Barcelona is both a place of political rupture and a measure of personal defeat in the novel. The May 1937 fighting there leaves more than two hundred anti-fascists dead and deepens the Republican government’s internal crisis; later, the city hosts the Spanish championship final in which Adrián Gallardo loses by knockout after spending seven rounds searching the crowd for Alfonso Navarro. Barcelona thus marks two different contests in which the immediate opponent is only part of the danger: political allies turn against one another, and a boxer’s fixation undoes his concentration in the ring.

The May crisis and its consequences

In early May 1937, anarchists and Trotskyists clashed in the streets with forces of the Generalitat and the Republican government. The revolution they proclaimed was defeated after six days of fighting, which left more than two hundred dead, all anti-fascists. The bloodshed was not simply a local disturbance: it precipitated the fall of Largo Caballero and the rise of Negrín to the presidency of the government, while leaving the Republic more divided and suspicious of its own factions.

Manuel Arroyo Benítez knew the public outlines of the Barcelona crisis before returning to Madrid, but not its full political aftermath. He had been in London collecting his office and preparing his luggage when the government appointed him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a fabricated identity, to serve as an auxiliary representative before Madrid’s Defense Junta. He had not been told that the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification had been arrested shortly before his journey in retaliation for the Barcelona conflict, or that its leader, Andreu Nin, had been missing since 18 May—even from Republican civilian intelligence.

Barcelona as a warning to Madrid

The political circumstances that made Arroyo’s assignment necessary were explicitly linked to Barcelona. Negrín described a government struggling to control its own territory: Soviet advisers wielded influence within the Military Intelligence Service, Socialist rivals undermined one another, and anarchists and Trotskyists continued to pursue their revolution independently. The Defense Junta had closed Madrid’s illegal detention centres the previous year, yet clandestine sites were still operating. The fear was that the internal violence witnessed in Barcelona could recur in the besieged capital.

Arroyo was therefore asked to join the Public Order Council under his false name and report what was happening: how many uncontrolled brigades remained active, who was conducting unauthorized purges in the rear, whether the intelligence service had become an extension of Soviet secret police, and whether Madrid might suffer a crisis like Barcelona’s. The appointment offered little protection; Negrín warned that this investigative work could be more dangerous than fighting at the front. Barcelona functions in this part of the novel as both recent history and a forecast—a defeated uprising whose unresolved consequences shadow the next city.

The championship final

Barcelona returns in a different register in Adrián Gallardo’s boxing career. After reaching the final of the Spanish championship, he defeats the Canary Islands champion in the semifinal. The bout costs him the greatest punishment of his professional career to that point, but his trainer, Pirulo, is pleased: they have reached the final, and the result has already made their trip a success in his eyes. The remaining week allows Pirulo to care for Gallardo for a couple of days before intensifying his training during the last three.

During their walks and massages, Pirulo warns Gallardo that Oñate is the best boxer he has faced. Gallardo’s answer—whether Oñate is better than Navarro—shows where his attention remains. On the day of the final, Pirulo urges him to concentrate on Oñate, embraces him, and calls him a champion. Gallardo nods without meeting his trainer’s gaze. As he descends the stairs and waits through the preliminary bouts, his eyes keep moving across the stands in search of Navarro.

For seven rounds Gallardo watches Navarro more than his opponent. In the eighth, he collapses onto the canvas. The defeat is the first knockout loss of the Tigre of Treviño’s professional career, though not the last. The final’s outcome therefore turns on a contrast already present in the political strand of Barcelona: the contest being fought in public cannot be separated from the conflict occupying the protagonist elsewhere. Gallardo is physically present against Oñate, but his attention is elsewhere, and the result becomes a personal reversal rather than the championship triumph Pirulo had hoped for.

Aftermath and significance

Pirulo tries to reassure Gallardo by invoking famous champions who had also been knocked out and reminding him that he is still the Spanish runner-up, with further fights, victories, money, and glory ahead. Gallardo no longer speaks with him. He spends his Barcelona winnings on fortune-tellers, card readers, protective charms, and rituals intended to ward off Navarro’s influence. He begins going out at night and drinking alone, takes up smoking, gains weight, and loses his fitness, strength, and reflexes. His decline proceeds from a single final defeat into a sustained withdrawal from the discipline that had shaped his life.

The political and sporting episodes do not make Barcelona a simple symbol with one meaning. In the May crisis, factional conflict turns the Republican cause inward against itself, and the dead are all on the anti-fascist side. In the championship, Gallardo’s attention to Navarro displaces the fight in front of him and helps make defeat the beginning of a broader collapse. Across both episodes, Barcelona is a setting where an apparent contest reveals a second struggle beneath it: the Republic’s struggle to hold together, and Gallardo’s struggle to remain a boxer after his fixation has taken hold.