Shadow of a Bull

by Maia Wojciechowska

  After that Manolo did not smile any more at night. He just practiced harder the hardest of all passes, the ones his father did so well. The veronicas and the medias were hard enough, because they required purity. But the muleta! He despaired of ever being able to master the red rug. Anyone, he thought, can swing a cape and make others believe he is doing it right, but how does one make the muleta look right? There was no body to it, no shape. It hung lifeless from his fingers. It fought him back, not surrendering like the cape, but making him feel ridiculous. And how was he going to amount to anything without being good with the muleta? After all, it was the faena, the last part of the fight, that was most important. The faena, and of course the kill.

  But to kill! He still did not understand how brave men could stretch their courage to that point. He could not believe that he himself could ever be capable of killing a bull, he who could hardly watch a fly being killed without feeling its pain, its loss. But he found a stick, as long and straight as a sword, and he devised a way of practicing the kill. He placed a sock in the crack of an open drawer and with the stick, held the way bullfighters hold their swords, he launched at the sock, until he was able to hit it. He allowed himself no more than a square inch for his target. He tried to profile well, raising on his toes and going in straight and steady at the drawer, seeing nothing but the sock, white in the moonlight and almost invisible on dark nights.

  Time passed very fast. And he began to gain confidence, began to believe in himself. He even began to think that the dream the men had of his being as great a bullfighter as his father was not so far-fetched after all. That’s how he thought on days when he was happy. On other occasions he doubted everything. And then he would practice harder. He would do other things that he hoped would help him. He would walk close to cars, but he was always too afraid to get as close as he wished, although he taught himself never to back away from them. He bought a small rubber ball, which he kept almost always in his right hand.

  “My brother Juan always keeps a ball in his right hand,” his friend Jaime had told him. “He found out that that is the very best way to strengthen the sword hand. If you keep squeezing it all the time, your hand will become strong and steady for the sword.”

  Manolo never walked now. Instead he ran; and more often than not, he ran backwards, rather than forwards, because that was the way, Jaime’s brother worked to strengthen his leg muscles. And Manolo found a tree overhanging the river and made himself jump. He still did not know how to swim, but he learned to paddle to shore after he had thrown himself from the height of the branch into space.

  He did all this alone and in secret, afraid of being discovered. He still knew that he was a coward, but he also knew that he was working at overcoming his cowardice.

  At ten, like everyone else in Arcangel, Manolo Olivar was waiting for the day, when, in two years, he would face his first bull. Like his father.

  6

  Count de la Casa lived in France most of the year. He only came to Spain early each spring for his annual tienta. The Count was an old man, almost seventy. Tall and very straight of posture, he always seemed to carry his thin body very carefully, as if he felt that it was an extremely fragile thing. He had close-set black eyes with pinpoints of fire in the middle of the pupils.

  Each year when he came to Arcangel, a few days before the tienta, he summoned Manolo. They met in a café that was more a shrine to Juan Olivar than it was a restaurant or bar. When Manolo was small, his mother had taken him there. Now at ten, he went alone. He did not have to be reminded this time to put on a clean shirt and to wet down his hair. This year he was almost eager to see the old man. He wanted to ask him some questions, mostly about the testing of the animals. And also, he wanted to find out what was expected of him. He knew that it was most unusual to fight and to kill a bull during the tienta, for only cows were tested on foot; bulls were tested from horseback. Because of the gypsy’s prophecy, the Count had had a bull waiting for his father. But possibly for him, for Manolo, he would only have a small cow to play with. If he were not expected to kill a bull, he thought hopefully, he might not disappoint them after all. He might be almost as good as his father was that first time.

  The meeting followed a long-established ritual. They first shook hands.

  “Que tal, Manolo? How are you?” The Count’s voice had not changed; it was still a harsh sound coming from the very depths of his thin body. His hands were like thin paper, and Manolo’s own felt big and clammy.

  “Come along,” the Count said, taking Manolo’s arm and leading him towards the bar. “What will you have, manzanilla?”

  Manolo shook his head.

  “Oh, I forgot!” the Count said chuckling. “The young man will have a soda,” he said to the bartender.

  The Count held on to Manolo’s arm as they waited for the drinks, and asked how old he was this year. The drinks arrived.

  “To all the brave bulls!” the Count said raising his glass and clicking it against Manolo’s.

  It was always like this. Every word was the same, every gesture repeated, year after year.

  “And how old did you say you are this year?”

  Manolo, quite warm in the discomfort of being with the Count, swallowed the sweet, heavy, liquid and replied looking down. He liked to look down at the floor where pink shells of shrimp lay uncrushed, mixed with sawdust.

  “How are you doing in school?”

  “Fine,” Manolo replied beginning to make a mound of shrimp shells with his foot.

  “And your mother, Señora Olivar, how is she?”

  “She is very well, thank you.” With the other foot Manolo pushed the sawdust into another mound. This way, with his feet busy, his eyes could be averted from the Count and the feeling of terrible uneasiness was bearable.

  The annual testing of the bulls came in April, and Manolo’s birthday was not until August. He was certain that they would wait until he was really twelve, going on thirteen, before he had to go to the Count’s tienta. And so, when the Count asked him again how old he was, he answered, looking at the two neat mounds of shrimp shells and sawdust:

  “I will not be twelve until the August after next.”

  “Oh!” The Count was surprised. He took a large swallow of wine, and Manolo, lifting his head, saw disappointment on the old man’s face. He shouldn’t be surprised, Manolo thought angrily. He knows very well when I was born; he knows that I will not be twelve for another year and a half. They all know it. Surely they won’t make me fight before I am really twelve. The thought came like a nightmare. It had been all their decision, he thought desperately, for him to do everything like his father. His father had been twelve and not eleven. At twelve, perhaps he, too, would be ready.

  “The boy has grown a lot this year. He saw his twenty-fifth corrida last Sunday.” It was one of the six men, who were always there during these annual meetings. He had turned towards the Count and had said that.

  “And how do you like them?” the Count asked Manolo. “How do you like the corridas you see?”

  “I like them very much. Most of the time.” He was happy at this change of subject. They were not going to make him do anything differently from his father. He would still have time, a whole year and a half, two years really.

  “And when you don’t like them, why is that?” the old man asked.

  “I don’t like them much,” Manolo said softly so that the six men would not hear him, “when the bulls are cowardly or treacherous or when the toreros are bad.”

  The count laughed, the sudden short laugh of an old man.

  “If he is to be as great as his father, let him start a little earlier. Next year.” Again one of the six men, Manolo did not see which one, said this loud and clear, breaking the silence in the café that followed the Count’s laugh.

  “What do you think?” The Count placed his arm on Manolo’s shoulder as the boy kicked at the mound of sawdust with disgust. “Do you think you will be as great as your father?”

&n
bsp; Manolo sighed with relief. The Count had ignored the busybody. Everything would be all right.

  “Will you be as great as your father?” the Count repeated.

  “Anyone who says that he’s as great as my father lies,” Manolo said, hoping the answer would please the Count.

  “Does that mean that you don’t think you’ll be ready to fight next year?”

  “It does not mean that at all!” He shouted in great anger. It was no use, no use to please the Count, no use to ignore the fact that they had all decided, without his knowledge, to cheat him of one year of his life. “It means,” he continued quietly, hating them now, crushing a shrimp shell under his heel and realizing that he was shattering his own hope, “that neither I, nor anyone else, will be as great as my father was.”

  “The boy could fight even this year.”

  “He is ready now.”

  “He is as tall as Juan was at twelve.”

  “He knows as much, maybe more, than his father did at his age.”

  “We’ve been teaching him. Almost every day, for over a year.”

  “No,” the Count finally said. “No, next year is soon enough. Maybe too soon. But it shall be next year.”

  “You’ve picked the bull already, haven’t you, señor?”

  “Yes, I’ve picked the bull. It will be three years old next spring.”

  Oh, how he hated them! The six men and the Count; most of all the bull that had been picked for him! Just a few minutes ago everything had seemed fine. He had been willing to accept his fate, but now they had killed everything. Killed everything that was fine and good with their cunning and dishonesty.

  When he left the café, he felt certain that the whole world was determined to get rid of him. The town, the six men, the Count, even his very own mother, wanted him dead even before his twelfth birthday. There was no hoping now that the animal could be just played with. He would have to kill it. They had all known it from the beginning. Only he had been stupid enough to hope that they would not make him do everything just like his father.

  For the very first time in his life he wished that he had not been born the son of Juan Olivar. He wished that he had not been born a Spaniard. He wished that he had not been born at all.

  7

  The town of Arcangel has both a soul and a heart. Its soul is the bull ring, and its heart is the marketplace. Like most small towns in Andalusia, it is bordered on three sides by olive groves and on one side by the Guadalquivir river. The olive groves belong to Count de la Casa, and the river belongs to everyone.

  There are no professional fishermen in Arcangel; but the men and the boys who fish the river, on a good day, catch enough to provide the whole town with fish. Whenever that happens, the market, just a block away from the plaza, becomes even noisier than usual. The bargaining and the laughter echo through the narrow streets, bouncing from house to house, an epidemic of sounds spreading from the stalls to the balconies and traveling upwards to the blue sky above.

  The earth of Andalusia, where Arcangel lies, is part of the people who live not only on it, but with it, form part of it, seem to merge with it, to share with it their poverty and their joys, their struggles and their good luck.

  The life of the people of Arcangel takes the rhythm of seed time and harvest. Fields stretch away, beyond the olive groves. They have been cultivated by generations of Andalusians who have plowed and sowed and harvested the vegetables and the wheat that grow meagerly in the ground that is tired of bearing.

  At the end of the fields, not even a mile from the town of Arcangel, there are hills that refuse to be used. Stones spring from the earth, and only occasionally a sturdy tree or hardy bush will grow under the hot sun.

  The sun is hot most of the year. It scorches the people and it scorches the earth for five months, from May to September. The sun is the joy and the sorrow of the people. It destroys their crops while it warms them with the heat they could not live without. And when the rains come, they are either a curse or a blessing. Sometimes the river floods, and the people lose their animals, their crops, and even their houses. At other times the newly planted seeds are watered by the rain, and the people are thankful for its coming.

  Like most people of Andalusia, the people of Arcangel are poor. But they are too proud to quarrel with their fate. Instead they make war against sadness with songs and dances, with laughter, and with joy at just being alive. That joy erupts like a volcano once a year during the three-day fiesta.

  During the fiesta, Arcangel becomes a chaos of color and music. The people do not sleep and they do not work during those three days. Instead they play, they sing, they dance, they laugh. It always begins with the Mass and ends in a litter of paper, exhaustion, and dying music.

  “Oh, what a feast there’s going to be,

  And then, what hunger we shall see!”

  goes the old song that tells the truth about Spanish fiestas. People save and wait for it; and when it is over, they save and wait again.

  March 25th, the feast of the Annunciation by Archangel Gabriel, the patron saint of Arcangel, begins the three-day madness. It was on the eve of the fiesta, that Manolo saw Count de la Casa. The year before he had spent the three days with the six men, with the noises of the fiesta only in the background. Together they had seen a series of three bullfights featuring the best and most highly paid toreros of Spain. Together they had seen the bullfighters dress, eat, wait, fight. With them they had talked about bulls and about other bullfighters. Manolo had been excited by their proximity, by the glamour that surrounded them. They wore the best suits money could buy; their cars were shiny and new; there was pride evident in their faces; and their gestures were almost royal. But he had wondered about the strangeness of their eyes, the faraway, almost vacant look in them. He wondered if that strange detachment was due to their having witnessed so many killings in the bull ring or to the presence of fear. For there was a sense of fear about them, in whispers of the cuadrilla after the drawing of the bulls, in half-finished sentences, in darting looks. This foreboding of danger had dimmed, at least for Manolo, the glamour and deadened the din of applause surrounding the fighters of bulls.

  This year, in his anger, Manolo wanted to avoid everything and anything that had to do with bullfighting. He spent most of his time during the fiesta with his friend Jaime García. They went to Mass together; and afterwards they followed the procession winding its way through the narrow streets of Arcangel. They walked solemnly in the long morning shadow cast by the statue of the Archangel Gabriel as it was being borne aloft by the strongest men of the town. In the early sunlight the candles burned dimly; yet they burned, as always during processions and in between; for the Spanish burn four thousand tons of candles each year to their saints. And in this light, the sun’s and the candles’, Manolo saw, as if for the first time, the faces of the people. Still solemn, for they would not start laughing until after honor had been paid their patron saint, the faces had the crude beauty of the landscape.

  As the procession reached the church from which it had started, a woman began to sing a saeta, more a lament than a song—a confession, sad and beautiful. And from that sadness and the beauty of this lament, the fiesta took its cue. The town, suddenly, like a spring gushing from under a rock, flowed into song. The guitars began a race; the tambourines of the gypsies joined in; and the castanets, like a million clattering hoofs, lent their beat. Flamenco songs and the wails of the cante hondo were heard and would be heard until the very end—the third, exhausted night of the fiesta.

  Manolo and Jaime wandered through the stalls that were set up along the riverbank. They tried their hands at the games of chance, the shooting gallery, and the ring-tossing. Each one won a prize, a box of candy. They ran through streets festooned with paper and balloons, bouncing into and out of the thick crowd in their Sunday best. They stopped to catch their breath, and when they did, they joined in the songs; and often they ran into a group dancing, and half-seriously, half-mockingly, they danced the
flamenco, stomping their feet and chanting all the while, then clapping and laughing and running away again.

  They spent their savings on ice cream and cotton candy and rushed home to get more money. Neither one, nor anyone else in Arcangel, was poor. Not during fiesta. They rediscovered the town, finding a ruin they had never known existed, and planned someday to establish a secret hideout there. They listened to the quarrels that erupted like brush fires and died as suddenly as they started. They stole apples from a cart and were chased with shouts by the vendor. They reeled against each other when they were laughing themselves into tears, and they stumbled against each other when they felt exhausted. They went to the outdoor movie twice and giggled when the cowboy kissed the girl and roared their approval at the appearance of the Indians. They climbed on the roof of a house and let homing pigeons out of their cages, all the while frightened by their daring and by the belief that the white specks would not come back from the sky before the loss was discovered by the owner.

  For three days and three nights Manolo managed not to hear anyone speak of bullfighting. He managed to dodge the six men, although he did see them several times and thought they were looking for him. When the crowd surged towards the bull ring, the two boys fought against its current. When they saw the bullfighters’ cars, they darted in the opposite direction without even giving the occupants a look.

  For two weeks after the fiesta Manolo played ball with his friends after school and went back to studying in earnest; for his school work had suffered because of his preoccupation with bullfighting, his lack of sleep, and his lack of interest. For more than two weeks he did not think about the future, and he did not resume his nocturnal practicing.

  And then, one day when he and Jaime were fishing, his friend brought up the subject.

  “My brother Juan is going again to the pastures to cape the bulls.” Jaime looked proudly at Manolo, who spat out a piece of grass he was chewing on. He had been afraid, during the fiesta and afterwards, that at any moment someone would remind him aloud of what he had not forgotten but wished he could forget. “He thinks he’s going to be another Belmonte, that crazy brother of mine. You know, he read me Belmonte’s story; how he used to look—skinny and all twisted up and hungry; and how he used to swim the Guadalquivir at night and cape the bulls on their pastures. He used to stand naked in the moonlight, and with his ugly little face and his ugly body he felt like God. Juan says that’s exactly how he feels, too.”