Adrián Gallardo’s scapular

Adrián Gallardo’s scapular is a devotional object that gives physical form to his faith and tenderness amid wartime violence. First seen beneath his shirt and repeatedly kissed, it becomes a private source of reassurance that contrasts with his role as a boxer expected to knock opponents unconscious. Its later appearance in an old wooden train links Adrián’s story to Guillermo’s memories of home, family, and loss.

A private devotional practice

Adrián is described as a healthy, innocent young man who neither drinks nor smokes and repeatedly draws out the scapular his mother gave him to kiss. The gesture is habitual: even while training as a boxer, he reaches for it. The object is not merely part of his clothing but a portable ritual of faith, carried close to his body in circumstances that repeatedly test the innocence associated with it.

Faith against the demands of the ring

The scapular becomes conspicuous when Adrián hesitates to strike a fellow soldier during training. He asks Antonio Ochoa Gorostiza whether he should hit his opponent hard or only lightly, explaining that the man is one of their own and a good fellow. Ochoa insists that the opponent is an enemy and demands a knockout, telling Adrián to stop handling the scapular and find his killer instinct. Adrián answers that he does not know whether he has one.

Despite that uncertainty, Adrián does fight. Afterward he helps his opponent up, apologizes, and invites him for beers at the troop canteen. The scapular thus belongs to a tension that the boxing routine cannot resolve: Adrián can perform the violence expected of him, but his conduct outside the bout retains a gentleness that Ochoa’s training is designed to suppress.

The Bilbao fight and its removal

Before the fight on a barge in Bilbao’s harbor, Adrián wants to carry the scapular into the ring. Ochoa notices a loop of its pale-blue cord showing above the waistband of Adrián’s trunks and reprimands him. Alone in the improvised changing room, Adrián takes the scapular from his trunks, kisses it repeatedly, folds its ribbon carefully, and tucks it between his uniform jacket and trousers. He is frightened, unsure why he is about to fight a Falangist he does not know, yet feels he is where he belongs. The object does not dispel his fear; the private act of kissing and carefully folding it accompanies him as he faces the public spectacle.

A remembered object

Much later, a wooden toy train repainted by Amparo brings Guillermo an unexpected sense of relief. He recognizes the train from his own childhood, though its locomotive is now black and its three carriages red, with traces of the original green showing through one coat of nail polish. The sight returns him to a painful period of silence and anger with Amparo after learning she was pregnant. The scapular itself is not identified as part of this scene; rather, the connection between the two objects lies in the novel’s wider movement between material keepsakes and the memories they awaken.

When Guillermo later opens the family bauls that Experta has preserved, he finds, among other belongings, the old wooden toy train, childhood stories, medical books, family papers, and the chess set he received at fifteen. He weeps over the train, which becomes a lever releasing grief for the family and home he has lost. Against that later history of displacement, Adrián’s scapular stands as another intimate object whose meaning exceeds its size: a touchable remnant of attachment carried through a world demanding violence and separation.