Antonio Ochoa

Antonio Ochoa is Adrián Gallardo’s former captain, boxing patron, and consequential mentor: he helps launch Adrián’s professional career after the rigged Bilbao fight, then, as his own body fails, urges him to enlist in the Blue Division. His influence offers Adrián a way forward, but it also binds him to the deception that began his fame and to a burden of guilt that Ochoa himself cannot undo.

Identity and Introduction

In Madrid at the beginning of 1940, Ochoa has become Don Antonio, a civilian living in a sumptuous building on Calle Velázquez. His former protégé finds him there after asking for his address at the Ministry of the Army. The doorman makes Adrián use the service stairs, a small but telling contrast with the acclaim that once surrounded the two men in Bilbao: the famous boxing spectacle has given way to a private encounter in an imposing home.

Ochoa’s past military rank remains part of their relationship. Adrián still addresses him as captain and approaches him as someone whose help might give shape to a life that otherwise seems settled by family circumstances. But Ochoa is no longer simply the commanding officer of their Portugalete days. The illness that has begun to overtake him increasingly constrains what he can do, even as his old authority continues to direct Adrián’s choices.

From the Bilbao Fight to a Boxing Career

Adrián tells Ochoa that he has come because he wants to be a boxer. His family is well established, and his father can manage the family estates; Adrián, however, has no desire to take up country life. He has some savings and asks his former captain to help him find a way into the sport. The request reopens the memory of the Bilbao contest, though Adrián has tried to forget that the victory was fixed.

For a moment, Ochoa appears close to mentioning the low blow and the manipulation that helped Adrián win. Adrián reads the movement in his face, but Ochoa quickly recovers his composure and agrees to help. He jokes that a little amusement will do them no harm, then proposes finding a good gym and making calls. His response protects Adrián from an immediate confrontation with the past, while at the same time helping him build a future on the reputation that the deception created.

Ochoa secures a place for Adrián at Gimnástica Ferroviaria, a leading Madrid gym on Calle Barbieri where professionals and amateurs train. He chooses Juan Manuel Suárez, known as Pirulo, as Adrián’s trainer. Ochoa does not enter the ring himself; instead, he becomes the organizer and sponsor who links the young fighter to experienced people and brings the atmosphere of their earlier boxing days back into their lives.

The old fraud remains more visible to Pirulo than to Adrián. Pirulo understands that the Bilbao bout was rigged and has pieced together the circumstances: the referee was a provisional second lieutenant, the judges were infantry officers, and Adrián knocked Alfonso Navarro out while Navarro was against the ropes on the estuary side. He suspects that Ochoa had intervened to make the victory possible, even though Adrián never confirms his suspicions. The contest’s arrangement thus connects Ochoa’s influence to a military-falangist rivalry, while its concealed truth continues to shape Adrián’s fixation on Navarro and his own legitimacy as a boxer.

Responsibility, Illness, and the Blue Division

Ochoa’s illness worsens sharply. The sensations he experiences progress from ants crawling over his arm to stabbing pains, patches of ice, and a feeling of stone, before finally becoming numbness. He walks with a cane; half his body is contracted, one shoulder is higher than the other, and his right hand is nearly useless. The physical decline makes it impossible for him to return to the role of vigorous military patron, but it also forces him to recognize his share in what has become of Adrián.

When Adrián comes to him in the spring of 1942, after nearly a year in which he has deteriorated and Ochoa has failed to help him, Ochoa sees a reflection of his own condition in the ruined, weakened fighter. The recognition is also moral: he understands that he had wound up the overstrained “toy” that Adrián has become, and that it is now broken beyond repair. The novel ties Ochoa’s responsibility to a concrete history of encouragement and concealment. He helped make Adrián a boxer after a compromised victory, but the career has not freed him from the memory that shadows it.

Ochoa nevertheless offers Adrián a new course. He says that, if he were able, he would go to Russia himself as a volunteer and kill communists; because his illness prevents him, he urges Adrián to go in his place and tells him that Adrián’s grandfather would be proud. The appeal is framed as a transfer of purpose from a disabled man to his former protégé, and as an opportunity to serve a cause Ochoa still embraces.

The moment has particular weight because Adrián’s grandfather, Don Carlos Garrote, has recently died. Adrián learned the news late, sobered enough one morning to sort through the letters piled on the hall table. His mother had written first out of concern, then to tell him about the death, and finally in desperation to ask why he had not attended the funeral. He wept for hours but did not answer. Ochoa’s suggestion gives him a way to respond at last: Adrián writes to his parents that he has quit boxing and enlisted in the Blue Division to honor his grandfather’s memory. In mid-July 1942, he reports to the headquarters at Pokrovskaya, twenty-five kilometres from Leningrad, where he discovers that Navarro is also there, serving as a lieutenant and a boxer.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ochoa’s mentorship is both practical and compromised. He uses his contacts to place Adrián in a respected gym and helps sustain the young man’s hope of becoming a fighter, yet his earlier role in the fixed Bilbao contest is the concealed origin of the fame on which that hope depends. Adrián’s success cannot be cleanly separated from the intervention Ochoa seems ready to admit but chooses not to discuss; the silence keeps the patron’s care inseparable from his complicity.

The later recognition that he has helped break the man he once encouraged complicates Ochoa further. His appeal to go to Russia carries the conviction of a man who still wants to fight for his beliefs, but whose body has made that desire impossible. Rather than resolve the harm between them, he redirects Adrián toward another form of service. His influence therefore marks a turning point in Adrián’s life without erasing the earlier deception: the boxer leaves the ring for the Eastern Front carrying both the memory of his grandfather and the burden of a career whose first great triumph was never honest.