La Puebla de Arganzón is the ancestral village that gives Adrián Gallardo his first model of identity: the Garrote family’s proud martial lineage, told to him by his grandfather, Don Carlos. It is also the home he repeatedly leaves behind. The village’s old barn, remade as a boxing gym and filled with the image of an absent opponent, shows how its familiar spaces become entangled with his ambitions; at Christmas, memories of his family and the snow of home sharpen the loneliness of his life far away.

Family legend and local identity

Adrián’s sense of belonging begins with Don Carlos’s daily insistence that he is a Garrote. The family’s story is rooted in La Puebla and the surrounding County of Treviño: his maternal ancestors had fought the French and then taken opposing sides in struggles over Ferdinand VII, before supporting Don Carlos in three Carlist wars. In the grandfather’s telling, their record made the Garrotes a renowned local dynasty of warriors, bound to God, the homeland, and the absolute king.

The village’s local esteem did not erase the family’s historical defeats. At nine, Adrián consulted a school encyclopedia and discovered that the Carlists had lost all the wars in which his ancestors had fought. Its definitions of his name offered no mention of the celebrated Garrote lineage, a discrepancy he kept from his grandfather. He gradually reconciled what he had learned about defeat with the solemn pride in Don Carlos’s voice whenever he pronounced the family name.

That inherited prestige had a contemporary political edge. When the Republic was proclaimed, the village’s left-wing children attached a new taunt to the venerable name: “Garrote, facha!” Adrián was fourteen when he first heard it. He had scarcely known the children who called him that, and asked his grandfather what the insult meant. Don Carlos answered by condemning the boys rather than explaining the political label. In the village, family identity was already a marker dividing neighbors.

The village and Adrián’s enlistment

On July 19, 1936, La Puebla’s recruiting table was still being set up when Adrián arrived to enlist; another young man had reached it first. The episode places him among the village’s young men at the outbreak of war, but also casts his decision as a claim on a family inheritance. He ran through the streets to join the army rebelling against the government in Madrid, under the banners of his ancestors and the familiar cry “Dios, Patria y Rey.”

The career he imagined did not follow the old Garrote pattern. His ancestors had reportedly gathered their servants and tenants, ridden out to impose order on lands they knew, and taken towns without answering to anyone below their king. Adrián, by contrast, could not persuade rebel commanders that his lineage entitled him to be an officer. He insisted that he was Burgundian rather than from Álava and demanded the rank due, in his view, to the last representative of a warrior dynasty; the officers laughed, and gave him no command. His village inheritance supplied a powerful image of what he ought to be, but no authority in the modern army.

The barn remade as a gym

After the boxing match and the story that had unsettled him, Adrián returned by train to Miranda and then went on to La Puebla. Though his trainer had ordered him to rest until July, he went to inspect the abandoned old barn before entering his parents’ home to kiss his mother. He spent a week clearing junk and straw, airing the space, and exposing its cement floor. The village barn became a place where he could resume training on his own terms.

Adrián commissioned wall bars, an abdominal bench, and a ceiling support for a punching bag from the village blacksmith. The roof needed two iron beams to strengthen it. To make the bag, he bought more than a hundred leather scraps from a Vitoria hide warehouse, stitched them together on his mother’s sewing machine, and filled the cover with a dozen burlap sacks packed with river sand. Neighbors came through the barn to admire the construction. The work revealed an aptitude for designing and making things, even as the narrator contrasts that talent with his lesser prospects of becoming heavyweight world champion.

The bag’s significance was not merely practical. Adrián imagined Alfonso Navarro López as its embodied target, boxing with his shadow and with the object as if it were the man himself. Two young women began visiting in the afternoons to watch him train. His mother, Doña María, noticed that his attention had narrowed and raised Rosario, a girl he had liked years before. Adrián brushed aside the possibility of romance: he was not in a state of mind to think about girlfriends. The barn thus holds both the public performance of a local sporting project and the private fixation that has begun to displace ordinary village attachments.

Home remembered from afar

La Puebla continues to reach Adrián after he has left it. During a Christmas boxing event in the palace at Pokrovskaya, a parcel from the Falange Women’s Section contains a Soto marzipan, his mother’s favorite sweet. He cannot bring himself to eat it and chooses a cinnamon shortbread instead, but the substitute triggers the same homesickness. Alone, half-dressed, and cold, he imagines the family’s evening in the village: his mother busy in the kitchen, his sisters around her, his father selecting wine in the cellar, and a lamb roasting while mint scented the broth.

His remembered village Christmas is carried by particular details: neighbors singing in the square that the fish drink in the river, the cold and perhaps snow, children released from school to play, and the warmth of the family kitchen and its fire. Snow in La Puebla had seemed a gentle, comfortable companion and a promise of a prosperous year. The snow beyond the palace’s frost-covered windows belongs to an altogether different world. The contrast makes the village more than a birthplace: it becomes the measure by which Adrián feels his absence, and the place where his mother and family are imagined missing him while he remains far from home.