[Trending News] Lorenzo Silva: In Pandemia “we all fail” and “we pay the toll” in lives

Magdalena Tsanis

Illescas (Toledo), 7 Mar (EFE) .- Five years after the emergence of the Covid, the writer Lorenzo Silva has introduced the pandemic and its impact on the elderly in the black novel saga that star Bevilacqua and Chamorro, which has already turned 30 and accumulates more than 2.5 million copies sold.

“Whenever a calamity passes, a fool is sought to blame and the rest exonerate, but we all fail to an identified threat and pay the one hundred and a thousand lives,” said the author in a meeting with journalists in the position of the Civil Guard of Illescas (Toledo).

That is one of the scenarios where the novel 'The opposite forces' takes place, the number 14 of the saga that has made Silva (Madrid, 1966) the most represented author of the Catalog of the Destination Editorial, along with Miguel Delibes, according to the editor Emili Rosales.

The writer considers that five years were enough to “have a perspective” of what happened and remember that in the 2011 national security strategy document there was already talk of the risk of pandemic due to serious respiratory diseases and the need to take measures to face it.

“What was done, we all know, do not even have masks,” he lamented. In the novel, the Bevilacqua subtail and the Chamorro Brigade move to Illescas to investigate the suspicious death of several older people.

The idea arose because a civil guard friend told him that during the confinement they were finding corpses in houses and residences and that often forensic doctors certified death at a distance.

“Everyone was overwhelmed,” said Silva, “and if we talk about the elderly and residences, the results are dreadful in all autonomous communities, although some are spoken of more than others.”

“Everything should be thoroughly investigated,” he insisted: “If we extreme rigor, everyone would have problems with justice, even some who make accusers.”

Silva wrote the first installment of this saga in 1995, although it was not published until 98 and since then he has kept his characters faithful to the quixotic ideal that enlightened them, “courageors of those who have nothing else.”

Far from feeling prisoner from them, the writer says they have given him freedom to “travel other paths” and appreciate everything Bevilacqua has taught him.

“Without Bevilacqua, I would never have been in a center for the reception of immigrants in the Strait, speaking with survivors who have played life at sea after three years in the desert; I would not have been at night in a patrol seeing Moroccan drugs and fishermen; I would not have been in Afghanistan or in Iraq, in many stories that have changed the vision of relevant realities of the world and the country alive”.

However, he considers that his greatest success was the creation of Chamorro's character at a time when there were few women in the Civil Guard, because thanks to her she has been able to narrate the change of Spanish society.

“In historical terms it is a radical, bestial transformation, the great transformation of Spanish society is not the highways or the bird, it is how women have gone from occupying a domestic and subaltern place to positions of authority,” he said.

The debate on linguistic unfolding also moves to the pages of this saga. Silva recalled the furibly criticisms he has received on social networks for saying “nurses and nurses” or even at the RAE headquarters for heading to “fathers and mothers.”

“We are worse, everything becomes trench and battlefield, bad faith is presumed, contrary to what the Civil Code and a legal culture of two thousand years say, but our world is governed by people who believe they are inventing everything from zero,” he says.

In his books he has also reflected the evolution of the Civil Guard itself, a body that, in his opinion, “accompanied the rule of law faster than other levels of Spanish society”, but it has improved in terms of means and in the enrichment and diversity of the staff, where 40% of the basic scale are higher titled.

Throwing the accounts of what is left to retire, Silva promises that there will be more novels and that he already has new stories in mind: “If there is no bus tomorrow to change everything, in eight years I have time for a few books.” EFE

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