Alfonso Navarro López

Alfonso Navarro López is a Spanish boxer whose wartime rivalry with Adrián Gallardo comes to an end in the ruins of Berlin. Their last meeting turns an old dispute over a boxing match into a confession about coercion and responsibility; Navarro is then killed, and Gallardo takes his identity papers. Navarro’s body is hidden from the Soviet occupiers, while his name becomes the means by which another man tries to escape his own past.

Identity and Introduction

Navarro appears in Berlin as a combatant assigned to help build a machine-gun position from rubble in a vast crater in the street. He is already at work when Gallardo and two companions arrive. Rather than interrupting his task to greet them, he carefully sets down the stone in his hands, looks up, recognizes Gallardo, and approaches with a gesture that is more mocking than openly defiant. The physical labor and the measured greeting establish him as a man worn down by the defense of the city, not as the brash boxer Gallardo remembers from years earlier.

Gallardo sees Navarro’s exhaustion reflected in his own appearance. Navarro’s face is distorted by fatigue; his eyes are red, and deep shadows beneath them are unfamiliar to Gallardo. The recognition works in both directions: each sees not simply an old opponent, but a fellow soldier reduced by the same desperate struggle. Their resemblance offers a stark counterpoint to the rivalry that once made them opponents in a ring.

The Berlin Encounter and the Bilbao Match

Navarro greets Gallardo with a coarse joke about the many comrades killed by the Russians and the size of Berlin, then mocks him by saying he looks like Navarro’s girlfriend rather than Jan Schmitt’s. Jan answers with an insult, and Navarro retorts that the real bastard is his cheating friend. The exchange revives the old accusation at the very place where all three men may soon die. Its roughness belongs to their shared exhaustion as much as to their lingering antagonism: Navarro’s voice, like Jan’s, has lost some of its former swagger.

Gallardo intervenes and addresses Navarro by his first name, Alfonso, for the first time in his life. He says that everything is now at stake only for a short while because they are going to die, and asks for peace between them. Then, with Jan listening, he admits that he won their Bilbao bout with a low blow. He did strike Navarro in the groin, but says the scheme came from Captain Ochoa, who explained when to strike and why the referee would not see it. According to Gallardo, Ochoa had turned the bout into a contest between the Army and the Falange, rather than simply between two boxers, and would have had him shot had he disobeyed.

Gallardo’s defense is specific: he was twenty-one, a private soldier, and obeyed a superior’s orders. He asks Navarro to understand that the circumstances of the war left him little choice. The explanation does not erase what happened in the ring, but changes the shape of the accusation. The old result had seemed to be a matter of cheating between two rivals; Gallardo presents it instead as a victory arranged through military authority and political antagonism. After speaking, he sees Jan nod beside him and Navarro staring as if unable to take in what he has heard. The other men have not understood the Spanish exchange, a difference Gallardo notices with a smile.

The Killing and the Assumed Identity

On 2 May 1945, when a Soviet tank points its cannon directly at the crater, Gallardo emerges with his hands raised. He does not surrender alone in the sense of arriving without another man’s identity: he carries Navarro’s documents. He does not show the occupiers Navarro’s corpse. Navarro’s death is thus joined to an act of concealment that lets Gallardo be questioned under a name that is not his own.

The narrative distinguishes this killing from the earlier act of striking Jan. Gallardo’s blow against Jan follows a sincere confession of affection: he tells Jan that he loves him and calls him the best friend he has ever had, then knocks him down so Agneta can reach him. After Agneta tries to revive Jan, Gallardo walks away for hours. When he returns to the crater, Navarro is the only one there to call him a lout. The distinction matters: Gallardo’s later killing of Navarro is not presented as another burst of anger in the old rivalry.

Gallardo knows Navarro is wrong about why Agneta chose Jan. He believes her choice was about love that Gallardo himself lacked, not Jan’s race, skin, or surname. Yet the narrative explicitly rejects jealousy, revenge for the Bilbao bout, guilt, and fear as the motives for Navarro’s murder. At the moment Gallardo pulls the trigger, he is not thinking about Bilbao, his failure to become Spanish champion in 1941, or the Christmas Eve fight of 1942. The stated motive is his overwhelming love for Agneta, and his determination not to die before having a chance to be with her after the war.

That desire does not make the act innocent. Gallardo has been at Klooga and understands that he will eventually have to answer for it. Kleiber, his men, the camp guards, and the many soldiers left at Narva could identify or denounce him to the Russians. He believes he needs a different identity and papers to support it. He kills Navarro for those documents and accepts the new crime without an apparent disturbance of conscience as he surrenders. Navarro’s identity becomes both a practical disguise and the means by which Gallardo tries to keep open the possibility of a life after defeat.

Narrative Significance

Navarro’s final appearance compresses the book’s concerns with honor, command, and false identity into a single encounter. The Bilbao fight that had defined him as the cheated opponent is reinterpreted through Gallardo’s account of Captain Ochoa’s orders and the political purpose imposed on the match. But the confession does not lead to reconciliation or restitution. The men reach an understanding at the edge of death, and Gallardo then kills Navarro to take the papers that can protect him from recognition.

The identity transfer also turns their likeness as exhausted soldiers into a material opportunity. At the crater, Gallardo sees his own weariness mirrored in Navarro; after the killing, he uses Navarro’s documents to make the two men interchangeable to those who do not know the truth. When a Soviet officer questions him after six weeks in an overcrowded cell, the other prisoners show no surprise at the new name. Navarro is therefore present in the story’s aftermath as an identity others accept, even though Gallardo has concealed his body and taken his place. His fate reveals the brutal limit of the confession: telling the truth about one past wrong does not prevent Gallardo from committing a new one when he sees a chance to survive.