Alfonso Navarro

Alfonso Navarro is a gifted Falangist boxer whose defeat by Adrián Gallardo begins as a rigged political spectacle and endures as a private debt that neither man can put aside. Proud, technically superior, and capable of the ferocity Gallardo lacks, Navarro becomes both the rival Gallardo defeats unfairly and the living reminder that the victory came at the cost of honor.

Identity and Background

Navarro is a handsome, polished Sevillian, born into an impoverished branch of an old aristocratic family. The family had lost its title because it could no longer afford to maintain it; Navarro, in turn, refuses to imagine earning a living as a professional boxer, even though the end of the war leaves him with nothing. Boxing is amusement and distinction, not a trade. His elegance and confidence contrast with Gallardo’s rough manners and working, rural image, but the difference is not simply one of refinement: Navarro is the more technically accomplished fighter, and the novel gives him the killer instinct that Gallardo’s military mentor has been searching for in his own champion.

His political standing is specific. He is not the champion of the Fifth Brigade of Navarre, as some assume, but the champion of the Spanish Falange. He is a favored protégé of Sancho Dávila, José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Sevillian cousin. Before Dávila became his protector in Pamplona, Fernando Villa Ruiz had supported him there as a standard-bearer for Falangist purity. Villa was arrested after resisting Francisco Franco’s Unification Decree, which fused the legal parties in Franco’s territory into a single National Movement. The decree leaves Falangists, Carlists, and monarchists resentful, while the military emerge as its principal winners.

Navarro’s conduct toward Villa gives his swagger a political and personal edge. Antonio Ochoa recognizes that Navarro did not lift a finger for his friend when Villa was arrested. Ochoa dislikes the political scheming of the Falangists and regards Navarro’s inaction as cowardice and ingratitude. Yet the captain also sees in Navarro’s eyes the fierce instinct he has sought in vain in Gallardo. His judgment is double: Navarro is a bad friend, but he is no harmless gentleman or merely theatrical rival.

The Bilbao Fight and the Stolen Victory

The fight with Gallardo is arranged as more than a sporting contest. Ochoa realizes that a bout between the Falangist Navarro and Gallardo, the Army’s champion, will stand for the rivalry between the Army and the Falange. He dislikes the political symbolism but decides to control the outcome. At the weigh-in, Navarro shakes Gallardo’s hand in front of photographers, smiling for the cameras; during the embrace, he quietly tells his opponent that he will not last two rounds. The public courtesy and private insult establish the contest’s divided face before either boxer enters the ring.

Navarro proves the stronger boxer by skill. Through the first four rounds he gives Gallardo a severe beating. He is faster, more elastic, and far more technically trained; although he is not as strong, his superiority would have put almost any opponent on the canvas. If judges decided the match on points, Navarro would win. Ochoa has arranged otherwise. The crowd stands on the quay, the two corners face away from it, and the ring sits on a barge high enough that spectators on boats in the estuary cannot see clearly. Military judges and an officer serving as referee are also aligned with the Army’s interest in beating the Falangist champion.

After the fourth round, Ochoa gives Gallardo a single-word signal: now. In the fifth, Gallardo moves toward the side of the ring facing the estuary. Navarro follows and tries to trap him against the ropes. As the referee separates them from a clinch, Gallardo turns quickly and lands a punch to the groin, hiding the foul with his body as Ochoa had instructed. Navarro falls at once. The referee counts him out, prevents his trainer from approaching, and raises Gallardo’s arm. The official victory belongs to Gallardo; the actual result has been manufactured by a low blow and protected by the military officials’ collusion.

Gallardo experiences the public acclaim as the high point of his life. He advances to the center of the ring with his arms raised, hears the crowd shouting his name, and is carried by boat to shore, where generals congratulate him and Ochoa shares his triumph. In that moment he does not remember the arrangements that made the win possible, or that Navarro had no fair chance to protest. The contrast between the crowd’s celebration and the concealed foul gives Navarro’s loss its lasting force: the deception is hidden from the public, but not from the two men who fought.

The Defeat’s Afterlife

After the war, Gallardo’s new trainer Pirulo asks whether he really knocked Navarro out in Bilbao and whether the punch was clean. Gallardo answers firmly that he put Navarro down in the fifth round and points to the crowded port as witness, but he avoids his trainer’s gaze. Pirulo knows Navarro as a good boxer and a bad man, a spoiled, hostile aristocrat; he insists that boxing does not require a fighter to be cruel. The conversation turns from a question about the official result into an unwelcome reopening of the moral fact Gallardo has tried not to face.

For Gallardo, the defeat never becomes a closed chapter. Ochoa had reassured him that he would never see Navarro again, and for a while the success seems solid enough to believe that promise. But in ordinary life after the war, Gallardo begins both to fear and to desire Navarro’s return. He continues boxing professionally in part because of him, unable to decide whether he wants to redeem himself through a clean contest or to reach a final peace. The rival becomes an absence with a voice: Pirulo’s question makes Gallardo feel as if Navarro has taken a seat beside them.

That voice grows into a recurring accusation during Gallardo’s training. Navarro’s imagined reproach says Gallardo dragged his reputation through the dirt with a foul, knowing the referee would pretend not to see it, and could win only because Ochoa had fixed the contest. Gallardo pounds the heavy bag with combinations, trying to silence the accusation through exertion; it continues through the summer. Pirulo praises his improved form when they meet again in Madrid, but the praise arrives too late to account for Gallardo’s next triumph. In October 1940 he becomes champion of Castile, and the narration presents Navarro’s living shadow—not training alone or the trainer’s advice—as the force that has driven him to the title.

The Rivals Meet Again

When Gallardo prepares for the Spanish championship in the spring of 1941, Pirulo tries to put the Bilbao bout in perspective. More than three years have passed. Gallardo had been an amateur with little knowledge of professional technique, while Navarro had learned professional tricks; now, Pirulo argues, Gallardo would knock him out in the first round. He believes Navarro knows this and will not leave his father’s horse-breeding estates to seek a rematch. Gallardo retains only the detail that Navarro’s father is ruined. His attention remains fixed on the possibility that the rival may return, even as Pirulo urges him to concentrate on his immediate opponent, Oñate, and the Spanish title.

Navarro does return, though not in the shape Gallardo remembers. By the time they encounter each other in an officers’ dining room, Navarro is thirty and visibly altered. His dark, brilliantined hair is gone, and a nervous tic makes his right eye blink. His wife was killed in the spring of 1940 during a guerrilla reprisal in the Sierra Morena, while recovering from an abortion at her family’s estate. He has lost weight, but not his hostility. The change in his appearance and circumstances makes the old rivalry more than a preserved boxing grudge: each man has been altered by the intervening war and its losses, while the accusation between them remains intact.

Captain Ernesto Junquera, eager for the two men to embrace in the spirit of sporting chivalry, misreads the encounter. Navarro refuses, calling Gallardo a cheat. The word strikes Gallardo like a bomb. Jan Schmitt, who knows Gallardo’s victories, calls Navarro a loser and challenges his audacity. Navarro pushes Jan to the floor. Gallardo then runs from behind the table and knocks Navarro down with a right hand, without a word. It is the second time he has felled Navarro since their first meeting.

Gallardo lets the officers believe he struck instinctively while defending a friend, and repeats that explanation. The narration makes clear that this is not the truth. He has thought through the action: in a room full of officers, provoking a brawl is his way out, even if it means the guardhouse. If he had been alone with Navarro, Gallardo would have welcomed a fight in which he could box with his soul as well as his fists. The audience’s interpretation again diverges from the private meaning of the encounter. Most of the officers accept Schmitt’s account that Navarro cannot take defeat and side with Gallardo, the Spanish runner-up.

Retaliation and an Unsettled Debt

The rivalry resurfaces at a Christmas boxing match in Pokrovskaya. When gunfire and confusion interrupt the proceedings, the chaplain, Father Arribas, orders the judges to stay put and leads the assembled men in a Christmas carol. Before the singers can repair their performance for a second time, Gallardo collapses onto the canvas. Navarro has seized the distraction to land a left-handed punch like the one that put him down in the officers’ dining room two months earlier. He murmurs that the two of them are still not even, although the unconscious Gallardo cannot hear him.

The referee calls for the military police while continuing to sing. Navarro submits to arrest as readily as Gallardo had on the earlier occasion. The senior legal officer, who is to become president of the disciplinary tribunal, privately promises that Navarro’s detention will last at least three months and that he would gladly impose twice as long. Gallardo learns what happened only after waking in the infirmary, where doctors keep him under observation for twenty-four hours. The repeated reversal is pointed: Gallardo’s first official victory rests on a hidden foul; his later fall happens in a scene whose noise and disorder obscure the punch. Navarro’s retaliation does not settle the original contest, but it makes the feud public again and carries it into the soldiers’ military life.

On 12 October 1943, as Gallardo is reflecting on his wasted hopes and reduced to fighting simply to survive a lost war, he sees Navarro again in the courtyard at Pokrovskaya. The date marks Franco’s dissolution of the Blue Division and announcement of the Blue Legion, a smaller Spanish volunteer force within the German army. Gallardo is not among those who step forward to volunteer; Navarro is the first to do so. The encounter places their different choices against the same battered horizon. For Gallardo, the war has swallowed boxing, ambition, and the causes he once thought he served. Navarro’s willingness to step forward continues his own path into the fighting, while the unresolved history between them remains a measure of how thoroughly their earlier contest has outlasted the ring.