Adrián Gallardo Ortega

Adrián Gallardo Ortega, the professional boxer known as the Tigre de Treviño, becomes one of the novel’s most consequential figures in the struggle over identity and responsibility after the war. A volunteer in the Blue Division who later serves with the Waffen-SS, he survives Berlin by killing Alfonso Navarro López and taking his papers. That act makes his name available to Manuel Arroyo as a disguise, but it does not make Gallardo himself disappear: his eventual return to Spain brings the concealed crime back into the lives of the men who have built their survival around it.

Identity and Background

Born in La Puebla de Arganzón in 1917, Gallardo becomes a professional boxer in the summer of 1937. The nickname Tigre de Treviño follows him into the sporting record. He fights from the Gimnástica Ferroviaria of Madrid, competes in a barge bout in the port of Bilbao in March 1938, wins the Castile heavyweight championship in 1940, and finishes runner-up in the Spanish championship in 1941. A gym owner remembers him as strong but slow, and as a promising boxer whose progress suddenly faltered. His public identity is thus established through a trail of matches and results that will later help others reconstruct who he is.

Gallardo’s career gives way to military service. He enlists in the Blue Division, continues as a volunteer in the Waffen-SS, and fights in the final defense of Berlin. His place in that history is not merely that of a soldier caught on the losing side. In Estonia, he participates with Kleiber’s men in the murder of prisoners at Klooga. Over three days in September 1944, the unit helps kill approximately 1,200 prisoners; Gallardo remains convinced that the victims were never anything other than human, but the conviction does not stop him from taking part. He expects that Germany will lose and that the crime will eventually be exposed, yet he does not speak of Klooga, treating speech about it as foolishness.

Berlin and the Assumed Name

As Berlin falls, Gallardo’s earlier participation in violence gives way not to remorse but to a struggle for survival. In a street position on Wilhelmstrasse, he shoots a fellow soldier who is preparing to operate the unit’s only usable machine gun. He searches the dead man’s uniform for identification, burns his own documents in the fire used as a stove, and takes the other man’s place. When a Soviet tank passes without noticing the position, Gallardo does not fire; he waits for another opportunity to fight.

On 2 May 1945, after the defenders have prolonged their resistance for a further day, a tank points its gun at his position. Gallardo emerges with his hands raised and surrenders to the Soviets carrying documents belonging to Alfonso Navarro López. He does not show the occupiers Navarro’s body. He has made the identity substitution a matter of survival, and the new crime does not trouble his conscience as he gives himself up. The real Alfonso Navarro has been killed; the name and papers that remain will instead accompany Gallardo through captivity and its aftermath.

After nearly two years in crowded prison cells, the man released under Navarro’s name steps into the open, overcome by the space outside. An offer of a route back to Spain does not persuade him to reclaim his own identity. He understands that returning as Alfonso Navarro would perpetuate the deception, but cannot see a way to restore his real name without risking ruin. Until then, he has scarcely considered that killing another man to save himself might entail a price beyond the immediate act. His escape has preserved his life while enclosing him in the identity he stole.

Klooga, Complicity, and the Limits of Remorse

Gallardo’s role at Klooga exposes the distance between knowing a crime is wrong and refusing to participate in it. He believes the prisoners were human and anticipates that someone will eventually uncover the burned remains or surviving testimony. He also knows that, as the group’s only Spaniard, he will not be mistaken for anyone else. Yet this expectation of exposure does not become an act of confession or resistance. The novel places his silence alongside his later willingness to kill again for survival, making the false identity less an isolated expedient than a continuation of a life in which evasion repeatedly takes precedence over accountability.

The distinction between his own crimes and those committed by Kleiber’s group is tested when Kleiber describes the massacre and identifies the men involved. His account includes an insubordinate German soldier whom Kleiber says he had to execute, while also claiming that the men had volunteered. A recollection of Gallardo as a Spanish professional boxer, together with the name Schmitt, gives Manuel and Guillermo leads to the boxer’s identity. Sporting records confirm his full name, boxing history, and Madrid club affiliation; the old nickname, once a mark of public recognition, becomes a clue in an investigation into wartime crimes.

The Name Taken by Another Man

Gallardo’s stolen identity becomes central to Manuel Arroyo’s postwar mission. Manuel assumes the name Adrián Gallardo Ortega to infiltrate the clandestine escape network run by Clara Stauffer and to travel to Argentina as one of the fugitives it assists. Meanwhile, the real Gallardo is living in Germany under Alfonso Navarro López’s papers, at one point begging in Berlin and showing those documents when stopped by a patrol. The two men’s stories run in opposite directions: Manuel adopts Gallardo’s name to enter the network, while Gallardo’s own survival depends on continuing to inhabit Navarro’s.

Manuel’s own temporary identity as Peter Louzán Valero adds another layer to this chain of substitutions. In Madrid, he stays in room 312 of the Gran Vía Hotel, chosen in part because he needs to keep a low profile. The borrowed name is intended to expire when he can exchange it for another identity suited to a more public life. The contrast with Gallardo is sharp: for Manuel, impersonation is an instrument of a dangerous assignment; for Gallardo, the false papers conceal a murder and obstruct any return to the life he abandoned.

Return to Spain and the Unmasking

In late 1949 Gallardo comes back to Spain after years away, carrying authentic documents arranged in Germany and seeking information about the identity that has replaced his. The Ochoas believe that he is the celebrated Tigre de Treviño and know he has been sought by the Allies; they consider departure for Buenos Aires an understandable chance to begin again. Gallardo, however, suspects that the person he has encountered may be an impostor using his name, and recognizes that Clara Stauffer may be involved in the proposed journey to Argentina. Going to Stauffer openly as himself could make him appear to be the impostor, so he instead seeks out Guillermo García Medina, telling him that Guillermo has a friend passing as Gallardo.

The encounter closes the distance between the false name and the original man. Guillermo has survived under a false identity himself, and Gallardo’s return forces him to confront the actual person behind the name Manuel has borrowed. Guillermo kills Gallardo on 29 December 1949. He understands that he has killed a man responsible for crimes, including participation at Klooga, but does not present his act as revenge or as a claim to be a just avenger. He believes he acted to save his own life and Manuel’s. The killing becomes a lasting source of guilt: in a later confession, Guillermo recounts Gallardo’s return and death, placing the boxer among the victims and perpetrators whose histories remain entangled in the postwar struggle for survival.

Narrative Significance

Gallardo’s biography binds together three different uses of a name: the boxer’s public record, the identity he takes from Alfonso Navarro, and the alias Manuel adopts for infiltration. Each name offers a means of crossing a boundary, but none erases what preceded it. The boxing record helps reveal Gallardo; Navarro’s documents keep him hidden; Gallardo’s own name grants Manuel access to a network that shelters war fugitives. Identity is therefore not simply a disguise in the novel but a fragile practical resource, dependent on documents, witnesses, and the choices of people who know the truth.

His trajectory also prevents survival from being confused with innocence. Gallardo escapes Berlin, endures captivity, and returns to Spain, but his capacity to endure rests on the murder of Navarro and sits beside his participation in the Klooga killings. His silence about the massacre and his lack of remorse for killing Navarro stand in contrast to Guillermo’s later recognition of his own act as morally consequential. Gallardo’s return does not undo the earlier substitutions; it reveals their cost, leaving Manuel’s assumed identity, Guillermo’s survival, and the memory of the man he killed inseparable from the crimes Gallardo committed and the life he preserved.