Her WhatsApp photo is a picture of Pippi Långstrump. The character of Astrid Lindgren was the first reference of her that she had of her: she was the strongest girl in the world and she did not let her bullies get away with it. She would then read Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky. And perhaps it was premonitory, because since 2020, Alexandra García Tabernero has been a prosecutor at the Provincial Court of Barcelona. International law has interested him since he was sixteen. But he shaped his vocation by doing a postgraduate degree at Harvard, where he met his inspirations Benjamin Ferencz –then the last living prosecutor in Nuremberg–, and his professor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who personally gambled in the trial of the Argentine military juntas, with a fundamental role in the history of his country, as reflected in the film '1985'. “I want to be like them when I grow up,” she says. Her tutor, Alex Whiting, and the dean of the faculty, Martha Minow, signed The First Global Prosecutor for her, a treasure for her.
Before that, she had studied at Ramon Llull, in Pedralbes, with a scholarship; She obtained the highest selectivity mark in Catalonia in 2009. She went to the university by bus, and spent the hour there and back reading. Her love of reading has been a constant since she was little. She regretted not being able to do it during the oppositions, when she spent thirteen hours a day memorizing laws; she felt that she was missing something. She reads mostly on weekends, in the armchair by the window that she faces on a quiet street, in an apartment that she moved into in September. Or on the sofa in the dining room, in front of a bookcase that doesn't look like it's from Ikea but is, “my best kept secret”. She has the classic collections of Penguin and Wordsworth in English, books by Simone de Beauvoir in French, by Hannah Arendt, Ferdinand Von Schirach in German. There is also The last girl, by Nadia Murad, about the sexual violence of the Islamic State; The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, on Eastern philosophy and military strategy; Yugoslavia, my land, by Goran Vojnović, about the conflict in the Balkans. In The Hague, she learned from prosecutors from different legal traditions, "it was very enriching."
On a small table, there is a bouquet of flowers that has been dried. It was given to him as a thank you by the victims of the serial rapist who pretended to be a 'rider', with a note that he also keeps. García Tabernero is very coffee. Coffee is the first thing you think about when you wake up. But he says that, to read, you have to drink tea, in a cute little cup; black tea with a little milk, or an English Breakfast, or a Chai. “I have a British lady inside of me,” he smiles. He likes to identify with what he reads, because the books reinforce his idealism. An ideal that, like that of Oscar Wilde (his favorite author of him), is conscious and pragmatic. Or on the contrary: the books bring him closer to the frustrations that also occur in his profession, the case of Without a doubt, by Marcia Clark, prosecutor for O. J. Simpson. He usually combines black novels to "disconnect from work" (sic) with psychology books. And he always carries one in his bag; now, Think Fast, Think Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. He likes to go to La Central to spend the afternoon and see what catches him; It is his main criterion. If he is looking for a specific title, it is because it has been recommended to him.
He doesn't care that the books he lends are not returned. Well, except for Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte, which she read in The Hague and an ex of hers stayed somewhere in northern Europe. He does not mark the pages, but underlines in pencil the sentences that catch his attention. For example, from Mario Puzo: "He has killed many people, but he has not committed any injustice." Or Wilde: "Progress is the realization of utopias." Arendt, Lindgren, Gandhi, Mandela; also Saviano and Murad, who gave him “a reality check”. Without being aware of it, many authors in his library share courage in common. There is Cosas de la Cosa Nostra, by Giovanni Falcone, his great adult reference, who accepted his own fear because otherwise he would be foolish, but he did not allow that fear to condition him. There are books about the mafia, about terrorism. And a bit of Murakami "to mislead". Also Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Kafka, Anna Frank, Stieg Larsson, the Terra Alta trilogy, by Cercas. And A Doll's House, by Ibsen: "It would be what Pippi would read when she grew up"
