Meeting Skorzeny at the Las Ventas Brawl Performance

The meeting between the narrator and Otto Skorzeny at Las Ventas turns a night of staged violence into a confrontation with the narrator’s history and with the impunity of his enemies. As his sons cheer a professional wrestler’s carefully scripted victory, the narrator recognizes a man who has enjoyed money and freedom after the defeat of the cause for which the narrator once struggled. He recognizes Skorzeny, but tells his sons only that he is an acquaintance, withholding the reason this encounter matters.

The performance and its audience

On 15 June 1974, a full Las Ventas hosted a wrestling card whose main event was for the Spanish championship. The narrator’s sons, Guillermo and Manuel, had already accepted that their father would not stay to watch the boxing main event. Boxing had never appealed to him, even before Adrián Gallardo entered his life; professional wrestling, by contrast, held a different attraction. To the narrator, it was a brutal ballet and savage comedy: the blows, pain, victory, and defeat were all performed, as false as the tomato-sauce stains worn by actors who die just before taking their bows.

The sons had come to support Juan Gómez Gómez, a huge former common prisoner who wrestled under the name El Demonio de Acero. He had served a sentence for killing a man in a fight, though he had always maintained that the death was accidental. His imposing appearance, a liability in court, helped him find work after prison. In the ring, however, he was repeatedly cast as the villain and made to lose. The narrator and his sons became his persistent supporters, following his appearances in and around Madrid. That night offered Juan a rare promised win, in the second bout of the evening, and the sons went to his home to accompany him to the arena.

The narrator’s sense of wrestling as transparent make-believe is tested by a spectator whose fury seems genuine. A man shouts for the wrestler to smash his opponent’s head, strike him in the nape, and kill him. At first, the outburst becomes another amusement for the family: Manuel laughs at the apparent belief that the wrestlers are really fighting, and Guillermo points out the tall man in a raincoat. The narrator follows his gesture and joins in the call for violence. Before an usher makes the man sit down, though, he has recognized him and said nothing.

Recognition inside the spectacle

Juan enters wearing a red cape, red horns on his cap, and carrying a cardboard trident with which he threatens the audience. Manuel tries to outshout the nearly unanimous boos, urging the wrestler on; Guillermo joins him. The man in the raincoat continues shouting, still not looking up. The narrator does not watch Juan’s victory, despite having witnessed his many defeats. His attention fixes instead on the man’s height—195 centimeters—and on the layered spectacle around him: a performance within another performance, itself at the center of the narrator’s own life as he now understands it.

When Juan raises both fists toward the narrator and his sons to dedicate his triumph to them, the man in the raincoat looks over, recognizes the narrator, and waves. The scene’s two acts of recognition are not equivalent. Juan’s gesture completes the affectionate ritual of a victory shared with his supporters; Skorzeny’s greeting makes visible a past the narrator has not prepared his sons to hear. The narrator is caught between the public noise of the arena and a private history that the spectacle cannot contain.

The answer withheld from his sons

Guillermo notices the greeting and asks whether his father knows the man. The narrator begins to answer, remembering that he had never explained why he refused to join Skorzeny’s party. For an instant, he thinks this might finally be the occasion to explain. He then understands that he will not take it. Guillermo is thirty-five, married to Laura, and already a father; Manuel is twenty-three and has just finished his degree. Both were born and live in Spain, with their lives ahead of them there. The narrator believes that, however he explained the encounter, they could not understand what it meant to him in that moment.

He tells them that Skorzeny is nobody, merely an acquaintance. The evasion is not presented as indifference: the narrator explicitly locates his shame elsewhere than in himself or in Manuel, and elsewhere than in their own naïveté and inexhaustible hope. He is ashamed of the country in which his sons live and must continue to live. Naming Skorzeny would mean explaining why a former enemy is at Las Ventas, enjoying his money and freedom and shouting like a maniac, while the narrator can only witness him. It would also mean recalling the narrator’s own powerlessness, the weakness of his cause, and the strength of those who defeated it.

The private cost of public impunity

The meeting gathers political defeat into a brief, ordinary exchange between father and sons. The arena supplies an exact contrast: Juan’s defeat and victory are scripted, visible, and safely contained within a show; Skorzeny’s freedom is neither make-believe nor confined to the ring. The narrator sees him amid the crowd, not as a distant historical figure but as a man able to spend his money and enjoy the evening. That contrast makes the staged violence around them an unsettling frame for the unredressed violence of history.

The narrator recalls a question Rita once asked: what had they done to deserve a worse fate than the Nazis? He does not want to bequeath that question, and all its answers, to his sons. For him, explaining Skorzeny would also transmit the coordinates of the place their father had occupied in the world: a defeated political cause, its frustrated hopes, and the continuing freedom of its adversaries. Instead, he changes the subject and offers to get his sons a beer. They both accept. The scene ends not with a public reckoning, but with the narrator’s deliberate silence and a small gesture of care that leaves the historical truth unspoken between generations.