‘I’m not sure if a BMW is the right kind of car for a place like this,’ Cámara said as they left the tarmac and started bobbing up and down cobbled streets.
The plan was to head straight to the town hall, where Alicia had arranged to meet the mayor, Francisco Faro Oscuro. A Republican red-yellow-and-purple tricolour flag hanging from the walls of an official-looking building seemed the likeliest place, and they pulled in opposite, slotting the car into a space between two others.
‘We could ask if this is it,’ Cámara said, ‘but I can’t see anyone around.’
The streets were deserted, and the shops closed. But there were no metal security shutters over the doors and windows, as there were in most towns, Cámara noticed.
They got out of the car and climbed a few steps. Alicia nodded at some modest lettering on a side wall: ‘Town Hall’.
They stepped inside to an entrance hall with a pale marble floor. A staircase led up to the storey above. No one was at the reception desk. Alicia stopped and stood expectantly, waiting for someone to appear, while Cámara snooped around.
‘There must be a bell, or something.’
He glanced at the papers strewn on the reception desk – official forms, pamphlets relating to water rights, and a map of the town, which he quickly glanced at, then folded and placed in his pocket. A little black metal box with a key was unlocked. He opened it and found a colourful array of papers inside, including bright green 100-euro and yellow 200-euro notes. About 3,000-euros in total, he quickly calculated.
‘Anything interesting?’ Alicia asked.
‘What time did you say we’d be here?’
‘We’re on time.’
She pulled her phone out.
‘I’ll give them a call.’
They heard footsteps coming from above, scuffing the floor as they moved towards the top of the staircase. Alicia took a step forwards. Cámara closed the metal cash box and stayed where he was. Then remembering he was meant to be a photographer, not a policeman, he stepped away from behind the desk and came out into the centre of the hall.
A tall, slim man with black hair appeared on the staircase, pausing as he caught sight of them before continuing downwards. Reaching the hall, he started to cross towards the main doors leading out into the square, not glancing at the two strangers.
‘Excuse me,’ Alicia called out as the man reached the door. He hesitated, then half-turned to her.
‘I’m looking for the mayor,’ she said. ‘I was supposed to meet him here now. Do you know where he is?’
The man already had his hand on the door handle.
‘The mayor?’ he repeated. Both Cámara and Alicia noted the accent. Middle Eastern, perhaps, given his appearance.
‘Francisco Faro Oscuro,’ Alicia said.
The man looked puzzled.
‘Ah, Paco,’ he said eventually.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Alicia asked again.
‘No,’ the man said. And he turned to leave.
‘Do you know where we might find him?’ Alicia butted in before he could get out the door.
The man shrugged.
‘Somewhere in the village,’ he said. ‘He walks around. You’ll find him. It’s not big.’
And he shuffled outside and disappeared.
Alicia and Cámara gave each other a look.
‘I don’t think there’s anyone else here,’ Cámara said.
‘Well, it looks like the mayor certainly isn’t,’ Alicia answered. ‘Fancy a stroll?’
Stepping out into bright November sunshine, Cámara reached for the map.
‘I can work out where we are,’ he said with a frown. ‘I just don’t know where we’re going.’
‘Down here,’ Alicia said, pulling on his arm.
They walked down what appeared to be the high street. Again, no one was around.
‘Perhaps everyone’s out working on the saffron harvest,’ Alicia said.
‘Or the place has been hit overnight by the plague,’ Cámara murmured.
He glanced up at a sign on a nearby house.
‘We’re on Calle Che Guevara,’ he said, ‘which leads on to Avenida Salvador Allende,’ he looked at his map. ‘And you’ll be happy to hear we’re just a stone’s throw from the Karl Marx Civic Centre. Perhaps they’ve all gone there for a collective read of Das Kapital.’
Alicia ignored him and carried on walking.
‘Are you taking photos?’ she called back.
Cámara shrugged, then reached for the camera slung around his neck, pulled off the lens cap, and started taking snaps. Peering through the viewfinder, he circled around, pausing, clicking, moving, pausing and clicking again, trying to capture a 360-degree view from where he was standing. A wooden door with black iron studs; an agricultural supplies shopfront; a dusty tall window with old, thin glass; a view back down the street to the town hall square.
He stopped, and quickly darted the camera back up to the window. He’d seen something there, a movement, a person. Through the viewfinder he saw only rain-streaked glass and a dirt-white curtain: no one was there. Pulling the camera away from his eye he looked up. No: nothing.
He was about to start scrolling through the photos he’d taken, to see if he’d caught anything with his shot, when Alicia beckoned him over.
‘Come on. Over here.’
Turning a corner, he saw her standing in front of what looked a bit like a police car. It was light blue and white, and had the town emblem stamped on the door, but the only word written on it was that for ‘Town Hall’; nothing to indicate police.
‘What do you reckon?’ she said.
Cámara shrugged.
‘Not like any Municipales car I’ve ever seen,’ he said.
‘That’s because it’s not really a police car,’ a voice said behind him.
Cámara turned to find a man in uniform approaching them from the other side of the street. He was bareheaded – no cap – and the black belt above his hips lacked a gun of any kind.
‘We don’t have any police in Pozoblanco,’ the man said. He was in his mid-thirties, with three days of stubble covering his chin.
‘You don’t need them in a utopia.’
‘You work for the Town Hall?’ Alicia asked.
The man nodded.
Alicia explained who she was, how she’d arranged to meet Paco, the mayor, to do a report for a major national newspaper.
‘We were told to walk around,’ Cámara said, ‘and see if we could find him. Some guy at the town hall. Tall, foreign.’
‘That’ll be Ahmed,’ the non-policeman said. ‘Yeah, but if you want Paco you’re better off going to the Peace Co-op. It’s harvest time, so everyone’s up there.’
Cámara checked the map.
‘That’s in Federico García Lorca Square?’
‘That’s right. Keep going straight, then swing round to the left.’
He turned to go.
‘Just one thing,’ Cámara said. ‘If you’re not the municipal policeman, what do you do?’
‘Deliver the mail,’ the man said. ‘That and a few other odd jobs around the place.’
‘Give out parking tickets?’
‘Nah! Nothing like that.’
He grinned.
‘We don’t need any police. It’s very peaceful here. People just get on with their lives.’
TWELVE
IT WAS OBVIOUS which one of them was Paco. The town might have been a collective utopia with no police force, but Mayor Faro Oscuro’s body language spoke of authority and of himself being in charge.
He wasn’t tall, but then neither were the dozens of other people milling about inside the Peace Co-op. He was physically strong, however, and the thick, forked greying beard jutting from his jaw gave him presence.
When he turned and caught sight of them, Cámara immediately registered two things: an animal liveliness in his eyes that seemed incongruous with one who had recently lost a granddaughter; and a white T-shirt pulled over the man’s b
lack top showing a picture of Franco’s face with a red line drawn over it. He would have to get Hilario one of those.
Finishing his conversation with a middle-aged woman, Faro Oscuro walked over to them, shaking hands first with Alicia and then with Cámara.
‘It’s harvest time, the most important moment of the year for us. We have to pick the flowers early the very morning they bloom, otherwise the stigmas dry out and become worthless.’
He swept a hand out, indicating the bustling activity around them.
The Peace Co-op was a simple barn-like structure made from breeze block and brick, with a corrugated roof. Around them were a dozen tables, each with four or five women and children sitting in front of piles of violet saffron flowers. With quick, deft movements, they were plucking at the red stigmas inside each flower, dropping them into baskets, and then tossing the remains of the flower on to the floor, chatting and joking as they worked.
‘We started yesterday. It’s hard work, but it has to be done. Can’t be kept waiting. It’s what keeps this town alive.’
Cámara detected an impediment in Faro Oscuro’s voice, an inability to roll his ‘r’s properly. At their feet lay a thick, undulating carpet of flowers, while the air was rich with an intense, sharp, hay-like saffron aroma. It made him think of paella, of Valencia, of his old police colleague Inspector Torres. They’d had more than a few paellas together, nipping out at lunchtime for an hour or two. It was usually when they came up with breakthroughs in a case. Or at least that’s what they told themselves.
Torres. He wondered how he was doing. They hadn’t spoken for months. Perhaps he should give him a call.
A man with a greasy wrinkled neck was backing in towards him as he swept up. Cámara stepped out of the way to let him pass. The man looked up as he pushed a great swathe of petals with his broom, and smiled; two front teeth missing, but Cámara saw a sparkle in one of the remaining incisors: a diamond stud, clean and shiny in an otherwise rotting mouth.
‘This is very impressive,’ Alicia was saying to Faro Oscuro. ‘Can we take some shots in here?’
It was his cue: Cámara reached for his camera again.
‘We tried looking for you at the town hall,’ Alicia said.
‘I left Ahmed in charge.’
‘Yes, we spoke to him.’
Snap went the camera.
‘Moroccan. Landed up here one day needing a job, so we took him in. Helps around the place – harvests, security, whatever’s going.’
‘That seems to be how things work here.’
Snap, snap.
‘Yes, we do things a bit differently.’
Faro Oscuro smiled.
‘Here, come and have a look around. You can come as well,’ he called over to Cámara.
They walked around the tables. Some of the women looked up in greeting, others kept their eyes on the flowers in their hands, not breaking their concentration or the chatter.
‘It’s communal – we try to rotate work duties,’ Faro Oscuro explained. ‘But you have to recognise that certain people are better at some things than others.’
He leaned down, picked up a saffron flower, and showed it to them.
‘We only want these red strands, the stigmas. The rest of the flower, the stamens, the petals, everything, gets thrown away. That’s what ends up on the floor. Although we use it to mix with fertiliser. No waste. You have to give back to nature what you take from her.’
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 anoth
er 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 Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) Page 9