Juan Manuel Suárez

Juan Manuel Suárez, known as Pirulo, is an experienced former professional boxer who trains Adrián Gallardo in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War. He builds Gallardo’s strength and provincial success around a blunt rule—attack rather than think—but also tells him of Max Schmeling’s willingness to risk his standing for his Jewish wife, Anny Ondra. That story, offered as a lesson in how a champion can be both strong and good, outlasts Pirulo’s practical coaching: years later, Gallardo recalls it at Klooga as he confronts the human cost of his own complicity.

Identity and place in Gallardo’s career

Pirulo is nearing forty when he takes Gallardo on at Gimnástica Ferroviaria, a boxing gym on Calle Barbieri that the narrative calls Madrid’s best. The gym trains both professional and amateur fighters. It becomes a place where Gallardo and Antonio Ochoa revive the atmosphere of their earlier boxing days in Portugalete, though Ochoa himself never steps into the ring. Ochoa chooses Pirulo as Gallardo’s trainer, entrusting the young boxer to a man with experience and a formidable appearance softened by the incongruously childish nickname.

Pirulo had boxed professionally before the war and had fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Francoist side. His past also includes service in Morocco, where he became familiar with military barracks culture. Those experiences later inform his understanding of the forces behind Gallardo’s disputed victory over Alfonso Navarro. The novel gives him more than the function of a trainer: he can read the political and personal history carried into the ring, even when Gallardo cannot bring himself to speak it plainly.

Training, discipline, and victory

Pirulo’s method is direct and physical. He treats Gallardo as a natural force whose advantage lies in his strength, not in complicated tactics: he tells him to go straight at opponents and knock them out in the first round. Gallardo follows the program without hesitation, absorbing jokes as readily as blows. At the Madrid provincial heavyweight championship, held at the Price circus in mid-May 1940, this approach produces a clear result. Gallardo knocks out the previous champion in the second minute. When the referee raises his right arm, Gallardo recognizes that this victory has not been fixed; that is one reason it tastes better to him than the earlier triumph in Bilbao.

Afterward, Pirulo gives Gallardo a meal and a short rest, but immediately sets out the next phase of preparation. A folder lists diet, exercise, skipping rope, and running. Gallardo must return to Madrid by August 25, fit to prepare for the Castile championship. When Gallardo explains that the nearest gym to his village may be thirteen kilometres away, Pirulo jokes that he can run there. The exchange shows the combination of strict expectation and teasing familiarity that governs their training.

Pirulo’s advice is not simply a recipe for victory; it also defines what he thinks Gallardo is capable of. He describes him as a powerful machine and discourages him from wasting time thinking. That instruction helps Gallardo succeed in the ring, but it leaves little room for examining the moral history of his previous fight. The contrast becomes sharper when Pirulo’s own questions force that history into view.

Schmeling’s photographs and the moral lesson

A treasured memory from Pirulo’s career is his encounter with Max Schmeling, the heavyweight world champion, when Schmeling visited Madrid with his wife in November 1939. At the Gimnástica Ferroviaria, Pirulo posed for photographs with him. They were not engaged in a real fight or even a training session: they wore boxing trunks and gloves, pretended to size each other up for the cameras, and then posed together smiling. Pirulo keeps the photographs in his wallet and handles them carefully, taking them one by one from tissue-paper wrappers as he recalls the visit.

He speaks of Schmeling with admiration for the champion’s power, intelligence, and courtesy. He praises Anny Ondra too, describing her beauty in extravagant terms and declaring that she was the woman Max deserved. Gallardo responds to this enthusiasm by searching the Sunday Rastro market until he finds a hand-coloured picture of Schmeling. He does not understand that the seller expects him to bargain and pays the excessive asking price without protest. He puts the picture beneath a bed rail at his Madrid lodging, where it watches over his sleep during the two years he lives in the city. Pirulo’s story therefore enters Gallardo’s life first as a treasured image and an uncomplicated boxing idol.

The lesson behind that image emerges over a meal after Gallardo’s Madrid victory. Pirulo has drunk heavily while Gallardo has barely touched his wine. Emboldened by the drink, he asks whether Gallardo really knocked Navarro out in Bilbao and whether the blow was clean. Gallardo answers that he knocked Navarro down in the fifth round and points to the crowd at Bilbao’s port as witnesses, but avoids Pirulo’s gaze. Pirulo retracts the challenge, says he is glad Gallardo won, and characterizes Navarro as a bad man whose anger drives him in the ring. He insists that cruelty is not a requirement for becoming a champion: Schmeling is a good person, and so is Gallardo.

Pirulo then discloses what he has never told anyone. He says that Anny was a Polish Jew, despite her success as a film star in Germany, and that Nazi authorities kept the couple under close watch. When the Nazis began destroying Jewish property during Kristallnacht, Schmeling sent Anny to the United States with her Jewish trainer. Pirulo recounts that Schmeling told the authorities that if his wife could not return to Germany and live with him, he would leave for America and continue boxing as an American. Pirulo presents this willingness to risk his championship as proof that a person can care for others, take a stand for them, and still reach the top. He urges Gallardo not to forget it.

The old fight and the limits of his knowledge

Pirulo’s question about Bilbao reopens a wound Gallardo has tried to bury. Gallardo has feared and desired Navarro’s return in equal measure; he has continued boxing partly because of him, uncertain whether he seeks a clean contest that could redeem the earlier result or a final release from the memory. Pirulo has not known exactly what happened, but he has long suspected the truth. He knows Ochoa, knows Navarro, and knows Gallardo well enough to see that Gallardo’s knockout was too improbable to be explained by the young boxer’s ability alone.

His inference rests on specific circumstances of the Bilbao match. The referee was a provisional second lieutenant, the judges were infantry officers, and Navarro was against the ropes on the river side when Gallardo knocked him out. Drawing on his familiarity with military life and the lethal hostility between the military and the Falange, Pirulo concludes that Ochoa must have intervened. Gallardo refuses to confirm his suspicion, but Pirulo needs no confession to recognize what the arrangement implies. Only later, while walking on Montjuïc, does he understand that the fixed fight lies at the root of Gallardo’s obsession.

That knowledge makes Pirulo’s dinner-table question a turning point in the trainer’s relationship with his pupil. Gallardo has regarded him as an ally whose role is always to take his side. Instead, Pirulo’s concern for the truth and his praise of a clean, humane champion place him outside that comforting expectation. The conversation does not resolve Gallardo’s guilt; it gives it a sharper shape. He leaves Madrid remembering Navarro, and at home he disobeys Pirulo for the first time, unable to set aside the prospect of finding a photograph of his rival.

A lesson recalled at Klooga

Pirulo’s account returns far from the gym and the Madrid dining table. At Klooga, Gallardo sees a Jewish woman among the prisoners about to be killed. Her composed farewell recalls the story of Anny that Pirulo had told while drunk; the story that once seemed remote and almost foolish now makes the woman’s fate impossible to treat as an abstraction. Gallardo remembers Pirulo’s claim that a champion need not be cruel, and recalls Schmeling’s decision to stand up for his wife despite having every reason to protect his own celebrated position.

The memory is not a simple rescue or a change of heart that erases what Gallardo has done. Instead, it makes the distance between an ideal and his conduct unmistakable. As Gallardo confronts the killing at Klooga, the remembered voices of Pirulo, Schmeling, and Navarro merge in his mind; Schmeling’s example becomes an accusation as well as an ideal. Pirulo’s teaching survives beyond the circumstances in which he offered it, but survival does not mean Gallardo has followed it. The trainer’s lasting narrative significance lies in that painful contrast: he gave his pupil a model of strength joined to care, and that model returns when Gallardo can no longer mistake obedience and self-preservation for innocence.