“We are all losers, Fermín. We lose things little by little until we lose everything with death.” This is Inspector Petra Delicado speaking in this way, in the beautiful translation from Spanish by Maria Nicola, to the deputy inspector, her precious collaborator Fermín Garzón, at the end of a tiring investigation that leaves her sad, even after having solved the case. In “La donna che fugge” (Sellerio), the most recent adventure in the beautiful series by the brilliant Spanish writer Alicia Giménez-Bartlett (which in the Italian TV series is set in Genoa with a masterful interpretation by Paola Cortellesi), the one who investigates the world of street food is the usual Petra, fearless, “stubborn as a mule”, always ready to keep the “thermostat of irony” high, but also dissatisfied, inclined to “philosophical” and “sociological” reflections as Garzón calls her, from whose reserve of self-evident serenity devoid of superstructures Petra knows she can draw.
So, a chef is stabbed to death while sleeping in his food truck, one of those vans that sell street food cooked on the spot: a very trendy phenomenon, as reported by the victim’s heartfelt partner and friend. From here begins an investigation that makes the two policemen run here and there in Barcelona, but it doesn’t seem to make progress, while it gives Petra and Fermín, a “Buddha repainted with Iberian popular wisdom”, time to reflect on the world of work, on the “ancient arrogance of the judges’ caste”, on the “rivalries between the forces of law and order, a disgrace”, on the anger and desperation of people, and also to make meta-narrative considerations on fiction in which crimes are quickly solved. And instead, Petra and her deputy seem to “follow the meanders of a very slow river without even being sure that it will flow into the sea”.
The crime does not remain isolated, other deaths and violence are added, while chasing a woman who seems to escape from everyone, a femme fatale who was seen talking to the victim before she died. But is she really the guilty one? Is she the woman who runs away? After all, we all run away, as women often do – said Alicia Giménez-Bartlett – when «they have a problem that could make those who love them suffer». And to women, to intuition and to feminine courage, the feminist sisterhood of Petra and Alicia always goes: «After all – thinks Petra – that of feminine intuition is one of the least annoying clichés in circulation». Yet, Petra, whose excessive analysis sometimes turns out to be a weakness, knows that intuition is only enough up to a certain point and that “you have to settle for reality without trying to seek the truth”: so the two often give each other “gastro-alcoholic compensations” and for Petra who, among other things, hates supermarkets (“a sinister place from which she wants to escape before even entering”), nothing like a good cold beer, or rather frozen, at the historic cervecería Jarra de Oro, soothes the sense of frustration and failure in the investigations.
