Lorenzo Silva: "The Civil Guard was about to die of Francoism"

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Bevilacqua always reflects a lot on the Civil Guard, also with a part of irony. Bevilacqua came to the Civil Guard by accident, he has been 30 years and has never fit in completely.

He sees things a bit from the outside and that is why he realizes the enormous paradoxes in the history of the Civil Guard.

Which are many, I could quote 20 from memory, but I'll keep one: a body considered conservative has only been equipped and strengthened when progressives have governed in Spain.

The revolutionaries of 1854, Manuel Azaña, Felipe González... Until the current social-communist government, which has created 7,000 new jobs that have been needed for a long time. Do you have any theory? Because all left-wing politicians understood at some point that The Civil Guard is a professional body and an element of modernization and strength of a State.

What existed before was a political police force, a Gestapo of Fernando VII. And why does the image of the tricorn hat persist? Because Francoism weighs us down, which was the darkest existential crisis of the Civil Guard.

They wanted to dissolve the Civil Guard many times but it was only about to die of Francoism.

Its essence is a moderate and humanistic liberalism.

Francoism, authoritarian and illiberal, was the opposite.

Are there equivalent militarized police forces in other countries? Without leaving Europe and memory: in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal... What happens is that the history of the Civil Guard is more complex.

The Civil Guard suffered three civil wars and, if we consider that its first members were liberal veterans of the first Carlist war, almost four.

That, in addition to terrorism,

which is not exclusive to Spain but which was a very tough stress test, as they say now. In the end, the drama is the same as for any police officer and you can see it in this novel: to investigate crime, sometimes you have to negotiate with the criminals.

But once you get into that game, the possibility of disaster is real. To know crime well, you have to rub shoulders with it, reach transactions.

The policeman who enters the china shop like an elephant never has sources or tools to fight crime.

But, of course, he can end up like the user who takes a powerful drug and says he controls.

He controls until he stops controlling and then the drug controls him. This book also talks about the relationship that we Spaniards who live or revolve culturally around Madrid have with Catalonia.

Which has a part of admiration and fraternity, and a part of strangeness.

There is always a little doubt, we don't know if those we feel like Barcelona friends see us as characters from

or like some nice carcas. The feeling of dazzlement I have had and Bevilacqua has.

Then, perception evolves, of course.

In my case, I married a Barcelonan, I hope I have managed to have some confidence.

I have kicked around Catalonia like nobody else, more than almost any Catalan.

My conclusion is that the difference exists, that it is unwise to deny it.

But that the affinities, the community of interests and the historical solidarity exist as much or more and that it would be suicidal not to see it.

It is my conclusion.

I can be wrong but I say it with loyalty and with a desire for conciliation.

From that starting point, many problems could be settled better than these 500 years of periodic friction.

The one who best explains it, and perhaps that is why it is forgotten, is Vicens Vives in

. Is it readable or is it a reading for very addicted to the subject? It is quite readable: it is written with elegance, with taste and with a desire for synthesis.

And he has the courage to look at history as it is, even if we don't like it.

He says that Catalonia was not integrated into the project of Spain forced by anyone;

on the contrary, it was Castile that was forcibly integrated by the emperor.

Catalonia agreed and entered Spain because its future was much better in Spain than in France. And Catalan literature, do you also feel it as basically your own but sometimes a bit foreign?

Depends.

But there is also literature from Madrid that is very foreign to me.

This book contains a lot of literature in Catalan that I have read in Catalan and with which I feel a very intense affinity.

And I feel that there is something that is not identical, but that it is recognizable in my culture.

And there are also Marsé, Mendoza,

Vázquez Montalbán, who, obviously, are writers with whom we have all grown up.

And then there is other literature in Catalan, put at the service of a political cause, with which I am sorry but I cannot identify myself.

I recently read in a book that "Castile is a plateau and that generates aridity of the soul, while we Catalans are Greeks."

And they put it in the mouth of Gaudí.

How am I going to feel like a bullshit like that?

Here, Greeks, we are all, and very much, the same in Albacete as in Ripoll.

In some places I have been called a plateau as an insult.

Well, look, the Meseta has two good things: there is an open horizon and the air flows.

I don't think the opposite is very good for the soul. In this book there are two figures that work by contrast:

.

That is what fascinates me about maximalist political movements.

There are always deer that risk everything for idealism and lose it and end up with 20 years in jail.

And, at his side, some guys who make a huge profit and become rich.

Idealism is supposed to be about making sacrifices.

Principles cost you something, don't they?

If they benefit you, they are not principles anyway. Faced with this, Bevilacqua confronts sentimentality with a language of "right, right, right. It doesn't matter what you feel towards Spain, but the rights and duties you have."

I wish we had all known how to speak like this in 2017. I am a lawyer, I know that the laws and their administration are imperfect.

And yet, they are infinitely better than any shortcut we take.

The history of Spain is full of shortcuts and, therefore, it has been disastrous.

Bevilacqua has experienced the consequences of breaking the rules.

He believes in the law not because he is spotless, but because he is spotless.

There is an idea that I read in Carrère's last book: you have to distrust people who are convinced of his goodness.

The people who are convinced of his evil, who know and watch over him, are better. The issue of Russian influence in the

is it an anecdote or is it something central? It is a matter that is subject to investigation, in which we have no conclusions and for which we cannot attribute crimes to anyone.

Others have not cared about the rights of others, they do matter to me.

But we have some certainties.

Since 2014, Russia has tried to destabilize all EU states.

That is documented.

It has done so through anti-establishment movements on the left and right and disinformation campaigns.

In the

, that effort was put at the service of the secession of Catalonia in order to break the fourth economy of the euro.

We also know, and there is evidence accepted in the procedure, that far from rejecting, the leaders of the independence movement accepted that help.

I think that decision underpinned the

.

A movement that aspired to create a new European state, what was it doing collaborating with the main enemy of the EU?

In addition to being ethically unworthy, it was absurd.

The

has many elements contrary to any moral vision of reality.

But the main one was to deceive their own, to leave them stranded. On the day of the referendum I thought that Spain was going to become a pariah state, but our partners supported us without cracks.

Was it because of that? Because of that and because on 1-O many things were done wrong but also some right.

All those policemen sent to the schools to confront the activists of the

, who were not the instigators but their less savvy followers... that was a mistake and that's why it was corrected mid-morning.

If the referendum was already falling apart computerized.

But there was something that worked very well and it is an advance that breaks with the black history of Spain.

The Spain of before would have settled a day like this with 200 dead.

That of 2017 sent 10,000 armed men and there were two seriously injured, one of them policemen.

That doesn't even happen in Europe.

When the Yellow Vests took to the streets there were dozens of dead.

In the US I don't even tell him what would have happened.

The Spanish police officers had excellent training, they knew how to assess the point at which the confrontation could end in disgrace and they withdrew because they had been instructed to use minimal force.

Some asshole yelled "get 'em"

of people dying was not fulfilled. We have not talked about the crime of this novel.

In Bevilacqua's novels there are times when it seems that crime doesn't matter so much. It does matter, it is what moves Bevilacqua and allows him to reflect on the world.

Crime matters as an existential fact.

Why does violence always end up appearing?

On the other hand, the convoluted and twisted plots interest me less.

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