Pamplona is both a political setting and a place of personal possibility in the novel. It is where Falangist rivalries give a proposed boxing match significance beyond sport, and where María Eugenia León’s familiar life is overturned in the summer of 1936 by her meeting with Fernando Villa Ruiz. In both strands, the city’s old loyalties and private attachments become difficult to separate from the upheaval of war.

Political loyalties and the boxing match

In Pamplona, Alfonso Navarro López is more than a prospective opponent in a boxing match. A Sevillian aristocrat from an impoverished branch of an old family, he has lost the title associated with his lineage because the family could not afford to maintain it. He boxes for amusement, not as a way to earn a living: even after the war left him destitute, he could not bear the humiliation of supporting himself with a pair of boxing gloves. His standing, however, is political as well as personal. He is the champion of the Spanish Falange, a pampered favorite of Sancho Dávila, and a protégé of Fernando Villa Ruiz, who had become a leading defender of Falangist purity in Navarre.

That background gives the match between Navarro and Adrián Gallardo a meaning that neither a simple contest of skill nor the fighters’ reputations can contain. Franco’s Unification Decree had merged the legal parties in his zone into a single National Movement, but the resulting consolidation had not ended tensions among Falangists, Carlists, and monarchists. When Captain Antonio Ochoa Gorostiza met Navarro in Pamplona, he recognized that the fight could become a symbolic confrontation between the Army and the Falange. The military, in his view, had emerged as the sole victor from the political operation, while Falangists continued to conspire and contest their place in the new order.

Ochoa’s judgment of Navarro is sharpened by a personal grievance: Navarro had failed to act when his friend Fernando Villa was arrested. Ochoa despises what he sees as the ingratitude and cowardice of that failure. But his unease is not simply political or moral. In Navarro’s eyes he detects the fierce, murderous instinct that he has repeatedly looked for, without success, in Gallardo’s. The contrast makes Pamplona the setting for an unsettling assessment of the fighters: Gallardo may be Ochoa’s champion, yet Navarro appears to possess the dangerous quality that the contest could demand.

Gallardo and Ochoa’s assessment

After meeting Navarro, Ochoa returns to Gallardo, who asks what the other boxer is like. The captain sees again Gallardo’s round, ruddy face, coarse country manners, scapular cord around his neck, and clear gaze. That gaze can look to Ochoa like a mark of innocence or a sign of stupidity; against Navarro’s evident ferocity, it makes Gallardo seem more than ever a poor bumpkin. Ochoa nevertheless tells him that he will easily beat Navarro.

The reassurance is shadowed by Ochoa’s physical unease on the journey back to Portugalete: the ants that have visited him before return, reaching his elbow and stopping there. The bodily detail accompanies a confidence that is not wholly convincing. Ochoa has seen in Navarro a capacity for violence that he doubts Gallardo possesses, and the assurance that Gallardo will win does not erase that difference. Pamplona thus shapes the match before it takes place, establishing the political stakes and the disparity between the two men as Ochoa understands it.

María Eugenia’s return to Pamplona

Pamplona also belongs to María Eugenia León’s earlier, private life. On 1 July 1936, her husband, Esteban Maroto, sent her and their children to Haro, where her parents had a country house among vineyards, near the family business whose expansion had helped bring about her marriage. María Eugenia asked why they could not spend the summer in Pamplona as they usually did. She had been born and raised there, had many friends, and remembered the freedom of coming and going while her parents doted on her children. In Pamplona she remained María Eugenia León, rather than simply being known as Mrs. Maroto.

Her husband did not usually restrict her freedom or her amusements, and Haro was not a place where she felt unfree, but it was more boring. This time he would not change his decision. Instead, he offered the enigmatic assurance that, if all went well, she would be able to spend a great deal of time in Pamplona that year. He would not explain what he meant. A few days later, he accompanied her and the children to the station, helped with their luggage, and kissed the children warmly, while giving María Eugenia only the expected kisses. They did not see each other again.

Fifteen days after the coup, María Eugenia moved into her parents’ house in Pamplona. She was content with a life of comfort, luxury, and relative calm, and with her three healthy children. She had never been happy with Esteban, but neither had she been unhappy; she did not know what kind of happiness she ought to have missed. That settled life changed abruptly one August afternoon. While she and her friend Pili were having an aperitif, Pili rose to greet two uniformed Falangists crossing Plaza del Castillo. One was her cousin Arturo; the other was Fernando Villa Ruiz.

Fernando Villa Ruiz and a changed life

María Eugenia did not know Fernando, and Pili was initially unable to believe it. She worked out aloud that María Eugenia had already left Pamplona to marry by the time Fernando’s family settled in the city. The calculation also made clear that he had just turned twenty-five, four and a half years younger than María Eugenia. She resented her friend’s indiscretion, but Fernando sat down beside her without asking permission, and the age difference did not trouble him from that afternoon on.

Fernando’s importance in Pamplona extends beyond this encounter. He was a Tudela-born Falangist and a defender of the movement’s political purity, arrested in April after opposing Franco’s Unification Decree. His former association with Navarro and his arrest connect María Eugenia’s emerging attachment to the same political conflict that gives the city’s boxing rivalry its larger stakes. Pamplona is therefore not merely the place where she returns to familiar friends and family; it becomes the place where that familiar world is interrupted by both political danger and an unexpected intimacy.

The city’s two strands of significance remain in telling contrast. For Ochoa, Pamplona exposes the tensions that survive political unification and helps him recognize the violent potential beneath Navarro’s polished manners. For María Eugenia, it is the home she preferred to Haro, the place where her own name and freedom had once seemed intact, and the setting of a meeting that changes the course of her life. Its narrative force lies in that double exposure: public allegiance and private desire enter the same streets, neither untouched by the Spanish Civil War.