Shadow of a Bull

by Maia Wojciechowska

  Shadow of a Bull

  Manolo was only three when his father, the great bullfighter Juan Olivar, died. But Juan is never far from Manolo’s consciousness—how could he be, with the entire town of Arcangel waiting for the day Manolo will fulfill his father’s legacy?

  But Manolo has a secret he dares to share with no one—he is a coward, without afición, the love of the sport that enables a bullfighter to rise above his fear and face a raging bull. As the day when he must enter the ring approaches, Manolo finds himself questioning which requires more courage: to follow in his father’s legendary footsteps or to pursue his own destiny?

  “This book is a must. . . .Anyone who starts Shadow of a Bull will finish it in a single sitting.” —NewYork Times

  “It is hard to imagine a child . . . who would not be enthralled by this book.” —NewYorker

  A NEWBERY MEDAL WINNER

  AN ALA NOTABLE CHILDREN’S BOOK

  A HORN BOOK FANFARE

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  Simon & Schuster, NewYork

  Cover designed by Karin Paprocki

  Cover photograph copyright © 2006 by

  Paul Taylor/Getty Images

  Ages 8–12

  kids.simonandschuster.com

  0507

  Shadow

  of a Bull

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1964 by Maia Wojciechowska

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  This Aladdin Paperbacks edition May 2007

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Wojciechowska, Maia, 1927-2002.

  Shadow of a bull / Maia Wojciechowska

  p. cm.

  Summary: Manolo Olivar has to make a decision: to follow in his famous father’s shadow and become a bullfighter, or to follow his heart and become a doctor.

  [1. Bullfights—Fiction. 2. Spain—Fiction] I. Title.

  PZ7.W8182Sh 1992

  [Fic]—dc 20 91-27716

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-30042-4 (hc.)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-30042-5 (hc.)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-4830-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-4830-9 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-44246-593-0 (eBook)

  To

  Oriana,

  Virginia, Vivianne,

  and

  Barbara

  Shadow of a Bull

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Glossary of Bullfighting Terms

  1

  When Manolo was nine he became aware of three important facts in his life. First: the older he became, the more he looked like his father. Second: he, Manolo Olivar, was a coward. Third: everyone in the town of Arcangel expected him to grow up to be a famous bullfighter, like his father.

  No one had to tell him these three things were true. He and everyone in the town of Arcangel knew the first and the last of these to be true. And the fact that he was a coward only he himself was aware of.

  When he was almost nine, he grew three full inches. All of a sudden, as if overnight, he seemed to change. He became very thin, his nose lengthened, his limbs became awkwardly long, like those of a boy twice his age.

  On the streets people began to turn around and remark about his resemblance to his father.

  “It’s the eyes! He has exactly the same look in his eyes!”

  “The same sad eyes.”

  “It’s not only the sadness. There is something more. Juan Olivar had eyes like no other man I’ve ever seen.”

  “And now the boy has that look.”

  “He also has his father’s thin, long nose. The same nose.”

  “His was the longest nose in Spain.”

  “Why shouldn’t it have been? He was the bravest. And in a torero, a long nose means bravery.”

  “Even with a short nose Juan Olivar would have been the bravest.”

  “I don’t agree! There has never been a brave torero with a short nose.”

  “You speak foolishly. I can name you a dozen …”

  This would lead into a fight of words, and Manolo would no longer be interested. The fact was that he had a long nose, like his father, and it seemed that this was to be his badge of courage.

  “Look at his face.”

  “Just like his father’s. Always brooding.”

  “A gypsy’s face.”

  “There is no gypsy blood in the Olivars.”

  “Yet the face is a gypsy’s face. Long, thin and dark.”

  “He might grow even taller and thinner than his father.”

  “That would be bad. The bulls then would always look too small.”

  “If he grows very tall, they will make him fight the biggest bulls in Spain. Each time the people will want a bigger bull.”

  “Until he will be made to fight cathedrals, not bulls.”

  “They will make him fight seven-year-olds, weighing two tons.”

  “There are no cows today in Spain that can drop bulls that would weigh two tons.”

  “I can name you twenty ganaderias with seven-year-old bulls that would weigh two tons. Easily two tons.”

  “Name me one! Just one! A hundred years ago, yes. Not today.”

  And again there would be an argument that might last for hours, if not days.

  “He’s growing fast. How old is he this year?”

  “Don’t worry, he will be twelve soon enough.”

  “Give him time. He is only a boy.”

  “So was Juan Olivar. At twelve one is not a man. Even though one is a matador, one is not a man.”

  People always talked about Manolo on the streets. They talked about him, not behind his back, but all around him, in front and alongside and behind, not caring at all if he was within earshot or even standing and listening to them. It was a habit of the people of Arcangel.

  And there was a reason for it. There have always been five things that people fear: war, disease, flood, hunger, and death. And of these, death has always been feared the most.

  In Spain, however, people have found a way of cheating death. They summon it to appear in the afternoon in the bull ring, and they make it face a man. Death—a fighting bull with horns as weapons—is killed by a bullfighter. And the people are there watching death being cheated of its right.

  In Arcangel the people had had their very own killer of death, Juan Olivar. He had been their own hero and their magician. Juan Olivar made their dreams come true: victory of man over death. The old saying, “Today as yesterday, tomorrow as today, and always the same,” was no longer true.

  But one day their killer of death met a bull that would not be deprived of his right. And the people of Arcangel, robbed of their pride, deprived of their magicia
n, lost their hero. And when they lost him, each day became exactly like the one that preceded it and the one that would follow it.

  Now the town of Arcangel was waiting, for that hero had left them a son who was growing up to once again take arms against death. They were waiting for the son to be like his father.

  2

  No matter how hard he tried, Manolo could not remember his father. He had been only three when the bull, “Patatero,” drove his right horn through his father’s heart. He was three when, one afternoon, two deaths happened almost at the same instant: the death of his father, and the death of his killer, the bull.

  What he himself could not remember was the one thing the town of Arcangel did remember. The town not only remembered, it was alive with the legend of Juan Olivar. Its very existence seemed to depend on one man’s fame, one man’s glory, one man’s death. There was nothing else to set Arcangel apart from other small Spanish towns. Juan Olivar alive, and even more dead, had created a town that lived on his name.

  Sometimes Manolo thought Arcangel must not have existed before his father. Everywhere he turned he found shrines to the memory of the man he did not remember. In people’s homes pictures of his father were kept alongside those of the saints. In every café there was his father in hundreds of photographs and dozens of posters: fighting a bull, waiting for the bull’s charge, standing over the bull he had killed.

  In the main square of Arcangel a great statue of his father and a bull, taller than any building, looked down over the red rooftops. His father’s lean hands held the muleta, the cloth carved in stone seemed to blow in the wind; his father’s sad eyes sighted down the length of the sword at the lowered head of the bull.

  Another statue, almost as tall, stood in the cemetery, marking his father’s grave. That one did not have a bull. His father stood alone, very erect, very thin, against the sky. His eyes were raised and Manolo, standing on the ground, could not see if they were sad. In his father’s right hand were a bull’s hoof, tail, and two ears; in his left, he held a bouquet of flowers.

  And then, there was the museum, a building that housed the legend’s heritage. Here there were the books that told about his father and copies of all the articles people had written about him. There was a copy of the painting that hung in his own house: a great life-size painting of his father in the red-and-gold traje de luces. The one he wore the day he was killed. There was a poster that had once hung outside Arcangel’s bull ring announcing his father’s first novillada when he was thirteen.

  And also, there, at one end of the building, at the very farthest end, was “Patatero’s” head. Mounted. Almost alive. Frightening in its power: the neck very strong, the horns very long and sharp, the eyes open and mean.

  Manolo remembered when the people of Arcangel had built the museum. They had built it brick by brick, each inhabitant in turn carrying one brick: a procession of sad-eyed people in black. They, perhaps only his mother, or maybe the people of the town, had made him stand and wait and watch. It had taken a whole day, and he had grown very tired and had fallen asleep because he was only four and did not yet know about pride.

  And still they talked, endlessly, everywhere, about Juan Olivar. They talked about Manolo’s grandfather too; but very rarely, because although he too had been a bullfighter, he had not been considered a very good one. His grandfather had not died in the bull ring; he had died in a fire that had swept the town; died saving his son, Juan. But while he lived, he had fought bulls. He had fought over a thousand of them, even more than his son, but he was not remembered except as Juan’s father.

  The father Manolo did not remember had become the one and only hero of the people of the town. They knew everything he had done and everything he had said. They knew how wide and how deep were his wounds. And they even knew, or at least claimed they knew, what he had thought.

  Most of all they knew that Juan Olivar’s destiny as a great bullfighter had been known from the very beginning, from his birth. They never tired talking of it. They repeated themselves again and again. And still everyone listened. And everyone added or took from the story as he saw it.

  “He wasn’t more than two hours old,” someone would recall, “when Señora Olivar sent for Maria Alvar…”

  “At that time Maria must have been a hundred and three…”

  “The old gypsy was more than that, at least a hundred and fifteen.”

  “How old Maria Alvar was doesn’t matter. Juan was barely born when the greatest gypsy fortuneteller who ever lived…”

  “Some said that her power to see into the future so clearly came straight from the devil.”

  “Who knows!”

  “There was a much greater gypsy fortuneteller in Granada at the time!”

  “Who? Flora? She was never as great as old Maria. Besides Maria taught Flora all she knew.”

  “Maria Alvar could look at a newborn baby, and without cards, without stars, without anything at all, she could tell you when the baby would walk, when it would talk, whether it would get sick or not, and how sick it would be…”

  “When she saw Juan Olivar, she fell to her knees.”

  “I was there! When she did that, do you know what I thought? I thought that little Juan would grow up to be the Holy Father!”

  “What did Maria say?”

  “I remember it as if it were yesterday! Still on her knees, she looked at the tiny baby and crossed herself. ‘At twelve, not before, but at twelve, the boy will bring great glory to Arcangel. It will be in the bull ring. He will fight, and he will kill his first bull. And he will go on killing bulls for as long as he lives. And this town will have Spain’s greatest matador!’ ”

  “She didn’t say any more? Didn’t she say anything at all about how Juan would not be interested in bullfighting until he faced his first bull?”

  “She said nothing about that.”

  “Someone told me she had said it.”

  “She said nothing more. I think she saw his death, but she said nothing. Just what I have told you. No more and no less.”

  “Count de la Casa was the first to believe the old gypsy. He took Juan to bullfights with him all the time. And he wasn’t discouraged when the boy showed no interest in playing at bullfighting.”

  “How many corridas did Juan Olivar see before his twelfth birthday?”

  “Twenty-five maybe thirty.”

  “Less than that!”

  “Couldn’t have been less, maybe more, but not less.”

  “No matter. The Count would take the boy to see the bulls being fought, and the boy would just sit there, not even interested.”

  “The Count never doubted that Maria was right. He just waited for Juan Olivar to become twelve.”

  “How carefully the Count bred that bull for the boy!”

  “He knew, the Count knew, that the boy deserved the best his ganaderia had to offer.”

  “And the boy’s bull was called ‘Castalon,’ and he was one of the best the Count had ever bred.”

  After such a conversation, someone would almost always read a passage from Juan Olivar’s biography, by the most famous of all bullfight critics, Alfonso Castillo:

  “It was there, at the spring tienta of Count de la Casa, that Juan Olivar, twelve, made his first pass with a cape. He went into the ring with a three-year-old bull, and the bull was dead fourteen minutes after Juan Olivar made his very first pass. In those fourteen minutes, the boy fought the animal with rare grace, fine skill, and great courage. And the bull was dead of a sword that was placed as calmly and as beautifully as any sword that has ever reached the heart of a bull has ever been placed. At twelve, having never practiced, or even shown any interest in the corridas he had seen, Juan Olivar was a matador. And the gypsy’s prophecy was fulfilled.”

  It did not matter to the people of Arcangel that there had been no similar prophecy made about Manolo.

  “Your mother wouldn’t let a gypsy into the house,” someone had once said to him angrily. “Maria was dead
by the time you were born, but Flora was still alive. And she wanted to come and see into your future, but your mother would have none of that.”

  “We might have needed a gypsy’s prophecy,” someone else had added, “if Manolo looked less like his father. But we all know that he looks exactly like his father. And we all know that he will be just like his father. Nobody in Arcangel believes otherwise.”

  When Manolo had first heard them say how very much he looked like his father, he had gone home and stood in front of the great oil painting. He had taken a mirror from his mother’s dresser and had looked at his father and then at himself. It was true what they were saying. Especially about his nose. But if a person’s nose is long and he is not brave, what then? Does having a long nose help one be brave?

  It was at nine that he first knew for sure he was not brave. Two things happened, both on the same day, to convince him of this.

  Coming home from school that day the boys he was walking with spotted a mule-drawn wagon full of hay. One of the wheels had broken off and the driver of the wagon had gone to get help.

  The other boys climbed to the top of the hay; then, screaming with excitement, they jumped down onto the grass that lined the street. It was a high jump, and watching them Manolo knew that he could never bring himself to jump down from such a great height.

  “Manolo! It’s your turn.”

  “Manolo hasn’t jumped yet. Let him jump.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  He heard them shout to him and saw them wave, but he could not move. The top of the mountain of hay seemed to touch the sky.

  Jaime, his best friend, whose brother, Juan, wanted to be a bullfighter, came and took Manolo by the arm.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked looking at Manolo very hard. “You’re missing all the fun! It’s almost like being a bird, like flying. And you haven’t tried it yet.”

  Manolo could not say anything. His throat had tightened, and it was terribly dry.

  “Come on,” Jaime said, laughing and dragging Manolo behind.

  “I don’t … I don’t want to jump,” Manolo managed to say before they reached the wagon.