Las Ventas Bullring

Las Ventas Bullring is the Madrid arena where, on 15 June 1974, a wrestling show and a championship boxing card frame the narrator’s encounter with Otto Skorzeny. Its significance lies in the collision of two kinds of performance: the knowingly fabricated violence in the ring and the narrator’s history, which suddenly seems to him like another act being played out before an audience.

The wrestling card

The arena is packed because the main boxing bout is for the Spanish championship. The narrator has never enjoyed boxing, even before Adrián Gallardo entered his life, but he and his sons have become devoted followers of Juan Gómez Gómez, a former common prisoner nearly two metres tall who performs under the name El Demonio de Acero. Juan has often been cast as the villain and made to lose; on this night, he has finally been offered a victory, in the second bout of the evening.

The narrator regards wrestling as an openly artificial spectacle, a brutal ballet in which blows, pain, victory, and defeat are all rehearsed. That shared understanding is part of the pleasure: his sons cheer for Juan, dressed in a red cape, red horns, and carrying a cardboard trident, while the crowd boos him. The ring offers a comic, collective performance precisely because its violence is understood to be pretend.

A disturbance in the stands

The contrast breaks when a very tall man in a trench coat stands up, punches the air, and shouts for the wrestlers to kill one another. The calls are startling because the violence in the ring is agreed-upon fiction, but at first they strike the narrator and his sons as another source of amusement. Manuel laughs at the man for apparently believing the fight is real; Guillermo points him out, and the sons continue to shout for Juan over the crowd.

An usher eventually makes the man sit down. Before then, however, the narrator has recognized him and chosen not to say so. The man has not yet looked up toward the family, leaving the narrator to watch him in silence while his sons enjoy the bout.

Recognition amid the performance

Juan wins and raises both fists toward the family to celebrate his victory. At that moment, the man in the stands—Otto Skorzeny—sees the narrator, recognizes him, and waves. Guillermo notices the exchange and asks who the man is; the supplied passage breaks off as the narrator begins to answer.

The scene gathers its force from the arena’s nested performances. Juan’s scripted victory takes place inside a wrestling show, while the narrator sees his own life as a further performance at its centre. Skorzeny’s wave punctures the safe fiction of the ring: a familiar figure from the narrator’s real history has appeared in the crowd, turning a night out with his sons into an encounter whose significance they do not yet know.