The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) (12 page)

With thick forefinger and thumb, he pulled at the stigmas, ripping them from the flower, and then tossed them into a nearby basket.

‘It’s delicate work, and you need small, delicate hands for it. Which is why we mostly have the women and children doing this part. It’s not sexist, it’s just how things work better. I could do it, the other men could do it, but we’d take longer. Haven’t got the right touch.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, Paco,’ one of the women at the table grinned up at him. ‘You’ve got the touch, all right.’

And the rest of the table laughed and giggled.

Faro Oscuro pulled affectionately at the woman’s ear.

‘I love them all,’ he said to Alicia. ‘And they certainly know how to keep me in my place.’

They moved around the tables, other women calling up to Faro Oscuro, joking with him as they passed around the barn.

‘You see, we’re happy here. Elsewhere in the country people are getting laid off, not finding jobs. But you give people work – work they can believe in, that’s part of the community, that they feel involved with – and they’re happy. That’s how we do things here, that’s the philosophy. It’s been going for over twenty years, and it just gets better. I’m more of a believer now than I was when we started.’

‘So how does this operate?’ Alicia was jotting down notes. ‘You must have something of a production line.’

‘We try to avoid using phrases like that – makes it sound like exploitation. But there is a system, voted on by everyone taking part.’

At one side of the barn, open doors looked out over a yard with a cement floor and the fields beyond.

‘The saffron gets brought in through here. We’re out before dawn picking the stuff. They’ll be bringing in the last of it now. You tend to stop picking around ten o’clock – have to get it early in the day.’

He pointed at the tables.

‘The flowers get distributed here, where the stigmas get plucked out, as you can see. Then as the baskets of stigmas get filled up, we store them in that container standing against the back wall.’

Snap
.

The container appeared to be an aluminium box, perhaps two metres by one metre, and a metre high. Already it was close to being full.

‘That looks like a very large amount.’

‘We’ll get almost three hundred kilos by the time we’ve finished.’

Alicia paused.

‘That’s about a million euros’ worth.’

‘It’s what we live on, as I said. And why the whole town chips in for the harvest. It belongs to everyone.’

He clapped his hands, and after a while the chattering hubbub inside the barn faded into near silence.

‘Now as you all know,’ Faro Oscuro called out to the women, ‘we have visitors today from Madrid, doing a report on us for a national newspaper.’

Calls of ‘Ooh, aren’t we grand.’

Faro Oscuro held his hands out for silence.

‘They’re very impressed by what we’re doing, and I want to make sure you all smile for the camera. In a few days’ time you’re all going to be famous!’

The women laughed; some of the children cheered.

‘But seriously, I was thinking we might offer our guests a sample of our important work here. So I propose a vote to decide if we should give them a present of some of our famous – soon to be even more famous – Pozoblanco saffron.’

The chatter rose in volume as the women took the idea on board.

‘We’ll have a show of hands. All those in favour?’

All the women, it seemed, raised an arm, along with Faro Oscuro himself.

‘All those against?’

No arm was raised.

‘Abstentions?’

A couple of arms went up at the back of the barn.

‘Right. Thank you for your cooperation.’

Faro Oscuro stuck a hand into his trouser pocket and fished out a small plastic box with a pinch of saffron stigmas inside. On the label it said, in English, ‘
Spanish saffron, La Mancha
’.

He handed it to Alicia and started clapping, along with the rest of the people inside the barn.

Alicia nodded her thanks.

‘Democracy in action?’

‘It’s how we like to do things around here.’

Cámara stepped up to have a look at the box in Alicia’s hand.

‘Where’s the packaging done?’ he asked.

Faro Oscuro indicated a door at the back of the barn, near the saffron container.

‘There’s another team in there. They’ll be starting this afternoon.’

He led them through the open barn doors and out in to the yard.

‘These are the fields where we pick the flowers. La Mancha saffron is the best in the world; that’s why it commands such a high price. It’s like gold.’

Cámara looked out on to fields of a light, creamy brown. Green shoots running in rows were all that remained of the flowers that had been picked earlier that morning.

‘With only three stigmas per plant it’s pretty labour intensive, I should imagine,’ Alicia said.

‘You need two hundred and fifty thousand flowers to produce a kilo of saffron, so yes, it is very definitely labour intensive.’

‘And you manage to grow all that here?’

‘The town has five hundred hectares, owned collectively. And that’s thanks to our struggle over the years. Almost all this land was owned by the Duke of Puertollano thirty years ago – didn’t do anything with it, and he refused to let us farm it. So that’s when it all started.’

They walked out of the yard, along the edge of one of the fields, before connecting with a street and turning back in towards the town centre.

‘It was when my father was mayor,’ Faro Oscuro said. ‘The whole town went on hunger strike, demanding access to the land. And we staged sit-ins, and occupied some of the fields.’

Cámara had stopped taking photographs by this point, and was lighting a cigarette. He hovered a step or two behind as Alicia prompted Faro Oscuro to tell more.

‘What happened?’

‘They sent the police in. Some of us got beaten up, sent to jail. It was back in the early eighties. Franco hadn’t been dead for long. Things were moving very slowly. People were frightened. But we had no work, nothing, here. So we went on hunger strike. The only thing we could do.’

He stopped to talk to a couple of men who were carrying baskets of saffron flowers. Across the street was a large white lorry with the name of an export company stamped on the side. Cámara stuck the cigarette in his mouth and took another shot.

The conversation finished and the two men headed up the road in the direction of the Peace Co-op.

‘That’s the last of it today,’ Faro Oscuro said. ‘We’ll pick up again tomorrow at dawn.’

‘So the hunger strike?’ Alicia said.

‘Lasted thirteen days. The regional government had to give in in the end. Well, of course, we were in the right. We were starving here, children, babies, everyone. So they expropriated the land and gave it to the town. And we’ve been doing nicely ever since.’

‘As a collective?’

‘As a collective. Everyone takes part, everyone owns everything. Schools, parks, civic centres, houses – we’ve built them all ourselves. That’s why it’s so cheap. An ordinary rent in Madrid is – what? Eight hundred, a thousand euros a month?’

Alicia nodded.

‘Here we pay fifteen euros. That’s it.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘But true!’ Faro Oscuro raised his arms in the air. ‘You help to build it, so you get the reward. It’s simple.’

They came out into the main square, where the town hall building stood. Some of the shops had opened now, making up for the lost hours of the early morning.

‘But the struggle continues?’ Alicia asked.

‘Yes, it’s not always easy,’ Faro Oscuro said with a grin. ‘But as I said, I’m even more of a believer now than I was at the beginning.’

‘But for you, personally, I mean.’

Faro Oscuro looked at her questioningly, his small, intense eyes fixed on her.

‘I heard there has been a family tragedy recently,’ Alicia said. ‘Your granddaughter?’

Faro Oscuro breathed heavily through his nostrils, the hairs in his thick beard vibrating. He looked more solid, harder, of a sudden.

‘This way,’ he said finally, turning towards one of the houses lining the square.

‘Come with me.’

A DARK PASSAGEWAY
led through to a patio where dusty glazed pots were held against the walls in iron brackets – geraniums, mostly devoid of their flowers by now, the leaves looking tired and heavy as though calling out to be pruned before the winter cold. An outdoor stairway led to a second floor, while two rooms opened out to where they stood: one shrouded in heavy curtains; the other, a kitchen, with its glass-pane doors slung back.

Inside, three women sat around a table. Two of them looked to be in their sixties, although one was greyer both of hair and skin than the other. They sat on either side of the table, dipping their hands into a large bowl in the centre to pull out potatoes for peeling.

Between them, at the far end of the table, sat a younger woman with long black hair that fell over her face as she leaned forwards, her back curled as though trying to make herself into a ball. It was difficult to see her features, but a thin mouth was just visible as she drew on a cigarette in short, rapid bursts.

All three of the women were dressed in black. Simple skirts and polyester jumpers for the elder two, trousers and a black leather jacket for the younger woman. They sat in silence, the only sound coming from their hands as they dipped into the bowl and then cut into the potato skin with small knives.

‘I know there are exceptions,’ Faro Oscuro said, ‘which is why I’m showing you this.’

He pointed at the women.

‘Newspapers, the TV – they concentrate on the story of a death, of a killing. It’s dramatic, it’s shocking . . .’

He sighed.

‘But this is the reality. This, what’s left behind.’

He took a step forwards towards the kitchen.

‘But no one wants to know about this.’

Alicia followed after him. Cámara glanced up at the rooms on the floor above: the shutters were all closed. Then he fell in step with the others.

The women barely reacted when they reached the kitchen doorway.

‘Maribel, my wife,’ Faro Oscuro said, indicating the elder of the two middle-aged women.

‘Marta, my sister-in-law, and Olga, my daughter.’

The woman in the leather jacket stubbed her cigarette out on a small tin ashtray, then reached over for her packet to light another one, pulling it out with long, thin, pale fingers.

‘Police?’

Marta had raised her head from the potatoes for a moment and directed her question to Alicia.

‘I’m a journalist,’ Alicia said.

‘And him?’

‘He’s my photographer. From the newspaper.’

Marta nodded and turned her attention back to the potatoes. Maribel and Olga remained silent.

At a signal from Faro Oscuro, Alicia and Cámara turned to walk away.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ Alicia said.

The knives scraped and cut, the smoke curling above their heads.

‘Is that the real reason why you came?’ Faro Oscuro said when they got back outside.

‘It’s not my intention to intrude,’ Alicia said. ‘You can show us and tell us as much or as little as you want.’

‘I want people to see what grief really looks like, what death means. It’s not about the crying, the sadness, the destruction of life. It’s what you just saw – it’s the obligation to survive when all you want to do is die yourself. It’s carrying on in an empty world. Thank God I have my work, and my wife and daughter. Otherwise . . .’

His eyes closed for a moment, then sprang open.

‘It was probably something to do with drugs. Olga has had her problems in the past. It seems my granddaughter did as well. We knew, of course, but we thought it could be kept under control. Recreational drug taking is what has kept humans sane for thousands of years. Even cavemen were eating hallucinogens in the Stone Age.’

He looked at Cámara.

‘But Mirella was all right. Perhaps she took too much, I don’t know. But it wasn’t the drugs that did it. A person killed her, a man. Not some chemical substance.’

He started crossing the road, heading back towards the town hall.

‘She needed some space, some time on her own. It’s what Olga never understood. So we let her go, when she said she wanted to go to the city. She was old enough. It would be good for her. There were problems at home with her mother. It’s why she was here in the first place, to get away for a while.’

He paused on the step outside the front door.

‘And so we let her go. Now she’s never coming back. The worst thing is that no matter how I reason it out to myself, I still feel guilty. Some bastard out there killed her, yet I’m the one to blame.’

Alicia took the keys from Cámara’s hand and sat behind the wheel.

‘I’ve never driven a BMW. Let’s see what all the fuss is about.’

The car rolled along the cobbled streets until reaching tarmac again on the outskirts of the village, and she pressed down the accelerator. Their heads pushed back against the rests as the engine surged.

‘Not bad. Thrilling, actually. Is this something to do with penis envy?’

‘If you want mine, it’s yours.’

‘Oh, I know that.’

She giggled as they passed the last of the trees lining the road out of the village, and broke out into the empty landscape once more.

‘I have a theory,’ Cámara said as field after field of light brown soil flew past. ‘The madness round here actually comes from the land itself, as though it runs through the earth like some invisible current, or underground rivers and streams, and it seeps into you if you stay here too long, soaking into your feet and up your body until it reaches your brain.’

Alicia swerved a little to avoid a lorry driving almost in the middle of the road.

‘I mean, Cervantes had to make Don Quixote a madman – or at least he had to make his madman come from La Mancha. Nothing else would make sense. Look around you.’

He waved a hand out of the open window.

‘Even the rocks and stones here are insane. Just look at them.’

Alicia gave him a quizzical look.