The boxing match interrupted by Father Arichas

The Christmas Eve boxing match in Pokrovskaya is the long-awaited rematch between Adrián Gallardo and Alfonso Navarro, but it ends before it can properly begin: Father Arribas interrupts the bout with gunfire and carols, and Navarro knocks Gallardo unconscious in the confusion. The episode turns a military spectacle into an absurd collision of revenge, religious authority, and disrupted ritual. For Gallardo, the promised fight had become not only a chance to defeat the man who tormented him, but a test of whether he could finally stop fearing him.

The Rematch and Its Stakes

Gallardo approaches the fight carrying the weight of an earlier life as a boxer. In Barcelona, he had once had the Spanish championship within reach and believed he could knock Navarro down again. Since then, both men’s fortunes have collapsed. Gallardo has spent a month and a half preparing for the rematch: first shadowboxing alone against the wall of his cell while under arrest, then training at the gym at a different time from Navarro. He diets, loses weight, gives up smoking, runs farther, and rebuilds his musculature and flexibility. The outward return to his former condition does not repair the inward damage. He still feels broken, and the favorable betting odds for the Tiger of Treviño mean little to him because the spectators cannot know what is at stake.

The fight is at once feared and desired. Gallardo knows that he will soon stand in the ring against the man who has tormented him into ruin, and a moment of lucidity comes as the rematch finally arrives. Before the bout, the recollection of childhood reprimands from Don Teodoro Gallardo returns as a question about what he has done. Unlike the small, knowable childhood offenses behind his old excuses, the wrong he now confronts cannot be explained away. Memories of a lit fireplace, cinnamon ice cream, and Doña María bring tears to his eyes; the scene grounds the impending fight in remorse as well as rivalry.

Comrades in His Corner

Junquera arrives carrying Gallardo’s hand wraps, while Gutiérrez follows in high spirits and urges the champion on. Gallardo asks whether Father Arribas has accepted the fight. He learns that the priest has instead become furious and intends to appeal to the high command to stop it; his companions say they have ensured that Arribas will not find a car. Their intervention gives Gallardo immediate reassurance, though it also leaves the fight dependent on a plan to prevent the priest from reaching the authorities.

Jan soon joins the improvised training team. The three men will be in Gallardo’s corner, and their enthusiasm revives his confidence in the boxer he once was. The memory of Montjuich and Pirulo’s old certainty—that Gallardo would knock Navarro down a second time if they ever met again—returns alongside thoughts of his vanished championship prospects. His supporters’ optimism cannot undo the intervening losses, but it helps him approach the ring with a steadiness he has not felt for a long time.

A Moment of Reconciliation Before the Bell

As Gallardo leaves the dressing room with the men behind him, he raises his gloves but says nothing. The crowd’s promise of victory is visible in his supporters’ faces. Then, while Navarro crosses the gym in the opposite direction, Gallardo realizes that he has stopped fearing him. He feels that he has made peace with himself. This change is not the result of a punch or a victory: it takes place as he walks toward the contest, shoulders lifted and body taut, his concentration spreading through him. He climbs into the ring slowly and solemnly.

The military audience makes the bout a public test as well as a personal one. A commander presents the fighters over a microphone while the troops roar; the senior officers in the stands remain silent, performing the impartiality expected of them. Gallardo knows that most of the officers, like the soldiers chanting his surname, favor him. Yet he sees neither audience nor opponent at first, keeping his eyes on the ropes until the referee calls him forward. After the instructions and the customary touch of gloves, he fixes his gaze on Navarro and does not look away. For the first time, he experiences the killer instinct that Ochoa had repeatedly demanded of him. He is certain he will win by knockout—but the referee has not yet started the fight when events take control.

Arribas Interrupts the Fight

A voice cries for the way to be cleared, and the referee raises his hands to stop proceedings. The soldiers around the ring continue shouting and singing, reluctant to give up the entertainment. Then gunshots ring out. Plaster dust falls from the ceiling, and the troops divide to open a passage for Father Arribas, who advances toward the ring with a pistol in his hand. His anger spills beyond the boxing match: from time to time he fires at the half-naked nymph figures feasting in what had once been the palace ballroom.

Arribas condemns the gathering as an unfit way to celebrate the birth of Jesus. When the judges try to approach, he and the armed priests accompanying him point their weapons at them and order them to stay where they are. He demands that everyone sing carols and declares the pagan spectacle finished. The referee and the crowd are no longer governed by the ordinary rules of a boxing match; a priest with a gun has displaced the planned contest with a forced religious performance.

The Knockdown and Its Aftermath

Arribas begins singing Hacia Belén va una burra. Before the singers can finish the second verse, the Tiger of Treviño falls to the canvas, heavy and unconscious. In the confusion of shots and carols, Navarro has let go with his left arm and landed a straight punch like the one that knocked Gallardo down in the officers’ mess two months earlier. The interruption does not erase the rivalry; it gives Navarro an opening to continue it on his own terms. As Gallardo lies unconscious, Navarro mutters that they are still not even. The fallen fighter cannot hear him.

The referee, still singing, holds Navarro by one arm and signals for the military police with the other. Navarro allows himself to be arrested as docilely as Gallardo did on the earlier occasion. The senior legal officer, who is to become president of the disciplinary tribunal, privately resolves that Navarro’s arrest will last at least three months and that he would gladly impose twice that period. Gallardo learns none of this at the time: he wakes in the infirmary, where doctors order twenty-four hours of observation.

When Jan tells him what happened, Gallardo cannot decide whether to celebrate that Arribas stopped the fight by firing his pistol or mourn the loss of a victory he had felt sure he would claim—and of the best Christmas Eve dinner of the year. His newly found calm has not vanished, but it recedes behind his uncertainty. Still young and due to turn twenty-six in the coming year, he takes heart from Jan’s reminder that Firpo continued winning by knockout past forty. The bout’s abrupt end leaves the central question of Gallardo’s redemption unresolved: he has ceased to fear Navarro, but has not yet had the chance to discover what that changed courage would mean in the ring.