Montjuich is the setting for a walk that turns a discussion of boxing into an exposure of Adrián Gallardo’s unresolved past. As he looks toward an upcoming fight, his question about whether Alfonso Navarro will attend reveals that the earlier bout still governs his expectations and his sense of what is at stake.

Setting and Conversation

Pirulo and Adrián have gone up Montjuich to walk around the castle. Pirulo is trying to explain that the Basque boxer Hidalgo is as strong as Adrián but much faster. Adrián first asks whether Hidalgo is better than Navarro; Pirulo pauses to identify whom Adrián means, then says Hidalgo is plainly much better because they are comparing professionals. The exchange moves from an assessment of an opponent to Adrián’s concern about who might be watching.

The Past Behind the Fight

Adrián keeps his gaze fixed on the horizon as he asks whether Hidalgo will come to see the fight. When Pirulo asks who else he could mean, Adrián clarifies that he is thinking of Navarro: if he were Navarro, he says, he would come. His eyes shine as if he has a fever. The physical intensity of the moment makes the name more than a reference to a former opponent; Navarro has become the imagined audience for Adrián’s next contest.

Pirulo’s Recognition

Pirulo has long known that the Bilbao fight was fixed. No one had told him outright, but he knew Antonio Ochoa from the time Ochoa was a boy struggling with his illness, knew Alfonso Navarro, and knew Adrián better than anyone else. Given the condition in which Adrián had come into his hands, the knockout of Navarro seemed to Pirulo an almost impossible miracle, one Adrián could not have achieved alone. Pirulo had suspected who helped him, drawing on his years in Morocco and on what three years of war on the Francoist side had taught him about the bitter enmity between the military and the Falangists.

The Hilltop’s Revelation

Adrián had refused to confirm Pirulo’s suspicion, but Pirulo had needed few questions to work out what happened: the referee was a provisional second lieutenant, the judges were infantry officers, and Navarro was against the ropes on the river side when Adrián knocked him out. Only during the walk on Montjuich does Pirulo understand what that deception means for the present. The trickery is not merely a concealed fact about the Bilbao match; it lies at the root of Adrián’s fixation on the fight ahead.

Silence and Significance

When Adrián asks what Pirulo thinks, Pirulo cannot answer. Speaking about Navarro might weaken Adrián before the most important fight of his life, while keeping quiet risks making the Sevillian’s shadow larger, denser, and more dangerous. Pirulo also recognizes that neither choice will change anything. Montjuich therefore marks a point of recognition rather than resolution: the hilltop walk makes visible how the old, rigged victory continues to shape Adrián’s present, while leaving Pirulo without words capable of freeing him from it.