer, seduce me more and more,” says Silva, who pays tribute to the late Galician writer, friend and master of the black novel Domingo Villar and returns to a Galicia he knows well since he worked as a lawyer for Fenosa Union.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
