The phenomenon of Lorenzo Silva with the cases of the Bevilacqua Lieutenant and the Virginia Chamorro Brigade is like that of that fine rain that, almost without realizing it, is soaked to you little by little and in the end you finish draft to the bones. With “the opposite forces” (destiny), Silva publishes its fourteenth delivery of the serieswhich puts civil guard agents in the face of two different cases, the disappearance of a woman in Badajoz and the suspicious death of a septuagenarian in Illescas (Toledo), possibly her most complicated research so far, not only for having to solve two cases at the same time, but for the difficult context in which they have to work, the confinement during the Pandemia of the COVID-19. One of the cases has a real basis. “It is not that they are excessively sophisticated crimes, Sometimes the most difficult is the one that is committed in a simple waydirect and without witnesses, but when everyone is confined, you lack many sources of information and the usual difficulties, they add a series of pitfalls and restrictions, both operational and mobility, which hinder the investigation, even part of the team also became ill in reality, ”explains the writer.
After five years, he has barely narrated on the pandemic. “There are still no wounds without closing, in cinema it seems that it gives it a bad vault to touch it, with the actors with mask they lose a lot and in literature, there are people to whom the issue gives a lot of laziness because it had a bad time, there is no desire to remember and when writing you are limited, as submitted to a corset, but it seems to me that when an experience is so bitter and transcendent, there is a time when you have to assume the bitterness and ask you What has contributed to us? Well, something gave us, not everything was negative, but also, narrating with a corset for me is not bad because it is to test you”
On the other hand, “the pandemic acted as a social increase lens that brought the best and the worst of us, we were seen a series of badly made and cracks that we knew they were there, but we did not tell them.” From the criminal point of view, what better time to commit a crime in anonymity of hundreds of daily deaths, many of them without certifying. “And above all, without doing autopsies,” Silva says. Among them, many older than those who refused medical assistance and the possibility of going to a hospital or the neglect of the elderly residences. “The results are dreadful. It is clear that it could have become better if the emergencies and residences had been better sized, but the dilemma was not easy, the ICUs were saturated and there was a lack of health personnel.”
In those critical days there was a group of people “who fajed in the street, such as security forces, supermarket workers or toilets, to whom we admire, applaud and recognize then and now hit them in the outpatient ones, which are the first barrier of the disease, especially to women. So that we see what is ingratitude”. And, “in reality, societies are not very grateful to their public servants,” says Silva. In Catalonia, for example, civil guards and police officers were vaccinated very late and justice has condemned the Catalan government for it. It is not understood that they are not yet considered risk professions. “This is because it does not interest politically and when you are interested, it will be achieved.”
If we see the evolution of Bevilacqua and Chamorro over time from “the distant country of ponds”, the change produced, both in the Civil Guard and in society. “When I wrote that first novel in 1995, for example, practically no one had mobile phone and Bevilacqua said that he would never wear one and in the latter he lives moored to him day and night.” But why do the passage of time endure so well? “Because these characters are a reflection of the human condition and its complexities, they are common people, two currants, who get up and win the bread, with bosses and labor problems and have established a relationship with the reader.”
Two walking knights that Silva has brought to Illescas (Toledo), where Cervantes passed on the way to Madrid. ” couple? The idea is that the next novel is counted from other premises, possibly even outside Spain in international operations, the promotion will not prevent them from continuing to be together, although their relationship is different, ”he concludes.