The photo she has on WhatsApp is a picture of Pippi LÃ¥ngstrump. The character of Astrid Lindgren was her first reference: she was the strongest girl in the world and she didn’t let the abusers get away with it. Then I would read Crime and Punishment, by Dostoevsky. Perhaps foreboding, because since 2020, Alexandra GarcÃa Tabernero has been a prosecutor at the Provincial Court of Barcelona. International law began to interest him at the age of sixteen. But her vocation took shape when she did a post-graduate degree at Harvard, where she met her inspirations Benjamin Ferencz – then the last living prosecutor of Nuremberg – and her teacher Luis Moreno Ocampo, who played her personally at the trial of the Argentine military junta, with a fundamental role in the history of the country, as reflected in the film 1985. “I want to be like them when I grow up,” he says. Her tutor, Alex Whiting, and the dean of the faculty, Martha Minow, signed The First Global Prosecutor, a treasure for her.
He had previously studied at Ramon Llull, in Pedralbes, on a scholarship; he obtained the highest selectivity mark in Catalonia in 2009. He went to university by bus, and devoted himself to reading the time on the way there and the way back. The love of reading has been a constant since childhood. He regretted not being able to do it while preparing for the exams, when he spent thirteen hours a day memorizing laws; he felt he was missing something. He reads mostly at weekends, in the armchair by the window overlooking a quiet street, in a flat he moved into in September. Or on the sofa in the dining room, in front of a shelf that doesn’t look like it’s from Ikea but it is, “my best kept secret”. It 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, mi tierra, by Goran Vojnović, about the conflict in the Balkans. In The Hague, he learned from prosecutors from different legal traditions, “it was very enriching”.
On a table, there is a bouquet of flowers that he dried. It was given as a thank you by the victims of the serial rapist who pretended to be a rider, with a note that he also keeps. GarcÃa Tabernero is very much a coffee maker. 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,” he smiles. He likes to identify with what he reads, because books reinforce his idealism. An ideal that, like that of Oscar Wilde (his favorite author), is conscious and pragmatic. Or on the contrary: the books bring him closer to the frustrations that also occur in his profession, case of Without a doubt, by Marcia Clark, prosecutor of O. J. Simpson. He usually combines black novels to “disconnect from work” (sic) with psychology books. And she always carries one in her purse; now, Think Fast, Think Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. He likes to spend the afternoon in La Central and see what catches him. If you are looking for a specific title, it is because it has been recommended.
It hurts him so much that the books he leaves are not returned to him. 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 those 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 jolt of reality”. Without being aware of it, many authors in their library have bravery in common. There are Things from Cosa Nostra, by Giovanni Falcone, his great reference as an adult, who accepted his own fear because otherwise he would be a fool, but he did not allow that fear to condition him. There are books on the mafia, on terrorism. And a bit of Murakami “to confuse”. 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 growing up”.
